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  Today's protip: If you *must* interact with a large language model, try telling it to only answer you in ASD-STE100 style. Even Gemini Flash (the lightweight model built into free Google searches) understands this directive, which constrains its output to conform to concise, clear scientific manual style. This also sharply reduces the amount of hallucinated output you get--but you do still need to CHECK what it says, because it WILL still hallucinate, despite the focus on brevity and clar...

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  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/117517937820188763 "A really good afternoon at work" involves working with a real human junior colleague, not herding Claudes and harvesting slop. 👍

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  RNG is a (pseudo)Random Number Generator and I'll fight anyone who argues~~

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  somebody please take AI away from anybody and everybody involved in commercial food sales, marketing, and/or distribution

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  Some free advice for my fellow MSPs/IT consultants/whatever we're calling ourselves this week: Don't be a credit hog. All too often, folks in our industry seem to think they need to gas themselves up and nobody else, 24/7/365. Instead, look for the rockstar employees at your clients. The ones that make every evolution they're involved in go smoothly. And SEND EMAIL recognizing those employees' contributions. Giving credit to the staff doesn't weaken your position as a con...

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  I don't mess with containers very much--I prefer the much greater security and load isolation offered by VMs--but I pretty regularly get questions about the best way to set up Docker and/or LXC with ZFS datasets. I'm happy to tell you, today I discovered a pretty thorough guide that includes--among other things--how to properly isolate ephemeral data from necessary data, in order to de-clutter and reduce the load of your backup and restoration routines. https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2026-05...

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  praxis

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  I know everybody loves their super "fancy" iDevices and looks down on Android... But at least the android users don't have to manually disco and reconnect their Wi-Fi to get it to roam. Out of almost 1,000 connected devices at this site, only fourteen have "fair" or "poor" connectivity. Every last one of them is an iPad, iPhone, or Apple Watch. (The apparently unidentified devices you see here are iPhones with MAC randomization enabled.)

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  This is an extremely well written essay, and I endorse its position. Strongly. If all you ever do in life is "the easiest way to get by," are you really, truly, *living*? Or are you just existing? https://po-ru.com/2026/07/28/you-dont-just-have-to-give-in

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  The guy behind me at a red light today thought it was hilarious to creep up inches behind me on my motorcycle and lay into his horn EXACTLY as I began cracking the throttle, as the guy ahead of me started moving. He thought it was so funny, he crept up and did it again at the next light. He seemed less amused about being stuck behind me, turned 180 degrees in the saddle to stare at him like an owl with an iridium visor, while two blocks of traffic zoomed by on the right. Don't be that g...

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  God I hate Bluetooth consumer shit. My kid connected to my Anker Soundcore Motion Boom Plus "boom box" at some point in the last couple of days without my knowledge... so the next time I turned it on, not only did the ongoing (important) call she was on suddenly route her (private) audio to the stupid jam box, **I** was utterly unable to use it myself until I could get hold of her and get her to forget the connection entirely. There is absolutely no provision for even a basic PIN to...

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  I don't know why I'm noticing this more lately, but all the memes about "white man energy" confidence/perceived-importance really are on point. I keep finding myself in situations where women are in charge, I really could not *possibly* be authoritative, and yet--without me saying a word, and despite nobody present knowing who I am--my mere white, male, and grey-bearded presence pulls focus from the women it should rightfully be on. Pay more attention to women, y'all. Pl...

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  Twinless is a 2025 movie in which a man who lost his twin brother in a car accident learns how to live without him. You will notice I did not say that's what this movie is "about" because, well... it isn't. What this movie is actually about is fascinatingly broken people, and it is one of the most intricately layered, thoughtfully constructed mindfucks I've ever watched. HIGHLY recommended. This is now one of my all time favorite movies. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3132...

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  Somebody please ELI5 to me why Ubuntu's systemd refuses to boot a system if ANY network interface is not currently connected to a network, with an UNLIMITED timeout. It's not (just) that I still have to remember to systemctl mask systemd-networkd-online-wait. I want to know what the hell was this idea about in the FIRST place--and why, after *years* of this idiocy, is it still in place? Who wanted this? And why? What "problem" was it meant to solve? Who wants their system to...

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  Ohmygod. THE CHAIR KNOWS.

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  Public Service Announcement: If you have a machine that keeps losing trust relationship with Active Directory, *especially* at the frequency of about once every one to three days: hit an elevated CMD prompt on the affected system (after restoring its trust relationship by leaving and rejoining the domain), then try w32tm /resync. If it tells you "no available time data", that machine can't get NTP from the domain. Ping the AD, go to the DC it resolves to, try w32tm /resync THERE...

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  I cannot believe it is the year of our noodly lord two thousand and twenty-six and yet I STILL have to do shit like: * run Notepad as Administrator * open C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\HOSTS * tell fucking Notepad to show me all files * add an entry for the AD domain that points directly to the LOCAL DC only * save ... just to keep a member server from constantly trying to jump across VPN links every time it needs an AD token. WHY the hell does AD not already prioritize subnet-local DCs?!

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  Look, I don't like vibe coding any more than anybody else does. But lay off of Tridgell if you're not willing to step up and do a better job yourself. Rsync is OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE. Tridge doesn't need to "quit" if you don't like the job he's doing with it: anyone who thinks they're able to do better ALREADY has the opportunity to do so. Tridge--and, SIGH his slop coding assistant--are doing a job none of US would. So either like it, leave it, or step the hell...

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  Fuck systemd. Seriously. FUCK THAT SHIT. I am so goddamn tired of it getting its nasty, poorly-coded, bug-ridden fingers into EVERYTHING like some kind of goddamn Microsoft library would. I can't use the shutdown command anymore, because systemd says "but you have a terminal open! In your own UID! that you're issuing the shutdown command from!" and prevents it from happening. So I have to instead systemctl reboot -f. And the -f is REQUIRED because see above, re my own TTY. I...

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  A new #OpenZFS article of mine is up at Klara! Ever fretted about how to get the most out of your database's storage performance? Here's a nice chewy read to get you on track: https://klarasystems.com/articles/tuning-openzfs-for-production-databases/

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  HMMMMM

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  In related news, Microsoft is offering thousands of its most senior employees an early buyout plan to get them off the payroll. ... only a few months after announcing to everyone how their new focus is QA and making sure everything works the right way, every time, reliably. I'm sure there won't be any downsides to THAT.

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  This is the best take on Fermi's Paradox that I've ever seen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

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  IYKYK. If you *don't* know... well. Think filesystems. Not ZFS. Not btrfs. And just like that, I bet a whole bunch of you suddenly knew EXACTLY who this was about. Sigh.

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  @datarama do you have a link to the bit where he throws a fit? I've seen the IRC chat log where freya convinced it to say it was a trans lesbian (with essentially no effort required), but I haven't seen Overstreet's reaction to it.

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  Ars Technica has let Benj go after the recent AI kerfuffle. I wish Benj well, but this was the right move. https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80%99s-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations.1511671/post-44278029

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  @cstross@wandering.shop the dictionary was a pretty frequent last resort of Something To Read for this pre-Internet kid. And looking up words is always better than just ignoring them like they weren't in the sentence!