How indeed? 🙁

Context: The character Indra on being trapped into a crew aboard a fishing vessel as a slave laborer and subsequently murdering one of his guards.

"How was I to know there was a hole in the world that I could fall through, like falling through an open manhole? That I could fall right through that story in the news, and end up on the other side, on a planet I don't even recognize? And become a person I don't recognize."
-Ray Nayler, "The Mountain in The Sea"

#GoodWriting
#Books

Probably my favourite traffic sign of the Netherlands: Stiltegebied or Silent area 🤫

Packaging Changes

In addition to the Kea 2.6.4 release, we have re-built packages for several existing versions. Users who have successfully installed and are running Kea 2.4.2 or 3.0.0 do not need to update their packages: the new packages address issues that in some cases, prevented successful installation and operation.

@ascherbaum @dvl @jpmens we’re going to need a bigger home, to fit our meta monitoring of our homelabs

Meet EDB at PGDay Austria this September:
🔹 Alvaro Herrera - What is an SLRU anyway?
🔹 Gabriele Quaresima - CloudNativePG 101
🔹 Boriss Mejias & Floor Drees have a role in the "Database Deathmatch" closing ceremony (which, upon reflection, sounds ominous...)
https://pgday.at/schedule/ @tchorix @alvherre @floord

Also, these tasks do not train [human] junior developers other than to train them into tooling complacency. We need to rethink the entire profession, training, and progression.

I am so sad when I come across devs who have only been exposed to one way of doing things for a long time and their mental model for dev environment tooling and DX is fixed in terms of current limits due to legacy decisions.

@dch Chesterton's Fence applies for sure, but my little rule focuses more on the social aspect.

Basically, I noticed with process automation, the more your flow differs from how folks already do things, the less folks will want to use it. You need to spend more time and money simply forcing people to adopt your idea.

Lots of startups fail and big companies embarrass themselves by ignoring this (Windows 8 is an easy example).

@dch my automation approach is to learn the existing process—by doing if possible—talk to folks getting work done, document process, help sand off rough edges, and then *maybe* write code to automate things. Always checking in to see if my changes are helping.

Turned a punch card system into a shared spreadsheet into a Rails app over six months with this approach. (A Rails app they kept using for 10 years after management said they'd stop using it, because mgmt ignored what I was just saying)

Version 4.9.0 of #syslog_ng is now available. Among others it adds:
- #Prometheus exporter
- more efficient file/directory monitoring on #Linux
- #FreeBSD audit source
Read more at https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/releases/tag/syslog-ng-4.9.0
Packages for #Debian / #Ubuntu / #openSUSE / #Fedora & #EPEL are available.

@KiwiEV I … words fail me @tayfonay

I've found the perfect shirt.
Ladies, please form an orderly queue. 😁

https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/2022/speech-to-text-with-whisper-how-i-use-it-why/#ethics In 2022 I wrote about how I was thinking about the ethics of using Whisper, an LLM I use to transcribe audio. I did some evaluation, in the absence of ethical guidance from trusted assesors. I continue to use it frequently.

I've tried to abstain from using AI/LLM-type tools that I haven't evaluated this same way. As far as I know, we still don't have any guides like "these LLMs are LESS unethically trained" - https://github.com/mozilla-ai/lumigator/issues/1338 is where I suggest Lumigator do that.

@mpts But uh. Well I *guess* you could make a cellar grow downwards by digging? But then you'd add new things at the bottom, where you're digging, not at the top (and good luck *reducing* the depth of a cellar again …)

I always thought that the plate dispensers you may find in hotels or cafeterias are a good representation, personally.

At least in #Poland all the time I hear otherwise reasonable people who say “let’s make a deal with #Russia with US as a guarantor”.

This is easily dismissed as a trivial naivety, but why doesn’t it work? Because Russia never honors any agreements with parties it considers weaker. Russian elites largely follow code of ethics originating from organised crime, similar to Italian Omertà.[^1] In this system you’re either a “man”, whose word can be relied upon, or a “loser” (Russian: лох), who can be exploited in any way, including deception. And, as a matter of fact, not exploiting a “loser” and holding a word given to him is a honor offense for the “man” himself. Putin often directly or indirectly refers to the criminal “code of ethics” in his public speeches, and occasionally uses terms from the criminal jargon (Russian: феня). Russian popular culture in response started to popularize and idealize it, even in TV series.[^2]

Lesson about “making deals with Russia” had been hard learned by many countries. In 1945 in Yalta[^3] leaders of USA and UK made a deal with Stalin where in Soviet-liberated #Poland there would be democratic elections under international supervision. What Soviet did was first mass-arrests[^4], then entirely falsified referendum[^5] and then falsified elections[^6], which sealed Poland’s fate as a Soviet colony for the next 42 years.

From recent history, #Ukraine had written security assurances from Russia in Budapest Memorandum[^7], guaranteed by US and UK, and also mutual friendship treaty with Russia signed in 1997.[^8] In 2014 Russia walked upon both of them as if they never existed. Even more recently, the ceasefires agreed in 2015-2019 Minsk Agreements were violated by Russia on the next day they were signed - Russians simply never stopped their offensives. As an added bonus, all that time Russia allso pretended it’s not Russian armed forces conducting these attacks.[^9]

That’s exclusively because in Russian thinking you are allowed to sign any agreement and promise anything to the other party but you’re not expected to deliver, as long as you consider them “losers”. This is what Russia did - in Yalta, Budapest and Minsk they made promises because US and UK wanted them and it helped push Russian political goals. But they never intended to honour them for even a minute.

That’s why “making deals with Russia” alone won’t work as long as their enforcement relies exclusively on international law, which - no need to explain - Russia also consider for “losers”.

You can of course make a successful deal with Russia if it’s supported by hard reciprocal measures, such as anti-tank trenches, mine fields or drones and rockets targeted at Russian military installations. But anything signed exclusively on paper won’t hold.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omert%C3%A0

[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy%27s_Word:_Blood_on_the_Asphalt

[^3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference

[^4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August%C3%B3w_roundup

[^5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1946_Polish_people%27s_referendum

[^6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_Polish_parliamentary_election

[^7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

[^8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian%E2%80%93Ukrainian_Friendship_Treaty

[^9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements

@BastilleBSD set up automated zfs snapshots using sanoid or zelta

We're happy to announce that we're launching the open beta of ppc64.be!

You can head to our chat (at ppc64.be) and request an account to get access to free shell servers on our POWER server.

Big endian, little endian, Linux, FreeBSD, glibc, musl, it's all available and the possibilities are endless.

Port your favourite software, mess around with big endian, run someone else's testsuite - you're free to do whatever you like.

Tell your (nerd) friends and enjoy :)

If you want to understand the possibility of solar power... https://www.theatlantic.com/photography/archive/2025/07/photos-china-solar-power-energy/683488/

Yesterday was my last day at Apple. I'm looking for new work as someone who helps people be better at shipping, usually program-manager shaped. My role at Apple was too secretive for me. More here! https://blog.bl00cyb.org/2025/07/the-secrets-we-keep/