The Operations team in Lyngby, Denmark is looking for a student assistant; you will be on premise, as are [most of] the Linux servers you will be looking after. Plenty of racks, cooling, UPS, backup tapes, distributed storage, virtual machines, automation, monitoring, and tasks to do → take a look at the posting and apply if it sounds interesting to you.
I stumbled over a long thread of Organisational Dysfunction of the Day-posts on the fediverse recently. Some stood out:
The organisation has values. […] the output was synthesised into five words: Courage, Trust, Impact, Collaboration, Excellence. They are on the website, in the onboarding deck, framed in reception. Leadership references them in all-hands. […] Most people cannot name all five without looking.
The company has a solid sustainability certification. […] Meanwhile, every developer on every team now runs an AI coding assistant constantly: […] Nobody tracks how much compute this consumes, or where.
· The adaptation plan nobody owns
Every team has one. The person who remembers why the architecture is the way it is, who onboards new people without being asked, who spots the misunderstanding between two colleagues before it becomes a conflict, who writes the documentation nobody else gets around to. They are rarely the loudest voice in the room. Their work is invisible precisely because it works. Then they leave, or they are cut in a restructuring because their output is hard to measure. The team notices immediately. Things that used to happen automatically now fall through the gaps.
The explanation sections are are little heavy on abbreviations and references you apparently Just Know™, but the thread is interesting nonetheless - and to be fair, it is advertising a book.
Rob Pike has some choice words on LLMs:
I like calculators, I like maps. But I worry every day about what LLMs are doing to people's brains.
It's why I won't touch the damn things. I like my ability to think.
The context is in the start of the thread.
Back in March I learned that one of my domains asjo.org was in the top 1000 in Akamai's AkaRank DNS ranking.
I set up graphing of the ranking, to be able to follow along. I also looked up the earliest ranking I could find in The Internet Archive (446 on 2025-11-13 - above wikipedia.org!), and added it to my dataset.
A couple of months after the discovery the ranking dropped significantly - suddenly my little domain was only listed in the top ~150K.
It stayed around there for another couple of months, and then it suddenly dropped to top ~900K.
I was half expecting that somebody noticed they had misconfigured something and fixed it, but still, none of my other domains are in the top 1 million.
Some weeks went by, then the ranking jumped up, and then up again, so now asjo.org is at 1268! That means that Akamai sees more DNS lookups for asjo.org than they do for domains such as messenger.com, samsungmobile.com, twitch.tv, visa.com, mastercard.com, amazon.it, and kaspersky.com just to mention a few.
The mystery lives on.
[ What was the path that led you to working on Multics and Unix? ]
Oh, the usual thing is if you arrive at Bell Labs for a PhD, you're left to find out what you're going to do. At first, I played with integer linear programming and proved an incorrect theorem. Gomory at IBM proved the correct one, and called me one day to tell me about it.
...
Eventually Thompson finds this cast off PDP-7 and in three weeks builds the whole operating system.
[ That's wild. Three weeks?? ]
The assembler and the operating system. His wife was away for vacation.
...
But when I came up with a notation for the shell, he said, to my surprise, "I'll do it." And he did it in one night.
[ Of course he did. ]
... In the same night, he recruited Dennis. They realized that lots of programs which had named inputs and outputs would naturally be pipeable together. ... They changed a whole lot of programs that night, too. And the next morning they told us, it's working. Then we had an orgy of pipelines that were demonstrated. Look what I can do, look what I can do.
... By the end of the week, our secretaries were piping stuff to the line printer.
... Finally the, the pipe symbol itself came up. Because Ken was scheduled to give a talk about Unix in London. He was embarrassed to talk about this ugly notation. So he cooked that one up, and it really stuck. Ken gets a lot of credit for the symbol.
...
[ Gotcha. So what got you into programming Haskell? ]
Well, the thing is, it's a beautiful imitation of mathematics. And, um, I happen to be an addict of stream processing. Haskell is the best stream processing language I know of. With lazy evaluation, a stream is exactly like a list. And, and so there's some lovely demos you can do.
...
In Unix, the first manual occurred two years after the system.
I couple of years ago I got filtering on the Supersedes: header going in Gnus for Feedbase.
Yesterday I did the same exercise for the Keywords: header, which I needed to score down lobste.rs posts with... let's say... a specific tag.
So now LIST OVERVIEW.FMT and XOVER in both Feedbase and Illuminant includes Keywords - for Illuminant this also prompted me to change the SQL for the overview queries for the less used groups to be as efficient as the one for the timeline; bonus!
Most of the time my laptop is at home - and Postfix on my laptop sends email via Postfix on my mail server, configured as the relayhost - which is allowed because the local network is included in permit_mynetworks on the mail server.
Sometimes I bring my laptop somewhere else. I can still read email, but until today I couldn't send, because the laptop is not on the local network.
A solution is to set up a client certificate on the laptop and configure the server to accept it, so that's what I did.
On the server I installed the mkcert package and ran mkcert -install. Then I created a client certificate for the laptop by running mkcert -client tullinup.koldfront.dk (also on the server). I copied the resulting certificate and private key to the laptop.
On the server I made a couple of changes to the Postfix configuration, in /etc/postfix/main.cf I added:
smtpd_tls_ask_ccert = yes
relay_clientcerts = hash:/etc/postfix/relay_clientcerts
and to the lists smtpd_recipient_restrictions and smtpd_relay_restrictions I put in permit_tls_clientcerts, after permit_sasl_authenticated,.
I created a new file /etc/postfix/relay_clientcerts in which I put the sha256 fingerprint of the client certificare followed by the name of the laptop, separated by a space. The fingerprint was found by running openssl x509 -noout -fingerprint -sha256 -in tullinup.koldfront.dk-client.pem. After creating the file I ran postmap on it as root.
To finish the server configuration I restarted the postfix service while monitoring the logfile for any oddities.
On the laptop I put the newly generated client certificate and key in /etc/postfix/certs (owned by root:root), and then in /etc/postfix/main.cf I added the lines:
smtp_tls_cert_file = /etc/postfix/certs/tullinup.koldfront.dk-client.pem
smtp_tls_key_file = /etc/postfix/certs/tullinup.koldfront.dk-client-key.pem
smtp_tls_fingerprint_digest = sha256
and then restarted the postfix service on the laptop.
Just sent a couple of test emails - it works!
Resources consulted:
Hjertestarterdagen (14).
Harry Halse Svendsen (120).
New York subway (122).
Jacob Binzer (60).
"lo" sent over the net (57).
Ivan Wanyu (38).