CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?

Saturday, April 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 April 2019

I Do Not Like It, Sam I Am Edition

Tech News

  • Should ad-supported networks be regulated differently from other platforms?  (TechDirt)

    That seems at least a reasonable idea to pursue.

  • Working as a librarian gave me PTSD.  (LA Times)

    What?

    In Washington DC.

    Oh.

  • RedHat has taken over management of OpenJDK 8 and 11 from Oracle much to everyone's relief.  (TheServerSide)

    RedHat did this previously for OpenJDK 6 and 7 when Oracle forgot those existed.

  • Google and Amazon have buried the hatchet, and not in each other.  (The Verge)

    YouTube is coming back to Amazon's Fire devices, and Prime Video is returning to Chromecast.

  • Is it possible to escape the Apple ecosystem?  (ZDNet)

    Wait, Apple has an ecosystem?

  • Build your own blockchain in Crystal.

    The code and explanation are both clear, and it covers the principles of blockchains and what mining is all about.  It doesn't cover the networking side of things so it's not a distributed blockchain.

  • But increasingly, neither is Ethereum.  (Coindesk)

    Running a full Ethereum node is a pain because the blockchain has grown huge as Ethereum has gained popularity.  (And the transaction rate of Ethereum, compared to real-world systems, is still indistinguishable from zero.)

    Running a light Ethereum node is a pain because light nodes suck so no-one will peer with you.

    So everyone wants to outsource that problem.

    And everyone is outsourcing it to the same platform - Infura.

    And that means you could replace the entirety of Ethereum with a single MySQL instance and maybe a couple of replicas for safety, and deliver 100x the performance for 1/100th the cost.

    That's the curse of decentralisation.

  • The curse of centralisation, on the other hand, can be shown in WordPress.com's censoring of Jerry Coyne's blog at the behest of Pakistan.

    Run WordPress yourself: Get hacked.  Even if the current release of WordPress is secure, no-one runs it without extensions, and the WordPress extension marketplace is a disaster area.

    Use hosted WordPress: Get hacked anyway, get charged $50 extra a month.

    Use WordPress.com: Get censored according to the standards of the most repressive regimes on Earth.



Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/DepartureJohnS1212_.jpg?size=720x&q=95




Disclaimer: Allergens - may contain traces of Node and NPM.

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Friday, April 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 April 2019

Nazi Flowers Edition

Tech News



Icy Trail Map of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/icy-trail-map.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Click for a readable version.  Possibly the only NSFW urban transport map you'll see all day.


Disclaimer: Some Thus No Highlander services operate directly to and from Celt Ran.

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Thursday, April 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 April 2019

Realistic Fake Cat Butthole Edition

Tech News



Science Fiction News

  • Science fiction and fantasy grand master Gene Wolfe has passed away, aged 87.  (The Guardian)

    The Book of the New Sun is probably his most noted work, but his stories range from the relatively whimsical Free Live Free and There Are Doors to the deeply introspective Soldier in the Mist.  Almost all of them are worth reading.  (I didn't care for The Land Across, but that's a rare exception).


Anime News

  • I have watched and enjoyed several anime series recently: The first half of Re:Slime (it loses steam after that point), My Roommate is a Cat, Hinamatsuri, Bunny Girl Senpai, Endro!, Iroduku, and Sakura Quest, which is an example of how quality writing, direction, and art outweighs a flimsy premise.

    Sakurada Reset is an example of how the lack of quality writing, direction, and art can sink an interesting premise.  Also, I don't think they had a budget.  I mean, literally zero.  Shame.

Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/CatButt.jpg?size=720x&q=95



Disclaimer: â–ˆ ███ ████████████████ ██ ███

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Wednesday, April 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 April 2019

Blup Edition

Tech News



Anime News

  • Monkey Punch a.k.a Kazuhiko Katou, creator of Lupin III, has passed away, aged 81.  (Crunchyroll)

  • I've been watching Sakura Quest.  By mistake, I thought it was a show about a young princess who leaves her kingdom and returns years later to become queen and work with her council of ministers (all young women) to restore prosperity and discover the truth behind the myth of the mysterious dragon girl.

    Which in fact it is.

    Anyway, initial thoughts:

    • This is nice, but it's no Shirobako.
    • It's taking an awful long time to find its pace.
Later thoughts:
    • This is actually really good.
    • Who wrote this?!  Have to screenshot that dialog and post it.
    • Is there some magic program that converts photos into anime backgrounds?  There's so much detail in some of these shots and they only last a couple of seconds.


Anime Opening of the Day



Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/anato-finnstark-remember-chihiro-spirited-away-by-anatofinnstark-dbvb8wt.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Remember, Chihiro... Art by Anato Finnstark



Disclaimer: á€™á€¼á€”်မာစာလုံးစောင်းအက္ခရာရှိပါလျှင်ငါတွေးမိ။ ဒါကမျိုးအေးပါလိမ့်မယ်။ သူအပေါငျးတို့ဆံပင်ကောက်ကောက်နှင့်လိမ်နေတဲ့စတိုင်သုံးဆယ်ဒီဂရီထောင့်မှာပါ။ ကောင်းပြီ, ဟုတ်တယ်, ကထိုသို့သောအမှုကိုအရှိကွောငျးပေါ်လာပါဘူး, သို့မဟုတ်ပါကအတုယူနိုင်ပါသည်ကအနည်းဆုံးပါ။

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Tuesday, April 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 April 2019

Chupakabura Edition

Tech News



Appropriately Named Things Video of the Day




Disclaimer: Don't eat the yellow neutronium.

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Monday, April 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 April 2019

Sakura Quest Wasn't The One I Was Thinking Of Edition

Tech News



Repeat Little Glee Monster of the Day



This has been running through my head all goddamn day until I scrolled back through my blog to find it.  Now I can know peace.



Disclaimer: Hora saikou no kao de PISU!  PISU!  [Wraps pillow around head.]

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Sunday, April 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 April 2019

No Such Thing As Too Much Anime Edition

Tech News



Disclaimer: And I wouldn't want to break the rules, no matter how retarded they are.

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Saturday, April 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 April 2019

You Shall Go To The Ball Edition

Tech News

  • Flink 1.8.0 is out.

    What is Flink?  I don't know.  I read "What is Apache Flink?" and I still don't know.

  • Intel has announced - sort of - the Xeon Gold U series.  (Serve the Home)

    This includes a 20 core server processor for around $1000 - the 6209U - which is amazing value compared to other Intel server parts, but only supports single-socket motherboards. 

    It replaces traditional configs with two ten core CPUs for much less money - the same configurations AMD has targeted with its 24 core Epyc 7401P at $1075.  Intel's advantage is that it has higher boost clock speeds - 3.9GHz vs. 3.0GHz on the Epyc.  AMD's advantage is it offers vastly more I/O - 128 PCIe lanes vs. just 40 on the Xeon.

    Supermicro are ready and waiting with their X11SPA-TF motherboard.  It's focused more at workstations but has onboard BMC so it's fine for servers as well.  Single socket LGA3467, 12 DIMM slots (up to 3TB RAM), 4 M.2 slots, 8 SATA ports, gigabit and 10G Ethernet (both RJ45), plus another port dedicated to IPMI.

  • Doing what the DOJ won't: Apple may be breaking up iTunes.  (Six Colors)

    Much of iTunes' terribleness comes down to it saving all your metadata in a single huge XML file rather than using a database the way any even vaguely sane person would.

  • Intel's H10 SSD is a piece of garbage that no-one should buy.  (ZDNet)

    It puts up to 32GB of Optane cache together with up to 1TB of QLC flash.  So far so good.  A small amount of high-performance, high-endurance Optane backed by lots of cheap QLC flash.  What's not to like?

    What's not to like is that this is not a single device.  It is two separate devices - a tiny useless Optane drive and a large, slow QLC flash drive with no integrated pseudo-SLC cache.  It only actually works if you have an 8th or 9th generation Intel CPU and RST support.

    Another two generations and they might actually get it right; for now just get the Intel 660p for fast bulk storage (~$100 per TB) or the Samsung 870 EVO Plus for high-speed storage (~$250 per TB).

Social Media News



Crystal Ballroom

  • Crystal has an issue that prevents you from building static binaries on MacOS.  Or so it seemed.  Turns out that MacOS has an issue that prevents you from building static libraries on MacOS: Some system libraries have no static version, and can only be dynamically linked.

    You can however build a portable Mac binary with Crystal that includes everything except the system libraries, and will run on any sufficiently recent version of the operating system.

    So that lets me run on any version of Linux (3.9 kernel or later for full functionality), and on Mac.  Currently I have a problem even on WSL let alone directly on Windows, but we'll see about that.


Disclaimer: Blup.

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Friday, April 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 April 2019

One Law Part Two Edition

Tech News

Social Media News

  • Mike Masnick wants to make it totally clear that there is no social media bias against conservatives.  (TechDirt)

  • Google just banned the Dissenter extension from the Chrome store for "hate speech".  (One Angry Gamer)

    Of course, there is no hate speech in the extension.  It just delivers content from the internet.

    One law for left and right alike, that forbids them equally from saying "learn to code" and assuming someone's gender.

  • Google totally doesn't shadow ban sites as you can tell by the lack of results if you search for "google shadow ban" on Google.  (One Angry Gamer)

  • Zero tolerance policies are recursive.  (Ars Technica)

    Rules against drug use become rules against discussing drug use become rules against discussing literature discussing drug use, ad infinitum.

    Pro Tip: Print your books on hemp paper.


Video of the Day


Tim Pool is unimpressed.


Disclaimer: cool

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 April 2019

Ftruncate Does Not Truncate Mmap'd Files Edition


Tech News

  • HP's new Xeon workstations also go up to 56 cores and 6TB of Optane memory.  (AnandTech)

    Prices start at $2372 and continue up past $100,000.

  • The EU has identified a great amount of terrorist content hosted on archive.org including Project Gutenberg, a collection of Grateful Dead bootleg recordings, and CSPAN.  (TechDirt)

    Under the EU's new censorship law - no, a different one - archive.org would have one hour to remove that content or face criminal prosecution.

  • Firefox has removed Dissenter from their add-on gallery.  (One Angry Gamer)

    Mozilla were quite clear on this: If your extension is used by people to say things Mozilla does not like, it will be removed.

    Web browsers have to be neutral to retain users' trust.  Without that they are dead.  I don't think any of the major browser companies remember that fundamental rule.

  • Ethereum continues to be a pain in the ass.

  • Oh joy, an API method that returns success when the value is unknown.  Good work guys.

Crystal Ballroom

  • LMDB doesn't work properly on WSL, which is also a pain in the ass. There are a couple of known bugs in WSL's mmap that give you happy little segmentation faults in place of working code. That also applies to Docker on Windows.

    I was looking at building an app in Crystal that you could run on Windows either using Docker or WSL, but this blows that up. The other thing I could do is write a wrapper that emulates LMDB with SQLite, which has the advantage of running with 100% reliability on everything from supercomputers to vacuum cleaners.  Or just use SQLite as SQLite.  I know, radical idea.

    And static linking on MacOS doesn't work yet either.

  • On the other hand, when it does work, I can read and write 300,000 native Crystal records per second sequentially, single-threaded.  Or, and this is important, 180,000 random reads per second.  That's converting everything to JSON and back again, unpacking nested data structures, all that stuff.

    Random access time is around 2-2.5µs, with the same going for JSON decoding.  Throughput should scale linearly with core count but I just tried it and it doesn't, which is kind of annoying.

  • Hmm.  How fast is SQLite then?

    Read 2000000 records in 00:00:01.68

    Okay, that should do.  (Those are smaller records, so it's probably about the same speed as LMDB.)


Disclaimer: WSL's mmap behavior different from native Linux.  Native Linux work, but WSL(1438cool segmentation fault.  Here is sample code.

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