• Oh, right.  That's why I was using TokuDB in the first place.
  
  InnoDB suffers from significant write amplification issues with large working sets on small systems.  Scaling up the numbers on my test suite by 100x took about 400x longer.  TokuDB scales nearly linearly.
  
  This is purely a write issue; reads only slow by about 10% with a 100x increase in database size.  That doesn't mean that they won't slow down eventually, but it does mean that I don't have any missing indexes or queries that take O(n!) time.  (I used to; on the weekend I was able to clear the three remaining #FIXMEs in the code.)
  
  
  
• I use a 4GB dual-core VPS for this testing, where the production server for Mana will be a 64GB eight-core hardware server, but the advantages of TokuDB on write are real.
  
  The recommended replacement for TokuDB is MyRocks, based on Facebook's RocksDB.  MyRocks doesn't support temporal tables - but then neither does TokuDB.
  
  One other benefit of MariaDB over MySQL is that I can use the Aria storage engine in place of MyISAM for the search indexes.  InnoDB supports full-text search now, but performance is disastrous.  I designed the code to replicate messages into MyISAM because keeping two complete copies of everything was an order of magnitude faster than using InnoDB for search.
  
  Problem was that MyISAM isn't crash-safe, so any unexpected reboot would take out the search index requiring a repair at best and a full rebuild at worst.  Aria is about as fast as MyISAM but crash safe.
  
  A better solution might be to use Elasticsearch but right now I fucking hate Elasticsearch.
  
  
  
• Apple has announced their first three Arm-based Macs.  (AnandTech)
  
  The new MacBook Air, 13" MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini.
  
  All use the new M1 CPU, which is a 4+4 core design.  If you're interested in benchmarks, it's four cores; the other four are low-power and much slower.
  
  All also have two USB4 ports - half the number of Thunderbolt ports of the previous models in some cases - and 8GB or 16GB of soldered-in LPDDR4X-4266 RAM.
  
  That's a big step down for the Mac Mini, which was previously user-upgradable to 64GB.  Probably for that reason the highest-end Intel Mac Mini is still being offered for sale.
  
  
  
• These models all come with only integrated graphics, but with USB4 and Thunderbolt at least you can add an external lol no fuck you that's why  (Apple Insider)
  
  There are no compatible eGPU solutions, and as far as anyone can determine - Apple isn't saying anything, because they're Apple - there are no plans to remedy this.
  
  
  
• As for Apple's M1 CPU it is faster on the Spec benchmark suite than any Intel CPU at least in single-threaded tests.  (AnandTech)
  
  Having only four full-size cores it will of course get stomped by any high-end Intel processor.
  
  And interestingly, though it is faster than any Intel CPU on single-threaded tests, that still leaves it slower than the slowest of AMD's new Zen 3 lineup.
  
  
  
• Skeptical Apple press is skeptical.  (ZDNet)
  
  Well, that's a change.  Not being facetious; it's good to see them raising questions.
  
  
  
• Skeptical Microsoft press is also skeptical of Apple.  (Thurrott.com - free registration required to read this article)
  
  Paul Thurrott mentions here that Apple never once spoke about application performance in its presentation.  And we know that if application performance were good, they would have said so.
  
  
  
• AMD has updated its Ryzen Embedded range to Zen 2.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Ryzen Embedded V2000 family are Ryzen 4000 APUs.  The only difference is that AMD guarantees long-term availability for these parts; the hardware itself is identical.
  
  
  
• AMD also says that Zen 4 and RDNA 3 will present similar improvements to Zen 3 and RDNA 2 sort of.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The interviewer was rather putting words in AMD's mouth there, but they did not deny or even demur.
  
  Zen 4 expected early 2022, since they're on roughly a 15-month release cycle, rather than 12 month.
  
  
  
• There's a rather nasty local privilege escalation bug in Ubuntu 20.04 desktop releases.  (GitHub)
  
  Does not affect the server edition at all, thankfully, and a patch has already been rolled out.  So don't ignore that security update message if you're running desktop systems in a shared environment.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new SmartSSD includes a Xilinx FPGA for local processing.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Not sure exactly what the target market is for this given the current server ecosystem.  When bandwidth and CPU power were limited, this idea made sense, but you can now have a two-socket server with 128 cores and 320GBps of bidirectional I/O.
  
  
  
• Hyundai is in talks with Softbank to buy killer robot dog maker Boston Dynamics.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Hyundai is a major maker of industrial robots so this one makes sense.
  
  
  
• Slingbox is dead.  (Variety)
  
  Well, will be dead as of November 2022.
  
  
  
• Bethesda added a DOOG Easter egg in honor of Hololive's Korone - and then removed it.
  
  Turns out the removal wasn't the usual big company shittiness but because DOOG is a registered trademark and they decided it wasn't worth the fuss for an Easter egg.
  
  So they sent her a Cacodemon plushie.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• I should start maintaining a list of bullshit censorship by social networks.  Might need a bigger blog.
  
  

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, November 12 2020 04:09 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 12 2020 05:33 AM (obo9H)

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Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 12 2020 11:33 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 13 2020 01:03 PM (eqaFC)

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• I got the new platform - it's called Mana - working with MariaDB and temporal tables.
  
  The switch to MariaDB only really required changing table collations, because the lists of collations supported by MySQL 8 and MariaDB 10 have diverged.  And of course switching from TokuDB over to InnoDB.
  
  Temporal tables required a little fiddling with my test suite, because when you run the full test it starts by truncating all the tables, and you can't truncate a temporal table.  You have to drop versioning, truncate it, and enable versioning again.
  
  Result: The first run was three times slower than before, but I quickly tracked this down to the stack table, which is the container for mentions, notifications, and other collections of messages.  Every time a message is posted, it's dropped into the stacks of all that user's followers, and the count on the stack record is updated.
  
  Turned off versioning for that one table and run time dropped back down to within 5% of an unversioned database.
  
  The resulting database is 25% bigger, partly because it's creating extra records, and partly because it needs to add timestamps to all the index entries so that you can go back in time.  
  
  Is it really working?  Yep.  The test I ran created 100 users, and there are a total of 10,100 records in the user table if you scan across all history.
  
  Also, the MariaDB hot backup utility can in fact capture system versioning, so I probably don't need to worry about bitemporal tables.
  
  This is good.  This is really good.  Not only does it automatically track intentional edits to every record (I had code set up to handle that for messages), but it provides a magical undo mechanism for accidental deletes or data-mangling bugs.
  
  I think there's a mechanism in there to zap the history for a record should I need that, for example, to comply with GDPR.
  
  
  
• Micron has delivered their new 176-layer 3D flash, sort of.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  One minor catch: It's actually two 88-layer dies nano-stacked on top of each other.  I'm not sure if that matters.
  
  It's shipping in products right now, though Micron didn't specify which ones.
  
  
  
• Looking for a rather chunky portable gaming device?  Look no further - the Aya Neo Founder Edition is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has a Ryzen 5 4500U, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB or 1TB SSD, and....  A 7" 1280x800 display, which is a crime given the rest of the hardware stats.
  
  
  
• A wild Ryzen 7 5700U appeared!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It used SMT.
  
  The 5700U appears to be essentially a 4800U.  That means it will be around 25% faster than the 4700U on multi-threaded workloads.  (CPUBenchmark)
  
  If the price is the same as before, that's a respectable generational bump.
  
  The 5800U, when it arrives, is expected to be Zen 3 and will offer a similar performance boost over the current 4800U.
  
  
  
• Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yeah, no shit.
  
  
  
• Et tu, Tame Apple Press.  (ZDNet)
  
  Even they expect the upcoming Arm-based Macbooks to suck to start with.

Bonus Hololive Opening Theme Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 11 2020 12:23 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Jay at Wednesday, November 11 2020 03:01 AM (0jVI9)

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• Facebook has declared war on conservative groups spreading information.  (Mashable)
  
  This is being done for their own protection.  (CNet)
  
  Slashdot are gleefully pro-censorship in all this, because fuck principles.
  
  
  
• Sites relying on LetsEncrypt certificates will become inaccessible from older versions of Linux starting in September next year.  (LetsEncryt)
  
  Anything older than Android 7.1 will stop working...  Unless you download Firefox, because whatever their their faults the folk at Mozilla actually know how to write a web browser.
  
  
  
• Putting things where they shouldn't be, part one: Running VMWare ESXi on a Raspberry Pi.  (Serve the Home)
  
  
  
• Putting things where they shouldn't be, part two: Running BGP on a Lego brick.  (Cynthia.re)
  
  
  
• MSI's upcoming RTX 3090 reportedly has a boost clock 16% higher than the Founder's Edition cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  
• In unrelated news their factory caught fire.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  
• Calli and Kiara restarted yesterday's failed Minecraft stream, Kiara died, respawned at the default start point miles from where they had been playing, made her way back, fell off a cliff and died again, and then Minecraft died too, so they spent the rest of a stream talking about their spa date.
  
  
  

• Got Object Desktop renewed so I could install Multiplicity everywhere (slightly tricky because when you renew it issues it to the original email, not the email you enter - and doesn't mention that anywhere), got Multiplicity installed, updated Rally Vincent to Windows 2010 or whatever they're calling this latest release, updated VirtualBox because the latest Windows 10 breaks VirtualBox 5, found that somewhere along the line my GitLab server had gotten hosed, patched it up long enough to copy everything over to a brand new Ubuntu 20.10 instance running ZFS - which works very nicely - and am currently digging into MariaDB temporal tables as originally planned.
  
  Some testing has shown at least that there's no longer any reason to avoid InnoDB so long as you are using ZFS.  The tables are much bigger than TokuDB, but about as fast, and ZFS LZ4 compression brings the size down to within about 20% of TokuDB.
  
  And rather importantly, it's unlikely to be suddenly abandoned and force me to convert all my tables.
  
  
  
• I was thinking Tohru - the older of my two Dell all-in-ones - might have had a hardware issue because the fan noise is noticeably louder than it used to be.  So I installed Multiplicity and now I'm running both Tohru and Rally rather than Rally being mostly dormant as just serving as a monitor.
  
  And now they're making exactly the same amount of fan noise.
  
  I guess it's just the number of apps and browser tabs and virtual machines I have running all the time.  And ever-increasing Windows bloat.
  
  
  
• Got locked out of Twitter today for posting a link discussing the application of Benford's Law to election results.  As did quite a few other people.  (Instapundit)
  
  No warning, no explanation, just "You broke one of the seven million rules and must be punished."
  
  Apparently the reason is that the site that hosted that link also reported on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop.  Twitter doesn't care - and doesn't tell you.  You're just kicked off the platform.
  
  
  
• And if you're locked out of Twitter, you also can't use Twitter OAuth to log into other platforms, like Disqus.  So the censorious fuckheads have killed that as well.
  
  
  
• In ENTIRELY UNRELATED NEWS Parler is the top free app on the App Store right now.
  
  ...
  
  How do you embed one of those things?  Can you embed one of those things?  I'll look into that.  Also the same for mee.ms, of course.
  
  
  
• Uber, fresh from a victory over AB5, vows to take on similar laws worldwide.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What, I have to like Uber now?
  
  Also, the voting map for Prop 22 looks exactly as you would expect.  California may be a standard deviation to the left of the US average, but it still has a group two standard deviations to the left of that, trying to control everything.
  
  
  
• ZeroSSL does everything that LetsEncrypt does but seems to be a little more flexible.  (ZeroSSL)
  
  95% of the websites at my day job went down for fifteen minutes last week after an issue with LetsEncrypt rate limits cascade-crashed our proxy servers.  Not blaming anyone; the latest version of the software fixes this but I haven't had time to update.
  
  
  
• The most popular thumbnail in the world.
  
  
  
  Kiara and Calli had a Minecraft stream planned, but it's a weekend for technical issues and it all fell over.  15,000 people in chat giving them money anyway.
  
  Rescheduled for tomorrow now.
  
  
  
• Which is something of a relief because I would have had to tear myself away for Coco's Minecraft stream which starts in twenty minutes.  Just after she finished her earlier Terraria stream.
  
  Update: Diamonds!
  
  

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, November 09 2020 01:46 AM (1ZQzH)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 09 2020 07:17 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 09 2020 07:20 AM (eqaFC)

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Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 09 2020 09:02 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 09 2020 09:12 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, November 09 2020 09:51 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 09 2020 10:02 AM (eqaFC)

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Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Monday, November 09 2020 11:25 AM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 09 2020 11:41 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, November 10 2020 11:33 AM (Ix1l6)

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• Working on the UI of the new social platform today.  I licensed a Bootstrap theme that has designs for pretty much everything I need - social newsfeeds, blogs, forums, photo galleries, videos and streams, profile pages, all that stuff.  But it was also visually busy and slow to load.
  
  I've slimmed it down and sped it up, and made the content load dynamically into a static frame.  There's still a small issue with the initial page load, it's now fast enough that you have to know what you're looking for to notice it.
  
  Tomorrow I'm going to implement MariaDB bitemporal tables.  These are interesting beasts: They version-track your data.  You can run a query to show you what your blog looked like last Tuesday before you messed it up, or to show all the edits to a post.  Handled entirely by the database server.
  
  I plan to use bitemporal tables rather than simply temporal tables because if you  dump and load a temporal table all the history vanishes, and likewise you can't import history from an existing source.  A bitemporal table tracks history both by system time and application time.
  
  I checked on a couple of details tonight, and it looks pretty good.  You can partition a temporal table so that the live data is in one file and the history in another (or several others), you can drop old history partitions if you don't need them and the disk is full, and you can add new columns to a temporal table.  That's not what the SQL:2011 standard says, and it's not correct from an auditing perspective, but I'm glad they did it because I doubt I could use this feature if it meant never changing my database definitions after launch.
  
  Update: Ugh, they've deprecated TokuDB.  It doesn't work with temporal tables anyway, but it was a really solid database engine.  InnoDB is supposedly the gold standard but it uses far more storage and offers worse performance.
  
  
  
• Facebook has gone all-in on censorship.  (Vice)
  
  The usual suspects are still complaining that they aren't silencing people fast enough.
  
  Orwellian doesn't begin to cover it.
  
  
  
• Scientists have discovered a planet where it rains rocks and the oceans are lava.  (CBS)
  
  Sounds like SMOD went to the wrong address.
  
  
  
• The Xbox Series X vs. The Good God That Thing Is Ugly.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Xbox is faster, uses less power, and is quieter than the GGTTIU, but not by a huge amount in any category.  For a proper head-to-head test we'll need multiple cross-platform titles optimised for each system, and so far there aren't any.
  
  
  
• "><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD has been forced to change its name.  (The Guardian)
  
  Yes, someone Little Bobby Tablesed the agency responsible for registering business names in the UK.
  
  
  
• Okay, I don't think that chilli was as gluten-free as the label suggested.  Gotta go.

1 OH! 

I was envisioning something like Twitter, Parler, or Pawoo. This sounds rather more impressive. Will we be able to migrate our Mee.nu blogs there or is this activating additional options in the mee.nu dashboard menu?

 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, November 08 2020 01:52 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, November 08 2020 05:35 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, November 08 2020 01:44 PM (Ix1l6)

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• I've put my nice fantasy home computer emulator project on hold and I'm back to building the social network because reasons.
  
  Will see if I can get an early preview up this weekend.  I was pretty close at the beginning of the year when things were merely literally on fire, and then things got bad.
  
  
  
• And so I was updating my development server (which is hosted at Vultr in Sydney) and it locked up on reboot.  After trying a few things to no avail I opened a support ticket, and they had it fixed in three minutes and thirty-nine seconds.
  
  We use IBM Cloud at my day job, and with them I'm lucky to get a response in three hours and thirty-nine minutes, never mind a resolution.
  
  
  
• You get better performance running your own hardware, sure, but with my development server down for entire minutes, I was able to fire up a new server, load the most recent backup, and have it back on line only a few minutes after they fixed the original one.
  
  
  
• Then since I had a complete clone to play with, I updated it to Ubuntu 20.04.  That went smoothly as well.  And while they don't currently have any available CPU-optimised nodes larger than 2GB in Sydney (a frequent issue with Vultr), the general-purpose node I spun up instead is only about 10% slower running my test suite.
  
  
  
• Zen 3 go brrrrr.  (AnandTech)
  
  Lots of benchmarks and tech details here.  They compare it against both 10th and 11th generation Intel parts, and Intel would need Rocket Lake to hit 5.6 GHz at default settings to match Zen 3 on single-threaded benchmarks.  On multi-threaded benchmarks they're just screwed, because Rocket Lake maxes out at 8 cores.
  
  I wonder when the 5900X and 5950X will actually be in stock.  I'd like to get one for our new server.  Either is fine.
  
  
  
• Zen 3 really go brrrrr.
  
  
  
  
  
• Arm's Cortex A78C is  a Cortex A78.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There is a meaningful difference though - it's designed to run in eight-core clusters, rather than the four+four big.LITTLE designs found in phones.
  
  It's fast enough to make a pretty decent Linux server; I just don't know how well Windows will run on it.
  
  
  
• The Xbox Series S is here.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Great timing, Microsoft.  Biggest release of the year and it disappears without a blip.
  
  Summary: Really good hardware, great price, not much storage given how bloated games are these days.  And it doesn't support 4K, at all.  It's not a performance question; it's unable to output a 4K video signal.
  
  
  
• The Xbox Series X is here as well.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Summary: Great hardware, runs cool and almost silent, a little expensive but very, very fast.
  
  
  
• San Francisco voters have passed a measure banning successful companies from the city.  (LA Times)
  
  Ijits gonna ij.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 07 2020 12:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, November 07 2020 05:11 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: benzeen at Saturday, November 07 2020 12:44 PM (JpDcM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 07 2020 06:39 PM (PiXy!)

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• Xiaomi has another of those little nuclets, like the Chuwi Larkbox.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This one is named the - seriously - the Xioami Ningmei Rubik's Cube Mini.
  
  It's powered by a quad core Celeron J4125 which delivers acceptable performance for simple tasks, two USB-A ports, one USB-C port, HDMI, headphone jack, and microSD, and measures a tiny 62 x 62 x 42 mm.
  
  6GB/128GB model is $149, 8GB/256GB model is $186.
  
  
  
• Social Media Nightmare Misinformation Scenario would be a good name for a rock band.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's Tech Crunch, so...  You know what to expect.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 5000 goes on sale today and it's already gone.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If you want a 5900X or 5950X you'll need to be fast and/or lucky.  5600X and 5800X are apparently in better supply.
  
  Also if you want to watch the first review - it was up on YouTube but now it's disappeared.  Apparently it was set to go public the minute the clocked ticker over to release day when the embargo actually had several hours to run.
  
  Update: Listed now on my preferred Australian supplier.  The 5900X is A$40 more than the 3900X, which is less than the US price increase.  On the other hand, they don't have any.
  
  Reviews are back up now.
  
  
  
  
  
• Florida is releasing 750 million mutant mosquitoes.  (BBC)
  
  They finished counting early so they got to work on their hobby project.
  
  
  
• An online community for marijuana growers suffered a data breach.  (ZDNet)
  
  The breach involved Kibana, which is part of the Elasticsearch stack, which long ago adopted the philosophy that information wants to be free, particularly your information.
  
  The data included hashed passwords, but they were only hashed using MD5, which is pretty easy to crack these days.
  
  
  
• Massachusetts voters passed a right-to-repair initiative by a 3:1 margin.  (Vice)
  
  It only applies to vehicles, but it's a start.
  
  
  
• The New York Times, tired of being merely corrupt, incompetent, divisive, immoral, greedy, and dishonest, has now gone batshit insane.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 06 2020 03:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 06 2020 11:29 AM (PiXy!)

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• California's Proposition 22 - limiting the scope of the anti gig-worker AB5 legislation - looks set to pass.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And Proposition 16, which would have enshrined racial discrimination into California law, looks set to fail.
  
  
  
• For some reason the number of visas granted to Chinese students looking to study in the US has dropped by 99%.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Guess we'll never know why.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 875 appears to have a HUGE.big.LITTLE layout.  (WCCFTech)
  
  One X1 core, three A78 cores, and four A55 cores.  The X1 is Arm's new performance core, related I think to the V1 and N2 server cores.
  
  
  
• Australia's STEM workforce should reach gender parity by 2091.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's good to have a hobby.
  
  
  
• The $34B IPO of Ant - the company behind Alipay - has been spiked by the Chinese government.  (New York Times)
  
  Apparently for insufficient reverence.  Okay, sure, it's a translation, but that's the word used in the translation.
  
  
  
• Twitch suspended guitarist Herman Li for playing his own music.  (Happy Mag)
  
  Good work there, guys.  It does look like he got his channel restored though.
  
  

Oh No It's Real Picture of the Day

Memetic Background Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 05 2020 12:34 AM (eqaFC)

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