brendank310

I got a panicked call from my parents when Facebook deleted my brother's profile, probably 5 or 6 years after he passed away. After looking into just trying to get the profile restored, I came to the same conclusion as the title essentially. The "memories" feature frequently shuffled posts and pictures of him and had become a comfort for them. They bring it up every now and then, maybe some day I'll find a way to sort it out.

I've been off work for two weeks to recover from surgery, and have been playing with a couple projects throughout the day between rest and physical therapy:

- A home-rolled router/firewall: Using yocto to create a distribution for a router/firewall for my home network. It started as an exercise in wanting to have more control over the security of my home network, as well as see how nice of a UI/UX I can tease out of an LLM. It's also part of a (seemingly never ending) consolidation of homelab services.

- A SNES Reverse Engineering setup: A nephew of mine is starting to get into video games and is starting with a SNES but his system broke. I'm working on helping repair the console, but am also trying to set up an effective "LLM + Ghidra + SNES emulator + image generation AI + asperite plugin" to allow him to swap sprites and text in games to add some creativity and learning to the experience.

- A personal assistant system: Experimenting with agents to create a personal assistant for our house, and seeing to what extent the agents can be helpful and how much hardware is required to run something like that in-house.

- aztui: A TUI for exploring and interacting with Azure resources. I'd like to add some caching/pre-fetching logic to make the interaction with the interface snappier (one of the main motivators to create it).

I've been using GPT pretty heavily throughout, and it has been a lot of fun both using it, and spending some dedicated time looking at the models themselves along with the frameworks that support running and integrating them.

Yeah it's a building block for understanding number theory well, which is important in cryptography.

Relatively common nowadays. It used to be delineated as a feature in Intel chips as part of their vPro line, but I think it’s baked in. Generally an IOMMU is needed for performant PCI passthrough to VMs, and Windows uses it for DeviceGuard which tries to prevent DMA attacks.

I get the reaction, but what about the trust factor of a box you own and have running on the other side of the world? TPM isn’t an evil concept, it’s fairly useful for some scenarios. Coercion to use TPMs, that sounds evil.

It's been probably 2 years since I've messed with it, but I was still using the tarball download for Xen in OpenEmbedded builds.

As someone noted above the Commercial Solutions for Classified program has been in existence for a long while (probably over a decade). This package is newer but not wildly newer. Installs of the various 'packages' do exist.

At least in NY (and probably true of state/local politics in general) this is not necessarily true. These third parties often will choose a D or R that align with their policy goals. It helps candidates in that their name is on the ballot more (either multiple rows or listing the parties that they are the nominee of)

SB is definitely imperfect, but a useful tool in moving toward a trusted boot. I think we'd all agree having a trusted boot sequence is desirable, the point of contention being who gets to decide the criteria for trust. It's been a few years since I worked in the space but I think SB gets a bit of an undeserved bad rep (I'm sure because people were vocal early on). There is a SB signed uefi application that allows for enrolling other loaders based on the hash of the loader.

I think you're largely correct but Google isn't one person so there may be somewhat emergent patterns that work from an SEO standpoint that don't have a solid answer to Why. If I were an SEO customer I would ask for some proof but that isn't the market they're targeting. There was an old saying in the tennis instruction business that there was a bunch of 'bend your knees, fifty please'. So lots of snakeoil salesman but some salesman sell stuff that works.