Nerd-ass geek sh*t

• Go around of interests and skills:

• Offer elastic search, want web application framework
• want to build web framework app
• bringing enthusiasm
• IPv6
• brining internet connectivity to remote areas

2. Discussion of AI

Uses:

• Used AI to create a program that takes raw notes and produces a memoir
• Takes transcripts of zoom meeting and produce summaries
• Take emails and produce templates: result was super bland, corporatey
• Writing code
• Write whistle blower protection policy

Comments:

• Accuracy rates: requires verification
• Good where this a giant corpus
• Must say query really specific (e.g. create a policy that conforms with the law)
• Extractivist nature of AI, when is traditional labor replaceable? Teachers union are under attack
• As things are more used, people will try to poison LLMs (like SEO)
• Predictive, not determining what's correct or logical thinking
• Concerned with bias, corpus is biased
• Need to say "large lagnuage model" not "artificial intelligence" to help people understand what it is doing
• Excels at taking lots of data and converting to something
• Nobody really knows how it works, you can say "don't make it racist" but if you don't, it will be racist"
• Gives a boost when you are first learning, once you are above average it's less helpful.
• Google says large language models slowing them down, looking at chaining smaller language models, now building

tools where you can give it your own corpus of knowledge

Web application Firewall

• What is it: typical firewall analyze traffic, web applicaion firewall - applies to web application,

sits between your app and traffic. Looks at incoming traffic and might rate limit, one ip can make one request per limit, but stop java script, stop requests that match attack patterns.

• WAF has list of known vulnerabilities.
• Problem: ModSecurity, the go to open source web application framework, is deprecated. Many alternatives, no clear path
• Solution: start a study group

Elastic Search for centralized logging

• Elastic searchis not relational database, it is time series database designed to ingest massive amounts of time stamped data
• Install "Beat" software on your servers that forward logs to central elastic search database
• Kibana is web interface to browse and search logs
• Challenging to get data out via command line - requires writing code, not as easy as a SQL query

Some "kind of" alternatives we discussed:

• Zabbix is alternative
• Splunk is alternative (resource intensive) - not open source
• Prometheus

Next steps:

We created a "nerd ass geek shit" singal group and email list