Olivier Mehani

@shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy

Random geek randomly geeking.

Topics of interest: #FreeSoftware, #SelfHosting, #Electronics, #AmateurRadio, and #InfoSec, some #Politics and, the ongoing #COVID19 […]

🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://piaille.fr/@shtrom, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

@patigallardo.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 3:52 PMReposted by @shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy

To the surprise of absolutely nobody: I feel Cal Newport is making a lot of sense here.

@shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy Oct 12, 2026, 2:00 AM

I'm getting gradually annoyed by the cold-open excerpts that more and more YouTube videos seem to have grown at the beginning. I'm not scrolling. I'm not taking algorithmic recommendations. I'm, intentionally, here because I want to watch that one discussion. I don't need to get hooked. If […]

@shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy Oct 11, 2026, 9:17 PM

AI Is a Harsh Mistress: On Anima Machina, Herd Acceptance, and the Politics of Conscious Machines https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3779311

>The argument runs that if cognition can be decomposed into attention, memory, and prediction, then implementing these functions in silicon will inevitably […]

@gabrielesvelto.mas.to.ap.brid.gy Oct 11, 2026, 7:03 PMReposted by @shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy

I double-checked this on a couple of Xitter stat sites and it's true. Average views of the main AfD account dropped 90% and average engagement dropped by 60%. This is commercial social media for you: bots, damn bots and Russian bots.

Angry@angrystaffer.bsky.socialOct 11, 2026, 6:38 PM

We’ve been talking about this for years. None of these far-right movements are organic.

@ketanjoshi.co Oct 11, 2026, 8:44 PMReposted by @shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy

is there any good, trustworthy information out there on the actual impact on bot / disinfo activity as a result of the data centre attacks in Russia? Seeing a lot of pixely screenshots but not a lot of links to primary sources or actual analyses

@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social Oct 11, 2026, 4:19 AMReposted by @shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy

The yellow heart emoji ⟨💛⟩ is mistakenly displayed as a pink "hairy heart" ⟨a pink heart symbol with marks representing short hair.⟩ in Google's Android 4.4 mobile operating system (released 2013) because Google's emoji art team misinterpreted the dots in Unicode's black-and-white reference images ⟨Heart symbol with dots.⟩ as being hair stubble. In reality, the dotted pattern is simply used as a colorless way to represent the color yellow (in accordance with heraldic hatching).

@ketanjoshi.co Oct 11, 2026, 8:03 PMReposted by @shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy

Tech companies have realised every time this spectre comes up all they have to do is say "Yes, but do it this way" and 'this way' = dodgy loopholes, certificates, offsets and cheats that create the perfect illusion of regulation, particularly in a way that staves off criticism from climate ppl

@ketanjoshi.co Oct 11, 2026, 8:03 PMReposted by @shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy

Genuinely well-meaning idea here I think, but think ahead to what the process of fossil fuel elimination actually looks like if a huge chunk of renewable growth is siphoned off towards meeting data centre demand

www.wsj.com/opinion/let-...

Let Physics Regulate the AI Industry
No new data centers without enough clean power to run them.

Regulation works best when attached to measurable physical acts. Bans on atmospheric testing, numerical limits on delivery systems, and the general understanding that first use will be severely condemned and punished have held off nuclear catastrophe. Sharply defined restrictions on biological weapons, ozone-destroying chemicals, leaded gasoline and tobacco marketing have also succeeded. “Develop AI responsibly” is fog. Gigawatts are measurable.
There is a golden opportunity for physics to establish a red line for AI technology: no new sustainable power, no new data center. No large data center, or major extension of an existing one, should receive the permits or grid connection it needs unless its developer brings enough new carbon-free generation, energy storage and transmission online to meet its additional electricity demand—and pays the full cost.
By itself, this won’t solve all the problems AI poses. Controlling AI remains difficult. But we can use the physical bottleneck of energy to impose a clear and simple restraint on an industry that has otherwise proved elusive to regulate.
Mr. Wilczek is a 2004 Nobel laureate in physics.

@shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy Oct 11, 2026, 2:02 AMReposted by @shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy

I'm building a bridge over the creek to get the mower across. Digging holes for all the stumps is hard work, particularly with the occasional floaters germane to being close to a water stream.

But the last hole was by far the easiest! I'll jot it down to improved […]

[Original post on piaille.fr]

Photo of a grassy patch of ground. There's a nice round hole in the middle, and bits of a wooden structure in the making towards the top of the photograph.

Two arms, presumably the owner of the hole's, project from outside the frame. They lead to hands, cradling opposite sides of the hole. There's a ring on the ring finger of the left hand.

@hsivonen.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy Oct 11, 2026, 10:22 AMReposted by @shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy

I have a canned answer for why we aren’t doing this for the Web platform: https://hsivonen.fi/utf-8-detection/

The key difference is that the Web behavior is consistent across operating systems and supports Existing Content out there on the Web. The Python/Ruby/Java behavior wasn’t consistent […]

@shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy Oct 11, 2026, 10:32 AM

Rah! FFS.

I'm getting SMART errors on a brand new disk.

They all look like

```
Error 16 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 8 hours (0 days + 8 hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle.

After command completion […]

[Original post on piaille.fr]

Screenshot of a terminal having run `smartctl -a`

```
60 00 b8 00 00 00 40 08 09:40:29.557 READ FPDMA QUEUED
61 00 b0 00 64 41 40 08 09:40:29.528 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
61 00 a8 00 60 41 40 08 09:40:29.526 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
61 00 a0 00 5c 41 40 08 09:40:29.525 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
61 00 98 00 58 41 40 08 09:40:29.523 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED

Error 16 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 8 hours (0 days + 8 hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle.

After command completion occurred, registers were:
ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
10 41 00 00 04 eb 40 Error: IDNF at LBA = 0x00eb0400 = 15401984

Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- --------------------
60 00 20 00 00 00 40 08 08:14:09.710 READ FPDMA QUEUED
61 00 18 00 04 eb 40 08 08:14:09.695 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
61 00 10 00 00 eb 40 08 08:14:09.693 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
61 00 08 00 fc ea 40 08 08:14:09.691 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
61 00 00 00 f8 ea 40 08 08:14:09.689 WRITE FPDMA QUEUED

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 120 -

SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
1 0 0 Not_testing
2 0 0 Not_testing
3 0 0 Not_testing
4 0 0 Not_testing
5 0 0 Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.

The above only provides legacy SMART information - try 'smartctl -x' for more
```

@shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy Oct 11, 2026, 10:00 AM

#TIL: `fallocate`(1) https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/fallocate.1.html

```
$ time fallocate -l 2G /mnt/data.img
fallocate -l 2G /mnt/data.img 0.00s user 0.00s system 36% cpu 0.008 total
$ ls -l /mnt/sw-data.img
-rw-rw-r-- 1 shtrom shtrom 2147483648 Oct 11 20:59 /mnt/data.img
```

Beats […]

@shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy Oct 11, 2026, 2:02 AM

I'm building a bridge over the creek to get the mower across. Digging holes for all the stumps is hard work, particularly with the occasional floaters germane to being close to a water stream.

But the last hole was by far the easiest! I'll jot it down to improved […]

[Original post on piaille.fr]

@dryad.technology Oct 10, 2026, 9:20 PMReposted by @shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy

In general: Do you want to make a difference in an election? The best way to do that is not on bluesky or really the internet at all. The best way is *something in the physical world*. Find a local campaign. Find a party office who will send you to a local campaign one district over. Knock on doors.

@spikybaddie.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy Oct 10, 2026, 8:46 PMReposted by @shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy

[poverty, question about services]

#Iowa #UnitedStates question:

Would love some advice from people better at being poor than I am. Has anyone successfully submitted a #medicaid work requirement attestation? When I did they canceled my plan entirely, spent the next month trying to get it back […]

@aj.gts.sadauskas.id.au.ap.brid.gy Oct 10, 2026, 10:21 AMReposted by @shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy

This is farked. Voice actors now have to compete against AI reproductions of their own voices. And because they often don't hold the copyright to the ads of TV shows they work on, there's basically no recourse: "Jacqui Duncan has voiced more than 5000 commercials for Australian radio and […]

@shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy Oct 10, 2026, 10:03 AM

And `/home`, which I apparently whimsically decided to make XFS, which in turns explains why `resize2fs` choked on it. ``` $ sudo xfs_growfs /home meta-data=/dev/mapper/root-home isize=512 agcount=8, agsize=5409024 blks [...] data blocks changed from 43271168 to 205975552 ``` ``` $ df -h […]

@shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy Oct 10, 2026, 10:00 AM

And, finally, ``` $ sudo resize2fs /dev/mapper/root-root resize2fs 1.47.4 (6-Mar-2025) Filesystem at /dev/mapper/root-root is mounted on /; on-line resizing required old_desc_blocks = 4, new_desc_blocks = 7 The filesystem on /dev/mapper/cancey-root is now 26214400 (4k) blocks long. $ sudo […]

@shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy Oct 10, 2026, 9:53 AM

And now, for the money shot (because money was certainly dropped on that new SSD). ``` $ sudo lvextend /dev/mapper/root-root -L 100G Size of logical volume root/root changed from 50.00 GiB (12800 extents) to 100.00 GiB (25600 extents). Logical volume root/root successfully resized. $ sudo […]

@shtrom.piaille.fr.ap.brid.gy Oct 10, 2026, 9:47 AM

So, I waited another half hour before rebooting, then had dinner, and... it only failed on the new boot partition not having been blessed with holy penguin pee. More prosaicaly, that was solved by booting on an Arch (btw) live USB, mount my new ESP partition on `/boot`, and running `bootctl […]

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