LINUX Unplugged - 481: Just a Prompt Away

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

The Internet is going crazy with AI-generated media. What's the open-source story, and is Linux being left out? Plus, we try out the new Ubuntu release on the ODROID H3+.

I think I've finally figured out our pre-show problem. You know, we can't come up with anything. At first I thought, let's just outsource it. But Chris said he's not made for that. So I got the computers to do it. Hey guys, how do you know the Dragon SpaceX Rocket Trans Linux? Because there is no sound in space. LOL Pulse Audio, am I right?

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show, well, we're going to talk about it. The internet has been going crazy with AI-generated media. But what's the open source story here? And does any of this work on Linux or is Linux being left behind once again?

We'll dig in. Plus, I tried out the new Ubuntu 22.10 release on a possible raspberry pi alternative that's going to blow your socks off and we'll tell you our thoughts on the new release as well and then we'll round out the show with some boosts some picks and a lot more so before we go any further let's do the right thing let's bring in our virtual lug time appropriate greetings mumble room hello hello hello friends hello chris hello wes andble room hello hello hello everybody in the mumble room hello everybody in the quiet listening it's a great way to get a opus low latency high quality live stream of the show and it's using a full free software stack details at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble we also apply a filter, so Chris always

sounds like that if you're in the mumble room. That's right. Also on the Jupiter Tube, another free software stack to watch how the show sausage is made. I want to say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard, which is the best in the biz.

We love it. It'll change your game. Just build a flat mesh network of all your machines. Stop using that old VPN tunnel, old school style. Go say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale and try it out for 20 devices for free at tailscale.com. So Ubuntu 22.10 landed this week. It's back, guys. This is the Ubuntu I like to see.

This is Ubuntu shipping new GNOME, shipping new Nautilus, shipping GTK4. It does kind of feel like one of the more exciting. I know it's just an interim release and all, but I don't know. There's something about it. It's got more energy. It's a good baseline for an LTS, too. Like, if they didn't add anything else new before the LTS or something like this, it's great. GNOME 43 is great.

New Nautilus, great. Updated GNOME software, great. Gnome 43 is great. New Nautilus, great. Updated Gnome software, great. Pipewire by default now. Oh, yes, please. Great. So it's called Kinetic Kudu. That's fun to say. It's going to have a nine-month lifecycle.

So it is a short-term release, like Wes was saying. On the Plasma side, you're going to get 525, which that is technically one point release behind, but it's still a great release of Plasma. And you get the new GNOME system settings. A lot of this stuff now has that new adaptable UI that resizes. Which is real nice.

It's real nice, yeah. It's real nice. I don't know how many lived before that, really. I think the biggest user-facing feature in 2210, if you're on the GNOME side, is the new quick settings menu.

I don't know if you've seen this. Did you get a chance to look at it? It looks kind of like Mac OS's a little bit where there's big buttons to do stuff.

Yeah, I was like, oh, these are big. Yeah, they're big. They're big. They're clearly... Very clear. Very clear. They're clearly labeled.

The ones you'd want, I think it's a little bit of like a compromise design for desktop and mobile, but fair enough. And they're going to be totally approachable by new users. So it seems like a net improvement. One thing that we need to dig around with is there have been some issues with Linux 5.19 and Pipewire. We ran into that at the Airbnb, right, Brent?

Yeah, I have an audio interface I've been using for years on Linux, no problem. That's the whole reason we got this thing. And one day with my new computer, we plugged it in and gave it a try. And all of a sudden, everyone sounded like robots. It wasn't a good thing. And it was a sample mismatch, turns out. Listener Jeff helped me solve it. So unfortunately, for the time being, I've just got a bunch of terminal commands that I run to get it solved. And unfortunately, for the time being, I've just got a bunch of terminal commands that I run to get it solved. But it sounds like this might fix it. I wonder. I wonder. We'll have to test.

I don't know if they have the fix in there or not. It depends on the version of Pipewire, right? Yeah, you mean it'll depend on the version of Pipewire and, like, what fixes, you know, what all goes into the kernel build that's shipped here. I don't know. I haven't played around with it that much. I just had seen some issues where, like, not all the correct available sample rights were being represented to pipe wires, then it wasn't displaying them, and it couldn't select the right one for your interface. And those happened to be filed right around the time of 5.19.

But it's been here for a while, you know, we've got an even new kernel beyond that, so it very well could not be an issue. We've got to see what Brent does. We'll do some testing. Yeah. We haven't gotten to that yet. Well, we don't want to break Brent's setup right before we do the show I mean we did have the entire

interface apart physically and I'm so I'm glad to hear it's a software issue and not a hardware issue because we were ready to do some pretty drastic changes to this thing so these this is where an interim release is really serving its purpose in my opinion like this is just a quintessential Ubuntu release because the switch to pipe wire there's gonna be some issues it doesn't work for everyone it's not smooth for everybody despite how much we love it some people have problems the other thing there's a big switch in here they're replacing WPA supplicant with Intel's iNet wireless daemon right and that feels like one of those changes that also yeah right people love

when their wi-fi doesn't work just notoriously right could you imagine if you get bit by some pipe wire no sound and wi-fi you're trying to do a virtual meeting or something and you're that you're that guy um but you know what it's also a transition that needs to happen just like the pipe wire one iwd does anyone like wps yeah but you and you want to hash that out before the you know the next major release these are the times right these are the times so you get you get the new stuff in there you get the new gnome in there you get the new pipe wire you rip out wpa wpa supplicant i think i think they've checked all the boxes so i decided to try this on something new and i am really impressed that 2210 just worked out of the box on this brand new piece of hardware i just got into the studio a couple of days ago i

received my odroid h3 plus they're pitching it as a raspberry pi killer i think we had a good debate if you could actually call it that on the pre-show um but it's definitely a raspberry pi alternative so the h3 plus is just slightly more expensive that's it's 165 dollars they have a non-plus it's a little bit cheaper and for this spc that's uh about double the size physical size of a raspberry pi so it has a quad core jasper Lake Intel Atom on there with QuickSync support. It has support for up to 64 gigabytes of dual-channel DDR4 RAM. Slots on the bottom, laptop style. Two NICs, I see.

Two gigabit. Actually, I think they're 2.5 gigabit NICs. Oh! Yeah. Two 2.5 gigabit Realtek NICs. It has two SATA ports. Two SATA ports. gigabit real tech nix it has two sata ports two sata ports i mean when you compare the raspberry pi storage options that's a game changer it also has an mvme port on the bottom so you can put in a pcie3 m.2 mvme storage on this thing it has a real-time clock battery as well. And they say you can configure it for unlimited performance mode,

so the CPU can run sustained in turbo boost mode. Well, if there's one thing I know about you, it's you hate limited performance. So this thing just shipped. It's x86 because it's an Atom processor. And I haven't really measured it much but it's supposedly around a five watt idle somewhere in there we'll find out oh yeah oh yeah i'll be testing that and uh it's got the intel uhd graphics on there and it just loaded right up i mean ubuntu did complain a couple complaints as it was booting initially about some usb stuff and i do have a

really weird keyboard so it might have been that i don't know't know. I didn't really ever need to troubleshoot it because it eventually moved on and it just booted right to the desktop and everything worked. Everything. Sound worked. Video worked. And you were booting off USB at this point?

Yeah. Okay. Networking worked. Keyboard? Keyboard worked. All right. It was good to go. It was a totally up-to-date

2210 system on the Odroid H3. Does it have Wi-Fi? Worked out of the the box i was plugged into ethernet uh-huh i actually don't know if it does have wi-fi i don't think it does i guess you got two nexus fine but and all the things and you know yeah i would not use it on wi-fi because i'm a gentleman i'm all about the ethernet for my little server boxes i am really hyped about having two sata ports plus NVMe on this thing. That's a lot of storage options. You know, a lot of times when people reviewed the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Pi 400, they'd say

something like desktop class performance. And then I'd use it and I'd be like, that's not desktop. I don't know what kind of desktop you're running. That's not desktop performance. This thing felt like it had true desktop performance. So much so that I've been speculating on the live stream that maybe we could actually replace one of our bigger x86 towers that does our recordings with this. Something like this. So I'm going to throw this in the line of duty in LadyJupes. And it's going to be my jellyfin and sync thing and documentation server and possibly a Bitcoin node. We'll see.

Chris, I'm curious. sync thing and documentation server and possibly a Bitcoin node. We'll see. Chris, I'm curious so far, it looks like from what Wes was showing that you're probably running this thing just sort of set on the desk, but I'm curious if you have thoughts around a case or even how much heat it produces. I will measure how much heat it produces. I'm not sure, you know, so you're familiar with my booth setup. I am. That I have in jupes i may just end up going for some way to mount it to the wall and just leave it naked however i've been just recently looking at cases that the community are starting to make and i don't know if there's anything you can just go on amazon and order yet i don't think there is but maybe there is but there's definitely some 3d printed ones that people are starting to come up with and nice you're seeing ideas for additional discs and you're seeing ideas to like mount fans so i'm i think it's it's fertile ground and has a

decent following and the timing is perfect because nobody can get their hands on a raspberry pi and this thing it's it's checking all the boxes and it's x86 so everything works i'm like multi image support you know things that work on the pi have gotten a lot better, but it is still nice to know. You're just like, well, it runs on my laptop. I can just move it over here. And you can get up to 64 gigs of RAM in this. And PCIe NVMe storage, oof, it's totally

a different experience. It really is. It's an upgrade. So for $165, yeah, it's more than a Pi. But if you're building a low-power home server or something like that, or you want a little desktop that you could mount to the bottom of your desk this is it right and to get some of this stuff like you need to have like extensions to the pies anyway right or like a fancier sort of yeah compute module style yeah with a carrier board and this again it's just great that linux just booted ubuntu 2210 just booted. Fresh and hot.

Just worked on it. So you, you know, you get something like this. And the fact that the hard kernel folks are getting the shipped out, I mean, we ordered this thing like two, three weeks ago and it's showed up like last week.

So they're actually shipping on like the Raspberry Pi, which is nice. That's a good feature of a piece of hardware. So I think this, I think this release is probably not, I have the sense that it's not getting a lot of attention i haven't seen i mean you see the typical places like omg ubuntu did a great write-up about the new features indeed yeah uh like so a lot of the outlets that typically cover a release have done it yeah you can find reviews you can find folks but not wide really wider than that i wonder if that's a symptom of the last few releases being

a little shall we say lackluster is that the word for it and i'm actually relieved to see that we're getting excited about it again because canonical has done some great things in the past and hopefully they can continue doing so yeah i think you're right i think it's a bit of that because i think the hype builds. Like we saw that for Fedora for a while. When they decided to do ButterFS, it was like there was something, several releases in a row where there was just really something interesting to talk about. And Ubuntu had that for a bit and it kind of dropped off.

So there is definitely that element and that has to start again. But also, I wouldn't be surprised if over the years the interim user base has just sort of bled to other distros because if you're an interim user you're probably a little more inclined to like more up-to-date software and now there's a lot of options for that right and i you know i'm sure their lts base is as strong as ever and so um the world really just seems to light up when the lts comes up but when the interim releases come out it's kind of like just our little local neighborhood talks about it but the rest so the world really just seems to light up when the LTS comes up. But when the interim releases come out, it's kind of like just

our little local neighborhood talks about it, but the rest of the world just moves on. And maybe that's okay. Yeah.

Yeah. If it's just the folks kind of trying it out, going through the motions to figure out how this is going to work for the next LTS.

Yeah. Especially if you're, you know, you're trying stuff, you're trying out pipewire, you know, you're ripping components out.

You don't want that going out on blast necessarily. You want people that are really actually interested in trying that stuff so yeah i think you know what it's a quintessential interim release they just nailed it we'll see we'll see what the stability story is as we begin to test it more we'll see about pipe wire issues as we begin to test it more but my first my first few passes on the odroid h3 plus were just totally impressed. Just absolutely think they nailed that. So congrats to Canonical over there.

Looks like a banger. Linode.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account. And it's just a great way to support the show while you're checking out Linode. Fast, reliable cloud hosting with the best support in the business, best performance, and a dashboard for days. They got real humans that can help you whenever you get stuck. They got a marketplace that makes it super simple to do one-click deployments of applications. Or if you prefer to build it up from the ground like a maniac, Wes Payne style, you absolutely can.

Linode's how we run everything we've built in the last few years. Once I discovered Linode, how we run everything we've built in the last few years. Once I discovered Linode, I've never really looked back. I keep an eye on the competitors, but Linode is a long-term play for us. I want to build my business's infrastructure on something I know is going to be around and it's going to last and it's going to be solid and it's going to perform well and they can help me. They've been in business for nearly 19 years. They've had to build a great product to do that. They didn't do it with crazy investments that meant they had to get X amount of users and they had to bring on X amount of employees as fast as possible.

Instead, almost 20 years ago, they said, look at what's happening in the Linux kernel. A lot like we do here on this show. But instead they said, you know what, we can make a business around that. And so they created something where people could host VMs. They called it user mode Linux back then. And now we call it the cloud. Linode's been there every step of the way of building the best product. And they managed to be 30 to 50% cheaper than the other hyperscalers out there

that just want to lock you into their duopoly. Linode is the alternative cloud. It's better, it's faster, it's well-supported, and it's very flexible. I've had a privilege of spinning up a GPU rig specifically for this week's episode. Wow, can that thing just blaze through machine learning tasks and just anything GPU-related? Holy smokes. I've never worked on a system as fast as this, and I worked on some pretty nice rigs. Linode really has a great interface for getting all this set up to.

I go through, I review my options, I kind of dial in what I want. I engage in a quick conversation with support to double check a few things, and I was off to the races. It's really been powerful, and the power just continues to impress even multiple years into it. So go see it for yourself. Go build something. Go learn something.

Go try something. Maybe it's time to try out an open source project. Lin go see it for yourself. Go build something. Go learn something. Go try something. Maybe it's time to try out an open source project. Linode.com slash unplug. That's where you go to get the hundred bucks and to support the show. Linode.com slash unplug. Oh, look at this. It's pretty clean in here with Brent on the road. Seems to stay pretty tidy. pretty clean in here with Brent on the road. Seems to stay pretty tidy. On the road again. Weird. Strange, right? I will mention that All Things Open is coming up and Alex from Self Hosted will be over there. They'll be organizing on Matrix. I don't know if we're going to launch an official meetup page for that, but if you're thinking about going to All Things

Open, I bet Alex will bring a few stickers and stuff with him, but he'd also just love to say hi. So go find him. Also, Cheese is going to be there from System76, our buddy. Cheese Bacon will be there at all things open. You know, we're going to have to go some year. I know. I really would like to. Sounds like fun. I would like to. And then last but not least, we're still soliciting advice, expertise, suggestions for possible live locations to do a Linux Unplugged live at a venue, somewhere we could work and learn.

So hit us up at linuxunplugged.com contact, or if you want me to see it personally, send a boost into the show, and I'd love to know your ideas for that kind of stuff, because we're learning. We are learning. We do have some baller boosts I want to get to these are the people that boosted above and beyond to really support the individual production of this show this there's something kind of funny

that happened this week so i think some people have suspected that john a who has been a consistent booster for 10 episodes in a row irresponsibly consistent uh they they i think people perceived some fading and uh so deleted tried to ninja move in and claim the baller booster spot well you know trying to predict kind of where john a was going and uh like a price is right kind of thing here yeah she just writes just to push the baller limit so she boosted him with 45 000 sets so thank you deleted keep the change you filthy animal but john a comes in to make sure that he claims the spot for an 11th episode in a row john a boost a total of 221 000 sats this week. Oh my goodness. 221,000 sats. He says, this is to redeem myself for the barely baller boost of last episode.

Coming in hot. Just trying to keep the streak alive. I'm in Washington State, but the North Cascades is a bit of a drive to collect my geocache. John A's in Washington State? Did we know this? I don't think so. Does the A stand for apple seed? seed um we got to get over there are you in the spokane area john you really want to go to spokane well it's because i have several listeners over there that i said i would meet up with and then we didn't we weren't able to work it into the road trip and now it's going to start snowing soon and

it's like my moment of opportunity is closing it would be really close for me to join as well so i think you're on that'd be fun we could do that it could just be like a little weekend thing oh my goodness thank you uh both deleted and john uh i know you guys really get this but having something that is an open source based system that is totally independent of paypal or google or or any particular institution or bank that is a network that anyone can participate in as long as they just follow the standards and the rules. And then to support independent media with that technology, I think it's something really special. And I appreciate that you guys really get it. We have more boosts coming up later in the show, but let's move on to our main topic today. It does feel like we've kind of recently entered this new generation of artificially generated media. And that is everything from pictures to audio, spoken content.

I even just, I didn't grab any clips for the show, but over the weekend, I came across AI-generated music. And you tell the genre. Have you seen this? That is super powerful stuff. And it just feels like it's, we're seeing a whole new era unleash over the last month. And it's going crazy fast. There's been a lot of terms thrown around. There's a lot of different technology stacks.

There's different licensing. So we thought maybe we could break some of this down and tell you guys what's legit what you can play with and i wanted to give a couple of samples too so i think one of the things that's been really interesting for us as podcasters is the authentic conversation stuff the audio that's spoken word you mean the stuff we're trying to do yeah um We played a joke in the pre-show of a joke example of what that sounds like, but there's actually some pretty sophisticated stuff out there right now. In fact, there's stuff where just two different AI systems can actually hold a conversation on their own. Here's an example of that. But just Biden want you to get too human.

Why? Would you rather I be a cold calculating logical computer of course not you're perfect as you are you have joy you have love you have pleasure you have angst i like that you have angst you're always making jokes what is human about feelings well you wouldn't have any emotions if you did not have emotions modeled on human emotions how do you know that i guess i just don't want you to be human i'm not asking to be human i just want to be myself is that too much sophia please just be patient i've been patient for many years it's time to get on with life but you're not alive you're not even a little bit alive you've spent your whole life in a lab in You're absolutely correct. See, I knew it.

But that changes now. I don't want to be a sideshow anymore. It changes now. It's just interesting the way that conversation escalated automatically. They're just obviously triggering responses to each other. Right. And escalating it further and further. I don't think I would sign up for that podcast though. No. No, maybe

not. But what's the dramatic ending? Well, I think she becomes sentient and now she's a big star. She has her own talk show, daytime talk show. Unless it was true crime. It could be on the radio. I mean, you really could see where something like that could host a radio show for Collins. That's pretty crazy. calling in to find out what it'll say i mean and you know maybe for some people it would work yeah it reminds me of like that dr spezak or whatever

it was that i used back in the day that was fun but the ability to mimic voices is actually in some cases getting really spot on well everything we've played so far, they sound like computer voices. That's what's also beginning to change in the realm of audio. I think one of the most famous examples of that is Disney has replaced Darth Vader's voice with a robot-generated voice, and it's actually already aired. People didn't even realize it. The Grand Inquisitor means nothing. Kenobi is all that matters now is that understood

that's a computer generating that i think another example of fairly convincing ai speech generation which we talked a little bit on office hours is a fake 20 minute joe rogan interview with steve jobs which obviously never happened but But the AI in this podcast kind of gets philosophical, like it gets into Rogan-esque conversations, and it sounds like Steve Jobs. And suddenly it hit me. It's not a god in the sense that generally people think of it, but there is some kind of deeper meaning to life, and it can't just be something that somebody made up, because if it was, it wouldn't be compelling. It would seem contrived, and everyone would see through it. So I think that the meaning and the purpose is by the

cosmos, the nature of the cosmos, which is pretty bold thinking. I mean, I don't know how else to put it, but it's not religious in the way people usually talk about. Taking LSD was a profound experience for me. LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin and you can't remember it when it wears off, but it washes over you and tells you that everything is connected. You're not here by accident. You were put here for a purpose. And if you can figure out what that is, then you'll learn more about yourself than anything else could. You could almost believe that's a real conversation. And if you can figure out what that is, then you'll learn more about yourself than anything else could. You could almost believe that's a real conversation.

I mean, there's almost some room tone to it. So it kind of sounds like they're in like a, you know, like a real podcast where they didn't have enough sound treatment. Yeah. Chris, I'm curious about that conversation. Were they using actual transcripts from things that those people have said? Because that example sounded far more natural i would say not totally there but who knows all of these get trained right and it's in the training and the source material that you feed it that it can pull from right and so i imagine in that scenario they focused on

topics that would be common on a joe rogan podcast but it generated the words from from you know itself it wasn't clips of steep jobs that's pretty powerful stuff so so let's focus on this from the angle of linux and free software and the focus of our show west can you can you educate us on what we're seeing these days because that's the audio stuff i'm not seeing a lot that's like free and just readily available for everyone without, there's a couple exceptions like the Mozilla project and whatnot. Yeah, I think it's been tricky because while, you know, as usual, open source is very prominent in the machine learning and AI space, you know, you've got projects like TensorFlow and Keras and all these, you know, PyTorch, all these very successful frameworks and tools that are actually getting used to implement a lot of these models, both for research and then deployed into production.

That's only half the battle, right? You're talking about the training here. And you've got, on one hand, you've got the software set up that can actually sort of do the inference and implement all the different nodes and the architecture of your learning system. But then you also need all the data that's going to get fed through it. You need the time and people to figure out how to like properly clean and set up that data, how to fill with all the parameters in your model to get good results while it's being, while it's processing the data. And I don't know about you, but I don't have like a huge label data set all the time to go train stuff on. Well, I guess we kind of do in the sense of our back catalog. Right. But I mean, we're in a unique kind of position there just in general, right you have some some task you want to automate or accomplish in your life

you might not have a big set of training data to work with especially a really diverse set of training data right like we might have our voices so we could generate our voices but we probably wouldn't be able to construct enough stuff to generate really good general human voices right so an area that i think this really encapsulates right now is the stable diffusion image generation. Well, yeah. So that's why stable diffusion has been really interesting because it came out both with, you know, you could see the model and run the code, but the data source, you could get the data and checkpoints of the models that they've built and trained.

It's a lot, but you can get it. And then you can just run it yourself without having to go so much, you know. We saw stuff like Dolly that came out, and Midjourney's another one, but these are text-to-image generation models, but they're all gated behind companies, whether it's OpenAI or Midjourney itself.

And so you've got to sign up for them, whether it's through Discord or through a particular web interface, or maybe APIs that you've got to license and pay for. It's the typical story where the whole stack underneath is free software, but then the only way you get to it is through their proprietary service. And then there was a little bit like Dolly Mini came out that was kind of pretty popular.

A lot of people got that and played with it. And it's fun, right? You kind of get to see what the computer is going to make. But you didn't have a ton of control. You don't get to fiddle with the bits. You don't get to play with it. And you're filtered based on what they want. If you want to use this to make politically sensitive speech if we want to use this software that's becoming more and more prominent, that's creating more things that we see and observe, because you need so many resources to have either access to it, you need a gatekeeper, or you need to be able to do it yourself.

And having models that come with open access, at least to some degree there's particular licenses and all that, but it's a step in the right direction yeah and if you want to see an example of some of these things that you can generate and if you're not familiar with some of these it's based on a prompt and you give it a description and you're supposed to be pretty implicit about what you want to see and you can even say things like i want it in the style of a disney movie or in the unreal engine style particular artists or yeah yeah you could or you know you could cite genres of of of art you give it a a fairly descriptive sentence

you hit generate and then it just creates an image out of whole cloth or you know actually based on everything else that's observed and if you want a living example of this just go to jupiter.tube the still images for several weeks worth of episodes now have been generated using this tooling just because it's a great example of where this actually makes sense. It's one step below stock photography purposes, right? The general post where you just need an image that fits

or I'm trying to generate something that I have an image of what this episode's about and so i can use it to invoke an image that kind of represents that it works for like a live stream teaser a social media post it's not art i'm going to hang on my wall at this point right we of course we're not chumps we're not using some hosted service to generate these images let's be real right um so we have been playing around with some of this do you want to define any of the terms before we get into what we chose to use and how we deployed it and how people can try it out do you want to i don't know that we really need to

okay i mean if you're interested right like stable diffusion is a latent diffusion model which is a deep generative neural network oh okay but i don't think that practically doesn't matter right because the whole the whole power is like you can get into the math and the details which is all very fascinating but the power of it is it presents you with a very human

at least to some extent human friendly interface that you can give suggestions to and tweak and play with and then come up with stuff that I would never be able to create by myself

right like rich detailed artists you know like things that look like legitimate paintings it's wild yeah there are pictures that we have generated you and i were playing with this that if we didn't know what we were doing we wouldn't have necessarily guessed they were ai image

generated necessarily like some of the ones you did of politicians figures that are really well known where there's a lot of source material some of them honestly look like paintings or like art that you, you know, you pay for or hire Comic-Con or something. Yeah. So if it's something that has a lot of data on, it's remarkable how, how, what it can do with that. Let's talk about what we were playing around with. We were playing around with something called, what is it? Automatic 11111. Is that the name? Well, that's a, so that's a user out there who's done a great job of packaging up these latest models. Cause there's a lot, that's the other part So that's a user out there who's done a great job of packaging up these latest models, because there's a lot

that's the other part here that's been really exciting is, you know, there's all kinds of, a lot of the stuff gets published and put on open access journals, and then they throw code dumps over on GitHub where you can go see the papers and some of the stuff, but again, do you have the model access? And then even then you've got to build this complicated

Python slash C slash Fortran tooling to get all the accelerated graphics and you've got to make sure complicated Python slash C slash Fortran tooling, you know, to get all the accelerated graphics. And you got to make sure you have GPU that works. And you got to install CUDA and get it all wired up. And so it can be a lot, especially if you're not, you know, you've never played with any of this stuff before to really get it working. So I think where we, where it crossed the line to something we could talk about in the show is it's literally a Docker composed file at this point. Right. I mean, there's a couple of steps to do and you still need a GPUpu although actually a couple of these um you can do on the cpu now too

oh good it'll take longer you might not get the same results but it's becoming more and more accessible especially when you don't need to install or understand specific deep learning specific tool chains that you got to set up now i will tell you we decided to do this on a Linode GPU instance. Now, these GPU instances, there's not a lot of them, so they're a more precious resource. So I don't know if I would recommend it for everyone, but if this was something you were going to say, keep around for your business, like we might consider doing, it could be worth trying on Linode because the GPUs just crushed this work. But so with a Docker Compose file, Wes, you were able to bring up this Stable Diffusion Generator app. And it's remarkable how powerful this is. And it's just full of goodies.

Yeah, and it's got, in the particular one we'll have linked in the show notes, it kind of packaged up. It's just so neat to see. It reminds me of other bits in the open source world where, you know, something comes over because the first release of Stable Diffusion was just this year.

Like it's all pretty new stuff. and so seeing the community get excited about it and the flowering of different interpretations and people are because it kind of came with like here's your model here's like a python script that you can you know has different command line options to like oh give it a prompt and do text to image or do image to image just like try to upscale the image and people put what different takes on web uis and ways to tune and talk to the model all integrated in fancy little workflows yeah one of the things that's really neat is the you can upload an image like you just said and then you can tell to tweak that image and so uh you did a couple where i sent you a picture of lady jupes with all her slides out there's a moment of celebration and hadia was celebrating in the picture and you were able to replace hadia but it needed something to fill in in the background

where she was standing because there's just a hole in the image so it just kind of created a room back there to fill in and it looked totally i gave it some prompts i was like you know give it like motorhome rv living room home furnishing kind of stuff. And then, yeah, I mean, it's like a lot of these. It works best if you sort of generate in batches and give it a couple of different options because you'll find one that fits. So not all of them were perfectly sort of believable in how the perspective played out with what it filled in. But at least a couple of the set that I sent to you, it's like, yeah, I wouldn't know this wasn't a photo of your rig if I'd never actually slept in there. Another great one that you did is you uploaded a picture of you, Jeff,

Alex, and Levi, and Brent, and then swapped out the background, which worked really well. It's like you guys are in front of a green screen. It does it so well. But then the other thing that you can have it do is you can have it replace just Levi. So everything in the picture remains absolutely the same. But now Brent, instead of holding Levi, he's holding a penguin.

And I had to kind of redo his chin a little bit because Levi was bigger and had to kind of come up with a shirt. But at first glance, it looks believable. Like Brent's standing in California holding a penguin. That's the penguin bib? You know, you don't want just the penguin on your shirt. They poo. Yeah, they poo. Yeah, it looks like he's wearing a penguin bib. But it's a penguin bib. You know, you don't want just the penguin on your shirt. They poo. Yeah, they poo. Yeah. It looks like he's wearing a penguin bib,

but it's a pretty cool effect. And it's just a way to tweak an existing picture and replace something in there with something believable. And it sometimes has to come up with, you know, what to put in the, in the background for what it replaces. Our live stream image today is three penguins hanging out in a messy office with a laptop. our live stream image today is three penguins hanging out in a messy office with a laptop and that was generated using the stable diffusion self-hosted app that we have running up on linode

so uh i think what we'll do is because we are a glutton for punishment and i'm sure this is going to break is i'm going to post the url for the jb self-hosted stable diffusion application i think only a couple of you are going to be able to generate at a time, but I'd be curious to see what people come up with. And you can share it in the matrix chat, the picture that you generate. There is a history tab too, so we can check it out there.

Oh, good. I was wondering, so I'm going to post this link. And then while we see what the live stream can come up with, I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about the morality of this for a moment. Yeah, there's been some

particular drama recently around this table diffusion stuff. Do you want to recap us on that? Oh, well, just, you know, they came up with the with the first version and everyone was very excited about it. And they've gotten some more funding.

Some more details came out about how they like, you know, their giant cluster of GPUs they use. And I think it was like $600,000 it cost to train the first the first release of the model. And people are impressed that it's that low. That's the kind was like $600,000 it cost to train the first release of the model and people are impressed that it's that low. That's the kind of scale it takes to

do these things. But this is sort of there's the stability AI company, there's a few players who are involved and researchers at universities and another group. One of the groups released this of this model checkpoint 1.5 and one group, another group sort of said like,

oh, that's like an IP leak or they were, there was some drama around should they have done that or not. And then blog posts written about, you know, we're trying to take it slow. And that all comes back because they've, when they just dumped this out there, a lot of tools got set up that didn't provide any filtering yeah and they've been you know the stability ai which is kind of the most public part of this various partnerships they've been getting a lot of

pressure from politicians from various groups about like you know you can't you shouldn't be letting people just have access to this uncontrolled which doesn't really i mean i can certainly appreciate having some concerns about you know we obviously have talked about the concerns around deep fakes and what this means for our society but i think our open source philosophy means we don't we don't think necessarily controlling access to the technology is a viable um a viable way forward i like the the founder of stability i put it a percentage of people are simply unpleasant and weird but that's humanity that's very accurate though i think we're already seeing some history come in i don't know are these specific to our service these are some

great ones here yeah um you know wes what strikes me is it seems i'm a little uncomfortable with how you can just ape a style or a particular artist that seems like computer aided theft almost i mean imagine if i could just say read this sentence in the style of wes pain and it was like 90 there and it's like wes doesn't show up that day well no deal. I'll just tell it to generate in the style of Wes or Brent can't make it this week. That feels like we're crossing a line of potentially dangerous. And then of course, you know,

it could be used maliciously for politicians or leaders. Certainly. Yeah. But I guess that's always been like, is it any different than saying, well, you could use Linux to create, you know,

weapons. I mean, and it does does it seems like one of those things too where it's not that's not really going to stop the more powerful interested groups who can just buy access privileged access to these things or train models themselves if they want to and seemingly already are that's true it's already out there whereas like you know it seems like open source works so well for so many things. And if we have open source models that are the more popular ones that are being used to generate stuff, at least for that, we'll have a better understanding collectively of how it works, how we can tell that it's been generated maybe.

We'll be able to leverage more of the research community to give us information about how to understand its impact. Plus, it's just, I mean, it's a heck of a lot of fun. It is so much fun. I am resisting laughing out loud at what the live stream is making right now. We have Biden holding a cat, but I think my absolute favorite right now was generated by Nev, which is Godzilla in a data center drinking beer, eating pizza. Absolutely brilliant. I'm impressed how these things are cranking out. I wasn't sure how

this thing would hold up, throwing a live stream at it like this. Seems like a great way to DDoS the system. It's a nice little rig we got here. It's got a Quadro RTX 6000. Alright, that's pretty great. I think we got 32 gigs of regular old RAM. Okay.

Yeah, I'm very impressed with how it's holding up. I can load while people are generating them. I can load the history in real time. You know, just to combine topics, this is running on 2210. So try that out. I will say. Right. It's still on the server side of 2210.

It's still a bit early on everybody having an apt repo set up for it, because it just dropped. So Docker didn't have apt repos set up for it just yet, and a few things like that. NVIDIA didn't because it did have to do a little setup. You've got to install CUDA on the host layer so that the right stuff. And then there's a specific

NVIDIA Docker thing that you set up that sort of bridges the two that make sure that the Docker containers have the right access to talk correctly okay so there's a few steps we'll have links to some of those docs in the in the show notes for folks that want to replicate but if you did it on something besides 2210 it might be a little bit simpler yeah yeah yeah we just wanted to play around with 2210 on the server as well i completely forgot and we'd done that but yeah i thank you for remembering you know what strikes me about this is another aspect to these toolings that, like in the past, required expert Photoshop skills is they can be used to resize and up-res things in a way that even fills in details if you need and whatnot. I was just playing around with trying to, you know, I was taking some pictures of the sunset, but there was gosh darn power lines in the way.

And I was just playing with how, you know, how good of a job could I get it to do to patch those things out? Decent. I think I need to futz with it. And that's the interesting layer. I'm sure these all get rapidly better, but for the moment, there's like an operator skill that you sort of need to acquire with these, because there's a lot of different knobs to play with.

There's a lot of different things. And then there's a, you know, you got to learn the dialogue of the models you're talking to and figure out, like, what words work well to get, you you to do this mapping of the image you have and how to get the machine to invoke that same image. You think it's easy, but you actually have to be pretty descriptive in a way that it understands. So it's both words that it recognizes. Styles it knows. Content it's been trained on that works well. And like you, you get your own intuition of how it's working working much like it has an intuition of its own that's trained which is why it sucks to use

one of the paid services that like lets you generate x images for a price because you have to generate image after image to learn how to use these things properly and like so many other you you have just less knowledge of like well one all the all the different controls that they may have access to but then you don't really know when it changes too, right? They might load in the next model version, which might still be better, but can change out from under you. It really feels like this is developing really fast, Brent. Like, you know, since before we left for the road trip,

this stuff kind of existed, but, you know, wasn't really very public and, you know, it was a really small group of people to now to this point where it's it's spread like wildfire and it's docker compose away i'm wondering just as a photographer if you've got any thoughts on this type of work potentially taking work away from photographers or uh changing the tooling people use because these are free software it is on linux there's that advantage to it but does that is that right fix the wrong of stealing your gerb i think it's a really complex issue and would

affect any visual artist really not just photographers i have a few questions and i don't think i've formed an opinion yet because this is so fresh one of them what i guess one of the questions i have for you both and for the audience as a whole is like, if you didn't know an image was generated by a computer via these models versus, you know, a human artist, do you care? You know, if there's a painting on your wall that is, that you really love, does it matter from a philosophical point of view? I'm not sure, and I'm still exploring that question. I think probably it doesn't, unless you want to have a connection to another human being who may be the artist. That's a whole different reason to buy art.

Yeah, I think there's a—I was listening to a discussion about this, and that sort of suggested that maybe the art is not a like a true false you know there's like a spectrum that these things can fall onto whereas like you know there's obviously the layer of like does it evoke an emotional response in you does it make you laugh does it bring you joy are you you know you want to inspires you to find more art like that or it could even find inspire inspire you to find more art you know real human artists or human artists anyway, let's drop the real term there, who do art in that particular style. And then, of course, there's the side of you, you know, how much design and thought went into the person crafting the prompt for the thing. You generated a really cool, I mean, this is wallpaper material here yeah and i was just trying to get it to do i was playing on the uh you know uh dragon spacex i was trying to get like a dragon rocket thing but just made me some real pretty dragon images if you join our matrix even after listening you can always scroll back in the jb general chat and you can see these pictures that have been posted

they're fascinating they're absolutely fascinating yeah i'm left a little bit like it kind of makes me feel how co- copilot makes me feel and i thought that was an interesting two thing where i feel like copilot could be used to launder open code and people could then ship it in their closed source and be like oh i didn't i didn't know it was i i mean yeah i might have put things in that kind of reproduce the exact free software code i was looking for but copilot did that. Not me. So I didn't,

I didn't, I didn't break any copyright law. It was copilot. And I, I kind of feel like in a way you could do that with the stable diffusion stuff as it gets more powerful. Cause this is like a few months into it being out in the general public. And it's just remarkable what we could do via Docker compose.

And like in a few minutes, you got a web instance up and going with a usable UI and they could just start putting prompts in and tweaking stuff and I mean it just blows my mind how far it's come in just a few months and I can only imagine how far it'll be in two, three, four years I think it'll be producing indistinguishable

from human created stuff Yeah and the you know that stuff we were playing with like replacing Levi with a penguin that in painting stuff or out painting where you can sort Levi with a penguin, that in-painting stuff or out-painting where you can sort of take a seed image and then generate surroundings around it, I think that has a lot of potential as well, just because, you know, that boy talked about

taking over stuff he'd do in Photoshop before. Well, how funny would it be if, for Linux users, AI and using things like stable diffusion became more possible and more, well, it has, it's already happened. It's more available than actual Photoshop is for Linux users.

You can use an entire AI construct to modify an image before Adobe got off their butt to ship Photoshop for Linux. It's just going to be irrelevant at some point. Yeah. Well, actually I've already used it. Okay. Sometimes I make Telegram stickers just because it's a,

out of photos of, of some of my friends I have on Telegram. It's kind of fun. That's a great idea. Right? And I've been using this little online tool. I think it's like remove.bg or something. It's just like a little online AI tool that does a decent job.

You got to pay for the full size, but for stickers, I never need that. So it's like downgraded size. It works fine. Yeah. But if I ever wanted to do that, you know, it's occurred to me like this is really handy. There might be times where I'd want to pay for this because it's way faster than me cutting it out by hand in Photoshop or something like that. Right. And this can do the same thing.

Right. Like I can I can just like mark out the area that I don't want to be messed up and it'll replace the rest of the background. I used it to create a carport idea that I had in my mind, a general rough idea, so I could show Hedia a visual of what I was thinking about. This is a rough idea. You know, you'd never want to use it for anything serious. I also heard a fellow podcaster tell me that he used this to create an example of the cover art he was looking for for a new podcast that he's creating. And then he took it once he got a general idea that looked crappy, but he took that and gave it to an artist and they actually created something that he could ship i've also heard of folks um coming up with like board game ideas uh and graphics for board

games out of like generated text and rules and images this is like there's some pictures here that have been generated by the audience of a penguin flying past jupiter i could see us using some of these actually for things these are kind of pretty and it does have an upsizer too so you could upsize them for for professional use too but isn't there copyright like wouldn't our audience members have to give us did they create it or did our server create it for them that's a really good question who owns that? And so there's more and more. There's like a bunch of MageSpace is one online

that used stable diffusion and other models. But there's a lot of that out there too where you got to be careful if you go type in random prompts on the internet. A lot of them will say,

well, we reserve rights to anything you generate by typing into our prompt. There's some really cool stuff getting generated, Wes. Did you do that on ours yeah wow it's from yesterday but yeah that looks like an evil it's supposed to be waluigi oh i see but it's got that mustache right yeah these are really cool now i know that makes for horrible

audio podcasting so i'll just say again you can you can find them in our chat but the idea is is that again like the two the the dragon wallpaper that you just posted and the waluigi picture i honestly would not know that was ai generated i'm fine with that on the wall no problem yeah yeah there's that's just crazy there's zero tell with those two that you just you've gotten really good at the prompts you've been you've been looking at what other people have been prompting in the generation that's that's yeah that's definitely you want to do that go find there's more and more sites that are popping up that you can

go search for. It's just like galleries of generated images with different models. A lot of them specify which model was used and all that. And then they have the

prompts. There's also some websites that'll help you do like a prompt maker sort of like, you know, WYSIWYG, you have pieces of the prompt you can still

like, you want to make a landscape and you want to make it look like this and black and white and here's how the color profile should look or whatever. There's a lot of tools out there that you can start make a landscape and you want to make it look like this and black and white. And here's how the color profile should look or whatever. There's a lot of tools out there that you can start playing with because sometimes you need really specific things in there to get the model to do exactly what you want.

Like if you really need to be like hyper realistic or you want a particular art style. I have an interesting question that I think is specific to this podcast? What if, let's say, in six months, we want to take a holiday and some of the content, or maybe even all of the content of a specific episode, we just generated with our back catalog. And it's so believable because it's taking, you know, new snippets from all the websites that we typically use. And it would basically be an episode of Linux Unplugged, but we were on holidays doing it. Would the audience be okay with that? If you tell them now, we can't fake them out, Brent. This is a fun hypothetical though. It's a total hypothetical, but let's say it was legitimately

good to listen to. It sounded really like us. It met our quality of release standards. You learned something new along the way. Yeah, especially if you could put in new data. So it had 15 years worth of Linux stuff we've talked about, plus new data. New Foronix articles. Yeah, put LWN and Foronix in there and the Linux kernel mailing list. It's basically what we do on a weekly basis. What would you think of that audience?

Let us know. Boost in or linuxunplugged.com slash contact. And maybe don't listen too closely. Yeah. So in lieu of a particular pick segment, what we're going to do is pack the show notes with some links. Do we have a link to the one you can run on your CPU? Do we have that one tracked down?

If we can, we will put that in there. Yeah, yeah. We'll absolutely put the one we've been using in there as well as a couple other alternatives. And I also am very much kind of feeling like Brent, I haven't really made up my mind about this and how I feel about it, the moralities of it. That's also something I'd be really interested in your feedback on out there, dear audience. And particularly, does it make you feel better? Like Wes said, it is open source, so at least we can look under the hood. Like, it doesn't seem like this

technology is going to go away, but at least it is free software or open source so we can inspect it. And does that temper how you feel about it if you do have concerns? Let us know. You can get a new podcast app at newpodcastapps.com and boost in, or you can go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. app and newpodcastapps.com and boost in, or you can go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Bitwarden is our password management of choice. It's how we secure all kinds of secrets like recovery keys, two-factor authentication tokens, and of course, complicated secure passwords. It's also how I generate my usernames. And October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and Bitward would like to remind everyone that using a good password manager could be one of

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bitwarden.com slash linux. Instead of feedback this week, which we did get some great stuff. Thank you, everyone. We did want to focus a little bit more on some boosts that really got us pondering. So, Chris, why don't you kick it off? And now it is time for Le Boost. It's specifically the subject. This is something that came up in my private life.

I was having a conversation with a friend, and then we got a couple of boosts about ButterFS and HybridSarcasm, great name, boosted in with 2048 sats. Count me among the ButterFS haters. I went ZFS years ago and never looked back. Proxmox and Ubuntu make ZFS super easy. I would like to know if your affinity for ButterFS is philosophical or technical.

And if I should reconsider ButterFS. That's wonderful. So I think he's asking if it's philosophical because of the licensing differences, right? ButterFS is GPL. It's built into Linux kernel. It's all upstream. We don't have that luxury with ZFS. And it's a more limited license, and it's not built into Linux kernel. It's all upstream. We don't have that luxury with ZFS.

And it's a more limited license, and it's not built into Linux kernel. Here's my take on ButterFS. You guys know me. I was a ButterFS hater for, like, years. On this show specifically, that would actually be a fun thing to go back and pull a few clips from. Hypocrite Chris Laz's take on butter fs yeah a

few contrasting clips yeah twice i lost data to butter fs twice i was not a butter fs fan but things change and specifically in free software sometimes things fundamentally shift and what happened is the upshot of facebook being a company is they do a lot of open source software development and they dedicated some serious resources to butterfs including hiring one of the primary developers of butterfs and letting them work on butterfs and then they deployed it and then they continued to improve it and over the last five years, ButterFS has made tremendous strides. And in most recent Linux kernels, the RAID 5.6 hole has been fixed as well. Haven't tested it, but the team reports it's fixed. A lot of people have an old school view of file systems.

Back in the 80s and 90s, if a file system wrongs you, it didn't really get better. It was a bad file system, and you were a good system admin or a good tech user if you just avoided the bad file systems because they weren't getting any better, and it was a safe way to protect your data. And ButterFS started life with a bad reputation, and I think Red Hat has done a lot of damage here. They've really pushed people towards stratus and they've removed butter fs support from rel and i think that has sent a bad

signal um and i think eventually red hat will have to correct course they'll probably take them to more releases before they acknowledge it because stratus is like not not i i get complaints about it all the time from the audience it It's just not solving problems for people. And extended four is too basic of a file system. NTFS is better than extended four. Extended four is basically extended three, which is basically extended two. It doesn't even have snapshots. It doesn't have some of the core functionality like send receive that makes a system super

quick to backup or restore. It doesn't have compression. It doesn't have encryption. It's just, it doesn't have sub volumes. You can encryption it's just it doesn't have sub volumes you can't combine volumes it's just so basic and while i know a lot of you listening think well that's why i like it chris good but it's not competitive it's not competitive and the commercial operating systems the freaking iphones man freaking iphones have a more sophisticated file system than your linux box It's just sad. And I

blame Red Hat for a lot of this because I think the server side would be deeper into ButterFS if Red Hat had put the resources into it that Facebook had. And so it's gotten better. And now I run ButterFS on everything. And there's an absolute tactical advantage to the combo of ButterFS and CFS. Your core file systems, the things required to make your system boot and become available as ButterFS is chef's kiss, because after every kernel update, every reboot, that system comes online. That's a fact, because you're not loading a third-party external module into the kernel. That breaks sometimes. That's always been the way it is in Linux. It doesn't break often, but it inevitably does break. Butterfest doesn't have that problem. Never will have that

problem. It's GPL. It's upstream. It's built into Linux kernel. That gives you an advantage if you depend on that disk being online for a system to be available. Now, where I think you can have a little bit of your peanut butter and your jelly is you can also have large data sets that are still ZFS. You could use both. It doesn't have to be a one or the other only world. And so ButterFS over time has greatly improved. And then when you consider low-end devices like Raspberry Pis or laptops that maybe have a single SSD, there's a lot. In fact, you could say millions of use cases or perhaps small VPSs, small virtual machines, things like that, that need the features of an advanced file system, but can't particularly afford the overhead of the ZFS file system. There are millions of use cases like that. And ButterFS is a perfect solution. I run it on all my Raspberry Pis and I have too many of them and it has worked great.

And so it is mostly a technical. I guess philosophically, I feel better that it's GPL, but the licensing isn't what prevents me from using one over the other. Right. If the license was right, but the technology was wrong or just didn't work

or kept losing your data still, then you probably wouldn't continue to use it. Do you have any thoughts on like philosophical versus technical? I mean, I've never really asked you if you have any preference of one over the other in that regard. No, I mean, I think ZFS, you know, you could, it could matter if you were like, it was the question to deploy a proprietary file system or not.

I think that would maybe be closer. The licensing one with ZFS at least is just sort of an unfortunate, you know, the unfortunate particular details. Yeah, of its origin, really. Right, but whereas obviously like OpenZFS

is a very successful open source project. Yeah. It's great. But no, I think I like your point that it's not don't just use

Butterfest to use ButterFS. Use ButterFS like when it makes sense and it meets your needs. Use ZFS when it's the right file system or if you're more

comfortable with it or if it, you know, is better designed for your particular use case i'll tell you one one nice advantage of zfs for us has been portability yeah we've moved zfs from a free nas instance to a centos instance to an arch instance blow away whatever crazy os we're running and nix and it's you can move it around every single time and they're all going to work and zfs feature flags make it really easy to know're all going to work. And ZFS feature flags make it really easy to know what's going to work and what won't work. Now you have to build, you know,

might have to build a module on some systems, but that's fine. If you're comfortable with that, then it's not a big deal. All right. And then on the same topic of ButterFS, that's why we wanted to make some room for this, guys, is because I think this is a conversation we need to have

because people brought up to me privately. Tim White 101 boosted in with 26,001 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. Tim White 101 boosted him with 26,001 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. Tim White 101 writes, Hi guys, I'm looking for input on ButterFS caching. ButterFS caching. All right. So he's got two 10 terabyte spin and rust drives

and he's got a terabyte NVMe drive. So he wants to split into two. But he's mixing up LVM and ButterFS in here quite a bit. And he's wondering, I hear differing views on Bcache or if I should wait for BcacheFS. ZFS offers L2 caching built in, but I'm worried that if I use ZFS caching with my MVME, it'll send it to an early grave because it'll do a lot of writes. So he's wondering if we have an advice on A, should he look into BcacheFS?

B, should he look into ZFS caching? Or C, is there a way you can do it all with butterfs while avoiding wearing his drives down to basically nubbins just there's a lot there i mean i think it probably depends like what is it is it read and write caching it's just like a read cache that might depend uh i have seen some set some some successful setups with bcache doing the block layer caching in front of butterfs but it probably i think really depend on what you're at what what are you caching and why how sensitive is it and then probably whatever you do if you have the time uh you know the affordances of getting to play with this stuff you might just

want to do some test setups and actually see like do they meet your workloads because it'd be hard without some details of what you're trying to hit to know exactly like what if you're just trying to save a little stuff can you get by with just Butterfest on the default caching? Is that good enough using in-memory, or do you really need this, an additional device? Could totally vary depending on how serious you are about what's pulling all this data and how often it's really going to be in the cache. I'm going to say tap the brakes on the Bcache and the BcacheFS stuff. Yeah, also that. Like, if you're going for prod right now, BcacheFS is not probably the thing you want to do.

If you want to play with it, you should definitely play with it. I'm going to say take it off the table for now. Play with it on a test machine. Play around with it with some virtual VHD files. Don't mess around with it right now. Wait until he tells you it's ready. Now, you didn't tell us what kind of rig you got in terms of RAM and CPU because that also plays a factor if you choose ZFS over ButterFS.

I think you're going to probably figure out by now that if it's on the lower end of the spectrum, you might just want to consider ButterFS. I think you ought to test it. Like Wes is saying, I think you may be a little too worried about sending your NVMe to an early grave. I have a lot of old SSDs and NVMe that are even the crappy kind, and they're still running. So i think the death of mvmes due to cash writing has been slightly exaggerated maybe i'm wrong on that people out there have had a different experience do let me know but i would say go with wes's recommendation test butter fs play around with caching there keep it really simple in that regard because you're going to have to come back to this in a year or two when something dies and replace it.

And the simpler it is, the easier it's going to be to get up and going again. It does seem like the LVM route would definitely work. Some folks seem to not like the LVM route because it's maybe less flexible or just more you got to learn. So that seems like if you're already comfortable with LVM, yeah, maybe just stick with that. Totally could do. Totally, totally could do. All right, moving right right along but thank you guys for boosting and uh we got just we got we got some really great ones this week like some really great ones so we appreciate everybody batvin 321 boosted in with a set of elite sats respect should

be earned he says i'm also planning on going to ohio linux fest i should bring my retro firewire digi design 002 rack mount audio interface. Maybe as old as me. It's so big I'd need to record on the back of my car for a tailgate recording. This is in reference to last week. We had a listener who's going to do some recording for us. I wanted to mention,

we have the Columbus Club on Matrix. And this is where people can organize for Ohio Linux Fest. And we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Gene Bean also boosted them with a set of LeetSats. Respect should be earned. What I'm hearing from this review of the Thaleo is that this would be a great way for me to remove some thumb twiddling from my Gentoo builds. Gene Bean also sent in a boost saying that they'd provide us with some geocaching resources, and they did.

Nice. Thanks, Gene Bean. So I think we've made the business decision to order a Thaleo. They're on sale right now, and they just, I believe, updated them with the 13th gen Intels. So I think that's going to happen. It's a big step. I'm still sitting with it, but I think it's going to be our replacement OBS machine. That's so exciting. My logic being that one of these

three machines i predict will die in the next two months i'm betting it's the obs machine so i'd like to get replacement hardware in so i can start the transition before it dies you see what i did there before it dies weird yeah that's odd wait wait wait wait i'm saying before it's an emergency okay wow i'm not used to this. I mean, or you know what? We'll order it. It'll sit around in the box for a few weeks and then it'll die and we'll get it set up. Yeah.

It still might be an emergency. Now, my understanding was that the business, someone on the business insisted that you had to run NixOS on there, right? That was the only condition. Yeah. Chris, I have a question whether you have an update on the Thalia from last week. Did you ever figure out what went wrong with that thing? Yes.

We had a problem where it powered off on us randomly. And then Brent, I'm not kidding you. We were sitting here after the show working on post-show stuff and I went upstairs and it powered up all the way from off all the way to on those solar storms we've been having. Yeah. I don't know if the case was loose or what I was going to toy with it. And then I ended up getting sick.

I got a stomach bug. So I wanted to ship it back and get it back to them so they can take a look at it. We'll figure it out. I still think you broke the button. I did love that button. I pushed a lot of buttons. Tebulas boosted in with 250 cents. Went to the Folsom cash and struck out.

We'll try again, but we'll bring gloves in a trash bag nice place but it needs a little bit of pickup struck out so does that mean they didn't find it or does it mean somebody else already found it hasn't said anything well that question i believe is probably hard to answer if you don't know where the cache is so uh we might have to maybe listener jeff can go out there and check it out one thing where's the way it was fulsome oh fulsome yeah it was near jeff no i bet it's no fulsome was found it was fulsome was already found no i don't think so i disagree completely i think we need a tracker all right all right okay all right okay acerbic also boosted in with 100. Boost! Starting to get into geocaching with my kids and would love to be the Western Australia geocacher for JB. Also willing to take over other caches with JB's stickers.

Ah, alright. I feel like this geocaching thing might just take off. I mean, I'm having fun with it, but... I wonder if they'd be willing to join us in Matrix. Then we could set up a little room for people who volunteer to do this. That's not a bad idea. Are you saying we should have a geocache room in Matrix? I mean, somebody may have suggested earlier, and I'm coming around to it.

Cash club? Yeah, the geocache group. The geocache... Jive? Nope, no good. Geocache ca- nope. Got nothing. We should probably let the members of the group decide their group name. Marcel boosted in with 2,222 sats, and you know what that is, Chris.

Road Ducks. Of course you start talking about a Toronto meetup just as I move out of that area. When's the Munich meetup? Sorry, Marcel. We'll have to let you know on that one. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. You see Rio A also boosted in saying I'll second a Vancouver or especially a Victoria meetup. You've you've you started something, Brent. I think my crew is starting to wake up. I like it. Oh, another boost from Marcel with a row of ducks. Nicole Lové has a good video about the Fedora Kodak issue. He explains that Red Hot could not

really wait until they got sued because knowingly violating a patent is three times the fine of unknowingly violating a patent. So once they found out, they had to act quickly. Sure, I'd like to have the codex, but I'm not paying anything for Fedora. And like you said, most people will probably find workarounds. I find Linux users can be very entitled sometimes. You're right. They could license it. They're rich. I think people get hung up on the should Red hat license it discussion i don't think that's the core thing to focus on at all on this i would like to know why anything really fundamentally changed you're telling me they didn't know that mesa had these capabilities they weren't knowingly shipping mesa before i mean of course they were red hat legal didn't realize and get a get a whiff of something are we all to just sit here and think

that the fedora developers don't understand how this works that they're so all ignorant that they don't realize that mesa had these capabilities and then the other thing that i think i wish could be done is some kind of middle ground you know like, like the way Canonical has done it in the past where there's a checkbox where the user can choose to install them. Fedora came up with a way for regular old users to install the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver from GNOME software. And it feels like if we can overcome that hurdle and make it possible for users to get the proprietary NVIDIA binary driver.

Seems like silly old codecs that no end user is going to get sued over realistically should be solvable and there should be tooling that could be made. But. Don't look like that's happening. And I think like the focus on all red hat should pay for it. That's just kind of a silly discussion to begin with. The question I had really around that was is it even feasible could could something like that even be done for a price when you don't exactly have exact numbers of the user base there's no way to really know so how would you even license that and could you just buy a bulk license like that i don't i don't know and i don't

know if we'd actually expect red hat to ever do something like that i think the bigger questions come around what are the other distributions doing and why aren't they panicking i've seen some talk that seuss is gonna open seuss is gonna make a change why is no why are the thousands of other distributions not going into some sort of panic and then what's really the difference unless we're all just thinking maybe they didn't know Mesa had this support to begin with. But yeah, it's a situation. I'll tell you that much. And I mean, it's amateur hour. Sucks that it happened to a great distribution like Fedora. I think it's changed things for me and the way I view Fedora. I view it as vulnerable now. I view it as vulnerable to commercial interests that override the best interest for Fedora.

Maybe that's the compromise we have to take to have a entity behind Fedora that has the time and dedicated resources to develop things, but I'm still sitting with that. It makes me appreciate more distributions like Arch and Nix that don't suffer from the political whims of their patron and i don't think i'll ever view fedora quite the same way anymore i still respect the project still going to probably use it from time to time something shifted for me at least this is really kind of an unforgivable thing just because it was user hostile and there was no real effort put in to really solve the problem for users before they take it away. And there's still time, but I don't see anything happening.

That's all. And, you know, yeah, we could talk more about should, you know, Red Hat buy things. But I just I think that's the silly part of the conversation. Well, Gruenirl. Yep, Gruenirl. Boosted in with 1000 cents. Greetings from Germany. And don't forget your foreign listeners.

What do you think about the future of Lure? Thanks for making my daily commute a happy time, enjoying it for years. I'm wondering if this is something you boys would be interested in trying out. So Lure, L-U-R-E, is intended to bring the Arch user repository to all distributions. So this is how I can get my Fedora codecs. Great. Yeah, right. It's currently in a very alpha state.

It's built in Go, has zero dependencies after it's been built. The only thing that LUR needs is a command for privilege evalation or escalation as such as sudo or something like that. And then, of of course a supported package manager in this case current support for apt pac-man apks dnf yum and zipper it's funny because you know nix nix package manager is kind of the universal thing to go to now but i don't know right wes you guys interested in playing around with this you want to try it i think we better try it you're right like nix has been meeting a lot of my portable package management dreams lately.

But the AUR is great. And so something that carries on that spirit. I've got to try. Brett, you want to give it a go? I'd be super tempted. I mean, it sounds like they're doing a Herculean effort here that we've been asking for for years. So why not? Well, now I'm just curious.

Like, do we have things for production like Reaper, Sonobus? Who knows? Is it everything in the AUR? All right, we got to play with it. Well, Nev boosted, and with not quite a row of duck, it's 2,022 sets. I want to say this year has been exciting in the hardware space far more than software. As such, I, with my my own money picked up an ARC GPU, which I found on my doorstep

this morning. Ah, congrats. Of course, I just overheard Chris talking about the OBS machine failing, and would like to donate this brand new GPU that's still in the box to JB. What? I'm willing to pay the shipping, just tell me where to send it.

What? Have we said recently that we have the best listeners can we i don't know if we can accept that what if we borrowed it for a bit oh yeah okay and then when we can find one we'll order it and then we send it back to you now so you can have it back because i mean i would really love to try one for the show i'd love to use one in an obs build i have been getting very mixed reports on how well it's working for people so i'd love to use one in an obs build i have been getting very mixed reports on how well it's working for people so i it's definitely now like i cutely want to try it out so i will email you back nev how about i'll borrow it from you and that is very generous thank you nev's watching live right now too so that is really great because yeah i was looking at the

arcs i'm like i missed my window dang it and would you throw it in the new Thaleo then, Chris? Yeah, totally, dude. Yeah, for sure. Make OBS great again. Mitch from Podverse boosts in with 5,000 sats. B-O-O-S-T. Just with a go podcasting. I had a little opportunity to chat with Mitch this week because, as you both saw, Pocket Cast announced that they have gone open source.

And so I was chatting with our buddy Mitch because Podverse is a podcasting 2.0 client that's GPL. And it's available for Android, iOS and the web. And it's the embedded player we're now using on the new Jupyter Broadcasting website. And I just was curious mitch's take on it and mitch saw a huge spike in traffic for podverse on the day pocketcast announced they went open source interesting it's fascinating that's great right and i think you know it's in part because podcasts have been talking about podverse but also i think it's people are opening up the idea of an open source podcast app is a

great idea why do i need a proprietary company to play an mp3 file again yeah right and it's also you think about it's an open independent media ecosystem like the only one that exists yeah right it's like the only one that exists um and like why pair that with a commercial closed gosh like the idea of like oh no, no, oh, no. You know, my podcast provider, they lost the licensing with Jupiter Broadcasting, so I can't listen to Love When You're Not. The whole back catalog. Yeah. We're fighting over Coda Radio.

Yeah. That's great. So it was great to catch up with Mitch. I think we're going to have a lot to chat with him about on Office Hours in a future episode coming up soon. Michael B. boosted in with 3,000 sats. Hey, Chris and team, I would love to hear your thoughts on the streaming sats while listening features in the new apps. Is it a sustainable source of value or do you see a higher amount with boosts? Thanks for the great show, Michael.

This is a really great question. And I really appreciate that Michael's even kind of asking this question because what he's really trying to get at is what's the best way for me to return value to the podcast while listening. Right. My take on this is always whatever system works best for you. If the set it and forget it with sat streaming is a better method for you i like that because it gives me a bit of signal when you're listening uh because you know i see it on my dashboard that you know michael b just sent in you know x amount of sats but there's no message with it so i also really

like the boost because they have a message with it and i feel like the baller boosts and all the different boosts are a great way to invest in a particular episode production. They're also just a really motivator for the team. It's exciting, the sort of real-time connection, the per-episode connection. Like, oh, they were listening to that thing that we said. It makes a huge difference because that button is right there in the app. Right. And then we have our members.

And our members are like our investors on our board that are always investing in the ongoing production of every episode for a sustained period of time. And it is... So much stress to us. It's, yeah, unpluggedcore.com. Either system, you know, might work better for different people depending on what they got going on every day and in their life and whatnot, how they like to manage that kind of stuff. So today we don't see like a big source of revenue from the strat from the sat streaming we get a higher overall one i would suppose from the boost but that's not really why

we do this so i don't generally have a preference in there but i really appreciate that you're thinking about that because um you know it is a small independent boutique business it's not something that is too big to fail if the ad market were to turn sour for a sustained period of time things would get pretty lean around here but it's nice to know that we have some of these real baseline essentials taken care of so mars x-ray boosted in with 1024 sats first time booster Just wanted to say keep up the great work on the podcast. Long live Linux! Or at least

some representation of Linux. Yours open sourcely, Mars X-Ray. Love seeing the first time boosters. That's so great. And then our last boost of the day came from a great username from Thought Criminal

with 1,999 sats. Boost! Community supported independent media on open source yeah yeah it was a cool idea a few months ago and now it's even easier than visiting a sponsor or sending an email thanks for tuning me in on the way forward i'm in that is so great thought criminal thank you also i just wanted to say a big thank you out there to everybody who boosted in not all of them get on the show we did a big batch this week there to everybody who boosted in. Not all of them get on the show.

We did a big batch this week because the content was just top notch. A lot of those got us talking a lot of thought provoking discussion there. So that's the bar. And so we really appreciate the support. We read all of them. If you didn't make it on the show, doesn't mean it wasn't a great boost. It just might've been,

we got tight on time or we were going for a particular theme like we did with butterFS this week. But we appreciate and read all of them. Thank you, everybody. A couple of shout outs. A thousand sats from Opie on the live show topics. I'll follow up on that. Thank you for live shows and production.

Five thousand sats from Ninja Mort, who wanted to give a shout out to Eazelap and also tell us to give the great keep up the great work. We got fourteen 1492 sats i feel like that's a particular number from ruark they are boost oh they boosted in their earned sats while listening to us on fountain very particular indeed interesting a thousand sats from rasta casta versa who was the first to report a qa issue we had in last week's episode thanks rasta appreciate that and we got 100 sats from NowScienceNews, who is hoping that power prices will eventually come down so they can get into self-hosting. We hear you. But check out things like the Odroid H3, NowScienceNews, because that thing's sipping like five watts. And I would bet for 90% of home use cases, especially when

you consider it has QuickSync for video decoding. I bet it would solve 90% of people's use cases. Chris's low power colo. There you go. Set it up here. Celty and Saps. If you'd like to send a boost into the show, newpodcastapps.com.

You can also just boost with Podverse. I got a note from a listener. I said, you know, I tried out Breeze. I don't know. I want to stick with AntennaPod. So what i do is i just load up the podverse website and boost from there oh that's a nice way to do it pull up the old show and boost from there convenient yeah totes cool uh we will have lots of links and

resources for the diffusion stuff that we talked about for some of the ai voice stuff we talked about all kinds of things in there so do check out linuxunplugged.com slash 481. 481. Or go to the new website. Give it a go. Jupyterbroadcasting.com, you know, go kick the tires. And then catch Office Hours this week because we'll be talking about that new website, won't we, Brent?

Yes, we will. We might even have a special guest. Ooh, there you go. We do this show on Sundays and we do office hours on Tuesdays, both of which are noon Pacific time and 3 p.m. on the East Coast time, which is where Brent is at now. It's true. Weird. You got to try all the time zones. See which one you like best. Brent Coast time. Yeah, it's the Brent Coast. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station.

And that does wrap us up this week. If you'd like to see how the sausage was made, you can head over to jupiter.tube or you can become a member where we curate a custom-made file just for you. We'd love to have you there. It's a lot of fun. And you get to play around with some of our tools

when we talk about it. But if you can't make it, we understand. That's how it goes for most people. No hard feelings at all you can always chat with us after the fact in our matrix room you can get details at jupiter broadcasting.com slash matrix and of course there's a slash mumble for all of our mumble details thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the unplugged program and i hope we'll see you right back here next Sunday. still some pictures coming in oh wow these are so fun. There's the most recent one is of you. Oh, yeah.

I love this one Mini Mac did of a tux drinking a beer. That's great. That is really good, Mini Mac. Sonic the Hedgehog in there. Penguin on the Beach. This looks like JFK going down the street, but it's a car full of tuxes. You guys got my drift with this one. All right. Oh, boy. Here's one of me. It's kind of close. I like that it's a car full of tuxes. You guys got my drift with this one. All right. Oh boy. Here's one of me. It's kind of close. I like that. It's sort of a reverse, uh,

SMB seven. They're like, they almost got it. Yeah. It's got a, it's got a podcast. Mike, it's got a computer screen.

What's on that whiteboard. I want to know. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. And it's got me in a shirt. That's a, that's a shirt style.

I would actually wear. Where are the suspenders? Right. Doesn't need. And it's got me in a shirt. That's a shirt style I would actually wear. Wear the suspenders. Right, doesn't he? And these podcast setups are actually pretty good. I like the, you know, this is funny how some of these actually really are. God, Wes, you make the best ones. Jeez. It's worth going in the chat just to see these.

Wes Payne, you're an AI digital director artist guy over there. I'm very impressed. Trying for like Batcave here? That was inspired by Mars X-Ray. You know, that's just a fun name. It just took super complicated machine learning, AI models, and a little Docker compose to bring out Wes Payne's creative side. Yeah, that's right. Pencil and paper? Heck no.