𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The main problem is when following instructions for command line tools. They might figure out how to use dnf instead of apt, but the extra layers required for ostree are not very friendly. There are a ton of potential frustrations in this area, especially with GPU stuff or hobbyist hardware like Arduino where kernel stuff is needed in userland. At least as of nearly 3 years ago, the documentation in this area sucks. I was on Silverblue for a few years and managed to get through the frustrations due to intermediate experience level. I found toolbox useless compared to distrobox. But using this with something like Arduino was annoying at best. The needed dependencies expected by whatever stuff I wanted to install was usually a big mystery with near useless error failure messages and names of packages and libraries totally unrelated to the package naming in DNF. When updating the base OS, stuff built in these containers is totally useless because I could not update the containers to the new OS image. Playing around with Flash Forth on a microcontroller was even worse. I ended up layering a bunch of stuff on the host because the containers were just not working. When I got an Nvidia machine, I went to Fedora Workstation and have had far fewer issues and frustrations. SB wasn’t bad, but it is a pain to use these if you need kernel level access. Just my $0.02. I was actually on SB for ~2-3 years.



  • Depends on the system. Typically, the older systems do not work like this. The GPS satellites only transmit a signal that contains their location information and the time. The device must collect several of these signals and then use trigonometry to calculate your real location in time and position. Yes there are relativistic effects due to the distance to the satellites and gravity.

    For instance, in home lab electrical engineering, if a person wants a really good reference clock but cannot afford a cesium atomic reference, they can use a relatively cheap GPS system to build a referenced oscillator that is disciplined by the reference clock on these satellites. I think they are cesium too, but it has been awhile since Dave Jones made YT uploads on the eevblog about it. A Garmin bicycle computer is another example. It is triangulating the signals and plotting periodic waypoints with some basic averaging.

    That said, WiFi routers and cellular towers are possible to use for similar triangulation. Maybe check out Hak5 if they are still around. It has been awhile since I looked them up, but they used to make pen testing red team stuff that will infer much about vulnerabilities.



  • Check DNS logs. Discord is proprietary undocumented garbage that connects to dozens of raw IP addresses that have no documentation, rhyme, or reasoning. You have no clue what or who is connected in that mess of garbage, or why they are there.

    It is about like, I’m going to give you access to a phone, a special phone, it just works.

    It is a prison phone. You are in prison when you use it… technically. But you don’t really “see” the “place”. The other inmates are all around you. They see you, but you don’t see them. Never mind that though, the phone just works. Lots of people love that phone. Nobody asks questions. Just use the phone and pay no attention to all the rest. It will be fine.

    Business model? Viability? Never mind all of that. Don’t ask questions like that. The numbers do not add up in the slightest. That is the magic of prisons. Justice costs a lot, but it is worth it right. Magic phone is easy. Ask no questions. Expect no answers. Totally normal, everyone is doing it.

    The whole thing is a mass of clueless zombie morons that ask no questions and have no idea who what or why they are connected to with all those raw IP addresses. They all give trust blindly without accountability or understanding.



  • llama.cpp is at the core of almost all offline, open weights models. The server it creates is Open AI API compatible. Oobabooga Textgen WebUI is more user GUI oriented but based on llama.cpp. Oobabooga has the setup for loading models with a split workload between the CPU and GPU which makes larger gguf quantized models possible to run. Llama.cpp, has this feature, Oobabooga implements it. The model loading settings and softmax sampling settings take some trial and error to dial in well. It helps if you have a way of monitoring GPU memory usage in real time. Like I use a script that appends my terminal window title bar with GPU memory usage until inference time.

    Ollama is another common project people use for offline open weights models, and it also runs on top of llama.cpp. It is a lot easier to get started in some instances and several projects use Ollama as a baseline for “Hello World!” type stuff. It has pretty good model loading and softmax settings without any fuss, but it does this at the expense of only running on GPU or CPU but never both in a split workload. This may seem great at first, but if you never experience running much larger quantized models in the 30B-140B range, you are unlikely to have success or a positive experience overall. The much smaller models in the 4B-14B range are all that are likely to run fast enough on your hardware AND completely load in your GPU memory if you only have 8GB-24GB. Most of the newer models are actually Mixture of Experts architectures. This means it is like loading ~7 models initially, but then only inferencing two of them at any one time. All you need is the system memory or the Deepspeed package (uses disk drive for excess space required) to load these larger models. Larger quantized models are much much smarter and more capable. You also need llama.cpp if you want to use function calling for agentic behaviors. Look into the agentic API and pull history in this area of llama.cpp before selecting what models to test in depth.

    Huggingface is the goto website for sharing and sourcing models. That is heavily integrated with GitHub, so it is probably as toxic long term, but I do not know of a real FOSS alternative for that one. Hosting models is massive I/O for a server.


  • The easiest way I know of to check any machine is to put another router or machine in front of it with a white list firewall or way of logging DNS traffic. You just need to spot the address in the list.

    DNS filtering usually only filters on incoming packets, but for bot stuff that should catch issues.

    In general, most routers run everything from a serial flash chip on the board. These are usually 8, 16, or 32 megabytes. They have a simple bootloader like U-Boot. This is what loads the operating system. These devices have a UART serial port on the PCB. You can use a USB to serial UART adaptor to see what is happening in the device. With a proprietary OS, you are still likely to see the pre-init boot sequence that the bootloader prints to terminal. Most operating systems also print information to this interface, at least of the couple dozen junk devices I have been given and messed around with. I make a little mount for a USB to serial adaptor and add it to all of my routers when new, so I only need to plug in USB to get to the internal bootloader and tty terminal interface of OpenWRT. You will need to know the default baud rate of the device, although it is probably listed somewhere online or can be guessed as one of the common high values at or above 9600.

    Getting into this further gets complicated. It is probably better to look for any CVE that is relevant to the device or software and work backwards. Look for any software updates that have obfuscated the risk for each CVE. If the issue was not fixed, that is where to look to see if someone has exploited the device. Ultimately, they need clock cycles from the CPU scheduler. So it must be a process or some way of executing code from unregistered memory.

    This is getting to the edge of what I have messed around with and understand. There may be a way to get a memory map that includes unused pages, and compare that with a hex dump of the flash memory. This is outside of your scope of a proprietary OS, but hopefully frames the abstract scope of what is possible on this class of device when you have an open source stack. The main advantage of this kind of device and issue is that you can physically remove the flash chip and then see and manipulate every page and memory location. The device likely doesn’t have microcode loaded into the CPU(s) that make it challenging to determine what is going on.

    There is probably an easier way, but a hex dump of the current system can be hashed against the factory updated version to see if any differences are present. It is likely that any exploit will include a string with the address to connect to somewhere in flash memory. It could be obfuscated through encryption or a cypher, but a simple check for strings in the hex dump and a grep for “http” is a simple way to looks for issues.

    The OpenWRT forum is a good general source. The people behind the bootloaders for these devices are also Linux kernel developers and on the OpenWRT forum.






  • The ability to filter information using proprietary devices and software in the kernel of all of these garbage devices is the core issue. Trusting the owners of that code is to surrender your right to unbiased and unfiltered information. I am not at all concerned about hacking or security by small insignificant players. I am massively concerned about the extremely powerful using the leverage they have normalized and embedded to become tyrannical neo feudal lords in a fascist society. Google IS the biggest danger by orders upon orders of magnitude. Trusting them is to give up democracy entirely.

    All mobile devices are proprietary. Android is a scheme to make a Linux kernel that has everything ready to deploy except the actual hardware drivers for the processor and modem. Manufacturers take this kernel and add their proprietary binaries at the last possible moment. That source code is not available anywhere. The hardware documentation is not available anywhere publicly. Every device model is just different enough that reverse engineering one does nothing transferable to any other. The level of reverse engineering is extreme and requires destroying many devices using things like fuming nitric acid and fluorine solutions just to have a small chance at reading some parts of embedded memory. These are some of the most dangerous and hazardous chemicals humans make, and you still need xray equipment, special microscopes with stepping automation to stitch images, and a ton of time.

    This is moving to a tyrannical surveillance state of fascist authoritarianism. Open source software is a major front on the line of real democracy. This is a nuclear bomb released on that democracy. You fear the wrong pirates and criminals. The biggest threats always come from within. Trust as a mechanism is fundamentally antithetical to democracy. Everyone demanding trust is a traitor to democracy. Trust is the key of the fascist kingdom. Once that key is held, democracy has failed regardless of whomever is aware of the situation. Democracy requires fully informed citizens with skepticism and the liberal right to decide for themselves even when they are wrong. This is impossible without full access to information. The source of that information cannot be filtered at any level. We already have the narrowest bottleneck of available information sources in the last 1000 years of history. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers. All search queries filter through one or both of these two and the results from these are not deterministic. Two people searching for the same thing at the same time will get very different and very biased results. This is individualized regardless of any protections people imagine they have in place. Outside of the internet there is no real unbiased media. A dozen people own it all. Even the garbage claiming to comb all sources is drawing the line and dictating what is center right or left is. Anyone at the grassroots level is impossible to find because there are no organic unbiased search results. The results are all filtered junk full of agenda and bias.

    This is the real big picture abstract issue in play. When the maga traitors said this was a coup, they absolutely ment that. Mobile devices are all rental garbage someone else controls. Your computer likewise has a secret operating system running in the background that you do not control. In Intel it is called the Intel Management Engines or ME. This started with Intel VPro in 2008. AMD adopted it is 2013. Arm has one too.

    All that is left is to steal your right to have a digital front door by eliminating DNS filtering and all of these devices will be controlled and connected directly by someone else that is watching and listening at all times. You are already in tethers as a digital slave that can be bought and sold for exploitation and manipulation without your consent or knowledge using your digital presence. You have not effectively realized the implications of that surrendering of rights to citizenship with full autonomy. The next step is to redefine the word citizen to be functionally equivalent to slave. “You will own nothing, and you will be happy about it” because if you are not, you will be dead. This is the death of democracy. My words will echo in your head years from now. The dystopia to come is beyond anything you can presently imagine and there is no way to stop it now short of taking up arms and playing Luigi if you are able.

    The consolidation of wealth is what really made Caesar. That was the death of the republic. It was not Caesar. We are all a product of our time and environment. It was the consolidation of great wealth. All that wealth did not give a shit about Rome, it went to Constantinople for better opportunities at first chance because consolidation of wealth is treasonous. It is as it was, just look at outsourcing and off shoring, or the disgusting mismanagement of banking and housing that have made the American worker completely uncompetitive with Asian counterparts at the same standard of living. No, I have no fear of the boogie man or foreign state actors. I am terrified of the criminal that normalizes domestic trust, actively manipulates and exploits me, and steals my purchased property. That is a real monster.







  • It is not the tool, but is the lazy stupid person that created the implementation. The same stupidity is true of people that run word filtering in conventional code. AI is just an extra set of eyes. It is not absolute. Giving it any kind of unchecked authority is insane. The administrators that implemented this should be what everyone is upset at.

    The insane rhetoric around AI is a political and commercial campaign effort by Altmann and proprietary AI looking to become a monopoly. It is a Kremlin scope misinformation campaign that has been extremely successful at roping in the dopes. Don’t be a dope.

    This situation with AI tools is exactly 100% the same as every past scapegoated tool. I can create undetectable deepfakes in gimp or Photoshop. If I do so with the intent to harm or out of grossly irresponsible stupidity, that is my fault and not the tool. Accessibility of the tool is irrelevant. Those that are dumb enough to blame the tool are the convenient idiot pawns of the worst of humans alive right now. Blame the idiots using the tools that have no morals or ethics in leadership positions while not listening to these same types of people’s spurious dichotomy to create monopoly. They prey on conservative ignorance rooted in tribalism and dogma which naturally rejects all unfamiliar new things in life. This is evolutionary behavior and a required mechanism for survival in the natural world. Some will always scatter around the spectrum of possibilities but the center majority is stupid and easily influenced in ways that enable tyrannical hegemony.

    AI is not some panacea. It is a new useful tool. Absent minded stupidity is leading to the same kind of dystopian indifference that lead to the ““free internet”” which has destroyed democracy and is the direct cause of most political and social issues in the present world when it normalized digital slavery through ownership over a part of your person for sale, exploitation, and manipulation without your knowledge or consent.

    I only say this because I care about you digital neighbor. I know it is useless to argue against dogma but this is the fulcrum of a dark dystopian future that populist dogma is welcoming with open arms of ignorance just like those that said the digital world was a meaningless novelty 30 years ago.


  • Fuck smart phones and neo feudalism. This is theft of ownership with a criminal complicit government. I applaud all Luigi’s these people deserve it. These are the killers of democracy. If your device only runs factory filtered stalkerware garbage, all democracy is dead. All information is easily filtered by this proprietary shit. Freedom of the press is a bullshit tiny niche of the broader requirement for a fully informed public. The fucking “press” is bullshit to highlight. You must have fully informed citizens and you may not choose how that information is shared or disseminated between citizens. This is not democracy. People are so fucking stupid.