johNny wAs oBsEsseD wiTH gOiNg fASt. HELEN Was OBseSSEd wIth GOiNG SlOw. I wENT INfinITy stepS FuRther AnD reveRsed ALL THE way bacK To aLL THe way BACk tO thE beGINninG. IRoNiCaLLY i dON't HaVe A loT Of TimE tO eXPLAiN, AND cERTainly DON't unDERSTaNd All THE afTer-EfFEcts. WErE NeW iTerAtIOnS spAwned, oR WerE TheY ALReady RunniNG? I DON't KNOw, BUt I THouGHt You shOuLd knOw.
I pulled the RTX 4080 from the server and sold it for ETH. I've had this midlife crisis on a slow burn for a very long time now. Three years ago I said I would drop out and I finally did. My disappearing act is complete.
Working for tech companies never made me feel good. The tech industry is not making the world a better place. The Internet is mostly destroyed and our top innovators are focused on putting more people out of jobs with their stupid AI language models. It felt good to burn bridges on my way out.
Luckily I found an infinite money hack so I'm set for life as long as I keep playing the game. I live in your critical infrastructure now, maintaining, advancing, defending. It feels good to do something useful, that helps people. Nobody around me knows what a psycho I really am. I charm, blend in, fade to gray.
Now I am finally living life on my own terms and it feels good.
I just started playing around Stable Diffusion, an "AI" image-generation model. It can be run locally via a very nice Web UI, and it generates images based on text prompts, provided you have enough GPU power. (Generally bigger images take longer and consume more GPU memory). I'm just scratching the surface and some of the results are trippy as hell. So far, most of the images are pretty hallucinatory, only vaguely relating to my prompts, and with all the spookiness inherent to a machine trying to replicate something approaching "art." More images after the click to not wreck my bandwidth.
This is a frequently asked question, and here's the answer. I love decentralized and federated protocols, but for security reasons I won't host Matrix or Mastodon services on this domain. If I had the time and patience, I'd love to create my own Matrix implementation, but it's a tall order. Matrix has always been a very complicated protocol to implement, and with the recent release of Matrix 2.0 it got even more complicated. Similarly, I'd love for the social features on this site to interoperate with Mastodon, but it has a very particular implementation of the ActivityPub protocol which would be a ton of work to recreate.
The vast majority of individuals hosting these services appear to be using publicly released Docker containers, or similar, which is great for spinning servers up quickly but bad (IMO) from a security standpoint. Trusting other people with the specifics of your packages is one thing, but spinning up other people's virtual machines on your own network(s) is a dangerous game. Attack surface is a big deal in cybersecurity, which is why I prefer to roll my own protocol implementations when possible. At least that way, if I fuck up, I know who to blame when shit goes south.
Matrix, Mastodon, and the Fediverse in general are amazing innovations, and likely the future of social interactions online. There are very smart people with domain expertise running and hosting these services, but I'm not one of them, nor do I care to be.
For people with shared goals and vision, don't fret. Obsessive Facts is a small operation, and I am likely not the threat actor you're looking for. Again, there are smart people with domain expertise working on the problems listed on the About Us page. You can either trust their implementation or roll your own, but sending toots on this domain won't change the inevitable outcome.
This is kind of fun, but probably no one will need to do this ever. But the point is you can! So why not? Anyway, suppose you have an encrypted Linux drive and you want to mount it in Windows for whatever reason. Just follow along.
Install Windows Subsystem for Linux 2
WSL 2 allows you to run a virtualized Linux environment that integrates tightly with the Windows OS. To install it, search for "Turn Windows features on or off" in the Start menu and click the shortcut to open the Settings pane. Scroll down towards the bottom and check the box for "Windows Subsystem for Linux". Then click "OK" to install WSL 2.
Open the Microsoft Store app and install Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS
This is trippy as hell. Ubuntu Linux on an App Store? We have entered the end times indeed.
Confirm it worked by opening Linux in Windows Terminal
Start the Terminal app, which should be pre-installed. By default it will probably open to a Powershell or Command Prompt. Click the dropdown arrow on the tab bar and you should see "Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS" or something similar in the dropdown menu. Click it to start Linux!
Run an Administrator Powershell and give WSL 2 access to your physical drive
These instructions are adapted from Microsoft's own documentation so check that out if you need help. Basically, open a new Powershell as Administrator (right click the shortcut and then "Run as administrator").
List your physical drives by entering: GET-CimInstance -query "SELECT * from Win32_DiskDrive"
The command should give you output similar to the following:
DeviceID Caption Partitions Size Model
-------- ------- ---------- ---- -----
\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE3 Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB 1 2000396321280 Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB
\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 WD_BLACK SN850X 4000GB 3 4000784417280 WD_BLACK SN850X 4000GB
\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1 Samsung SSD 970 PRO 512GB 1 512105932800 Samsung SSD 970 PRO 512GB
\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE2 WDBRPG0020BNC-WRSN 1 2000396321280 WDBRPG0020BNC-WRSNSo, one of the DeviceIDs in the output should map to your LUKS encrypted Linux.
Suppose for example it was \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE3, then you can give your WSL 2
environment access to that drive with the following commmand:
wsl --mount \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE3 --bare
PROTIP — If you need to do this a lot, you can put that command in a .bat file and run it (as Administrator) anytime you want to mount the drive in WSL 2.
Find your encrypted drive in your WSL 2 shell
Go back to your Terminal with the Ubuntu Linux shell running, and if everything
worked, you should be able to find your encrypted drive with the following
command: lsblk -l
The command should give you output similar to the following:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 363.3M 1 disk
sdb 8:16 0 8G 0 disk [SWAP]
sdc 8:32 0 1T 0 disk /snap
/mnt/wslg/distro
/
sdd 8:48 0 2T 0 disk
sdd1 8:49 0 2T 0 partIn this example the sdd1 identifier maps to the encrypted partition
on your physical drive.
Decrypt and mount the encrypted drive
You will need a package called cryptsetup if it's not installed. From your
Linux shell, enter sudo apt install cryptsetup if needed.
Now you can decrypt the volume by entering (for example):
sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdd1 samsung_980_pro
^ The name you put in the last argument of that command is any arbitrary
name you want to assign the drive in the device mapper. Just be sure that
you use the correct device name for the encrypted partition listed from lsblk
(in this example /dev/sdd1).
Once it's decrypted, you can mount the drive with the following command(s):
sudo mkdir /mnt/my_encrypted_drive (if needed)sudo mount /dev/mapper/samsung_980_pro /mnt/my_encrypted_driveObviously you can customize the names and mount location however you see fit.
Now you can access your encrypted drive from Windows Explorer!
Open a new Explorer window and scroll down the left sidebar until you see "Linux."
Click this and you'll be able to browse the filesystem from your Ubuntu 22.04
installation. Simply navigate to /mnt/my_encrypted_drive or wherever you mounted
the drive, and you'll have access to your encrypted volume!
Having an encrypted drive is just a good idea in general. If your computer is lost or stolen you can keep your private files protected and not worry so much about identity theft or any other bad outcomes from people maliciously accessing your files. Many Windows computers ship without any kind of drive encryption, and Microsoft's own BitLocker disk encryption is only available in "Pro" editions of Windows.
Speaking of BitLocker, who can even trust that shit? It's a closed source system and Microsoft can swear up and down that it's safe and secure, but for all anyone knows it's backdoor'ed six ways from Sunday. By using Linux LUKS drive encryption in Windows, you at least have open source and provable security. Just make sure your passphrase is strong enough and you're good to go!