Biggles @Biggles@qoto.org

WTF....

🛒 Remember the iconic Kmart in-store audio that set the holiday shopping vibe? 🎄🛍️ Travel back to December 1990 & relive the holiday magic with these preserved recordings: https://archive.org/details/KmartDecember1990 #ThrowbackThursday

#DOScember tests with MSDOS NETDRIVE, which assigns a new drive letter to a remote LAN or internet hard disk/diskette volume; accessing the tool's author test remote volume. I grabbed a bunch of his favorite utilities and ran programs like it was nothing. https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=97743

I was showing off the Mistral 7B language model to some friends at lunch yesterday (using llama.cpp) - and let them type their own prompts.

Here's how that went.

If you use #Dropbox there are two toggles that you have to check/toggle in order to avoid your private data being sold or being used to train AI models:

On the Desktop website:
1) Go to Help and then Cookies & CCPA preferences to enable "do not sell or share my information"

2) And then next, go to Settings -> Third Party AI, to disable sharing your data for AI training.

Do you want to block threads from your account?
Would you eat a plastic milk jug ring than see a Facebook minion meme on your timeline?

Well oh boy do I have a treat for you! If you're like me and have at least three different Mastodon accounts (or even just one!), you can dom-block them quick fast and in a hurry...

Sᴛᴇᴘ 1: Login to your account. 🖼️⁠¹
Sᴛᴇᴘ 2: Go to Settings, then Development 🖼️⁠²
Sᴛᴇᴘ 3: Create a New application with at least write or write:blocks access. 🖼️⁠³
Sᴛᴇᴘ 4: After you saved, click on the name of your application and copy Your access token 🖼️⁠⁴
Sᴛᴇᴘ 5: Repeat for all your accounts, then run the following shell script...

readarray -t pw <<EOF
infosec.exchange Your-Api-Key1
mastodon.social Your-Api-Key2
defcon.social Your-Api-Key3
EOF

masdablock() {
local i c u p
while [ -n "$1" ]; do
for ((i=0; i<${#pw[@]}; i++)); do
read -ra p <<<"${pw[i]}"
u="$p/api/v1/domain_blocks"
u="https://${u}?domain=$1"
c="Authorization: Bearer ${p[1]}"
curl -H "$c" -X "POST" "$u"
done; shift; echo
done;
}
masdablock threads.net


Mastodon API documentation relating to accounts can be found here:

➡️⁠https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/accounts

#MastodonTips #Threads #Privacy #️⃣CatSalad

fave new QOTD, via the comments on https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/07/Just-Dont

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken

Failure analysis in complex system design (especially when lives are at stake) is always fascinating, but especially so when you can see compensating design choices that helped mitigate the worst outcomes. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-the-story-of-qantas-flight-32-bdaa62dc98e7

not many people know this but the "C" in USB-C stands for "cloaca" because it uses one port for everything

When a company pledges to ‘plant a tree,’ tell them you prefer they help ‘protect a forest.’

#programming #gamedev

@Biggles this was a good conversation

Please favor and boost. Let show that love can overcome hate and ignorance.

Three days after Amazon announced its AI chatbot Q, some employees are sounding alarms about accuracy and privacy issues. Q is “experiencing severe hallucinations and leaking confidential data,” including the location of AWS data centers, internal discount programs, and unreleased features, according to leaked documents obtained by Platformer.

An employee marked the incident as “sev 2,” meaning an incident bad enough to warrant paging engineers at night and make them work through the weekend to fix it.

https://www.platformer.news/p/amazons-q-has-severe-hallucinations

Battle.net broke in Wine / Proton - here's how to fix for Steam Deck / Linux https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/12/battlenet-broke-in-wine-proton-heres-how-to-fix-for-steam-deck-linux/

#SteamDeck #Linux

So much great stuff in this Jeremy Howard interview on LLMs - I grabbed this quote for my blog, but there's just a ton of insight crammed into this one: https://www.youtube.com/live/6LXw2beprGI?si=I2JEqIccboFRou0K

https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/1/jeremy-howard/

Here's an incredible new way to run LLMs on your own machine: llamafile - https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/11/introducing-llamafile/

It bundles an LLM with the code needed to run it in a single binary using DEEP magic (Cosmopolitan Libc) such that the same binary works on 6 different operating systems

Best part: it works with LLaVA multi-modal... so you can a 4GB file from https://huggingface.co/jartine/llava-v1.5-7B-GGUF/blob/main/llamafile-server-0.1-llava-v1.5-7b-q4 and:

chmod 755 llamafile-server-0.1-llava-v1.5-7b-q4
./llamafile-server-0.1-llava-v1.5-7b-q

Visit http://127.0.0.1:8080/

And now:

@mttaggart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3i6c4TRuZc

But it has to come with it's crew.