Month: September 2023

Microsoft added AI to Bing (fail)

For the first time ever for me, today MS Edge gave me a search result that automatically sent me to their AI chatbot. Of course, the result wasn’t helpful – I needed information about how to do the task with PowerShell, not interactively. So I clicked the button to copy the AI chatbot prompt, did new search, typed in “powershell” and pasted the original query in. It came back with results.

The results were wrong. Completely wrong. But they looked like they might be right.

If I were some new sysadmin trying to figure out something I was unfamiliar with, this would have so fouled me over.

I just have to laugh at Microsoft being so incompetent.

I mean, I know I have a chip on my shoulder about Microsoft. But man they keep shooting themselves in the foot. It’s hilarious.

Microsoft’s company motto appears to be “Quality is Job Secondhundredandthirteenth”.

Microsoft moving their documentation to GitHub – What could go wrong?

I’m not a Windows expert: as much as I dislike Microsoft for their lack of ethics, this should be no surprise. So when I do need to do Microsofty-sorts-of-things, I need to RTFM – which I’m fine with. They took the time to write the manual so I wouldn’t waste valuable people’s time with basic questions. I should Read The Friendly Manual.

I also know that things people link to might change behind the scenes. There’s no way for the changer to know that something else on the planet links here, so yes dead links happen. It should be a temporary problem; and as soon as someone who knows where the page moved to can supply the answer, the dead link can be fixed.

Recently I got a 404 This is not the web page you are looking for on Github. The source document is on Microsoft’s GitHub for PowerShell. Specifically the paragraph that said “Install PowerShell using Winget (recommended)”. That contained the sentence “Note: see the winget documentation for install instructions.”

I’ve never dealt with Winget before, so yes, please, let me read how to install it.

As of this moment, if you were to click on the link winget documentation you get 404 This is not the web page you are looking for.

Okay, this can happen. I have zero idea of what the actual link should be; but, I can let someone know there is a problem. I opened an issue in GitHub.

And it was closed, with the comment “The URL is correct on the published docs site. The links in the markdown source files are relative to the docs site, not to Github”

Well that’s nice. Between that and 404 pennies, I can get a coffee at Starbucks.

Factorio starter base – still looking for a favorite

At the moment, I’m trying ElderAxe’s Quick Start Base (v8.1.1)

I remember trying something else from ElderAxe and being pretty happy with it. I like the idea of adding different pieces as I go along: maybe I want Military Science early on, before other blueprint pieces. This modular system looks like it lets me do this.

I kind of hate Docker

The beauty of Linux is that every program writes log files. The ugly of Docker is that nothing exists after the session ends. Because things like my ssh session are running in a temporary limited container, nothing works and there’s no record of what went wrong.

I’m trying to get a share on a Synology mounted as the media folder in Home Assistant, but Home Assistant doesn’t do SMB 3. There’s a video that shows how to edit a config file to make it work; but, for me it doesn’t work. That would be fine if I could see the log files to figure out what is making it unhappy with my particular installation. But there are no log files from Home Assistant. It is reporting all clear / everything is good. But of course the files aren’t there from the CIFS / SMB share I’m trying to mount.

I tried using ssh to manually do the mount command, but that didn’t work, and the Dockerized ssh doesn’t have access to the log files. This is bullshit.

Maybe I hate Home Assistant for being Docker -only software. Except that every time I have tried to get something to work with Docker, it didn’t, and there was no way to tell what went wrong. Even the stuff that did some logging, logged only the most trivial of events. Service started. Service ended. Gee, thanks for the detail. That was super helpful. Who wrote this? Windows programmers?

Factorio blueprints – Kitch’s Totally Practical Strip Mall

On the one hand, I really like this mall. The layout makes sense to me, and the way it intersperses feeder bus and production columns is straightforward and clean.

One the other hand, it doesn’t have accumulators or solar. It does have nuclear power pieces, but I haven’t gotten into nuclear power. Yet another resource to mine, which also means setting up transport in and subsequent refining. I’d rather do solar.

I did find these two blueprints by Diana. One is for accumulators and the other for solar.

I’m still really happy with NRC’s Mining.