Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 19/02/2026The steam forums were a mistake. **Effectively** moderating that many tweens, teens, and hardcore gamerzzz who never grew up would likely require more active, expert effort than Valve's entire management operation requires now. How many *millions* of gamer(gater)s use that platform? 020
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 15/02/2026I think I'm going to have to go with "I appreciate that you pulled up your pants and got Kyle off the hook, and I MIGHT forgive Benj the lapse in judgment regarding using AI due to COVID... But I don't think I can forgive the lapse in judgment AND violation of a very clear and long-standing policy. 130
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 15/02/2026Found Benj's statement. He took responsibility. Not sure how I feel about the "but I had COVID" excuse. A fever can absolutely fuck up your decision making, but there was a very strong policy in place ALREADY forbidding the use of AI generated content unless 1. for demo purposes and 2. DISCLOSED. 140
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 15/02/2026Btw the only reason I actually saw this is because I logged in to favorite Kyle's statement on the matter, and this is where he is. I ended up on mastodon by (strong) preference. No algorithmic feed, for one thing. Federation and actual human moderation, for another. fosstodon.org/@jimsalterfosstodon.orgJim Salter (@jimsalter@fosstodon.org)3.7K Posts, 49 Following, 1.98K Followers · Hi! I'm Jim Salter, aka mercenary_sysadmin, aka "the biggest ZFS stan on the planet." I am *not* Jim Salter, the Associated Press reporter based in Missour... 120
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 15/02/2026I do still have friends there. That is not standard policy. This is an EXTREMELY big deal and I'm waiting for a detailed post mortem on exactly how it happened and why it won't happen again. That may realistically take a week or two, because there is HR and a union to get through. But I'm waiting. 130
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 11/12/20252.5 Admins 277: Battering RAM The Crucial brand of consumer SSDs and RAM is going away, AMD and Intel memory encryption can be bypassed with cheap hardware, more AI buffoonery, and monitoring users’ usage on a network. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 050
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 05/12/20252.5 Admins 276: Very Prudish Network What a government crackdown on VPNs would look like, malware groups play the long game with browser extensions, a new major version of FreeBSD is released, and using a single database vs one DB per application or VM. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 030
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 13/11/20252.5 Admins 273: Reliability Tracking Allan tells us about the OpenZFS Summit, mixed disk sizes in ZFS with AnyRaid, an upcoming standard keeps partially dead drives usable, upcoming 50 and 100 TB drives, and NVMe rust drives. Plus using a separate mini PC for work. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 051
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 06/11/20252.5 Admins 272: NVMe Surprise Why you should seriously consider buying refurbished hard drives, why drives might be lasting longer than they once did, Jim’s M.2 NVMe drive died at an inopportune moment, using multiple partitions on disks with ZFS. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 031
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 30/10/2025Even if you don't need me to tell you "stop trusting email," you might find it handy to have the reasons why not to trust email written out and easy to refer *other* folks to, instead of having to make the argument from scratch every damn time. jrs-s.net/2025/10/30/p...jrs-s.netPlease STOP trusting email. – JRS Systems: the blog 020
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 30/10/20252.5 Admins 271: Dead Internet Why you should keep your Baseboard Management Controller off the network, ZFS is hard to defeat with a zip bomb, how bad the Internet bot problem probably is, and building a small home server cluster. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 020
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 23/10/20252.5 Admins 270: Storage Shortage It looks like the storage companies aren’t betting on the AI bubble lasting much longer, the arguments against self-hosting, and setting up a server for virtualization and containers. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 011
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 16/10/20252.5 Admins 269: End of 10? Windows 10 is officially end of life but Microsoft extends free updates for Windows 10 in Europe, it gets even harder to use a local account in Windows 11, and whether repurposing old server hardware is worth it. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 020
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 15/10/2025I agree with you that 4chan did a lot to incubate the kind of shit we're talking about. My point is that it certainly didn't *originate* with 4chan, and that quite a lot of the original community were shocked as the gestalt slid inexorably away from "tongue in cheek brainrot" to straight fascism. 000
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 15/10/2025What if I told you those beliefs were already "everywhere" in the 90s And 80s And 70s And... But I didn't personally know that until the 90s, because that's when I was in the Navy and both getting deployed away from the SE USA (eg Philly) and working closely with people from all over. 010
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 14/10/20254chan didn't exist in 1980s Alabama, and guess what these fuckers sound like? 230
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 14/10/2025Every damn time I think I'm done being surprised by these bastards, I swear to fucking God... 010
Reposted by Jim SalterCarl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 14/10/2025POLITICO: “.. They referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies .. and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery. @politico.com www.politico.com/news/2025/10... 877104005164
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 13/10/2025That was one to remember. I'm still hoping somebody comes forward with a picture! 😅 110
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 09/10/20252.5 Admins 268: The Salter Philosophy A Red Hat breach leads to a leak of lots of sensitive customer data, Synology backs down on allowing third-party drives but they are removing features, and managing ZFS properties during replication. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 030
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 02/10/20252.5 Admins 267: Hoarding Cache The weird errors you see when your root partition is full, TikTok uses a lot of bandwidth by preloading videos, and dealing with a ZFS pool that won’t import. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 151
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 26/09/20252.5 Admins 266: Jiggawatts of Hallucinations Intel and Nvidia are teaming up for multiple reasons, Open AI are planning to use a ludicrous amount of power, LLM hallucinations aren’t going away, and how long we keep servers and hard drives in production. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 051
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 11/09/20252.5 Admins 264: A Question of Trust Matrix shows how painful DBs can be to restore, the TLS cert system doesn’t make sense in 2025, using S3 object storage outside of the cloud, and more. With guest host Gary from Linux After Dark and Hybrid Cloud Show. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 040
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 29/08/20252.5 Admins 262: It’s About Control Google is planning to assert even more control over which Android apps can be installed, the US government takes a 10% stake in Intel, and minimum networking speeds in homes and offices. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 020
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 21/08/20252.5 Admins 261: Worms and Baskets Why you can’t rely on a single cloud provider, Jim discovers AI that spreads itself like a worm, and configuring all-flash arrays. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 020
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 15/08/20252.5 Admins 260: Watery Email AMD’s recent mobile-class processors impress us with their power to performance ratio, the UK government suggests a preposterous way to save water, setting up verified boot with snapshots, and the best way to configure ZFS to run VMs. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 010
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 07/08/20252.5 Admins 259: New Web? The Web is a mess of tracking and AI scraping so do we need a new one, would it even be possible, or is this the wrong question? Plus setting up servers in a garage where dusty woodworking is happening. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-259/ 030
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 31/07/20252.5 Admins 258: Artificial Dirtbag Jim is concerned that although over-anthropomorphising LLMs is a mistake, we should be cautious about some of their human-like behaviour. Plus how to maintain old ZFS pools, and accessibility in the BSDs. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 041
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 25/07/20252.5 Admins 257: Outage365 Two recent outages were handled very differently but show the dangers of centralisation, Let’s Encrypt is introducing certificates for IP addresses, and the differences between backup and production systems. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 010
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 19/07/20252.5 Admins 256: Why ZFS To celebrate the 256 milestone we devote the whole episode to explaining why we use ZFS. We explain about data safety, data retention, data portability, and ease of administration. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 042
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 10/07/20252.5 Admins 255: Copyright Your Face Microsoft offers Windows 10 updates in return for your settings data, Denmark wants to protect against deepfakes using copyright, someone is wrong on the Internet about RAID, and getting a sysadmin job in your late 40s. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 030
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 03/07/20252.5 Admins 254: chrudo A vulnerability in sudo brings up concerns about feature-creep, and makes us consider alternatives. Plus Broadcom starts auditing VMware customers, and how to decide which outbound ports to open on a large network’s firewall. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 040
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 26/06/2025I've been self-hosting mine since the late 1990s, and all I can offer you is my condolences. 100
Reposted by Jim SalterJohn Scalzi @scalzi.com · 26/06/2025Came across an obviously "AI"-made article of "Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels of 2025" where every one of the books doesn't actually exist, including one purported to be by me. The internet's filling up with slop, y'all. Here's a canonical list of my work, btw: whatever.scalzi.com/about/books-...whatever.scalzi.comBooks and Other Projects by John ScalziYou may have heard: I write books. Here’s what I’ve published. The Old Man’s War Novels This series of books is what I’m currently best known for. Old Man’s War (2005)… 42751123
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 26/06/20252.5 Admins 253: ImpossibleFS Jim is concerned that we might not see another next-gen filesystem that can compete with ZFS, no matter how much we all want one. Plus whether you should switch to third-party firmware on your router. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 020
Reposted by Jim SalterBrad Proctor @bdproctor.bsky.social · 19/06/2025I just have to say, as a historian of the Reconstruction-era Klan, that masked paramilitaries are very bad and masked vigilantes are even worse and there are causal links between the two and none of this is good for democracy. 10568261973
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 20/06/20252.5 Admins 252: Nintendon’t Back Up Nintendo cuts off Switches that dare to play backed up games, more Microsoft AI exploits, why you shouldn’t regularly spin down hard drives, and securing applications on a home server. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2... 040
Reposted by Jim SalterKevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 18/06/2025It's way down on the list of horrors, but National Parks having to post signs asking visitors to report anything there that provides "information that [is] negative about either past or living Americans" is utterly pathetic. The past isn't all positive, kids. I'm sorry if that hurts your feelings. 601580369
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 16/06/2025If we can't get these shit heels out of office, it really will not take that long to permanently destroy the version of America I enlisted at 17 to serve. MAYBE twenty years. Maybe less. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...theguardian.com‘Extremely disturbing and unethical’: new rules allow VA doctors to refuse to treat Democrats, unmarried veteransTrump order allows VA staff to decline providing healthcare to patients based on political affiliation or marital status 010
Jim Salter @jimsalter.bsky.social · 15/06/2025Columbia, SC, and for ONCE without a right wing counter protest--literally the first protest I've ever been to here without one. 0182
Reposted by Jim Salter🍁🇨🇦Team Canada Forever🇨🇦🍁 @teamcanadaforever.bsky.social · 15/06/2025Honestly I still can’t stop laughing 😂😅🤣 20243758212105
Reposted by Jim SalterMatt McDermott @mattmfm.bsky.social · 15/06/2025Smart analysis of the No Kings protests estimates roughly 4-6 million people protested Trump across America yesterday. The anti-Trump resistance is unprecedented, and exceeds his first term. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/no-kings-d... 181047195
Reposted by Jim SalterAlt National Park Service @altnps.bsky.social · 15/06/2025Just want to take a moment to shout out the international reporters helping us get the real story out. When an 80-year-old veteran with a walker is hauled off with his hands zip-tied behind his back, and the media spins it as a “threatening breach” of a police barricade 588356249333