WordPress, Automattic and AI

1 Mar 2024 By in Blogging Tags: , , , , , ,

It has come to my attention that Automattic is going to be selling of the data of its users for training AI.

This is unacceptable and I’m sure violates at least some data protection rules.

While I can’t stop them using my past data, since they already have it and likely already HAVE trained their models on it, I can stop them using more of my WordPress data…. by not giving them any more of my data.

As such, when my WordPress plan here expires, I will not be renewing it. When the domain comes up for renewal, I’ll transfer it off WordPress entirely.

As for my blog? At the moment I’m looking at other options, including Medium, Blogger, and Ghost, and also self-hosted options.

Fedora 39

18 Nov 2023 By in Linux Tags: , ,

I decided to try upgrading my Fedora to Fedora 39 (from 38)

I ran into a few issues already.

  1. I used the option from https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/upgrading-fedora-offline/#sect-performing-system-upgrade to download and upgrade the system using the “on boot” update. This then caused the initrd issue I’ve encountered before (https://blenderfox.com/2023/05/02/fedora-5/), I fixed that by booting up the previous version, then finding I couldn’t log in unless I picked “Gnome on XOrg”.
  2. The breakage of Wayland login seemed to be related to Problems with wayland after updating to fedora 39 – Fedora Discussion. And interestingly was fixed in the same way: removing ~/.config/dconf/user, logging out and then back in via Wayland. It completely reset my Gnome state, so all my custom docked shortcuts were gone and it offered to run me through the Gnome tutorial again
  3. Running my ansible playbook to configure my machine again, seemed to run for the most part, but failed at installing a pip module — but that looks like a module build failure, not the playbook.

And now I discovered that there’s no F39 of VirtualBox yet, so I guess I’m rolling back for now….

Car Accident

11 Nov 2023 By in Cars, Thoughts Tags: , , ,

I finally got some good news about my car accident from 2020 (https://wordpress.com/post/blenderfox.com/7610)

After just over 3.5 years, the other side’s insurance (Aviva) finally settled and the costs have been recovered. And I expect it was quite a lot of cost too. As mentioned in https://wordpress.com/post/blenderfox.com/8108:

Total costs the other side will have to foot:
Value of my car (written off): £3000
Value of the car next to me (written off): £2500
Value of the car that both our cars got shunted into (written off): £1500
Repair of the damaged car (sole survivor): £1500
Hire car (45 days @ £75 per day): £3375

Total Costs: £11875

And this is not including the other side’s own car, which was likely also written off.

I’m just glad it’s over now

Covid

19 Sep 2023 By in Thoughts Tags: , , , ,

So last week, my boss and I had a one-to-one review going over things that had happened since the last review. Generally OK, but he was definitely not sounding right.

Turned out that he had picked up covid, and since I was both sitting next to him and had a face-to-face meeting with him, I decided to test myself, but gave it a day before doing so to make sure if I did have symptoms they would have enough time to manifest properly.

I was clear and tested negative.

However my boss was bedridden for about two days before he started answering some of his slack messages.

Now, over the weekend, his bad luck got even worse, and we found out his dad passed away. So not only is he recovering from Covid, he now has to deal with the end-of-life stuff for his dad.

There’s an expression in Chinese which literally translates to “misfortune doesn’t come alone”

Wishing him a speedy recovery and I’m sorry for his loss.

Terra-fork

29 Aug 2023 By in News, Technology Tags: , , , , ,

Okay, so I swiped the headline from the video, but it’s pretty much a given.

Further to my previous blog entry about Hashicorp’s decision to change Terraform’s license, I mentioned how the OpenTF Initiative put a choice to Hashicorp: change the license back or we will fork Terraform.

Unsurprisingly, Hashicorp didn’t comply, so now Terraform has (or will be) forked as OpenTF at https://github.com/opentffoundation

This story has been covered in several places including The Register and several videos on YouTube including a nice short summary by Fireship

If the fork goes ahead, I’m curious as to whether Hashicorp sees it as a competition and goes after the foundation, but if it does, what little reputation Hashicorp has left in the OSS community will be nigh on destroyed.

Meanwhile, I’m going to continue playing with Pulumi in case the OpenTF doesn’t work, gets blocked or if we need another alternative.

Google Domains and Terraform

19 Aug 2023 By in News, Technology, Thoughts Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Two major updates recently

Firstly, as suspected, I finally got the notification saying that Google Domains’ registrations would be acquired by SquareSpace so all my registrations would be transferred over them should I not do anything. Obviously, I didn’t want that, so I transferred them over to AWS (Route 53) so now my domains are registered with AWS, but are DNS managed by Cloud DNS. I had some weirdness when trying to migrate all my domains in bulk, with respect to the auth code not being accepted on one of the domains when doing the bulk migration, but it was accepted when I did the migration on that one domain alone, so… go figure.

Next update is Terraform. In case you didn’t know, Hashicorp has changed the Terraform license and essentially made it no longer open source. This behaviour is similar to what Red Hat did with its RHEL offering and the backlash is just as bad.

Immediately I knew someone would fork it, and already, there’s the OpenTF Initiative and this is the key part:

Our request to HashiCorp: switch Terraform back to an open source license.

We ask HashiCorp to do the right thing by the community: instead of going forward with the BUSL license change, switch Terraform back to a truly open source license, and commit to keeping it that way forever going forward. That way, instead of fracturing the community, we end up with a single, impartial, reliable home for Terraform where the whole community can unite to keep building this amazing ecosystem.

Our fallback plan: fork Terraform into a foundation.

If HashiCorp is unwilling to switch Terraform back to an open source license, we propose to fork the legacy MPL-licensed Terraform and maintain the fork in the foundation. This is similar to how Linux and Kubernetes are managed by foundations (the Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, respectively), which are run by multiple companies, ensuring the tool stays truly open source and neutral, and not at the whim of any one company.

OpenTF Initiative (https://opentf.org/)

Essentially, make Terraform open source again, or a fork from the MPL version will be made and maintained separately from Hashicorp’s version. This will essentially lead to two, potentially diverging versions of Terraform, one BUSL and one MPL licensed

I’m already looking at alternatives and the two currently that I’m looking at are Ansible and Pulumi

Ansible I’ve had experience in , but there’s two main issues with it:

  • It’s underused compared to Terraform and the providers are woefully undersupported and undermaintained
  • It’s Red Hat

Pulumi I’ve heard lots of good things about, but its a new technology, and I don’t know if it is can “Import” existing infrastructure.

Guess a “spike” is worth doing for it.