Manipur Videos
Warning: The text might be mature and will have references to violence so if there are kids or you are sensitive, please excuse.
Few days back, saw the videos and I cannot share the rage, shame and many conflicting emotions that were going through me. I almost didn t want to share but couldn t stop myself. The woman in the video were being palmed, fingered, nude, later reportedly raped and murdered. And there have been more than a few cases. The next day saw another video that showed beheaded heads, and Kukis being killed just next to their houses. I couldn t imagine what those people must be feeling as the CM has been making partisan statements against them. One of the husbands of the Kuki women who had been paraded, fondled is an Army Officer in the Indian Army. The Meiteis even tried to burn his home but the Army intervened and didn t let it get burnt.
The CM s own statement as shared before tells his inability to bring the situation out of crisis. In fact, his statement was dumb stating that the Internet shutdown was because there were more than 100 such cases. And it s spreading to the nearby Northeast regions. Now Mizoram, the nearest neighbor is going through similar things where the Meitis are not dominant. The Mizos have told the Meitis to get out.
To date, the PM has chosen not to visit Manipur. He just made a small 1 minute statement about it saying how the women have shamed India, an approximation of what he said.While it s actually not the women but the men who have shamed India. The Wire has been talking to both the Meitis, the Kukis, the Nagas. A Kuki women sort of bared all. She is right on many counts. The GOI while wanting to paint the Kukis in a negative light have forgotten what has been happening in its own state, especially its own youth as well as in other states while also ignoring the larger geopolitics and business around it. Taliban has been cracking as even they couldn t see young boys, women becoming drug users. I had read somewhere that 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 young person in Afghanistan is now in its grip. So no wonder,the Taliban is trying to eradicate and shutdown drug use among it s own youth.
Circling back to Manipur, I was under the wrong impression that the Internet shutdown is now over. After those videos became viral as well as the others I mentioned, again the orders have been given and there is shutdown. It is not fully shut but now only Govt. offices have it. so nobody can share a video that goes against any State or Central Govt. narrative A real sad state of affairs
Update: There is conditional reopening whatever that means
When I saw the videos, the first thing is I felt was being powerless, powerless to do anything about it. The second was if I do not write about it, amplify it and don t let others know about it then what s the use of being able to blog
Mental Health, Binging on various Webseries
Both the videos shocked me and I couldn t sleep that night or the night after. it. Even after doing work and all, they would come in unobtrusively in my nightmares While I felt a bit foolish, I felt it would be nice to binge on some webseries. Little I was to know that both Northshore and Alaska Daily would have stories similar to what is happening here While the story in Alaska Daily is fictional it resembles very closely to a real newspaper called Anchorage Daily news. Even there the Intuit women , one of the marginalized communities in Alaska. The only difference I can see between GOI and the Alaskan Government is that the Alaskan Government was much subtle in doing the same things. There are some differences though. First, the State is and was responsive to the local press and apart from one close call to one of its reporters, most reporters do not have to think about their own life in peril. Here, the press cannot look after either their livelihood or their life. It was a juvenile kid who actually shot the video, uploaded and made it viral. One needs to just remember the case details of Siddique Kappan. Just for sharing the news and the video he was arrested. Bail was denied to him time and time again citing that the Police were investigating . Only after 2 years and 3 months he got bail and that too because none of the charges that the Police had they were able to show any prima facie evidence.
One of the better interviews though was of Vrinda Grover. For those who don t know her, her Wikipedia page does tell a bit about her although it is woefully incomplete. For example, most recently she had relentlessly pursued the unconstitutional Internet Shutdown that happened in Kashmir for 5 months. Just like in Manipur, the shutdown was there to bury crimes either committed or being facilitated by the State. For the issues of livelihood, one can take the cases of Bipin Yadav and Rashid Hussain. Both were fired by their employer Dainik Bhaskar because they questioned the BJP MP Smriti Irani what she has done for the state. The problems for Dainik Bhaskar or for any other mainstream media is most of them rely on Government advertisements. Private investment in India has fallen to record lows mostly due to the policies made by the Centre. If any entity or sector grows a bit then either Adani or Ambani will one way or the other take it. So, for most first and second generation entrepreneurs it doesn t make sense to grow and then finally sell it to one of these corporates at a loss GOI on Adani, Ambani side of any deal. The MSME sector that is and used to be the second highest employer hasn t been able to recover from the shocks of demonetization, GST and then the pandemic. Each resulting in more and more closures and shutdowns. Most of the joblessness has gone up tremendously in North India which the Government tries to deny.
The most interesting points in all those above examples is within a month or less, whatever the media reports gets scrubbed. Even the firing of the journos that was covered by some of the mainstream media isn t there anymore. I have to use secondary sources instead of primary sources. One can think of the chilling effects on reportage due to the above. The sad fact is even with all the money in the world the PM is unable to come to the Parliament to face questions.
The above poster/question is by Surya Pratap Singh, a retired IAS officer. He asks why the PM is unable to answer in either of the houses. As shared before, the Govt. wants very limited discussion. Even yesterday, the Lok Sabha TV just showed the BJP MP s making statements but silent or mic was off during whatever questions or statements made by the opposition. If this isn t mockery of Indian democracy then I don t know what is
Even the media landscape has been altered substantially within the last few years. Both Adani and Ambani have distributed the media pie between themselves. One of the last bastions of the free press, NDTV was bought by Adani in a hostile takeover. Both Ambani and Adani are close to this Goverment. In fact, there is no sector in which one or the other is not present. Media houses like Newsclick, The Wire etc. that are a fraction of mainstream press are where most of the youth have been going to get their news as they are not partisan. Although even there, GOI has time and again interfered. The Wire has had too many 504 Gateway timeouts in the recent months and they had been forced to move most of their journalism from online to video, rather Youtube in order to escape both the censoring and the timeouts as shared above. In such a hostile environment, how both the organizations are somehow able to survive is a miracle. Most local reportage is also going to YouTube as that s the best way for them to not get into Govt. censors. Not an ideal situation, but that s the way it is.
The difference between Indian and Israeli media can be seen through this
The above is a Screenshot shared by how the Israeli media has reacted to the Israeli Government s Knesset over the judicial overhaul . Here, the press itself erodes its own by giving into the Government day and night
Binging on Webseries
Saw Northshore, Three Pines, Alaska Daily and Doogie Kamealoha M.D. which is based on Doogie Howser M.D. Of the four, enjoyed Doogie Kamealoha M.D. the most but then it might be because it s a copy of Doogie Howser, just updated to the new millenia and there are some good childhood memories associated with that series. The others are also good. I tried to not see European stuff as most of them are twisted and didn t want that space.
EU Digital Operational Resilience Act and impact on FOSS
Few days ago, apparently the EU shared the above Act. One can read about it more here. This would have more impact on FOSS as most development of various FOSS distributions happens in EU. Fair bit of Debian s own development happens in Germany and France. While there have been calls to make things more clearer, especially for FOSS given that most developers do foss development either on side or as a hobby while their day job is and would be different. The part about consumer electronics and FOSS is a tricky one as updates can screw up your systems. Microsoft has had a huge history of devices not working after an update or upgrade. And this is not limited to Windows as they would like to believe. Even apple seems to be having its share of issues time and time again. One would have hoped that these companies that make billions of dollars from their hardware and software sales would be doing more testing and Q&A and be more aware about security issues. FOSS, on the other hand while being more responsive doesn t make as much money vis-a-vis the competitors. Let s take the most concrete example. The most successful mobile phone having FOSS is Purism. But it s phone, it has priced itself out of the market. A huge part of that is to do with both economies of scale and trying to get an infrastructure and skills in the States where none or minimally exists. Compared that to say Pinepro that is manufactured in Hong Kong and is priced 1/3rd of the same.
For most people it is simply not affordable in these times. Add to that the complexity of these modern cellphones make it harder, not easier for most people to be vigilant and update the phone at all times. Maybe we need more dumphones such as Light and Punkt but then can those be remotely hacked or not, there doesn t seem to be any answers on that one. I haven t even seen anybody even ask those questions. They may have their own chicken and egg issues.
For people like me who have lost hearing, while I can navigate smartphones for now but as I become old I don t see anything that would help me. For many an elderly population, both hearing and seeing are the first to fade. There doesn t seem to be any solutions targeted for them even though they are 5-10% of any population at the very least. Probably more so in Europe and the U.S. as well as Japan and China. All of them are clearly under-served markets but dunno a solution for them. At least to me that s an open question.
Posted on July 26, 2023
Since some time I ve been thinking about making myself a top or a dress with a wide gathered neckline that can be work at different widths, including off-the-shoulders.
A few years ago I ve been gifted a cut of nice, thin white fabric with a print of lines and lozenges that isn t uniform along the fabric, but looks like it was designed for some specific garment, and it was waiting in my stash for a suitable pattern.
And a few days ago, during a Sunday lunch, there was an off-hand mention of a dress from the late 1970s which had an elastic in the neckline, so that it could be optionally worn off-the-shoulders.
And something snapped in place.
I had plans for that afternoon, but they were scrapped, and I started to draw, measure, cut rectangles of fabric, pin and measure again, cut more fabric.
two rectangular tubes for the sleeves laid so that they meet the body just at the corners, and a triangle (a square gusset folded on the diagonal) joins them to the body.
I decided on a pattern made of rectangles to be able to use as much fabric as possible, with the size of each rectangle based mostly on the various sections on the print of the fabric.
I ve made the typical sleeves from a rectangle and a square gusset, and then attached them to the body just from the gusset to keep the neckline wide and low.
The part of the fabric with large vertical stripes had two different widths: I could have made the back narrower, but I decided to just keep a strip with narrower lines to one side.
The fabric also didn t have a full second strip of lozenges, so I had to hem it halfway through it.
The casing for the elastic was pieced from various scraps, but at least I was able to match the lines on the center front and back, even if they are different. Not that it matters a lot, since it s all hidden in the gathering, but I would have known.
And since I was working on something definitely modern, even if made out of squares and rectangles, of course I decided to hand-sew everything, mostly to be able to use quite small sewing allowances, since the fabric was pretty thin.
In my stash I had a piece of swimsuit elastic that feels nice, looks nice and makes a knot that doesn t slip, so I used it. It s a perfect match, except for the neon yellow colour, which I do like, but maybe is a bit too high visibility? I will see if the haberdasher has the same elastic in dark blue, but right now this will do.
It was a quick project anyway: by the end of the working week the top was finished; I think that on a sewing machine it would be easy to make it in a day.
And it can be worn off the shoulders! Which is something I will probably never do in public (and definitely not outdoors), but now if I wanted I could! :D
As usual, the pattern (for what pattern there is) and instructions are on my pattern website under a #FreeSoftWear license, and I ve also added to the site a tip on how I use electrician fish tape to thread things through long casings
KDE Akademy 2023
A big thank you goes out to the Ubuntu Community for making my attendance to the KDE Akademy 2023! This was a very successful conference for me. I had very positive feedback for my speech on A million reasons why snaps are important. I also had a productive BoF on snapping KDE applications. Most importantly I got to catch up with many old and new friends and got to put faces to the new. There were so many great talks and BoFs, but one of my favorites was the Goals as all three compliment each other. The keynote was amazing, I had no idea open source has made its way into space! How cool is that!?! Despite the high temperatures ( something I am used to, but not that humidity! ) I had a wonderful time and was able to visit many cool sites in Greece. What an amazing place.
In the snap world I haven t had much time this month as previous months as my part time gig doing them expired a few months ago and I had to focus on some paid work which has now run out. However, I did finish a new content pack containing KDE frameworks 5.108 and Qt 5.15.10 and most of KDE release applications 23.04.2. I also got Konsole working!
KDE Konsole snap
I have some fixes merged into snapcraft that will fix some strange build errors reported on the forums and for myself as well. I will be creating a new PR for the new content pack as soon as testing is complete.
We will have some very exciting news coming as soon as the t s are crossed and the i s are dotted. Until then I must reach out to the community for help to Keep the lights on until more paid work comes in. If it wasn t for all of you I couldn t make all of this possible and I thank each and every one of you. This is the greatest software community ever!
https://gofund.me/018ddb06
When I began to read about the generative AI revolution, I realized
there was an opportunity to combine two aspects of my life I never
thought I could merge. While I m not working on the cloud or security, I
work as a sex and intimacy educator, helping people embrace love,
vulnerability and connection.
As I first began to interact with ChatGPT, I saw the potential for AI
to help people explore parts of the world they had not experienced for
themselves. I m blind. When I write fiction, physical descriptions are
always challenging for me. I don t understand facial expressions very
well, and figuring out what characters look like is difficult.
Generative AI has opened up an entire new world for me. I can explore
how people might express some emotion and how they might dress in a
certain situation. I can even exploit the cultural biases that are
sometimes the bane of AI to translate my ideas about personality and
background into appearance.
Immediately I realized the opportunities for sexual freedom:
AI could help people practice talking about intimacy, for example
helping people practice negotiating their limits and
boundaries.
AI could help explore feelings and find the words to share what
is in our hearts.
We are more willing to tell a computer our fantasies than another
person. AI can reassure us that our desires are normal; we are not
broken or disgusting because of what we desire.
For the fantasies we want to stay in our head, AI can help us
make them vivid in a way that respects our privacy.
And for the fantasies we want to bring into the world, AI can
help us understand how to turn the hot images in our head into something
safe that respects our boundaries and those of our lovers.
People are already using Generative AI to help with intimacy. There
are plenty of stories about how people use AI to tune their dating
profiles. But all too often, the desire to make AI safe brings shame and
rejection into the discussion of intimacy. Even something as simple as
Help me come up with a sensual description of this character, is
likely to run up against the all-too-familiar responses:
I am a large language model and for safety reasons I cannot do
that.
That safety is important: one thing we have learned from sex positive
culture is how important boundaries are. We need to respect those
boundaries and not expose people to unwanted sexual content. But we also
know how damaging shame is. When someone reaches out and tentatively
asks to explore their sexuality, rejecting that exploration will come
across as a rejection of that person they are dirty or disgusting for
wanting to explore.
Fortunately, we will see AI models that are open to exploring
sexuality. Some of the uncensored models will already try, although
calling some of the results sex positive would be stretching the truth.
We re already seeing discussions of virtual AI girlfriends. And as AI
meets sex, I m going to be there, helping try and turn it into something
healthy both for business and for lovers.
There are all sorts of interesting challenges: There are all the
cultural and social challenges that sex-positive work faces. Then there
are versions of the AI challenges of bias, hallucinations and the like,
along with specific challenges of exploring emotionally-charged
vulnerable topics. And yet there s so much potential to help people gain
confidence and valuable skills.
I am eagerly looking for opportunities to combine my work as a sex
positive educator and as a software developer. I d love to hear about
any ongoing work at the intersection of Sex and Generative AI. I ve done
some research already, but there s so much going on in the AI world it
is impossible to follow it all. Please reach out with anything you think
I should track.
Welcome to the 41th post in the $R^4 series. Just
as the previous
post illustrated r2u use to empower
interactive Google
Colab sessions, today we want to look at continuous integration via
GitHub Actions.
Actions are very powerful, yet also intimidating and complex. How
does one know what to run? How does ensure requirements are installed?
What does these other actions do?
Here we offer a much simpler yet fully automatic
solution. It takes advantage of the fact that r2u integrates
fully and automatically with the system, here
apt, without us having to worry about the setup. One way to
make this very easy is the use of the Rocker containers for r2u. They already include
the few lines of simple (and scriptable) setup, and have bspm setup so that R
commands to install packages dispatch to apt and will bring
all required dependencies automatically and easily.
With that the required yaml file for an action can be as simple as
this:
name: r2uon:push:pull_request:release:jobs:ci:runs-on: ubuntu-latestcontainer:image: rocker/r2u:lateststeps:-uses: actions/checkout@v3-name: SessionInforun: R -q -e 'sessionInfo()' #- name: System Dependencies # # can be used to install e.g. cmake or other build dependencies # run: apt update -qq && apt install --yes --no-install-recommends cmake git-name: Package Dependenciesrun: R -q -e 'remotes::install_deps(".", dependencies=TRUE)'-name: Build Packagerun: R CMD build --no-build-vignettes --no-manual .-name: Check Packagerun: R CMD check --no-vignettes --no-manual $(ls -1tr *.tar.gz tail -1)
There are only a few key components here.
First, we have the on block where for simplicity we
select pushes, pull requests and releases. One could reduce this to just
pushes by removing or commenting out the next two lines. Many further
refinements are possible and documented but not reqired.
Second, the jobs section and its sole field
ci saythat we are running this CI on Ubuntu in its latest
release. Importantly we then also select the rocker container for r2 meaning that we
explicitly select running in this container (which happens to be an
extension and refinement of ubuntu-latest). The
latest tag points to the most recent LTS release, currently
jammy aka 22.04. This choice also means that our runs are
limited to Ubuntu and exclude macOS and Windows. That is a choice: not
every CI task needs to burn extra (and more expensive) cpu cycles on the
alternative OS, yet those can always be added via other yaml files
possibly conditioned on fewer runs (say: only pull requests) if
needed.
Third, we have the basic sequence of steps. We check out
the repo this file is part of (very standard). After that we ask
R show the session info in case we need to troubleshoot.
(These two lines could be commented out.) Next we show a commented-out
segment we needed in another repo where we needed to add
cmake and git as the package in question
required local compilation during build. Such a need is fairly rare, but
as shown can be be accomodated easily while taking advantage of the rich
development infrastructure provided by Ubuntu. But the step should be
optional for most R packages so it is commented out here. The next step
uses the remotes package
to look at the DESCRIPTION file and install all dependencies which,
thanks to r2u and bspm, will use all Ubuntu
binaries making it both very fast, very easy, and generally failsafe.
Finally we do the two standard steps of building the source
package and checking it (while omitting vignettes and the (pdf)
manual as the container does not bother with a full texlive
installation this could be altered if desired in a derived
container).
And that s it! The startup cost is a few seconds to pull the
container, plus a few more seconds for dependencies and let us recall
that e.g. the entire tidyverse installs all one hundred plus
packages in about twenty seconds as shown in earlier post. After that
the next cost is generally just what it takes to build and check your
package once all requirements are in.
To use such a file for continuous integration, we can install it in
the .github/workflows/ directory of a repository. One
filename I have used is .github/workflows/r2u.yaml making
it clear what this does and how.
More information about r2u is at its site, and we
answered some question in issues, and at stackoverflow. More questions
are always welcome!
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at
GitHub.
After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that Debian
riscv64 is now an official
architecture!
This milestone is not the end of the journey but rather the beginning of a new
one: the port will need to be rebootstrapped in the official archive, build
daemons will have to be reinstalled and handed over to
DSA, many bugs will need to be fixed. If everything
goes well, the architecture will eventually be released with
Trixie. Please note that this
process will be long and will span several months.
I would like to take this opportunity to thanks everyone who contributed to
this significant milestone, including individuals and Debian teams, as well as
the organizations and companies that provided us with resources (by rough
chronological order):
MIT CSAIL,
Sifive,
Mullvad,
tetaneutral.net,
OSU Open Source Lab,
Microchip,
BeagleBoard.org Foundation,
RISC-V international,
PLCT Lab (ISCAS),
StarFive,
and Metropolitan Area Network Darmstadt.
The DebConf video team has been
sprinting in
preparation for DebConf 23 which will
happen in Kochi, India, in September of this year.
Present were Nicolas "olasd" Dandrimont, Stefano "tumbleweed" Rivera,
and yours truly. Additionally, Louis-Philippe "pollo" V ronneau and Carl
"CarlFK" Karsten joined the sprint remotely from across the pond.
Thank you to the DPL for agreeing to fund flights, food, and
accomodation for the team members. We would also like to extend a
special thanks to the Association April for
hosting our sprint at their offices.
We made a lot of progress:
Now that Debian Bookworm has been
released, we updated our
ansible
repository to
work with Debian Bookworm. This encountered some issues, but nothing
earth-shattering, and almost all of them are handled. The one thing
that is still outstanding is that
jibri requires OpenJDK 11, which is
no longer in bookworm; a solution for that will need to be found in
the longer term, but as jibri is only needed for online conferences,
it is not quite as urgent (Stefano, Louis-Philippe).
In past years, we used open "opsis" hardware to do screen grabbing.
While these work, upstream development has stalled, and their
intended functionality is also somewhat more limited than we would
like. As such, we experimented with a USB-based HDMI capture device,
and after playing with it for some time, decided that it is a good
option and that we would like to switch to it. Support for the
specific capture device that we played with has now also been added to
all the relevant places. (Stefano, Carl)
Another open tool that we have been using is voctomix, a software
video mixer. Its upstream development has also stalled somewhat . While
we managed to make it work correctly on Bookworm, we decided that to
ensure long-term viability for the team, it would be preferable if we
had an alternative. As such, we quickly investigated
Nageru,
Sesse's software video mixer, and decided that
it can everything we need (and, probably, more). As such, we worked on
implementing a user interface
theme that would work with
our specific requirements. Work on this is still ongoing, and we may
decide that we are not ready yet for the switch by the time DebConf23
comes along, but we do believe that the switch is at least feasible.
While working on the theme, we found a bug which Sesse quickly
fixed for
us
after a short amount of remote debugging, so, thanks for that!
(Stefano, Nicolas, Sesse)
Our current streaming architecture uses
HLS, which
requires MPEG-4-based codecs. While fully functional, MPEG-4 is not
the most modern of codecs anymore, not to mention the fact that it is
somewhat patent-encumbered (even though some of these patents are
expired by now). As such, we investigated switching to the
AV1 codec for live streaming. Our
ansible repository has been updated to support live streaming using
that codec; the post-event transcoding part will follow soon enough.
Special thanks, again, to Sesse, for pointing out a few months ago on
Planet Debian that this is, in fact,
possible to do. (Wouter)
Apart from these big-ticket items, we also worked on various small
maintenance things: upgrading, fixing, and reinstalling hosts and
services, filing budget requests, and requesting role emails. (all of
the team, really).
It is now Sunday the 23rd at 14:15, and while the sprint is coming to an
end, we haven't quite finished yet, so some more progress can still be
made. Let's see what happens by tonight.
All in all, though, we believe that the progress we made will make the
DebConf Videoteam's work a bit easier in some areas, and will make
things work better in the future.
See you in Kochi!
So it's there on Download on the Debian web site.Thanks to the folk who've done this point release testing. No new major bugs found: a couple of pre-existing ones may still be there.
Thanks very much indeed to the new people who have been in IRC on debian-cd, downloading, testing, editing the wiki page.
This release has gone very well indeed - I'll see some of the same folk at the BBQ in late August but otherwise we'll be back in September or so for the next point release for Bookworm (and probably a release for Bullseye as well).
Now trying various tricks with Raspberry Pi 4s to get them to boot with UEFI and the standard Debian installer.
Lots of tests being tried and passing. The usual bits of finger trouble / misreading the wiki. People are settling into the rhythm. Almost all of the tests for the standard .iso files are done and we're well into testing live images. All's good
And so we're back at Steve's in Cambridge for release testing. A few testers here: we're now well into testing the various iso images.So we have Sledge, RattusRattus, Isy, smcv and myself. We've also been joined here by Helen who has just done her first install. Online we've got a couple of new folk - luna, The_Blode. Thanks to everyone involved - we always need all the help we can get. Cold and grey outside: usual warmth in here. Also the usual snake of cables to trip over across the floor.
We took a couple of days of for a family vacation / road trip through
the hills of Central Mexico. The overall trip does not look like
anything out of the ordinary
Other than the fact that Google forecasted we d take approximately
15.5 hours driving for 852Km that is, an average of almost 55
Km/h. And yes, that s what we signed up for. And that s what we
got. Of course, the exact routes are not exactly what Google suggested
(I can say we optimized a bit the route, i.e., by avoiding the
metropolitan area of Quer taro, at the extreme west, and going via San
Juan del R o / Tequisquiapan / Bernal).
The first stretch of the road is just a regular, huge highway, with
no particular insights. The highways leaving and entering Mexico City
on the North are not fun nor beautiful, only they are needed to get
nice trips going
Mexico City sits at a point of changing climates. Of course, it is a
huge city And I cannot imagine how it would be without all of the
urbanization it now sports. But anyway: On the West, South, and part
of the East, it is surrounded by high mountains, with beautiful and
dense forests. Mexico City is 2200m high, and most of the valley s
surrounding peaks are ~3000m (and at the South Eastern tip, our two
big volcanoes, Popocat petl and Iztacc huatl, get past the 5700m
mark). Towards the North, the landscape is flatter and much more
dry. Industrial compounds give way to dry grasslands. Of course,
central Mexico does not understand the true meaning of flat, and the
landscape is full with eh-not-very-big mountains.
Then, as we entered Quer taro State, we started approaching
Bernal. And we saw a huge rock that looks like it is not supposed
to be there! It just does not fit the surroundings.
Shortly after Bernal, we entered a beautiful, although most crumpled,
mountain ridge: Sierra Gorda de
Quer taro. Sierra Gorda
encompasses most of the North of the (quite small 11500Km total)
state of Quer taro, plus portions of the neighboring states; other
than the very abrupt and sharp orography, what strikes me most is the
habitat diversity it encompasses. We started going up an absolute
desert, harsh and beautiful; we didn t take pictures along the way as
the road is difficult enough that there are almost no points for
stopping for refreshments or for photo opportunities. But it is quite
majestic. And if you think deserts are barren, boring places well,
please do spend some time enjoying them!
Anyway At on point, the road passes by a ~3100m height, and
suddenly Pines! More pines! A beautiful forest! We reached our
first stop at the originally mining town of Pinal de
Amoles.
After spending the night there and getting a much needed rest, we
started a quite steep descent towards Jalpan de
Serra. While it is
only ~20Km away on the map, we descended from 2300 to 760 meters of
altitude (and the road was over 40Km long).
Being much lower, the climate drastically changed from cool and humid
to quite warm and the body attitude in the kids does not lie!
In the mid-18th century, Fray Jun pero Serra established five missions
to evangelize the population of this very harsh territory, and the
frontispiece for the church and monastery in Jalpan is quite
breathtaking.
But we were just passing by Jalpan. A short visit to the church and to
the ice-cream shop, and we were again on our way. We crossed the state
border, entering San Luis Potos , and arrived to our main destination:
Xilitla, the little town in
the beautiful Huasteca where
the jungle meets surrealism.
Xilitla was chosen by the British poet and patron of various
surrealist artists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_James. He was a British noble (an unofficial grandson of King
Edward VII), and heir to a huge fortune. I m not going to repeat here
his very well known biography suffice to say that he got in love
with the Huasteca, and bought a >30ha piece of jungle and mountain
close to the Xilitla town, and made it his house. With very ample
economic resources, in the late 1940s he started his lifelong project
of building a surrealist garden.
And Well, that s enough blabbering for me. I m sharing some
pictures I took there. The place is plainly magic and
wonderful. Edward James died in 1984, and his will decrees that after
his death, the jungle should be allowed to reclaim the constructions
so many structures are somewhat crumbling, and it is expected they
will break down in the following decades. But for whoever comes to
Mexico This magic place is definitely worth the heavy ride to the
middle of the mountains and to the middle of the jungle.
Xilitla now also hosts a very good museum with sculptures by Leonora
Carrington, James long-time friend, but I m not going to abuse this
space with even more pictures. And of course, we did more, and enjoyed
more, during our three days in Xilitla.
And for our way back I wanted to try a different route. We decided
to come back to Mexico City crossing Hidalgo state instead of
Quer taro. I had feared the roads would be in a worse shape or would
be more difficult to travel And I was happy to be proven wrong!
This was the longest driving stretch approximately 6:30 for
250Km. The roads are in quite decent shape, and while there are some
stretches where we were quite lonely (probably the loneliest one was
the sharp ascent from Tamazunchale to the detour before Orizatl n),
the road felt safe and well kept at all times. The sights all across
Eastern Hidalgo are breathtaking, and all furiously green (be it with
really huge fern leaves or with tall, strong pines), until
Zacualtip n.
And just as abruptly or more as when we entered Pinal de Amoles We
crossed Orizatl n, and we were in a breathtaking arid, desert-like
environment again. We crossed the Barranca de Metztitl n natural
reserve, and arrived to spend the night at Huasca de Ocampo.
There are many more things we could have done starting at Huasca, a
region where old haciendas thrived, full of natural formations, and
very very interesting. But we were tired and pining to be finally back
home. So we rested until mid-morning and left straight back home in
Mexico City. Three hours later, we were relaxing, preparing lunch, the
kids watching whatever-TV-like-things are called nowadays.
All in all, a very beautiful vacation!
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 245. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Don't include file size in image metadata; it is, at best, distracting and
it is already in the directory metadata.
* Move to using assert_diff in ICO and JPEG tests.
* Update copyright years.
The seventh release of the still pretty new qlcal package
arrivied at CRAN today.
qlcal
delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R
package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained
and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be
demanding to build). qlcal covers
over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its
complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more.
This release brings updates from the just-released QuantLib 1.31 version.
Changes in version 0.0.7
(2023-07-19)
Updates, extensions and corrections to calendars from South
Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Taiwan, South Africa, Denmark and
Finland from QuantLib 1.31
Added support for UnitedStates/SOFR calendar
As the update comprises a number of small-but-important updates to
eight different country calendars as well as a new US calendar (in a
slight variation on the government bond calendar) we can also update the
little
demo highlighting all calendars within the US for the given
year:
>## see https://github.com/qlcal/qlcal-r/blob/master/demo/allUScalendars.R>## see R/calendars.R in qlcal, we prepend 'UnitedStates/' in makeHol()> cals <-c("LiborImpact", "NYSE", "GovernmentBond", "NERC", "FederalReserve", "SOFR")>print(Reduce(cbind, Map(makeHol, cals))) LiborImpact NYSE GovernmentBond NERC FederalReserve SOFR2023-01-02TRUETRUETRUETRUETRUETRUE2023-01-16TRUETRUETRUENATRUETRUE2023-02-20TRUETRUETRUENATRUETRUE2023-04-07NATRUENANANATRUE2023-05-29TRUETRUETRUETRUETRUETRUE2023-06-19TRUETRUETRUENATRUETRUE2023-07-04TRUETRUETRUETRUETRUETRUE2023-09-04TRUETRUETRUETRUETRUETRUE2023-10-09TRUENATRUENATRUETRUE2023-11-10TRUENANANANANA2023-11-23TRUETRUETRUETRUETRUETRUE2023-12-25TRUETRUETRUETRUETRUETRUE>
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there
is a diffstat report for this
release. See the project page
and package documentation for more details, and more examples.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at
GitHub.
RISC -V Motherboard, SBC
While I didn t want to, a part of me is hyped about this motherboard. This would probably be launched somewhere in November. There are obvious issues in this, the first being unlike regular motherboards you wouldn t be upgrade as you would do.You can t upgrade your memory, can t upgrade the CPU (although new versions of instructions could be uploaded, similar to BIOS updates) but as the hardware is integrated (the quad-core SiFive Performance P550 core complex) it would really depend. If the final pricing is around INR 4-5k then it may be able to sell handsomely provided there are people to push and provide support around it. A 500 GB or 1 TB SSD coupled with it and a cheap display unit and you could use it anywhere although as the name says it s more for tinkering as the name suggests.
Another board that could perhaps be of more immediate use would be the beagleboard. They launched the same couple of days back and called it Beagle V-Ahead. Again, costs are going to be a concern. Just a year before the pandemic the Beagleboard Black (BB) used to cost in the sub 4k range, today it costs 8k+ for the end user, more than twice the price. How much Brexit is to be blamed for this and how much the Indian customs we would never know. The RS Group that is behind that shop is head-quartered in the UK.
As said before, we do not know the price of either board as it probably will take few months for v-ahead to worm its way in the Indian market, maybe another 6 months or so. Even so, with the limited info. on both the boards, I am tilting more towards the other HiFive one. We should come to know about the boards say in 3-5 months of time.
CHIPS Act
I had shared about the Chips Act a few times here as well as on SM. Twoarticles do tell how the CHIPS Act 2023 is more of a political tool, an industrial defence policy rather than just business as most people tend to think.
Cancelation of Books, Books Burning etc.
Almost 2400 years ago, Plato released his work called Plato s Republic and one of the seminal works within it is perhaps one of the most famous works was the Allegory of the Cave. That is used again and again in a myriad ways, mostly in science-fiction though and mostly to do with utopian, dystopian movies, webseries etc. I did share how books are being canceled in the States, also a bit here. But the most damning thing has happened throughout history, huge quantities of books burned almost all for politics But part of it has been neglect as well as this time article shares. What we have lost and continue to lose is just priceless. Every book has a grain of truth in it, some more, some less but equally enjoyable.
Most harmful is the neglect towards books and is more true today than any other time in history. Kids today have a wide variety of tools to keep themselves happy or occupied, from anime, VR, gaming the list goes on and on. In that scenario, how the humble books can compete. People think of Kindle but most e-readers like Kindle are nothing but obsolescence by design. I have tried out Kindle a few times but find it a bit on the flimsy side. Books are much better IMHO or call me old-school. While there are many advantages, one of the things that I like about books is that you can easily put yourself in either the protagonist or the antagonist or somewhere in the middle and think of the possible scenarios wherever you are in a particular book. I could go on but it will be a blog post or two in itself.
Till later. Happy Reading.
Update:Manipur
Extremely horrifying visuals, articles and statements continue to emanate from Manipur. Today, 19th July 2023, just couple of hours back, a video surfaced showing two Kuki women were shown as stripped, naked and Meitei men touching their private parts. Later on, we came to know that this was in response of a disinformation news spread by the Meitis of few women being raped although no documentary evidence of the same surfaced, no names nothing. While I don t want to share the video I will however share the statement shared by the Kuki-Zo tribal community on that. The print gives a bit more context to what has been going on.
Update, Few hours later : The Print also shared more of a context about six days ago. The reason we saw the video now was that for the last 2.5 months Manipur was in Internet shutdown so those videos got uploaded now. There was huge backlash from the Twitter community and GOI ordered the Manipur Police to issue this Press Release yesterday night or just few hours before with yesterday s time-stamp.
IndianExpress shared an article that does state that while an FIR had been registered immediately no arrests so far and this is when you can see the faces of all the accused. Not one of them tried to hide their face behind a mask or something. So, if the police wanted, they could have easily identified who they are. They know which community the accused belong to, they even know from where they came. If they wanted to, they could have easily used mobile data and triangulation to find the accused and their helpers. So, it does seem to be attempt to whitewash and protect a certain community while letting it prey on the other.
Another news that did come in, is because of the furious reaction on Twitter, Youtube has constantly been taking down the video as some people are getting a sort of high more so from the majoritarian community and making lewd remarks. Twitter has been somewhat quick when people are making lewd remarks against the two girl/women. Quite a bit of the above seems like a cover-up.
Lastly, apparently GOI has agreed to having a conversation about it in Lok Sabha but without any voting or passing any resolutions as of right now. Would update as an when things change.
Update: Smriti Irani, the Child and Development Minister gave the weakest statement possible
As can be noticed, she said sexual assault rather than rape. The women were under police custody for safety when they were whisked away by the mob. No mention of that. She spoke to the Chief Minister who has been publicly known as one of the provocateurs or instigators for the whole thing. The CM had publicly called the Kukus and Nagas as foreigners although both of them claim to be residing for thousands of years and they apparently have documentary evidence of the same . Also not clear who is doing the condemning here. No word of support for the women, no offer of intervention, why is she the Minister of Child and Women Development (CDW) if she can t use harsh words or give support to the women who have gone and going through horrific things
Update : CM Biren Singh s Statement after the video surfaced
This tweet is contradictory to the statements made by Mr. Singh couple of months ago. At that point in time, Mr. Singh had said that NIA, State Intelligence Departments etc. were giving him minute to minute report on the ground station. The Police itself has suo-moto (on its own) powers to investigate and apprehend criminals for any crime. In fact, the Police can call for questioning of anybody in any relation to any crime and question them for upto 48 hours before charging them. In fact, many cases have been lodged where innocent persons have been framed or they have served much more in the jail than the crime they are alleged to have been committed. For e.g. just a few days before there was a media report of a boy who has been in jail for 3 years. His alleged crime, stealing mere INR 200/- to feed himself. Court doesn t have time to listen to him yet. And there are millions like him.
The quint eloquently shares the tale where it tells how both the State and the Centre have been explicitly complicit in the incidents ravaging Manipur. In fact, what has been shared in the article has been very true as far as greed for land is concerned. Just couple of weeks back there have been a ton of floods emanating from Uttarakhand and others. Just before the flooding began, what was the CM doing can be seen here.
Apart from the newspapers I have shared and the online resources, most of the mainstream media has been silent on the above. In fact, they have been silent on the Manipur issue until the said video didn t come into limelight. Just now, in Lok Sabha everybody is present except the Prime Minister and the Home Minister. The PM did say that the law will take its own course, but that s about it. Again no support for the women concerned.
Update: CJI (Chief Justice of India) has taken suo-moto cognizance and has warned both the State and Centre to move quickly otherwise they will take the matter in their own hand.
Update: Within 2 hours of the CJI taking suo-moto cognizance, they have arrested one of the main accused Heera Das
The above tells you why the ban on Internet was put in the first place. They wanted to cover it all up. Of all the celebs, only one could find a bit of spine, a bit of backbone to speak about it, all the rest mum
Just imagine, one of the women is around my age while the young one could have been a daughter if I had married on time or a younger sister for sure. If ever I came face to face with them, I just wouldn t be able to look them in the eye. Even their whole whataboutery is built on sham. From their view Kukis are from Burma or Burmese descent. All of which could be easily proved by DNA of all. But let s leave that for a sec. Let s take their own argument that they are Burmese. Their idea of Akhand Bharat stretches all the way to Burma (now called Myanmar). They want all the land but no idea with what to do with the citizens living on it.
Even after the video, the whataboutery isn t stopping, that shows how much hatred is there. And not knowing that they too will be victim of the same venom one or the other day Update: Opposition was told there would be a debate on Manipur. The whole day went by, no debate. That s the shamelessness of this Govt. Update 20th July 19:25 Center may act or not act against the perpetrators but they will act against Twitter who showed the crime. Talk about shooting the messenger
We are now in the last stage. In 2014, we were at 6
Observe the output from the apt-get install. If your disk arrangements are unusual, that may generate some error messages from update-initramfs.
Go back to the installer VC with Alt + Left arrow. If there were no error messages above, you may tell it to reboot.
If there were error messages (for example, I found that if there was disk encryption, alarming messages were printed), tell the installer to go Back . Then ask it to Install GRUB bootloader (again). After that has completed, you may reboot.
Enjoy your Debian system without systemd.
Discussion
This is pleasingly straightforward, albeit with an ugly wart. This recipe was not formally developed and tested; it s just what happened when I tried to actually perform this task.
The official installation guide has similar instructions although they don t seem to have the initramfs workaround.
update-initramfs
The need to go back and have the installer reinstall grub is because if your storage is not very straightforward, the update-initramfs caused by apt-get install apparently doesn t have all the right context. I haven t investigated this at all; indeed, I don t even really know that the initramfs generated in step 3 above was broken, although the messages did suggest to me that important pieces or config might have been omitted. Instead, I simply chose to bet that it might be broken, but that the installer would know what to do. So I used the installer s install GRUB bootloader option, which does regenerate the initramfs. So, I don t know that step 6 is necessary.
In principle it would be better to do the switch from systemd to sysvinit earlier in the installation process, and under the control of the installer. But by default the installer goes straight from the early setup questions through to the set the time or reboot questions, without stopping. One could use the expert mode, or modify the command line, or something, but all of those things are, in practice, a lot more typing and/or interaction. And as far as I m aware the installer doesn t have an option for avoiding systemd .
The apt-get install line
sysvinit-core is the principal part of the sysvinit init system. Asking to install that causes the deinstallation of systemd s init and ancillary packages.
systemd refuses to allow itself to be deinstalled, if it is already running, so if you boot into the systemd system you can t then switch init system. This is why the switch is best done at install time. If you re too late, there are instructions for changing init system post-installation.
elogind is a forked version of some of systemd s user desktop session functionality. In practice modern desktop environments need this; without it, apt will want to remove things you probably want to keep. Even if you force it, you may find that your desktop environment can t adjust the audio volume, etc.
ntp is needed because nowadays the default network time client is systemd-timesyncd (which is a bad idea even on systems with systemd as init). We need to specify it because the package dependencies don t automatically give you any replacement for systemd-timesyncd.
dbus-x11 is a glue component. In theory it ought to be installed automatically. However, there have been problems with the dependencies that meant that (for example) asking for emacs would try to switch the init system. Specifying dbus-x11 explicitly is a workaround for that, which I nowadays adopt out of caution. Perhaps it is no longer needed.
(On existing systems, it may be necessary to manually install orphan-sysvinit-scripts, which exists as a suboptimal technical workaround for the sociopolitical problems of hostile package maintainers and Debian s governance failures. The recipe above seems to install this package automatically.)
usrmerge
This recipe results in a system which has merged-/usr via symlinks. This configuration is a bad one. Ideally usrmerge-via-symlinks would be avoided.
The un-merged system is declared not officially supported by Debian and key packages try very hard to force it on users. However, merged-/usr-via-symlinks is full of bugs (mostly affecting package management) which are far too hard to fix (a project by some folks to try to do so has given up).
I suspect un-merged systems will suffer from fewer bugs in practice. But I don t know how to persuade d-i to make one.
Installer images
I think there is room in the market for an unofficial installer image which installs without systemd and perhaps without usrmerge. I don t have the effort for making such a thing myself.
Conclusion
Installing Debian without systemd is fairly straightforward.
Operating Debian without systemd is a pleasure and every time one of my friends has some systemd-induced lossage I get to feel smug.
This post describes how to deploy cilium (and
hubble) using docker on a Linux system with
k3d or kind to test it as
CNI and
Service Mesh.
I wrote some scripts to do a local installation and evaluate cilium to use it
at work (in fact we are using cilium on an EKS
cluster now), but I thought it would be a good idea to share my original
scripts in this blog just in case they are useful to somebody, at least for
playing a little with the technology.
LinksAs there is no point on explaining here all the concepts related to cilium
I m providing some links for the reader interested on reading about it:
All the scripts and configuration files discussed in this post are available on
my cilium-docker git repository.
InstallationFor each platform we are going to deploy two clusters on the same docker
network; I ve chosen this model because it allows the containers to see the
addresses managed by metallb from both clusters (the idea
is to use those addresses for load balancers and treat them as if they were
public).
The installation(s) use cilium as CNI, metallb for BGP (I tested the
cilium options, but I wasn t able to configure them right) and nginx as the
ingress controller (again, I tried to use cilium but something didn t work
either).
To be able to use the previous components some default options have been
disabled on k3d and kind and, in the case of k3d, a lot of k3s options
(traefik, servicelb, kubeproxy, network-policy, ) have also been
disabled to avoid conflicts.
To use the scripts we need to install cilium, docker, helm, hubble,
k3d, kind, kubectl and tmpl in our system.
After cloning the repository, the sbin/tools.sh
script can be used to do that on a linux-amd64 system:
Once we have the tools, to install everything on k3d (for kind replace
k3d by kind) we can use the
sbin/cilium-install.sh script as
follows:
$# Deploy first k3d cluster with cilium & cluster-mesh$./sbin/cilium-install.sh k3d 1 full
[...]
$# Deploy second k3d cluster with cilium & cluster-mesh$./sbin/cilium-install.sh k3d 2 full
[...]
$# The 2nd cluster-mesh installation connects the clusters
If we run the command cilium status after the installation we should get an
output similar to the one seen on the following screenshot:
The installation script uses the following templates:
tmpl/cilium.yaml: values to deploy the
cilium using the helm chart.
Once we have finished our tests we can remove the installation using the
sbin/cilium-remove.sh script.
Some notes about the configuration
As noted on the documentation, the cilium deployment needs to mount the
bpffs on /sys/fs/bpf and cgroupv2 on /run/cilium/cgroupv2; that is
done automatically on kind, but fails on k3d because the image does not
include bash (see this issue).To fix it we mount a script on all the k3d containers that is executed each
time they are started (the script is mounted as /bin/k3d-entrypoint-cilium.sh
because the /bin/k3d-entrypoint.sh script executes the scripts that follow
the pattern /bin/k3d-entrypoint-*.sh before launching the k3s daemon).
The source code of the script is available
here.
When testing the multi-cluster deployment with k3d we have found issues
with open files, looks like they are related to inotify (see
this
page on the kind documentation); adding the following to the
/etc/sysctl.conf file fixed the issue:
# fix inotify issues with docker & k3d
fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288fs.inotify.max_user_instances=512
Although the deployment theoretically supports it, we are not using cilium
as the cluster ingress yet (it did not work, so it is no longer enabled)
and we are also ignoring the gateway-api for now.
The documentation uses the cilium cli to do all the installations, but I
noticed that following that route the current version does not work right with
hubble (it messes up the TLS support, there are some notes about the
problems on this cilium
issue), so we are deploying with helm right now.The problem with the helm approach is that there is no official documentation
on how to install the cluster mesh with it (there is a request for
documentation here), so we are
using the cilium cli for now and it looks that it does not break the hubble
configuration.
TestsTo test cilium we have used some scripts & additional config files that are
available on the test sub directory of the repository:
cilium-connectivity.sh: a script
that runs the cilium connectivity test for one cluster or in multi cluster
mode (for mesh testing).If we export the variable HUBBLE_PF=true the script executes the command
cilium hubble port-forward before launching the tests.
http-sw.sh: Simple tests for cilium policies
from the cilium demo;
the script deploys the Star Wars demo application and allows us to add the
L3/L4 policy or the L3/L4/L7 policy, test the connectivity and view the
policies.
ingress-basic.sh: This test is for
checking the ingress controller, it is prepared to work against cilium and
nginx, but as explained before the use of cilium as an ingress controller
is not working as expected, so the idea is to call it with nginx always as
the first argument for now.
mesh-test.sh: Tool to deploy a global
service on two clusters, change the service affinity to local or remote,
enable or disable if the service is shared and test how the tools respond.
Running the testsThe cilium-connectivity.sh executes the standard cilium tests:
$./test/cilium-connectivity.sh k3d 12
Monitor aggregation detected, will skip some flow validation
steps
[k3d-cilium1] Creating namespace cilium-test for connectivity
check...
[k3d-cilium2] Creating namespace cilium-test for connectivity
check...
[...]
All 33 tests (248 actions) successful, 2 tests skipped,
0 scenarios skipped.
To test how the cilium policies work use the http-sw.sh script:
kubectx k3d-cilium2 #(just in case)#Create test namespace and services
./test/http-sw.sh create
#Test without policies (exaust-port fails by design)./test/http-sw.sh test
#Create and view L3/L4 CiliumNetworkPolicy
./test/http-sw.sh policy-l34
#Test policy (no access from xwing, exaust-port fails)./test/http-sw.sh test
#Create and view L7 CiliumNetworkPolicy
./test/http-sw.sh policy-l7
#Test policy (no access from xwing, exaust-port returns 403)./test/http-sw.sh test
#Delete http-sw test./test/http-sw.sh delete
And to see how the service mesh works use the mesh-test.sh script:
#Create services on both clusters and test./test/mesh-test.sh k3d create
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d test
#Disable service sharing from cluster 1 and test./test/mesh-test.sh k3d svc-shared-false
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d test
#Restore sharing, set local affinity and test./test/mesh-test.sh k3d svc-shared-default
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d svc-affinity-local
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d test
#Delete deployment from cluster 1 and test./test/mesh-test.sh k3d delete-deployment
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d test
#Delete test./test/mesh-test.sh k3d delete
Last month I blogged about how the mainstream
media is focusing on the wrong parts of the Artificial Intelligence/ChatGPT
story.
One of the comments left on the post was:
I encourage you to dig a little deeper. If LLM s were just probability
machines, no one would be raising any flags.
Hinton, Bengio, Tegmark and many others are not simpletons. It is the fact that
the architecture and specific training (deep NN, back prop / gradient descend)
produces a system with emergent properties, beyond just a probability machine,
when the system size reaches some thresholds, that has them spooked.
They do understand mathematics and stats and probabilities, i assure you. It is
just that you may have only read the layman s articles and not the scientific
ones
I confess: I haven t made much progress in this regard. I gave Vicky Boykis'
Embeddings
a go, and started to get a handle on the math, but honestly had a hard time
following it. I m open to suggestions from anyone with a few good
recommendations for scientific papers accessible to non-math professionals,
particularly ones that explain the emergent properties and what that means.
Meanwhile, regardless of the scientific truths or falsehoods around chat GPT,
the mainstream media continues to miserably fail in helping the rest of us
understand the implications of this technology.
Most recently, I listend to This American Life s First Contact (part of
their Greetings People of Earth
show).
They interviewed several Microsft AI researchers who first experimented with
ChatGPT 4 prior to it s big release.
The focus of the researchers was: can we demonstrate chat GPT s general
intelligence ability by presenting it with logic problems it could not possibly
have encountered before? And the answer: YES!
The two examples were:
Stacking: the researcher asked chat GPT how to stack a number of odd objects
in a stable way (a book, a dozen eggs, a nail, etc) and chat GPT gave both
the correct answer and a reasonable explanation of why.
Hidden state: the researcher described two people in a room with a cat. One
person put the cat in a basket and left. The other moved the cat to a box
ad left. And, remarkably, chat GPT could explain that when they returned,
the first person would think the cat is in the basket and the second person
would know it s in the box.
I thought this was pretty cool. So I fired up chat GPT (and even ponied up for
chat GPT version 4). I asked it my own stacking question and, hm, chat GPT
thought a plate should be placed on top of a can of soda instead of beneath it.
So, well, mostly right but I m pretty sure any reasonable human would put the
can of soda on the plate not the other way around (chat GPT 3.5 wanted the can
of soda to be balanced on the tip of the nail).
I then asked it my own simple version of the cat problem and it got it right.
Very good. But when I asked it a much more complicated and weird version of the
cat problem (involving beetles in a mansion with a movie theater and changing
movies and a butler with a big mustache) it got the answer flat out wrong.
Did anyone at This American Life try this? Really? It seems like a basic
responsibility of journalism to fact check the experts. Maybe the scientists
would have had a convincing response? Or maybe scientists are just like
everyone else and can get caught up in the excitement and make mistakes?
I am amazed and awed by what chat GPT can do - it truly is remarkable. And, I
think that a lot of human intelligence is synthesizing what we ve seen and
simply regurgitating it in a different context - a task that chat GPT is way
better at doing than we are.
But the overriding message of most mainstream media stories is that chat GPT is
somehow going beyond word synthesis and probability and magically tapping into
a form of logic. If the scientific papers are demonstrating this remarkable
feat, I think the media needs to do a way better job reporting it.
Photo by Taylor Vick (Unsplash)
Linux networking can be confusing due to the wide range of technology stacks and tools in use, in addition to the complexity of the surrounding network environment. The configuration of bridges, bonds, VRFs or routes can be done programmatically, declaratively, manually or with automated with tools like ifupdown, ifupdown2, ifupdown-ng, iproute2, NetworkManager, systemd-networkd and others. Each of these tools use different formats and locations to store their configuration files. Netplan, a utility for easily configuring networking on a Linux system, is designed to unify and standardise how administrators interact with these underlying technologies. Starting from a YAML description of the required network interfaces and what each should be configured to do, Netplan will generate all the necessary configuration for your chosen tool.
In this article, we will provide an overview of how Ubuntu uses Netplan to manage Linux networking in a unified way. By creating a common interface across two disparate technology stacks, IT administrators benefit from a unified experience across both desktops and servers whilst retaining the unique advantages of the underlying tech.
But first, let s start with a bit of history and show where we are today.
The history of Netplan in Ubuntu
Starting with Ubuntu 16.10 and driven by the need to express network configuration in a common way across cloud metadata and other installer systems, we had the opportunity to switch to a network stack that integrates better with our dependency-based boot model. We chose systemd-networkd on server installations for its active upstream community and because it was already part of Systemd and therefore included in any Ubuntu base installation. It has a much better outlook for the future, using modern development techniques, good test coverage and CI integration, compared to the ifupdown tool we used previously. On desktop installations, we kept using NetworkManager due to its very good integration with the user interface.
Having to manage and configure two separate network stacks, depending on the Ubuntu variant in use, can be confusing, and we wanted to provide a streamlined user experience across any flavour of Ubuntu. Therefore, we introduced Netplan.io as a control layer above systemd-networkd and NetworkManager. Netplan takes declarative YAML files from /etc/netplan/ as an input and generates corresponding network configuration for the relevant network stack backend in /run/systemd/network/ or /run/NetworkManager/ depending on the system configuration. All while keeping full flexibility to control the underlying network stack in its native way if need be.
Who is using Netplan?
Recent versions of Netplan are available and ready to be installed on many distributions, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat Enterprise Linux, Debian and Arch Linux.
Ubuntu
As stated above, Netplan has been installed by default on Ubuntu systems since 2016 and is therefore being used by millions of users across multiple long-term support versions of Ubuntu (18.04, 20.04, 22.04) on a day-to-day basis. This covers Ubuntu server scenarios primarily, such as bridges, bonding, VLANs, VXLANs, VRFs, IP tunnels or WireGuard tunnels, using systemd-networkd as the backend renderer.
On Ubuntu desktop systems, Netplan can be used manually through its declarative YAML configuration files, and it will handle those to configure the NetworkManager stack. Keep reading to get a glimpse of how this will be improved through automation and integration with the desktop stack in the future.
Cloud
It might not be as obvious, but many people have been using Netplan without knowing about it when configuring a public cloud instance on AWS, Google Cloud or elsewhere through cloud-init. This is because cloud-init s Networking Config Version 2 is a passthrough configuration to Netplan, which will then set up the underlying network stack on the given cloud instance. This is why Netplan is also a key package on the Debian distribution, for example, as it s being used by default on Debian cloud images, too.
Our vision for Linux networking
We know that Linux networking can be a beast, and we want to keep simple things simple. But also allow for custom setups of any complexity. With Netplan, the day-to-day networking needs are covered through easily comprehensible and nicely documented YAML files, that describe the desired state of the local network interfaces, which will be rendered into corresponding configuration files for the relevant network stack and applied at (re-)boot or at runtime, using the netplan apply CLI. For example /etc/netplan/lan.yaml:
Having a single source of truth for network configuration is also important for administrators, so they do not need to understand multiple network stacks, but can rely on the declarative data given in /etc/netplan/ to configure a system, independent of the underlying network configuration backend. This is also very helpful to seed the initial network configuration for new Linux installations, for example through installation systems such as Subiquity, Ubuntu s desktop installer or cloud-init across the public and private clouds.
In addition to describing and applying network configuration, the netplan status CLI can be used to query relevant data from the underlying network stack(s), such as systemd-networkd, NetworkManager or iproute2, and present them in a unified way.
At the Netplan project we strive for very high test automation and coverage with plenty of unit tests, integration tests and linting steps, across multiple Linux distros, which gives high confidence in also supporting more advanced networking use cases, such as Open vSwitch or SR-IOV network virtualization, in addition to normal wired (static IP, DHCP, routing), wireless (e.g. wwan modems, WPA2/3 connections, WiFi hotspot, controlling the regulatory domain, ) and common server scenarios.
Should there ever be a scenario that is not covered by Netplan natively, it allows for full flexibility to control the underlying network stack directly through systemd override configurations or NetworkManager passthrough settings in addition to having manual configuration side-by-side with interfaces controlled through Netplan.
The future of Netplan desktop integration
On workstations, the most common scenario is for end users to configure NetworkManager through its user interface tools, instead of driving it through Netplan s declarative YAML files, which makes use of NetworkManager s native configuration files. To avoid Netplan just handing over control to NetworkManager on such systems, we re working on a bidirectional integration between NetworkManager and Netplan to further improve the single source of truth use case on Ubuntu desktop installations.
Netplan is shipping a libnetplan library that provides an API to access Netplan s parser and validation internals, that can be used by NetworkManager to write back a network interface configuration. For instance, configuration given through NetworkManager s UI tools or D-Bus API can be exported to Netplan s native YAML format in the common location at /etc/netplan/. This way, administrators just need to care about Netplan when managing a fleet of Desktop installations. This solution is currently being used in more confined environments, like Ubuntu Core, when using the NetworkManager snap, and we will deliver it to generic Ubuntu desktop systems in 24.04 LTS.
In addition to NetworkManager, libnetplan can also be used to integrate with other tools in the networking space, such as cloud-init for improved validation of user data or installation systems when seeding new Linux images.
Conclusion
Overall, Netplan can be considered to be a good citizen within a network environment that plays hand-in-hand with other networking tools and makes it easy to control modern network stacks, such as systemd-networkd or NetworkManager in a common, streamlined and declarative way. It provides a single source of truth to network administrators about the network state, while keeping simple things simple, but allowing for arbitrarily complex custom setups. If you want to learn more, feel free to follow our activities on Netplan.io, GitHub, Launchpad, IRC or our Netplan Developer Diaries blog on discourse.
Legends & Lattes is a sword and sorcery fantasy novel of the
RPG-inspired, post-Dungeons-and-Dragons subtype. It was Travis
Baldree's first novel.
Viv is an orc, the heavy muscle for a roving band of adventurers who take
jobs for hire in a way familiar to any Dungeons and Dragons player.
As this book opens, she's been an adventurer for twenty-two years, and
she's done. Her band have defeated the Scalvert Queen and gained its
hoard, but all that Viv wants is the stone in its head. With that in hand
and some vague lore about how to use it, Viv leaves, rather abruptly, and
heads for the city of Thune to chase a dream she's never told anyone else
about.
Viv wants to start a coffee shop.
Legends & Lattes is an unapologetic comfort story. Viv doesn't
entirely know what she's doing, but she has a lot of experience hiring
people, negotiating, and figuring things out, and she's willing to do a
lot of hard work. She's blunt and a bit rough, but she's ethical and
kind, which lets her attract and retain her first two employees: a
taciturn expert carpenter Viv picks out by watching people work at the
docks, and a succubus she hires as a barista. From there, the story
slowly turns into a found family dynamic, full of people that you like and
are rooting for. There is one actual villain who shows up towards the end
of the book to give it some conflict, but mostly this is the story of Viv
building a small business while being a good employer and friend.
The subtitle of "a novel of high fantasy and low stakes" is therefore an
excellent description. (Pedantic aside: This is "high fantasy" in the
literary sense of not involving an otherwise-normal world, not "high" in
the RPG sense of having less realistic, more mythic characters.) You are
not going to be surprised by the outcome of the story, or even most of the
events along the way. It's a book full of basically good people trying to
do the right thing, largely succeeding, and building a community in the
process.
If that feels relaxing and fun, you have precisely the right idea.
Sometimes you want a book in which good things happen to good people, and
that's exactly what Baldree delivers.
There are also a lot of specific details about explaining coffee to
everyone and setting up a portion of the menu of a modern coffee shop in a
fantasy world, and those parts I found less interesting. Baldree uses the
handwave of gnomish machinery to import big chunks of 2020s coffee
technology wholesale, which felt oddly out of step with the vaguely
medieval-ish Dungeons and Dragons world. This is also one of those
books where the characters independently reinvent multiple ideas that
historically came from different regions and slow processes of refinement.
Here it's drinks and pastries rather than major technological advances,
which I guess is a little bit better, but I find this style of
world-building grating.
The obligatory coffee shop cat is delightfully strange and suits the
fantasy setting. I wish more of the coffee shop trappings had similar
twists.
That said, everything else about the book worked for me, and the
characters are thankfully more central to the book than the coffee shop
trappings. I liked all of them and had no trouble rooting for them. The
found family bits worked for me and the character relationships developed
slowly enough to be believable but fast enough to be satisfying. Viv is
refreshingly blunt, so I wasn't annoyed by communication failures. And
the succubus, Tandri, is a fun, complex character and a great counterpoint
to Viv.
If you're looking for something challenging or deep, this isn't the book,
but if you're in the mood for a predictable comfort read, this hit the
spot. Recommended.
Followed by Bookshops & Bonedust (not yet published), but
Legends & Lattes is a complete story.
My edition has a novella (maybe a novelette) at the end of the short
novel.
"Pages to Fill": This is a prelude to the novel, telling the
story of Viv's first encounter with a coffee shop and the point where she
made the decision to stop adventuring. That's not the main plot of the
story, though. She and her team are pursuing a shapeshifting thief, which
leads to Viv having some unexpected reactions.
This was fairly slight and predictable, but once you've read the novel,
it's fun to see how the story began. The best part is seeing more of
Gallina, the gnome who was by far my favorite of Viv's old team. (6)
Rating: 8 out of 10
A real sad state of affairs 
Since some time I ve been thinking about making myself a top or a dress with a wide gathered neckline that can be work at different widths, including off-the-shoulders.
A few years ago I ve been gifted a cut of nice, thin white fabric with a print of lines and lozenges that isn t uniform along the fabric, but looks like it was designed for some specific garment, and it was waiting in my stash for a suitable pattern.
And a few days ago, during a Sunday lunch, there was an off-hand mention of a dress from the late 1970s which had an elastic in the neckline, so that it could be optionally worn off-the-shoulders.
And something snapped in place.
I had plans for that afternoon, but they were scrapped, and I started to draw, measure, cut rectangles of fabric, pin and measure again, cut more fabric.
The part of the fabric with large vertical stripes had two different widths: I could have made the back narrower, but I decided to just keep a strip with narrower lines to one side.
The fabric also didn t have a full second strip of lozenges, so I had to hem it halfway through it.
The casing for the elastic was pieced from various scraps, but at least I was able to match the lines on the center front and back, even if they are different. Not that it matters a lot, since it s all hidden in the gathering, but I would have known.
And since I was working on something definitely modern, even if made out of squares and rectangles, of course I decided to hand-sew everything, mostly to be able to use quite small sewing allowances, since the fabric was pretty thin.
In my stash I had a piece of swimsuit elastic that feels nice, looks nice and makes a knot that doesn t slip, so I used it. It s a perfect match, except for the neon yellow colour, which I do like, but maybe is a bit too high visibility? I will see if the haberdasher has the same elastic in dark blue, but right now this will do.
It was a quick project anyway: by the end of the working week the top was finished; I think that on a sewing machine it would be easy to make it in a day.
And it can be worn off the shoulders! Which is something I will probably never do in public (and definitely not outdoors), but now if I wanted I could! :D
As usual, the pattern (for what pattern there is) and instructions are 
KDE Akademy 2023
KDE Konsole snap
Welcome to the 41th post in the 
After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that 
The DebConf video team has been
We took a couple of days of for a family vacation / road trip through
the hills of Central Mexico. The overall trip does not look like
anything out of the ordinary
This post describes how to deploy 
My daughter Beatrice asked for me to print her a 3D printer.
