For 2 years, I had to set up production environments on RHEL, mostly Apache and Keycloak servers. I had a limited, very specific list of sudo permissions, and I had to ask very specifically what I else needed, which was then granted by people who neither knew nor cared what I was working on.

SELinux permission problems were always the fallback reason when nothing else made sense. With my permissions, I could not just straight up check for it. E. g. Apache would not server a folder, cryptic error -> check file permissions -> check general Apache config problems -> assume SELinux permission is missing and request it, supplying the exact command they need to type.

The one point I don’t completely understand is the tax debt: Wouldn’t a failed business, no matter how ridiculous, be a complete write-off?

Maybe the problem is that he has to tax each fiscal year independently, so a tax debt in 2023 from successful freelance work would not be diminished by a failed “business idea” in 2024.

This is a crazy use of AI!

What I have been considering, but haven’t found a readily available setup yet: Make a user with lots of read permissions (most of /etc, API keys & passwords in separate excluded files). That could be done with very restrictive sudo patterns. Let the AI run commands under that user directly (it can do sudo -l to get an idea of what it can do). Then, use it like in Star Trek “Computer - run a level 2 diagnostic”.

Not as the centre of attention when fixing a problem, but as additional input / modern rubber ducking.

Challenging, but not impossible. I think the military budget of all other NATO members combined would just be about the same as the US. However, it’s not like every country has its own independent “mix of everything”; they are supposed to work supplemental. What makes things worse is proprietary hardware and software in modern equipment such as planes. I’m not sure to which degree it would even be technically possible to use it to defend against the USA.

Then there is the nuclear weapon problem. France and UK would have to really stand their ground and follow through with nuclear retaliation. That means that even when the USA or Russia just use a small tactical nuke in Poland, Greenland or wherever, they’d have to use one of their few strategic nukes to destroy something big, possibly dooming Paris. The downside of the idea of mutually assured destruction always was that it only works with somewhat reasonable people who REALLY are not willing to take their entire civilisation with them. But since Stalin, there have never been nutjobs like Trump or Putin in charge, neither in the USSR, nor US, nor Russia.

A victorious Ukraine would certainly be an incredible asset to have in NATO, with all those battle-hardened, highly educated people.

But all things considered, might as well give it a try.

I’m reading AI content there, and when I post, I’m getting accused of being a bot / using an LLM. Fantastic.

Seeing what happens when the US just stops helping makes me realise: The good they did as a superpower over the decades isn’t talked about as much as the bad. Obviously now, there is plenty of that, too.

The absurd “pizza-gate” suddenly makes sense.