• 4 Posts
  • 53 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You’ve probably read about language model AIs basically being uncontrollable black boxes even to the very people who invented them.

    When OpenAI wants to restrict ChatGPT from saying some stuff, they can fine tune the model to reduce the likelihood that it will output forbidden words or sentences, but this does not offer any guarantee that the model will actually stop saying forbidden things.

    The only way of actually preventing such an agent from saying something is to check the output after it is generated, and not send it to the user if it triggers a content filter.

    My point is that AI researchers found a way to simulate some kind of artificial brains, from which some “intelligence” emerges in a way that these same researchers are far from deeply understanding.

    If we live in a simulation, my guess is that life was not manually designed by the simulation’s creators, but rather that it emerged from the simulation’s rules (what we Sims call physics), just like people studying the origins of life mostly hypothesize. If this is the case, the creators are probably as clueless about the inner details of our consciousness as we are about the inner details of LLMs





  • Your ISP might make you go through another layer of NAT. Can you find the WAN IP address of your router and compare it to your public IP address from a website such as ipinfo.io ?

    If they do not match, you’re probably out of luck and will need to forward your port from an actually public IP in order to achieve what you want

    More details : CGNAT (Carrier Grade Network Address Translation) is basically a second router between your router and the public internet. This second router is configured in the same way as your personal one, the main difference being that your ISP fully manages it. From the viewpoint of this second router, your WAN IP is a private IP, and you share one actual public IP with several other customers (the same way all devices on you LAN share one single WAN IP)

    Performing port forwarding from the public internet to your LAN, when behind a CGNAT, would require you to be able to configure a forwarding rule in the ISP’s NAT, which you usually cannot do.




  • I can recommend some stuff I’ve been using myself :

    • Dolibarr as an ERP + CRM : requires some work to configure initially. As most (if not all) features are disabled by default, it requires enabling them based on what you need. It also has a marketplace with a bunch of modules you can buy
    • Gitea to manage codebases for customer projects. It can also do CI but I’ve not looked into it yet
    • Prometheus and its ecosystem (mostly promtail and grafana) for monitoring and alerting
    • docker mail server : makes it quite easy to self host a full mail server. The guides in their doc made it painless for me to configure dmarc/SPF/other stuff that make e-mail notoriously hard to host
    • Cal.com as a self hostable alternative to calendly
    • Authentik for single sign-on and centralized permission management
    • plausible for lightweight analytics
    • a mix of wireguard, iptables and nginx to basically achieve the same as cloudflare proxying and tunnels

    I design, deploy and maintain such infrastructures for my own customers, so feel free to DM me with more details about your business if you need help with this





  • They told me about hosting their own tile server earlier today. I’m really impressed by how fast they moved !

    A pull request for a privacy page during the onboarding is in the works, and I’ve been working with them to update the settings page and documentation (with the goal of providing an easy way to switch map providers). They are also working on a privacy policy, and want to ship all of this in a few weeks as part of a single release.

    Once again, I’m really impressed with how well they’re handling this



  • I’ll probably look into newer fancier options such as Caddy one day, but as far as I remember Nginx has never failed me : it’s stable, battle tested, and extremely mature. I can’t remember a single time when I’ve been affected by a breaking change (I could not even find one by searching changelogs) and the feature set makes it very versatile. Newer alternatives seem really interesting, but it seems to me they have quite frequent breaking changes and are not as feature rich.

    That being said, I’d love to see side-by-side comparison of Nginx and Caddy configs (if anyone wants to translate to Caddy the Nginx caching proxy for OSM I shared earlier this week, that would make a good and useful example), as well as examples of features missing from Nginx. This may give me enough motivation to actually try Caddy :)

    (edit : ad->and)





  • I used to wonder what kind of nerd notices this kind of thing, now I’m one of them

    Edit : If you want to join us :

    • you can run Pi-hole which is a self-hosted DNS server that allow monitoring/blocking DNS requests from devices configured to use it. In its default configuration, it acts as a network wide ad/tracker blocker.
    • On Android, you can install Rethink DNS. This will configure itself as a VPN on your device, forcing all traffic to go through it. This allows it to act as an on-device firewall that allow monitoring/blocking DNS requests and TCP/UDP connections. This is similar to the features of Pi-hole, but the fact that it’s on-device allows it to be app aware : the logs will detail which app is responsible for which connection, and the allow/block rules can be app-dependent. The app honestly goes beyond all my expectations :
      • it does a good job at being easy to use by default
      • it is very configurable which gives you a lot of control if you want/need/can handle it
      • You can configure it to route traffic (after applying firewall rules) to a Wireguard VPN or through Orbot. (Apps that act as VPNs are not compatible with each other : you can only have one active at a time)
      • You can even configure several Wireguard interfaces at the same time, and route specific apps through specific tunnels