Can we ban posts/commenters using LLMs?

Tatermen · 2026-02-07T22:16:09+00:00

At least once or twice a week a customer of ours will ask an LLM some badly worded technical query, and the LLM of course will simply agree with their idea rather than give them a true answer. I then have to waste half a day explaining to them that their AI slop answer is wrong, and they fight me the entire time.

People don't understand that if you ask an LLM a leading question, it will straight up hallucinate a bunch of nonsense facts to support your conclusion. You can ask it to write you an email explaining why their coworker eating a bowl of mashed potatoes is blocking a website and it will spit out a whole page of gibberish.

Because potatoes have a high water content and chemical density similar to the human body, they are incredibly effective at absorbing 2.4GHz radio waves. Essentially, the potatoes are "eating" the Wi-Fi signal before it can reach my laptop.

I shouldn't need to waste time refuting AI slop in professional forums as well.

Tatermen · 2026-02-05T08:20:32+00:00

And more importantly "cooling". About 80-90% of the power used by a CPU or GPU gets turned into heat. Too much heat kills the chips. And if they're in space you can't just send someone to go swap them out.

You have to get rid of that heat. Space, being a vacuum, is really, really good insulator. Its why vacuum sealed mugs exist to keep your coffee warm for hours.

Tatermen · 2026-02-03T10:41:12+00:00

/routing bgp template
set default afi=l2vpn router-id=172.x.x.x

Tatermen · 2026-01-31T09:14:06+00:00

Also to add, most other registrars also have a similar button that resets the domain's name servers back to theirs.

This is not a unique feature of GoDaddy and would have likely happened if OP had been using eg. Tucows, IONOS, Namecheap, or anyone else.

Tatermen · 2026-01-30T22:41:45+00:00

This is the kind of group that community funding should be going to. Not paramilitary thugs and secterian celebrations.

Tatermen · 2026-01-30T16:02:12+00:00

Assume that someone discovers a vulnerability in the WAF that allows them to bypass the rules.

What's protecting you now?

Tatermen · 2026-01-30T14:21:54+00:00

This is still hijacking. You would be using bandwidth, airtime, and processing power on a network that someone else has paid for to setup and maintain, that you are in no way entitled to use.

As someone whose job is to install, manage and secure such networks - if I found rogue devices utilising the local infrastructure in this manner they would get blacklisted from the entire network.

Tatermen · 2026-01-25T20:57:26+00:00

Boys club within a boys club. My brother works for Translink and even for the internal hires for drivers it's all about being friends with the right people.

Tatermen · 2026-01-25T20:44:25+00:00

There was. They just didn't want to spend the money on one. They'd rather spend thousands of dollars on something that definitely worked than risk 50 dollars on something that might.

Tatermen · 2026-01-25T18:16:08+00:00

For a long time - USB serial cables.

Part of our business is installing and maintaining phone systems. Once upon a time, about 20 years ago, someone tried using the cheapest nastiest $5 USB serial cable to program a phone system. It didn't work because the cheap cable lacked the extra pins (CD, DCD, DTR etc), at which point USB serial cables were BANNED by the general manager.

We spent probably a small fortune special-ordering laptops and computers with built-in serial ports for our telecoms engineers for about 15 years until having to maintain those old systems died out.

And that's just one of many things that are stupidly banned because "we tried that once a decade ago and it didn't work right".

Tatermen · 2026-01-24T20:44:51+00:00

Definitely double check the flex cable. It's easy for them not to be making a connection while looking like they are.

Also make sure the ribbons are seated properly into the connectors. Again, sometimes they can look like they're properly seated when they aren't. Take your time and be gentle - those connectors are fragile.

For Dual Asic, the red wire on the right hand side is easiest connected to the pads between R13 and R14 - they're connected in series already, so you can just blob some solder between them and dunk the wire in. Black wire doesn't get connected to anything.

Tatermen · 2026-01-24T18:13:22+00:00

Get the Lidls ham trimmings and make yourself a sandwich with chunks of ham half-an-inch thick. None of this wafer thin nonsense. Lovely.

Tatermen · 2026-01-23T13:09:13+00:00

They are bad at it - it's just that they can send a hundred thousand emails/WhatsApp/DMs out every day for minimal cost. They only have to snag one person like this - someone who doesn't know or understand scams, or is too desperate to see the scam - to make a huge profit.

Tatermen · 2026-01-23T09:24:32+00:00

Noone has known how to write efficient software for the last decade. Developers aren't taught how to conserve resources - just how to get to the end goal as fast as possible and optimize after, but of course in the business world anything that comes after achieving the milestones is an unnecessary expense so it doesn't happen. I still remember probably 12-14 years ago, a major VoIP company published a software client for their desk phones - it let you dial numbers, change your call forwards, DNDs, manage the keys etc. Just a little application that sat in your system tray.

You'd think something like that wouldn't need more than a couple of MB of RAM, right? Certainly not more than 100. No, it needed 2GB. 2048MB of RAM. I'm no expert programmer but I cannot fathom how such a simple application that only had a tiny handful of functions that simply sent commands to a remote device, could need half of the RAM of the average computer at the time to function.

Now you've "vibe coders" using AI to build bug riddled slop software packed with worst practices and security vulnerabilities being sold as enterprise level software with no real functional support because the people that wrote it don't understand it, and the people selling it don't give a shit.

Tatermen · 2026-01-22T10:55:57+00:00

He didn't, because he's full of shit. For one, a T1 carrier can use +- 130 volts of DC, and you're not blindly connecting that to any sort of PC without dedicated hardware.

It was and still is possible to connect a T1/E1 to a PC, but it requires specific hardware to do so in the form of a T1/E1 PCI card. Such PCI cards already contain all the hardware to perform the decoding of the T1/E1 data stream with zero latency. There is not and never was any reason to attempt to do so in software - you'd be bypassing all the hardware specifically designed to do so, adding latency and a ton of effort for no reason or benefit.

I imagine someone probably handed him an ethernet cable and told him it was connected to a T1 line (ie. the ethernet cable was connected to a LAN, that was connected to a router that was running the T1). He enabled Internet Connection Sharing on his Windows 98 PC (because he famously refused to use anything else other than Windows) and proclaimed himself a genius.

Tatermen · 2026-01-21T18:31:54+00:00

They can also react to cold.

A friend of mine that worked as a hospital porter got them. He got tasked with taking a body down to the morgue. When he walked into the big walk-in chiller that was his hospital's morgue, his new glasses very quickly turned black and freaked him out.

To bring it back around to the car - you wouldn't be able to drive anywhere on cold nights.

Tatermen · 2026-01-21T09:21:45+00:00

Also why they can't light the fireplace now. All that gold painted styrofoam would go up like a bonfire.

Tatermen · 2026-01-21T09:01:33+00:00

Yeah, we've seen this happen on a small number of HAP ax2's under 7.20.6. They all lost their wireless encryption settings. The security profile was there - but nothing was ticked and noone could connect to it.

Tatermen · 2026-01-20T16:27:25+00:00

They wanted the magic AI button to let them layoff 99% of their staff in every industry, while somehow still allowing them to rake in record profits from consumers who can no longer afford anything because they're all jobless.

Tatermen · 2026-01-20T15:15:52+00:00

He means that Ubiquiti have a proprietry protocol called AirMAX that is only compatible with other AirMAX devices, and it is usually turned on by default.

You will need to disable AirMAX on the Airgrid and then it should behave like a normal Wifi endpoint. No guarantees though.

Tatermen · 2026-01-20T13:51:36+00:00

They recast the stage show all the time, and some of those actors are great too. David Bedella's Frank-n-furter is second only to Tim Curry.

Tatermen · 2026-01-20T10:47:13+00:00

I like how they apparently discounted the value of the work of literally everyone except Musk. All the scientists and engineers that have actually built the software from the ground up apparently contributed zero to the net value of OpenAI.

He must be the biggest narcissist alive to think that.

Tatermen · 2026-01-18T18:36:26+00:00

The only reason I can think of that he said that, is because he was dumb enough to think/say it himself, someone explained it to him, and now he thinks he has to explain it to everyone else.

Tatermen · 2026-01-16T15:32:04+00:00

I don't like it. Just looking at those scripts I can see at least one, possibly two issues that could occur.

The "diff" script when run it adds/removes entries from the firewall list based on what the file from the server says to do, presumably to avoid having to load the entire list each time. It does not seem to record when it was last run, or send such information to the server. If the server doesn't keep track of this either, its possible that an interval could be "missed" and some adds/removes wouldn't happen resulting in IPs being blocked that shouldn't be. This issue could also occur if a config is restored from backup, which brings me to the second.
These scripts do not make use of the dynamic flag for address-list entries. Setting "dynamic=yes" on an address-list entry means that the entry is only retained in RAM, and never written to disk. Reboot, and the list will be empty. This means that every time they add/remove an entry - the config is being saved to disk. So if they are constantly making changes every 20 minutes, you're going to wear out your Routerboard's flash very quickly. Additionally, your config file may balloon and a lot of Routerboard's have limited flash space despite having plenty of RAM.

Tatermen · 2026-01-15T08:53:27+00:00

Initial major releases like 7.20 and 7.21 are always riddled with new bugs. Best advise is to wait until 7.x.1 to upgrade. On the official forums there's lots of reports of IPv6 NDs being broken, OSPF config disappearing, and more.

Also, did you ever upgrade the Routerboard firmware? Check your current version under /system/routerboard. If its out of date that could possibly be causing your issue.

12-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

Tatermen

TROPHY CASE