Llama 3 and Phi-3-mini are up and running on phones, Raspberry Pis, and we give them a go. Plus Google kills the vibe, and Meta opens up Horizon OS.

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• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
• Building for our AI future — But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.
• Google, after protester firings, now looks just like every other company — Google's firing of 28 protesting employees Wednesday sends the clearest signal yet that the tech giant — whose founders pledged it was "not a conventional company" — has become just that.
• In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives: Levy, Steven: 9781416596585: Amazon.com: Books — Written with full cooperation from top management, including cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, this is the inside story behind Google, the most successful and most admired technology company of our time, told by one of our best technology writers.
• Meta Debuts Llama 3, Latest AI Model for Powering Chatbots — Llama 3, unveiled Thursday, is an upgrade from an AI model that Meta released last summer. Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said that model, Llama 2, has been downloaded 170 billion times. Llama 2 was billed as open source, though its license included some restrictions such as requiring companies with more than 700 million users to ask for permission to use it.
• Meta's Mark Zuckerberg says energy constraints are holding back AI data center buildout - DCD — "Now I think that's getting less, and you're seeing a bunch of companies thinking 'wow we should really just invest a lot of money in building out these things.' I think that will go [on] for some period of time."
• Private LLM: Secure Offline & Local AI Chatbot for iOS & macOS — Private LLM is a local AI chatbot for iOS and macOS that works offline
• Microsoft launches Phi-3, its smallest AI model yet - The Verge — Phi-3 learned from ‘bedtime stories’ created by other LLMs.
• Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone
• Dylan Patel on X: — Synthetic data pipelines are massive improvements over internet data Flywheel only continues with big models too when these techniques are applied
• Aran Komatsuzaki on X: "A few caveats about Phi-3:" — Phi-3-medium performs well on TriviaQA but noticeably underperforms rel. to GPT-3.5. We can guess that Phi-3 recipe doesn't magically make it understand more random factoids. It's more focused on valuable knowledges (e.g. STEM), which makes sense.
• Meta Expands Its Mixed Reality Beyond the Quest Headsets - CNET — Meta opened the Quest Horizon OS to others, and now VR headsets from Asus, Lenovo and even an Xbox variant are on the way.
• A New Era for Mixed Reality | Meta Quest Blog | Meta Store

We're back from Austin, with interviews and stories to share. Plus, it's Gentoo week and we take our first look at Fedora 40.

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• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
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• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
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• Fedora 40 beta is fastest operating system I've tested — Apps opened in the blink of an eye. The Overview appeared instantly. Everything seemed to be built around the idea that the user works at the speed of madness and the OS is there to help make it happen.
• Fedora Linux 40 Docs
• Fedora Linux 40 Cleared For Release — Fedora 40 thus will see its official release happen next Tuesday, 23 April.
• F40 Change Proposal: Drop Delta RPMs — According to early feedback from Release Engineering, it looks like it will not be feasible to address the shortcomings of Delta RPMs as they are currently implemented, and since they often no longer result in a net reduction in download sizes for upgrades, this Change proposes both to disable the generation of DeltaRPMs during the compose process, and to disable the deltarpm support in dnf / dnf5 by default.
• Berlin with Brent May Meetup — May 11, 2024
• LinuxFest Northwest 2025 — April 26 - 28, 2024
• System76 and Jupiter Broadcasting Epic Parking Lot BBQ — Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 12:00 PM
• LFNW Talk: 5 Reasons to Love NixOS — NixOS seems to be everywhere these days and has the fanatic energy usually reserved for Arch users. But WHY is it so popular? In this talk, I'll go over 5 reasons I love NixOS and you might too.
• LFNW Talk: Deploying NixOS Anywhere — In this talk, we'll unlock the full potential of NixOS by exploring how its unique architecture enables installation just about anywhere—from bare metal and VMs to a VPS provider near you.
• LFNW Talk: LINUX Unplugged LIVE — We're recording a live edition of LINUX Unplugged in person. Our weekly Linux talk show with no script, no limits, surprise guests, and tons of opinions.

Special guest Casey Liss from the Accidental Tech Podcast joins the show to discuss his homelab, how he uses HomeBridge, and his delightfully complex garage door sensor system.

Then Alex and Casey do their "best" to convince Chris the Apple Vision Pro is an excellent remote admin tool.

Special Guest: Casey Liss.

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• Unraid: Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility.
• Grist: Grist - the open-source alternative to Airtable and Google Sheets.
• Tailscale: Tailscale is a Zero config VPN. It installs on any device in minutes, manages firewall rules for you, and works from anywhere. Get 3 users and 100 devices for free.

Support Self-Hosted

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• ⚡ Grab Sats with Strike Around the World — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
• System76 and Jupiter Broadcasting Epic Parking Lot BBQ, Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 4:30 PM | Meetup — Join Jupiter Broadcasting and System76 in the parking lot of Bellingham Technical College after the LinuxFest Northwest conference! Let's eat, drink and be nerdy!
• LinuxFest Northwest — April 26 - 28, 2024 • Bellingham Technical College
• Baseus PD 100W USB C to USB C Cable — 5A Fast Charging USB C Cable with LED Display.
• HDMI Dummy Plug — Headless Ghost, Display Emulator
• Splitscreen brings a multimonitor setup to Apple’s Vision Pro — new app called Splitscreen takes things a step further, by allowing you to add a second macOS display to your Vision Pro — even if it uses a different Apple ID.
• Splitscreen App — Right now Splitscreen only allows you to create one extra virtual display. If you also use Mac Virtual Display that means you can have up to two Mac displays on your Apple Vision Pro.

We delve into the top 3 open-source revenue streams, expose the pitfalls, and discuss what could be done quickly to improve the situation.

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• Coder QA: Take $1 a month off your membership for a year, and contribute to our show directly! Promo Code: darthjarjar

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• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
• System76 and Jupiter Broadcasting Epic Parking Lot BBQ, Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 4:30 PM | Meetup — Join Jupiter Broadcasting and System76 in the parking lot of Bellingham Technical College after the LinuxFest Northwest conference! Let's eat, drink and be nerdy!
• San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks — The agency noted that its system was installed in 1998, when floppies were still in common use
• Open Source's Funding Fiasco - dominickm.com — I’ve been thinking a lot about how we as a community and industry can make sure open-source projects keep getting the love they deserve. It’s no secret that the traditional funding model of donations and sponsorships is more than a little shaky.
• What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world — Researchers have spent the weekend gathering clues. Here's what we know so far.
• LocalStack — LocalStack is a cloud development platform that facilitates building/testing of cloud and serverless applications on your local machine. At its core, it features a service emulator that runs in a single container on your laptop or in your CI environment.
• Watch 3 Body Problem | Netflix Official Site — Across continents and decades, five brilliant friends make earth-shattering discoveries as the laws of science unravel and an existential threat emerges.

Why does Meta give away Llma for free? What's in it for them?

Plus, our thoughts on the data showing the trades are starting to see a boom, and new coding jobs are declining.

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• Coder QA: Take $1 a month off your membership for a year, and contribute to our show directly! Promo Code: darthjarjar

Support Coder Radio

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
• System76 and Jupiter Broadcasting Epic Parking Lot BBQ, Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 4:30 PM | Meetup — Join Jupiter Broadcasting and System76 in the parking lot of Bellingham Technical College after the LinuxFest Northwest conference! Let's eat, drink and be nerdy!
• Google Vids is the latest AI-powered app in Workspace - The Verge — Google’s latest Workspace app reflects the way people talk at work now — and maybe signals the end of the slide deck’s supremacy.
• Cloud Next 2024: Gmail voice input, Gemini for Google Chat, more — Google is updating Help me write in mobile Gmail with voice prompting and input that lets you “send emails easily when you’re on the go.” Meanwhile, an “instant polish” feature will “convert rough notes to a complete email with one-click.” Google shared today that “70% of enterprise users who use Help Me Write in Docs or Gmail end up using Gemini’s suggestions.”
• Microsoft is confident Windows on Arm could finally beat Apple - The Verge — After years of issues, the upcoming Qualcomm chips might be a big moment for Windows on Arm.
• Google announces Axion, its first custom Arm-based data center processor | TechCrunch — Google did not provide any documentation to back these claims up and, like us, you’d probably like to know more about these chips. We asked a lot of questions, but Google politely declined to provide any additional information. No availability dates, no pricing, no additional technical data. Those “benchmark” results? The company wouldn’t even say which X86 instance it was comparing Axion to.
• Meta Platforms to Launch Small Versions of Llama 3 Next Week — The Information
• TV Host Mike Rowe weighs in on Gen Z gravitating toward trade jobs - YouTube

We're building a completely hidden Linux OS inside an existing system—with no trace left behind.

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• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
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• Shufflecake — Plausible deniability for multiple hidden filesystems on Linux
• System76 and Jupiter Broadcasting Epic Parking Lot BBQ, Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 4:30 PM | Meetup
• Jupiter Extras: Nostr Workshop — Our Nostr workshop. We’ll help you get your Nostr identity and answer any questions.

Alex goes head-to-head with budget VPS providers, which gets us into a classic debate.

Plus we sit down with Adam Morales from Unraid to get the inside scoop on recent changes and exciting upcoming features.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a Zero config VPN. It installs on any device in minutes, manages firewall rules for you, and works from anywhere. Get 3 users and 100 devices for free.
• Grist: Grist - the open-source alternative to Airtable and Google Sheets.

Support Self-Hosted

Links:

• ⚡ Grab Sats with Strike Around the World — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
• LowEndTalk
• Configuring Proxmox For Hetzner - YouTube — Throughout the video, we delve into the nitty-gritty of Proxmox configuration, highlighting key steps such as booting from the drives, setting up network devices, and managing SSH access over Port 2222. I'll walk you through running and connecting to your virtual machines, ensuring you understand every command and its purpose.
• Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts — Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE
• Migrate to Proxmox VE — This article aims to assist users in transitioning to Proxmox Virtual Environment. The first part explains the core concepts of Proxmox VE, while the second part outlines several methods for migrating VMs to Proxmox VE. Although it was written with VMware as the source in mind, most sections should apply to other source hypervisors as well.
• Dockge — A fancy, easy-to-use and reactive self-hosted docker compose.yaml stack-oriented manager.

Microsoft wins the foot-in-mouth award this week, and Google gets the Rust religion - but Mike is skeptical.

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Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
• Piece of 5,800lb battery pallet tossed from NASA's ISS crashes through Florida home - and nearly kills homeowner's so — A piece of metal came crashing through a home in Florida that is believed to be from a 5,800-pound battery pallet discarded by the International Space Station (ISS).
• Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores — “Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts”
• FFmpeg on X — The xz fiasco has shown how a dependence on unpaid volunteers can cause major problems. Trillion dollar corporations expect free and urgent support from volunteers.
• Rust developers at Google twice as productive as C++ devs — Speaking at the Rust Nation UK Conference in London this week, Lars Bergstrom, director of engineering at Google, who works on Android Platform Tools & Libraries, described the web titan's experience migrating projects written in Go or C++ to the Rust programming language.
• Spatial Personas Make Apple Vision Pro a Less Isolating Experience — Up to five people can watch movies and TV shows, play AR games, and collaborate on work together even when they’re across the planet.
• Two Persona Video Demo on X — Here's a video of two Persona (plus the one looking at them) provided by Apple. This wasn't recorded from my demo yesterday. It's just a demo to show what spatial Persona on Apple Vision Pro looks like

We're breaking down the attack: how it works, how it was hidden, and why time was running out for the attacker.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
• Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• oss-security mailing list — Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise.
• Fedora Announcement
• Debian Announcement
• Ubuntu Announcement
• Kali Linux Announcement
• Arch Linux Announcement
• Gentoo Announcement
• openSUSE Tumbleweeed Announcement
• NixOS Unstable Discussion
• Why does it take two weeks for NixOS to replace xz?
• Andres Freund on Mastodon — I was doing some micro-benchmarking at the time, needed to quiesce the system to reduce noise. Saw sshd processes were using a surprising amount of CPU, despite immediately failing because of wrong usernames etc....
• rwmj on Hacker News — Very annoying - the apparent author of the backdoor was in communication with me over several weeks trying to get xz 5.6.x added to Fedora 40 & 41 because of its "great new features"
• A Microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projects — Make no mistake. This is the way it works. It needs to change.
• Devuan GNU/Linux on X — Devuan is not affected by the latest vulnerability caused by systemd.
• systemd PR: Dynamically load compression libraries
• Matteo Croce on X — I'm the author of such PR. While I absolutely didn't know that libxz had a backdoor, I really think that libraries should be loaded on-demand when rarely used, hence my change :)
• Ryan C. Gordon on X — This is probably how the xz thing happened, right?
• Jan Wildeboer on the Fediverse — Again the FOSS world has proven to be vigilant and proactive in finding bugs and backdoors, IMHO.
• Unplugged Core Membership
• TXLF is coming up! — April 12 - 13 in Austin, Texas.
• LFNW coming up! — April 26 - 28
• Mobile Game Ads Are Boosting Podcast Follower Counts — Wondery, iHeart and Lemonada Media are all using a non-public product from MowPod - which gives extra lives and game credits to gamers if they follow shows on Apple Podcasts from game apps.
• MowPod's podcast promotion tools: tales from the bar
• fortydeux's NixOS Configs
• Prism Launcher — An Open Source Minecraft launcher with the ability to manage multiple instances, accounts and mods.
• World Backup Day — March 31st — One small accident or failure could destroy all the important stuff you care about.
• Updating Our Fiddly Bits | LINUX Unplugged 494