Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?
Tuesday, November 10
Bitemporal Edition
Tech News
- I got the new platform - it's called Mana - working with MariaDB and temporal tables.
The switch to MariaDB only really required changing table collations, because the lists of collations supported by MySQL 8 and MariaDB 10 have diverged. And of course switching from TokuDB over to InnoDB.
Temporal tables required a little fiddling with my test suite, because when you run the full test it starts by truncating all the tables, and you can't truncate a temporal table. You have to drop versioning, truncate it, and enable versioning again.
Result: The first run was three times slower than before, but I quickly tracked this down to the stack table, which is the container for mentions, notifications, and other collections of messages. Every time a message is posted, it's dropped into the stacks of all that user's followers, and the count on the stack record is updated.
Turned off versioning for that one table and run time dropped back down to within 5% of an unversioned database.
The resulting database is 25% bigger, partly because it's creating extra records, and partly because it needs to add timestamps to all the index entries so that you can go back in time.
Is it really working? Yep. The test I ran created 100 users, and there are a total of 10,100 records in the user table if you scan across all history.
Also, the MariaDB hot backup utility can in fact capture system versioning, so I probably don't need to worry about bitemporal tables.
This is good. This is really good. Not only does it automatically track intentional edits to every record (I had code set up to handle that for messages), but it provides a magical undo mechanism for accidental deletes or data-mangling bugs.
I think there's a mechanism in there to zap the history for a record should I need that, for example, to comply with GDPR.
- Micron has delivered their new 176-layer 3D flash, sort of. (Tom's Hardware)
One minor catch: It's actually two 88-layer dies nano-stacked on top of each other. I'm not sure if that matters.
It's shipping in products right now, though Micron didn't specify which ones.
- Looking for a rather chunky portable gaming device? Look no further - the Aya Neo Founder Edition is here. (Tom's Hardware)
It has a Ryzen 5 4500U, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB or 1TB SSD, and.... A 7" 1280x800 display, which is a crime given the rest of the hardware stats.
- A wild Ryzen 7 5700U appeared! (Tom's Hardware)
It used SMT.
The 5700U appears to be essentially a 4800U. That means it will be around 25% faster than the 4700U on multi-threaded workloads. (CPUBenchmark)
If the price is the same as before, that's a respectable generational bump.
The 5800U, when it arrives, is expected to be Zen 3 and will offer a similar performance boost over the current 4800U.
- Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption. (Ars Technica)
Yeah, no shit.
- Et tu, Tame Apple Press. (ZDNet)
Even they expect the upcoming Arm-based Macbooks to suck to start with.
Hololive Opening Theme Video of the Day
Previously I'd only caught her mid-way through a livestream. On the weekend I caught one from the beginning, and found I'd been missing out on something.
Specifically, this.
Which on the stream I was watching immediately segued into this.
I was not prepared for that.
Bonus Hololive Opening Theme Video of the Day
Turns out it's composed by the same musician as Haachama's.
Hololive National Anthem Video of the Day
That's actually pretty good.
Disclaimer: There is no
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Monday, November 09
Reasons Part Four Edition
Tech News
- Facebook has declared war on conservative groups spreading information. (Mashable)
This is being done for their own protection. (CNet)
Slashdot are gleefully pro-censorship in all this, because fuck principles.
- Sites relying on LetsEncrypt certificates will become inaccessible from older versions of Linux starting in September next year. (LetsEncryt)
Anything older than Android 7.1 will stop working... Unless you download Firefox, because whatever their their faults the folk at Mozilla actually know how to write a web browser.
- Putting things where they shouldn't be, part one: Running VMWare ESXi on a Raspberry Pi. (Serve the Home)
- Putting things where they shouldn't be, part two: Running BGP on a Lego brick. (Cynthia.re)
- MSI's upcoming RTX 3090 reportedly has a boost clock 16% higher than the Founder's Edition cards. (Tom's Hardware)
- In unrelated news their factory caught fire. (Tom's Hardware)
- Calli and Kiara restarted yesterday's failed Minecraft stream, Kiara died, respawned at the default start point miles from where they had been playing, made her way back, fell off a cliff and died again, and then Minecraft died too, so they spent the rest of a stream talking about their spa date.
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Sunday, November 08
Reasons Part Three Edition
Tech News
- Got Object Desktop renewed so I could install Multiplicity everywhere (slightly tricky because when you renew it issues it to the original email, not the email you enter - and doesn't mention that anywhere), got Multiplicity installed, updated Rally Vincent to Windows 2010 or whatever they're calling this latest release, updated VirtualBox because the latest Windows 10 breaks VirtualBox 5, found that somewhere along the line my GitLab server had gotten hosed, patched it up long enough to copy everything over to a brand new Ubuntu 20.10 instance running ZFS - which works very nicely - and am currently digging into MariaDB temporal tables as originally planned.
Some testing has shown at least that there's no longer any reason to avoid InnoDB so long as you are using ZFS. The tables are much bigger than TokuDB, but about as fast, and ZFS LZ4 compression brings the size down to within about 20% of TokuDB.
And rather importantly, it's unlikely to be suddenly abandoned and force me to convert all my tables.
- I was thinking Tohru - the older of my two Dell all-in-ones - might have had a hardware issue because the fan noise is noticeably louder than it used to be. So I installed Multiplicity and now I'm running both Tohru and Rally rather than Rally being mostly dormant as just serving as a monitor.
And now they're making exactly the same amount of fan noise.
I guess it's just the number of apps and browser tabs and virtual machines I have running all the time. And ever-increasing Windows bloat.
- Got locked out of Twitter today for posting a link discussing the application of Benford's Law to election results. As did quite a few other people. (Instapundit)
No warning, no explanation, just "You broke one of the seven million rules and must be punished."
Apparently the reason is that the site that hosted that link also reported on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop. Twitter doesn't care - and doesn't tell you. You're just kicked off the platform.
- And if you're locked out of Twitter, you also can't use Twitter OAuth to log into other platforms, like Disqus. So the censorious fuckheads have killed that as well.
- In ENTIRELY UNRELATED NEWS Parler is the top free app on the App Store right now.
...
How do you embed one of those things? Can you embed one of those things? I'll look into that. Also the same for mee.ms, of course.
- Uber, fresh from a victory over AB5, vows to take on similar laws worldwide. (Tech Crunch)
What, I have to like Uber now?
Also, the voting map for Prop 22 looks exactly as you would expect. California may be a standard deviation to the left of the US average, but it still has a group two standard deviations to the left of that, trying to control everything.
- ZeroSSL does everything that LetsEncrypt does but seems to be a little more flexible. (ZeroSSL)
95% of the websites at my day job went down for fifteen minutes last week after an issue with LetsEncrypt rate limits cascade-crashed our proxy servers. Not blaming anyone; the latest version of the software fixes this but I haven't had time to update.
- The most popular thumbnail in the world.
Kiara and Calli had a Minecraft stream planned, but it's a weekend for technical issues and it all fell over. 15,000 people in chat giving them money anyway.
Rescheduled for tomorrow now.
- Which is something of a relief because I would have had to tear myself away for Coco's Minecraft stream which starts in twenty minutes. Just after she finished her earlier Terraria stream.
Update: Diamonds!
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Saturday, November 07
Because More Reasons Edition
Tech News
- Working on the UI of the new social platform today. I licensed a Bootstrap theme that has designs for pretty much everything I need - social newsfeeds, blogs, forums, photo galleries, videos and streams, profile pages, all that stuff. But it was also visually busy and slow to load.
I've slimmed it down and sped it up, and made the content load dynamically into a static frame. There's still a small issue with the initial page load, it's now fast enough that you have to know what you're looking for to notice it.
Tomorrow I'm going to implement MariaDB bitemporal tables. These are interesting beasts: They version-track your data. You can run a query to show you what your blog looked like last Tuesday before you messed it up, or to show all the edits to a post. Handled entirely by the database server.
I plan to use bitemporal tables rather than simply temporal tables because if you dump and load a temporal table all the history vanishes, and likewise you can't import history from an existing source. A bitemporal table tracks history both by system time and application time.
I checked on a couple of details tonight, and it looks pretty good. You can partition a temporal table so that the live data is in one file and the history in another (or several others), you can drop old history partitions if you don't need them and the disk is full, and you can add new columns to a temporal table. That's not what the SQL:2011 standard says, and it's not correct from an auditing perspective, but I'm glad they did it because I doubt I could use this feature if it meant never changing my database definitions after launch.
Update: Ugh, they've deprecated TokuDB. It doesn't work with temporal tables anyway, but it was a really solid database engine. InnoDB is supposedly the gold standard but it uses far more storage and offers worse performance.
- Facebook has gone all-in on censorship. (Vice)
The usual suspects are still complaining that they aren't silencing people fast enough.
Orwellian doesn't begin to cover it.
- Scientists have discovered a planet where it rains rocks and the oceans are lava. (CBS)
Sounds like SMOD went to the wrong address.
- The Xbox Series X vs. The Good God That Thing Is Ugly. (Tom's Hardware)
The Xbox is faster, uses less power, and is quieter than the GGTTIU, but not by a huge amount in any category. For a proper head-to-head test we'll need multiple cross-platform titles optimised for each system, and so far there aren't any.
- "><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD has been forced to change its name. (The Guardian)
Yes, someone Little Bobby Tablesed the agency responsible for registering business names in the UK.
- Okay, I don't think that chilli was as gluten-free as the label suggested. Gotta go.
Video of the Day
Miko showed up in Coco's Minecraft stream and things went about as you would expect. The chaos starts before this, but the highlight is the three minutes starting at 26:00.
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Friday, November 06
Because Reasons Edition
Tech News
- I've put my nice fantasy home computer emulator project on hold and I'm back to building the social network because reasons.
Will see if I can get an early preview up this weekend. I was pretty close at the beginning of the year when things were merely literally on fire, and then things got bad.
- And so I was updating my development server (which is hosted at Vultr in Sydney) and it locked up on reboot. After trying a few things to no avail I opened a support ticket, and they had it fixed in three minutes and thirty-nine seconds.
We use IBM Cloud at my day job, and with them I'm lucky to get a response in three hours and thirty-nine minutes, never mind a resolution.
- You get better performance running your own hardware, sure, but with my development server down for entire minutes, I was able to fire up a new server, load the most recent backup, and have it back on line only a few minutes after they fixed the original one.
- Then since I had a complete clone to play with, I updated it to Ubuntu 20.04. That went smoothly as well. And while they don't currently have any available CPU-optimised nodes larger than 2GB in Sydney (a frequent issue with Vultr), the general-purpose node I spun up instead is only about 10% slower running my test suite.
- Zen 3 go brrrrr. (AnandTech)
Lots of benchmarks and tech details here. They compare it against both 10th and 11th generation Intel parts, and Intel would need Rocket Lake to hit 5.6 GHz at default settings to match Zen 3 on single-threaded benchmarks. On multi-threaded benchmarks they're just screwed, because Rocket Lake maxes out at 8 cores.
I wonder when the 5900X and 5950X will actually be in stock. I'd like to get one for our new server. Either is fine.
- Zen 3 really go brrrrr.
- Arm's Cortex A78C is a Cortex A78. (Tom's Hardware)
There is a meaningful difference though - it's designed to run in eight-core clusters, rather than the four+four big.LITTLE designs found in phones.
It's fast enough to make a pretty decent Linux server; I just don't know how well Windows will run on it.
- The Xbox Series S is here. (Thurrott.com)
Great timing, Microsoft. Biggest release of the year and it disappears without a blip.
Summary: Really good hardware, great price, not much storage given how bloated games are these days. And it doesn't support 4K, at all. It's not a performance question; it's unable to output a 4K video signal.
- The Xbox Series X is here as well. (Thurrott.com)
Summary: Great hardware, runs cool and almost silent, a little expensive but very, very fast.
- San Francisco voters have passed a measure banning successful companies from the city. (LA Times)
Ijits gonna ij.
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Thursday, November 05
I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire Just Certain Parts Edition
Tech News
- Xiaomi has another of those little nuclets, like the Chuwi Larkbox. (Tom's Hardware)
This one is named the - seriously - the Xioami Ningmei Rubik's Cube Mini.
It's powered by a quad core Celeron J4125 which delivers acceptable performance for simple tasks, two USB-A ports, one USB-C port, HDMI, headphone jack, and microSD, and measures a tiny 62 x 62 x 42 mm.
6GB/128GB model is $149, 8GB/256GB model is $186.
- Social Media Nightmare Misinformation Scenario would be a good name for a rock band. (Tech Crunch)
It's Tech Crunch, so... You know what to expect.
- Ryzen 5000 goes on sale today and it's already gone. (WCCFTech)
If you want a 5900X or 5950X you'll need to be fast and/or lucky. 5600X and 5800X are apparently in better supply.
Also if you want to watch the first review - it was up on YouTube but now it's disappeared. Apparently it was set to go public the minute the clocked ticker over to release day when the embargo actually had several hours to run.
Update: Listed now on my preferred Australian supplier. The 5900X is A$40 more than the 3900X, which is less than the US price increase. On the other hand, they don't have any.
Reviews are back up now.
- Florida is releasing 750 million mutant mosquitoes. (BBC)
They finished counting early so they got to work on their hobby project.
- An online community for marijuana growers suffered a data breach. (ZDNet)
The breach involved Kibana, which is part of the Elasticsearch stack, which long ago adopted the philosophy that information wants to be free, particularly your information.
The data included hashed passwords, but they were only hashed using MD5, which is pretty easy to crack these days.
- Massachusetts voters passed a right-to-repair initiative by a 3:1 margin. (Vice)
It only applies to vehicles, but it's a start.
- The New York Times, tired of being merely corrupt, incompetent, divisive, immoral, greedy, and dishonest, has now gone batshit insane.
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Wednesday, November 04
Flying Chaos Monkeys Edition
Tech News
- California's Proposition 22 - limiting the scope of the anti gig-worker AB5 legislation - looks set to pass. (Tech Crunch)
And Proposition 16, which would have enshrined racial discrimination into California law, looks set to fail.
- For some reason the number of visas granted to Chinese students looking to study in the US has dropped by 99%. (Tech Crunch)
Guess we'll never know why.
- Qualcomm's Snapdragon 875 appears to have a HUGE.big.LITTLE layout. (WCCFTech)
One X1 core, three A78 cores, and four A55 cores. The X1 is Arm's new performance core, related I think to the V1 and N2 server cores.
- Australia's STEM workforce should reach gender parity by 2091. (ZDNet)
It's good to have a hobby.
- The $34B IPO of Ant - the company behind Alipay - has been spiked by the Chinese government. (New York Times)
Apparently for insufficient reverence. Okay, sure, it's a translation, but that's the word used in the translation.
- Twitch suspended guitarist Herman Li for playing his own music. (Happy Mag)
Good work there, guys. It does look like he got his channel restored though.
Oh No It's Real Picture of the Day
Memetic Background Video of the Day
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Tuesday, November 03
Take Off And Turn The Entire Planet Into Paper Clips Edition
Tech News
- Apple has an event on the 10th where they will be inviting everyone to their new combination Arm-based Mac / Walled Garden / Roach Motel. (AnandTech)
Unless Apple surprises us, this is the end of the line for Mac as anything resembling an open platform.
- What social networks have learned since the 2016 election. (Tech Crunch)
1984 is a cookbook, apparently.
- The Ryzen 5600X is slightly slower than the 3700X on Cinebench. (WCCFTech)
Since that's comparing a 6 core Zen 3 against an 8 core Zen 2, that's a pretty respectable result.
Compared to Intel's 6 core 10600K, it's just embarrassing. 25-40% better performance at half the TDP.
- Second-tier Chinese phone makers could be looking to Samsung for their chipsets. (WCCFTech)
Huawei is out of the running for now because they've lost access to TSMC's fabs because they're filthy commies.
- How to make your Git repo unpublishable on GitHub. (Joey)
Of course, someone can still publish your code to GitHub, just not the repo.
- Benchmarking the Samsung 980 Pro. (Serve the Home)
This is their new PCIe 4.0 SSD. Despite the "pro" moniker, it is TLC flash just like the current "evo" models.
It's fast, but at $150 for 500GB it's unreasonably expensive. That's more than two 500GB WD Blue SN500 drives which you could RAID-0 for similar speed and double the capacity.
- Tech startups are complaining that Republicans took their slaves away. (WSJ)
Move out of San Francisco, you idiots.
- Undocumented colours on the Tandy Colour Computer. (Vintage is the New Old)
I remember finding these, many, many years ago. The CoCo officially had 9 colours available (not all at once) but unofficially there were several more. I found dark green and brown (shown in the article) while playing with the 6847 registers. Which is to say, poking values into addresses and seeing what would happen.
- An overpriced, underpowered desktop motherboard. (CNX Software)
It's a 1.4GHz quad core, probably a fair bit slower than a Raspberry Pi. But if you want to develop for Linux on the RISC-V architecture, it's something that exists.
$665.
Take a Ride on the Death Coaster Video of the Day
The funniest part - which I missed while watching the live stream - is that while four of the girls were dying like flies, Sora (the very first Hololive girl), was.... Well, just watch it.
Areorobonekomimiocracy* Video of the Day
* Government by robot catgirls from Mars.
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Monday, November 02
Political Event Horizon Edition
Tech News
- The Raspberry Pi 400 squooshes a 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 into the Raspberry Pi keyboard. (Tom's Hardware)
$100 in a kit with mouse, power supply, a pre-loaded microSD card, cables, and other stuff. You'll need the cables because for some stupid reason it still uses micro HDMI ports.
I was looking at benchmark chart and wondering why it was slower than the regular Pi 4, then my eyes focused and I realised that was a temperature chart. It actually uses a new version of the Pi 4 SOC and runs 20% faster than the regular model.
- Samsung has entered early production on their 5nm node. (Tom's Hardware)
The first devices with 5nm chips are expected to ship in Q4... Which is now.
I'm guessing the device will also be made by Samsung.
It's great to have two companies now on a leading edge process node. Samsung may be a little behind TSMC here, but it's measured in months rather than years, and TSMC's capacity is sold out anyway.
- Leaked benchmarks of the RX 6800 running games with ray tracing suggest it works pretty well. (WCCFTech)
Ray tracing is a key feature of both the Xbox Series X/S and the PS5, so one would hope AMD had it sorted out.
- San Francisco and New York are screwed. (NPR)
As many as 23 million Americans are planning to relocate now that they can work from home, and they're not going to be moving to dirty, smelly, dilapidated, socialist shitholes.
- Apple's iCloud is having a few problems. (9to5Mac)
Fortunately, the outage is limited to just these services:
- Find My
- iCloud Account & Sign In
- iCloud Backup
- iCloud Bookmarks & Tabs
- iCloud Calendar
- iCloud Contacts
- iCloud Drive
- iCloud Keychain
- iCloud Mail
- iCloud Storage Upgrades
- Photos
- Screen Time
Yeah, basically you're fucked.
- It's not the hardware that's going to be the problem. (MSN)
NASA's SLS is built by five different companies in traditional pork-barrel style. The hardware works, kind of. The big problem is getting five separate software systems to co-ordinate with each other.
I've done that. It's not a lot of fun, even with hardware that doesn't literally blow up when you have a problem.
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Sunday, November 01
Minecart Edition
Tech News
- Wait, when did those get added to Terraria?
- Paging Big Hero 6. (IEEE Spectrum)
Swarms of tiny self-assembling robots. What could possibly go wrong?
- Intel's DG1 GPU card is coming to the desktop. (AnandTech)
It's currently only for laptops and sold bundled with Intel CPUs, and the card will also be OEM-only. I'm not sure who exactly would want it, though it should support QuickSync for video transcoding.
- There were zero new local cases of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague in Australia yesterday. (WuhanBatSoupDeathPlagueData)
People in Melbourne are now able to freely travel... A maximum of 25km.
A colleague had to co-ordinate with her parents to meet half-way for lunch.
Oh, and the Melbourne Cup is on Tuesday. This year it will be virtual. Robot horses or something.
One Million Yubis
Planning to get a new computer next year. Rough specs - subject to a lot of change.- Ryzen 5900X
- Radeon 6800 XT
- ASRock X570 Taichi
- 128GB RAM
- 3TB NVMe RAID-0
- 4TB SATA SSD RAID-0
- Maybe a 14TB hard disk
- 3 x 4K monitors
And I can buy the SSDs now and put them in the Dells until I'm ready to do the rest of it. Can't do that with memory unfortunately, since the Dells use SO-DIMMs.
Honestly I could halve everything and still be pretty happy, but I am going to be running VMs, databases, cryptocurrency nodes, and all sorts of other crap on it, and expecting it to run games smoothly at the same time, so it needs to be overkill.
Or... I could just buy two smaller systems. I guess.
Update: Thinking about it, two systems makes more sense. One Windows and one Linux. Probably just with the 5600X and a 6700 XT or whatever they come up with on the Windows system.
Let's see what reasonably-priced motherboards are available with faster than 1Gb Ethernet... Well, if I wanted to stick with ASRock, the answer is none. Better off getting a couple of 10Gb cards rather than paying nearly as much to upgrade to a motherboard with integrated 2.5Gb.
Not At All Tech News
Terraria Video of the Day
Since when was there a mini map? Since when were there minecarts? Okay, yes, it's been a while.
Coco is eager to get a multi-player server set up and drag the other girls into this. I'd love to see them battling the various bosses together, because it would be complete chaos. They can't even ride a virtual roller coaster without multiple fatalities.
Update: Someone clipped and translated yesterday's Death Coaster insanity. This is just a few of the highlights, I counted at least six fatal falls while I was watching.
Picture of the Day
Three of the HoloEN girls were streaming Left4Dead, a four-player game. Calli had a recording session and Kiara had a collab with one of the HoloJP members, I think.Since leaving a slot open would allow random people to join the game, the HoloEN manager joined in - and turned out to be the MVP. Fans quickly dubbed her Enma (EN manager).
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