I'm in the future. Like hundreds of years in the future. I've been dead for centuries.
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?
Sunday, January 10
Daily News Stuff 10 January 2021
Things That Aged Poorly Edition
Everything on this channel is great. You might wonder how it has survived given the way YouTube is, and the answer as you might expect is it didn't. This is the second channel; the original, along with six years of content, got completely wiped a couple of years ago.
This stream got privated shortly after it aired because of an accidental bad word - Gura had just one fumbled vowel sound, but that meant three hours of video had to be recompressed and re-uploaded to fix it, and she had other streams scheduled, and given the way YouTube is, leaving it up would mean the end of her career and those of everyone around her, and probably everyone around them and also some of their pets.
Anyway, it's back and it's good fun.
Now that the [youtube] tag supports anonymous playlists (you can just give it a list of video IDs separated by commas) I'm going to build a page - maybe a separate mee.nu blog - hosting collections of videos I like.
Well, the tag does that on this site, anyway. Haven't pushed it out to the rest of mee.nu yet. Next day or so.
Disclaimer: Free telescreen with every painting, but only if you act now!
Things That Aged Poorly Edition
Tech News
- 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.
Tiny Explosions Video of the Day
Everything on this channel is great. You might wonder how it has survived given the way YouTube is, and the answer as you might expect is it didn't. This is the second channel; the original, along with six years of content, got completely wiped a couple of years ago.
Comfy Block Video of the Day
This stream got privated shortly after it aired because of an accidental bad word - Gura had just one fumbled vowel sound, but that meant three hours of video had to be recompressed and re-uploaded to fix it, and she had other streams scheduled, and given the way YouTube is, leaving it up would mean the end of her career and those of everyone around her, and probably everyone around them and also some of their pets.
Anyway, it's back and it's good fun.
Now that the [youtube] tag supports anonymous playlists (you can just give it a list of video IDs separated by commas) I'm going to build a page - maybe a separate mee.nu blog - hosting collections of videos I like.
Well, the tag does that on this site, anyway. Haven't pushed it out to the rest of mee.nu yet. Next day or so.
Disclaimer: Free telescreen with every painting, but only if you act now!
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Parler Embed Test
Ah, got it. It works just fine, but glitches slightly if you embed the same post twice in the page. That's not really a problem; I'll let them know and they can fix that when they have slightly fewer things to deal with.
Update: Implemented for testing here.
Update: Implemented for testing here.
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Saturday, January 09
Daily News Stuff 9 January 2021
The Purge Accelerates Edition
I worry about what might happen to Hololive with American Big Tech gone batshit insane. They're as apolitical as you can get, but that's probably not going to be enough.
The Purge Accelerates Edition
Tech News
- 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.
* Good thing too because now it's private. Possibly because she discussed her alien visitation, or the time she appeared on stream naked.
** Why do we even have that lever?!
Kiara Minecraft Compilation Video of the Day
I worry about what might happen to Hololive with American Big Tech gone batshit insane. They're as apolitical as you can get, but that's probably not going to be enough.
Disclaimer: War is Fuck. Freedom is Fuck. Ignorance is Fuck.
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Video Spam Test Post
If this works properly, this post won't break your browser.
Update: But your browser might break it.
Waterfox Classic's DOM support is out of date - deliberately, so as not to break plugins - and Pale Moon's JavaScript support is way out of date.
I'll need to detect them via the user agent string and revert to direct (slow) embedding.
If this works properly, this post won't break your browser.
Update: But your browser might break it.
Compatibility Test Results
Desktop- Chrome ✔
- Firefox ✔
- Edge ✔
- Vivaldi ✔
- Brave ✔
- Pale Moon âŒ
- Opera - not tested because I uninstalled it a year ago
- Safari ✔
- Waterfox 3G ✔
- Waterfox Classic âŒ
Waterfox Classic's DOM support is out of date - deliberately, so as not to break plugins - and Pale Moon's JavaScript support is way out of date.
I'll need to detect them via the user agent string and revert to direct (slow) embedding.
Huh. It works.
Once more, withfeeling playlists.
Once more, with
That was... Surprisingly painless.
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Friday, January 08
Daily News Stuff 8 January 2021
In Other Less Genocidey News Edition
Disclaimer: Maybe the real treasure was the Tonys we met along the way.
In Other Less Genocidey News Edition
Tech News
- Lenovo has a new range of Ideapads. (AnandTech)
These include the IdeaPad 5G based on Qualcomm's 8cx processor, which no-one should buy because it's terribly slow, the IdeaPad 5i Pro based on Intel's 11th generation processors which no-one should buy because AMD is much better value and also isn't available in the US, the IdeaPad 5 Pro 14" which has an AMD APU but is also not available in the US, and the IdeaPad 5 Pro 16" which has an AMD APU, will ship in the US starting in May, and...
Well, I personally don't like numeric keypads on laptops - or desktops, really - but it does effectively give you the Four Essential Keys so there's that.
1920x1200 120Hz display, Nvidia MX450 graphics in addition to the APU's integrated graphics, and up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD.
- Sealed court records were exposed by the SolarWinds debacle. (Krebs on Security)
The article also covers speculation that the SolarWinds breach was enabled by an earlier breach of JetBrains - makers of IntelliJ and PyCharm and more significantly here, TeamCity.
What a fiasco.
- Running Windows on the Arm-based Mac Mini. (Thurrott.com)
Using a technical preview of Parallels Desktop and an insider preview of Windows on Arm, so not something any sane person would want to do. You'd be better off with DOSBox-X and Windows Me.
- Facebook has removed the likes count from public pages. (New York Post)
Because fuck you, that's why.
- Fuck ZDNet... No, wait, it's always that one idiot. Why they keep him on staff I don't know, but the rest of the site is still more-or-less worthwhile.
- Blockchain Stalin is at it again.
- Saw an unfamiliar host logging in to one of my servers just now with a private key.
Minor heart attack until I realised that it was the backup server doing its daily duty and the hosting company had changed their reverse DNS settings.
Essential Minecraft Mods Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Maybe the real treasure was the Tonys we met along the way.
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Never Mind The Genocide, Feel The Width
Tim Cook hates Donald Trump. But he's just fine doing business with China.
Tim Cook hates Donald Trump. But he's just fine doing business with China.
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Thursday, January 07
Daily News Stuff 7 January 2021
If Everyone Could Just Stop Being Idiots For Five Minutes Edition
Someone leak a schematic so that people might have a chance to repair the crap Apple sells? Unleash the NSA!
Devices being made by child slaves? Yeah, whatever.
If Everyone Could Just Stop Being Idiots For Five Minutes Edition
Tech News
- Adata is working with Gigabyte and MSI to prepare for DDR5-8400. (Tom's Hardware)
The entry spec for DDR5 is 4800, but manufacturers are hoping to have 8400 at launch. This would be huge for future desktop APUs.
- AMD's upcoming 32-core Epyc 7543 is just 5% slower than Intel's far more expensive 28-core Xeon 8280 assuming you are using two Xeons. (Tom's Hardware)
And the Xeon is Intel's current top of the line, while the 7543 is the middle of AMD's range.
With base and boost clocks of 2.8/3.7GHz, this chip is clocked nearly as high as my desktop, and since it's Zen 3 and not Zen1 like I have, would run around 50% faster on even single-threaded workloads.
- Sonnet has a rather neat little eGPU in their new Breakaway Puck. (Tom's Hardware)
Not particularly cheap at $600 for a 5500XT and $900 for a 5700XT, but I'm not sure there are that many options in this space. Most such devices are built to take a full-size graphics card.
It also serves as a basic dock - Thunderbolt in and out, two USB 3, plus HDMI and Displayport.
- The EPYC3451D4U-2L2T2O8R is a previously undiscovered novel by Hugo Gernsback. (Serve the Home)
Or possibly an Epyc Embedded microATX motherboard from ASRock.
It's still based on Zen 1 parts, though AMD recently announced Zen 2 Epyc Embedded chips so we might see an upgrade soon.
Compared to full-size Epyc it uses a much smaller socket and much less power (sub-100W). Compared to desktop Ryzen - which does make a good CPU for small servers - it offers four-channel memory and RDIMM support for up to 512GB here and 1TB in theory, and more PCIe lanes.
This board is also the first I've seen supporting the built-in 10G Ethernet found in every Ryzen part. About time. It also has dual Intel 10Gb and 1Gb ports and yet another port for remote management, plus four U.2 NVMe ports and twelve SAS ports, so a full complement of both networking and I/O for a small board.
- The NYSE
isisn'tis delisting three Chinese telcos. (ZDNet)
The companies are, of course, under the thumb of the CCP and the Chinese military and busy stealing any data they can get their hands on, because that's simply how China works.
- Microsoft is adding a newsfeed to the Windows taskbar. (Thurrott.com)
So that users can disable it until Microsoft abandons the idea.
That's not my take, that's everyone's take.
- Fuck Apple. (9to5Mac)
Also Twitter, Facebook, and Tech Crunch.
- Meanwhile I'm trying out Vivaldi as an alternative to Chrome. But given the recent hacks I'm not sure I want to give it my passwords, so kind of a pain.
Fuck Apple Video of the Day
Someone leak a schematic so that people might have a chance to repair the crap Apple sells? Unleash the NSA!
Devices being made by child slaves? Yeah, whatever.
Disclaimer: Two minutes. I'd settle for two minutes.
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Wednesday, January 06
Daily News Stuff 6 January 2021
A Trans-Pacific Tunnel, Hurrah Edition
This one is rather long. For all I know it might be infinitely long; I started watching seven hours ago and it's still going. Anyway, about three hours in, after some successful treasure hunts around the distant island Kiara dubbed Japan, she makes it back with all her goodies to the HoloEN base.
And then chat persuaded her to build a railway through the Nether between their base and Japan. Solo construction through lakes of fire and past tribes of piglins and angry ghasts. And she succeeded.
Disclaimer:
Once I built a railroad
A Trans-Pacific Tunnel, Hurrah Edition
Tech News
- Jim Keller has been named CTO of Tenstorrent. (AnandTech)
He's been behind a lot of what's good in CPUs over the last couple of decades, working on the DEC Alpha, AMD K7 (Athlon) and later guiding (but not designing) Zen, and working for P.A. Semi and then Apple on Arm designs.
Tenstorrent makes AI processors rather than general-purpose CPUs so this isn't likely to become a consumer product.
He was most recently at Intel beforetelling them to shove their office politics where the sun don't shineresigning to spend more time with his family.
- DOSBox-X is DOSBox only X. (DOSBox-X)
It supports Windows 95, 98, and ME, and also the NEC PC-98, Roland MT-32 emulation, internet access, and useful tricks like snapshotting your machine state. (Perfect for games with crappy save systems.)
- Android Things is the latest member of the Google Deadpool. (InfoQ)
It is no longer accepting new projects and will be shut down entirely exactly 365 days from now.
- GitHub has received a US license to operate in Iran. (ZDNet)
Countdown to it being banned in Iran...
- Telegram lets you triangulate the precise location of any idiot who turns on the People Nearby feature. (Ars Technica)
Telegram's response so far is yeah, whatever.
Once I Built A Railroad to Japan Video of the Day
This one is rather long. For all I know it might be infinitely long; I started watching seven hours ago and it's still going. Anyway, about three hours in, after some successful treasure hunts around the distant island Kiara dubbed Japan, she makes it back with all her goodies to the HoloEN base.
And then chat persuaded her to build a railway through the Nether between their base and Japan. Solo construction through lakes of fire and past tribes of piglins and angry ghasts. And she succeeded.
Disclaimer:
Once I built a railroad
To Japan,
Made it of iron and sticks,
Turns out that ghast was
Not a fan,
Now I have tunnels to fix.
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Tuesday, January 05
Daily News Stuff 5 January 2021
Fuck All The Words Edition
This hasn't yet streamed at time of posting, but if anyone can do Minecraft ASMR it's Roboco.
Disclaimer: We use "fuck" for everything. We're eco-fucking-nomical.
Fuck All The Words Edition
Tech News
- Sydney has gone into, well, not a lockdown, but a something, with masks mandated for pretty much anyone out in public.
We had five Bat Flu cases yesterday.
I mean, it's not like I want to go outside anyway. Sydney is catching the edge of the Cyclone Imogen storm system right now and it's absolutely pissing down. And Warragamba Dam is 98% full already, so we can expect flooding in western Sydney at any moment.
(This time last year it was 63% full and western Sydney was on fire.)
- Crypto miners say fuck you to anyone hoping to get a new graphics card. (Tom's Hardware)
With Bitcoin and Ethereum on the zoom again it's likely that mid-range and last-gen cards will quickly become impossible to find as well.
And it's not just theoretical. (WCCFTech)
Some guy got hold of 78 RTX 3080s and built them into a mining rig. Some other people are slightly peeved.
If crypto prices keep increasing, AMD CPUs will also become viable, and the shortage of 5000-series parts is already causing increases in 3000-series pricing.
- Original Linus says fuck Intel and their short-sighted policy on ECC memory. (Tom's Hardware)
ECC absolutely matters.
He also doesn't like 80 character line limits.
ECC availability matters a lot - exactly because Intel has been instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with it's horribly bad market segmentation.
- A Windows guy is taking a look at the new Arm-based Mac Mini. (Thurrott.com)
Just an unboxing so far, but he's pretty fair with both praise and criticism and not a member of the tame Apple press, so the follow-ups should be worth reading.
- There's a new PlayStation game out: Magic Castle. (Engadget)
Where by PlayStation we mean PlayStation. None of this numbered bullshit.
- Ether - the Ethereum currency - has hit $1000 again. (Ars Technica)
Coupled with high gas fees this makes the network completely unusable. But I should be able to swap a tiny amount of ETH for a ton of Matic for the work I'm doing at my day job.
- Alibaba CEO Jack Ma hasn't been seen in public since October due to a scheduling conflict. (Reuters)
The conflict being not wanting to get vanned by the CCP.
Minecraft ASMR Video of the Day
This hasn't yet streamed at time of posting, but if anyone can do Minecraft ASMR it's Roboco.
Disclaimer: We use "fuck" for everything. We're eco-fucking-nomical.
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Monday, January 04
Daily News Stuff 4 January 2021
Shiny Slimy Story Edition
Coco is back playing Terraria again. In today's episode, she murders so many slimes that she ends up building a house out of them.
Shiny Slimy Story Edition
Tech News
- Crucial's DDR4-5100 RAM delivers an average of nearly 1% better performance than DDR4-4400. (Tom's Hardware)
At $900 for a 16GB kit, basically any other hardware upgrade will deliver better value for money. This is a marketing gimmick, nothing more.
- URL shorteners track you for advertising revenue. (Like Miles)
Even if they don't show you an ad, they set ad cookies using an intermediary redirect.
- An overview of USB 5GbE adapters. (Serve the Home)
After reviewing three different adapters, the takeaway is just buy the Sabrent. It's the most reliable and also the cheapest.
They're planning to review a QNAP model, which I hope will also be good. QNAP is an established brand for networking gear and I would hope they're not selling garbage even if it's just an OEM product they've put their name on.
- Facebook bad. (The Atlantic)
They do have a point here, but there's a reason I refer to them as Fascist Quarterly.
- Apple has decided not to ban the MacOS app Amphetamine after all. (9to5Mac)
They said the app - which simply gives you fine-grained control over your computer's sleep settings - broke the App Store guidelines on drugs and alcohol.Your app appears to promote inappropriate use of controlled substances. Specifically, your app name and icon include references to controlled substances, pills.
Apple is run by morons. Common sense prevailed in this instance, but that's not going to last.
Diggity Dig Dig Video of the Day
Coco is back playing Terraria again. In today's episode, she murders so many slimes that she ends up building a house out of them.
Disclaimer: A witch! A witch!
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