Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.
Monday, October 03
Daily News Stuff 3 October 2022
Getting The Bone From The Trom Edition
Getting The Bone From The Trom Edition
Top Story
- PayPal has banned using its services to buy, well, books. (Hacker News)
The terms are so broad that they cover all works of fiction and probably all non-fiction except for trigonometry textbooks:You may not use PayPal's services for activities that
Romance novels? Banned. Medical textbooks? Banned. Historical fiction and non-fiction alike? Banned. Mark Twain and Charles Dickens? Banned to hell and back. Shakespeare and Chaucer? Banned so hard they're still spinning in their graves.
...
5. involve the sending, posting or publication of any messages, content or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) are harmful, obscene, harassing or objectionable, (b) depict or appear to depict nudity, sexual or other intimate activities, (c) depict or promote illegal drug use, (d) depict or promote violence, criminal activity, cruelty or self-harm (e) depict, promote or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups or of individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation etc.) (f) presents a risk to consumer safety or (financial) wellbeing, (g) are fraudulent, promote misinformation or are unlawful, (h) infringes the intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights of any party or (i) are otherwise unfit for publication.
The Bible? Banned. The Koran? Oddly enough, also banned.
Oh, and they want you to snitch on that samizdat copy of Ivanhoe:We encourage you to report violations of this Acceptable Use Policy to PayPal immediately. If you have a question about whether a type of transaction may violate the Acceptable Use Policy, or wish to file a report, you can do so here.
So that PayPal can steal all their money:If you are a seller and receive funds for transactions that violate the Acceptable Use Policy, then in addition to being subject to the above actions you will be liable to PayPal for the amount of PayPal’s damages caused by your violation of the Acceptable Use Policy. You acknowledge and agree that $2,500.00 U.S. dollars per violation of the Acceptable Use Policy is presently a reasonable minimum estimateof PayPal’s actual damages - including, but not limited to, internal administrative costs incurred by PayPal to monitor and track violations, damage to PayPal’s brand and reputation, and penalties imposed upon PayPal by its business partners resulting from a user’s violation - considering all currently existing circumstances, including the relationship of the sum to the range of harm to PayPal that reasonably could be anticipated because, due to the nature of the violations of the Acceptable Use Policy, actual damages would be impractical or extremely difficult to calculate. PayPal may deduct such damages directly from any existing balance in any PayPal account you control.
Do not leave any money in your PayPal account. Ever.
Tech News
- Are theses new "AI" art generators really applying artificial intelligence or are they just picking out elements of a vast library of existing images and putting them together?
Yes.
The creator of that page took the prompt
A woman with flowers in her hair
in a courtyard, in the style of ...
And ran it through the Stable Diffusion algorithm with 1500 different artists names.
On the one hand, most of them are not very good. Sturgeon's Law applies at least as much to AI-generated art as to human efforts, and no-one went through the 6000 results (there are four examples for each artist) to filter out the crap.
On the other hand, it is doing pretty much what it says on the tin.
I was preparing some examples of this myself, getting long-dead masters to paint the Space Shuttle, but I didn't have this much time to dedicate to such a project.
- Linux kernel 6.0 is out. (Phoronix)
So what's the big change that led to the jump in version numbers? Linus himself explains:So, as is hopefully clear to everybody, the major version number change is more about me running out of fingers and toes than it is about any big fundamental changes.
It was up to 5.19, but it version numbers count from zero, so nothing essential is missing.
- The story behind the 2018 Tumblr containment breach that unleashed insanity on an unsuspecting planet. (The Verge)
It all came down to - as so many things do - money. Tumblr contained all kinds of weird porn, and all the weird people who like that shit, and the payment processors didn't want to go near it.
So Tumblr's parent company at the time - I don't remember which bunch of idiots was running things right then - banned porn. All of it.
Rather like lancing a boil on a patient with bubonic plague... In a crowded subway car.
- If we increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, doesn't that mean trees will grow faster and lock away more carbon? Yes. (Phys.org)
The effect is measurable and consistent, but currently CO2 is increasing faster than plants can soak it up, so some gradual and carefully planned adjustments to industry and transport are in order.
By which I mean nuclear powered cars.
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Sunday, October 02
Daily News Stuff 2 October 2022
Magic Robots Edition
Disclaimer: Okay, I think two hours is the maximum time I can spend with you.... Would you believe thirty minutes? Look, I've got an egg timer here -
Magic Robots Edition
Top Story
- Kioxia - formerly Toshiba's flash memory division - has reduced production of flash chips following declines in sale prices of 30%. (Tom's Hardware)
Without cuts to production, prices were predicted to decline a further 20% this quarter.
I'm not seeing much movement in the prices of consumer SSDs yet, but the chips in SSDs being sold now were likely bought at prices set six months ago.
Tech News
- Busty anime babes painted by the Old Masters and Stable Diffusion but mostly Stable Diffusion. (Niche Gamer)
The algorithm has been trained with over 50,000 images from Danbooru including work by Sakimichan, and the results are what you'd expect, except:The only thing Stable Diffusion AI (or others) seem to have difficulty with is hands, which is hilariously something even human artists tend to struggle with.
No nudity, but probably NSFW if you're working on a Sunday.
- SigNoz is a monitoring tool like Datadog, only open source. (GitHub)
They do have paid plans if you want someone else to look after everything.
Also, the complete source code is about 2.4MB. I haven't tried compiling it yet, though I'm assuming the binaries will be larger.
The monitoring agent alone for Datadog is 750MB installed.
SigNoz supports the OpenTelemetry standard; the Python libraries for that total 160kB.
- Apple's chief procurer was apparently fired for quoting the movie Arthur. (WCCFTech)
Never speak to the cops, and seven times never speak to anyone pointing a camera at you.
- SuperSpeed no more: USB now has sensible names. (Thurott.com)
It now comes in 5, 10, 20, and 40 Gbps flavours. There's actually two ways to get 10 Gbps on a USB-C port, but I've never seen anyone using two lanes of 5 Gbps so the chance of confusion is minimal.
- Even with Zen 4, mitigations for security bugs carry major performance penal... Wait. (Phoronix)
I was reading the chart wrong. In most cases, applications run faster with the security patches active. In isolated cases, as much as 40% faster. The few programs that are noticeably slower aren't real applications but benchmarks to measure the impact of specific patches.
Overall, 72% of tests ran faster with the patches active.
Just Hololive Being Totally Normal Video of the Day
Bonus Mumei Moment Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Okay, I think two hours is the maximum time I can spend with you.... Would you believe thirty minutes? Look, I've got an egg timer here -
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Saturday, October 01
Daily News Stuff 1 October 2022
Comatose Coders Edition
Iku Hoshifuri of Prism Project. She had a birthday stream today and announced her upcoming debut album, and that if she could hit a (fairly modest) fundraising goal by the end of October she'd be able to commission cover art and a new music video.
Took about fifteen minutes.
Comatose Coders Edition
Top Story
- Google Stadia's shutdown shocked developers too. (The Verge)
"I woke up getting ready for my workday, and I see on our Discord private chat for the company that one of my employees sent a message saying 'is this true?,' with a link," Rebecca Ann Heineman, CEO of Olde Skuul, said in an interview with The Verge. "I follow the link and it's like 'oh, okay.'" Olde Skuul had planned to launch Luxor Evolved on Stadia Pro on November 1st and was even planning to meet with Google on Friday to discuss the release plan. That obviously isn’t happening now.
I feel bad for small developers who are looking for every avenue available to get games out there without going the gacha route or worse, NFTs, but if you didn't see this coming a mile away you have no business being in the industry.
- Google Stadia never mattered and it never had a chance. (The Verge)
That's more like it. Game streaming had its golden opportunity during the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague when everyone was at home and both consoles and graphics cards were all but impossible to buy, and it went nowhere. Now that that situation is over it's only going to get worse.
Google shut down its own game studio in February last year, which should have given everyone ample warning to take the money and run.
Tech News
- Intel's Arc graphics cards are in the hands of reviewers. (Tom's Hardware)
Earlier reviews of the low-end Arc A380 were not particularly favourable, but Intel has had a couple of months to fix driver bugs, plus these cards are four times as fast. That, coupled with Nvidia's stratospheric pricing push, might make for a more receptive audience this time around. We'll know within two weeks, but for now, the cards themselves at least appear to be well made.
- Ryzen 7000 CPUs - 7700X and up - from Microcenter come with a free 32GB DDR5 memory kit. (Tom's Hardware)
While stocks last.
Meanwhile the hosting provider that runs the big server has Ryzen 7000 servers in stock already. They're not especially cheap, but they range from 25% to 200% faster than the existing server.
Though it looks like Ryzen 7000 doesn't support ECC RAM. DDR5 RAM has on-die ECC by default so they're still viable for non-critical tasks, but it removes one of the advantages AMD had over Intel.
The other advantage AMD has is Intel's Efficiency cores, which just plain suck for servers - once you run out of Performance cores, additional thread will run at half speed.
- Update: I was wrong. Ryzen 7000 does - unofficially - support ECC, just the same as earlier desktop Ryzen chips. (Serve the Home)
Gigabyte already has a server motherboard out for Ryzen 7000, with built-in remote management and dual 10Gb Ethernet ports. It's not a high-end board, with two PCIe slots, one M.2, and four SATA ports, but with ECC support and a suitable disk controller card would make for a good storage server solution.
- Steampipe is a library that turns cloud APIs back into SQL queries. (Steampipe)
A lot of cloud APIs.
Weird but extremely useful if you just want to know, for example, how many of your Amazon Lambda functions are running on outdated versions of Python.
- If you're running Microsoft Exchange, unplug it right now. (Krebs on Security)
Sure, it won't work if you do that, but nobody will be able to send you emails complaining about it not working so what does it matter?
Artificial Music Video of the Day
Iku Hoshifuri of Prism Project. She had a birthday stream today and announced her upcoming debut album, and that if she could hit a (fairly modest) fundraising goal by the end of October she'd be able to commission cover art and a new music video.
Took about fifteen minutes.
Disclaimer: Can't file a complaint if we run out of complaint forms.
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, create the zpool, create the basic zfs layout, and then use rsync to clone anything I need over. I mean, you are using FreeBSD, right?
Server Migration This Weekend
Might be some site hiccups, planned or unplanned. I'll post more details when I have the final switch scheduled.
Might be some site hiccups, planned or unplanned. I'll post more details when I have the final switch scheduled.
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