• Twitter's new "fleets" feature, which causes posts to self-destruct after 24 hours, has itself self-destructed after 24 hours.  (The Independent)
  
  It's the 2020est thing ever.
  
  
  
• However bad we thought it was, it's worse.  (Mr Macintosh)
  
  
  • The MacOS Big Sur update would brick the 2013-2014 MacBook Pro beyond any recovery, requiring a whole new logic board.
    
    
  • The repair costs users $500, despite the fact that Apple destroyed your computer themselves.
    
    
  • The replacement logic board is not available anyway.
  
  Good work there, world's richest company.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte finally has a range of Zen 2 NUC's.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the good side, they have 2.5GbE as standard, HDMI, DisplayPort, and two USB-C with DP, one each at the front and back.
  
  On the bad side, the arrangement of the USB ports at the front seems deliberately designed to infuriate people.
  
  
  
• Fonts for developers.  (Devfonts)
  
  
  
• The threat of the leapn't second.  (Dreamwidth)
  
  Every few years on average we need to add a leap second to our clocks to keep them in sync with the Earth's actual rotation, which is very slightly slower than 86400 seconds per day, gradually slowing down, and variable anyway.
  
  Lately the accumulated drift has been holding at just above zero, raising the possibility of a negative leap second, which has never happened and would likely crash every computer in the world.
  
  
  
• The ASRack X570D4U-2L2T-HoldTheMayo.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is the updated version of what I have in the new server (where Ace is running now, after the old server imploded).
  
  It has two 10GbE ports, two 1GbE ports, and yet another one for IPMI, and both VGA from the management chip and HDMI for an APU.
  
  
  
• IBM's Power 9 has a cache invalidation bug similar to the ones that have affected Intel in recent years.  (Phoronix)
  
  The fix is to flush the L1 cache on every single kernel call.
  
  Fortunately most Power 9s aren't running untrusted code in the first place and can just disable the security patch, because that would be really bad for preformance.
  
  
  
• Buzzfeed is, for some unfathomable reason, acquiring the Huffington Post.  (Business Insider)
  
  Lois McMaster Bujold had a great expression for this in Shards of Honor (which if you haven't read it, you should):

  Put all the rotten eggs in one basket - and then drop the basket.

  
  
  
• The usual suspects are back to demanding more censorship.  (New York Times)
  
  
  
• Arecibo is being decommissioned.  (Science Magazine)
  
  Recent damage has left the radio telescope out of action and repairs are judged too risky.  One cable failed in August, and a backup cable failed last week while engineers were planning repairs.  The cables are nearly four inches thick, and if one failed while a repair crew was on site it could easily lead to fatalities.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, November 21 2020 04:42 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, November 21 2020 12:51 PM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, November 22 2020 02:53 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, November 22 2020 03:40 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 22 2020 08:51 AM (PiXy!)

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