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Wednesday, December 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 December 2021

Welcome To The Real World Edition

Top Story

  • Programmer encounters paperwork, film at eleven.  (Hacker News)

    Welcome to the real world, kid.  Here's a nickel.

    Going through this right now at my day job, but I've been there multiple times before so I know this too shall pass, just like a kidney stone.


Tech News

March

  • On March 1, AMD's Genoa server chips would have stuff unless they wouldn't - now pretty much all confirmed by updates to the Linux kernel to support said stuff, WASM everywhere - except it went pretty much nowhere, Alexa had 90,000 friends skills, don't plug your Macbook into a USB-C dock, and Microsoft had a patch for that horrifying NTFS bug.


  • On March 2, Intel launched their 670p before the 665p even really reached store shelves, no USB-C PD for you, a Pi Pico carrier board with HDMI in software, fried rice was off, and fuck Apple yet again.


  • On March 3, lots more details on how the Pi Pico generates HDMI signals in software, the Threadripper Pro hit retail, an AMD motherboard with Thunderbolt 4, the Radeon 6700XT arrived, and the US Navy was convicted of piracy.


  • On March 4, CircuitPython was coming to town, SpaceX's Starship SN10 test flight was a complete succ... oh dear, Mozilla had concerns about India probably because they're racist, 117 patches to Grub on the wall, 117 patches to Grub, a lightweight UI toolkit with a 1.3GB SDK, and ladies and gentlemen please stand for the national anthem.




  • On March 5, bring your own damn client, eBay banned sales of the six Dr Seuss books removed from publication because fuck you that's why, HTTPWTF, ceci n'est pas une pomme, Google gave your browser cancer, and Kiara from Hololive got her shadowban lifted whereupon YouTube deleted her last two months of content because fuck you that's why.


  • On March 6, Rocket Lake accidentally arrived and was okay I guess (the Rocket Lake laptop chips came later and are actually pretty good), iMac Pro delenda est, and 30,000 Exchange servers got hacked.


  • On March 7, Seagate was planning a 100TB hard drive, Solasta: Crown of the Magister was an upcoming D&D game shortly before D&D got woke and went broke - but I'll take a look at it now as it has now released and has a ton of positive reviews, everything you never wanted to know about FFMPEG, and the Ballad of Little Boolean Bobby Drop Tables True.


  • On March 8, Humble had a Bundle, Hynix shipped 18GB 6400Mbps LPDDR5, there was no serverless, there was just nobody else's servers, how quickly we forget, Dell's XPS 15 still lacked the Four Essential Keys, Google killed Google Pay and replaced it with Google Pay, yes, really and freak bread accidents.




  • On March 9, Epyc Milan was about to launch - and did, Lunar Lake popped up in Linux kernel patches, Ice Lake Xeons leaked, Google's UI sucks - probably deliberately, and the most efficient way to solve linear equations turned out to be guesswork.


  • On March 10, Samsung announced the 980 Nothing edition, this was not the bear you were looking for, and there was an RCE in Git.




  • On March 11, the Xiaomi Mi 11 was a flagship phone priced like a flagship phone, Epic Games sued Apple and Google again, the MGM lion was a paper tiger, and you really shouldn't have been browsing North Korean websites in the first place.


  • On March 12, our main MongoDB cluster started to go to pieces at my day job - a clear sign of how the year would proceed, the Razer Blade 15 generally sucked, Alder Lake was going to have a lot of PCIe lanes, and looking inside Cooper Lake.


  • On March 13, Rocket Lake was huge, Stronghold Warlords was more Stronghold than Warlords, SQLite 3.35 could drop columns, there were no adults at Google, and we received a warning and failed to recognise it when OVH's SGB2 datacenter burned to the ground.

    And Hololive EN Gen 1 celebrated their halfiversary.



    Prism Gen 3, Mooyu, and Nymroot all just celebrated their respective halfiversaries. March was a long long time ago.

  • On March 14, Apple forced Crabhouse - a game in which you made a house for crabs - to change its name because it might mislead people, threads are better, anyhting mandatory was forbidden, and Apple wisely killed the HomePod.


  • On March 15, Epyc Milan was here, Nvidia hacked its own drivers, WeLeakInfo did, GitLab fell over, and the LG Gram 17 was a definite if expensive maybe.

    On March 16, India was confused but had the right spirit, the new USPS truck looked dumb, Azure Active Directory fell over and not for the last time, and a hidden Epyc Milan gem.


  • On March 17, Asus showed off a new Thunderbolt 4 expansion card that only worked on motherboards designed specifically with that card in mind making it entirely useless, Rocket Lake actually launched officially after accidenteally leaking out to retail over a week earlier, Apple took up the Google challenge of terrible UI design, and we discovered zombie rap electroswing fusion.




  • On March 18, the 6700XT reached reviewers and was somewhere between pretty good and amazing depending on stuff, HP spileld the a lake of beans, which one was Van Gogh again, building SMB into the Linux kernel was a bad idea, YouTube only had your back inasmuch as they used it for target practice, and Shapecatcher was Shazam for Unicode.

  • On March 19, AMD did not artificially limit crypto mining performance, AWS added Lambda to S3 for and actually useful, 19 antiviri classed uTorrent as malware, and Russia threatened to ban Twitter but still hasn't followed through.


  • On March 20, learn science, go to jail, the PCIe 6.0 spec reached a final draft, interrupts updated, Victoria University deleted every file on every PC on their network, and alkalized water was dangerous bullshit.




  • On March 21, we got our Pi Picos onto the internet, Asus launched their version of Intel's useless DG1, Alder Lake was going to bring DDR5, PCIe 5, and more fast, Nividia's unhackable rate limited got hacked again, the Surface Duo could double as a 2D 3DS, and Mini-Zork II was released for the Commodore 64.




  • On March 22, the 32 core 3970X was 75% of a 64 core 3990X because TDP is a thing, the 6700 non-XT leaked but never showed up, fuck systemd, the worst possible case, Backblaze accidentally leaked all yourfilenames to Facebook, and it was millions of spiders.


  • On March 23, one of the MongoDB nodes at my day job simply dropped dead, a sign of things to come, I set myself up with a Minecraft server, a sign of things not to come, Crystal hit 1.0, MangaDex went very thoroughly offline, and just Windows things.


  • On March 24, sorr folks, canal's closed - camel out frount should've told ya, Intel is back, baby, said Intel, Google remove ClearURL because fuck you that's why, Reddit hired a known associate of rapists and paedophiles, tried to scrub all mention of her from the site, and then fired her in the space of 24 hours, and then they came for RMS and the FSF, and Cream of Bat Soup or Anthrax Leprosy Pi?




  • On March 25, Samsung sampled 512GB DDR5 modules, Genshin Impact crossed the billion dollar mark, were you pondering what I was pondering*, and the 11700K was a waste of sand.

    * I think so, Brain, but where would we find five hundred gallons of lime jello and a polo pony at this time of night?


  • On March 26, Qualcomm announced the 780G, with unspeicifed Qualcomm CPU cores because you don't need to know, that ship was still stick, two gigauwus per second, the $69 million 404, and SpaceX dusted itself off and tried again.


  • On March 27, it was the stupid questioning the stupid in DC, which Epyc CPU is right for Factorio, and in Minecraft I found diamonds before sheep.


  • On March 28, Dave arrived and was loaded up with the backups from the deceased Theodore, I found sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens, testing the NUC 11 as a tiny server, and Haachama's content returned, though not Haachama herself.


  • On March 29, Haachama herself returned, there were no Nvidia cards in Australia, that ship got unstuck, I repaired that 12TB MongoDB cluster - or so I thought, octal considered harmful, PHP got hacked, and I had every colour except brown.


  • On March 30, an RTX 3060 for ants, mining Bitcoin on a Game Boy, the database I just repaired was still work - spoke too soon, we unleashed the Pigz, and there were 30 malicious Docker images on Docker Hbu - downloaded a combined 20 million times.


  • On March 31, Intel's 11900K was an embarrassment, we found out what mongod --repair did (not much), Arm announced Armv9, Dimgrey Cavefish leaked, TSMC outlined its plans for 4nm, and we didn't yet know the full story of the Ubiquiti hack.

 
 

Even More Tech News Video of the Day



Worst Chemical Video of the Day




Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day




Disclaimer: I wasn't even there, nobody saw me, you can't prove anything!

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Tuesday, December 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 December 2021

Snowpocalypse Edition

Top Story

  • Go to Politico's EU website.  (Politico)

    Or don't, which is probably safer for all concerned, but if you do, take a look at the GDPR cookie popup you get.  If you've previously visited the site there's a button at bottom right.

    Click on the Site Vendors tab, all the companies the site potentially shares your data with.  And start scrolling.  Let me know when you're done, I'm going to go take a nap.

    ...

    Done?

    Okay.  Well, the article itself is about how Facebook is arguing that EU users' data is safe with them and the EU arguing that it is not, but from looking at that popup I can say safely say that data is safer with Facebook than it is with whoever the hell is running things at Politico.


  • Madeleine from Tucows reached out to us to note that Tucows is still very much alive.  The original article included in yesterday's roundup explained that the original download site closed down in January after 27 years but the other parts of the company continued operations, but the roundup truncated those details.

Tech News


February

  • On February 1, the Amazon Telescreen was available in burnt orange, harvest gold, and avocado, for any X build your own X, we lint-picked the MIT license, and Android emulators delivered malware.


  • On February 2, Perth caught fire during a Bat Flu lockdown which must have been inconvenient, the specs for AMD's Milan server CPUs leaked - accurately as it turned out, Alder Lake-P was on its way - and still is, and the Odroid H2+ had six 2.5Gb Ethernet ports except you couldn't get one and still can't.


  • On February 3, Huawei's completely new and original mobile operating system still said Android on the info screen, PCIe 5.0 switch chips were sampling, there was a local exploit on all popular versions of Unix, and Big Tech was whining that some politicians wouldn't stay bribed.




  • On February 4, Google got into a slap fight with Australia, Microsoft made popcorn, AMD shipped a million Ryzen 5000 CPUs which wasn't nearly enough, Sony shipped 4.5 million PlayStation 5s which wasn't nearly enough, and Mass Effect got high resolution textures.


  • On February 5, Mass Effect edited Miranda's butt, Disqus sucked, Huawei remained on the shitlist, and Haachama taught us how to speak English.


  • On February 6, Myanmar very sensibly banned all social networks, Intel fire back against Apple's selective benchmarks with their own selective benchmarks, Fujitsu was working on a 1PB tape cartridge, and Apple was the apatosaurus in the room of software immortality. Plus truth in computer advertising.


  • On February 7, PCIe 5.0 SSDs were due next year and still are, we reverse engineered a 1 bit processor, Iran stopped the Signal, apps in the App Store openly lied, an article about privacy issues set 87 distinct tracking cookies, and the internet was full of crazy people.


  • On February 8, Google locked the YouTube and Gmail accounts for Terraria and ignored the company's attempts to contact them, Google locked the accounts of one of its own employees and ignored his attempts to contact them, I attempted to make gluten-free donuts and failed, and an Android barcode scanner app with ten million users suddenly turned into malware.




    The actresses in these ads are from the pop group Nogizaka46 and can actually play the instruments they are pretending to play.  I had a great video of a drum solo but it's disappeared because we can't have nice things.


  • On February 9, if you needed a 28GBps SSD and couldn't wait for PCIe 5.0 Highpoint had you covered, Tesla bought $1.5 billion worht of Bitcoin, CD Project Red got hacked, Zen 4 could deliver a 40% total performance boost - next year, and we discovered Monkeys R Us.




  • On Fabruary 10, Haachama from Hololive hit a million subscribers, I had no groceries again, Rocket Lake wouldn't work on existing motherboards - despite fitting into the existing socket, Amazon removed a fashion range from its store after a competitor filed a report saying they contained drugs, and fuck Apple.


  • On February 11, Amelia from Hololive hit a million subscribers, we compared the Threadripper Pro 399WX to mortal systems, Samsung planned a $17 billion fab for Texas, I air fried baby potateos, Let's Encrypt joined the preppers, what was it with Democrats and fake screenshots, and the Matic blockchain was two million times cheaper than Ethereum. (This has since been corrected.)


  • On February 12, Cover Corp announced auditions for EN Gen 2 - now known as the Council and a bigger bunch of lovable dorks you can't find anywhere, the Biden administration had plans for stuff, Australia introduced legislation to really annoy Google, everyone had package vulnerabilities, and Audible censored a book on censorship. Also, Apple couldn't figure out how to format a disk:
    The problem occurs at the end of the normal installation phase, when presumably the installer is writing hashes up the Merkle tree, with the installer window claiming that there’s only About a minute remaining. At that stage, Activity Monitor reports that com.apple.MobileSoftwareUpdate.UpdateBrainService is taking lots of CPU, and there’s sustained and intense disk activity for many minutes. When that finally completes, instead of the Mac restarting from the external disk to complete installation, the installer just quits. Trying to restart from the external disk then results in an error.
  • On February 13, I predicted you wouldn't be able to get an RTX 3060 - and though it's been a while, I now have two of those, Rocket Lake was on its way, Amazon claimed that state laws didn't apply to them, YouTube shadowbanned everybody, and a Yandex employee was caught selling access to other people's email.


  • On February 14, the Pimoroni Tiny was an alternative for when the Pi Pico was just too damn large, we remembered that the other person on the tech support call was a human being too - probably, Arm shipped 6.7 billion chips, and 1921 Duesenberg, one careful owner, with original toolkit.

  • On February 15, the RTX 3060 hit shelves at two to three times MSRP, SELECT * considered harmful, the Pi Pico could output VGA despite having no video hardware at all, and bubble dwellers rose up against reality.




  • On February 16, YouTube banned Sakura Miko, my router caught fire - literally; I burned myself yanking the power cord, the WD Green SN350 was serviceable but overpriced, Clubhouse was sending your data to China, and the idiots at Bloomberg ran another story claiming that Supermicro motherboards were compromised based on absolutely zero evidence.


  • On February 17, Coco from Hololive hit a million subscribers despite having her million subscriber stream banned by YouTube, testing the Lenovo Thinkstation P620, Pine64 announced a new Quartz64 SBC, Samsung's new memory chips ran at 1.2TFLOPs, Texas froze over, Adata changed the hardware on their SX8200 Pro SSDs without notification for the third time, and Parler came back online for a few minutes.




  • On February 18, we were briefly blessed when Facebook blocked Australia, we were sad to note that Google was not planning to block Australia, the Spectre x360 14 had a 3000x2000 display and the Four Essential Keys, Citibank blew half a billion bucks and it was not a blockchain bug, and the CEO of Minds was not a lunatic.


  • On February 19, Nvidia skorked the 3060, the Aurora A7 had up to seven screens - unusual in a laptop, a leak said that Intel's 12th generation parts would be faster than 11th generation, WhatsApp was owned by Facebook, Photoshop couldn't draw lines, and we discovered indie Indo vtuber Vyolfers, who just just yesterday celebrated the anniversary of her first stream.

    This was before the great English-language vtuber explosion, so if HoloEN weren't streaming you had to go hunting for something. Now we have eleven HoloEN girls instead of just five, plus ten in NijisanjiEN, plus thirteen in Prism, which while based in Japan streams almost entirely in English, plus ten in Cyberlive (though I have only found time to watch Lumi). I not only can't keep up with all the content, I can't keep up even with just the content I particularly want to watch.


  • On February 20, ethicists behaving unethically, 10Gbit/mm², build your own Voodoo 5 6000, and Brave found a bug and had a fix released in under 24 hours.


  • On February 21, bits fell off Boeings, an expansion board for the Pi Pico turned it into the perfect 1980s home computer, leaks of what turned out to be the M1 Max were mostly accurate, and we bound to localhost:0.


  • On February 22, Ethereum sucked, we headed off into a Brave New World, liberals got the bullet too, Totalitarianism for Dummies, and we lamented video card pricing that now looks cheap.


  • On February 23, unexpected technical difficulties with Chinese online platforms, Facebook sadly unblocked Australia, JPEG XL was JPEG 2000 but fixed, JWCC was in retrospect a terrible idea, Concise Encoding was a universal data file format still only available in Go, and a news article got everything wrong.


  • On February 24, a Chrome extension that blocked Google, a review of console architecture in a lot of depth, Betteridge's Law of Quantum, and the trouble with MinIO was Cassandra, and the other problem with MinIO was their entire business model.


  • On February 25, AMD was to announce the Radeon 600XT on March 3 which they did, it was expected to sell at double MSRP which it did, and Ubuntu took a chill pill on LTS updates.



  • On February 26, Redbean was a web server that ran on Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD using the same binary, semiconductor demand was 130% of supply, the RTX 3060 was pretty good, all we wanted was an edit button, Australia's stupid link tax law passed through Parliament, and the language of technical difficulties was universal. Humanity will one day be saved by everyone on the planet coming together to try to figure out how to operate the Doomsday Machine.


  • On February 27, don't connect critical industrial control systems directly to the internet you idiots, Dell's water-cooled systems were still noise (reportedly the latest models are better), the Sabrent Rocket Q4 was the fastest 4TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive available, YouTube sucked, and we discovered why gluten free chicken nuggets are better than the regular kind.


  • And on February 28, mining Ethereum on the M1, Redbean got Lua support, meaning it needed only SQLite to become a universal lightweight app server - and I wasn't the only person to note that because it now has exactly that, Lastpass vs. Lastpass, the last of the dumb TVs, and we discovered we discovered a cheap source of vanilla vodka.


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day





Disclaimer: If I had a nickel for every hit Australian song from the late 70s / early 80s that was about underage sex I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird it happened twice.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 2057 words, total size 18 kb.

Monday, December 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 December 2021

Really Saying Something Edition 

Top Story

  • Facebook earned the title of the worst (tech) company of 2021.  (WCCFTech)

    The survey was conducted by Yahoo Finance which apparently still exists.  Whatever the value of the survey, you can immediately tell that the article is worthless garbage because it prominently features prefab "whistleblower" Frances Haugen.

    Which is not to say that Facebook doesn't suck, of course.

Tech News


January

  • On January 1, Farmville joined the bleedin' dawn chorus invisible, Microsoft got breached in the SolarWinds fiasco, I grabbed two SSDNodes servers that I never ended up using but at least they were cheap, a new California law made it legal to punch GrubHub in the face, and we had a Non Non Biyori trailer.


  • On January 2, the EU pledged "up to" €145 billion to develop next-gen CPUs which so far has resulted in absolutely nothing, my main PC audibly went splut, a backdoor was found in Zyxel enterprise network security hardware, and I made an observation:
    If you keep pumping money into the economy, you're going to get inflation. Somewhere. If it's not grocery prices, it's something else.





  • On January 3, I deployed ZFS at SSDNodes - at about one third the speed of my new server, don't get a TRENDnet 5GbE USB adaptor, ZipFly generated Zip files on the fly, my main PC went splut again - I suspected my new washing machine causing power spikes but it stopped happening by itself, and Ollie was built different.


  • On January 4, DDR4-5100 was 1% faster than DDR4-4400, URL shorteners tracked everyone, Facebook was bad, and Apple decided not to ban amphetamines.




  • On January 5, Sydney went into lockdown for the first time over 5 cases of Bat Flu, there were no video cards anywhere, Linus said fuck Intel, there was a new PlayStation game, Ether hit $1000, and China had vanished Alibaba CEO Jack Ma.


  • On January 6, Jim Keller was named CEO of Tenstorrent, DOXBox-X was DOSBox but more X, Google deadpooled Android Things, Telegram let you triangulate idiots, and a Transpacific Tunnel Hurrah.



    (As I edit this I'm listening to Gura, Amelia, Sana, Fauna, Kronii, and Mumei all playing Minecraft together. That's more than the total membership of Hololive EN in January.)


  • On January 7, Adata, Gigabyte, and MSI were preparing for DDR5-8400 which is still nowhere to be found, AMD's Epyc 7543 kicked Intel to the kerb, Sonnet had a neat eGPU, Hugo Gernsback was naming ASRock motherboards, Microsoft added a newsfeed that everyone hates, and fuck Apple.


  • On January 8, the SolarWinds debacle unsealed sealed court records, som lunatic got Windows running on an M1 Mac Mini, Facebook removed the likes count, and Blockchain Stalin was at it again.


  • On January 9, the purge accelerated, fuck Google, Apple,9 Reddit, and Twitter, albeit not necessarily in that order, and when you have a spare moment also Facebook, Shopify, Twitch, Discord, Instagram, YouTube, and CampaignMonitor, Twitter banned the account of Sci-Hub because they were being sued in India, GNAP was the next generation of OAuth and entirely uninteroperable, half the memory in my main PC vanished - another problem that somehow resolved itself, and I added a new YouTube tag.


  • On January 10, I added a Parler embed tag - waste of time that was, things aged poorly, YouTube influencers were getting paid for genocide apologetics, there were Zen 3 desktop APUs (I just checked and there still are), Chinese corporations bought smaller companies and destroyed their value through incompetence just like western ones, why I'm not going back to Firefox, ever, the tech independence movement kicked off - my new server is located in Australia at an Australian hosting provider - and Section 230 ruined the internet.




  • On January 11, the Chinese Embassy in US was boasting about how the mass murder of undesirables improved life for the few who remained, Parler was down for a while, HP's Envy 14 had the four essential keys but was otherwise meh, the Threadripper Pro 3995WX got put through its paces, that was a lot of ads, and New Zealand's central bank got hacked and nobody even noticed.


  • On January 12, I discovered satay chicken, bought an oven, and joined Minds, decentralising the web got harder than ever, the Australian government made the social networks very upset, and Germany and France looked askance at American big tech's growing fascism.


  • On January 13, Uganda very sensibly banned all social media ahead of an election, AMD launched Zen 3 mobile parts which were mostly Zen 2, Threadripper Pro reached retail, we couldn't have nice things, Nvidia announced the RTX 3060 of which I now have two, Apple fucked child slaves or something like that, Beaker was a dessert topping and a floor wax, Twitter got upset with Uganda and everyone laughed at them, and fuck Godaddy.


  • On January 14, Pat Gelsinger returned to the CEO role at Intel, Minds didn't entirely suck, TSMC was not going to be producing i3 CPUs for Intel, Microsoft announced Azure for Retail, banking on the fact that retailers loathe Amazon, the security of iOS was hampered by the fact that it wasn't turned on, and Parler redeployed to a new serverless architecture.




  • On January 15, Samsung announced the Galaxy S21, Twitter got involved in a land war in Africa, Apple's new M1 processor had no documentation, Elon Musk was not giving you $58,000 and how to instantly corrupt an NTFS filesystem.


  • On January 16, I managed to compile some code, there were a trillion SQLite databases, SSDs maxed out PCIe 4.0, TSMC ramped up its ramp up, Sigmal was expleriemcing tegnical differcultes, WhatsApp postponed stealing customer data, Google kept that right on schedule, BugTraq died, Google stomped on the Minds app, and fascists were busy speaking out against fascism, by which they meant anyone who disagreed with them.


  • On January 17, Intel cancelled Optane for consumers, Google "accidentally" killed smaller competitors, FreeBSD continued working to eliminate GPL code - in favour of more open licenses, NASA finally tested the SLS booster, and the beatings would continue until morale improved.


  • On January 18, Pixy had never seen such fuckery, I had no groceries, got video embeds working for Rumble and Lbry, still more ways to instantly corrupt an NTFS filesystem, Google set out to ban third-party cookies and replace them with something only Google could control, we couldn't have nice things again, the strings command had an RCE, and Apple got sued by crazies seeking to force it to ban Telegram.

    Also Hololive stars Gura and Marine hit 2 million and 1 million subscribers respectively. That was a long time ago; they are now at 3.6 and 1.7 million.



    Korone is also at 1.7 million.


  • On January 19, I got purged by Twitter - three times, Intel announced its Panther Canyon NUCs (which have since been denounced), and Facebook an Google were making secret deals in smoke-filled rooms.


  • On January 20, well.
    January 20, 2021 -
    The press goes back to sleep
    After four years
    Of moral outrage
    At being forced
    To pretend
    To do their jobs.

    Now again they can bask
    In the warm praise
    Of government apparatchiks
    For asking pre-screened questions
    Regarding the color
    Of the paint
    On the presidential plane.

    --

    Some months later
    When everything has gone
    Quite predictably
    To Hell
    The question on every journalist's lips
    Is how could the public
    Have got all of this
    So wrong?
    Plus YouTube chat leaked memory like a firehose through a used Kleenex, Samsun announced the 870 EVO range, it turned out that Alibaba CEO Jack Ma might still be partly alive, MeWe added 2.5 million users in a week, Elastic went full fuckbiscuit, a review of the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 (I was just looking at this the other day - I could actually afford one), and Brave added IPFS.


  • On January 21, Intel started rehiring retirees, Minisforum had a dual network NUC, the Pi Pico cost four bucks and like everything else this year went immediately out of stock, Microsoft continued its trend of being the least sucky big tech company while still sucking, cats and Linux didn't mix, IBM handed out free RHEL licenses to make up for the murdered CentOS, and trust in the media was at a historical low and simultaneously at its highest point for the year.


  • On January 22, Intel said it was on track with its 7nm process - for 2023, running Elite on a Pi Pico, Amazon told Elastic to get forked, and Twitter was sued for enabling child sex trafficking.


  • On January 23, Facebook shut down the page of the British Socialist Workers Party and Twitter started suspending Antifa accounts now that they were deemed surplus to requirements, SpaceX lobbed 143 satellites into polar orbit, oh, and PayPal sucked. Just generally sucked.


  • On January 24, everything about the Pi Pico, RTX 3060s cost more than 3060 Tis, Pip dropped Python 2, the Code of Cancer people were at it again, Softbank ran into minor difficulties with its sale of Arm to Nvidia, and ClF3.




  • On January 25, PGM indexes were magic, SonicWall ate its own dogfood and discovered that this was a bad idea, the Tucows download site closed its doors after 27 years, Facebook had no friends, and YouTube marked Haachama's entire channel as safe for children.

    Update: Madeleine from Tucows reached out to me to note that while the venerable Tucows download site had closed, the company itself is still very much alive.  (Tucows)




  • On January 26, Stasis mom had it going on, installing an RTX 3090 into an M.2 slot, CollapseOS ran on anything, MeWe's free speech policy needed a little work, and the zombie apocalypse had to be rescheduled.


  • On January 27, Reddit broke the hedge funds at least for a while, once again we couldn't have nice things, ASRock announced a new mini-PC that you couldn't get, and Google banned the SubStation Alpha subtitle file format from the Play Store.


  • On January 28, fuck Discord, Jen Psaki was a gender essentialist, Intel's DG1 video cards were useless, all other video cards were out of stock, and AMD announced record sales despite none of its products being purchasable anywhere.


  • On January 29, we refused to live in our pods and eat our bugs, Personium kept all your data in one safe place so anyone who wanted to steal it only needed to find one exploit, fuck Facebook, port 69 got blocked, Apple escalated its war with Facebook, Google and Apple purged unfavourable app reviews - which were being left on the Robinhood app after they put restrictions on their customers and then blatantly lied about it.




  • On January 30, 11 million IOPs on consumer SSDs, Microsoft Edge hadn't been ruined yet, Reddit saved AMC theaters, Robinhood relented and allowed its customers to buy one single share in GameStop, and SQLite had a WAL.


  • And on January 31, the Asus PWS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi had a chipset fan, the Intel DG1 was as I mentioned previously completely useless, HTMX looked interesting, and the Excel formula language was Turing-complete.

Party Like it's 1979 Video of the Day




Disclaimer: Only ten shopping days left before 1980.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:22 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1977 words, total size 18 kb.

Sunday, December 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 December 2021

Own Goals R Us Edition

Top Story

  • Still dithering over what hardware to buy to build out my software lab - so far I have two laptops and two monitors, which is a good starting point.  I'll have the money just before Christmas but I have six different possible configurations and I can't afford them all.

    So I got a virtualised dedicated server with an Aussie hosting company I've used for a while.  I just have a couple of cheap cloud servers with them - about $20 a month combined - but they've been rock solid.  And they bill hourly in arrears so if it turned out not to be what I wanted the cost would be negligible.

    Turns out it's great.  I had it up and running with Ubuntu 20.04 in 30 seconds.  I wanted to configure it with 75% of the disk space in ZFS to run LXD, and they have a control panel that lets you do exactly that, without needing a reinstall or manual configuration.  Resize, reboot, configure ZFS, done.

    Disk is 800GB of mirrored NVMe storage and gets about 1.6GB per second on writes in an actual test, which is just fine.

    It's more expensive than US-based options but it's an 8ms ping from my house compared to a 180ms ping even to Los Angeles.  It's great.

    If I keep it for more than six months and I don't end up using it for any public or shared stuff I might as well have bought a NUC or something like that, but the ease of getting it up and running is hard to beat.

    So now I'm getting started on the software side of the software lab and maybe I'll wait for the sales after Christmas before ordering any more hardware.

Tech News

  • A well-known tech blogger got caught in that Princeton research project that involved thinly-veiled legal threats from fake email accounts to random websites. (Christine.website)

    I'd be happy to see this asshole getting sued.

    The problem is, you'd have to be able to prove actual damages.

    Oh.  Well then.  Gentlemen (and Christine), call your lawyers.


  • This isn't tech news but it has to be seen to be believed.  The German army, facing fierce criticism for organising a march of soldiers wearing 20th century uniforms and carrying burning torches, played the Don't Mention the War card.

    You started it!
    No we didn't!
    Yes you did!  You invaded Poland!


  • Kolmogorov Complicity.  (Slate Star Codex)

    Kolmogorov - a Soviet mathematician perhaps best known for his mathematically precise definition of complexity - walked a fine line with Stalin's thugs, mouthing Party platitudes while continuing his research and trying to protect others.  He survived the purges by keeping his mouth shut most of the time, though he did publish a paper that indirectly denounced Lysenko.

    This 2017 article links to pieces by Scott Aronson and Paul Graham from 2017 and 2004 respectively.  Given who was occupying the White House in those particular years I expected the comments to be a dumpster fire, but for the most part, no.  Though some of them have proven in retrospect to be hopelessly naive.


  • Log4j 2.17 is out fixing the bug in 2.16 that fixed the bug in 2.15 that set the world on fire last week.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Fucking yay.

    This one is relatively minor; all it does is kick of an infinite recursion that kills your server.


  • Putting a lampshade on the new MacBook's idiotic screen notch.  (IconFactory)

    The Dell Inspiron 16 Plus delivers 92% of the CPU performance of the M1 Max MacBook Pro (and 150% of the GPU performance) for half the price, weighs the same, and does not have an idiotic screen notch.


  • Wikipedia has booted a team Chinese editors working to push genocide apologetics.  (Wikimedia)

    They took it a little too far when they physically assaulted other Wikipedia editors.  Just posting communist propaganda apparently didn't raise any red flags.

    So to speak.


  • Scripps Memorial Hospital automatically marks everything up by 675%.  (MSN)

    Something needs to be done about that bullshit.  I can go to my eyecare specialist here locally, get a basic test for "free" (we have a specific extra income tax allocated to healthcare, so while it's not free at all, it is at least visible), and pay out of pocket for a retinal exam that isn't covered by the government plan.

    Last time I was there they recommended it since I'm past a certain age, but stressed that it was an additional expense.  Of 60 bucks.

    Lady, you charged me $600 for a new pair of glasses with the high refractive index glass I need for my prescription.  I'm not going to quibble about 60 bucks for a test every couple of years that could save my eyesight.

    ...

    I did however get my next pair of glasses from an online store.


  • Intel is planning to shower top engineers with $1 billion in cash and $1.4 billion in shares next year.  (Tom's Hardware)

    They already pay pretty well, but it's a fiercely competitive market.


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day



The meme police they live inside of my chat
The meme police ain't gonna let them do that
The meme police I bonked them all with a bat
Oh nyo...




Disclaimer: Here in my car I have a pool and a bar
It doesn't go very far 
To the gallon
But hey.

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Saturday, December 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 December 2021

Starting Off With A Bang Edition

Top Story

Tech News


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day



Nice Moog.


Update: JROD over at Ace of Spades pointed me to this version with NIN.





Disclaimer: Remember folks, it's the holiday season, so this blog is issuing double demerits for anyone mentioned in these news roundups.  Don't take the risk of being a corporate communist.  It's not worth it.  We accept bribes by cash, direct deposit, and most major cryptocurrencies.

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Friday, December 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 December 2021

Onwards To The Eighties Edition

Top Story

  • So I technically survived the last working day of the year and I'm technically on leave for three weeks.  In reality I'll be logging in on Monday to do a few things - but I won't be answering phone calls or attending meetings.  Those alone make it a holiday.


  • Lumi arrived, or possibly Pomu.  Anyway, the second of my Dell Inspiron 16 Plus laptops.  I might get a third one of these - I'm using them as compact, portable servers with a built-in UPS, which is why I need more than one of them.

    The specific model I've been buying isn't 40% off right now so any potential purchases will wait until that sale comes around again.


  • Ethereum costs $250 per second and is 5000 times slower than a Raspberry Pi costing $45.  (Usenix)

    It has a data transfer rate about as fast as a 19.2k modem and storage costs that would turn a 1960 IBM account manager green with envy.

    And it doesn't even work consistently.



Tech News

  • Merry Christmas!  You've been hacked!  Here's a bill for $45,000!  (Tom's Hardware)

    Just what I wanted!  How did you guess?


  • I'm not sure who the imagined market is for a $2600 audiophile network switch.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Audiophiles want tube amplifiers and laser turntable pickups.  They don't stream from Spotify.


  • A reader also forwarded this audiophile SSD.  (AudiophileStyle)

    This one does have one valid function: 100% of the TLC flash is locked in pseudo-SLC mode, making for more consistent write speeds.  Though any SSD these days is a thousand times faster than is needed for audio recording and playback, even if you're using 192kHz and 32 bits.


  • Next-level Zenloss:A new strain of ransomware specifically targets Minecraft servers.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Ha.  My Minecraft server runs in a container and the host takes a snapshot every twenty minutes.

    And keeps it.

    Forever.

    Thousands of the damn things.

    I really should clean that up.

    (I think zenloss is a Hololive term, and mostly relates to Minecraft, which is rather nasty about deleting all your items if you die and don't make it back to your place of death in five minutes.)


  • Log4j attackers otherwise are switching to mining Monero.  (Bleeping Computer)

    That's the same thing that happened in that $45,000 AWS account breach above - the hackers used the account to mine Monero, earning themselves $800 at a cost of $45,000.  So yes, it's 50 times less painful to just have your wallet stolen.


  • Fossil fuels kill a million people a year.  (Ars Technica)

    Sort of.  Shorten lifespans to that effect, anyway.

    Mostly coal.

    Mostly China.

    If you've seen a major Chinese city on a bad air day this is entirely believable.


  • So burn wood instead.  (New Yorker)

    It's technically renewable so the EU will shower you with subsidies even though it makes no fucking sense.

    If the system is stupid you might as well take advantage of it.


  • At EA it can take a day to change a three lines of code.  (Neowin)

    Or rather - the article is kind of dumb - it takes five minutes to make the change and the rest of the day to test the effects throughout the game.


  • Crypto investors were cheated out of $8 billion in 2021.  (The Register)

    Still less than civil asset forfeiture.


  • Is China going backwards to Mao or sideways to Pol Pot?  (The Register)

    The Chinese government has issued a new list of things you're not allowed to say in video streams, including:

    1. Suggesting socialism is anything but perfect.
    2. Suggesting Marxism is anything but perfect.
    3. Suggesting the CCP is anything but perfect.
    4. Suggesting that maybe things are going in the wrong direction.
    5. Suggesting that the CCP has at any time in history been anything but perfect.
    6. Suggesting that shoving people into an unmarked van at 3AM never to be seen again might not be the most perfectly ethical way to behave.
    7. Making jokes about the CCP.
    8. Pointing out that Taiwan is a country that exists.
    9. Mentioning the independence movements in Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, or basically anywhere else on the planet the CCP considers their property.
    10. Reporting on any foreign news that reports on any of that or mentions Taiwan as a country that exists.
    11. History.
    12. Making jokes about China.
    13. Making jokes about the Chinese flag.
    14. Making jokes about the Chinese national anthem.
    15. Factual reporting about what Chinese leaders actually said.
    16. Cosplaying as any Chinese leader.
    17. Wearing funny hats.
    18. Pointing out that that Mao guy kinda sucked.
    ...
    100. Anything else the CCP doesn't like.

    Yes, the list has exactly 100 rules, and yes, that's the last one.



Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day


That doesn't really sound like a 70s song, and that's because it ain't.



1962.



Disclaimer: And now the maple syrup is very sticky,
The stuff is on the pancakes now,
That ought to make them stick together.

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Thursday, December 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 December 2021

Fried Green Potatoes Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day



The audio on that clip isn't wonderful, so here's the studio version as well.



I was running low on 1979 songs that I actually like, then I took a look at the Australian charts for 1979, and I was like, oh, right, that one, and that one, and that one...  And we're good through the end of the year at least.



Disclaimer: If you leave me, can I come too?

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Wednesday, December 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 December 2021

A Starlab Is Born Edition

Top Story


Tech News

Party Like It's Schadenfreude All the Way Down Video of the Day


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day






Disclaimer: Well owl bee.

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Tuesday, December 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 December 2021

Crises Diverted Edition

Top Story

  • News continues to be quiet, which reminds me of what I did this time last year.

    And I'll do it again if you're not careful.

    Only one of the videos in the December 31 post is dead, and I know which it is, and I think there's an alternate source.


  • Open source is not broken.  (Nadh.in)

    The argument is not wrong in itself but it doesn't really address the claim.  The author is trying to say that just because the cause of open source software's breakage is outside of open source that open source is not broken, but that's nonsense.

    It's important to identify the cause, but it's just as important to recognise the wreckage.

    (This is in response to an earlier article in response to the Log4j debacle.)

Tech News



Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day


That is extremely 1979.



Disclaimer: Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.

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Monday, December 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 December 2021

On Beyond Quagga Edition

Top Story

  • Hmm.  Remarkably little news today.  Nothing new has exploded and ruined the lives of sysadmins around the globe.  I think everyone is sleeping off the chaos of last week.

    I wish I was.


  • Looks like that Log4j vulnerability first surfaced on December 1, a full week before anyone noticed.  (ZDNet)

    The idiot script kiddies using every server they can breach to mine crypto actually serve a useful purpose, in the same way that...  404 Analogy not found.  In the same way that Billy the mailboy showing up to work with a thousand bucks worth of bling alerts you to audit your system before Svetlana disappears with a couple of mill.



Tech News

  • Little JNDI Tables.



    A researcher hacked Apple - just a little bit - simply by changing the name of his iOS device.  The logs show that Apple's servers dialed out to his research server when his connection was logged, which would have let him run arbitrary code within Apple's datacenter.

    That's how bad this was.  That's how easy it was to exploit.  And it was everywhere.

    It could be that Apple's logging servers are isolated and can't do anything, but they're not as isolated as Cloudflare's, which were configured so they couldn't dial out at all.


  • On the upside, there's this.



    Someone exploited a bug in a logging library to make a Minecraft server run Doom.


  • New keyboard arrived.  Accidental jellybeans too.  Desktop shelving is now due next Monday rather than today, but whatever.  The second Dell laptop is now stuck in between "shipped" and "on its way" - I think systems bound for Australia are assembled in Singapore, so there's a period where they go into stealth mode where they've been shipped from the factory but tracking just doesn't update.

    Won't have time to do anything with it this week anyway.


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day



(Replaced the original music video with a later live performance because video not available in your location.)



Disclaimer: Not all that hot on Tuesdays either.  Wednesdays I can deal with.

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