Thursday, July 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 July 2021

Eternal October Edition

Top Story

  • npm audit is broken by design.  (Overreacted)

    To unpack that: npm audit is a tool for tracking the infinite number of vulnerabilities NPM causes.  NPM is the unbelievably awful package manager for Node.js.  Node.js is the godforsaken fusion of JavaScript and interrupt-driven code for server-side applications.

    And JavaScript is a quick hack Brendan Eich threw together over a weekend in 1995 to get some basic field validation into Netscape Navigator.

    It's all broken, in every way imaginable, and in many ways impossible to imagine.



Anime of the day is Tenshi ni Narumon - I'm Gonna Be An Angel - from 1999.  I couldn't find a decent clip of the opening credits, but here's the whole first episode....  Dubbed into Spanish.  Don't say I never give you anything.

This is unusually cartoonish for anime - you can see the style in the opening credits, which fortunately were not dubbed - but it has its own weird charm.

There won't be a dry seat in the house when you get to the scene where - as I wrote at the time - our hero and his maybe-girlfriend (aged 16-going-on-4) are plummeting to their deaths from the school clock tower whence they have been ejected by a perverted demon puppet, but are rescued in the nick of time by our brave (if scatterbrained) heroine wearing mechanical wings and a rocket pack (made by her little sister) - and a durian on her head - at the precise moment the Earth is undergoing a very near miss from a rather unlikely short-period comet.

That's one episode.



Tech News

  • Gigabyte has announced a 10Gbit Ethernet card.  (Tom's Hardware)

    I can't even remember when I upgrade to gigabit ethernet - twenty years ago, maybe - and we're still mostly stuck at that speed.  Recent motherboards have started to show up with 2.5Gb Ethernet, and 100Gb cards are readily available, but the switch situation is a complete nightmare.


  • Unexpectedly: Neurons encode information in the timing of their firing.  (Quanta)

    Speaking from a computer and network background, why the bleeping bleep was this in any way unexpected?  It's entirely routine in computer networks - and in pre-computer networks like the telegraph system - so there's no reason to expect the brain not to have evolved the same tricks in some form.

    Neuroscientists love to tell people that the brain is not a computer, but all they show when they say that is they don't know what computers are.


  • 36 US states and one swamp are going after Google for monopolistic shit relating to the Play Store.  (Thurrott.com)

    Don't know if this will also run afoul of a random Hawaiian judge the way the Facebook case recently did, but keep it up guys.


  • What browser should you use to replace Chrome?  (ZDNet)

    They suggest Brave, and it's a good choice.  I'm running it on my Android tablet and I get the occasional UI glitch - which might be due to the fact that I'm browsing huge pages on an old A53 CPU - but it's quickly fixed by switching out of the app and then back in again.

    It has built in ad blocking, when Chrome on Android doesn't even allow you to set up a plugin for that.


  • A Chinese prenatal test has been used by the PLA to gather genetic data on millions of women.  (Reuters)

    The privacy agreement promises to hold the data confidential unless...  Basically unless the Chinese government wants to take a look.


  • New Hololive member IRyS has now passed 200,000 subscribers, without posting anything, and 150,000 Twitter followers, with a single tweet and her account restricted - still, because this is Twitter.



    Meanwhile YouTube demonetised Pikamee, everyone's favourite electric kettle, and in a shocking turn of events admitted it was a mistake and fixed it in a matter of hours.


  • It never rains but it rains some more, particularly when there's an idiot on the roof with a hose.



    Marine only has 1.4 million subscribers.  No reason to maybe assign someone to take a look before deleting her entire fucking account.

    Yes, it's back now.  But maybe, YouTube, maybe you could try skipping the part where you delete the entire account and go straight to the having something with a functioning brain check on things?


Let's Kill Da Ho Vtuber Clip of the Day


Pikamee is fluent in spoken English and pretty good at written English, but her partner in the VOMS project Tomoshika is still learning and sometimes trips up resulting in clips with millions upon million of views.


HoloVOMS Anime Music Video Clip of the Day



The song - consisting entirely of Japanese onomatopoeia - was written by Gyari, the founder of VOMS, and covered here by Sakura Miko of Hololive Generation 0.



Disclaimer: Could be worse.  Could be engulfed in a pyroclastic flow, and also raining.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:43 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 817 words, total size 7 kb.

1 I bought a used wireless router 15 years ago for $20 that had 4 1000Mbit ports.  And my IBM x40 laptop from 2004 has gigabit ethernet.
On the other hand, this laptop I bought new last year doesn't have an ethernet port at all (which was a bit of a pain when the linux distro I installed didn't have drivers for the wireless chip).

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 08 2021 09:54 PM (obo9H)

2 "As of today, npm auditis a stain on the entire npm ecosystem."
How would you be able to tell?

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 09 2021 12:37 AM (eqaFC)

3 See that patch that's the same muddy grey colour as the rest but is also slightly damp?
That's npm audit.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 09 2021 12:59 AM (PiXy!)

4 Normal, I have an ethernet-to-usb cable for just such an occasion, although the most common modern USB wifi adapters, for some reason, aren't in the kernel, but in 3rd-party repositories.  (If you're OK with wireless G or N, and can find an adapter, though, the kernel's got you covered.  Go figure.)

At least, that was the situation a year or so ago.  Maybe it's better now.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 09 2021 01:24 AM (eqaFC)

5 Rick C:  I had a USB wifi thingummer that was supported, but it's still a bit silly switching adapters.  I mean, once you're up and running with a newer kernel that has the proper drivers, it's not bad, but still. Yes, an old, slow UBS->Ethernet dongle that is well supported would be nice to get stuff up and running.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 09 2021 12:57 PM (obo9H)

6 I guess I'm sorta wishing that there was a lower, common mode, like the ole modems, that would "just work" with whatever.  Like some kind of bog-standard wireless B/G driver that would work with every chipset.  Wishlist item.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 09 2021 01:01 PM (obo9H)

7 Well, if you plug in a b/g usb wifi adapter, it will almost certainly work out of the box.  If you use wireless-n, there's a decent chance it will, too.  The last time I looked, people suggested getting a cheap Android unlocked phone that can do connection sharing as the easiest thing to do, and it worked fine with a moto g5.  (Unlocked recommendation is just to make sure the carrier didn't do something sleazy like disable tethering, like AT&T used to do.)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 09 2021 02:41 PM (eqaFC)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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