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Lees weergave

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Russell Coker: Links August 2026

✇Planet Debian

This YouTube video about the Cashier Girl Meme is interesting in the context of AI systems that generate images of people and can communicate with people, hotter than any real human is an achievable goal [1].

Stand Up Maths has an interesting Youtube video about LLMs solving maths problems which I highly recommend watching (it does not require any real knowledge of maths), I think this opens the door to attacks on well established cryptologic systems [2].

Adam Conover made an insightful YouTube video about how and why Hollywood is now unable to make good sitcoms and why this is bad for society [3].

Sky Croeser wrote an interesting and insightful blog post about topics covered at the “Digital and sexual citizenship in an age of social media bans: Interrogating the rights of children and young people conference” [4].

Zane wrote a very informative blog post about reverse engineering a trojaned Android projector with Claude Code [5]. We need much better security on home networks to break the business model for this sort of thing.

Renee Stonebraker’s article “Puritans Wouldn’t Eat Pussy, So They Invented the Western” has a lot of interesting information about early days of colonising the US, and not much about eating pussy [6].

IFLScience has an interesting article about brinicles, icicles of brine that form under sea ice [7].

Nautilus has an interesting article about the Silurian Hypothesis [8].

The Conversation has an intersting article about the pros and cons of no-till farming [9].

Cold War is a 365tomorrows story about bio-warfare which raises several disturbing possibilities we need to guard against [10].

Scott Santens wrote an insightful article describing how a land value tax would reduce rent and solve the housing shortages [11].

Positive News has an interesting article about using OnlyFans to teach people about climate change [12].

The Conversation has an interesting article about cultural safety in healthcare, sounds good, and while we are at it lets deal with sexism [13].

Doctoreww has an interesting web page about ways of displaying different strings to humans and machines, this could result in you running a different command to what you thought you copied from a web site or defeating tools designed to block hostile content [14].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article “Commentary Hell is Other People” about the way rich people want to use AI to replace all people [15]. Also psychologists who help rich people accept being greedy are worthy of a Luigi

The research article “Worship me at the office altar: Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work” is interesting, yet another reason to get rid of narcissistic executives [16].

Renew Economy has an interesting article about clean up costs for mining (which is usually left for the government to pay) and how this could impact renewable energy production facilities [17].

Elvira Bary wrote an insightful article on the Russian financial collapse that is happening now [18].

The Guardian has an interesting article about Afro-American women who travel to South Korea for healthcare because of problems with racism and sexism in American hospitals [19].

The Conversation has an interesting article about the potential for disabled people to be more productive in space than non-disabled people [20].

Krebs has an interesting article about LG banning residential proxy code from apps after the LG store was found to have such code in 42% of it’s apps [21].

Robert B Shpiner wrote an insightful article for The Guardian about the death of democracy in the US [22].

Related posts:

  1. Links August 2024 Bruce Schneier and Kim Córdova wrote an insightful article about...
  2. Links February 2026 Charles Stross has a good theory of why “AI” is...
  3. Links August 2025 Dimitri John Ledkov wrote an informative blog post about self...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.4.28 on CRAN: Small Updates

✇Planet Debian

A new minor release 0.4.28 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings to the Google Protocol Buffers (“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol. The new release is also already as a binary via r2u.

This release corrects a really old bug. Troy found, when working on gRPC based extensions, which is in and by itself exciting, that a small part of our interface surface (for service descriptors) was just wrong confusing single and double underscores. adjusts to a change upstream. This has been corrected. I updated a few of the usual continuous integration parts, updated a help page for a newly-added nag by CRAN, and also got a last-minute round of noodling in as the JSS paper vignette was still referencing OmegaHat which the CRAN URL checker objected to. I created a quick one-off repo to serve pdf files should the need arise again, and rebuilt the vignette linking to it. No other changes.

The following section from the NEWS.Rd file has all details and links.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.28 (2026-08-21)

  • Standard maintenance of continuous integration

  • The type help page has received a usage section

  • Cleanup of several methods for ServiceDescriptor, correct several other declaration (Troy Hernandez in #117 fixing #116)

  • Adjusted vignette reference to Omegahat paper to alternate location

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the ‘quick’ overview vignette, and the pre-print of our JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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Emmanuel Kasper: Create a development VM using Debian cloud images

✇Planet Debian

Following on the rationale of the previous post, here is how I create a development VM based on ready to use disk images made by the debian cloud team. I could as well install the VM myself using an ISO, but why download a collection of packages in a ISO only to copy them right onto a disk image ?

From the list of images available at https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/ we will start with the generic qcow2 disk image, it has cloud-init, which allows initial automatic configuration, and snapshots of the VM via the qcow2 disk format.

As for the virtualization, I am using virsh virt-install and virt-manager, which are part of the libvirt framework. Libvirt offers an excellent API accessible over qemu/KVM via shell (virsh), GUI (virt-manager) and Web (cockpit) .

To use libvirt, properly you need to make sure your standard user is member of the libvirt group, and the libvirt default network is started via virsh net-autostart default. Also make sure you set export LIBVIRT_DEFAULT_URI=qemu:///system to use the system wide instance of libvirt, which is needed for the default bridged networking.

Download the debian cloud image:

$ wget https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/trixie/daily/latest/debian-13-generic-amd64-daily.qcow2

Add the disk image as a libvirt volume:

$ export SIZE=$(stat -Lc%s debian-13-generic-amd64-daily.qcow2)
$ virsh vol-create-as default dev-vm $SIZE --format qcow2
$ virsh vol-upload --pool default dev-vm debian-13-generic-amd64-daily.qcow2

Create a VM with the root password set to “root”:

$ echo root > password.txt
$ virt-install --name dev-vm --memory 4096 --noreboot \
	--os-variant detect=on,name=linux2024 \
	--disk vol=default/dev-vm \
	--import \
	--boot uefi \
	--cloud-init root-password-file=password.txt,clouduser-ssh-key=$HOME/.ssh/.ssh/id_ed25519,disable=on

At the point libvirt will create a VM (a domain in libvirt parlance) and start it.

Starting install...
Allocating 'virtinst-ns9oa7_i-cloudinit.iso'                | 368 kB  00:00     
Transferring 'virtinst-ns9oa7_i-cloudinit.iso'              | 368 kB  00:00     
Creating domain...                                          |         00:00     
Connected to domain 'dev-vm'

BdsDxe: starting Boot0001 "UEFI Misc Device" from PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x2,0x3)/Pci(0x0,0x0)

Booting `Debian GNU/Linux'

Loading Linux 6.12.101+deb13-amd64 ...

Loading initial ramdisk ...

EFI stub: Loaded initrd from LINUX_EFI_INITRD_MEDIA_GUID device path
EFI stub: UEFI Secure Boot is enabled.
[    0.000000] Linux version 6.12.101+deb13-amd64 (debian-kernel@lists.debian.org) (x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc-14 (Debian 14.2.0-19) 14.2.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.44) #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.12.101-1 (2026-08-05)
[    0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-6.12.101+deb13-amd64 root=PARTUUID=2b4578e2-9d2e-4b32-b6a4-b5b2ca607ef6 ro console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200 earlyprintk=ttyS0,115200 consoleblank=0
...

Once the VM is created you have now three ways to access it:

# open a serial console to the VM
$ virsh console dev-vm
# access the graphical console
$ virt-manager
# Access the VM via SSH with the precreated cloud user "debian"
$ virsh domifaddr dev-vm
 Name       MAC address          Protocol     Address
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 vnet7      52:54:00:23:e6:61    ipv4         192.168.122.225/24
$ ssh debian@192.168.122.225

In the next blog post we will see how to configure the IDE (vscodium) to run confortably in the VM.

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