• Took a nap, came back to my desk, both my computers had rebooted for updates and Tohru was down to 8GB of usable RAM again.
  
  Restart, enter BIOS, exit BIOS, and Windows finds all the RAM again.
  
  Ugh.  Well, I'll be doing a full reinstall soon, so if it's Windows itself that will fix it.
  
  
  
• On the up side I've been having trouble with Multiplicity and with both machines freshly restarted there was no reason not to fiddle with it.  I couldn't break any running apps because there weren't any.
  
  Turns out there was nothing wrong with Multiplicity, but instead our new VPN client had rolled back some fixes I made to my hosts file, and while Multiplicity could discover Rally from Tohru it then got fed the wrong IP address.
  
  Now it's all working properly.
  
  
  
• AMD has launched Ryzen 5000 Mobile.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's their big day at Pretend CES so there were a few announcements.
  
  There are eight H-series variants and two U-series models, with either 6 cores / 12 threads or 8 cores / 16 threads.
  
  In addition there are three rebadged Ryzen 4000 models as was leaked previously, making up the low end.  However, all 13 parts have threading enabled, and all but one have at least six cores.
  
  There's supposedly another mobile APU range coming this year with RDNA2 rather than Vega graphics, but that wasn't announced today.
  
  
  
• Threadripper Pro is no longer just for big OEMs.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's not clear if it will be available at regular retail, but Supermicro, Asus, and Gigabyte have all announced motherboards.
  
  All support at least six PCIe 4.0 x16 slots and 1TB of RAM, including registered and load-reduced DIMMs and ECC.
  
  Serve the Home has more detail of the Supermicro offering.
  
  It includes remote management, 10Gb Ethernet, and four M.2 slots.
  
  
  
• Also Epyc.  (AnandTech)
  
  There was a demo of Zen 3 Epyc and a benchmark comparison against Intel - which AMD naturally won - but no dates, specs, or prices.
  
  
  
• The Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 has a Ryzen 5000 APU and an RTX 3000 GPU.  (AnandTech)
  
  Up to 32GB RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD, and a basic 1080p display or a 1440p 165Hz model with 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut.
  
  But it lacks the Four Essential Keys because we can't have nice things.  Also good chance finding one when it eventually ships.
  
  
  
• Oh yes - Nvidia announced RTX 3000 Mobile.  (AnandTech)
  
  There will be various models of 3060, 3070, and 3080, with 6GB RAM on the 3060 and 8GB on the 3070 and 3080.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the RTX 3060 Nvidia announced the RTX 3060.  (AnandTech)
  
  Where the 3060 Ti is 80% of a 3070 at 80% of the price, this is 80% of a 3060 Ti and 80% of the price.  Except for memory, where it is 150% of a 3060 Ti.
  
  Nvidia reduced this to a 192-bit bus to cut costs, but 6GB RAM isn't enough for modern games, so they had to double it.  That's not bad overall; $329 for the full RTX 3000 feature set and 12GB of RAM.
  
  If it costs $329 at retail, and if you can actually find it at retail.
  
  
  
• Apple has announced that it is racist.  (9to5Mac)
  
  It will be spending $100 million to tackle its problems with using child slaves to assemble its overpriced fashion access...  Wait, not, it's not doing any of that.  Fuck the child slaves.
  
  
  
• JuiceFS is a Posix-compliant filesystem built on top of, uh, built on top of Redis and S3-compatible object storage.  (GitHub)
  
  It's inherently a shared filesystem, and apparently performance isn't entirely awful.  But I use Redis and S3 storage in my day job and the notion of gluing them together like that is slightly horrifying.
  
  
  
• Beaker is a browser with a built-in peer-to-peer web server.  (Beaker Browser)
  
  That doesn't necessarily mean that your computer will get hacked and all your files deleted, but it does seem likely.
  
  
  
• Apple's App store is a trash fire on MacOS too.  (Wireguard Mailing List)
  
  Just making sure Mac users and developers don't feel left out of all the fun with inconsistent review policies, bizarre demands for a 30% cut of everything, and weeks-long delays for critical bugfixes.
  
  
  
• Fuck GoDaddy.  (Not the Bee)
  
  I've given GoDaddy some credit because when someone tried to hijack one of my domains all it took was one ticket for them to jump in and yank it back for me.  But this is abject shittery.
  
  
  
• Just look at these fuckbiscuits.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Twitter is getting ratioed to hell on Twitter.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 14 2021 12:27 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:32 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:35 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:43 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:43 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:45 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 14 2021 02:33 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, January 14 2021 02:56 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 14 2021 06:43 AM (eqaFC)

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Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, January 13 2021 03:02 PM (4i7w0)

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• In somewhat better news, I've found that both major supermarkets have surprisingly good store brand gluten free frozen satay chicken and rice for $3.  With actual real identifiable chicken.
  
  Chicken korma too, though that one's a little spicy for a korma.  The butter chicken has the same branding but is clearly made by someone else and is terrible.
  
  This matters to me because a lot of the gluten-free products I usually eat have been out of stock for months.  Fruit and vegetables and meat are naturally gluten-free but who has time to bother with such stuff?
  
  
  
• I bought an oven.  I was looking for an air fryer but the ones at Kmart are perpetually out of stock, and they had a 12L benchtop convection oven for $45 and I thought, why not give that a try?
  
  Well.  It arrived.
  
  It's basically a big bowl of heat-resistant glass with the heating element, fan, and controls all sitting on the (mostly also glass) lid.  Being almost entirely glass makes it dead easy to clean and it's surprisingly large.  My microwave is nominally, what, 25L?  And this one has much more usable room.
  
  Going to give it a try tomorrow and cook some chips (fries) or tater tots or something.
  
  
  
• Also joined Minds.
  
  Seems to be a nice clean design and the site works well.
  
  It's not like Twitter or even Facebook, more like, well, mee.nu.  And I already have one of those.
  
  Actually, to be fair, it's more modern and cleaner than mee.nu, offers global search, and lets you construct your own feed.  Discoverability still not great even so.
  
  Plus it's open source and there's an API maybe and you can run your own node oh fucking hell.
  
  
  • 3 Cassandra Nodes (Min 30gb RAM, 1TB SSD, 8 CPU)
  • 1 ElasticSearch Node (Min 16GB RAM, 250GB SSD, 8 CPU) #2 nodes are recommended for failover
  • 1 Docker Machine (Min 60gb RAM, 50GB SSD, 32 CPU)
  
  I do all my Mana testing on a 2 core VM with 4GB RAM, to run everything, including all my non-Mana development stuff.  Admittedly I'm moving to something large because it actually costs less, but those starting requirements are yikes.
  
  
  
• Intel at Virtual CES spoke about Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake, Jasper Lake, and Alder Lake.  (AnandTech)
  
  Then they took questions from the press.  Sort of.

  Intel has been teasing its next generation Rocket Lake desktop processors for several months now, with arrows pointing to PCIe 4.0 and we already know about the backported CPU and GPU cores.  There are big questions as to what this means for performance and power, and Intel answered exactly zero of our questions.

  
  
  
• Lulu is a firewall for MacOS that blocks unexpected outgoing connections.  (Objective-See)
  
  MacOS, which is the major problem app on Macs these days, still exempts itself and does whatever the fuck it wants though.
  
  
  
• Ubiquti has had a data breach at their cloud provider.  (The Verge)
  
  They don't know what data might have leaked, and I'm not sure what you can do via Ubiquiti's website, but if you use their products it would be a good time to check.
  
  
  
• The challenge of decentralising the web in 2021.  (Medium)
  
  Extra tricky when hosting providers act by bills of attainder and the default assumption of corruption of blood.
  
  
  
• Intel has added hardware-based ransomware detection to 11th generation CPUs.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Everything in that headline is a lie.  This is clearly software-based and detects load patterns and will probably cause problems all over the place.  But it's worth trying and they might eventually get it right, or at least to a point where it is worthwhile.
  
  
  
• A bipartisan group of Australian politicians is looking into whether American social media companies are breaking Australian law.  (ZDNet)
  
  Science Minister Karen Andrews:

  That is the absolute lack of transparency and the subjectivity that I am most concerned about. There needs to be fairness, it needs to be very clear that these rules are being applied in a consistent manner. And it's pretty obvious that at the moment they're not.

  Our current Acting Prime Minister:

  McCormack on Tuesday also declared "all lives matter" during a press conference.  He also said most of what his colleagues have said is true and that people on Twitter need to "toughen up".

  
  
  
• Germany and France have also taken note of the actions of the Bay Area Mafia.  (Fortune)
  
  Looking forward to years of multi-billion-dollar fines.  I'm totally against the European Union as a concept and as a real-world entity, but I'm fine with them as a boot kicking techno-fascists right in the wallet.

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, January 13 2021 07:33 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, January 13 2021 08:07 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 13 2021 11:44 AM (PiXy!)

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• Parler will be down for a while; apparently the major cloud providers have all refused to provide services.  So they're all either openly fascist or so risk-averse that they are bending to the fascists.
  
  They have all the data and will be back.
  
  Don't ever use cloud services, except for stuff you can afford to drop without notice.  Always have a backup on an entirely separate platform and preferably in a different country.
  
  One report said they were paying Amazon $300,000 per month.  That's a crazy amount of money, but Amazon is crazy expensive.
  
  
  
• The 2021 HP Envy 14 has the Four Essential Keys but nothing much else to recommend it.  (AnandTech)
  
  I mean, it's not garbage, but it has an Intel CPU and soldered-in RAM, so it's certainly not good great.  [Changed that slightly out of misplaced fairness.]
  
  
  
• If you cut and paste a link from the Edge URLbar, the result is target-dependent.  In Notepad++ it gives you just the link.  In the Minx editor, it gives you HTML, which is exactly what I don't want it to do.  Ugh.
  
  
  
• Testing the Threadripper Pro 3995WX.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  64 cores, eight memory channels, 128 lanes of PCIe.
  
  They plugged in an RTX 3090 and ran games on it, an it's about 8% slower than a 10900K (though it lags behind the 5900X by a wider margin).
  
  On tests that could take advantage of all those cores it was either the fastest or narrowly behind the regular Threadripper 3990X.  It's no faster in itself; it just supports more memory and I/O for applications that need that.
  
  Serve the Home also got their hands on one.
  
  
  
• I mean, you're not wrong.
  
  
  
  
  
• Member is a messaging platform that stores messages in Bitcoin Cash.  (Member.Cash)
  
  I don't know how well it works, but I'm looking into something not entirely dissimilar.
  
  Discussion on Hacker News notes that the front end of the example node is running on AWS and says:

  Ask Parler how that's working out.

  
  
  
• Oh yeah, fuck Stripe.  Hardly the first time they've done something awful.
  
  
  
• New Zealand's central bank got hacked.  (AP)
  
  The hackers didn't managed to do anything but probably gained access to confidential information.  But what's the point?  Who would want to hack New Zealand?  An angry sheep?
  
  
  
• That $2 trillion COVID relief omnibus shitbill contained a law requiring all US intelligence agencies to release their data on UFOs within 180 days.  (CNN)
  
  Probably the least stupid part of it.

First I Was Like What and Then I Was Like Oh Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 12 2021 12:44 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, January 12 2021 02:47 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, January 12 2021 04:10 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 12 2021 05:58 AM (6y7dz)

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• Yeah, about that, Jack.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Move Amazon over to the Fascist column. (Instapundit)
  
  Instapundit in turn links to Buzzfeed, which uses Facebook comments. which rather illustrates the problem here.
  
  Ah. Let's try this.
  
  

  Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products. We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies. This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out. #speakfreely

  -- John Matze 🇺🇸 John Sunday, January 10, 2021

  
  I'll have to see if there's a way to generate that embed from the URL.  This is a new feature; they didn't have embeds last time I looked.
  
  Update: There is a way to do it automatically, but automatic or manual it glitches slightly if you - oh, wait.  Yeah, fixed.
  
  
  
• I signed up with MeWe in the meantime.
  
  This is their privacy policy.
  
  It's pretty solid. It's about as good as it is possible to be and still maintain a functioning social media site. The site itself seems to work well and loads quickly, though it all looks a bit 2012-ish. But then so does Facebook.
  
  Don't seem to be able to read anything unless you're logged in, though.
  
  
  
• Walter Duranty has a YouTube channel.
  
  
  The article is paywalled, and it's a British paper that's actually bothered to report in this.  I haven't seen any coverage from the American mainstream media at all.  Australia's Sky News has good coverage of China, and we're currently in a low-key trade war with them so there's not a lot of positive sentiment for the commie bastards generally.
  
  Here's a longer article from last year about the wumao - China's fifty cent army.  (Medium)
  
  Because that's how much they're paid for each piece of propaganda they post.
  
  They should really talk to the New York Times again.  They would do it for free.
  
  
  
• There are engineering samples of Zen 3 desktop APUs floating around.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure that means much since you still can't get your hands on Zen 2 desktop APUs.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 3080 Max-Q could deliver 26% of the performance of a desktop 3080.  (NotebookCheck)
  
  That's...  Not great.  They've had to clock it wayyy down to get it into a laptop power envelope at all.
  
  Also - if leaked information is correct - some RTX 3070 mobile parts will be faster than some RTX 3080 mobile parts.  I'll wait for Nvidia to confirm that before I jump on their heads though.
  
  
  
• There are also reportedly Ryzen 5800 and 5900 - non-X - models on the way.  (WCCFTech)
  
  8 and 12 core 65W parts respectively.  Same disclaimer as above - wait, let me check.  Yep, same disclaimer as above.
  
  
  
• It's not just an American - or even Western - thing.  (The Lowdown)
  
  Interesting tale of how Alibaba buys smaller companies and destroys them through the usual mix of arrogance and incompetence.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk told his Twitter followers to drop Facebook for Signal.  (Digital Trends)
  
  
  Not sure what problem that really solves, but fuck Facebook, so okay.
  
  
  
• Fuck Discord.
  
  The UI is a disaster anyway.
  
  
  
• Fuck Mozilla.
  
  The Brendan Eich situation was bad enough, but now they've clearly aligned themselves with the fascists.
  
  
  
  
  
• But while I was looking for that tweet, I stumbled onto something that reminded me I was thinking too narrowly.
  
  
  My thinking was mostly that American Big Tech had told America they are not to be trusted.  But that's too narrow.  After all, I'm not American.
  
  American Big Tech has told the entire world they are not to be trusted.
  
  That's a completely different proposition.  Under the Biden Administration, there aren't going to be any rulings curtailing their depredations.  But every other country in the world will be taking note of this.
  
  Lots of interesting discussion on this point from Indian techies on Twitter.  Let a thousand social networks bloom.
  
  
  
• Section 230 ruined the internet.  (The Atlantic)
  
  Wait, what?
  
  It's actually an insightful and well-written piece.  It points out that Section 230 promotes centralised platforms at the expense of smaller ones, bad moderation at the expense of good, and uniformity of thought at the expense of individualism and free expression.

Comfy Block Video of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, January 11 2021 02:30 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 11 2021 03:03 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Monday, January 11 2021 03:47 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 11 2021 03:48 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 11 2021 04:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, January 11 2021 05:56 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, January 11 2021 06:36 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 11 2021 06:58 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 11 2021 07:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, January 11 2021 07:31 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 11 2021 08:18 AM (+Kfbd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 11 2021 08:38 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, January 11 2021 09:26 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, January 11 2021 12:37 PM (u/3ql)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 11 2021 01:25 PM (PiXy!)

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• This.
  
  
  
  
• Fuck Google. (ZDNet)
  
  
  
• Fuck Apple. (Input Mag)
  
  
  
• Fuck Reddit. (Gizmodo)
  
  
  
• Fuck Twitter. (The Verge)
  
  
  
• Fuck Facebook and Shopify as well. And Twitch and Discord, and Instagram and YouTube specifically and separately from their parent fucks. And fuck anyone who approves of this. Fuck you, Joe Manchin. Fuck you, Jason Snell.
  
  Update: Fuck CampaignMonitor.
  
  
  
• Microsoft and Amazon have managed not to be openly fascist this week. Good for you, Microsoft and Amazon.
  
  
  
• Trump moved to Parler, naturally. That effectively gave Parler the hug of death - the site is up but not really working. And it's pure coincidence that the usual suspects immediately moved to wipe Parler off the map.
  
  Build your own social network, they say. That makes you an easier target.
  
  
  
• Acer has a new Chromebook. (WCCFTech)
  
  You'd have to be nuts to buy a Chromebook, unless you can wipe it and install regular Linux.
  
  
  
• Twitter also banned the account of Sci-Hub, a site that freely distributes scientific papers from paid journals. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Sci-Hub is being sued in India by Elsevier, which holds a huge percentage of the market for paid scientific journals. The site is popular there because Elsevier is eye-gougingly expensive, and it gives Indian scientists a chance to keep up with the literature.
  
  That doesn't make it necessarily legal or morally right, but why exactly is Twitter banning them, when they don't publish anything there?
  
  
  
• You can download the torrents here, at least for now. (gen.lib.rus.ec)
  
  Though at last count it was about 55TB, which is rather a lot.
  
  
  
• The Chinese genocide propaganda account is still up on Twitter, so apparently that's just fine.
  
  Update: Huh. It's gone. That's a first. Tiny, tiny bit of credit to Twitter for not openly supporting the forced sterilisation of entire ethnic populations.
  
  
  
• GNAP is the next generation of OAuth. (FusionAuth)
  
  This is what is becoming OAuth3. It is completely incompatible with OAuth2, so congratulations on a good job there guys.
  
  
  
• Roku has bought the content of the deceased Quibi for some amount below $100 million. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Quibi launched in April last year, burned through $1.7 billion in cash, and died in December. Roku frankly overpaid for their content, but it will be available to their customers for free.... Which means their customers are also overpaying.
  
  
  
• The Asus TUF Gaming A17 might be coming sooner than expected. (WCCFTech)
  
  Ryzen 5800H, RTZ 3070, 17.3" 1080p screen, 16GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD.
  
  
  
• Half the memory in Tohru has evaporated.  I was wondering why it was slow.  It's showing 16GB found, 8GB usable.
  
  I haven't put the new RAM in yet, so this will get fixed one way or another.  This is almost certainly related to my earlier crashes.
  
  
  
• I've watched Gura's undying gawrilla Minecraft stream now* and replaced all the YouTube videos from December 31 onwards with the new quick-load format.  I'm thinking of making that global.
  
  Now I'll backup some essential files and reboot this thing to see if it finds its other 8GB of RAM.
  
  
  
• Update: Well, that was weird.  Windows Memory Diagnostics found no errors.  The Dell BIOS diagnostics found no errors.  Resetting page file allocation (one suggestion I found) did nothing, and setting and clearing the maximum memory allocation** in MSConfig did nothing.  There's no option in the BIOS to adjust reserved memory, and the BIOS shows 16GB of RAM present as it should.
  
  And now it's working.
  
  
  

Kiara Minecraft Compilation Video of the Day

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, January 09 2021 01:56 PM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 09 2021 02:46 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 09 2021 02:57 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Sunday, January 10 2021 02:08 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 10 2021 03:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 10 2021 03:19 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 10 2021 03:21 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 10 2021 03:22 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, January 10 2021 05:56 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 10:16 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 10:29 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 10 2021 11:19 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 10 2021 11:35 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 12:17 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 01:42 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: DougO at Sunday, January 10 2021 01:53 PM (kqK5x)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 10 2021 02:30 PM (PiXy!)

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