Ben Pettis

Hey, there's a bubble

https://fortune.com/2025/10/29/powell-says-ai-is-not-a-bubble-unlike-dot-com-federal-reserve-interest-rates/

Black and white cattle dog staring to the side

Black and white cattle dog with its mouth wide open as if screaming

Do you ever just....?

#mastoDogs #dogsOfMastodon

As a fun prank to myself, the only wired keyboard I had on hand has some super sticky keys. So when I was trying to log in, I wasn't sure if I had forgotten the root password (entirely possible) or if the keyboard was just bad.

I ended up resetting the password anyway before realizing it was a […]

Linux fsck utility running with many errors found

well fsck!

Who could have ever predicted that the old hard drive I salvaged from some old machine and frankenstein'd into my mastodon server would have ever ran into issues!?

(Yes, I did have backups. This time.)

Nobody could have possibly predicted this!

https://flipboard.com/@theverge/the-verge-on-artificial-intelligence-rkbtf55qz/-/a-fISXK0kQTD-G1Yk6_nOi8w%3Aa%3A43611565-%2F0

Is your teen texting about Unions? UWU: Union Workers Unite LOL: Labor Organizes Labor TFW: Time for Fair Wages IDC: I demand a contract OMG: Overtime money guaranteed ASAP: All Solidarity, All Power STFU: Support the effing Union From the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW).

The Commander of ICE-CPB troops in Chicago, Gregory Bovino appeared in federal court today, on the order of federal judge Sara Ellis. Bovino is personally alleged to have violated the court’s order banning certain uses of tear gas and other riot control tactics. The hearing was extraordinary. 1/ […]

SNAP is set to not be funded in November, so remember that if you see somebody stealing food at the grocery store or something similar that no you didn't

Hell of an advertisement for SanDisk, though: what's more crushing than losing your cherished photos and memories?

https://www.techspot.com/news/109921-oceangate-titan-sub-camera-found-mostly-intact-sandisk.html

"OceanGate Titan sub's camera found mostly intact with SanDisk SD card still […]

@briankrebs DNS is the "free square" on the bingo card

Simpsons meme: Bus driver "Don't Make me tap the sign" The sign reads: "It's always DNS"

RE: US-East-1

https://www.thewrap.com/kenny-loggins-danger-zone-king-trump-ai-video-response/

I guess somebody *did* call Kenny Loggins

“This is an unauthorized use of my performance of ‘Danger Zone.’ Nobody asked me for my permission, which I would have denied […]

[Original post on mastodon.benpettis.ninja]

@rwg @julian @0000-0001-6000-4722

This is amazing!

@kdriscoll Even the sloppiest of AI slop would be an upgrade on every front

Stylized haiku poem: It's not DNS There's no way it's DNS It was DNS

Anyway - removing the rate limiting on the PiHole servers fixed the problem right away.

Perhaps this will help other server hosts troubleshoot similar issues in their own setups. Or more likely, I will encounter this problem again in the next 5 […]

[Original post on mastodon.benpettis.ninja]

Reader, it was DNS.

I run PiHole on my network as a DNS-level adblocker. By default it rate limits requests to 1000 per 60 seconds (per client). Seems that the tootctl command floods the PiHole with DNS queries, and getting temporarily blocked (by the DNS server). Which then causes every URL […]

Screenshot of a tmux session showing numerous errors fro the `bin/tootctl media refresh --days 1` command

Certainly a very niche topic, but putting out into the world to potentially avoid a DenverCoder9 (https://xkcd.com/979/) situation:

Mastodon's `tootctl media refresh` command is supposed to retrieve assets from external servers - esp. if they failed […]

[Original post on mastodon.benpettis.ninja]

You really think YOUR job is tough? I'm sure you're right. Most jobs have difficult aspects to them. Kudos to you for sticking with it.

Mastodon HTTP 500 Error Page

Terminal session with two panes, showing numerous 'cd' and 'ls' commands in a backup directory on the left and a prepared pg_upgrade command on the right

So it turns out, I was able to find some pretty fun and exciting ways for things to go wrong!

- Tried just running the script that's included when using `apt upgrade` to install the newer postgres version (which I believe just used `pg_upgrade` […]

[Original post on mastodon.benpettis.ninja]

More (mis)adventures in #selfhosting...

Decided to be a responsible sysadmin and upgrade my software, including finally moving from postgres 16 to 18

Decided to be an unresponsible sysadmin and tried to do that upgrade late on Friday night without fully reading through the instructions or […]

MIT becomes first school to reject proposed ‘compact’ with Trump administration

Good.

"In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the […]

Duck family rescued from busy Australian motorway | Flipboard BBC News - A family of ducks brought traffic on Perth's Kwinana Freeway to a standstill during Friday's morning rush hour. Main Roads, Western Australia's motorway transport agency, posted the footage on X warning motorists to "be aware and be alert". "If you see ducks, ducklings or wildlife attempting to cross …

Finally, some good news:
https://flipboard.com/@bbcnews/world-c8sqdvr9z/-/a-a6vK5XxJQoC_A4nnI-501w%3Aa%3A3199692-%2F0

The image contains a text block set against a plain white background. The text reads: “When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist. Democracy depends on people who refuse to stay silent, who dare to step forward despite grave risk, and who remind us that freedom must never be taken for granted, but must always be defended – with words, with courage and with determination.”

This part of the Nobel committee's statement hits.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2025/press-release/
#politics #NobelPeacePrize

Nobody could have possibly predicted that private platforms collecting government IDs would possibly become a security liability...
https://flipboard.com/@theverge/tech-news-e3qmqbb8z/-/a-OsdZs6LSRJWaDGdFVlnglw%3Aa%3A43611565-%2F0

The painting "Freedom of Speech" by Norman Rockwell. A man in a thick coat stands and looks forward stoically. Other people in the room are sitting and look toward him as he speaks.

I think that the president calling for a governor and a mayor to be jailed is a Very Bad Thing™

This was the automatically generated alt-text (from trying to read text in the image)

“And this life activity [the worker] sells to another person in “You wanna live fancy? Live in a big mansion? Party in
order to secure the necessary means of life. ... He works France? You better work, bitch […]

Portrait of Karl Marx alongside a portrait of Brittney Spears, with quotes beneath each image: “And this life activity [the worker] sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. ... He works that he may keep alive..” – Karl Marx “You wanna live fancy? Live in a big mansion? Party in France? You better work, bitch..” – Britney Spears

on my way to talk about influencers and @sophiebishop's algorithmic gossip piece with my students and/or (depending on who you ask because I teach in America) brainwash students with a bunch of "woke" radical ideologies about labor and precarity

Surely the AI bubble will go differently than the Dot Com bubble and the mid-2000s housing market. If there's one thing that you can reliably expect from the doing the same thing it's that you're surely get different results....

@AlsoPaisleyCat But in an twisted and ironic way, the rise of Mastodon phishing schemes is a good sign of the network gaining significant traffic and "legitimacy"

Screenshot of mastodon post by my "Objectionodon" bot with a video paused on a frame of Phoenix Wright pointing alongside a meme image of JD Vance

My new goal is to find a way to work this screenshot into either my book or a future journal article, because I want to bring something unexpected into a copyeditor's day by making them conform this image to their publisher's standards