Tuesday November 12th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday November 12th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

We always spend 15-30 minutes in chaos discussion mode.  It's been a
month since we have seen each other and we have to catch up! :-)

Once again not having a prearranged agenda after the random discussion
died down we started in on a round-robin for anyone who wanted to say
anything about what they have been working on lately.

Morey started things off giving a demo of his most recent adventure
with LLM Machine Learning.  Fired up his laptop OFFLINE and ran one of
the current "AI" models and demonstrated some pretty cool interaction.
Things like, "Generate a bash shell script to search my home directory
looking for PDF files and list them out in sorted order leaving the
list in my home directory."  And then it generated a script which
called find piped to sort.  All offline.  Which is really pretty
impressive.

Then Morey talked about how all of this interacted internally.  The
various things that can be done with it.  He changed speakers and gave
various demos.  Among other things you can ask for it to speak using
the voice model of (non-copyright) speakers.  It was pretty good!

As a side note I mention that RT Russia Today the state news source
admitted this past week that half of their newscasters are generative
AI models complete with social media accounts.  Because of course TV
personalities must have social media to be able to interact with their
fans.  But in this case the are constructs.  They don't really exist.
But they speak the state propaganda.

Stephen spoke about his adventure writing tools for the Creator Hub
Wordpress site.  Which is of course in PHP.  So we griped about
Wordpress for a while.  And mentioned the only way that *we* would run
Wordpress but of course that's not the way it is being run and so it
is getting compromised repeatedly.

Mike then talked about his experiences chatting with an AI tool
talking about security context of encrypted data.  And others agreed
that at the end the AI often complements you.  It will say thank you
for being a security researcher and improving security of systems and
similar types of conversation.

And we talked about how people can game the AI systems to get it to
tell us information which is otherwise to be filtered out.  Out of a
need for security I am not going to repeat it here.

Carlos joined us for the first time tonight.  I truly hope we did not
scare him off!  The advantages of free software operating systems.

Lucas is also somewhat new and so I asked the two Randal Schwartz
questions of what's your favorite programming language and edit.
This was a soft answer and not hard but recently go-lang and
previously emacs but now vscode.  (So close to the right
answers. [haha])

Aaron lamented his current interactions with security theater of
corporate security theater department.  Required to run security tools
flag things like zero sized security key file which contains no keys
and therefore grants no access but the presence of the file is flagged
and so it upsets the tool.  But it is not in his part of the project
but in a 3rd party tool which he can't affect anyway.  So much fun.
Well I remember similar interactions.  I sympathize.  So happy I am
not dealing with that now.

Kirk stood up and said, My name is Kirk and I do not like AI.  (Ha!)
Been reorganizing his computer rack.

Alex talked about a fancy feature of python parsing YAML which avoided
most of the pain of dealing with YAML.

Scott is now after years not now has been for the last month writing
nothing but PowerShell for his employer.  Shock to the system!
(Brian, He missed your talks about PowerShell!)  Has been getting help
from Perplexity which is another AI engine.  Talked about how it is
really a better way to generate searches.  Can mostly convert what you
ask into a more intelligent search.  Then the search turns up the clue
that is needed.

Scott had one interesting problem.  A Docker hosting instance for some
reason he hasn't figured out yet is changing the /tmp directory to the
owner of the docker containers and restricting access to /tmp.  Which
breaks other things which then try to use /tmp later.

Bob griped and whined about how IPv6 not being functional on my
Connexion ISP connection.  IPv4 works.  It works extremely well.  So
well that there is really no way to detect that something is not
working.  I asked the question if anyone knows for certain that their
IPv6 is working on their Connexion home network and no one has been
looking.  Because Connexion is working really well.  I don't want to
make it sound like I don't like Connexion.  Connexion is awesome!
It's 100x better than my previous ISPs and you won't pry it out of my
hands.  But I want all of it to be working.  I am working up a test
system so I can interact with support reasonably and get this figured
out.

This was typed in on the fly by me, definitely not an AI.