theterrasque
@theterrasque@infosec.pub
- Comment on Gemini AI tells the user to die — the answer appeared out of nowhere when the user asked Google's Gemini for help with his homework 2 days ago:
With chatgpt’s new web search it’s pretty good for more specialized searches too. And it links to the source, so you can check yourself.
It’s been able to answer some very specific niche questions accurately and give link to relevant information.
- Comment on REPORT: Arm is sensationally canceling the license that allowed Qualcomm to make Snapdragon chips which power everything from Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs to Samsung's Galaxy smartphones and tablets 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. 1 month ago:
Temperature 0 is never used
It is in some cases, where you want a deterministic / “best” response. Seen it used in benchmarks, or when doing some “Is this comment X?” where X is positive, negative, spam, and so on. You don’t want the model to get creative there, but rather answer consistently and always the most likely path.
- Comment on A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. 1 month ago:
learnprompting.org/docs/…/chain_of_thought
It’s suspected to be one of the reasons why Claude and OpenAI’s new o1 model is so good at reasoning compared to other llm’s.
It can sometimes notice hallucinations and adjust itself, but there’s also been examples where the CoT reasoning itself introduce hallucinations and makes it throw away correct answers. So it’s not perfect. Overall a big improvement though.
- Comment on A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. 1 month ago:
Microsoft’s Dolphin and phi models have used this successfully, and there’s some evidence that all newer models use big LLM’s to produce synthetic data (Like when asked, answering it’s ChatGPT or Claude, hinting that at least some of the dataset comes from those models).
- Comment on A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. 1 month ago:
randomly sampled.
Semi-randomly. There’s a lot of sampling strategies. For example temperature, top-K, top-p, min-p, mirostat, repetition penalty…
- Comment on US: Alaska man busted with 10,000+ child sex abuse images despite his many encrypted apps 2 months ago:
So telegram’s delusional propaganda did something good for once?
- Comment on Self-Hosted AI is pretty darn cool 3 months ago:
Llama3 8b can be run at 6gb vram, and it’s fairly competent. Gemma has a 9b I think, which would also be worth looking into.
- Comment on Reddit brings back its old award system — ‘we messed up’ 5 months ago:
- Comment on ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US 6 months ago:
You realise there is no algorithm behind Lemmy, right?
Of course there is. Even “sort by newest” is an algorithm, and the default view is more complicated than that.
You aren’t being shoved controversial polarizing content subliminally here.
Neither are you on TikTok, unless you actively go looking for it
- Comment on 4chan daily challenge sparked deluge of explicit AI Taylor Swift images 9 months ago:
Hah as if. In the early 00s the mods were in maybe once or twice a day and there was tons of CP being posted.
Worst I saw was a little girl chopped into pieces, and a many -page discussion / argument if it should be sorted as CP or Necro porn. That was the old 4chan.
- Comment on 4chan daily challenge sparked deluge of explicit AI Taylor Swift images 9 months ago:
Even for 4chan that’s fucked up.
Oh, sweet summer child…
- Comment on bash.org is gone 10 months ago:
- Comment on Smartphone manufacturers still want to make foldables a thing 10 months ago:
I’m waiting for them to find a better spot on durability, weight /bulkiness and hardware like cameras.
They’re still too big and bulky for me, the other components are usually a bit behind, and the screen durability seems a bit too eeh still.
Which is to say, I’m interested in one, but they’re not there yet for me.
- Comment on 41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!! 11 months ago:
I gotta ask… were you around and actively using xmpp around that time?
Because I was. And xmpp struggling had nothing to do with Google
- Comment on 41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!! 11 months ago:
- Comment on Thousands of private camera footages from bedrooms hacked, sold online - VnExpress International 11 months ago:
Goatse, for the connoisseur
- Comment on Marketer sparks panic with claims it uses smart devices to eavesdrop on people 11 months ago:
He’s arguably a big enough target to actually worry about custom hardware modification attacks.
- Comment on Should I move to Docker? 11 months ago:
For the nfs shares, there’s generally two approaches to that. First is to mount it on host OS, then map it in to the container. Let’s say the host has the nfs share at /nfs, and the folders you need are at /nfs/homes. You could do “docker run -v /nfs/homes:/homes smtpserverimage” and then those would be available from /homes inside the image.
The second approach is to set up NFS inside the image, and have that connect directly to the nfs server. This is generally seen as a bad idea since it complicates the image and tightly couples the image to a specific configuration. But there are of course exceptions to each rule, so it’s good to keep in mind.
With database servers, you’d have that set up for accepting network connections, and then just give the address and login details in config.
And having a special setup… How special are we talking? If it’s configuration, then that’s handled by env vars and mapping in config files. If it’s specific plugins or compile options… Most built images tend to cast a wide net, and usually have a very “everything included” approach, and instructions / mechanics for adding plugins to the image.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can build your own image. Generally that’s done by basing your Dockerfile on an official image for that software, then do your changes. We can again take the “postgres” image since that’s a fairly well made one that has exactly the easy function for this we’re looking for.
If you would like to do additional initialization in an image derived from this one, add one or more *.sql, *.sql.gz, or *.sh scripts under /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d (creating the directory if necessary). After the entrypoint calls initdb to create the default postgres user and database, it will run any *.sql files, run any executable *.sh scripts, and source any non-executable *.sh scripts found in that directory to do further initialization before starting the service.
So if you have a .sh script that does some extra stuff before the DB starts up, let’s say “mymagicpostgresthings.sh” and you want an image that includes that, based on Postgresql 16, you could make this Dockerfile in the same folder as that file:
FROM postgres:16 RUN mkdir /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d COPY mymagicpostgresthings.sh /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/mymagicpostgresthings.sh RUN chmod a+x /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/mymagicpostgresthings.sh
and when you run “docker build . -t mymagicpostgres” in that folder, it will build that image with your file included, and call it “mymagicpostgres” - which you can run by doing “docker run -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=mysecretpassword -p 5432:5432 mymagicpostgres”
In some cases you need a more complex approach. For example I have an nginx streaming server - which needs extra patches. I found this repository for just that, and if you look at it’s Dockerfile you can see each step it’s doing. I needed a bit of modifications to that, so I have my own copy with different nginx.conf, an extra patch it downloads and applies to the src code, and a startup script that changes some settings from env vars, but that had 90% of the work done.
So depending on how big changes you need, you might have to recreate from scratch or you can piggyback on what’s already made. And for “docker script to launch it” that’s usually a docker-compose.yml file. Here’s a postgres example:
version: '3.1' services: db: image: postgres restart: always environment: POSTGRES_PASSWORD: example adminer: image: adminer restart: always ports: - 8080:8080
If you run “docker compose up -d” in that file’s folder it will cause docker to download and start up the images for postgres and adminer, and port forward in 8080 to adminer. From adminer’s point of view, the postgres server is available as “db”. And since both have “restart: always” if one of them crashes or the machine reboots, docker will start them up again. So that will continue running until you run “docker compose down” or something catastrophic happens.
- Comment on Should I move to Docker? 11 months ago:
It’s a great tool to have in the toolbox. Might take some time to wrap your head around, but coming from vm’s you already have most of the base understanding.
From a VM user’s perspective, some translations:
- Dockerfile = script to set up a VM from a base distro, and create a checkpoint that is used as a base image for starting up vm’s
- A container is roughly similar to a running VM. It runs inside the host os, jailed, which account for it’s low overhead.
- When a container is killed, every file system change gets thrown out. Certain paths and files can be mapped to host folders / storage to keep data between restarts.
- Containers run on their own internship network. You can specify ports to nat in from host interface to containers.
- Most service setup is done by specifying environment variables for the container, or mapping in a config file or folder.
- Since the base image is static, and config is per container, one image can be used to run multiple containers. So if you have a postgres image, you can run many containers on that image. And specify different config for each instance.
- Docker compose is used for multiple containers, and their relationship. For example a web service with a DB, static file server, and redis cache. Docker compose also handles things like setting up a unique network for the containers, storage volumes, logs, internal name resolution, unique names for the containers and so on.
A small tip: you can “exec” into a running container, which will run a command inside that container. Combined with interactive (-i) and terminal (-t) flags, it’s a good way to get a shell into a running container and have a look around or poke things. Sort of like getting a shell on a VM.
One thing that’s often confusing for new people are image tags. Partially because it can mean two things. For example “postgres” is a tag. That is attached to an image. The actual “name” of an image is it’s Sha sum. An image can have multiple tags attached. So far so good, right?
Now, let’s get complicated. The actual tag, the full tag for “postgres” is actually “docker.io/postgres:latest”. You see, every tag is a URL, and if it doesn’t have a domain name, docker uses it’s own. And then we get to the “: latest” part. Which is called a tag. Yup. All tags have a tag. If one isn’t given, it’s automatically set to “latest”. This is used for versioning and different builds.
For example postgres have tags like “16.1” which points to latest 16.1.x version image, built on postgres maintainers’ preferred distro. “16.1-alpine” that point to latest Alpine based 16.1.x version. “16” for latest 16.x.x version, “alpine” for latest alpine based version, be it 16 or 17 or 18… and so on. You can find more details here.
The images on docker hub are made by … well, other people. Often the developers of that software themselves, sometimes by docker, sometimes by random people. You can make your own account there, it’s free. If you do, make an image and pushes it, it will be available as shdwdrgn/name - if it doesn’t have a user component it’s maintained / sanctioned by docker.
You can also run your own image repository service, as long as it has https with valid cert. Then it will be yourdomain.tld/something
So that was a brief introduction to the strange World of docker. Docker is a for profit company, btw. But the image format is standardized, and there’s fully open source ways to make and run images too. At the top of my head, podman and Kubernetes.
- Comment on Should I move to Docker? 11 months ago:
Yeah, it also has the effect that when starting up say a new postgres or web server is one simple command, a few seconds and a few mb of disk and ram, you do it more for smaller stuff.
Instead of setting up one nginx for multiple sites you run one nginx per site and have the settings for that as part of the site repository. Or when a service needs a DB, just start a new one just for that. And if that file analyzer ran in it’s own image instead of being part of the web service, you could scale that separately… oh, and it needs a redis instance and a rabbitmq server, that’s two more containers, that serves just that web service. And so on…
Things that were a huge hassle before, like separate mini vm’s for each sub-service, and unique sub-services for each service doesn’t just become practical but easy. You can define all the services and their relations in one file and docker will recreate the whole stack with all services with one command.
And then it also gets super easy to start more than one of them, for example for testing or if you have a different client. … which is how you easily reach a hundred instances running.
So instead of a service you have a service blueprint, which can be used in service stack blueprints, which allows you to set up complex systems relatively easily. With a granularity that would traditionally be insanity for anything other than huge, serious big-company deployments.
- Comment on Should I move to Docker? 11 months ago:
Nine. How much ram do they use? How much disk space? Try running 90, or 900. Currently, on my personal hobby kubernetes cluster, there’s 83 different instances running. Because of the low overhead, I can run even small tools in their own container, completely separate from the rest. If I run say… a postgresql server… spinning one up takes 90mb disk space for the image, and about 15 mb ram.
I worked at a company that did - among other things - hosting, and was using VM’s for easier management and separation between customers. I wasn’t directly involved in that part day to day, but was friend with the main guy there. It was tough to manage. He was experimenting with automatic creating and setting up new VM’s, stripping them for unused services and files, and having different sub-scripts for different services. This was way before docker, but already then admins were looking in that direction.
So aschually, docker is kinda made for people who runs things in VM’s, because that is exactly what they were looking for and duct taping things together for before docker came along.
- Comment on Should I move to Docker? 11 months ago:
Just remember that Raspberry is an ARM cpu, which is a different architecture. Docker can cross compile to it, and make multiple images automatically. It takes more time and space though, as it runs an arm emulator to make them.
docker.com/…/faster-multi-platform-builds-dockerf… has some info about it.
- Comment on Should I move to Docker? 11 months ago:
VM’s have much bigger overhead, for one. And VM’s are less reproducible too. If you had to set up a VM again, do you have all the steps written down? Every single step? Including that small “oh right” thing you always forget? A Dockerfile is basically just a list of those steps, written in a way a computer can follow. And every time you build an image in docker, it just plays that list and gives you the resulting file system ready to run.
It’s incredibly practical in some cases, let’s say you want to try a different library or upgrade a component to a newer version. With VM’s you could do it live, but you risk not being able to go back. You could make a copy or make a checkpoint, but that’s rather resource intensive. With docker you just change the Dockerfile slightly and build a new image.
The resulting image is also immutable, which means that if you restart the docker container, it’s like reverting to first VM checkpoint after finished install, throwing out any cruft that have gathered. You can exempt specific file and folders from this, if needed. So every cruft and change that have happened gets thrown out except the data folder(s) for the program.
- Comment on Should I move to Docker? 11 months ago:
Modularity, compartmentalization, reliability, predictability.
One software needs MySQL 5, another needs mariadb 7. A third service needs PHP 7 while the distro supported version is 8. A fourth service uses cuda 11.7 - not 11.8 which is what everything in your package manager uses. a fifth service’s install was only tested on latest Ubuntu, and now you need to figure out what rpm gives the exact library it expects. A sixth service expects odbc to be set up in a very specific way, but handwaves it in the installation docs. A seventh program expects a symlink at a specific place that is on the desktop version of the distro, but not the server version.
And so on and so forth… with docker not only is all this specified in excruciating details, it’s also the exact same setup on every install.
You don’t have it not working on arch because the maintainer of a library there decided to inline a patch that supposedly doesn’t change anything, but somehow causes the program to segfault.
I can develop a service on windows, test it, deploy it to my Kubernetes cluster, and I don’t even have to worry about which machine to deploy it on, it just runs it on a machine. Probably an Ubuntu machine, but maybe on that Gentoo node instead. And if my osx friend wants to try it out, then no problem. I can just give him a command, and it’s running on his laptop.
If you’re an old Linux admin… This is what utopia looks like.
- Comment on YouTube is deliberately crippling Firefox on ARM systems 11 months ago:
First language in Accept-Language header that server also support
- Comment on YouTube is deliberately crippling Firefox on ARM systems 11 months ago:
That’s in separate headers
- Comment on EU agrees to landmark rules on artificial intelligence 11 months ago:
In other news, they also regulated that knives must be designed to prevent stabbing people, and guns must be designed to only shoot bad guys.
- Comment on Video of ceramic storage system prototype surfaces online — 10,000TB cartridges bombarded with laser rays could become mainstream by 2030, making slow hard drives and tapes obsolete 11 months ago:
And what do you think CD writers are? I’m not talking about rewriteable CDs here. Normal burn once CDs. You could write some files, then decide to replace a file and add more.
Look up cd sessions. Until you finalized it, and as long as there was still free space, you could add, modify and delete data on it.
- Comment on Video of ceramic storage system prototype surfaces online — 10,000TB cartridges bombarded with laser rays could become mainstream by 2030, making slow hard drives and tapes obsolete 11 months ago:
You had tricks on cd’s and such to make it kinda work as read/write storage.
