~elis/blog/

AI should be trained with vegan values

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, concerns have been raised about the potential dangers of AI becoming too powerful and taking over human civilization. In a recent interview, entrepreneur and CEO Elon Musk expressed his concerns about the risks associated with developing super-intelligent AI. However, his views were challenged by Larry Page, co-founder of Google, who referred to Musk as a “speciesist” for not wanting AI to become a “digital god”.

Outsourcing NixOS compile time to Microsoft

NixOS is a Linux-distribution that may be source-based, but it has a binary cache that covers things so you generally don’t need to compile things, things tends to be cached.

However, depending on how you configure your system, you may trigger compiles depending on what you do.

So a thing I do is that I run Emacs 29 with the native-comp patches that is wayland native with the pgtk-branch. This is by no mean the stable Emacs release at the point of writing. So to get this Emacs I use the excellent nix-community/emacs-overlay (that is maintained by my friend @adisbladis). However, this means that I will get Emacs from a development branch of Emacs, then I need to build all the Emacs packages that I use in my configuration as well for this version of Emacs.

Keeping LG webOS Developer Mode alive with Home Assistant

For over 10 years I’ve used Kodi on a separate PC connected to a TV to play back local media.

A couple of weeks ago everything changed in a matter of days. I listened to Late Night Linux – Episode 179 where they talked about Jellyfin. I have looked into Jellyfin before, however I’ve disregarded it due to the lack of app for LG webOS. This changed because the podcast episode told that there was a webOS app for Jellyfin.

First impressions of Purism Librem 5

Back in 2017, this fairly small company Purism launched a crowdfunding on their own crowdfunding platform for their future phone known as Librem 5. I went back and forth a bit, I thought through some of the history about the company and decided that I thought they may deliver some day. At least I wanted to support the effort to make a modern Linux that could fill the hole that the demise of the Nokia N900 with no worthy device following up.

Dynamic CSS color themes with similar contrasts

This blog is built with Emacs, SCSS using Nix and deployed as static files to GitHub Pages. This blog also has quite some colors due to the syntax highlighting for code that is performed using CSS rules on HTML classes.

So in total I have 15 different colors defined, in which four of them is background and foreground colors, two of them is related to link and visited link colors. Then I have nine colors remaining which are related to syntax highlighting of code.

Mobile org-mode use with Orgzly and Syncthing

I’ve been an Emacs user for 13+ years, during this time I’ve been using org-mode on and off for different thing.

Some examples where I currently use org-mode:

• Deployment of this website
• Making of presentation slides
• Project read me files
• Notes files
• Time reporting

I’ve tried to use it for to do’s but never really managed, partly because I wanted to have a good interface for my to do’s on my phone. Then I wanted quick synchronization to my computers to be able to pick up the changes there.

Simple deployments of NixOS machines with nixus

Since I’ve started using NixOS about four years ago I haven’t really used any tools to do central deployments of machines. But I’ve always read and known that NixOS is excellent at this. NixOS can easily build another systems configuration, then copy the system to the target systems nix store and then activate it there.

Despite knowing all this, I haven’t gotten around to doing this centrally. A while ago the need for this changed because one of my VPSes started running low on RAM, low enough to not be able to build new generations of it’s own system. Which posed a problem for future upgrades. One way to solve it would be to pay more money for resources that aren’t really needed except from when doing system upgrades. The other way would be to push pre-built systems from another location. Using the second way is simpler and fixes the issue.

NixOS: Setting up Push To Talk in Mumble on Sway

Switching to Wayland has it’s side-effects, one of which is the improved security from X11 where applications can’t just randomly spy on each other at any point.

This is both good news and bad news.

The good news:

• Applications can’t just randomly spy on each other.

The bad news:

• Things like global hot-keys in for example Mumble won’t work.

Back from complaining to actually solving the problem though.

Mumble does have a patch for a future release

So there’s the issue about Push to talk does not work in Wayland, this has been followed up by a patch Add DBus calls to de/-activate push to talk. This patch will land in the 1.4.0 release though while current stable is 1.3.4.

The day when ZFS saved my data

Today my work day didn’t turn out the way I expected. It started like a normal day, I woke up around the regular time, did my morning routine, sat at my desk and started my work-issued laptop.

It booted up just fine, I connected it to my Ultrawide display, started going through Slack and Email and catch up on some news while drinking my morning tea and waking up.

Then after around an hour of work things started to hang up, most notably Firefox totally froze up. I could launch a new terminal but not start htop, I had a htop session in a terminal already because it’s part of what I usually have running. So I went there to look.

Detailed setup of screen sharing in Wayland (Sway)

Getting screen sharing to work on Wayland seems to be surprisingly hard. Maybe it is compared to X11 that doesn’t require any additional setup at all.

To have working screen sharing on Sway you really need three components installed and set up with correct environment variables.

These three components are:

• pipewire (I have version: 0.3.21)
• xdg-desktop-portal (I have version: 1.8.0)
• xdg-desktop-portal-wlr (I have version: 0.1.0)

These three components has to have systemd user services. You should be able to see them in the list if you run systemctl --user, just look for the different programs name ending in .service.