Technology Tales

This morning, I heard a story on Irish radio about someone who had their Facebook account hijacked. The impact was heavy: it was a place for fundraising for a child with cerebral palsy, a place to do business, and somewhere for social connections and sharing memories. There was assistance as a result, so I hope things work out in some way.

The cautionary tale highlights the importance of being forensic with passwords, never reusing them and using two-factor authentication. Password managers and generators are crucial, even if one wonders about all this paraphernalia overwhelms many. There also is the importance of being a paying customer in order to get support, rather than availing of a free service where you are the product for those who do the paying, advertisers in other words.

The website has suffered a bump that I inflicted on it through my own inattention. Databases do need backing up before doing anything serious with the WP Crontrol plugin, especially deleting every CRON event in the cause of getting the Site Health display to improve. A new database build was needed as a result, with the content being added in at the database level. While nothing major was lost, I still needed to iron out some creases, a few of which were time-consuming to resolve. All is steadier now, and there was a spot of flab removal too, which might speed up things following the upheaval.

SimplyStatic

This is WordPress plugin that enables the conversion of dynamic websites into static HTML files by crawling the site and generating a collection of HTML, CSS, JS and media files that do not require server-side processing, offering faster performance, enhanced security and the ability to host content on basic servers or cloud storage. Users configure settings such as URL inclusion, link rewriting, media handling and deployment location before initiating the export process, which produces a static version of the site suitable for scenarios where dynamic features like comments, user logins, or forms are not essential, though such interactivity is lost unless external services are employed. This approach is particularly beneficial for documentation, marketing pages, or personal blogs prioritising speed and simplicity over server-side functionality.

Rclone is a command-line tool that manages files on cloud storage, offering features such as data backup, restoration, mirroring, migration, and mounting. It supports over 70 providers, including Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, and Dropbox. Rclone preserves timestamps and checksums during transfers and allows for restarting operations. It also provides features like MD5 and SHA1 hash checking, synchronization, and mounting cloud storage as a network disk. The tool is open-source, written in Go, and supports various operating systems including Linux, Windows, and Mac. Rclone's friendly support community uses it for backup solutions, restores, GUIs, and business processes. It is widely adopted and can be downloaded from rclone.org or official repositories like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Brew, Chocolatey.

An open-source alternative to GPT-4, ColossalChat allows for faster and cheaper chatbot customization with its complete RLHF pipeline, bilingual dataset, and 4-bit quantized inference. Alpaca-LoRA offers a high-quality Instant model on limited hardware through low-rank adaptation, while Vicuna generates coherent and creative text for chatbots with near 90% of ChatGPT's performance as part of the Fast Chat platform. GPT4ALL uses LLaMa architecture and low-latency machine learning accelerators for fast inference on CPUs and multilingual tasks, while Raven RWKV achieves comparable levels of quality and scalability with faster processing speed and VRAM conservation through an RNN language model. OpenChatKit offers a comprehensive toolkit for chatbot development with step-by-step instructions, fine-tuning capabilities, and both moderation features to train your own instruction-tuned large language model. OPT demonstrates remarkable abilities in zero-shot and few-shot learning, as well as stereotypical bias analysis through decoder-only transformers of various sizes. Flan-T5-XXL significantly improves performance on a variety of model classes through fine-tuning and multilingual tasks. Baize exhibits impressive multi-turn dialogue abilities with guardrails for risk mitigation, while Koala performs better than Alpaca and is similar to ChatGPT in numerous instances after fine-tuning LLaMa on a dialogue dataset. Dolly uses instruction following ability from old open-source language models, and Open Assistant offers truly open-source large language chatbots with dynamic information retrieval capabilities.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is utilising artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies to enhance its grant management operations. The Automated Referral Tool, an AI-based system launched in 2022, assists NIH staff in assigning applications to appropriate review branches based on historical data. An enterprise level tool comparing application abstracts with program officials' expertise suggests matches and reduces workloads for liaisons at NIH Institutes or Centres. Digital tools also help prevent duplicate or overlapping applications from being funded, saving time and resources. NIH is exploring ways AI can guide programmatic assessment of an application’s Data Management and Sharing Plan, improve public reporting on funded projects, and reduce reputational bias during merit review. These technologies aim to make grant operations more efficient, innovative, and flexible while adhering to confidentiality rules and ethical guidelines.

It is better to close Mac applications using the CMD + Q keyboard shortcut or clicking on the Quit entry in the application menu. Simply clicking on the red X icon risks losing a memory of anything that you have open in the application. That was what I found when closing Firefox that way, and it happened a few times before I finally took the hint. Restoring open tabs is not only a faff, but also is unreliable. Visual Studio Code behaves the same way, and I suspect that CotEditor does too. All in all, this seems to be a general macOS thing and a gotcha for anyone coming from Windows or Linux.

Installing PowerShell 7 or later on macOS systems running version 13 or higher is possible using one of multiple installation methods including Homebrew, direct download, .NET Global tool and binary archives. It specifies that newer versions replace existing ones, with preview versions installable alongside other versions using the binary archive method. Installation via Homebrew is recommended, requiring the use of the brew command to install the latest stable, LTS, or preview releases, followed by verification through the pwsh command. Direct download involves bypassing macOS Gatekeeper restrictions, either through Finder with manual security settings or Terminal commands. The .NET Global tool method requires the SDK to be installed, while binary archives necessitate manual dependency management. Uninstallation instructions are provided for each method, along with details on supported macOS versions and file paths for configuration and module storage. The content also notes that Microsoft supports the outlined installation approaches but does not guarantee compatibility with alternative methods.

Now that I have a presence on Mastodon, I have begun to use a command line tool called toot to add missives on there. The web interface works as well, yet toot can be logged into more than one account at a time; switching between accounts is a fairly facile operation. For a command line tool, toot is well intuitive once you get used to it.

WinGet is a package management solution for Windows that enables users to install, upgrade and manage applications through a command line interface, offering tools for developers, independent software vendors and enterprise environments. It supports configuration files that streamline device setup using PowerShell Desired State Configuration and YAML instructions, while also providing enterprise security features such as certificate pinning to protect against man-in-the-middle attacks. For organisations using Microsoft Intune, WinGet integrates with Group Policy settings to control application sources, execution policies and local development options, with additional templates available for deployment. The tool is maintained through open-source contributions on GitHub, where users can access documentation, submit feedback and explore training resources to enhance its functionality and adaptability across different use cases.