Reviving ThinkCentre M58p in 2024

Days before mini-PC become a thing, there was no NUC, MinisForum or Beelink. It was the time of thin client and SFF (small-form-factor), manufacturers such as Shuttle, Dell and Lenovo were made a lot of these. Back then, the performance of SoC was too weak so that even laptops wouldn’t use them. But my first dedicated home lab machine was an Atom D525, which was called embedded industrial computer. It served as a router rather than server due to its performance and heat....

December 14, 2024 · 3 min · Jun

On Windows: 7 Nostalgia, Linux and Its Discontents, Double Debloat, Tiny 11 LTSC WTG

Windows Nostalgia A recent video on Windows 7 as daily driver OS by Brodie Robertson was hilarious but also arguable. For me, XP is the best OS ever made by M$. However, it has became not so useful nowadays neither for retro gaming (which 98SE is the king) nor for day-to-day usage, due to both hardware and software incompatibility. The compromise would be Windows 7. I agree there are too much of accumulated unpatched security vulnerabilities, but there are tricks to mitigate most of those either technically or strategically....

December 6, 2024 · 8 min · Jun

Dealing with the Enshittification of Proton VPN on Free Plan's Server Selection

As a early adopter of Protonmail, I use their later coming VPN product as well, regularly yet lightly. Although I’m a potential customer but still not paying for any of their plan, for many reasons. Being a free account user, I’ve never done torrenting or any other heavy usage on their servers. It is not moral even though the provider allows me to. Probably because of my account was old enough so that my country selection feature wasn’t banned until latest update....

November 28, 2024 · 4 min · Jun

Ethics of Local LLMs: A Response to Zuckerberg's ''Open Source AI Manifesto''

the “Open Source AI Manifesto” Mark Zuckerberg has been hated by Richard Stallman for decades and he is the only person who appears on both cover image of the video essays: How the Internet was Stolen and How AI was Stolen by Then & Now. However, things has changed recently after his adoption of the Fediverse and open-sourcing of Llama continuously. In Zuckerberg’s latest “Open Source AI Manifesto”, he stated 5 needs of open-source:...

July 25, 2024 · 9 min · Jun

AI CyberSecurity, ChatGPT and Post-humanism

This is the text for a lecture I’m going to give recently. Thanks for Daniela Baron’s guide which helped me tremendously for creating the slides with RevealJS. Hey everyone. Well, first, I have to confess and apologize that I could not prepare this enough. Because I have to working on my dissertation, which also discusses about AI augmented APT attack such as using ChatGPT to create phishing email and ransomware code....

April 6, 2023 · 17 min · Jun