This wouldn't have happened with Gainsborough or one of those proper painters.

Tuesday, November 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 November 2020

Swings And Roundabouts Edition

Tech News

  • In the end it turns out that the net hole in my budget is only around $500, so I could in fact get myself a new PC if I cut the specs down a bit.

    And now there are no Ryzen 5000 CPUs in stock at all.

    Oh, wait, there's a 5600X at another store I've used before.  I'll spec something out.

    Update: RAM prices have finally returned to the low they reached back in, what, 2013?  A$300 for 64GB of DDR4-3200.  And while Radeon 6000 cards basically don't exist at present, a placeholder RX 580 can be had for relative peanuts.  

    I can afford something that would be 70% faster than my current system for single-threaded tasks and 50% for multi-threaded, have 4x as much memory, 8x as much space on the C drive if I can get it to RAID-0 two M.2 devices, be just as fast for gaming, and be a whole lot quieter while it does it.  Even if it does make noise it will do it under my desk and not directly in front of me.


  • PayPal is still screwing up payments for Coles and Woolworths.  The order from Kmart (part of the Coles group here) got paid, then cancelled, then refunded, then I placed it again by credit card, then they cancelled the items I particularly wanted because they were out of stock even though they still list them as in stock though that part is not PayPal's fault.

    Then Woolworths dropped part of my grocery order - again - so I tried to place a second order with Coles and PayPal bounced it - again.

    Update: Wait.  The only thing Woolies entirely dropped from my order was the paper towels.  The gluten-free bread was out of stock but they replaced that with two smaller gluten-free loaves; the specific toilet paper I ordered was out of stock but they replaced that with a larger 24-pack of the same brand.  So worst case I just need to duck out and pick up some paper towels, or just try not to make a mess until next week.


  • Speaking of Ryzen 5000 AMD now supports undervolting and overdriving.  (AnandTech)

    This is entirely automated, requiring just one click to optimise your CPU for the active cores, and voids your warranty because of course it does.


  • MyNOR is a homebrew CPU with an ALU consisting of a single NOR gate.  (MyNOR)

    It takes 2600 cycles to perform an 8-bit addition.


  • Apple's head of security has been indicted.  (Morgan Hill Times)

    This is security as in making sure people don't walk off with the laptops, not as in bypassing your firewall settings because fuck you anyway.

    Allegedly the Santa Clara Sheriff's Department was holding out for bribes before issuing CCW licenses, and Apple just happened to donate a couple of hundred iPads to the department out of a sense of community something something.

    Two senior officers in the department were also indicted.


  • Maddy is a mail server.  (GitHub)

    It's designed to replace Postfix, Dovecot, OpenDKIM, OpenSPF, and OpenDMARC with a single binary.

    And if you've ever configured an even slightly complicated mail server you'll know what a blessing this is.  Configuring the standard mail services on Linux these days is like configuring Node.js to run PHP applications, only worse.


  • Many smart doorbells for sale on Amazon come pre-installed with vulnerabilities.  (CyberScoop)

    On the other hand, Amazon's own smart doorbells catch fire, so the choice is up to you.


Quack Like A Duck, Sing An Angel Video of the Day



Give it a couple of minutes for her to really get into the song.  It's worth it.


Disclaimer: My Squirrel Buddha Can't Sing In Duet...  With Herself.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:46 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 628 words, total size 5 kb.

Monday, November 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 November 2020

Illudium Q-36 Edition

Tech News


Noisy Neighbour Problem Video of the Day




Squirrel Noises Video of the Day



Disclaimer: Noisy neighbours - not just for virtual servers anymore.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 174 words, total size 2 kb.

Sunday, November 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 November 2020

Publication Order Edition

Tech News

  • Asus has not announced their new Tinkerboard 2 and 2S. (Tom's Hardware)

    These are similar to the Raspberry Pi, albeit slower because they only have two A72 cores rather than four.


  • I thought the Tinkerboard had a dedicated AI core but I had it confused with another news item: SolidRun has launched their new Arm developer board for low-end AI vision projects. (ZDNet)

    These use an NXP i.MX 8M Plus (originally Motorola, then Freescale) which is slower than the Raspberry Pi because it has zero A72 cores rather than four - just the slower A53 core - but it does have a dedicated neural processing unit running at up to 2.3 trillion operations per second.  Boards start at $75.


  • Apple says that it's up to Microsoft to make Windows run on Arm Macs. (Tom's Hardware)

    Which implies that Windows can run on Arm Macs, at least in theory.  Which would suggest that Linux could in principle run on Arm Macs.  Which would make them something other than shiny paperweights.

    Still not going to buy one.


  • Twitter seems to have completed its process of wokifying its technical staff. (Tech Crunch)

    The new fleets feature supposedly made tweets disappear after 24 hours. However:

    • Twitter's API includes fleets in the requests, so any app that caches the API data will keep the fleets indefinitely.

    • Each fleet has a canonical URL which still works after the fleet has nominally expired.

    • Twitter doesn't actually delete the content for 30 days or longer anyway. The feature is purely cosmetic even when it works, which it currently does not.


  • Victoria and South Australia are imposing a mileage tax on electric cars to replace the petrol excise.  (The Driven)

    Which means they need to track how far you drive.  

    Wonderful.


  • Angry Haskell noises.  (Is Apple Silicon Ready)

    Well, angry Android Studio and Docker noises too, but Haskell is the only one that gets the double red splat of not working natively at all and also not working under x86 emulation.  At least some parts of Android Studio and Docker sort of work.

    There is only one app I use that I know is written in Haskell, but it's really useful.


  • Ubuntu Web Remix is ChromeOS only Firefox on Ubuntu.  (Ubuntu Forum)

    This isn't being officially announced by Canonical, but the lead developer is an Ubuntu team member.  I can certainly see the value in a ChromeOS-like operating system that isn't controlled by Google's HR department.


Disclaimer: I say we take off and nuke the entire HR department from orbit.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:45 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 432 words, total size 4 kb.

Saturday, November 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 November 2020

Entropy Gradient Edition

Tech News

  • It seems PayPal doesn't like Australia's largest retailers.  Had a problem placing a grocery order with Woolworths on Thursday.  Went out to the shops, used the same card I use to pay via PayPal, went through just fine.

    Paid a hosting bill today, no problem.  Tried to buy a few items from Kmart, goes into compliance review with PayPal and they'll get back to me in three days, maybe.  Not sure what good that will do since the order seems to have been cancelled already.

    Fortunately this is just some household things I'd like to get before Christmas, not my next week's worth of food.


  • YouTube chat is garbage.  Just an observation.

    I mean technically, not the people in it, who are mostly fine.

    Except for the Chinese antis, who are very much garbage.


  • Sam is coming to Intel and Nvidia.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This is AMD's method for direct-mapping all of a video card's RAM into the CPU's address space.  Currently only works for Radeon 6000 series with Ryzen 5000 series CPUs on a 500 series motherboard but in theory it should work for any CPU, GPU, and motherboard combination.


  • An Elbrus mini-ITX motherboard.  (Tom's Hardware)

    I didn't know they were still making these things.  The chip is on the slow side and the board will be expensive, but if you're interested in that kind of thing, it will make it a lot easier to get a working system.


  • Third-party Radeon 6800 cards are on their way unless they're not.  (WCCFTech)

    Stock clock speed on this one from PowerColor is 2340 MHz vs. 2250 MHz for the reference design, but they got a stable overclock of 2650 MHz.


  • Making your web app run 100x faster means it costs 100x less to host maybe.  (Luke Rissacher)

    Just yesterday I found a common API call at my day job that takes about two seconds - but 99.something% of the time is returning the same, public data.  We added some code to the client to hit the API when it needs custom data and the CDN otherwise, and that dropped to 14 milliseconds.


  • End-to-end ECC vs. a 0.1¢ surface-mount resistor.  (Kate's Lab Notebook)

    0.1¢ on the resistor.


  • A Brainfuck IDE and interpreter that fits in a boot sector.  (GitHub)

    Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to boot and cry.


  • It's always a demarcation dispute with these guys.  (Tech Crunch)

    Pakistan: We want to censor the internet!

    Twitter, Facebook, Google: Hey!  That's our job!


  • Oh, right.  I have Amazon Prime now.


Move Aside, Conan O'Brien Video of the Day


I saw this and thought, hey, nice, they got a professional editor to do the opening credits.

No.  Well, maybe.  It was another HololiveEn member - Amelia.  But I know that Ina is a professional illustrator, so it's entirely possible that Amelia is a professional video editor as well as a Minecraft gremlin.


Disclaimer: All I got right now is this box of one dozen starving, crazed weasels.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:27 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 507 words, total size 5 kb.

Friday, November 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 November 2020

Shark Hat Edition

Tech News

  • Twitter's new "fleets" feature, which causes posts to self-destruct after 24 hours, has itself self-destructed after 24 hours.  (The Independent)

    It's the 2020est thing ever.


  • However bad we thought it was, it's worse.  (Mr Macintosh)

    • The MacOS Big Sur update would brick the 2013-2014 MacBook Pro beyond any recovery, requiring a whole new logic board.

    • The repair costs users $500, despite the fact that Apple destroyed your computer themselves.

    • The replacement logic board is not available anyway.

    Good work there, world's richest company.


  • Gigabyte finally has a range of Zen 2 NUC's.  (Tom's Hardware)

    On the good side, they have 2.5GbE as standard, HDMI, DisplayPort, and two USB-C with DP, one each at the front and back.

    On the bad side, the arrangement of the USB ports at the front seems deliberately designed to infuriate people.


  • Fonts for developers.  (Devfonts)


  • The threat of the leapn't second.  (Dreamwidth)

    Every few years on average we need to add a leap second to our clocks to keep them in sync with the Earth's actual rotation, which is very slightly slower than 86400 seconds per day, gradually slowing down, and variable anyway.

    Lately the accumulated drift has been holding at just above zero, raising the possibility of a negative leap second, which has never happened and would likely crash every computer in the world.


  • The ASRack X570D4U-2L2T-HoldTheMayo.  (Serve the Home)

    This is the updated version of what I have in the new server (where Ace is running now, after the old server imploded).

    It has two 10GbE ports, two 1GbE ports, and yet another one for IPMI, and both VGA from the management chip and HDMI for an APU.


  • IBM's Power 9 has a cache invalidation bug similar to the ones that have affected Intel in recent years.  (Phoronix)

    The fix is to flush the L1 cache on every single kernel call.

    Fortunately most Power 9s aren't running untrusted code in the first place and can just disable the security patch, because that would be really bad for preformance.


  • Buzzfeed is, for some unfathomable reason, acquiring the Huffington Post.  (Business Insider)

    Lois McMaster Bujold had a great expression for this in Shards of Honor (which if you haven't read it, you should):
    Put all the rotten eggs in one basket - and then drop the basket.


  • The usual suspects are back to demanding more censorship.  (New York Times)


  • Arecibo is being decommissioned.  (Science Magazine)

    Recent damage has left the radio telescope out of action and repairs are judged too risky.  One cable failed in August, and a backup cable failed last week while engineers were planning repairs.  The cables are nearly four inches thick, and if one failed while a repair crew was on site it could easily lead to fatalities.



Japanese-Australian-Finnish Cultural Fusion and How to Raise Wolves Video of the Day




Disclaimer: I regret nothing!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:45 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 483 words, total size 5 kb.

Thursday, November 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 November 2020

All Sales Final Edition

Tech News

  • Selected a hosting provider for the new social network.  Our current provider was very good on free speech issues and helped me with a bogus DMCA claim on one occasion, but they got swallowed up by a larger corporation a while ago and I don't know if they'd do the same today.

    But I've found a provider that has a good track record, that I've used once before, whose terms of service are essentially:

    • No illegal content.
    • No illegal activity.
    • No refunds.

    And while not the cheapest around they are reasonably priced.  That's all I ask.


  • Looking at Big Navi.  (PC Perspective)

    Generally speaking these are great cards at 1440p, often beating the more expensive Nvidia models, and good cards at 4k, coming close behind the more expensive Nvidia models.

    For ray tracing they are okay.  Noticeably slower than Nvidia but still playable.

    Of course, availability is currently zero, but that's just of AMD-branded cards.  Third-party cards are expected to arrive as soon as next week.


  • I expected the 6800 XT to be the pick of the RDNA 2 litter, but the 6800 turns out to be a surprisingly good card.



    It's $80 more than the 3070 (in the US) but beats it on every game, sometimes by substantial margins, and has 16GB vs. just 8GB on the 3070.  In Australia they're exactly the same price, making the 6800 the obvious choice unless you need a specific Nvidia-only feature.


  • Tame Apple Press says you don't need the thing you need the moment Apple stops providing it.  (Macworld)

    No, 16GB of RAM is not enough, thanks all the same.  16GB of main memory and 8GB of video RAM is not enough.  Two computers each with 16GB of main memory and 8GB of video RAM is almost enough.

    Please go piss on someone else's leg.


  • The internet is being censored.  (University of Michigan)

    File this one under no shit, Sherlock.


  • And again.



    What the hell does Outbrain do, anyway?
    We power the feed experience of the open web helping over 1 billion people discover content, products & services that they may be interested in.
    Oh, spam.


Disclaimer: Baked beans are off!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:23 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 369 words, total size 3 kb.

Wednesday, November 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 November 2020

Everyone Else Has A Better PC Than Me Edition

Tech News

  • Testing the new Mac Mini.  (AnandTech)

    The hardware is very good.  The CPU beats Intel on single-threaded tasks and competes well with AMD, and while the integrated GPU can't beat a 580X (as one site claimed) it can beat a 560X.  I wonder how wide the memory bus is - we know it's LPDDR4X-4266, but the performance is surprisingly good if that's just a 128-bit bus.

    The software, unfortunately, is MacOS, which these days means you're a perpetual unpaid beta tester.



    If this hardware were generally available and at all open it would be an exciting and potentially market-changing event.  Instead it's a shiny piece of crap.


  • Intel is talking up its Ice Lake Xeon processors.  (Serve the Home)

    They claim that a 32-core Ice Lake Xeon can beat a 64-core Epyc Rome on AVX512 benchmarks.

    The problem here is that (a) they're comparing against Zen 2 cores from last year when Zen 3 Epycs are already shipping to major customers, (b) Epyc doesn't have AVX512, and (c) Ice Lake Xeon doesn't even have a release date yet.

    Still, it should be a decent chip.


  • Marvell is licensing 112G SerDes for TSMC's 5nm process.  (AnandTech)

    But to whom?  Apple is the main customer of TSMC 5nm, and Apple has no use for this.


  • Resellee wants to become the Pinduoduo of Southeast Asia.  (Tech Crunch)

    I'm sure they do.  Who wouldn't?


  • The censorship will continue until morale improves.

    Natural News is a garbage website populated by alt-med cranks, but Twitter and Facebook are treating it as if it were malware.

    Update: Original tweet went away, replaced with a comment about the issue.


  • Epic Games is suing Apple under Australia's consumer protection laws.  (ZDNet)

    This will be interesting; the ACCC, which manages such things, has real teeth.


  • There you go again.

    We're moving off Ethereum at my day job because it is, not to put too fine a point on things, a complete fucking disaster.


  • Twitter has announced that it is adding an edit button.  (Reuters)

    Just kidding.  Of course they're not doing anything logical or useful.  They're adding tweets that disappear after 24 hours, leaving behind only a perpetual cryptographically verifiable audit trail and a billion screenshots.

    Thanks for leaving the market open for me, anyway.

  • Deplatforming is the new blacklist.  (Legal Insurrection)

    Only now they come for you if you're not a communist.


  • Update: I go, I come back.



    Basically, the Radeon 6000 series does what it needs to do, except that you won't be able to get one.

    Plus in Australia, the 6800 is priced the same as a stock 3070, which it beats easily, and the 6800 XT is priced like a moderately overclocked 3070 - over $300 cheaper than the cheapest 3080.

    But there are no 3080s to be had, currently no Radeon 6000s either, and there are some 3070s.



Except Kiara

http://ai.mee.nu/images/HoloPC.png?size=720x&q=95

(Discussion on Reddit.)




Disclaimer: Doesn't matter if you're a global idol with a million YouTube subscribers, you're still not getting an RTX 3080.  And the supply situation isn't looking great for AMD's RX 6000 range, which launches in about five hours.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:44 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 533 words, total size 6 kb.

Tuesday, November 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 November 2020

Chicken Smoked Salmon And Spicy Noodle Cheeseburger Edition

Tech News


Oh No It's Real Video of the Day



The aforementioned culinary masterpiece.  Maybe I could arrange Haachama a care package.


Disclaimer: A 20-pack of disposable frypans, for a start.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:49 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 328 words, total size 3 kb.

Monday, November 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 November 2020

Space Taxi Edition

Tech News

It's An Idol Group Like AKB48 Video of the Day



Hololive in two minutes and twelve seconds.


Hololive En's Sixth Ranger Video of the Day


Right down to the technical problems.

She didn't take the railroad from the spawn point, so we're still waiting to see someone react to Gura's efforts on the weekend.


Disclaimer: Instead of office chair, package contained cheetah.  Four stars.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:18 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 407 words, total size 5 kb.

Sunday, November 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 November 2020

Too True To Be Good Edition

Tech News

  • Okay, my test run on the dev server with everything enabled is four hours, not two.  Still down from ten hours, and no longer overloads the I/O or causes odd latency spikes towards the end of the run.

    On the bigger server the performance curve is nice and flat.  The first 50,000 messages pushed through the system averaged 5ms each, and at the 5,000,000 mark it's averaging 8.6ms.

    So that's good to go as far as I'm concerned and I can focus entirely on the UI.

    Using ZFS with Gzip does put a fair amount of load on the CPU, though the advantage is less I/O and significantly smaller databases (which in turn means that the Linux filesystem cache can hold more data).  So when it's time to give this a dedicated server I'll be looking for something with plenty of CPU.  Fortunately that's pretty cheap these days; going from 6 cores to 10 adds about $25 per month.

    I used Vultr for this testing.  It cost me $7.68 to get a dedicated server for two days, and while I just used their default Ubuntu 20.04 setup in this case, you can manually install any Linux distro.  Very handy for ZFS because otherwise you have to add SAN storage at extra cost or jump through hoops resizing your root volume.


  • Apple locked down networking in the Big Sur MacOS update so that users can no longer control it.

    Unfortunately...


    Ijits gonna ij.


  • Russian and North Korean state-sponsored hackers are targeting Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague vaccine makers.  (ZDNet)

    That's an act of war.


  • Amazon has recalled 350,000 Ring doorbells because they, uh, catch fire.  (People)

    That's a pretty neat trick for a fucking doorbell.


  • The Fascist People's Front - a.k.a. the American news media - are attacking YouTube for not censoring people in a sufficiently arbitrary way.  (NBC News)
    "Is YouTube unable to contend with this material, meaning they lack resources? Or is it a lack of will?" asked Sarah Roberts, co-director of UCLA's Center for Critical Internet Inquiry.  "Can't we just line them up against the wall and, well, you know?"
    I may have embellished that last sentence slightly.

    Fourteen days to flatten the election result.


  • Five separate HoloEn Minecraft streams this weekend.  Sure, it doesn't compare with the best television ever made, but it's better than 99.5% of it.

    I cancelled my Netflix subscription not as a political protest - this happened a while ago - but because I spent as much time searching for something worth watching as I did actually watching.

    I still have my Animelab subscription, and I'll be keeping that.

    Also I have new desktop wallpaper.



Disclaimer: Spider spider spider spider spider spider.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:44 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 461 words, total size 4 kb.

<< Page 204 of 711 >>
117kb generated in CPU 0.1489, elapsed 0.4289 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.4079 seconds, 412 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
Using http / http://ai.mee.nu / 410