In the hopes that it saves someone else two hours later: the ISP Astound only supports IPv6 in Washington State. You might find this page which says “Astound supports IPv6 in most locations”. Their tech support agents might tell you that they support v6 on your connection, even if you are not in Washington. “Yes, we do support both DHCPv6 and SLAAC”, they might say, and tell you to use a prefix delegation size of 60. If you are staring at tcpdump and wondering why you’re not seeing ...| aphyr.com
In my free time, I help run a small Mastodon server for roughly six hundred queer leatherfolk. When a new member signs up, we require them to write a short application—just a sentence or two. There’s a small text box in the signup form which says:| aphyr.com
I’ve been involved in content moderation since roughly 2004. I’ve built spam prevention for corporate and personal e-mail, moderated open-source mailing lists and IRC channels, worked at a couple social media networks, and help moderate a Mastodon instance for a few hundred people. In the last few years I’ve wasted more time fighting blog comment spam, and I’m pretty sure Large Language Models (LLMs) are to blame.| aphyr.com
Update, 2025-05-22: TrueNAS was kind enough to reach out and let me know that their support process does not normally incorporate LLMs. They’re talking about what happened internally, and intend to prevent it from happening again through improved documentation and reviewing the support process as a whole. I’m happy to hear it!| aphyr.com
I subscribe to the Chicago Sun-Times, a non-profit newspaper. This week they sent me a sixty-four page special insert, branded with the Chicago Sun-Times logo, full of LLM nonsense. Yesterday I wrote the following letter to the Chicago Sun-Times. That evening, they published this followup.| aphyr.com
Submitted to the Department of State, which is requesting comments on a proposed change which would align US passport gender markers with executive order 14168.| Aphyr: Posts
This is not at all news, but it comes up often enough that I think there should be a concise explanation of the problem. People, myself included, like to say that POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the numberofsecondssincetheUnixepoch, which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00.| Aphyr: Posts
In June 2023, when Threads announced their plans to federate with other Fediverse instances, there was a good deal of debate around whether smaller instances should allow federation or block it pre-emptively. As one of the admins of woof.group, I wrote about some of the potential risks and rewards of federating with Threads. We decided to wait and see.| Aphyr: Posts
I’m in the process of replacing a old radiator system with a centrally-ducted, air-source heat pump system with electric resistive backup heat. I’ve found that the default ecobee algorithm seems to behave surprisingly poorly for this system, and wanted to write up some of the settings that I’ve found yield better behavior.| Aphyr: Posts
Recently I’ve had users of my libraries start reporting mysterious errors due to a missing reference to SequencedCollection, a Java interface added in JDK 21:| Aphyr: Posts
People keep asking why Jepsen is written in Clojure, so I figure it’s worth having a referencable answer. I’ve programmed in something like twenty languages. Why choose a Weird Lisp?| aphyr.com
Back in 2023 I went through an inter-state move with Flat Rate Movers,| aphyr.com
A few quick notes for other folks who are geoblocking the UK. I just set up a basic geoblock with Nginx on Debian. This is all stuff you can piece together, but the Maxmind and Nginx docs are a little vague about the details, so I figure it’s worth an actual writeup. My Nginx expertise is ~15 years out of date, so this might not be The Best Way to do things. YMMV.| aphyr.com
Over the last year I’ve been working on ways to resolve these problems. Generators are up to ten times faster. A new operation datatype makes each operation smaller and faster to access. Jepsen’s new on-disk format allows us to stream histories incrementally to disk, to work with histories of up to a billion operations far exceeding available memory, to recover safely from crashes, and to load tests almost instantly by deserializing data lazily. New history datatypes support both densely ...| aphyr.com
Previously on Jepsen, we explored two-phase commit in Postgres. In this post, we demonstrate Redis losing 56% of writes during a partition.| aphyr.com
Again with the reductions! I keep writing code which reduces over a collection, keeping track of more than one variable. For instance, here’s one way to find the mean of a collection of integers:| aphyr.com
I write a lot of reductions: loops that combine every element from a collection in some way. For example, summing a vector of integers:| aphyr.com
Previously: Rewriting the Technical Interview.| aphyr.com
Please note: our followup analysis of 3.4.0-rc3 revealed additional faults in MongoDB’s replication algorithms which could lead to the loss of acknowledged documents–even with Majority Write Concern, journaling, and fsynced writes.| aphyr.com