• 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.
  
  ECC availability matters a lot - exactly because Intel has been instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with it's horribly bad market segmentation.

  He also doesn't like 80 character line limits.
  
  
  
• 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.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, January 06 2021 02:16 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Wednesday, January 06 2021 04:05 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Philip Fraering at Wednesday, January 06 2021 06:59 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 06 2021 09:16 AM (PiXy!)

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• 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.

• Lessons learned from the SSDNodes outage: They have pretty good support for a budget VPS provider.  30 minutes to resolve a host node problem at 1AM on a Sunday is fine, though perhaps better monitoring could have caught this earlier.
  
  Also, the backups appear to be snapshots attached to the host node.  Fine if you accidentally splatted your database, not so useful if the entire node goes down.
  
  After the reboot, I averaged 487MB per second creating a 60GB file (for setting up a ZFS filesystem).  I've seen it running faster but that's quite acceptable, and faster than you get on Digital Ocean volumes for example.
  
  
  
• Need 5GbE?  Only have USB?  Not sure what to buy?  Serve the Home got you covered.
  
  Sabrent NT-SS5G.
  StarTech US5GA30.
  TRENDnet TUC-ET5G.
  
  In short: Don't get the TRENDnet.  It bad.
  
  The others only deliver around 3.5Gbps, because they run USB 3.0, which is only 5Gbps itself and has its own overhead to account for.  But if you're otherwise stuck on plain old Gigabit Ethernet that's still a pretty big gain.
  
  
  
• Global app spending reached $407 million on Christmas.  (SensorTower)
  
  Apple removed 39,000 games from their Chinese app store on New Year's Eve, including 95% of the top 1500 paid titles.  (Reuters)
  
  For every hard-won success there is an equal and opposite China ruins everything.
  
  
  
• ZipFly generates Zip files on the fly with Python.  (GitHub)
  
  That is, it doesn't need to write to disk or build the entire file in memory first.  This is great if, for example, your app needs to deliver multiple CSV or JSON downloads at once in a convenient form.
  
  I have a use for this.
  
  
  
• Tohru went splut again just now...  At the exact moment my new combination washer/dryer switched from the wash cycle to the dry cycle.
  
  Which might be a coincidence except that my home office is on the same power circuit as the laundry.
  
  Time to look for a small UPS, I think.  I have one lying around but it's pretty old and at this point it's more of a hazardous waste boat anchor.
  
  My iMac didn't blip, but it wasn't running anything and the screen was off, so it wouldn't have been drawing much power anyway.
  
  
  

• This happened last month but I missed it and so did everyone else: The EU has signed a €145 billion declaration to develop next-gen processors.  (EETimes)
  
  This is a very EU thing to do.  They will allocate "up to" €145 billion over the next few years.  The real amount might turn out to be 10% of that, and of that, perhaps 10% will be spent on anything worthwhile.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, the top seven tech companies gained $3.4 trillion in market cap during 2020.  (CNBC)
  
  If you keeping pumping money into the economy, you're going to get inflation.  Somewhere.  If it's not grocery prices, it's something else.
  
  
  
• ECS has a half mini-ITX motherboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You might think that mini-ITX is about as small as you can make a full-featured motherboard.  And you'd be right.  This is an Atom-based board for embedded applications.  I'm not sure what the advantage is over the mini-STX form factor, except that it does match up with the standard IO backplate shared by everything from mini-ITX to EATX.
  
  
  
• PyPy is seeking sponsorship to enable support for MacOS on Arm.  (More PyPy)
  
  They already support Linux on Arm, so it's not a new compiler, just fixing it to deal with weird stuff Apple has done.
  
  
  
• There's a backdoor account in Zyxel enterprise firewalls and VPN gateways.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's been patched on most models, but who keeps up with all the patches on network appliances?
  
  
  
• After only reading tech stuff and the Hololive subreddit for a couple of weeks, and ignoring the rest of the internet, I visited Twitter again today.
  
  It is a very strange place.
  
  
  
• Tohru - my other desktop - just went splut.  Literally since it's plugged into a 400W Logitech speaker system and it makes a pretty loud splut sound when it powers off.  It's working again now.  Not sure why but the CPU temperature seems rather high if it's being reported correctly.  I might need to get a can of compressed air and clean it out while I'm installing the upgrade bits.
  
  
  
• SSDNodes are upgrading their hardware in Los Angeles, which I noticed when signing up for the two new servers was sold out.  My original server with them is in LA, so it will get migrated to new hardware.
  
  I mention this because it's currently on a Xeon E5-2690 v3, a 2014 CPU that makes perfect sense for a budget VPS provider.  It was a high-end part then and it still provides decent performance.
  
  They'll most likely be upgrading to a Xeon Silver 4214 which is what they seem to use now.  That's a 2019 part, but this being Intel is actually slightly slower.  (CPUBenchmark)
  
  
  
• Then they came for Top Hat Studios...  And got a well-deserved middle finger.
  
  
  I was only vaguely aware of this game previously, but now I've bought it.  Well, also there was nothing interesting in the Steam sale.
  
  Life hack for game publishers: If you tell the Twitter mob to go fuck itself, I will buy your game.  It's really that simple.
  
  
  
• There was no English-language Hololive Minecraft today. Send help.
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 03 2021 06:09 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 03 2021 08:31 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 03 2021 04:07 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 03 2021 05:35 PM (PiXy!)

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• I grabbed two more SSDNodes servers before their current sale ends, one in Dallas in the same datacentre as this server, and one in Singapore since that's their closest location to Sydney.
  
  Singapore is a bit annoying because the routing between eastern Australia and there is random as hell.  It's a 90ms ping from my little Vultr node in Sydney, but a 230ms ping from my house, also in Sydney.  So I need to fiddle with routes to make it worthwhile.
  
  If they do open in Australia - which is possible because they use Hivelocity's datacentres and they're right here in Sydney - then I'll move it across.  You need to pay a year in advance to get their good prices, but if you cancel you do get an account credit so it's fine in the long run.
  
  It's certainly convenient to be able to spin up an instance with AWS or Digital Ocean or Vultr for just an hour or three, but you sure do pay for that.
  
  
  
• Asus has a 28" 4K monitor for $260.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Slight catch: It's a TN panel.  I have one like it, since these 28" TN models were the first affordable 4K displays, and it's very good for TN, but it doesn't measure up to even a middle-of-the-road IPS or VA display,
  
  
  
• The Core i9 11900K is supposedly faster than the Ryzen 5950X in single-core workloads.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's possible if it is hitting 5.3GHz as the same leak suggests.  Ice Lake seems to be a good design, just built on a bad process.
  
  It's slower than both the 5800X and the 10900K in multi-core benchmarks, though, and the 5950X crushes it like a bug.
  
  
  
• A proposed California law makes it legal to punch GrubHub in the face.  (CA.gov)
  
  Probably.  I haven't read the fine print.  
  
  Of course this is the California state legislature, so it will somehow end up making everything worse, and probably also cause an earthquake and/or plague of locusts.
  
  
  
• Microsoft got breached in the SolarWinds debacle.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  From the sound of things they have sufficient auditing to know that the attackers never had write access to any code and they verified separately that nothing was changed, but that's still pretty nasty.
  
  
  
• Farmville has gone to the great milking shed in the sky.  (CNet)
  
  It has plucked its last chicken.  Pickled its last onion.  Joined the bleedin' dawn chorus invisible.
  
  
  
• Google is cross with the FAA's new rules for drones.  (Reuters)
  
  The rules require a low-power radio transponder that broadcasts the drone's ID, so that authorities can track the owner.  Google wants drones to use internet tracking instead, so that they can track the owner.
  
  
  
• California's government sucks.  (Bloomberg)
  
  You don't say.
  
  
  
• It's kind of nice to just post the stories of the day again and not be trying to recap an entire year.  It was worth it though; there was a lot of important stuff I had forgotten and it's much easier to access now.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 02 2021 04:01 AM (obo9H)

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• 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.

• 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 Teichmüller 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.
  
  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9 December is now spelled correctly.

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

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

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• 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.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, December 31 2020 04:05 AM (Bkp4m)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, December 31 2020 10:36 AM (ZlYZd)

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• 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

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, December 30 2020 10:16 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, December 30 2020 10:20 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, December 30 2020 10:21 AM (obo9H)

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• 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

Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, December 29 2020 11:42 AM (Bkp4m)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, December 29 2020 08:06 PM (Bkp4m)

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