Ambient Irony

Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.

Thursday, December 31

Daily News Stuff 31 December 2020

Year In Rereview Edition

Tech News

A short recap of Nim in 2020. (Nim-Lang)

I was dubious about Nim at first because it compiles to C (or JavaScript) rather than directly to binaries, but so far it's worked very well indeed.
Ticketmaster has been fined $10 million for illegally accessing CrowdSurge's systems. (Bleeping Computer)

They didn't hack in, exactly; it seems that CrowdSurge didn't deactivate the accounts of former employees who were subsequently hired by Ticketmaster. But it wasn't any mistake, they did this repeatedly and systematically.
You gotta fight Apple for your right to party. (Ars Technica)

Of course, the usual suspects think that crushing free speech and freedom of association is a great idea.
2020 ended as it began: With Koefficient reacting to Haachama reacting to Koefficient reacting to Haachama. (Twitch)

He even superchatted Haachma live from his stream but I don't think she saw it, though her audience certainly noticed.

Warning: Includes a clip of the tarantula hotpot episode.

December

On December 1 we got a new server and accidentally gave it the same name as this server right here, but on the other hand it's a 452 microsecond ping away so they might as well be the same, AWS had non-virtual virtual Macs, colapsado el Observatorio de Arecibo meant pretty much what it sounded like, and Nvidia launched the RTX 3060 Ti and for some reason it's absurdly overpriced in Australia.
On December 2 ZFS all the things, even the ones that already have filesystems, the 3060 Ti performed close to the 2080 Super, SSDs that aren't what they were, Saleseforce bought Slack, Pharmaceuticals for Algernon, AWS had gaudy habaneros, and Big Tech fled San Francisco.
On December 3 Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 888, Supermicro had a reasonably-priced dual 100GbE card, everything was in short supply, the PlayStation 5 played fan supplier lotto, and Botanx vs. Shubangelion.

Polka being Polka built a circus tent directly between the two. The tent looks pretty good though.
On December 4 my SSDs reached Sydney, one of Micron's fabs lost power for an hour, wrecking days worth of production, Intel's 11900K was nearly as fast as the 5800X, the iPhone's wifi got hacked even though it was turned off at the time, and Google used the your proposal is acceptable line.
On December 5 my new washing machine arrived, yay, and played music, yay, Rally (one of my two desktops) died and then promptly undied, we looked at 8TB consumer SSDs, AMD had some interesting mobile parts in the pipeline, and Apple released the second beta for the patch to the fix to the update to Bug Sir.
On December 6 we ignored warning labels, Razer had a sixteen pound NUC, Big Tech outsourced everything to Bangalore, a caddy caddy caddy for hot-swap NVMe, spores from planet Yuggoth were safely returned to Earth, and we rediscovered the Surveyor 2 booster stage.
On December 7 Timnit Gebru was surprise removed, the Ryzen 5800X cost $50 too much for perfection, SpaceX Eats, and broadcasting TV over ESP.
On December 8 Hynix joined the 176-layer NAND party, incredibly expensive datacentre GPUs are also out of stock, Microsoft Teams had worms, and Gigabyte had a dual Epyc EATX motherboard.
On December 9 things didn't go quite as planned, ASRock had new graphics cards, Shuttle had a new barebone system that fit in a 5" drive bay, don't use a message queue as a transactional database you idiots, CentOS 8's EOL got pulled forward by about seven years, Apple announced their new PodMax MaxPod Pro, and YouTube banned Kiara.

I guess they had their reasons.
On December 10 working 8 to 1 - 1 the next morning - what a way to make a living, YouTube banned everyone because reasons, every detail of the story banned because reasons turned out to be true, the FTC sued to break up Facebook, the latest Starship test was 95% successful, ducks could swim, and Google screwed up the only intelligent thing they had done in two years.
On December 11 Intel's W-1200 server platform was kind of meh, Western Digital's Black SN850 SSD was kind of expensive, the Orange Pi might make a good little router, democracy vs. Facebook, a single-chip 25.6Tbps switch, Microsoft forced upgrades from Windows 10 to Windows 10, and Spotify leaked passwords somehow.
On December 12 we did not recommend the Corsair MP400, though the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus looked good, the Hackboard 2 was a tiny Atom-based single-board computer, Oracle fled San Francisco, we got a Bat Flu vaccine, the $72,000-per-day free cloud server, fork you, CentOS, and Ryzen 5600X servers.
On December 13 Intel's 11900K was slower than the 10900K, Nvidia shot off all its toes, virtual events sucked, Nox Archaist was released for the Apple II, and the mainstream media lost the Jacobins. Also, she did warn us.
On December 14 I clicked the button on 64GB of RAM, AMD's Epyc Milan would hit 4GHz, working in pyjamas wouldn't hurt productivity, but a global Google outage sure would.
On December 15 the rest of my computer upgrade bits arrived, and so did my groceries, putting a slow NVMe SSD on a USB interface made it faster, the FTC woke from its nap, and Google ran out of disk space.
On December 16 LG had a 32" 4K monitor for $350, Gmail fell over again, SolarWinds was a complete fucking mess, Twitter got fined €450,000 for reporting and fixing a bug, the new Arm-based iPhoneBook was adequate, and Amazon offered chaos-as-a-service. And Hololive would rock you.
On December 17 we looked at the best desktop APUs you can't get, the ASRock 4x4 turned out to have remote management, Smashing was a dashboard app, Ethereum pooped itself again, Intel had new Optane drives with 6Âµs access times, Google and Facebook got sued some more, and China ruined everything, twice.
On December 18 Gigabyte had a Threadripper Pro motherboard, Ampere's Altra Arm server CPU turned out to be pretty good, Apple's Bug Sir prevented you from having it update itself, Twitter cut off tweets, DON'T USE AUTO-SCALING, Google got sued again, and three days later all the cows exploded. Oh, and tarantula hotpot.
On December 19 we found cheap gluten-free pizza, Microsoft didn't co-develop squat, Intel was working on DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 for some time between now and the heat death of the Universe, Zoom's Security Technical Lead was literally a communist spy, and a bug in the Magecart malware provided a handy list of all the infected servers.

Oh, that's what that sound was.
On December 20 we looked forward to replacing Google with Nextcloud, and backward to January.

On January 1 Google was rotten to the core.
On January 2 Samsung's DRAM fab lost power for an entire minute.
On January 3 Python 2.7 reached EOL and we switched to PyPy.
On January 4 literally everything was on fire.
On January 5 Bruce Perens resigned from the OSI over stupid licenses.
On January 6 Ricky Gervais warned us about brown M&Ms.
On January 7 the ABC thought that literally everything was on fire.
On January 8 Google announced nothing and IBM dropped Swift.
On January 9 Jussie Smollett glowed in the dark, but so did everyone.
On January 10 scientists fitted cuttlefish with 3D glasses and ZFS.
On January 11 John Carmack discovered that $30 1TB USB drives are a scam.
On January 12 NASA discovered the first known Class M planet.
On January 13 Razer showed off a desktop PC.
On January 14 Threadripper Pro wasn't real.
On January 15 a critical security bug was fixed before it caused disaster.
On January 16 the new Edge was released - and it actually worked.
On January 17 I ordered an NBN after waiting eleven years.
On January 18 California asked tech companies what are you going to do, move to Texas?
On January 19 the YouTube Embedding Conjecture was proven false.
On January 20 stupid tweets were forever - the stupider, the foreverer.
On January 21 I switched to DuckDuckGo
On January 22 AMD's 5600XT turned out better than expected.
On January 23 dealing with $60,000 in unexpected donations.
On January 24 I got a decent internet connection.
On January 25 you can't copyright a number, you wombats.
On January 26 overclocking a 32-core Threadripper to 5.4GHz.
On January 27 the Doomsday Clock moved to two minutes to midday.
On January 28 Intel got hit by another speculative execution attack.
On January 29 we refused to eat bugs or live in a pod.
On January 30 the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague confirmed cases chart went vertical.
And on January 31 YouTube fucked everything up.

On December 21 Apple tied up 80% of TSMC's 5nm capacity through 2021, AMD chose to go with 6nm for some reason, F5 fixed YouTube, and we dreamed a little dream of February.

On February 1 we dropped your phone in molten iron.
On February 2 we wondered who the hell was still running mail servers as root.
On February 3 we discovered a new Heinlein novel.
On February 4 Twitter leaked everyone's mobile number that they demanded you had over.
On February 6 Windows desktop search went down worldwide somehow.
On February 7 Doctor Who had not yet entirely erased itself.
On February 8 Twitter and Bluetooth both got hacked.
On February 9 Big Tech fucked up the new privacy rules.
On February 10 Mobile World Congress unravelled over WBSDP.
On February 11 China ruined Equifax.
On February 12 we got 82Mbps and a six-digit IP address.
On February 13 Amii Stewart explained Wordpress plugin security.
On February 14 MacOS Catalina was a total mess.
On February 15 Twitter ran an ad for a human organ market.
On February 16 Linux patched the Y2K038 bug.
On February 17 we got with Cream of Bat soup.
On February 18 a new device generated electricity from humidity gradients.
On February 19 everyone spoke up about censorship - they wanted more of it.
On February 20 we examined the Bitcoin pipe wrench vulnerability.
On February 21 Repairman Jack also switched to DuckDuckGo.
On February 22 it had always been AWS.
On February 23 Samsung started 7nm production.
On February 24 Sony announced the Xperia 1 II.
On February 25 the Xbox Series X would be nice when you can actually get one.
On February 26 Microsoft expected you to use an online login to access your own computer.
On February 27 fuck Node.js anyway.
On February 28 China ruined everything, including China.
And on February 29 Go morphed into Node.js and Node.js morphed into into Nyarlathotep.

On December 22 I went cold-turkey on Hololive for nearly two whole days while their big annual live event was on, the Ryzen 5800X was much, much faster than the 1800X, DMCA shenanigans, and we went for a March.

On March 1 a Space X prototype very much did went kerplooie.
On March 2 Amazon banned a million products but not fake SD cards.
On March 3 Datastax acquired The Last Pickle.
On March 4 let's Encrypt revoked three million SSL certificates.
On March 5 everyone DMCA'd everyone.
On March 6 a truckload of toilet paper crashed and caught fire in Brisbane.
On March 7 researchers found a bug in AMD chhips for a change.
On March 8 stop pissing around with event loops.
On March 9 IBM's X15 processor had over 1GB of cache.
On March 10 don't use free VPNs.
On March 11 my groceries arrived.
On March 12 your personal information was worth about a dollar.
On March 13 glorkums passed harmlessly through the shade.
On March 14 AMD rubbed salt into Intel's wounds.
On March 15 we got WSL2, and Pokemon Go went.
On March 16 grocery deliveries stopped entirely across Australia.
On March 17 Eureka was good.
On March 18 all([ ]) was true.
On March 19 Ethereum sucked and the Aussie dollar cratered.
On March 20 Twitter rebranded itself as MiniTwi.
On March 21 Twitter suspended arch-conservative Cory Doctorow.
On March 22 Google and Microsoft took pity on sysadmins.
On March 23 don't single-source your bread wrappers from Kazakhstan.
On March 24 DON'T EAT FISH MEDICINE.
On March 25 nobody had ever heard of Brandenburg v. Ohio.
On March 26 Navi got stolen and we ran out of cloud.
On March 27 Zoom was the hot new cancer.
On March 28 CNN was completely fucking insane.
On March 29 the price for crude oil went negative for the first time ever.
On March 30 doctors continued to disappear in Wuhan.
And on March 31 gas dropped to $1 per gallon in London.... Kentucky.

On December 23 the Fast Food Console wars began, helpful tricks for Nim programmers, the SEC sued Ripple, Hololive returned to save the day, and April flowers.

On April 1 the Atlantic embraced fascism and Xerox didn't buy HP.
On April 2 96TB of RAID storage landed on my doorstep.
On April 3 everything was worse than we thought, particularly Zoom.
On April 4 seriously, Zoom was a disaster.
On April 5 we ran out of COBOL programmers.
On April 6 New York banned Zoom.
On April 7 Mochizuki's inter-universal TeichmÃ¼ller proof was published.
On April 8 Sydney welcomed visiting plague rats.
On April 9 a Microsoft spider tried to take out this site.
On April 10 we sheltered in place and ate Vegemite.
On April 11 the aptly named Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-U6780A arrived.
On April 12 Google returned no search results for "can I feed my dinosaur ramen".
On April 13 BEEEEEEP, wait, Risu, durian donuts, seriously?
On April 14 every copy of Valorant came with a free rootkit.
On April 15 Python morphed into Node.js.
On April 16 there were no lamingtons.
On April 17 YouTube was full of horrible perverts.
On April 18 we discovered dinosaur DNA. What could go wrong?
On April 19 a fake Intel quad 10GbE network card worked perfectly.
On April 20 we were living through Connie Willis's Remake.
On April 21 LG's Vervet had a headphone jack.
On April 22 Stripe was obviously retarded.
On April 23 we dropped the Staten Island groundhog.
On April 24 we compared the iPhone SE to the DOOGEE X95.
On April 25 TURN OFF YOUR BLUETOOTH! NOW! TURN IT OFF NOW!!!
On April 26 a bug in a one-line Node.js package broke 3.4 million projects.
On April 27 Monkey vs. Opossum Lady.
On April 28 the Atlantic embraced fascism, again.
On April 29 Google killed Shoelace. RIP Shoelace.
On April 30 USB 4 supported DisplayPort 2 - except as it turned out, not.

On December 24 Intel's Maple Ridge Thunderbolt 4 controller shipped, we looked at the Asus PN50 with the optional collapsible stock, fintech was social cancer, China fined people for I don't know what exactly, but they May.

On May 1 server monitoring sucked - and we didn't know the half of it then.
On May 2 Quibi died and nobody mourned.
On May 3 California passed a well-intended law that made things worse.
On May 4 YouTube banned David Icke for spreading the wrong type of conspiracy theory.
On May 5 Julia captured Heisenbugs.
On May 6 Elasticsearch was a disaster.
On May 7 Microsoft released new Surfaces and the EU went bananas for cookies.
On May 8 Apple, Sonos, and Spotify were battling for the worst developer support crown.
On May 9 Go was still hipster COBOL.
On May 10 Meizu released a 17" smartphone - unless they didn't.
On May 11 /r/animetitties was safe for work.
On May 12 birdless Birds, and the 125W Intel 10900K used 235W.
On May 13 we were mostly swearing at LXD.
On May 14 Deno was Node.js only using TypeScript and written in Rust.
On May 15 Facebook bought Giphy for some bizarre reason.
On May 16 I tried out SSDNodes and pronounced it mostly not sucky.
On May 17 GIFs were considered harmful and WSL was pronounced weasel.
On May 18 we learned how to add ZFS on servers after the fact.
On May 19 Minecraft had sold 200 MILLION copies.
On May 20 Intel's Comet Lake arrived, whichever that one was.
On May 21 Twitter fucked Twitter up yet again.
On May 22 Rocket Lake leaked, whichever that one was.
On May 23 we listed fictional inventions by year of publication.
On May 24 we had pizza arbitrage and safe spaces.
On May 25 Elasticsearch did what it's best at - leaking private data.
On May 26 every singly iPhone got jailbroken.
On May 27 DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES UNINSTALL THE LAUNCHER.
On May 28 Twitter was the problem with Twitter.
On May 29 everything got hacked and YouTube was run by morons.
On May 30 Hivelocity declared war on catgirls.
And on May 31 all of D&D - all of it.

On December 25 we looked at installing Windows on an Xbox One, sort of, Ruby 3.0 was out, China launched an antitrust investigation into Alibaba, Amazon got sued for burning people's houses down, and June bugs.

On June 1 the apatosaurus reached the ISS.
On June 2 Sienna Cichlid reported for NPR.
On June 3 what was this, a console for ants?
On June 4 the Chuwi Larkbox was small and Big Navi was big.
On June 5 Sim Refinery was rediscovered.
On June 6 we experience sudden total existence failure.
On June 7 Brave didn't do what they were accused of, not exactly.
On June 8 Tiger Lake was on its way, whichever one that was.
On June 9 I officially fell down the rabbit hole.
On June 10 IBM Cloud crashed across the entire world due to a bad BGP packet.
On June 11 Twitter went full Karen.
On June 12 Itch.io released a good bundle for a bad cause.
On June 13 Zoom bad, Huawei also bad, and HSBC did what?
On June 14 how to grow your project to 13,000 dependencies with one line of code.
On June 15 AMD's latest APUs work just fine with no cooling whatsoever.
On June 16 Amazon Prime on the Moon.
On June 17 Google lied through their fucking teeth.
On June 18 Intel's Copper Lake - Cooper Lake? Really?
On June 19 content moderation at scale was impossible if you hired morons to do it.
On June 20 the server exploded and I'm still fixing some bits.
On June 21 cat sitting on keyboard crashed lightdm.
On June 22 I remoted-mounted a CD-ROM from the other side of the planet.
On June 23 Apple did not mention Arm once.
On June 24 everyone went full Kafka.
On June 25 TikTok was spyware, fancy that.
On June 26 Twitter's kafkabot went insane.
On June 27 we dove head first into Brave New World.
On June 28 the Pico-8 was upgraded to 32 colours.
On June 29 GitHub went down worldwide.
And on June 30 MongoDB indexing was a Swiss Army chainsaw.

On December 26 we looked at a $225 mini-PC, some settings to adjust and some rules to ignore when reinstalling Windows, Coindesk lost the Slashdot audience, a Korean tokamak achieved 100 million degrees for 20 seconds, and we had to go back to July

On July 1 Apple killed the PC as we knew it.
On July 2 we looked at Intel's Field Lake. Wait, Lakefield? Really?
On July 3 23,000 MongoDB databases got hacked and not Elasticsearch this time.
On July 4 the Ryzen 4700G (which you can't get) matched the 3800X (which you can).
On July 5 the next big thing from Apple was higher prices and shit no-one asked for.
On July 6 we used DEX as a dump stat.
On July 7 Slack imploded, then exploded.
On July 8 the WHO noted that Bat Flu was, and we quote, "a thing".
On July 9 117 out of 117 home routers failed security scans.
On July 10 Threadripper Pro appeared and Google banned its competitors.
On July 11 1TBVPS.com sold 1TB VPSes.
On July 12 we discovered MariaDB support for temporal tables.
On July 13 Github went down again.
On July 14 New York celebrated a mountain of corpses.
On July 15 Google ruined everything and Patch Tuesday fixed 123 vulnerabilities.
On July 16 we banned Tencent and Twitter got hacked again.
On July 17 the Twitter hacker had inside help.
On July 18 Cloudflare went down and took GitLab, Patreon, Authy, and Digital Ocean.
On July 19 Citrine was an incredibly bad idea.
On July 20 Loren Chariot Addy the Titbit of Cholame questioned Cele Garth Alda and 16 windy frogs.
On July 21 AMD officially launched their desktop APU range which you can't get.
On July 22 Metacritic saw a bright new future in fraud.
On July 23 the Xioami Mi 10 offered near-flagship specs at flagship prices.
On July 24 Intel's 7nm process was a year late and getting later by the day.
On July 25 TechDirt was tilting at wombats imagining they were windmills.
On July 26 it turned out there a world outside of Europe.
On July 27 PHP 8 caught up with ALGOL 60 - in one specific feature.
On July 28 a Suikoden sequel crashed Kickstarter by giving it too much money.
On July 29 Wikipedia claimed that all DDR5 modules were registered.
On July 30 a Grub bug nibbled a hole in UEFI.
On July 31 we journeyed beyond the shoe event horizon.

On December 27 we were back after a not particularly secret midnight bomber bombed at midnight and disrupted the internet a little bit, someone sneezed in Sydney's north, AMD needed a 5700X, Asus leaked two very different 12GB graphics cards, how to make your APIs horrible, iCloud fell over, 5x4 is a bad thing in SSDs, and August was a thing that happened.

On August 1 Twitter got hacked by a 17-year-old kid from Florida.
On August 2 the Dragon returned to Earth.
On August 3 we visited Derepedia.
On August 4 we were reincarnated as a wombat in a world where P=NP.
On August 5 Apple released new iMacs, overpriced and already obsolete on launch day.
On August 6 Twitter locked the Trump campaign out of its account over a fact.
On August 7 MySQL decided to drop 20% of incoming connection.
On August 8 Google Focal and immediately bricked all their existing devices.
On August 9 Twitter was in talks with TikTok to create the worst website ever envisioned.
On August 10 Department of Corporate Slave Rabbits came to an end.
On August 11 the Oppo Reno3 came with an A75, A76, or A77 core depending.
On August 12 we looked at a 128-core six-screen laptop for very large laps.
On August 14 the Yam cryptocurrency self-destructed due to a tiny but unfixable bug.
On August 13 Humble Bundle had Vegas and Acid and it's back right now.
On August 15 notes on writing your own virtual machine.
On August 16 Google Cloud had more death flags than an otome game isekai manga main character villainess.
On August 17 Notepad++ got banned in China.
On August 18 IBM's Power 10 and z15 CPUs were too complicated to even describe coherently.
On August 19 the A520 chipset was in fact a chipset.
On August 20 Intel remembered for ten minutes which one Tiger Lake was.
On August 21 a Lightroom update freed up space by deleting all your photos.
On August 22 the 6502 was fucking weird - and so was the BBC Micro that used it.
On August 23 I tried out Nim for the first time and it worked exactly as described.
On August 24 server-side rendering was the new hotness.
On August 25 why not write your configuration files in JavaScript?
On August 26 birds were kind of dumb.
On August 27 Arwes made your app look like 2020 as seen from 1980.
On August 28 Google declared war on the Fediverse.
On August 29 a malloc Geiger counter was actually kind of a good idea.
On August 30 I completed the programming model for my 10-bit 1983 home computer.
And on August 31 we explored how to cheat wavetable synthesis into existence in 1983.

On December 28 we said no to Turbo, China completed its antitrust investigations of Alibaba, a two-acre vertical farm outproduced a 720-acre real farm if you simply ignored reality, and September exited stage left.

On September 1 we looked at classic Japanese home computers.
On September 2 Intel launched Tiger Lake, whichever one that was.
On September 3 we examined wavetable synthesis in fantasy 1983 and in 2020.
On September 4 Ethereum gas prices peaked at 28,925.
On September 5 we downloaded 100,000 pages of ocs for 1980s computers.
On September 6 the HP Omen 15 had the four essential keys.
On September 7 QB64 was a 64-bit Basic compiler.
On September 8 Microsoft announced the Sbox.
On September 9 BEEEEP.
On September 10 AMD took over the top ten slots in Passmark entirely.
On September 11 the Surface Duo was a brilliant $299 device priced at $1399.
On September 12 it was time to download an Amiga.
On September 13 per explodia ad astra.
On September 14 Nvidia bought Arm and Microsoft did not buy TikTok.
On September 15 IBM was working on a 1121 qubit quantum computer.
On September 16 yes, Virginia, Nim can compile to a Raspberry Pi.
On September 17 Sony revealed the PS5 and also the Xperia 5 II.
On September 18 Apple complained that Epic Games was interfering with monopoly.
On September 19 everything sold out immediately upon launch.
On September 20Intel submitted their secure enclave patches for Linux for the 38th time.
On September 21 the US Air Force designed, built, and flew a new prototype fighter in under 12 months.
On September 22 Elasticsearch took seven seconds to search 28,000 records.
On September 23 we had a day.
On September 24 HP had a 4K laptop with 8GB of non-upgradable RAM.
On September 25 we interpreted Intel's 10nm nightmare.
On September 26 Google Maps removed photos of Ayer's Rock.
On September 27 Navy Flounder joined Sienna Cichlid and Dimgrey Cavefish.
On September 28 researchers found the man page for a secret Nazi supercomputer.
On September 29 DuckDuckGo had about a zillion magic search codes.
And on September 30 we never updated our operating systems. NEVER.

On December 29 Xiaomi announced the Mi 11, Gigabyte had a nice B550 microATX motherboard, the Ryzen 5900X was nearly as fast as the 10900K, Nissin waited sixty years for this moment, echo 'BBuaBubaBubbbaBubbbbaBubbbbbaBubbbbbba' | watson decode -t json, remote management over Thunderbolt, China ruined China, and October looked good in retrospect.

On October 1 Humble's Corel Draw Bundle didn't actually contain Corel Draw.
On October 2 Dwarf Fortress turned out to be a great source of bitmapped fonts.
On October 3 we took a guided tour of the pixel-packing plant.
On October 4 Green Sardine joined Navy Flounder and Sienna Cichlid.
On October 5 running Doom 3 on an RTX 3090 - as a RAM disk.
On October 6 Nvidia replaced codecs with video puppets.
On October 7 the House Judiciary Committee took off and nuked the entire site from orbit.
On October 8 Intel announced its new Rocket Lake, whichever that is.
On October 9 YouTube chat was terrible but in a different way this time.
On October 10 you could no longer run Star Citizen on a Pentium.
On October 11 all DRAM has the same access speed - around 15ns.
On October 12 the Pentagon contracted SpaceX to deliver mail by rocket.
On October 13 serverless was always bullshit.
On October 14 Amazon Prime Video wasn't good but Netflix was even worse.
On October 15 mainstream media and social media companies didn't tell the truth once.
On October 16 Twitter crashed, and Slack decided that looked like fun and joined in.
On October 17 Atlassian told its customers to get fucked.
On October 18 the New York Post's Twitter account was still locked.
On October 19 God Mode in Windows 10. Literally.
On October 20 Intel sold its flash memory division to Hynix.
On October 21 Osiris Rex landed safely on Bennu.
On October 22 OAuth 3 was heading our way to make everything worse.
On October 23 a small shark hit one million subscribers.
On October 24 GitLab crashed and Xerox PARC got a DARPA contract.
On October 25 it was fourteen degrees in Sydney in late October.
On October 26 Azerbaijan posted Armenian ceasefire violations before they happened.
On October 27 Zoom censored warnings about Zoom censorship.
On October 28 AMD recorded record records.
On October 29AMD's Radeon RX 6000 arrived for approximately seven femtoseconds.
On October 30 Zen 3 was a lot better than Zen 2 which was a lot better than Zen 1 which was vastly superior to Bulldozer which was not very good at all.
And on October 31 it was time to launch Twitter Safety into the Sun.

On December 30 HololiveJP found new and exciting ways to die in Minecraft, Intel's upcoming Alder lake looked frankly awful, the MacOS internet recover feature would recover you to the previous release, and we revisited an entire month of gunpowder, treason, and plot in November

On November 1 since when did Terraria have minecarts?
On November 2 the Raspberry Pi 400 was 2020's answer to the ZX 80.
On November 3 Apple invited everyone into their roach motel.
On November 4 Twitch suspended musicians for playing their own music.
On November 5 Xioami unveiled the Xioami Ningmei Rubik's Cube Mini.
On November 6 I Vultr fixed my server in three minutes and thirty-nine seconds.
On November 7 "><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD was forced to change its name.
On November 8 Twitter went all in on reasons and locked me out of my account.
On November 9 Facebook was only reasons because they loved you.
On November 10 we got MariaDB temporal tables working and they were genuinely great.
On November 11 this claim was disputed and also considered harmful.
On November 12 Twitch set itself on fire, just because they are idiots.
On November 13 MacOS Bug Sir arrived and Apple immediately fucked everything up.
On November 14 we just used GZip with ZFS.
On November 15 Amazon was on fire, and spiders.
On November 16 Wordpress booted sites because reasons.
On November 17 we looked into a dual-core Intel CPU from 1977.
On November 18 Resellee wanted to be the Pinduoduo of Southeast Asia.
On November 19 I found two hosting providers who don't reasons their customers.
On November 20 Twitter's new feature that no-one wanted survived less than a day.
On November 21 YouTube chat was terrible again.
On November 22 Asus did not announce their new Tinkerboard 2.
On November 23 S3 was a semantic minefield.
On November 24 PayPal screwed up all my paypalments.
On November 25 Vivaldi was putting the good stuff back into their browser.
On November 26 we were back in Twitmo and zombie minks attacked.
On November 27 AWS collapsed in a heap and took the New York Subway with it.
On November 28 scientists found water of the coast of Hawaii.
On November 29 journalists were outraged that Facebook was still allowing people to post.
And on November 30 we snaffled two 1TB Western Digital Black SN750s.

On December 31 there was not a new but we did remember December.

On December 1 colapsado el Observatorio de Arecibo meant pretty much what it sounded like.
On December 2 Pharmaceuticals for Algernon.
On December 3 Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 888.
On December 4 the iPhone's wifi got hacked even if it was turned off at the time.
On December 5 Apple released the second beta for the patch to the fix to the update to Bug Sir.
On December 6 spores from planet Yuggoth were safely returned to Earth.
On December 7 Timnit Gebru was surprise removed and broadcasting TV over ESP.
On December 8 Microsoft Teams had worms.
On December 9 CentOS 8's EOL got pulled forward by about seven years.
On December 10 every detail of the story banned because reasons turned out to be true.
On December 11 Spotify leaked passwords somehow.
On December 12 we examined a $72,000-per-day free cloud server.
On December 13 the mainstream media lost the Jacobins.
On December 14 Google ran out of disk space and crashed. Globally.
On December 15 putting a slow NVMe SSD on a USB interface made it faster.
On December 16 Gmail fell over again and SolarWinds was a complete fucking mess.
On December 17 Ethereum pooped itself again.
On December 18 Apple's Bug Sir prevented you from updating itself.
On December 19 a bug in the Magecart malware provided a handy list of all the infected servers.
On December 20 we looked forward to replacing Google with Nextcloud.
On December 21 Apple tied up 80% of TSMC's 5nm capacity through 2021.
On December 22 I went cold-turkey on Hololive for nearly two whole days.
On December 23 the Fast Food Console wars began.
On December 24 Intel's Maple Ridge Thunderbolt 4 controller shipped.
On December 25 we looked at installing Windows on an Xbox One.
On December 26 we looked at a $225 mini-PC.
On December 27 we were back after a not particularly secret midnight bomber bombed at midnight.
On December 28 we just said no to Turbo.
On December 29 echo 'BBuaBubaBubbbaBubbbbaBubbbbbaBubbbbbba' | watson decode -t json.
On December 30 the MacOS internet recover feature would recover you to the previous release.
On December 31 there was not a new.

Disclaimer: I'm a dragon. I don't wear no undies. I'm fast.

â€” Kiryu Coco returning from a bathroom break during her New Year's Eve karaoke stream.

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1 I was kind of hoping that when you got to Dec 31 you were going to recurse another level. grin

Posted by: ed hering at Friday, January 01 2021 01:29 AM (yKa6S)

2 I thought about it, but sanity prevailed for once!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 01 2021 01:54 AM (PiXy!)

3 Also seems I have a few typos to fix in the morning. Problem with these posts is they turn into a sea of red squiggles with all the brand/model names and technical terms.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 01 2021 02:03 AM (PiXy!)

4 December 9 link was broken for me.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 01 2021 02:44 AM (6y7dz)

5 "Nvidia launched the RTX 3060 Ti and for some reason it's absurdly overpriced in Australia."
Good (?) news! It's absurdly overpriced in the US, too, thanks to scalpers. Bitwit had a video a day or two ago trawling Craigslist for people charging ripoff prices on new GPUs.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 01 2021 07:11 AM (eqaFC)

6 https://https://ai.mee.nu/archive/2020/daily_news_stuff_9_deccember_2020 You just need to learn how to spell "Deccember".

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 01 2021 07:12 AM (LADmw)

7 https://ai.mee.nu/archive/2020/daily_news_stuff_9_december_2020
I'm not good at this.

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 01 2021 07:14 AM (LADmw)

8 https://ai.mee.nu/archive/2020/daily_news_stuff_9_deccember_2020 I missed my nap, I guess

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 01 2021 07:15 AM (LADmw)

9 December is now spelled correctly. smile

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 01 2021 03:45 PM (PiXy!)

10 Also noticed that dec. 10's link goes to dec. 19, but that is much less of an issue.

I found the coverage of the imaginary retrocomputing project interesting. I'm just starting to have the background to follow what was going on.

I'm still not sure when I started following AI this year. Looks like early December, or before. Which is a little surprising, given that this was still during a period when I very much did not have a lot of spoons to spare.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, January 02 2021 04:01 AM (6y7dz)

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Daily News Stuff 30 December 2020

Server Upgrade Woes

Tech News

HololiveJP upgraded their Minecraft server to the latest version, and everyone immediately discovered new ways to die and lose their items.
Intel's upcoming 16-core Alder Lake shows similar multi-threaded performance to the Ryzen 3600X. (Tom's Hardware)

Harsh, man.

The chip has eight big cores and eight little (Atom) cores, but still, that's pretty bad.
If you use the internet recovery feature on an Intel Mac, it will only recover to Catalina, not Bug Sir. (Mr Macintosh)

Arm-based Macs aren't affected by this problem. They can't use internet recovery at all.
Did some work with the Matic Ethereum sidechain today. Yes, the Solidity language is still kind of crap, and yes, the tooling in JavaScript is every kind of crap, but transactions taking 3.4 seconds and costing $0.000004 takes some of the sting out of it.

Essential Minecraft Mods Video of the Day

November

On November 1 since when did Terraria have minecarts, paging Big Hero 6, Intel's DG1 card was coming to the desktop, no, seriously, stop laughing, and there were zero new cases of Bat Flu in Australia.
On November 2 the Raspberry Pi 400 was 2020's answer to the ZX 80, Samsung entered production on 5nm, San Francisco and New York were screwed, iCloud dropped dead, and NASA's SLS ain't gonna work.
On November 3 Apple invited everyone into their roach motel, 1984 was a cookbook, the Ryzen 5600X was slightly slower than the 3700X, and undocumented colours on the Tandy Colour Computer. Also, everyone rode the Death Coaster.
On November 4 California's Proposition 22 was set to pass, proving that the only solution for a bad law was a worse law that couldn't ever be repealed, Australia's STEM workforce was set to reach parity by 2091, Ant's IPO got spiked, and Twitch suspended musicians for playing their own music. Also, Asa Coco University was on Google Maps.
On November 5 Xioami unveiled the - I am not making this up - Xioami Ningmei Rubik's Cube Mini, Ryzen 5000 went on sale and was out of stock in 3.75 Planck times, Florida released three quarters of a billion mutant mosquitoes, and the New York Times was sitting quietly in its corner, drooling and nibbling its hair.
On November 6 I got annoyed because reasons, Vultr fixed my server in three minutes and thirty-nine seconds - where with IBM Cloud at my day job I have been waiting A WHOLE FUCKING WEEK FOR THEM EVEN TO RESPOND and that's after our account manager escalated the ticket twice, Zen 3 went brrrr, the timing of the release of the new Xbox could have been better, and San Francisco killed itself some more because why not?
On November 7 Facebook went all-in on reasons, scientists discovered the Nether, "><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD was forced to change its name, TokuDB was depreciated, and the gluten-free chilli wasn't.
On November 8 Parler hit two million users, my GitLab server imploded, but I was able to scrape it back together from a corrupted virtual machine image and it worked again, Twitter went all in on reasons and locked me out of my account, and it was probably all Casper's fault.
On November 9 Facebook was only reasons because they loved you, older versions of Android were going to stop working with Let's Encrypt - unless you installed Firefox, so just do that, and running BGP on a Lego brick. No, really.
On November 10 we got MariaDB temporal tables working and they were great, the Ryzen 5700U was a 4800U, Zoom lied, and the tame Apple press had a brief moment of clarity before it went back to being the tame Apple press. And I encountered Haachama's opening theme for the first time.
On November 11 this claim was disputed and also considered harmful, I fucking hated Elasticsearch, Apple announced a new family of desktop iPhones, AMD updated Ryzen Embedded to Zen 2, there was a rather nasty security bug in Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop, Hyundai was looking to buy Boston Dynamics.
On November 12 ugh, I got some UI that loaded fast, at least, TSMC approved $3.5 billion to construct a 5nm plant in Arizona, and Twitch set itself on fire, not because reasons, just because they are idiots.
On November 13 Aria tables weren't any better than InnoDB, Facebook tripled down on reasons, passively cooled Ryzen mini-servers from ASRock, MacOS Bug Sir arrived, Apple immediately fucked everything up, preventing Catalina and Bug Sir users from launching apps unless they first disconnected their internet access - and then it got worse, and Target removed a book.
On November 14 I was testing Mana at scale - small scale, but scale, X-NAND was NAND only X, Target apologised and put the book back, and just use GZip with ZFS.
On November 15 if it's too good to be true you probably disabled the full-text index, more bad news for Bug Sir - news that Apple knew about all along and decided to ignore, Amazon was on fire, and spiders.
On November 16 the first regular launch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon, um, launched, Wordpress booted sites because reasons, Free Republic also got reasonsed by their hosting company, iPhone development was a disaster area, and the OnePlus 8T camera was great about half the time.
On November 17 GitHub reinstated Youtube-dl, the Azure Python library was so large you couldn't deploy it on Amazon Lambda, new graphics cards you can't afford (and also can't get), and a dual-core Intel CPU from 1977.
On November 18 Resellee wanted to be the Pinduoduo of Southeast Asia, Epic Games sued Apple some more, Ethereum continue to be crap, Twitter announced a new feature that no-one asked for and that would almost certainly not work, and the new blacklist.
On November 19 I found two hosting providers who don't reasons, we looked at Big Navi, the tame Apple press immediately changed its mind about what you need from hardware when Apple stopped providing what they previously said you needed, and Outbrain joined reasons club.
On November 20 Twitter's new feature that no-one asked for lasted less than a day before collapsing in a heap, Bug Sir was worse than we could imagine, Zen 2 NUCs arrived from Gigabyte, Devfonts had fonts for devs, the threat of the leapn't second, Buzzfeed bought the Huffington Post because no-one else would, and Journalists For Reasons struck again.
On November 21 YouTube chat was terrible, Radeon 6000 third-party cards were on their way and expected to solve the supply problems, and end-to-end ECC vs, a 0.1Â¢ surface-mount resistor.
On November 22 Asus did not announce their new Tinkerboard 2, Twitter's new fleets feature did not work in any way whatsoever, angry Haskell noises, and ChromeOS without so much Chrome in it.
On November 23 the Ryzen 5600X was the best mainstream gaming CPU, the ASRock 4x4 didn't suck, and S3 was a semantic minefield.
On November 24 PayPal screwed up all my paypalments, MyNOR was a homebrew CPU with a one-transistor ALU, Maddy was a mail server, and burning down your own home for fun and profit.
On November 25 Arm-based Macs were only slightly more open than a brick, Vivaldi was putting the good stuff back into their browser, I was tempted by 32GB DIMMs, memory leaks were working as planned, the Poco M3 was announced starting at $149, and the new Razer Blade Stealth was utterly pointless.
On November 26 we were back in Twitmo, minks attacked, Cowputers returned, a macro-mini-ITX Epyc server motherboard, and third-party Radeon 6000 cards arrived and lasted about as long as a snowflake on the surface of the Sun.
On November 27 the midpoint between zero and infinity was 1.5, PHP 8.0 was released, Russia announced its intention to ban Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and AWS collapsed in a heap and took the New York Subway with it.
On November 28 cheap NVMe SSDs were going, going, gone, we looked at the Western Digital Black SN750, and scientists found water of the coast of Hawaii.
On November 29 Journalists For Reasons were outraged that Facebook was still allowing people to post, OpenVPN was ugh, and Ruffle was a Flash player written in Rust.
And on November 30 the Western Digital Black SN750 was on sale about 40% below its usual Australian price and we grabbed two of 'em, don't make your users mad, 35 years with the Amiga, and did Nvidia sell $175 million worth of RTX 3000 cards directly to crypto miners?

Disclaimer: For answers to questions such as these... We dunno.

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Tuesday, December 29

Daily News Stuff 29 December 2020

Drawing The Shortbread Straw Edition

Tech News

Xiaomi has announced the Mi 11, the first official announcement of a Snapdragon 888 device. (AnandTech)

Though there have been leaks.

The Snapdragon 888 includes one X1 core and three A78 cores, and should be a good bit faster on single-threaded tasks than the current A77-based chips. I'm not sure exactly how much faster, though, because the benchmarks I've seen are for the server-optimised N1, N2, and V1 cores, and not the mobile-optimised X1.

But faster, anyway.
Gigabyte's B550M Aorus Pro looks like a decent inexpensive AMD motherboard. (Tom's Hardware)

The B550 chipset isn't as capable as the X570, but it's ahead of last year's X470. It's not bad by any means. This board for example has two x4 M.2 slots, something most X470 motherboards lacked. (The PCIe on the X470 chipset was only 2.0 speed in any case.)
The Ryzen 5900H mobile APU is nearly as fast as Intel's Core i9-10900 unless... No, this one is probably right. (WCCFTech)

The 10900 is barely faster than a desktop 3700X at server tasks, so I'd be surprised if this were not the case.
How Nissin caused the great bucatini shortage of 2020. (Grub Street)

With a delay of several decades between cause and effect.
Watson is an esoteric language for configuration files. (Reddit)

Me: Ha. That's funny, I was just watching Hololive's Amelia Watson earlier today.

Watson docs:
You can create arbitrary integers by using these instructions:

$ echo 'BBuaBubaBubbbaBubbbbaBubbbbbaBubbbbbba' | watson decode -t json
123
As the thread says, r/hololive is leaking again.
How AWS added Mac Mini nodes to EC2. (Serve the Home)

Basically, they took Mac Minis and stuck them in a rack. Oh, and a bunch of completely custom hardware for remote management over Thunderbolt.
LG's new 86" 8K TV has 30,000 lighting zones. (ZDNet)

Should be great for HDR. Apparently Samsung is preparing something similar, which is odd because they stopped making LCDs.
China has jailed the journalist who broke the news on Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague for breaking the news on Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague. (BBC)

Seriously though, the story is appalling. China ruins everything, but most of all, China ruins China.

October

On October 1 Humble's Corel Draw Bundle didn't actually contain Corel Draw, the Surface Go was adequate - if you avoided the terribly underpowered entry model, the Surface Pro X was meh, the XMG DJ 15 had all the ports, 3270font was what it said on the tin, the Great Peanut Brittle Shortage of 2020, The Elf and the Hunter's Item Atelier, and the Intel 8051 had 128 bytes of RAM.
On October 2 Dwarf Fortress turned out to be a great source of low-resolution bitmapped fonts, Transport Tycoon and the Memotech MTX 512, and a leaked benchmark of the 5900X turned out to be pretty damn accurate.
On October 3 the 11th generation ZenBook 13 wasn't terrible, we took a guided tour of the pixel-packing plant, and Apple patched the fix to their update.
On October 4 Green Sardine joined Navy Flounder, Sienna Cichlid, and Dimgrey Cavefish, NestedText was 98% less insane than YAML, which is still a bit insane, Ubuntu 20.10 beta was here, and so was PHP 8 RC1 because we can't have nice things.
On October 5 running Doom 3 on an RTX 3090 - as a RAM disk, a preview of a preview of the Xbox Series X, Windows kernel timers were horrible, and I was tricked by Western Digital's naming. Also, DOOG.
On October 6 Nvidia replaced video meeting codecs with video puppets, USB 4 was worse than USB 3, Python 3.9 was out, and I was watching YouTube streams from a parallel universe.
On October 7 the House Judiciary Committee report on Big Tech came back and recommended taking off and nuking the entire site from orbit, Netflix got indicted, Apples T2 security chip was broken and unfixable - though exploits require physical access, and we got a Baldur's Gate 3 release trailer.
On October 8 Intel announced its new Rocket Lake desktop lineup which is still months away even now, AMD announced the Ryzen 5000 family, and the former head of Apple's App Store testified that yes, the store's policies are set up explicitly to illegally abuse a monopoly position.
On October 9 Hololive livestreams were unwatchable - a problem that turned out not the be the streams themselves but Chrome's terrible handling of YouTube chat, the latest Acer Nitro 9 paired Renoir with Turing, and AMD was rumoured to be looking to buy Xilinx, which as it happened, they were, and did.
On October 10 you could no longer run Star Citizen on a Pentium, not that the game will ever actually see release, the Xeon W-1270 was kind of meh, scientists found a better solution to the Travelling Salesman problem - 0.0000000000000000000000000000000002% better, yes, but it was thought to be impossible, and Twitter escalated its war against its own users.
On October 11 lunasvg was a standalone SVG rendering library, CSV at 2GB per second, automating reversible functions in Julia, and all DRAM has the same access speed. DDR1-333 has the same random access latency as DDR5-6400.
On October 12 the Seeed Grove Beginners Kit was good value at $19.90, Telepath was a new social network for idiots, JuliaMono had all the glyphs, an office suite in four lines of code, and the Pentagon contracted SpaceX to deliver mail by rocket.
On October 13 the Ryzen 5600 was probably on its way and probably still is, the Xeon W-1290P was the fastest small-server Xeon and still meh, a new Amiga for 2021, and serverless was always bullshit.
On October 14 the iPhone 12 came out, Krita 4.4 came out and we couldn't remember what Krita was, sneaky tricks with cartridge ports, Amazon Prime Video wasn't good, but Netflix was worse, and Torchlight 3 got a launch trailer. Apparently the latest update makes it into a fairly decent game.
On October 15 everything about the Hunter Biden laptop story was true, and everything the mainstream media and Big Tech said about it was a calculated lie. Oh, and something about a room-temperature superconductor.
On October 16 Twitter crashed, Slack quickly followed suit, we were somewhat irate with the utter bullshit flowing from social media companies' spokespuppets, Nim 1.4 was out and pretty good, and we reported in on the LA jetpack guy.
On October 17 Ryzen 5000 and liquid nitrogen - two great tastes, Atlassian took a leaf out of Apple's book and told it's customers to get fucked, and GitLab 13.4 is out. While GitLab has had a few bumps along the way, and it's getting kind of memory-hungry, they consistently pump out solid new releases with solid new features for free. They make their money from enterprise customers, and I hope they continue to succeed because it's great stuff. Oh, and PHP sucked.
On October 18 we got 1.2TB of microSD cards,the New York Post's Twitter account was still locked over an entirely accurate and correct news story, 50Gb Ethernet cards, twenty-five European governments announced plans to set €10 billion on fire, and more Node malware. Note Node itself, other Node malware.
On October 19 Google and Facebook went to war with Australia's ABC, who are also filthy commies but the old school variety that you don't see so much anymore, the Raspberry Pi 4 compute module was, an Intel laptop with Intel graphics from Asus, AMD made its model numbering problems even worse, and there would be four models of the Radeon 6900, maybe. Oh, and God Mode in Windows 10. Literally.
On October 20 the battery on my nice Dell Laptop was 110% dead, Intel sold its flash memory division to Hynix, and Epyc Milan looked promising. Still does, because it's still not available. If you're a regular user, anyway; apparently Amazon, Microsoft, and Google aren't having trouble getting them.
On October 21 Osiris Rex landed safely on Bennu, and there was no ~~Dana~~ FreeNas, only ~~Zuul~~ TrueNAS.
On October 22 the 5950X hit 5GHz with a regular cooler, no liquid anythings, the 3070 could outrun a 2080 Ti but you couldn't get one, OAuth 3 was heading our way to make everything worse, and how the perfectly nice ironclad beetle survives getting run over.
On October 23 Intel shipped its DG1 graphics chip to an eager audience of nobody, the Ryzen 5600X was fast, Amazon was openly engaging in fraud, Ubuntu 20.10 was out, and a small shark hit one million subscribers.
On October 24 we got a new Penric and Desdemona story, the RTX 3070 Ti died on the vine, leaked benchmarks of the Radeon 6000 family looked great - shame we didn't get leaked availability data, GitLab went down - we did mention a few bumps, Xerox PARC got a DARPA contract and we expressed surprise that either entity still existed, Patreon banned QAnon, Hololive streamed 32 hours of Minecraft content in one day, and The Outer Worlds came out. Oh, and the RIAA Streisanded youtube-dl.
On October 25 it was fourteen degrees in Sydney in late October, somehow, someone tweeted out the source code for youtube-dl, someone else managed to get it into GitHub's official DMCA repo - sort of, then they came for the Jacobins, some cookies were more equal than others, and programming in Algol on the Atari XL.
On October 26 Azerbaijan posted notices of Armenian violations of their ceasefire agreement - but accidentally pushed Send before the violations supposedly happened, escaped cloned female mutant crayfish took over a Belgian cemetery - a headline that could not be beaten in a normal year, Twitter censored warnings about Twitter censoring warnings, passive cooling was hard, the RIAA was full of crap, and the Ryzen 5950X showed up. In Passmark. It went whoosh.
On October 27 AMD bought Xilinx as we mentioned, Zoom censored warnings about Zoom censoring warnings, 3% of Starlink satellites failed shortly after launch which is about the industry average, and The PlayStation 5 looked terrible. Not its capabilities, the physical design. Seriously, what the hell? And there was water on the Moon.
On October 28 AMD recorded record records, the RTX 3070 got tested and pronounced "good but nonexistent", GitHub played the good guys - for real, and MacOS would damage your computer.
On October 29 we ran out of frogs, AMD's Radeon RX 6000 arrived for approximately seven femtoseconds, 5nm was 50% denser than 7nm, the ten quintillion dollar asteroid, and the Scottish National Party is run by Nazis. Oh, and Hololive really likes Queen.

This is probably my favourite clip because of the trouble she goes to to play the song in-game.

Also the pure Elite Miko energy. Though Haachama's recent video was actually in tune.
On October 30 Zen 3 was a lot better than Zen 2 which was a lot better than Zen 1 which was vastly superior to Bulldozer which was not very good, Intel released more details of chips that still don't exist, yes we have no video cards, restaurants had had enough of Grubhub's shit, and I played laptop charger badminton.
On October 31 Big Navi got benchmarked, it was time to launch Twitter Safety into the Sun, Sony reportedly wanted to buy Crunchyroll, and Mars declared independence.

Disclaimer: Out of frog error. Redo from start.

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Monday, December 28

Daily News Stuff 28 December 2020

Back On The Chain Gang Edition

Tech News

Back to work tomorrow - just for two days because there was no-one else to cover support. Then I have a few more days off.
Turbo is a framework for building single-page apps without having to write JavaScript. (Hotwire)

Written in JavaScript.

Well, TypeScript. Which is just JavaScript but with a nun with a ruler standing over you.

I think you can use it as the front end for any back end though. They mention Ruby on Rails specifically.

The idea is that it decomposes your page into a bunch of sub-requests, calls them all on the server in parallel, builds the page, and ships it out. And when one part of the page needs updating, it makes just the request needed for that part.

So page loads get rendered on the server, but page updates are rendered incrementally, without needing to write extra code.

Could be worth a closer look.
You can install Turbo from npm
Or on the other hand they can fuck the hell off and never darken my door again.
China's planned regulations for Alibaba and the broader Ant group.... Seem to make sense (Tech Crunch)

I mean, I trust the CCP even less than Google, which is to say as much as gas station sushi in Alabama in August in 1962, but what they are actually saying is not outrageous.
They raised the level caps in Idle Champions.
A high-tech two-acre vertical farm can outproduce a 720-acre real farm. (Intelligent Living)

This is easy enough to achieve if cost is factored out entirely and you only care about salads. Not even good salads. Kale. Useful for the Moon and Mars though.

Explaining Hololive

This is real.

And for Wonderduck, here's a subtitled version of the Pekora Minecraft clip from before. Hope this clears everything up for you, Wonderduck.

September

On September 1 we looked at some classic Japanese home computers, and... Oh, right, the specs of the initial RTX 3000 cards were leaked.
On September 2 Ethereum gas prices peaked at 660, Intel launched their Tiger Lake family, whichever one that is, Acer announced some Tiger Lake laptops which were actually quite nice but would be better if they used AMD, Nvidia launched their RTX 3000 range making the earlier leak a bit of a non-event, and bubble memory was surprisingly slow.
On September 3 we looked more closely at wavetable synthesis both on a 3MHz 10-bit CPU and in modern software, Qualcomm announced the 8cx gen 2 which was the exact same chip as the 8cx gen 1, and Arm announced the Cortex R82 which is an embedded processor capable of directly addressing 1TB of RAM.
On September 4 Ethereum gas prices peaked at 28,925 - I had forgotten that, restaging Gallipoli with rubber duckies, Melbourne went full Stalin, kicking down doors of people accused of posting on Facebook, Samsung announced the Galaxy Fold 2, and we discovered that NEC had a 9MB floppy drive all the way back in 1988. Oh, and full specs for the Imagine 1000.
On September 5 we died of dysentery after downloading 100,000 pages of documentation for 1980s computers, text editing for podcast, how modern digital pregnancy tests really work (hint: very small rabbits), and I couldn't do math.
On September 6 the HP Omen 15 had the four essential keys, we found a PDP-11/70 emulator that runs in your browser, Snap sucked, and HP Basic didn't.
On September 7 QB64 was a 64-bit Basic compiler, we discovered some really nice game resource packs on Itch.io, the Poco X3 NFC seemed like a decent phone, magenta did not exist, and Google fixed one of the worst Chrome misfeatures.
On September 8 Microsoft announced the Sbox, the SiPearl Rhea had 72 Zeus cores, Jasper Lake was, well, something, Ryzen 4000 would include 10-core parts (this has very much not happened), Progress bought Chef, and Italy and Australia opened noticed Apple-kouhai. Oh, and Itch.io is just full of resource kits suitable for classic computer games.
On September 9 BEEEEP, the Sbox cost less than its components, some Western Digital 5400rpm drives turned out to run at 7200 rpm, and squeezing 256 colours into 5 bits.
On September 10 AMD took over the top ten slots in Passmark entirely (today the best Intel result is a $7500 Xeon coming in at #15 while costing more than every AMD part above it), get your own Threadripper Pro 3995WX system for just $18,000, AMD announced its upcoming Zen 3 and RDNA 2 announcements.
On September 11 the Surface Duo was a brilliant $299 device priced at $1399, Synology introduced their first desktop 10Gbit device, promising rumours the RTX 3060 Ti surfaced (and it did in fact turn out to be a nice card), and the iPhone camera app normalised the California fires out of existence. Oh, and the SNES hardware was insane. It did a matrix multiplication for address calculation, on every single clock cycle.
On September 12 the Nightmare 13 was horrible, the Phantom 9 was a Z90, and the Mirage 11 was one louder, I started writing an emulator generator, time to download an Amiga, the first benchmarks of the Radeon 6000 range leaked (and were on the low side of what was actually released), YAML was bad, Apple continued to Apple its customers, and long cat could get its own damn coffee.
On September 13 multiple register banks were the way to go - and also multiple stack pointers, because why not, the Iconikal SBC was $7.99 on Amazon except they didn't have any, per explodia ad astra, and a look at the classic HP 150 touchscreen PC.
On September 14 writing a Basic compiler in Python, Nvidia bought Arm, Microsoft did not buy TikTok, Nikola imploded, and the CBP impounded 2000 sets of OnePlus-branded OnePlus ear buds for not being Apple. Oh, and cheating in text mode for fun and legibility, and actual 1980s hardware did it first.
On September 15 3D-printing BMO, don't write a recursive-descent parser, another nice game resource pack, an 1121 qubit quantum computer, and no-one was going to get a PS5 for Christmas.
On September 16 the RTX 3080 was great and you can't have one, Apple's new iPads were okay, I guess, China fucked itself, I accidentally reproduced the Microbee Gamma on paper, and yes, Virginia, Nim can compile to a Raspberry Pi.
On September 17 Sony revealed the PS5 and also the Xperia 5 II, Tiger Lake was the CPU of choice for Dwarf Fortress, an LL(1) expression parser in 100 lines of Python that didn't work, and what happened to the Z800.
On September 18 SiFive was preparing a desktop RISC-V processor, a rather nice imaginary computer, Apple complained that Epic Games was interfering with its ongoing abuse of its monopoly position, the PS5 could run PS4 games but not PS1 or PS2 games even though the PS4 could run PS1 and PS2 games, and we watched far too many Dragon Spirit videos.
On September 19 the RTX 3080 was released and immediately sold out, and the PlayStation 5 went up for pre-order and immediately sold out, VueJS hit 3.0, MSX1 was bad, and the Sharp X68000 was good.
On September 20 the Amiga was a hell of a lot better than the Atari ST, a motherboard with 20 USB ports, the new Spider Man game was a 105GB download, Intel submitted their secure enclave patches for inclusion in the Linux kernel again - after being rejected thirty-seven times, Russia headed back to Venus maybe, and tricks you could play with one bit.
On September 21 it wasn't Chrome fucking up the comments but an expired SSL certificate, China was at war with everyone, the US Air Force skunk-worked like they had never skunk-worked before, I knew why the Hololive JP girls referred to to Gura as Same-chan, and the Ars Technica comments were very briefly worth reading.

Plus twelve hours of high-spec chiptunes.
On September 22 Arm announced the N2 and V1 cores, Microsoft bought Bethesda, and the 74LS861 was magic. Also, Elasticsearch took seven seconds to search 28,000 records on a 4.5GHz 24-core Threadripper server.
On September 23 we had a day, the Samsung Pro 980 abandoned MLC, Intel found some atoms somewhere, and AMD was preparing a next-plus-one generation APU.
On September 24 HP had a 4K laptop with 8GB of non-upgradable RAM, the RTX 3090 arrived and immediately sold out, Amazon showed off their fall lineup of telescreens, and a 1TB storage module for the Sbox cost nearly as much as the Sbox itself. Also, free anime.
On September 25 we decoded Intel's 10nm mess, Google decided that an Apple a day was a good way to fuck its customers, and an entry-level Epyc server from ASRock. Entry-level as in it's limited to 1TB of RAM.
On September 26 Seagate released a buzzword-laden announcement of a new object storage platform that managed to hide the key fact that the whole thing was open source and available for download immediately on GitHub, the RTX 3000 capacitor fiasco, Dimgrey Cavefish joined the school, and Google Maps removed photos of Ayer's Rock.
On September 27 Navy Flounder joined Sienna Cichlid and Dimgrey Cavefish, PyPy updated to Python 3.7, Toshiba announced 25Gb Ethernet SSDs, and San Francisco asked everyone to please leave.
On September 28 we fell completely down the rabbit hole, the RTX 3060 would have more cores and worse performance than the 2080 Ti, researchers found the man page for a secret Nazi supercomputer, and tried turning it off and on again, which would explain the remainder of 2020, SectorForth was a complete Forth system that fit in a boot sector, and the source code for the original BBC Micro version of Elite was rediscovered, annotated, and published.
On September 29 the Cortex 78AE was an embedded Cortext A78, the Thinpad X1 Nano was a smaller Thinpad X1, reasonably enough, the X1 Fold was a notebook that - novel idea - folded, and DuckDuckGo had about a zillion magic search codes.

Still down the rabbit hole, if you were wondering.

There are a lot more rabbits now, but Roboco still doesn't have any pants. Actually looking back at this, they've grown up a lot in just six months.
And on September 30 we never update our operating system, we found someone even worse at SQL extensions than the PostgreSQL team, Neo4j fixed the limitations that made me sideline it previously, and this house.

Disclaimer: Good morning, motherfuckers.

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Sunday, December 27

Daily News Stuff 27 December 2020

Gotta Pay The Bills Edition

Tech News

Someone sneezed in Sydney's Northern Beaches - about twenty miles from where I live - and toilet paper is rationed again.

On the other hand, the shelves are full. Being limited to two packs per customer but having plenty of supply is definitely preferable to the other way around.
AMD needs a Ryzen 5700X. (Tom's Hardware)

They will likely release one as soon as they manage to keep the 5600X and 5800X in stock for more than a few days at a time.
Asus seems to have leaked the RTX 3060 and 3080 Ti. (Tom's Hardware)

Both have 12GB of RAM. It will be interesting to see how they position the price on the 3060 against the 8GB 3060 Ti, which in Australia is bloody expensive.
How to make your API horrible. (Solovyov)

I hate APIs that do this. There is some useful discussion at Hacker News though.
No! Why would you do that?! (Serve the Home)

The Sabrent Rocket Q4 is a PCIe 4.0 QLC SSD. The cost of the PCIe 4.0 controller makes it more expensive than even a high-end PCIe 3.0 TLC drive, and while it is faster on sequential reads, QLC isn't great at write-intensive workloads. It's really bad at write-intensive workloads.

I guess if you want a nice big expansion drive for your PlayStation 5, this could fit nicely.
iCloud fell over. (CNet)

While Apple is particularly plagued by this sort of thing, no cloud provider went without a major outage in 2020.

August

On August 1 Twitter got hacked by a 17-year-old from Florida, because your security is only as strong as the weakest link and Twitter's weakest link was very weak indeed, and meanwhile RedHat made their weakest link 100% secure, so much so that your servers would no longer boot.
On August 2 the Dragon returned to Earth, Bootstrap Icons was a set of icons for Bootstrap, and Tesla and Google re-invented cookies.
On August 3 we visited Derepedia, Pleroma was a fediverse node written in Elixir and not a reportable medical condition, except that it also used Node.js which is.
On August 4 we were reincarnated as a wombat in a world where P=NP, Ryzen hit 6W except it was still Zen 1, Intel's next-gen chips would beat AMD's current-gen chips, and weird shit the PostgreSQL query optimiser taught me. Oh, and Windows Defender defended you from defending yourself. Peachy.
On August 5 Apple released new iMacs, ranging in price up to A$13,748 and already obsolete, Luau was Lua with types, Parkinson's law applied to web page load times just as every other field of human endeavour, and a SpaceX Starship prototype didn't explode.
On August 6 Samsung launched the Note 20 and Tab S7, Twitter locked the Trump presidential campaign out of its account over a factually accurate tweet, and the matte finish option on the new iMac turned out to cost as much as two Acer 27" 4K monitors.
On August 7 MySQL decided to drop 20% of incoming connections, Intel got hacked - sort of - and sort-of confidential documents were sort-of leaked, and Apple forbade game streaming on iOS because they are idiots.
On August 8 I was playing Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, apparently, Google bought the creator of Focal smart glasses and immediately bricked all existing devices, the Note 20 was not very good, and Julia could compile static binaries.
On August 9 Twitter was in talks with TikTok to create the worst website ever envisioned, scientists actually demonstrated working cold fusion - useless for energy production, but working, and several hundred critical bugs were found in Qualcomm's DSP firmware.
On August 10 Department of Corporate Slave Rabbits came to an end, but to make up for it we got alcohol from air.
On August 11 the Oppo Reno3 came with an A75, A76, or A77 core depending on where you bought it, the Oppo A52 looked good, Reddit committed slow suicide, the customer was mostly wrong, ASRock showed off a standard ATX EPYC motherboard which might be very interesting now with Epyc 3 close to retail release, China blocked all TLS 1.3 connections, Ceres had an ocean, and 2020 was summed up in one tweet.
On August 12 a 128-core six-screen laptop for very large laps, LPDDR5 <> DDR5, Genius used Trap Street, there's a hole in the radio telescope, dear Liza, AMD clobbered Intel in value competition even after Intel slashed its prices, and Microsoft announced the Surface Duo, a very nice pocket productivity device for the busy young businessperson on the go in a year when all the busy young businesspersons are sitting at home in their pyjamas.
On August 13 Humble Bundle packaged Vegas, Sound Forge, and Acid Music Studio at a very reasonable price and if you missed it they're doing it again right now, Intel spilled a deet, Twitter announced their new API and hurriedly reassured developers that the old API wasn't going away because the new one was a train wreck, TechDirt got the DTs and I dumped them from my list of news sources, and I still don't trust Dropbox.
On August 14 Micron announced GDDR6X RAM - now ued in Nvidia's high-end cards, Ethereum gas prices briefly hit 300, Intel confirmed DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 for 2021, which probably means 2023, SpaceX's Starlink didn't suck, web browsers did, and YouTube went full Kafka. Oh, and the Yam cryptocurrency self-destructed - due to a bug rather than the more usual someone running off with the funds.
On August 15 notes on writing your own virtual machine, Ubuntu updated the kernel version on an LTS release, apparently forgetting what the S stands for, Clippy got a job with Twitter, and I migrated all my music over from Google Play to YouTube (since Google Play Music is now deceased) and only lost one track out of the thousands I'd uploaded - Deborah Conway's Holes in the Road. ((I chose Google Play Music precisely because it let me upload all the tracks I'd ripped from my own and my father's CD collections.)
On August 16 Google Cloud had more death flags than an otome game villain, and a California court found that Amazon does in fact sell the products it sells.
On August 17 a rather nice and not insanely expensive HP laptop, Notepad++ got banned in China, IBM announced their Power 10, and I realised that Hot Chips was on.
On August 18 the Chuwi AeroBook Pro also had a 4K display, but had a five year old CPU to go with it, IBM's Power 10 and z15 CPUs were too complicated to even describe coherently, Big Tech was playing Notice Me Senpai with the DOJ, a strategy that appears to be paying off, just not for them, and a new biography of Dave Brubeck got around to mentioning his birth on page 302.
On August 19 the A520 chipset was in fact a chipset, Microsoft presented the Xbox Series X, and Baldur's Gate 3 was announced for early access starting September 30. I should check on how that's going.
On August 20 Intel actually said what Tiger Lake would be, though they've probably forgotten which one it is by now, Melbourne got a brand new 212-storey residential skyscraper - in Microsoft Flight Simulator, and the Eiuyuden Kickstarter unlocked its 30th stretch goal.
On August 21 I started tinkering with my 10-bit home computer emulator, a Lightroom update helpfully freed up large amounts of storage by deleting all your photos, and the Synology DS1520+ was still only gigabit.
On August 22 the 6502 was fucking weird - and so was the BBC Micro that used it, 95 nearby brown dwarfs were discovered though none closer to us than Alpha Centauri, and Microsoft Flight Simulator required all the hardware.
On August 23 I tried out Nim for my emulator after running some initial experiments in Python, and it actually worked great, a retail release of Ryzen 4000 APUs sold out in minutes, we found a guide to de-Googling your life, and no-one recycled dead solar panels.
On August 24 server-side rendering was the new hotness, and Zoom went down. Also, 128k of RAM really is not a lot.
On August 25 Nim worked nicely, TSMC's 5nm node entered production with a total of one customer, and why not write your configuration files in JavaScript.
On August 26 birds were kind of dumb, the new version of Firefox for Android was bad, we underestimated the price of the RTX 3090 but not by much, the Zenfone 7 went bziiip and we looked at classic graphics chips from the 1980s.
On August 27 TSMC pushed GAA back to 2nm, Salesforce recorded reocrd profits and record layoffs, Fucking Elastic recorded a record share price, Arwes made your app look like 2020 as seen from 1980, and ArangoDB had some good stuff.
On August 28 8-bit Atari systems had an early version of the Amiga Copper chip, you will soon be able to exit your ship in Elite, Google declared war on the Fediverse, First Rule of 30% Fee Club is Do Not Mention 30% Fee Club, and we remembered the HP Series 200 Model 16.
On August 29 the Eiyuden Kickstarter ran out of ideas for new stretch goals after clearing 45 of them, Marvel cancelled their Arm server processors, Apple told everyone to go fuck themselves, a malloc Geiger counter was actually kind of a good idea, and Objective-Rust.
On August 30 I completed the programming model for my 10-bit home computer emulator - currently unfortunately on hiatus, Rochester Electronics had 27 billion components in stock in a warehouse the size of Belgium, and Google decided to attempt necromancy on Macromedia Flash only this time with "open" standards that just happened to be entirely controlled by Google.
And on August 31 we explored how to cheat wavetable synthesis into existence in a 1983 home computer, on a clear dodecahedron you could walk forever, Cloudflare sort of went down only it was someone else's fault and they blamed BGP, Pinterest decided they didn't need a shiny new building in the Bay Area, and Apple was working on an in-house GPU. Oh, and the media started tweeting their "fiery but peaceful" pieces because they have no understanding of how Twitter selects an image to associate with a link.

Disclaimer: Or for that matter of anything else.

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Ah, We're Back

All three of our servers in Dallas disappeared for a while. There was a network outage somewhere, and I can guess what might have caused it.

First thought was my router had locked up. Second thought was I'd missed a support ticket, because I know I've paid the bills.

I spend so much time dealing with problems with websites that I reflexively panic when any site exhibits any sort of issue. YouTube is down? What could have caused it - is our MongoDB cluster still work... Oh. I don't run YouTube.

Probably Not Because of This

http://ai.mee.nu/images/CreamySpooders.jpg?size=720x&q=95

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Saturday, December 26

Daily News Stuff 26 December 2020

Post-Derpmas Coma Edition

Tech News

A useful little mini-PC from Azulle. (PC Perspective)

It's a quad-core Atom so it's not going to set any speed records, but it provides dual Ethernet ports and WiFi, five USB ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, and VGA, and costs $225 with 4GB RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage. You can add an M.2 NVMe drive and/or a 2.5" SATA drive, and another 4GB of RAM in theory.

In practice these Atoms reportedly work just fine up to 32GB.

Would make a nice home router / media box, or a server for your home office if you don't want to fuss around with VirtualBox.
Some settings to adjust whenever you install Windows. (Tom's Hardware)

For example, Storage Sense. Make sure that fucker is turned off. Nail it in place if you have to.
Did you know that there's a Windows hotkey that reduces a window to just the title bar? I don't know what it is, but I hit it a couple of minutes ago and was left hunting frantically for this post.
Also I may have too many Chrome windows open.
When you've lost Slashdot... (Slashdot)

A self-serving article from Coindesk about the bright future of crypto in 2021 - neglecting entirely to mention that 2020 was a fucking disaster - and the commenters piss all over it.
A Korean tokamak sustained 100 million degrees for 20 seconds. (Phys.org)

Practical fusion power is now only 19 years away.
iOS 14 has almost caught up with Android 4. (9to5Mac)

Widgets on the home screen, you say? How novel.

Essential Minecraft Mod Video of the Day

The conversation between the Minecraft rabbit Pekora and the Minecraft rabbit Pekomama is 100% real.

Pekora promised her fans that she'd come out to her family when she hit a million subscribers - she'd been keeping it secret the entire time that she was a cartoon rabbit. And she followed through, inviting her mother to join her live on stream, with 130,000 viewers, completely cold.

When her mother used her own trademark peko she died of embarrassment. Twice.

July

On July 1 Apple killed the PC as we knew it, if "as we knew it" was "a Mac retaining any semblance of openness", Amazon delivered snowcones, and ruining open source projects for fun and profit. Speaking of fun and profit, EOFY reporting requirements suck.
On July 2 we dove deep into Intel's crappy Lakefield thing, LG produced a 17" laptop weighing less than three pounds, the Rust compiler will never be fast, Microsoft made the start menu somewhat less worse, and the Color Maximite 2 arrived, runnin Basic code about as fast as a 6502 could run assembler. Also a whole bunch of anime was pushed back to 2021.... Which is now almost here.

Non Non Biyori season 3 airs starting January 10.
On July 3 don't use archive.org as a CDN, beating the Blub Paradox, 23,000 MongoDB databases got hacked this time, and Facebook shut down Lasso and Hobbi.

Who?
On July 4 the Ryzen 4700G (which you can't get) matched the 3800X (which you can), Cronk returned, Walmart converted 160 unused parking lots into drive-in theatres, John was kind of a jerk, and Twitter removed sanity checks. Also we wished America a happy Independence Day.
On July 5 we predicted that the next big thing from Apple was higher prices and shit no-one asked for - and we were right, relativity explained Mercury - both the planet and the element, and we did not end up getting a W-1290P.
On July 6 Brython was a bad idea, don't buy $2 USB-to-Lightning cables, and using DEX as a dump stat.
On July 7 Slack imploded, then exploded, Ryzen XT was meh - compared to Ryzen X, which was and is great, pricing for Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs leaked and you still can't get one, and amorphous boron nitride either was or was not the next big thing.
On July 8 Thunderbolt 4 was on its way, and so was Hot Chips 2020, the Phanteks P500A had room for two motherboards, and the World Health Organisation noted that Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague was, and I quote, "a thing".
On July 9 we were slacking from work due to a back injury and accidentally skipped an entire season of Fate Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya and got very confused, some lunatic turned Redis into a search engine, Reddit was spying on you, and 117 out of 117 home routers failed security scans.
On July 10 Threadripper Pro appeared - a fully unlocked Epyc for the workstation market, Google banned its competition, I asked a question that I still don't know the answer to, and Facebook broke everything.
On July 11 1TBVPS.com sold 1TB VPSes, engineering samples for Epyc 3 showed up in benchmark results, and the Commander X16 should have used a W65C265S.
On July 12 Threadripper Pro started at just 12 cores, presumably for tasks that didn't need much CPU but used a ton of RAM, I first discovered MariaDB support for temporal tables, and the WD Blue SN550 performed good.
On July 13 Github went down again, WeWork was wildly woverwoptimistic, and no, you idiots, Microsoft is not about to abandon x86.
On July 14 New York celebrated a mountain of corpses, you couldn't get a Ryzen 3300X - and you still can't, and a crowdfunded AMD NUC appeared just in time to be obsolete.
On July 15 Google ruined everything, Patch Tuesday fixed 123 vulnerabilities, and the Ethereum disaster was just beginning.
On July 16 we banned Tencent, Twitter got hacked, and Zen 3 did not support DDR 5, as it turned out. It could, but it doesn't.
On July 17 it wasn't Twitter accounts that got hacked, but Twitter itself, and with inside help, my perpetual license for FontAwesome 5 got planned obsolencensed, and Patreon shot itself in both feet.
On July 18 Twitter attackers "were not able to view previous account passwords" - just your email address and phone number, Cloudflare went down and took GitLab, Patreon, Authy, and Downdetector with it - and also Digital Ocean, the Asus PN50 broke cover, and no, you're not shadowbanned, we've just, um, banned your shadow.
On July 19 Citrine was an incredibly bad idea, remote work could destroy Silicon Valley, and if not there's still a chance of a wandering comet, and the Children's python was not named for its diet after all.
On July 20 we installed Windows and Steam on a Raspberry Pi - or at least, some unfortunate soul did, Loren Chariot Addy the Titbit of Cholame questioned Cele Garth Alda and 16 windy frogs, and H.R. 6666 had 66 sponsors.
On July 21 AMD officially launched their desktop APU range which, yes, you still can't get, AnandTech benchmarked all the things, and Samsung remotely bricked every single one of their Blu-Ray players. With an XML file.
On July 22 Metacritic saw a bright new future in fraud, 10.16 == 11, and Comet Neowise put on a show over the SpaceX launch pad.
On July 23 the Xioami Mi 10 offered near-flagship specs at flagship prices, TechDirt was still drunk, PyPy had a huge problem with Mustache partials, and oh, how quaint, the Ethereum gas price spent most of the day below 100.
On July 24 Intel's 7nm process was a year late, and won't show up for at least another two years, and I was hyped for 5nm Ryzen APUs which also won't show up for at least two years. The next release looks set to be at 6nm, which is a minor (but worthwhile) update to 7nm rather than a brand new node.
On July 25 TechDirt was tilting at wombats imagining they were windmills, Yahoo nuked its comment system, and Ethereum continued to be Ethereum, a condition that would persist through the remaining months of the year.
On July 26 Intel's Xe graphics were on their way, no, there aren't going to be hydrogen-powered Airbi any time soon, and it turned out there a world outside of Europe.
On July 27 PHP 8 caught up with ALGOL 60 - in one specific feature, don't give third-party sites access to your private GitHub repos, do not watch this video.
On July 28 a Suikoden sequel crashed Kickstarter by giving it too much money, Intel's crunchy ice pickle, S3 considered harmful - for anything that isn't... for anything at all really, Arm-based Macs entered a quantum superposition, and we discovered Campbell's Law. Or rather, we knew of the fact, we just discovered that it was named Campbell's Law.

Oh, and we also fell into the derpy otome villainess isekai manga subsubsubsubsub-genre with Bakarina and Bertia.
On July 29 Wikipedia claimed that all DDR5 modules were registered - and still does, Zen 3 was due this year, and you could in fact briefly get one, humans did not live in trees,
On July 30 a Grub bug nibbled a hole in UEFI, Big Navi turned out to be not quite that big - that leak was probably AMD's compute chip, and Arm's fired CEO of their Chinese division decided he wasn't fired after all.
On July 31 we journeyed beyond the shoe event horizon, we had a massive philosphers' strike on our hands, and Envoy was an application router supporting layers 3, 4, and 7.

Disclaimer: Mostly.

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1 "a Windows hotkey that reduces a window to just the title bar" Wasn't that the old WindowShade extension? I don't bother any more with minimize and all that: just switch to another virtual desktop. Except, does Winders offer multiple virtual desktops? (sorry, I use evilwm, which is full of evil, so I'm not a good source for help, probably)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 27 2020 08:45 AM (obo9H)

2 Huh? There's something wrong with crypto right now?
(Trudges off to check coindesk.com/price)
Everything seems mildly ok-ish, it's only up 7% today...

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Sunday, December 27 2020 09:33 AM (Clxcy)

3 That's the problem. The Slashdot crowd wants to build practical applications that use the blockchain, and for that they need stable prices.

Although Ethereum increased moderately over the year, the price of transactions on the Ethereum blockchain spiked by as much as 60,000%.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 27 2020 10:21 AM (PiXy!)

4 What are people doing on the Ethereum chain that causes the GAS price to spike 60,000 percent when bitcoin goes up 10%?
(BTW, the first time we discussed this, I went and looked at the data, but since I only pulled down the daily price average of gas I may have been missing all the spikes).

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Sunday, December 27 2020 10:43 AM (Clxcy)

5 I find it slightly humourous that the TomShardware article brings up privacy but never mentions disabling Cortana or "check my spelling as I type". Also: use google chrome instead of ms edge is risible in the extreme. Pretty sure these people only use computers the way small children use tamagochis.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 27 2020 10:48 AM (obo9H)

6 The thing with Ethereum is you can run code on it, not just send payments. In theory, anyway; in practice it quickly uses up all the capacity of the blockchain and everything goes to hell.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 27 2020 11:09 AM (PiXy!)

7 Normal - yeah, I'd certainly trust Google less than Microsoft at this point. The article at least points out things to be aware of.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 27 2020 11:11 AM (PiXy!)

8 I'm definitely not drugged enough to understand that Pekora video. In fact, I'm not sure there ARE enough drugs for me to understand that Pekora video. WTactualF was that???

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, December 28 2020 05:55 AM (Bkp4m)

9 Now that I've seen the subtitles, I understand the Pekora video rather less than I thought I did.

Though Mom embarrassing Pekora and revealing the origin of her name was priceless.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, December 29 2020 06:26 AM (5iiQK)

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Friday, December 25

Daily News Stuff 25 December 2020

Meppy Derpmas Edition

Tech News

Installing Windows on an Xbox One ish. (AnandTech)

The Chuwi Aerobox uses the original Xbox One APU, though why those still exist when they were replaced years ago by the smaller, lower-power Xbox One S part is an open question.

It has eight Jaguar cores and uses dual-channel DDR3-1333 RAM, so fast it is not. But exists it does.
It's a Christmas miracle (and a whole lot of hard work): Ruby 3.0 is out. (Ruby)

It features a shiny new JIT engine and averages three times the performance of Ruby 2.0. It also features native type hinting like recent versions of Python.
China has launched an antitrust investigation into Alibaba. (Thurrott.com)

Which simply means that someone didn't get paid off.
The idiots who thought that selling a doorbell that connected to the internet was a good idea are now being sued by the idiots who thought that buying a doorbell that connected to the internet was a good idea. (The Guardian)

Look, just be happy your house didn't burn down. Unless it did, in which case here's a cookie.
Things are back to normal.

June

On June 1 the apatosaurus reached the ISS, Australia had no CDA 230 protections, transparency when moderating content was more important than getting it right - and the social networks did neither, and we got an eight-core Elbrus CPU.
On June 2 Sienna Cichlid reported for NPR, Intel produced a bunch of meh, and an image of an Angel became an Angel in itself.
On June 3 what was this, a console for ants, Italy tried to shut down Project Gutenberg for infringing on non-existent copyrights, and $90 tablets vs. $730 tablets.
On June 4 not much happened, though the Chuwi Larkbox was small and Big Navi was big.
On June 5 Sim Refinery was rediscovered, you wouldn't download a Mac, would you, and China, Russia, and Iran criticised America for not murdering protesters. Meanwhile, Instagram pretty much murdered its own API.
On June 6 apparently our two million hours was up and one of our high-end 7.6TB MLC PCIe enterprise SSDs suffered from sudden total existence failure, we got the good peanuts, giving China a kill switch for the internet seemed like a bad idea, TechDirt was drunk again, liquid helium was back in stock, and Mint dumped Snap.
On June 7 Brave didn't do what they were accused of, as it turned out, though they did do something slightly sus, Chromium ungoogled, C&C Remastered, the worst perfect website in the world, and where late the sweet bridge sang.
On June 8 Tiger Lake was on its way, and nobody outside Intel remembered which one that was, Sapphire Rapids was on its way and nobody including Intel knew which one that was, and FoundationDB was kind of stupid.
On June 9 your motherboard was simultaneously killing and not killing your shiny new Ryzen CPU, Cerebras sold two computers - for $5 million, Apple might or might not have been planning an Arm-based Mac, and MongoDB 4.4 was almost released.

Oh, and I officially fell down the rabbit hole.

I was watching for for the first Hololive link as I went through the year, it came earlier than I thought. Figures it was Miko.
On June 10 I had a fun morning when IBM Cloud - which hosts most of our core services at my day job - dropped dead worldwide due to a routing issue, Baldur's Gate II in your browser, Crystal 0.35 arrived, Lakefield - whichever one that was - had 64 EUs, and peanuts were out of stock.
On June 11 we compared Windows 2004 with Ubuntu 2004, it only took one packet to take down IBM's Cloud, and Twitter went full Karen.
On June 12 Itch.io released a good bundle for a bad cause, Sony announced their inverse penguin, Jim Keller told Intel to shove it, async was bad, and I forgot about that time we got hit with thousands of requests per second by Microsoft.
On June 13 Xbox bigger, PlayStation faster, Zoom bad, Huawei bad, HSBC migrated what to what, and Twitter accidentally did something good.
On June 14 always mount a scratch puppy, I fell down the fantasy console rabbit hole, and how to grow your project to 13,000 dependencies with one line of code.
On June 15 AMD's latest APUs continue to work just fine when the fan isn't even touching the chip, Reddit thought GitHub was stupid, and what, are you crazy?
On June 16 Amazon Prime on the Moon, eight of one, two thirds of a dozen of the other, and social distancing for TCP packets. Oh, and I forgot that Lagrange Points are a thing.
On June 17 Google lied through their fucking teeth, NBC were only pretending to be insane, 20% of people still trusted social networks, and Bootstrap 5 was on its way.
On June 18 Intel's Copper Lake - Cooper Lake? Really? Intel's Cowpie Lake platform arrived, Ryzen 4000 desktop parts would arrive this year and indeed sort of did, and Google decided that only they had the right to steal your data.
On June 19 content moderation at scale was impossible if you hired morons to do it, it was a fucking triangle, Twitter's user interface sucked, Mozilla offered a VPN tailored precisely for people who didn't need it, and Twitter went censorship Inception.

It was at roughly this point during the year that I started to become irritated with the course of events.
On June 20 the server exploded an event that I am still recovering from, and CERN asked for $24 billion to see if they could accidentally destroy the Earth. As I said at the time, go for it.
On June 21 Wakfu season four was announced, cat sitting on keyboard crashes lightdm, and the case of the terrible, horrible, no good very bad MacBook.
On June 22 I remoted-mounted a CD-ROM from the other side of the planet, the Washington Post reported that Google Chrome was spyware with an online article containing over 150 ads and tracking cookies, Epic Games was trash, and what happened to the Oxford vaccine anyway?
On June 23 Apple did not mention Arm once, France dumped France's new hate speech laws, the New York Times threatened to doxx healthcare workers, Twitter screwed up but much less than usual, and we got a Foundation trailer from Apple. Filming had to be stopped due to plague, but is apparently under way again.
On June 24 the server that had the SSD suddenly vanish had more problems, Parler was meh but at least it existed, and everyone went full Kafka.
On June 25 Amazon announced an absurdly expensive platform for mobile apps, TikTok was spyware, Wirecard left $2 billion in the back of a taxi, the Perl guys pretended Perl 6 never happened, and GitHub renewed its focus on people who don't use GitHub.
On June 26 Twitter's kafkabot went insane, a very, very accurate emulator for 8-bit computers, embedding Javascript in favicons, and rumours surfaced of an Xbox Series S - that turned out to be 100% accurate.
On June 27 we dove head first into Brave New World, Telegram sowed the seeds of its downfall, and astronomers found a... thing.
On June 28 the Pico-8 was upgraded to 32 colours, Python got a case statement, maybe, TikTok and 52 other apps were spyware, and Mixer self-deceased.
On June 29 GitHub went down worldwide, Russia said very specifically that it had not suffered any accidents at any nuclear power stations when no-one was asking, and blame New York.
And on June 30 MongoDB indexing was a Swiss Army chainsaw, the modern web was awful, and Reddit went full Twitter.

Disclaimer: Half way there is half more than not any of the way there.

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Thursday, December 24

Daily News Stuff 24 December 2020

Waiting On The Help Line Edition

Tech News

So I'm A Spider, So What? airs starting January 8.

The (unnamed) main character is voiced by Aoi YÅ«ki, who played Tooru in A Channel and more recently Froppy in My Hero Academia.

That's promising because she has the only speaking part for a good long time, and Froppy's voice is perfect for her character.
Intel's Maple Ridge Thunderbolt 4 controller is now shipping. (AnandTech)

Answering the question from yesterday, it does not support DisplayPort 2.0.
A review of the Asus PN50 mini PC. (KitGuru)

It packs fifty rounds of 5.7x28 into... Wait.

It packs an eight core Ryzen 4700U into a NUC-sized, um, NUC, with room for two SO-DIMMs, one M.2, and one 2.5" drive.

It can hit 188 fps in League of Legends at 1080p low detail, and draws 31W at full load. It's better for work than for games, but it's fine for light gaming.
Fintech is social cancer. (ZDNet)

The article is a glowing description of a looming totalitarian nightmare.
China is planning to fine radio stations that broadcast people eating large amounts of food. (Gizmodo)

Wait, what?
Russia is thinking of doing the smart thing and just blocking Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter entirely. (NPR)

Because they discriminate against Russia by labelling Russian state media outlets as, well, Russian state media outlets.

May

On May 1 the Ryzen 3700X was still the new hotness, the sale of .Org was called off, don't use the browser that comes with your phone, server monitoring dashboards sucked - and we didn't know the half of it, and Mail-in=a-Box was.
On May 2 Intel was up to its old tricks, Quibi died, and we've all had days like [tweet deleted].
On May 3 ASRock's IPMI worked, California passed a well-intended law that made things worse, and there was no documentation for LXD networking. (I since figured it out, more or less.)
On May 4 YouTube banned David Icke for spreading the wrong type of conspiracy theory, and how to get your problems solved for free. (Hint: Post the wrong answer on the internet.)
On May 5 we set case sensitive = true, B2 gained S3 compatibility, and Julia captured Heisenbugs.
On May 6 Elasticsearch was a disaster, Microprose returned, Twitter reloaded, aimed at its feet again, and pulled the trigger, and seven times never edit a running shell script.
On May 7 Microsoft released new Surfaces, the EU said that your site has to work without cookies even if it needs cookies to work, and the 1600AF was a 2600.
On May 8 Apple, Sonos, and Spotify were battling for the worst developer support crown, USB 4 was DisplayPort, the Ryzen 3300X was really good and good luck getting one, and there would be 600-series chipsets from AMD. (There weren't.)
On May 9 LG's Vervet was released, Go was still hipster COBOL, and Google put all its eggs in one basket prior to dropping the basket.
On May 10 Meizu released a 17" smartphone - unless they didn't, Intel's DG1 was faster than a PS4 - unless it wasn't, Tesla moved to Texas, and a paladin checked your dovecote for rogue perfume weasels.
On May 11 /r/animetitties was safe for work, Swift 5.3 supported Windows though no-one was entirely clear why, and iridescent tempered chocolate.
On May 12 birdless Birds, the Ryzen 4700G peeked out from behind cover only to disappear again and never be seen, the 4900U likewise, and the 125W Intel 10900K used 235W. 235 is more than 125.
On May 13 we had fun with virtual machines under LXD for versions of fun that involve a surprising number of swear words, if everything requires HTTPS then any sites only supporting HTTP will cease to be, and a question was asked and answered.
On May 14 Nvidia announced their Ampere A400, recent laptops are faster than cloud servers - sometimes a lot faster, Wordpress was broken yet again, Amazon's Fire HD 8 did not entirely suck, and Deno was Node.js only using TypeScript and written in Rust, which is like building a skyscraper by gluing blocks of cheese together but only using premium Campania mozzarella.
On May 15 TSMC committed to building a 5nm fab in Arizona, Facebook bought Giphy, all the social networks withdrew from France, and this blog sucked at code formatting.
On May 16 I tried out SSDNodes and pronounced it good as long as you knew what you were doing, distributed transactions were tricky, and the Mac had been x86 longer than it was previously PowerPC or 68k. Apple set itself to correcting that.
On May 17 GIFs were considered harmful, WSL was pronounced weasel, supercomputers were mining cryptocurrencies, and Doom was doomed.
On May 18 we learned how to add ZFS on servers after the fact, Universal Basic Internet was a bad idea, Google banned a podcast app for doing exactly what it said, Docker was sometimes less worse than it was the rest of the time, and one of the X-37B space planes took off for orbit.
On May 19 QNAP devices got QNAPped, Minecraft sold 2)) MILLION COPIES which is quite a lot, and formatting code was hard (and not just for this blog).
On May 20 Intel's Comet Lake arrived, whichever that one was, early samples of Zen 3 showed up, and Windows Terminal hit 1.0.
On May 21 Twitter fucked Twitter up yet again, PCIe 4,0 showed up on Intel motherboards - though not on Intel CPUs, the Alienware M17 R3 had everything including a power brick the size of a Volvo, and Terraria got another big update.
On May 22 Rocket Lake leaked, whichever that one was, AMD planned the release of what became their XT CPUs, and, um. not much else really.
On May 23 we lited fictional inventions by year of publication, some Zigs were moved, and the Dynabook Portege X30L-G weighed 870 grams. Also, Castle was Scooby Doo.
On May 24 we had pizza arbitrage and safe spaces.
On May 25 Elasticsearch did what it's best at - leaking private data, quantum computing was proved both possible and impossible, and GitLab got social engineered.
On May 26 Ryzen 3000XT arrived, every iPhone got jailbroken, and Gigabit NBN arrived, except that it already existed and no-one can get it.
On May 27 DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES UNINSTALL THE LAUNCHER, a guide to the Lakes District, Twitter was a garbage site run by garbage people,and MacOS Catalina was a garbage OS designed by idiots.
On May 28 Twitter was the problem with Twitter, Python gained two new string functions, and we got eight gigabytes of Pi.
On May 29 Twitter hated roof Koreans, nobody knew anything, everything got hacked, and YouTube was run by morons.
On May 30 Hivelocity declared war on catgirls, TechDirt was garbage, and critics were angry with Facebook for not censoring more people.
And on May 31 all of D&D - all of it, Cities Skylines, the MSI Modern 14, SpaceX and NASA launched an apatosaurus into orbit, website port-scan you, and social networks should just die already.

Disclaimer: Best place for it. Orbit, I mean.

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Wednesday, December 23

Daily News Stuff 23 December 2020

Begun The Fast Food Console Wars Have Edition

Tech News

So, this happened.

Then this happened.

Then this happened.

And yes, it's real. (Tom's Hardware)

The hardware is an Intel NUC 9 Extreme with unspecified Nvidia graphics in a customised Cooler Master case.

And it really does have a bay for keeping chicken warm.
Helpful tricks for Nim programmers. (John Novak)

Some of these are obvious if you're familiar with C, others are more specific to the language, compiler, or operating system, like how to bundle a default icon into a Windows executable.
The SEC is suing Ripple for selling unregistered securities. (Axios)

Ripple is a blockchain designed for financial transactions, and uses a core currency - Ripple, or XRP - to charge transaction fees (which are tiny). That part is fine, but they way they managed availability of XRP to boost the nominal assets of the company has got them into hot water.

It will be interesting how this plays out because all the major blockchains have done this.
Hololive is back from the big festival. I was almost at a point where I would have had to look for something to watch, rather than deciding which things I didn't have time to watch.

Now it's stay up late to catch Haachama live, or get up at a normal time and watch Ina, Nene, and Polka live. Sorry, Haachama, I caught your earlier stream with Coco, and I'll catch your stream with Amelia on Christmas Day. And once again, that's just Minecraft. I can't keep up with their English-language Minecraft content.

Haachama's thumbnails are a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

April

On April 1 the Atlantic embraced fascism, Samsung stopped making LCDs, and Xerox didn't buy HP.
On April 2 96TB of RAID storage landed on my doorstep, Zoom was a disaster, and Intel announced Comet Lake H to and adoring audience of no-one.
On April 3 everything was worse than we thought, Netflix was streaming 4K - at 240p, Zoom was a disaster, and Threadripper go whoosh.
On April 4 LXD 4 arrived, Caddy 2 RC1 arrived - along with a completely incompatible config file format, Redis 6 RC3 arrived, Zoom was a disaster, Intel's mobile chips used more power than AMD's desktop chips, and 15,000 insecure Elasticsearch servers bit the dust.
On April 5 we ran out of COBOL programmers, and don't bind services directly to 0.0.0.0. Maybe that's why we're running out of COBOL programmers.
On April 6 we got DNS over Wikipedia, SEO ruined everything for a change, and New York banned Zoom, the last intelligent action by the city for the entire year, and they reversed that pretty quickly anyway.
On April 7 Twitter suspended me for a week, the media was in full batshit insane propaganda mode, Mochizuki's inter-universal TeichmÃ¼ller proof was published, I got groceries delivered at 4AM, that being the only open timeslot, and ruxolitinib was binitiloxur backwards.
On April 8 everything was a lie, Sydney welcomed a shipload of plague rats and didn't bother with any testing or tracking whatsoever - which could have turned out much worse than it ultimately did, I tried programming in Nim and pronounced it good, OpenVMS was not in any sense open, and True Facts about the Nudibranch.
On April 9 a Microsoft spider tried to take out the site at thousands of requests per second, fuck Swift, nice CGI, more day job Threadrippers arrived, and Stadia went free to play, costing Google $0 in lost revenue.
On April 10 we sheltered in place and ate Vegemite, 800Gb Ethernet, and QLC hit the datacenter.
On April 11 the Asus G14 looked good, IBM threatened free COBOL training, and the aptly named Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-U6780A arrived.
On April 12 Google returned no search results for "can I feed my dinosaur ramen", Turbo Pascal 3 was smaller than the MacOS touch command - which sets the timestamp on a file, and nothing else, and the Sea of Marmara looked like an angry possum.
On April 13 BEEEEEEP, wait, Risu, durian donuts, seriously? Sorry, distracted by a squirrel, writing a SQL database server in Go in one easy lesson, a $100 100GbE card, and Twitter said no privacy for you!
On April 14 every copy of Valorant came with a free kernel-level rootkit, and we got a 15GHz 6502. Sort of.
On April 15 Python started turning into Node.js, Western Digital developed shingles, GitHub went free of charge for small closed-source projects, and regex as a filesystem.
On April 16 there were no lamingtons, China embraced radical opacity, and the HP Envy 13 looked nice.
On April 17 there was treasure everywhere, the shingles inflection spread, and China said, oh, those thousands of dead people. Also YouTube was full of horrible perverts.
On April 18 we wrote Python in Rust, TSMC's 3nm node looked awesome, and we discovered dinosaur DNA.
On April 19 a fake Intel quad 10GbE network card worked perfectly, and we looked at one of AMD's first microprocessors.
On April 20 we were living through Connie Willis's Remake, Australia caught a case of France, Ruby was a disaster, and so was Zoom.
On April 21 LG's Vervet had a headphone jack, comic books were already dead, and fuck all the Amendments.
On April 22 Stripe was obviously retarded, Australia had a total of four new cases of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, and everything mandatory was forbidden.
On April 23 Crucial released the P5, a mid-range SSD, as in 3.4GB per second, we dropped the Staten Island groundhog, the fossa was focalised and actually turned out to be pretty good, and Apple planned an Arm-based Mac.
On April 24 iPhone SE vs the DOOGEE X95, Nvidia was making a 5nm mystery chip - still a mystery, in fact, and everyone wanted free money.
On April 25 we looked at the difference between AMD's four core CPU and AMD's four core CPU, the Arm-based MacBook would be great at half the price, and Unix sort turned out to automatically multi-thread your workloads. Oh, and TURN OFF YOUR BLUETOOTH! NOW! TURN IT OFF NOW!!!
On April 26 TSMC started work on 2nm, a bug in a one-line Node.js package broke 3.4 million projects, America outsourced contact tracing to Sauron, but also discovered ten extinct varieties of apple, and the media got the story wrong in every possible way and also several impossible ways.
On April 27 Monkey vs. Opossum Lady, Hitler with a head tilt, Rust-induced migraines, and Lexx.

Give it a minute - almost exactly - for the theme to kick in.

On April 28 the Atlantic embraced fascism, like, a lot, Disney clickwrapped a hashtag, and a Starship prototype did not explode.
On April 29 Arm turned 35, Google killed Shoelace, and Reddit was slow.
On April 30 home deliveries resumed, USB 4 supported DisplayPort 2 - I should check if that really happened, there was no Threadripper 3980X, and Google Cloud bandwidth was wildly overpriced.

Disclaimer: Durian donuts?

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Thursday, December 31

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Essential Minecraft Mod Video of the Day

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Praise for Ambient Irony

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