College Students Demand Refunds
The University of Illinois at Chicago students are trying to get a partial refund for tuition and fees paid for on-campus studying that’s been moved online due to the pandemic. A similar situation is developing at other US colleges with lawyers getting involved and a growing potential for class-action lawsuits.…Read More
Finding Gaps in Timestamps
Sometimes knowing when something didn't happen can be just as valuable as knowing when it did. For reasons yet to be determined, my Salt Master server needs to be bounced occasionally. Not the whole server - just the salt-master service. I needed to find a good time to do this.
The Black Box on the Org Chart
There’s a particular kind of delusion that takes hold in tech booms. It starts with a true thing, wraps itself around a useful thing, and then inflates into a preposterous thing.
The Post-Language Future of AI Systems
There’s a persistent assumption baked into how we talk about AI: that language is fundamental. That intelligence expresses itself through something like English, or at least through structured programming languages we recognize. It’s a comforting idea. It’s also probably wrong.
Outsmarted by a River, a Rope, and an Anchor
Before you entrust serious decisions to AI, consider that the most advanced systems routinely fail at school-level physics problems written over a century ago. Here's why, and what it reveals about how these systems actually "think."
To Mask or Not to Mask
Effectiveness of face masks against the coronavirus has been debated to death in both popular and scientific literature. Here are the two most common mistakes made by journalists and by people who should know better.
The AI Bubble Isn’t a Bubble. It’s a Trap.
Let’s dispense with the fantasy right away. Your $20-a-month ChatGPT subscription isn’t paying for anything remotely resembling the actual cost of running modern AI. It doesn’t cover the data centers, the power bills, the GPUs stacked like gold bars in climate-controlled bunkers. Not even close.
Checking Linux Account Password
On occasion you may need to check if an account has a specific password. For example, when you build VMs, you may use some default passwords for some default accounts (i.e. root) that should be changed later by your password management application.
Coronavirus Stats in Bash
The result of my morbid fascination with the coronavirus situation is this quick bash script that parses Johns Hopkins University coronavirus data to generate a quick report for the current date for the specified countries.
The Coronavirus Discussion
Just a few words about the coronavirus. Clearly, the Internet is in need of my contribution to this topic.
Updating Lynis
Lynis is an excellent security audit tool for Linux and various Unix derivatives. I have a small wrapper script that runs Lynis via a cron job, does a selective diff with the previous run's output, and sends me an email.
Hiding Passwords
I've touched on this subject previously, but suddenly felt I should repeat myself. The big issue with using passwords from command line is shell history.
Reading Multi-Line Input in One Loop Iteration
Bash loops can read the input as words or lines, but what if you needed to accept multi-line input with a single loop iteration?
Convert Code Snippets to PNG
On occasion I find myself struggling posting code on discussion forums that don't handle code formatting all that well. What would've helped is some quick and easy way to convert code to an image file with syntax highlighting. And so here it is.
Backup Options for Raspberry Pi
Just about every Raspberry Pi I used suffered the same fate: the micro SD card died. It is generally accepted that the expected lifespan of an SD card is around ten years of normal use.
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