AI, Azure, SimpleX, Contabo, Token2, RocksDB

1. Helped a friend to setup a basic serverless Azure (@ Wikipedia) Python project, so they can continue developing on that base being deployed and confirmed to work.

2. It seems that XFTP server for SimpleX Chat doesn't properly cleanup the data folder. It might leave random files around. - I personally hate programs which do not manage house keeping properly and just go and poop around corners making a mess. When the server starts, it going through every active file reference anyway. So how hard it is to delete the files without existing reference? Shouldn't be too complicated task after all (?). Duh! Annoying. Yet it seemed that they're aware about this garbage lame code being in the program. Basic garbage collection...

3. Had really annoying boot problems with Contabo and Proxmox (@ Wikipedia). It seems that BsdDxe failed to load UEFI PXEv4 from PciRoot. After that loading Windows Boot Manager failed as well, with the device UUID provided. System crashed, until I restarted the virtual environment manually. - Duh! It seems that TFTP loading most probably failed with at least some of the hosts.

4. Token2 seems to be providing really nice FIDO2 / WebAuthn / TOTP / Passkeys products: Multi-profile TOTP "calculator" (@ token2.com)

5. And of course their FIDO2 / Passkeys FIDO2 USB with NFC (@ token2.com) - Really nice products, I like it. 

6. AI race keeps chugging forward. Meta Llama 3 is now available. Way interesting, also just saw the new Atlas video from Boston Dynamics. World will be quite different in future than what we used to know. It's not instant change, but it's going to happen, sooner or later.

7. Installed Llama3 and Wizard2lm language models locally using Ollama, so information about searched topics doesn't leak. (Later updated versions of LLaMa, Hermes, Mistral, Dolphin, etc).

8. Online AI platforms are popping out really fast. Which isn't surprising at all. It's interesting to see which options will prevail and get some kind of edge, as well which providers can balance the privacy aspects correctly.

9. I could run all of my blog posts via AI and ask it to rephrase and fix grammar. But that's kind of pointless. it probably could lead to some changes being done, which do not reflect the reality. It also would ruin the originality of the content.

10. Read RocksDB (@ Wikipedia) documentation, FAQ and lightly tested it with Docker and Python. Database creation, inserting loads of synthetic test load stuff to the database. Checking that compacting and key seeks and deleting works as expected. And it all unsurprisingly seems to be working fine, I just don't currently have use for it, but I'll keep in mind for situations where JSON, pickle, raw binary, flat files / with optional directory structure, SQLite3 or PostgreSQL doesn't cut it for some strange reason.

11. Long discussion about, if prebuilt binaries are good or bad. Well, easy it is. But for performance and security, it might not be always the case. - Complex topic if diving even slightly deeper into it.

12. Long networking discussion: NATs and SPI firewalls with short timeouts are the worst problem, unless applications are correctly configured to deal with those. Which of course is energy inefficient.

13. I've tuned so much as example with SSH (and other) long lived TCP sessions and SimpleX makes no difference at all. There are multiple factors at play and everything needs to be right that the sessions can be kept open power efficiently. And in some cases, it's just better to decide that you don't even try to keep the sessions open. You'll close session when done, and open new one when it's necessary. Then you'll avoid problems with stuck sessions. Some people "fix it" by doing something like setting client / server alive interval to 15 seconds, which is of course very energy inefficient if having mobile device and many connections. It's just constant (almost) pointless traffic.

14. Something not so different: Interesting documentaries, of course earlier Snowden, Navalnyi and now Yanis Varoufakis documentary. Many views about world: power, money, control, monitoring, economy, privacy, big brother and so on.

2024-12-22