Well that's good. Fantastic. That gives us 20 minutes to save the world and I've got a post office. And it's shut!
Sunday, December 27
Daily News Stuff 27 December 2020
Gotta Pay The Bills Edition
Gotta Pay The Bills Edition
Tech News
- Someone sneezed in Sydney's Northern Beaches - about twenty miles from where I live - and toilet paper is rationed again.
On the other hand, the shelves are full. Being limited to two packs per customer but having plenty of supply is definitely preferable to the other way around.
- AMD needs a Ryzen 5700X. (Tom's Hardware)
They will likely release one as soon as they manage to keep the 5600X and 5800X in stock for more than a few days at a time.
- Asus seems to have leaked the RTX 3060 and 3080 Ti. (Tom's Hardware)
Both have 12GB of RAM. It will be interesting to see how they position the price on the 3060 against the 8GB 3060 Ti, which in Australia is bloody expensive.
- How to make your API horrible. (Solovyov)
I hate APIs that do this. There is some useful discussion at Hacker News though.
- No! Why would you do that?! (Serve the Home)
The Sabrent Rocket Q4 is a PCIe 4.0 QLC SSD. The cost of the PCIe 4.0 controller makes it more expensive than even a high-end PCIe 3.0 TLC drive, and while it is faster on sequential reads, QLC isn't great at write-intensive workloads. It's really bad at write-intensive workloads.
I guess if you want a nice big expansion drive for your PlayStation 5, this could fit nicely.
- iCloud fell over. (CNet)
While Apple is particularly plagued by this sort of thing, no cloud provider went without a major outage in 2020.
August
- On August 1 Twitter got hacked by a 17-year-old from Florida, because your security is only as strong as the weakest link and Twitter's weakest link was very weak indeed, and meanwhile RedHat made their weakest link 100% secure, so much so that your servers would no longer boot.
- On August 2 the Dragon returned to Earth, Bootstrap Icons was a set of icons for Bootstrap, and Tesla and Google re-invented cookies.
- On August 3 we visited Derepedia, Pleroma was a fediverse node written in Elixir and not a reportable medical condition, except that it also used Node.js which is.
- On August 4 we were reincarnated as a wombat in a world where P=NP, Ryzen hit 6W except it was still Zen 1, Intel's next-gen chips would beat AMD's current-gen chips, and weird shit the PostgreSQL query optimiser taught me. Oh, and Windows Defender defended you from defending yourself. Peachy.
- On August 5 Apple released new iMacs, ranging in price up to A$13,748 and already obsolete, Luau was Lua with types, Parkinson's law applied to web page load times just as every other field of human endeavour, and a SpaceX Starship prototype didn't explode.
- On August 6 Samsung launched the Note 20 and Tab S7, Twitter locked the Trump presidential campaign out of its account over a factually accurate tweet, and the matte finish option on the new iMac turned out to cost as much as two Acer 27" 4K monitors.
- On August 7 MySQL decided to drop 20% of incoming connections, Intel got hacked - sort of - and sort-of confidential documents were sort-of leaked, and Apple forbade game streaming on iOS because they are idiots.
- On August 8 I was playing Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, apparently, Google bought the creator of Focal smart glasses and immediately bricked all existing devices, the Note 20 was not very good, and Julia could compile static binaries.
- On August 9 Twitter was in talks with TikTok to create the worst website ever envisioned, scientists actually demonstrated working cold fusion - useless for energy production, but working, and several hundred critical bugs were found in Qualcomm's DSP firmware.
- On August 10 Department of Corporate Slave Rabbits came to an end, but to make up for it we got alcohol from air.
- On August 11 the Oppo Reno3 came with an A75, A76, or A77 core depending on where you bought it, the Oppo A52 looked good, Reddit committed slow suicide, the customer was mostly wrong, ASRock showed off a standard ATX EPYC motherboard which might be very interesting now with Epyc 3 close to retail release, China blocked all TLS 1.3 connections, Ceres had an ocean, and 2020 was summed up in one tweet.
- On August 12 a 128-core six-screen laptop for very large laps, LPDDR5 <> DDR5, Genius used Trap Street, there's a hole in the radio telescope, dear Liza, AMD clobbered Intel in value competition even after Intel slashed its prices, and Microsoft announced the Surface Duo, a very nice pocket productivity device for the busy young businessperson on the go in a year when all the busy young businesspersons are sitting at home in their pyjamas.
- On August 13 Humble Bundle packaged Vegas, Sound Forge, and Acid Music Studio at a very reasonable price and if you missed it they're doing it again right now, Intel spilled a deet, Twitter announced their new API and hurriedly reassured developers that the old API wasn't going away because the new one was a train wreck, TechDirt got the DTs and I dumped them from my list of news sources, and I still don't trust Dropbox.
- On August 14 Micron announced GDDR6X RAM - now ued in Nvidia's high-end cards, Ethereum gas prices briefly hit 300, Intel confirmed DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 for 2021, which probably means 2023, SpaceX's Starlink didn't suck, web browsers did, and YouTube went full Kafka. Oh, and the Yam cryptocurrency self-destructed - due to a bug rather than the more usual someone running off with the funds.
- On August 15 notes on writing your own virtual machine, Ubuntu updated the kernel version on an LTS release, apparently forgetting what the S stands for, Clippy got a job with Twitter, and I migrated all my music over from Google Play to YouTube (since Google Play Music is now deceased) and only lost one track out of the thousands I'd uploaded - Deborah Conway's Holes in the Road. ((I chose Google Play Music precisely because it let me upload all the tracks I'd ripped from my own and my father's CD collections.)
- On August 16 Google Cloud had more death flags than an otome game villain, and a California court found that Amazon does in fact sell the products it sells.
- On August 17 a rather nice and not insanely expensive HP laptop, Notepad++ got banned in China, IBM announced their Power 10, and I realised that Hot Chips was on.
- On August 18 the Chuwi AeroBook Pro also had a 4K display, but had a five year old CPU to go with it, IBM's Power 10 and z15 CPUs were too complicated to even describe coherently, Big Tech was playing Notice Me Senpai with the DOJ, a strategy that appears to be paying off, just not for them, and a new biography of Dave Brubeck got around to mentioning his birth on page 302.
- On August 19 the A520 chipset was in fact a chipset, Microsoft presented the Xbox Series X, and Baldur's Gate 3 was announced for early access starting September 30. I should check on how that's going.
- On August 20 Intel actually said what Tiger Lake would be, though they've probably forgotten which one it is by now, Melbourne got a brand new 212-storey residential skyscraper - in Microsoft Flight Simulator, and the Eiuyuden Kickstarter unlocked its 30th stretch goal.
- On August 21 I started tinkering with my 10-bit home computer emulator, a Lightroom update helpfully freed up large amounts of storage by deleting all your photos, and the Synology DS1520+ was still only gigabit.
- On August 22 the 6502 was fucking weird - and so was the BBC Micro that used it, 95 nearby brown dwarfs were discovered though none closer to us than Alpha Centauri, and Microsoft Flight Simulator required all the hardware.
- On August 23 I tried out Nim for my emulator after running some initial experiments in Python, and it actually worked great, a retail release of Ryzen 4000 APUs sold out in minutes, we found a guide to de-Googling your life, and no-one recycled dead solar panels.
- On August 24 server-side rendering was the new hotness, and Zoom went down. Also, 128k of RAM really is not a lot.
- On August 25 Nim worked nicely, TSMC's 5nm node entered production with a total of one customer, and why not write your configuration files in JavaScript.
- On August 26 birds were kind of dumb, the new version of Firefox for Android was bad, we underestimated the price of the RTX 3090 but not by much, the Zenfone 7 went bziiip and we looked at classic graphics chips from the 1980s.
- On August 27 TSMC pushed GAA back to 2nm, Salesforce recorded reocrd profits and record layoffs, Fucking Elastic recorded a record share price, Arwes made your app look like 2020 as seen from 1980, and ArangoDB had some good stuff.
- On August 28 8-bit Atari systems had an early version of the Amiga Copper chip, you will soon be able to exit your ship in Elite, Google declared war on the Fediverse, First Rule of 30% Fee Club is Do Not Mention 30% Fee Club, and we remembered the HP Series 200 Model 16.
- On August 29 the Eiyuden Kickstarter ran out of ideas for new stretch goals after clearing 45 of them, Marvel cancelled their Arm server processors, Apple told everyone to go fuck themselves, a malloc Geiger counter was actually kind of a good idea, and Objective-Rust.
- On August 30 I completed the programming model for my 10-bit home computer emulator - currently unfortunately on hiatus, Rochester Electronics had 27 billion components in stock in a warehouse the size of Belgium, and Google decided to attempt necromancy on Macromedia Flash only this time with "open" standards that just happened to be entirely controlled by Google.
- And on August 31 we explored how to cheat wavetable synthesis into existence in a 1983 home computer, on a clear dodecahedron you could walk forever, Cloudflare sort of went down only it was someone else's fault and they blamed BGP, Pinterest decided they didn't need a shiny new building in the Bay Area, and Apple was working on an in-house GPU. Oh, and the media started tweeting their "fiery but peaceful" pieces because they have no understanding of how Twitter selects an image to associate with a link.
Disclaimer: Or for that matter of anything else.
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Ah, We're Back
All three of our servers in Dallas disappeared for a while. There was a network outage somewhere, and I can guess what might have caused it.
All three of our servers in Dallas disappeared for a while. There was a network outage somewhere, and I can guess what might have caused it.
First thought was my router had locked up. Second thought was I'd missed a support ticket, because I know I've paid the bills.
I spend so much time dealing with problems with websites that I reflexively panic when any site exhibits any sort of issue. YouTube is down? What could have caused it - is our MongoDB cluster still work... Oh. I don't run YouTube.
I spend so much time dealing with problems with websites that I reflexively panic when any site exhibits any sort of issue. YouTube is down? What could have caused it - is our MongoDB cluster still work... Oh. I don't run YouTube.
Probably Not Because of This
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Saturday, December 26
Daily News Stuff 26 December 2020
Post-Derpmas Coma Edition
The conversation between the Minecraft rabbit Pekora and the Minecraft rabbit Pekomama is 100% real.
Pekora promised her fans that she'd come out to her family when she hit a million subscribers - she'd been keeping it secret the entire time that she was a cartoon rabbit. And she followed through, inviting her mother to join her live on stream, with 130,000 viewers, completely cold.
When her mother used her own trademark peko she died of embarrassment. Twice.
Post-Derpmas Coma Edition
Tech News
- A useful little mini-PC from Azulle. (PC Perspective)
It's a quad-core Atom so it's not going to set any speed records, but it provides dual Ethernet ports and WiFi, five USB ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, and VGA, and costs $225 with 4GB RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage. You can add an M.2 NVMe drive and/or a 2.5" SATA drive, and another 4GB of RAM in theory.
In practice these Atoms reportedly work just fine up to 32GB.
Would make a nice home router / media box, or a server for your home office if you don't want to fuss around with VirtualBox.
- Some settings to adjust whenever you install Windows. (Tom's Hardware)
For example, Storage Sense. Make sure that fucker is turned off. Nail it in place if you have to.
- Did you know that there's a Windows hotkey that reduces a window to just the title bar? I don't know what it is, but I hit it a couple of minutes ago and was left hunting frantically for this post.
- Also I may have too many Chrome windows open.
- When you've lost Slashdot... (Slashdot)
A self-serving article from Coindesk about the bright future of crypto in 2021 - neglecting entirely to mention that 2020 was a fucking disaster - and the commenters piss all over it.
- A Korean tokamak sustained 100 million degrees for 20 seconds. (Phys.org)
Practical fusion power is now only 19 years away.
- iOS 14 has almost caught up with Android 4. (9to5Mac)
Widgets on the home screen, you say? How novel.
Essential Minecraft Mod Video of the Day
The conversation between the Minecraft rabbit Pekora and the Minecraft rabbit Pekomama is 100% real.
Pekora promised her fans that she'd come out to her family when she hit a million subscribers - she'd been keeping it secret the entire time that she was a cartoon rabbit. And she followed through, inviting her mother to join her live on stream, with 130,000 viewers, completely cold.
When her mother used her own trademark peko she died of embarrassment. Twice.
July
- On July 1 Apple killed the PC as we knew it, if "as we knew it" was "a Mac retaining any semblance of openness", Amazon delivered snowcones, and ruining open source projects for fun and profit. Speaking of fun and profit, EOFY reporting requirements suck.
- On July 2 we dove deep into Intel's crappy Lakefield thing, LG produced a 17" laptop weighing less than three pounds, the Rust compiler will never be fast, Microsoft made the start menu somewhat less worse, and the Color Maximite 2 arrived, runnin Basic code about as fast as a 6502 could run assembler. Also a whole bunch of anime was pushed back to 2021.... Which is now almost here.
Non Non Biyori season 3 airs starting January 10.
- On July 3 don't use archive.org as a CDN, beating the Blub Paradox, 23,000 MongoDB databases got hacked this time, and Facebook shut down Lasso and Hobbi.
Who?
- On July 4 the Ryzen 4700G (which you can't get) matched the 3800X (which you can), Cronk returned, Walmart converted 160 unused parking lots into drive-in theatres, John was kind of a jerk, and Twitter removed sanity checks. Also we wished America a happy Independence Day.
- On July 5 we predicted that the next big thing from Apple was higher prices and shit no-one asked for - and we were right, relativity explained Mercury - both the planet and the element, and we did not end up getting a W-1290P.
- On July 6 Brython was a bad idea, don't buy $2 USB-to-Lightning cables, and using DEX as a dump stat.
- On July 7 Slack imploded, then exploded, Ryzen XT was meh - compared to Ryzen X, which was and is great, pricing for Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs leaked and you still can't get one, and amorphous boron nitride either was or was not the next big thing.
- On July 8 Thunderbolt 4 was on its way, and so was Hot Chips 2020, the Phanteks P500A had room for two motherboards, and the World Health Organisation noted that Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague was, and I quote, "a thing".
- On July 9 we were slacking from work due to a back injury and accidentally skipped an entire season of Fate Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya and got very confused, some lunatic turned Redis into a search engine, Reddit was spying on you, and 117 out of 117 home routers failed security scans.
- On July 10 Threadripper Pro appeared - a fully unlocked Epyc for the workstation market, Google banned its competition, I asked a question that I still don't know the answer to, and Facebook broke everything.
- On July 11 1TBVPS.com sold 1TB VPSes, engineering samples for Epyc 3 showed up in benchmark results, and the Commander X16 should have used a W65C265S.
- On July 12 Threadripper Pro started at just 12 cores, presumably for tasks that didn't need much CPU but used a ton of RAM, I first discovered MariaDB support for temporal tables, and the WD Blue SN550 performed good.
- On July 13 Github went down again, WeWork was wildly woverwoptimistic, and no, you idiots, Microsoft is not about to abandon x86.
- On July 14 New York celebrated a mountain of corpses, you couldn't get a Ryzen 3300X - and you still can't, and a crowdfunded AMD NUC appeared just in time to be obsolete.
- On July 15 Google ruined everything, Patch Tuesday fixed 123 vulnerabilities, and the Ethereum disaster was just beginning.
- On July 16 we banned Tencent, Twitter got hacked, and Zen 3 did not support DDR 5, as it turned out. It could, but it doesn't.
- On July 17 it wasn't Twitter accounts that got hacked, but Twitter itself, and with inside help, my perpetual license for FontAwesome 5 got planned obsolencensed, and Patreon shot itself in both feet.
- On July 18 Twitter attackers "were not able to view previous account passwords" - just your email address and phone number, Cloudflare went down and took GitLab, Patreon, Authy, and Downdetector with it - and also Digital Ocean, the Asus PN50 broke cover, and no, you're not shadowbanned, we've just, um, banned your shadow.
- On July 19 Citrine was an incredibly bad idea, remote work could destroy Silicon Valley, and if not there's still a chance of a wandering comet, and the Children's python was not named for its diet after all.
- On July 20 we installed Windows and Steam on a Raspberry Pi - or at least, some unfortunate soul did, Loren Chariot Addy the Titbit of Cholame questioned Cele Garth Alda and 16 windy frogs, and H.R. 6666 had 66 sponsors.
- On July 21 AMD officially launched their desktop APU range which, yes, you still can't get, AnandTech benchmarked all the things, and Samsung remotely bricked every single one of their Blu-Ray players. With an XML file.
- On July 22 Metacritic saw a bright new future in fraud, 10.16 == 11, and Comet Neowise put on a show over the SpaceX launch pad.
- On July 23 the Xioami Mi 10 offered near-flagship specs at flagship prices, TechDirt was still drunk, PyPy had a huge problem with Mustache partials, and oh, how quaint, the Ethereum gas price spent most of the day below 100.
- On July 24 Intel's 7nm process was a year late, and won't show up for at least another two years, and I was hyped for 5nm Ryzen APUs which also won't show up for at least two years. The next release looks set to be at 6nm, which is a minor (but worthwhile) update to 7nm rather than a brand new node.
- On July 25 TechDirt was tilting at wombats imagining they were windmills, Yahoo nuked its comment system, and Ethereum continued to be Ethereum, a condition that would persist through the remaining months of the year.
- On July 26 Intel's Xe graphics were on their way, no, there aren't going to be hydrogen-powered Airbi any time soon, and it turned out there a world outside of Europe.
- On July 27 PHP 8 caught up with ALGOL 60 - in one specific feature, don't give third-party sites access to your private GitHub repos, do not watch this video.
- On July 28 a Suikoden sequel crashed Kickstarter by giving it too much money, Intel's crunchy ice pickle, S3 considered harmful - for anything that isn't... for anything at all really, Arm-based Macs entered a quantum superposition, and we discovered Campbell's Law. Or rather, we knew of the fact, we just discovered that it was named Campbell's Law.
Oh, and we also fell into the derpy otome villainess isekai manga subsubsubsubsub-genre with Bakarina and Bertia.
- On July 29 Wikipedia claimed that all DDR5 modules were registered - and still does, Zen 3 was due this year, and you could in fact briefly get one, humans did not live in trees,
- On July 30 a Grub bug nibbled a hole in UEFI, Big Navi turned out to be not quite that big - that leak was probably AMD's compute chip, and Arm's fired CEO of their Chinese division decided he wasn't fired after all.
- On July 31 we journeyed beyond the shoe event horizon, we had a massive philosphers' strike on our hands, and Envoy was an application router supporting layers 3, 4, and 7.
Disclaimer: Mostly.
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Friday, December 25
Daily News Stuff 25 December 2020
Meppy Derpmas Edition
Meppy Derpmas Edition
Tech News
- Installing Windows on an Xbox One ish. (AnandTech)
The Chuwi Aerobox uses the original Xbox One APU, though why those still exist when they were replaced years ago by the smaller, lower-power Xbox One S part is an open question.
It has eight Jaguar cores and uses dual-channel DDR3-1333 RAM, so fast it is not. But exists it does.
- It's a Christmas miracle (and a whole lot of hard work): Ruby 3.0 is out. (Ruby)
It features a shiny new JIT engine and averages three times the performance of Ruby 2.0. It also features native type hinting like recent versions of Python.
- China has launched an antitrust investigation into Alibaba. (Thurrott.com)
Which simply means that someone didn't get paid off.
- The idiots who thought that selling a doorbell that connected to the internet was a good idea are now being sued by the idiots who thought that buying a doorbell that connected to the internet was a good idea. (The Guardian)
Look, just be happy your house didn't burn down. Unless it did, in which case here's a cookie.
- Things are back to normal.
June
- On June 1 the apatosaurus reached the ISS, Australia had no CDA 230 protections, transparency when moderating content was more important than getting it right - and the social networks did neither, and we got an eight-core Elbrus CPU.
- On June 2 Sienna Cichlid reported for NPR, Intel produced a bunch of meh, and an image of an Angel became an Angel in itself.
- On June 3 what was this, a console for ants, Italy tried to shut down Project Gutenberg for infringing on non-existent copyrights, and $90 tablets vs. $730 tablets.
- On June 4 not much happened, though the Chuwi Larkbox was small and Big Navi was big.
- On June 5 Sim Refinery was rediscovered, you wouldn't download a Mac, would you, and China, Russia, and Iran criticised America for not murdering protesters. Meanwhile, Instagram pretty much murdered its own API.
- On June 6 apparently our two million hours was up and one of our high-end 7.6TB MLC PCIe enterprise SSDs suffered from sudden total existence failure, we got the good peanuts, giving China a kill switch for the internet seemed like a bad idea, TechDirt was drunk again, liquid helium was back in stock, and Mint dumped Snap.
- On June 7 Brave didn't do what they were accused of, as it turned out, though they did do something slightly sus, Chromium ungoogled, C&C Remastered, the worst perfect website in the world, and where late the sweet bridge sang.
- On June 8 Tiger Lake was on its way, and nobody outside Intel remembered which one that was, Sapphire Rapids was on its way and nobody including Intel knew which one that was, and FoundationDB was kind of stupid.
- On June 9 your motherboard was simultaneously killing and not killing your shiny new Ryzen CPU, Cerebras sold two computers - for $5 million, Apple might or might not have been planning an Arm-based Mac, and MongoDB 4.4 was almost released.
Oh, and I officially fell down the rabbit hole.
I was watching for for the first Hololive link as I went through the year, it came earlier than I thought. Figures it was Miko.
- On June 10 I had a fun morning when IBM Cloud - which hosts most of our core services at my day job - dropped dead worldwide due to a routing issue, Baldur's Gate II in your browser, Crystal 0.35 arrived, Lakefield - whichever one that was - had 64 EUs, and peanuts were out of stock.
- On June 11 we compared Windows 2004 with Ubuntu 2004, it only took one packet to take down IBM's Cloud, and Twitter went full Karen.
- On June 12 Itch.io released a good bundle for a bad cause, Sony announced their inverse penguin, Jim Keller told Intel to shove it, async was bad, and I forgot about that time we got hit with thousands of requests per second by Microsoft.
- On June 13 Xbox bigger, PlayStation faster, Zoom bad, Huawei bad, HSBC migrated what to what, and Twitter accidentally did something good.
- On June 14 always mount a scratch puppy, I fell down the fantasy console rabbit hole, and how to grow your project to 13,000 dependencies with one line of code.
- On June 15 AMD's latest APUs continue to work just fine when the fan isn't even touching the chip, Reddit thought GitHub was stupid, and what, are you crazy?
- On June 16 Amazon Prime on the Moon, eight of one, two thirds of a dozen of the other, and social distancing for TCP packets. Oh, and I forgot that Lagrange Points are a thing.
- On June 17 Google lied through their fucking teeth, NBC were only pretending to be insane, 20% of people still trusted social networks, and Bootstrap 5 was on its way.
- On June 18 Intel's Copper Lake - Cooper Lake? Really? Intel's Cowpie Lake platform arrived, Ryzen 4000 desktop parts would arrive this year and indeed sort of did, and Google decided that only they had the right to steal your data.
- On June 19 content moderation at scale was impossible if you hired morons to do it, it was a fucking triangle, Twitter's user interface sucked, Mozilla offered a VPN tailored precisely for people who didn't need it, and Twitter went censorship Inception.
It was at roughly this point during the year that I started to become irritated with the course of events.
- On June 20 the server exploded an event that I am still recovering from, and CERN asked for $24 billion to see if they could accidentally destroy the Earth. As I said at the time, go for it.
- On June 21 Wakfu season four was announced, cat sitting on keyboard crashes lightdm, and the case of the terrible, horrible, no good very bad MacBook.
- On June 22 I remoted-mounted a CD-ROM from the other side of the planet, the Washington Post reported that Google Chrome was spyware with an online article containing over 150 ads and tracking cookies, Epic Games was trash, and what happened to the Oxford vaccine anyway?
- On June 23 Apple did not mention Arm once, France dumped France's new hate speech laws, the New York Times threatened to doxx healthcare workers, Twitter screwed up but much less than usual, and we got a Foundation trailer from Apple. Filming had to be stopped due to plague, but is apparently under way again.
- On June 24 the server that had the SSD suddenly vanish had more problems, Parler was meh but at least it existed, and everyone went full Kafka.
- On June 25 Amazon announced an absurdly expensive platform for mobile apps, TikTok was spyware, Wirecard left $2 billion in the back of a taxi, the Perl guys pretended Perl 6 never happened, and GitHub renewed its focus on people who don't use GitHub.
- On June 26 Twitter's kafkabot went insane, a very, very accurate emulator for 8-bit computers, embedding Javascript in favicons, and rumours surfaced of an Xbox Series S - that turned out to be 100% accurate.
- On June 27 we dove head first into Brave New World, Telegram sowed the seeds of its downfall, and astronomers found a... thing.
- On June 28 the Pico-8 was upgraded to 32 colours, Python got a case statement, maybe, TikTok and 52 other apps were spyware, and Mixer self-deceased.
- On June 29 GitHub went down worldwide, Russia said very specifically that it had not suffered any accidents at any nuclear power stations when no-one was asking, and blame New York.
- And on June 30 MongoDB indexing was a Swiss Army chainsaw, the modern web was awful, and Reddit went full Twitter.
Disclaimer: Half way there is half more than not any of the way there.
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Thursday, December 24
Daily News Stuff 24 December 2020
Disclaimer: Best place for it. Orbit, I mean.
Waiting On The Help Line Edition
Tech News
- So I'm A Spider, So What? airs starting January 8.
The (unnamed) main character is voiced by Aoi YÅ«ki, who played Tooru in A Channel and more recently Froppy in My Hero Academia.
That's promising because she has the only speaking part for a good long time, and Froppy's voice is perfect for her character.
- Intel's Maple Ridge Thunderbolt 4 controller is now shipping. (AnandTech)
Answering the question from yesterday, it does not support DisplayPort 2.0.
- A review of the Asus PN50 mini PC. (KitGuru)
It packs fifty rounds of 5.7x28 into... Wait.
It packs an eight core Ryzen 4700U into a NUC-sized, um, NUC, with room for two SO-DIMMs, one M.2, and one 2.5" drive.
It can hit 188 fps in League of Legends at 1080p low detail, and draws 31W at full load. It's better for work than for games, but it's fine for light gaming.
- Fintech is social cancer. (ZDNet)
The article is a glowing description of a looming totalitarian nightmare.
- China is planning to fine radio stations that broadcast people eating large amounts of food. (Gizmodo)
Wait, what?
- Russia is thinking of doing the smart thing and just blocking Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter entirely. (NPR)
Because they discriminate against Russia by labelling Russian state media outlets as, well, Russian state media outlets.
May
- On May 1 the Ryzen 3700X was still the new hotness, the sale of .Org was called off, don't use the browser that comes with your phone, server monitoring dashboards sucked - and we didn't know the half of it, and Mail-in=a-Box was.
- On May 2 Intel was up to its old tricks, Quibi died, and we've all had days like [tweet deleted].
- On May 3 ASRock's IPMI worked, California passed a well-intended law that made things worse, and there was no documentation for LXD networking. (I since figured it out, more or less.)
- On May 4 YouTube banned David Icke for spreading the wrong type of conspiracy theory, and how to get your problems solved for free. (Hint: Post the wrong answer on the internet.)
- On May 5 we set case sensitive = true, B2 gained S3 compatibility, and Julia captured Heisenbugs.
- On May 6 Elasticsearch was a disaster, Microprose returned, Twitter reloaded, aimed at its feet again, and pulled the trigger, and seven times never edit a running shell script.
- On May 7 Microsoft released new Surfaces, the EU said that your site has to work without cookies even if it needs cookies to work, and the 1600AF was a 2600.
- On May 8 Apple, Sonos, and Spotify were battling for the worst developer support crown, USB 4 was DisplayPort, the Ryzen 3300X was really good and good luck getting one, and there would be 600-series chipsets from AMD. (There weren't.)
- On May 9 LG's Vervet was released, Go was still hipster COBOL, and Google put all its eggs in one basket prior to dropping the basket.
- On May 10 Meizu released a 17" smartphone - unless they didn't, Intel's DG1 was faster than a PS4 - unless it wasn't, Tesla moved to Texas, and a paladin checked your dovecote for rogue perfume weasels.
- On May 11 /r/animetitties was safe for work, Swift 5.3 supported Windows though no-one was entirely clear why, and iridescent tempered chocolate.
- On May 12 birdless Birds, the Ryzen 4700G peeked out from behind cover only to disappear again and never be seen, the 4900U likewise, and the 125W Intel 10900K used 235W. 235 is more than 125.
- On May 13 we had fun with virtual machines under LXD for versions of fun that involve a surprising number of swear words, if everything requires HTTPS then any sites only supporting HTTP will cease to be, and a question was asked and answered.
- On May 14 Nvidia announced their Ampere A400, recent laptops are faster than cloud servers - sometimes a lot faster, Wordpress was broken yet again, Amazon's Fire HD 8 did not entirely suck, and Deno was Node.js only using TypeScript and written in Rust, which is like building a skyscraper by gluing blocks of cheese together but only using premium Campania mozzarella.
- On May 15 TSMC committed to building a 5nm fab in Arizona, Facebook bought Giphy, all the social networks withdrew from France, and this blog sucked at code formatting.
- On May 16 I tried out SSDNodes and pronounced it good as long as you knew what you were doing, distributed transactions were tricky, and the Mac had been x86 longer than it was previously PowerPC or 68k. Apple set itself to correcting that.
- On May 17 GIFs were considered harmful, WSL was pronounced weasel, supercomputers were mining cryptocurrencies, and Doom was doomed.
- On May 18 we learned how to add ZFS on servers after the fact, Universal Basic Internet was a bad idea, Google banned a podcast app for doing exactly what it said, Docker was sometimes less worse than it was the rest of the time, and one of the X-37B space planes took off for orbit.
- On May 19 QNAP devices got QNAPped, Minecraft sold 2)) MILLION COPIES which is quite a lot, and formatting code was hard (and not just for this blog).
- On May 20 Intel's Comet Lake arrived, whichever that one was, early samples of Zen 3 showed up, and Windows Terminal hit 1.0.
- On May 21 Twitter fucked Twitter up yet again, PCIe 4,0 showed up on Intel motherboards - though not on Intel CPUs, the Alienware M17 R3 had everything including a power brick the size of a Volvo, and Terraria got another big update.
- On May 22 Rocket Lake leaked, whichever that one was, AMD planned the release of what became their XT CPUs, and, um. not much else really.
- On May 23 we lited fictional inventions by year of publication, some Zigs were moved, and the Dynabook Portege X30L-G weighed 870 grams. Also, Castle was Scooby Doo.
- On May 24 we had pizza arbitrage and safe spaces.
- On May 25 Elasticsearch did what it's best at - leaking private data, quantum computing was proved both possible and impossible, and GitLab got social engineered.
- On May 26 Ryzen 3000XT arrived, every iPhone got jailbroken, and Gigabit NBN arrived, except that it already existed and no-one can get it.
- On May 27 DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES UNINSTALL THE LAUNCHER, a guide to the Lakes District, Twitter was a garbage site run by garbage people,and MacOS Catalina was a garbage OS designed by idiots.
- On May 28 Twitter was the problem with Twitter, Python gained two new string functions, and we got eight gigabytes of Pi.
- On May 29 Twitter hated roof Koreans, nobody knew anything, everything got hacked, and YouTube was run by morons.
- On May 30 Hivelocity declared war on catgirls, TechDirt was garbage, and critics were angry with Facebook for not censoring more people.
- And on May 31 all of D&D - all of it, Cities Skylines, the MSI Modern 14, SpaceX and NASA launched an apatosaurus into orbit, website port-scan you, and social networks should just die already.
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Wednesday, December 23
Daily News Stuff 23 December 2020
Begun The Fast Food Console Wars Have Edition
Begun The Fast Food Console Wars Have Edition
Tech News
- So, this happened.
Then this happened.
Then this happened.
And yes, it's real. (Tom's Hardware)
The hardware is an Intel NUC 9 Extreme with unspecified Nvidia graphics in a customised Cooler Master case.
And it really does have a bay for keeping chicken warm.
- Helpful tricks for Nim programmers. (John Novak)
Some of these are obvious if you're familiar with C, others are more specific to the language, compiler, or operating system, like how to bundle a default icon into a Windows executable.
- The SEC is suing Ripple for selling unregistered securities. (Axios)
Ripple is a blockchain designed for financial transactions, and uses a core currency - Ripple, or XRP - to charge transaction fees (which are tiny). That part is fine, but they way they managed availability of XRP to boost the nominal assets of the company has got them into hot water.
It will be interesting how this plays out because all the major blockchains have done this.
- Hololive is back from the big festival. I was almost at a point where I would have had to look for something to watch, rather than deciding which things I didn't have time to watch.
Now it's stay up late to catch Haachama live, or get up at a normal time and watch Ina, Nene, and Polka live. Sorry, Haachama, I caught your earlier stream with Coco, and I'll catch your stream with Amelia on Christmas Day. And once again, that's just Minecraft. I can't keep up with their English-language Minecraft content.
Haachama's thumbnails are a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
April
- On April 1 the Atlantic embraced fascism, Samsung stopped making LCDs, and Xerox didn't buy HP.
- On April 2 96TB of RAID storage landed on my doorstep, Zoom was a disaster, and Intel announced Comet Lake H to and adoring audience of no-one.
- On April 3 everything was worse than we thought, Netflix was streaming 4K - at 240p, Zoom was a disaster, and Threadripper go whoosh.
- On April 4 LXD 4 arrived, Caddy 2 RC1 arrived - along with a completely incompatible config file format, Redis 6 RC3 arrived, Zoom was a disaster, Intel's mobile chips used more power than AMD's desktop chips, and 15,000 insecure Elasticsearch servers bit the dust.
- On April 5 we ran out of COBOL programmers, and don't bind services directly to 0.0.0.0. Maybe that's why we're running out of COBOL programmers.
- On April 6 we got DNS over Wikipedia, SEO ruined everything for a change, and New York banned Zoom, the last intelligent action by the city for the entire year, and they reversed that pretty quickly anyway.
- On April 7 Twitter suspended me for a week, the media was in full batshit insane propaganda mode, Mochizuki's inter-universal Teichmüller proof was published, I got groceries delivered at 4AM, that being the only open timeslot, and ruxolitinib was binitiloxur backwards.
- On April 8 everything was a lie, Sydney welcomed a shipload of plague rats and didn't bother with any testing or tracking whatsoever - which could have turned out much worse than it ultimately did, I tried programming in Nim and pronounced it good, OpenVMS was not in any sense open, and True Facts about the Nudibranch.
- On April 9 a Microsoft spider tried to take out the site at thousands of requests per second, fuck Swift, nice CGI, more day job Threadrippers arrived, and Stadia went free to play, costing Google $0 in lost revenue.
- On April 10 we sheltered in place and ate Vegemite, 800Gb Ethernet, and QLC hit the datacenter.
- On April 11 the Asus G14 looked good, IBM threatened free COBOL training, and the aptly named Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-U6780A arrived.
- On April 12 Google returned no search results for "can I feed my dinosaur ramen", Turbo Pascal 3 was smaller than the MacOS touch command - which sets the timestamp on a file, and nothing else, and the Sea of Marmara looked like an angry possum.
- On April 13 BEEEEEEP, wait, Risu, durian donuts, seriously? Sorry, distracted by a squirrel, writing a SQL database server in Go in one easy lesson, a $100 100GbE card, and Twitter said no privacy for you!
- On April 14 every copy of Valorant came with a free kernel-level rootkit, and we got a 15GHz 6502. Sort of.
- On April 15 Python started turning into Node.js, Western Digital developed shingles, GitHub went free of charge for small closed-source projects, and regex as a filesystem.
- On April 16 there were no lamingtons, China embraced radical opacity, and the HP Envy 13 looked nice.
- On April 17 there was treasure everywhere, the shingles inflection spread, and China said, oh, those thousands of dead people. Also YouTube was full of horrible perverts.
- On April 18 we wrote Python in Rust, TSMC's 3nm node looked awesome, and we discovered dinosaur DNA.
- On April 19 a fake Intel quad 10GbE network card worked perfectly, and we looked at one of AMD's first microprocessors.
- On April 20 we were living through Connie Willis's Remake, Australia caught a case of France, Ruby was a disaster, and so was Zoom.
- On April 21 LG's Vervet had a headphone jack, comic books were already dead, and fuck all the Amendments.
- On April 22 Stripe was obviously retarded, Australia had a total of four new cases of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, and everything mandatory was forbidden.
- On April 23 Crucial released the P5, a mid-range SSD, as in 3.4GB per second, we dropped the Staten Island groundhog, the fossa was focalised and actually turned out to be pretty good, and Apple planned an Arm-based Mac.
- On April 24 iPhone SE vs the DOOGEE X95, Nvidia was making a 5nm mystery chip - still a mystery, in fact, and everyone wanted free money.
- On April 25 we looked at the difference between AMD's four core CPU and AMD's four core CPU, the Arm-based MacBook would be great at half the price, and Unix sort turned out to automatically multi-thread your workloads. Oh, and TURN OFF YOUR BLUETOOTH! NOW! TURN IT OFF NOW!!!
- On April 26 TSMC started work on 2nm, a bug in a one-line Node.js package broke 3.4 million projects, America outsourced contact tracing to Sauron, but also discovered ten extinct varieties of apple, and the media got the story wrong in every possible way and also several impossible ways.
- On April 27 Monkey vs. Opossum Lady, Hitler with a head tilt, Rust-induced migraines, and Lexx.
Give it a minute - almost exactly - for the theme to kick in.
- On April 28 the Atlantic embraced fascism, like, a lot, Disney clickwrapped a hashtag, and a Starship prototype did not explode.
- On April 29 Arm turned 35, Google killed Shoelace, and Reddit was slow.
- On April 30 home deliveries resumed, USB 4 supported DisplayPort 2 - I should check if that really happened, there was no Threadripper 3980X, and Google Cloud bandwidth was wildly overpriced.
Disclaimer: Durian donuts?
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Tuesday, December 22
Daily News Stuff 22 December 2020
Banana Free Zone
Banana Free Zone
Tech News
- It's time for Hololive's annual stage show and my YouTube and Reddit feeds have gone from being 90/10 Hololive/everything else to the reverse.
Should have my Minecraft fix back soon. In fact, I think there's something in the Pikamee queue for me to watch.
- The Ryzen 5800X is 70-80% faster than the 1800X. (WCCFTech)
That's not too bad for three years. It's a combination of IPC increases, better multi-threading, and clock speed improvements.
On the other hand, power consumption increased from 95W to 105W.
- The upload is coming from inside the takedown notice. (TorrentFreak)
More precisely, YouTube got hit with a class-action lawsuit from Hungary over movie clips uploaded from Pakistan - but then one of these Pakastani users logged into their YouTube account from Hungary, using the same IP address as was used to file a DMCA complaint.
March
- On March 1 February didn't end, a Space X prototype very much did, Tomcat got hacked, and the WHO finally noticed Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague.
- On March 2 conference cancellations widened, toilet paper vanished, and Amazon banned a million products but still knowingly sells fake flash storage.
- On March 3 Reuters reported Governor Cuomo as New York's first WBSDP case - because grammar is hard, the WHO said don't call it Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, and Datastax acquired The Last Pickle, in case you were wondering why the jar was empty.
- On March 4 we took our first look at Altra's Ampere 8-core Arm server processors, it was aliens, and let's Encrypt revoked three million SSL certificates.
- On March 5 Doctor Who self-destructed, YouTube took down a YouTube video explaining YouTube's takedown process, and CBS filed DMCA takedown notices against three presidential candidates' own speeches.
- On March 6 security to the toilet paper aisle, a truckload of toilet paper crashed and caught fire in Brisbane, a Toowoomba family discovered that accidentally ordering 2000 rolls online wasn't so unfortunate after all, and Twitter banned comparing people to animals as unfair to animals.
- On March 7 researchers found a side-channel attack that worked on AMD chips rather than Intel - though it was apparently patched before the paper was published, and also found a bug in all recent Intel chips that was impossible to patch but required physical access to exploit.
- On March 8 the SpaceX that launched a thousand ships, stop fussing about with event loops when you have infinite memory, and the case of the disappearing MacBook port.
- On March 9 IBM's X15 processor was announced with over 1GB of cache, Australia's privacy regulator sued Facebook, and K-On! broke up.
- On March 10 Arm servers happened, a $100 laptop happened, Intel 10th gen sort of happened, and don't use free VPNs.
- On March 11 my groceries arrived safely - a trend that would not become familiar as the year went on, Ryzen 4000 laptops started to show up before seeing their shadow and disappearing again, and Nvidia's streaming service died even more.
- On March 12 I got all the Crusader Kings II DLC and have not had time to play it since, your personal information is worth about a dollar, and your light bulbs got EOLed.
- On March 13 we avoided "
's glorkum pass harmlessly through the shade" for weaponless mon, Linked appealed a court ruling that public data posted publicly on a public website was public, Amazon fucked Elasticsearch up even more than it already was - somehow, and how not to clean your phone.
- On March 14 AMD rubbed salt into Intel's wounds, a trend that would become very familiar as the year went on, the usual suspects did that the usual suspects do, Visual Basic came to an end, and all the Apple stores closed.
- On March 15 we got WSL2, Pokemon Go went, or rather, didn't, and Oracle screwed themselves.
- On March 16 grocery deliveries stopped entirely across Australia, forcing people to go to the supermarket in person, because that would make everything better, Google launched the corona-screening site it had loudly asserted it was not developing just a day earlier, and Microsoft announced the Xxxx Xxxxxx X.
- On March 17 I watched Eureka and proclaimed it good, and the Library of Congress acquired leprosy. Or something.
- On March 18 we were offered a choice of walnut or white oak, 3D-printing ventilator valves for fun and profit, and
all([ ])is true.
- On March 19 Ethereum sucked, the Aussie dollar cratered (it is feeling much better, thanks), Sony announced the PlayStation 5, Facebook blocked the New York Times, and the hydroxychloroquine saga began in earnest.
- On March 20 AWS was fookin' expensive, Twitter jumped feet-first into being the arbiter of truth, and we all ditched Adobe.
- On March 21 Twitter suspended arch-conservative Cory Doctorow, plague candy, why the Active Record model - and REST - are bad, and I got a Threadripper at my day job.
- On March 22 the Oracle v. Google courtroom drama entered its ninety-second year, Apple lost Tech Crunch, and Google and Microsoft took pity on sysadmins, just briefly.
- On March 23 don't single-source your bread wrappers from Kazakhstan, ventilator production ramped up just before it turned out that we already had plenty, Andrew Cuomo was a communist, and I somehow got groceries delivered.
I remember that time now, staying up past midnight so that I could snah a delivery slot before they were all taken.
- On March 24 Lego released their Coronavirus Panic playset, now considered a hard-to-find classic, unless they didn't, DON'T EAT FISH MEDICINE, and why can't the AI learn how to speak.
- On March 25 nobody had ever heard of Brandenburg v. Ohio, Microsoft and Nvidia said their supply chains would be just fine and I said that shortages and high prices would persist throughout the year, so score one for me there, and Adobe Creative Cloud had a little bug that let other people delete all your files. Unless you were using HPE SSDs in which case you didn't have any files.
- On March 26 Navi got stolen, we ran out of cloud, and Linux finally dropped support for a network standard that exactly zero people in the entire world were using.
- On March 27 Thunderbirds were go, DO NOT ENABLE DEDUPLICATION, Huawei announced the P40, P40 Pro, P40 Pro Plus, and P40 Plus Pro, Backblaze hit an exabyte, and Zoom was the hot new cancer.
- On March 28 CNN was completely fucking insane, Google forgot TechDirt, which had, admittedly, just returned from a month-long bender, Yelp forgot to tell companies that they had been signed up to a Corona fundraiser, and SpaceX got the delivery contract to Gateway.
- On March 29 we failed to install Numpy, the price for crude oil went negative for the first time ever, and a $9 million virtual server.
- On March 30 the Peace Talks trailer arrived - it's worth watching again if you've read the book, we got the first reviews of Ryzen 4000 laptops, the cloud was still full, and doctors continued to disappear in Wuhan.
- And on March 31 gas dropped to $1 per gallon in London.... Kentucky, we saw the shiny Ryzen 4900HS which is still basically not available anywhere, 100% of Australia's manufacturing capacity was dedicated to producing nothing but
shoestoilet paper, and the 19th person died of it - in the entire country.
Disclaimers: All disclaimers are limited to one per customer, first come, first served, no rainchecks, 15% weekend surcharge, 25% public holiday surcharge, 50% weekday surcharge, no cash, cheques, or credit cards.
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Monday, December 21
Daily News Stuff 21 December 2020
February Edition
February Edition
Tech News
- Apple has tied up 80% of TSMC's 5nm cpacity for the next year. (WCCFTech)
It's hard to be annoyed by this, because it's Apple's chip purchases to power their overpriced fashion accessories that has funded TSMC's massive expansion over the last decade.
- Unsurprisingly, AMD will be going 6nm for their next-plus-one generation APUs. (WCCFTech)
These will finally bring together Zen 3, Navi 2, DDR5, and PCIe 4.0 on a single chip. The leaked timeline slots them into H2 2021, but that's likely when production will start, with chips actually arriving in the beginning of 2022.
In the meantime, AMD will have two mobile parts - Zen 3 with older Vega graphics, or Zen 2 with newer Navi 2 graphics. I guess they couldn't bring the two designs together in time for their launch schedule.
The new consoles are also Zen 2 with Navi 2.
- Life Hack: If you're watching a long Hololive stream, like Gura's gem today building a trident farm and then getting trapped inside her own creation, and it starts to lag, hit F5. It's likely the culprit is not the stream but the chat. YouTube chat, built by Google, doesn't work very well in Chrome, built by their fiercest competitors, Google.
February
- On February 1 we suggested dropping your phone in molten iron - and your fingers too.
- On February 2 we reinstalled Windows, celebrated World Palindrome Day, and wondered who the hell was still running mail servers as root.
- On February 3 we discovered a new Heinlein novel and also a 300GB archive of Flash games, and Google fucked up Chrome, a trend that would grow familiar as the year wore on.
- On February 4 Intel brought the fight to AMD with a whole bunch of nothin', VMWare doubled their prices, and Twitter leaked everyone's mobile number - which they demanded you provide for security reasons.
Their security, not yours.
Oh, and the voting system used in the Iowa Caucuses collapsed under the strain of literally dozens of users.
- On February 5 we freaked out about online voting and traded new lamps for old. Well, SSDs anyway.
- On February 6 Windows Search went down. You know, the local search that searches locally on your local computer for your local files? Went down.
- On February 7 Doctor Who had not yet entirely erased itself from existence, Wacom sent all your data to Google who did who-knows-what with it, and Australia announced a National Blockchain Roadmap which thankfully has gone exactly nowhere.
- On February 8 we looked at the shiny new Threadripper 3990X, Facebook's Twitter got hacked, everyone's Bluetooth got hacked, and we didn't have permission to shut down our computers.
- On February 9 Big Tech fucked up its response to new privacy rules, Singapore declared war on Netflix, Congress declared war on the First Amendment, and Birds of Prey was one of the last bombs of 2020 because it was one of the last movies of 2020.
- On February 10 Mobile World Congress unravelled over WBSDP, benchmarks leaked of AMD's shiny new Ryzen 4000 APUs which are still in short supply, Britain's NHS upgraded to Windows 7, and all the fires around Sydney were put it when we were pummelled with sixteen inches of rain.
The flatter parts of Sydney - which are far away from where I live - immediately flooded.
- On February 11 China ruined everything, but in this case specifically Equifax, and some crazy people tested Chrome with 1.5TB of RAM.
- On February 12 we got 88Mbps and a six-digit IP address, the FTC started poking around Big Tech, and Nvidia's brand new streaming service pretty much died.
- On February 13 Amii Stewart explained the B550 chipset, a Wordpress plugin that did nothing but display a GDPR cookie message opened sites up to hackers, and blind people don't get schizophrenia, sort of.
- On February 14 we got a Repairman Jack midquel introducing Srem - yes, the Srem, MacOS Catalina was a total mess, the DoJ whacked Huawei, and the British Police warned us about the terrifying dangers of Discord.
- On February 15 Twitter ran an ad for a human organ market, Betelgeuse again completely failed to explode, and why everyone is crazy.
- On February 16 Linux patched the Y2K038 bug, and and Getty Photos get hit with a billion dollar countersuit for being retards.
- On February 17 I was apparently really busy, but 10th gen Intel CPUs launched along with Cream of Bat soup.
- On February 18 it was still raining, idiots tried to trademark the word "did", and a new device generated electricity from humidity gradients.
- On February 19 we first noted the Journalists for Censorship movement, the continuing Police for Censorship movement, and also the Facebook for Censorship movement, and Docker and Razer broke each other's software by shipping identical bugs.
- On February 20 we noted the pipe wrench vulnerability in Bitcoin, why repealing Section 230 won't help - this was before we decided that it should be done anyway just to watch the fuckers squirm, Google went full woke and never recovered, and ICANN decided to try using the internet.
- On February 21 Repairman Jack also switched to DuckDuckGo - the internal chronology of the books is, um, interesting, everyone reviewed the Fractal Design Define 7, and it was time for PCIe 5.0. Also an AI found new antibiotics that work on multi-drug-resistant bacteria.
- On February 22 it had always been AWS, it was time for PCIe 6.0, Nvidia's new streaming service died some more, and someone put 68 billion melodies into the public domain. Which, given the structure of music, is all of them.
- On February 23 Samsung started 7nm production, Google got pissy with Microsoft, and the Star Trek transporter doesn't kill you and then recreate you - it kills and recreates everyone else in the entire universe.
- On February 24 Sony announced the Xperia 1 II, Docker was the solution to - and cause of - all our deployment problems, and KidCraft RFID tagged your children.
- On February 25 the Xbox Series X should be nice if it ever arrives, the announcements from the cancelled Mobile World Congress trickled out and we discovered that the whole event would have been pointless anyway, Intel panicked and slashed prices on server CPUs, and the leaked specs for what became the 6900 XT were mostly wrong.
- On February 26 the Smithsonian released 2.8 million photos into the public domain, Microsoft tried to force you to use an online log in to access your own computer, and we took a look at the Nintendo PlayStation. Yes, really.
- On February 27 fuck Node.js anyway, I took my Xperia tablet out of its box, Hynix said that the leaked specs for what became the 6900 XT were mostly wrong, TikTok sucked, and your browser was spying on you unless it was Brave in which case it had its own problems.
- On February 28 China ruined everything, but in this case specifically the products of their joint venture with AMD, the Raspberry Pi got an extra gig of RAM, and Google Play and Apple's App Store came in fourth and fifth in mobile app store rankings.
- And on February 29 I fixed my Xperia Z3 tablet and my Endless Frontier login, hydrogen power was stupid, Go was slowly morphing into Node.js, Node.js was slowly morphing into Nyarlathotep, Amii Stewart returned, and so did Isaac Asimov.
Disclaimer: I can't believe my little elder god can be this cute.
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Sunday, December 20
Daily News Stuff 20 December 2020
January Edition
January Edition
Tech News
- Not much tech news at the moment, and what there is, is mostly either stupid or depressing, so I'm going to try a year in review since there are twelve days left before we escape from 2020 for good.
- But here's an article discussing using Nextcloud to replace Google. (Kira McLean)
Nextcloud supports email, file sharing, document editing and collaboration, calendars and contacts, video calls and meetings, and has a built-in CMS for basic websites. I'll install it once I've upgraded Rally and give it a try.
January
- On January 1 I noted that Google is rotten to the core, and suggested that investors short it. I'm not wrong, but if you come to me for investment advice you're crazy.
- On January 2 Samsung's DRAM production was derailed by a 60-second power outage, a theme that would become familiar as the year went on.
- On January 3 Python 2.7 reached EOL. Or at least we recovered sufficiently to note that Python 2.7 had reached EOL.
At my day job we switched to PyPy and we're still running happily so far. We've set up a service worker system for code that can't run on Python 2 and will migrate our main apps at leisure.
- On January 4 we had a warning that SSD prices might rise sharply over the course of the year. This didn't happen, though prices didn't decline as sharply as in some recent years.
Also, everything in Australia was on fire, my air conditioner wasn't working, and the New Yorker published their obscene hagiography of thoroughly deceased terrorist general Qasem Soleimani.
Oh, and there was a 32" 4K monitor from LG on sale for $300.
- On January 5 Bruce Perens resigned from the OSI over stupid open source licenses.
In brighter news, Mangadex returned from a three-day outage forced upon them by an idiot uploader and a panicked hosting company.
- On January 6 we received a warning about brown M&Ms, and Ricky Gervais didn't so much roast Hollywood as flame-broil them.
Also the video that introduced me to Saint Motel has since been age-restricted by the fuckwits at YouTube and can no longer be embedded.
- On January 7 the American ABC posted a map showing that all of Australia had burned down, China ruined everything, and AMD announced their Ryzen 4000 APUs which are still in short supply.
- On January 8 Google announced a grand total of nothing at CES, and IBM abandoned Apple's Swift for server code.
- On January 9 the Jussie Smollett case permanently imploded, AMD confirmed Big Navi, which still isn't available anywhere, and it turned out that humans glow in the dark.
Also, YouTube flagged Happy Tree Friends as child-friendly.
- On January 10 scientists fitted cuttlefish with 3D glasses, and original Linus told us not to use ZFS and we all ignored him.
- On January 11 John Carmack discovered that $30 1TB USB drives are indeed a scam.
- On January 12 NASA discovered the first known Class M planet. Other than this one.
- On January 13 Razer showed off a desktop PC - which still hasn't shipped, though they showed it off again earlier this month.
- On January 14 we were informed that AMD's WRX80 platform did not exist. This is what is now known as Threadripper Pro.
- On January 15 a critical security bug was discovered, reported, and fixed before it could lead to disaster, a pattern that... Well, fuck.
- This is taking longer than expected.
- On January 16 Microsoft's new version of Edge was released - and turned out not to suck - and Apple literally made people disappear.
- On January 17 I ordered my NBN upgrade, which was painless and has been very reliable, which one would expect after it took ELEVEN FUCKING YEARS TO ARRIVE, and Betelgeuse failed to explode.
- On January 18 I got the date wrong, HP's protection racket got unmasked, and California asked tech companies "What are you going to do, move to Texas?"
- On January 19 I really need to note what the videos I embed are, because going back now half of them are dead, the Connes Embedding Conjecture was proven false - unrelated, and $3.75 donuts.
- On January 20 I predicted that an astoundingly stupid post from a mainstream journalist would shortly be deleted. Unlike half my videos of the day, it is still there.
- On January 21 I switched to DuckDuckGo, and the price and release date of the Playstation 5 leaked out - completely accurate, minus the availability woes.
- On January 22 AMD's 5600XT turned out better than expected.
- On January 23 how to deal with getting $60,000 in unexpected donations - the answer is to call your payment processor and stay on the phone until it is resolved, and the roadmap to Swift 6 was announced. There is no Swift 6.
- On January 24 Log Horizon season 3 was announced - for October - and I wondered what had happened to Non Non Biyori season 3.
Log Horizon season 3 premieres January 13, and Non Non Biyori season 3 on January 10.
Also, NBN arrived. I initially only got 50Mbps down, but some poking increased that to 82Mbps, which is good enough. Oh, and YouTube fucked things up, a theme that is universal throughout human existence.
- On January 25 Nvidia was so panicked by AMD's 5600XT that they targeted it with an RTX 2080, and Quora was awful. Also, and I quote, You can't copyright a number, you wombats.
- On January 26 oh look another vanished video, but at least I can note that it was the opening credits to Blake's 7, and some crazy people overclocked a 32-core Threadripper to 5.4GHz on all cores.
- On January 27 - just an average day - the Doomsday Clock moved to two minutes to midday.
In a year where more peace agreements were signed than most decades.
- On January 28 - also an average day - Intel got hit by another speculative execution attack. Remember when we worried about those?
- On January 29 we refused to eat bugs or live in a pod, and AMD posted yet another record quarter.
- On January 30 we hoped that Torchlight 3 would not suck, and the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague confirmed cases chart went vertical. The official numbers from China, before they went back to pretending it didn't exist.
- And on January 31 YouTube fucked everything up.
Not Quite Anime Opening Theme Video of the Day
I check out the official Hololive subreddit pretty regularly, because it's impossible to keep track of all the goings on, and I don't want to miss a moment like Haachama live-streaming her tarantula hotpot cooking session.
Cries of Oh god, it's real fill the chat starting at about the six-minute mark, for those of you who are interested. The whole stream lasts about two hours.
Anyway, being Reddit there's a lot of nonsense, but it is moderated by company staff and some of Hololivers do participate.
Oh, hey, A-chan is streaming right now. She's the only member of the staff who has a character design and actually livestreams and joins in the insanity.
Anyway - sometimes it throws up gems like that Amelia vs. hydraulic press video, or this one.
Their actual Minecraft streams are total chaos, ranging from getting blown up by a creeper while trying to prank another team member to trying to remodel an aquarium while the fish are still in it and having to recover them from all over the building when they escape. Although they had an amazing spontaneous moment in their Christmas special which I won't spoil for you.
Cries of Oh god, it's real fill the chat starting at about the six-minute mark, for those of you who are interested. The whole stream lasts about two hours.
Anyway, being Reddit there's a lot of nonsense, but it is moderated by company staff and some of Hololivers do participate.
Oh, hey, A-chan is streaming right now. She's the only member of the staff who has a character design and actually livestreams and joins in the insanity.
Anyway - sometimes it throws up gems like that Amelia vs. hydraulic press video, or this one.
Their actual Minecraft streams are total chaos, ranging from getting blown up by a creeper while trying to prank another team member to trying to remodel an aquarium while the fish are still in it and having to recover them from all over the building when they escape. Although they had an amazing spontaneous moment in their Christmas special which I won't spoil for you.
Disclaimer: Punching Bag was the name of the cat.
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Saturday, December 19
Daily News Stuff 19 December 2020
You Can Take The Girl Out Of Australia Edition
You Can Take The Girl Out Of Australia Edition
Tech News
- Content advisory: You might not want to click on that Haachama Cooking video from yesterday. I posted it before the stream went live based on the amusing and misleading thumbnail... That turned out to be a terrifying and accurate thumbnail.
- Life Hack: Go to Domino's Australian website. Select the three pizzas/three sides online coupon. Swap the sides one-by-one for the gluten-free salted caramel mousse. Then add regular pizzas, one at a time, and select half-and-half with the gluten-free sourdough base. (Check their list of gluten free toppings to be safe.)
There are no coupons for gluten-free pizzas or meals, but if you do this it works out to about half the normal price, and for some reason half-and-half is even cheaper than regular pizzas.
- Not so much. (Tom's Hardware)
Microsoft is reportedly working on custom Arm server CPUs for Azure. The article cites their work co-developing the Qualcomm SQ2 chip used in the Surface Pro X.
The SQ2 is literally the same chip as the 8cx gen 2, which is literally the same chip as the 8cx. Microsoft didn't co-develop squat.
- Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors will support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 in 2023 unless they don't. (WCCFTech)
Intel's roadmap says 2021, but that seems unlikely. Their Ice Lake Xeons are supposed to be out right now but aren't even on the horizon.
- A Zoom executive has been charged with disrupting video meetings commemorating the Tiananmen Square Massacre. (DoJ)
The charges filed include a long litany of irredeemable bullshit, including identity theft and attempts to frame Zoom users for crimes.
Friends don't let friends use Zoom.
China ruins everything.
- A bug in the Magecart malware - which steals payment details from online stores - leaked a list of infected sites. (Bleeping Computer)
The biter bit.
- Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla have declared war on Kazakhstan. (Engadget)
The Kazakhstan government is forcing its serfs - can hardly call them citizens - to use a government-issued root certificate to access secure websites. The browser makers are going to invalidate that certificate. For the third time.
Disclaimer: Taratame did nothing wrong.
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