Hive Mind: Looking for a sci-fi book read in the mid-'60s. Takes place in a moon colony run by a large corporation. Murders are happening & no one can find the murderer. A detective is brought up from Earth to assist. He is blind & has a "birth defect" that allows him to see people as strange, colorful geometric objects, which leads to the answer. Need author & title.

#SciFi
#Books
#Reading
#FindABook
#ScienceFiction

*Please Boost*

Lots of terrain for fantasy and Sci-Fi tabletop games, all deigned, and made by me Mystic Pigeon Gaming!

You can find everything on my website, or Etsy store.

Got a 3D printer? Then you can find my designs on Cults and MyMiniFactory (links can be found on my website).

https://www.mysticpigeon.com/

#dnd #ttrpg #warhammer #warhammer40k #3dprinting

I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when they're in the room.

Tridge almost walked backwards into implementing the Windows SMB protocol (he was just debugging some funny NetBIOS extensions IIRC). But his paper on the #rsync algorithm was groundbreaking, and actually writing the tool to implement it was brilliant. It's become one of those tools like #curl that just forms one of the major structural supports of the modern Internet. I still remember the day that the SSH transport became the default, and I remember being able to thank him in person when he came to the San Francisco office (although IIRC by that point he'd handed control of rsync over to mbp).

I remember at my next job he came to a summit of folks working on print driver/spooler software. When he pointed out that some problems were effectively a cache-consistency algorithm, we all kind of put our fingers to our temples and said "Oh wow, you're SO right!" He was always insightful and sharp, while being gentle and approachable.

I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with him in two decades, and only know what I see him put out. A friend of mine in Australia noted that he hasn't posted to the Canberra LUG list since 2020, thanking someone for congratulating him on receiving the Medal of the Order of Australia. He's very much alive, but from what little I see I grow concerned for him.

In 2024 he took over maintenance of rsync once more. The 3.3.0 release was the last one from the previous maintainer, and Tridge is currently working on 3.4.x releases.

Well... Tridge and #Claude, it seems: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345332213390

The issue tracker for rsync has recently lit up with regressions, showing features that worked reliably for almost 30 years are suddenly coming crashing down in 3.4.2 and 3.4.3. People are scrambling to find ways to pin rsync to known-good versions. The considerate, incisive mind I briefly knew is letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him, and it just seems so astonishingly *unlike* the person I met back in the day.

I am still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope all is well for him, but I will not cast aspersions on his goals or his abilities. No, instead I draw this conclusion:

If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.

That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.

No one.

Running Podman  in production for years now, and I don't miss the Docker daemon one bit.

I just published a deep dive on managing OCI containers the Unix way: daemonless, rootless, and natively integrated with systemd via Quadlets.

I cover:
- Real secrets management
- Auto-updates via systemd timers
- The Docker compatibility layer

This is the guide I wish I had when making the switch.

Read it here: https://blog.hofstede.it/podman-in-production-quadlets-secrets-auto-updates-and-docker-compatibility/

#Podman #Linux #DevOps #Systemd #Homelab #Sysadmin #Containers

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@pypi/116335453780319113

There is a ton in this report, like how @pypi is able to respond so quickly to malware thanks to our network of trusted reporters and how to keep yourself secure both as a maintainer and user of Python packages.