Twelve years, and four psychiatrists!
Four?
I kept biting them!
Why?
They said you weren't real.
Friday, December 31
Why Do We Even Have That Lever Edition
Top Story
- One end of the scale: Police in Tokyo lost two floppy disks containing the personal information on 38 public housing applicants. (The Mainichi)
If that makes the news, things are either going pretty well or so badly that you'll throw out anything at all as a smokescreen. Since Godzilla has not been sighted yet this year it looks like it might actually be the former.
- Other end of the scale: Kyoto University lost 77TB of research data - 34 million files - due to an error in their backup routine. (Bleeping Computer)
Seriously, folks, ZFS snapshots.
Anyway, this is data produced by the university's 6 petaFLOP supercomputer cluster, which has storage bandwidth on the level of hundreds of gigabytes per second, and apparently not primary research data. So it can likely be recovered at the cost of slightly delaying other jobs for the cluster.
Tech News
- So I switched my misbehaving keyboard (I have three other keyboards but they're all in boxes. My house is FULL of boxes. Nobody understands how many boxes I have.) from the little USB receiver to Bluetooth and it stopped misbehaving. Seriously all the little issues except for the problem with N-key rollover on [ and ] were resolved.
Need to find a good wired mechanical keyboard though. I want one with no numeric keypad and 15 macro keys, but there aren't any unless you get a specialised POS (cash register) keyboard.
- Speaking of of boxes, monitors #3 and #4 for Starlab arrived. I thought this morning that I should at least clear the front hall of boxes because the monitors take up a lot of room, and then the courier showed up before 9AM when Amazon still had an ETA of the 6th of January.
Yeah, Amazon. I know. But their Boxing Day (more boxes) sale saved me about 30% and at this rate all the cardboard boxes they're sending me will very likely bankrupt them.
- Speakers are on the way as well. I'm replacing my Logitech 2.1 setup with a pair of Audioengine A2+ speakers. I don't really have anywhere good to place a subwoofer at my desk so it's off to one side which makes the sound unbalanced. A good basic stereo set is likely going to work a lot better.
- And I placed the third Starlab buildout order with a smaller Aussie online retailer, for the first of the 4TB SSDs and some minor bits and pieces.
I was trying to convince myself that 3TB per laptop (the 1TB drive they come with and a 2TB in the second slot) would be enough and failed.
I'm getting the Corsair MP400 R2. It's a QLC drive, which made me hesitate, but very large QLC drives are less of a problem because they just have so much space to balance out your writes. I likely wouldn't put one in a server, but for my development lab it should be fine.
I have enough room in the budget to even go to 8TB on one system, but the difference in price between the 4TB and 8TB SSDs would buy me a 32TB external RAID array, which seems more useful right now. High capacity M.2 drives get expensive fast.
Also, this is the R2 version and not the original one; I couldn't find details of the precise change but indications are that at 1TB and 2TB R2 is 20% slower on reads and 20% faster on writes, but at 4TB there's little difference because there's so much flash the changes don't matter.
And credit to Corsair for actually labelling it R2, when Adata (for example) changed the hardware on one of their drives three times without any outwards indication.
- The CPU year in review. (AnandTech)
AnandTech is known for it's in-depth analysis of new CPUs and this year has been, well, I won't say no exception because of the two big launches one - Apple's new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips - was so shrouded in secrecy that they airbrushed out an entire segment of the chip from the publicly released data. That kind of thing makes deep analysis difficult.
Still an interesting roundup.
- Asus has a prototype adaptor card that lets you plug DDR4 RAM into a DDR5 motherboard. (AnandTech)
There are no Alder Lake motherboards that support both memory types, but the CPUs themselves still do, so this adaptor takes advantage of that fact to trick the CPU into accepting DDR4 in a DDR5 slot.
And the reason for this is because there is no DDR5.
- A year later AMD is still working towards approval for its acquisition of Xilinx. (AnandTech)
Xilinx is one of the biggest companies in the FPGA space, alongside Altera which is now owned by Intel. Lattice and Microchip are the only other significant players I know of, so it's understandable that regulators are taking a close look.
It does seem like a good fit for both companies, though.
- Asus has launched an official recall of its Z690 Hero motherboards. (Tom's Hardware)
The were already being replaced under regular RMA procedures, but because of the potential fire hazard they've escalated it to a full-blown recall.
I think the time from the first public reports of problems to the recall was three days, which is pretty good.
The problem is a manufacturing fault and not a design flaw and doesn't appear to affect any other models.
- Intel showed off an SSD running at 13.8GBps with a 12900K desktop CPU. (Tom's Hardware)
Not one of their own SSDs though because they don't make them anymore, but an engineering sample of Samsung's upcoming PM1743 server drive.
I'm not sure how much appreciable difference this makes, but more is better.
- Huawei and SMIC, blacklisted by the US Department of Commerce which actually seems to be properly performing one of its functions are collaborating on building a new chip fab. (Tom's Hardware)
This will likely be a 14nm factory since the most advanced manufacturing equipment all comes from the Netherlands - at this rate Dutch company ASML could become Europe's first trillion-dollar company - and China is banned from acquiring it.
Hard to sneak it in either because the individual machines are each the size of a house.
- Intel's graphics cards and dedicated laptop graphics chips are set to arrive in March. (WCCFTech)
Will they be any good?
Maybe.
The current DG1 cards are basically useless, because they are limited to the same performance as laptop chips and only function at all when paired with an 8th or 9th generation Intel CPU and a custom BIOS. But the current laptop chips perform pretty well for laptop chips, with 96 Intel EUs competing closely with AMD's 8 CU Vega parts.
(Don't worry about the numbers; everyone counts GPU capacity differently.)
The discrete graphics cards will go as high as 512 EUs - and almost certainly be clocked higher than laptop parts as well, so probably equal to 64 or 80 Vega CUs. That would make for a decent mid-range card, probably somewhere between AMD's 6700XT and 6800 non-XT.
And we already know the drivers work pretty well, because Intel have been shipping this GPU design all year inside their 11th generation laptop chips.
So given the scarcity of graphics cards generally, this is very welcome news.
- Given enough users, all bugs are features. (Hyrum's Law)
If you provide a public API, then once you have enough users all behaviours, whether documented, undocumented, or obviously broken, will be relied upon by third-party software.
This is also known as the Make Principle. (The weird syntax of makefiles has persisted for decades because by the time someone suggested a fix the program already had a dozen users.)
- Le CentOS est mort. (Serve the Home)
CentOS 7 is I believe still supported but CentOS 8 support dies today, after IBM pulled forward the EOL date by a full five years.
The alternatives are the live update CentOS Stream which is probably a no-go for many server environments, RHEL 8 where IBM is being pretty generous with free licenses even for commercial use, and Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux which aim to be 100% compatible with CentOS 8 and RHEL.
Or do what I did and get so disgusted with how long CentOS 8 was taking in the first place that you jump ship to Ubuntu 16.04.
Honestly been pretty happy with the change.
- Classic Blackberry devices are also biting the dust as of January 4. (9to5Mac)
Not the later Android models, but the really old ones running Blackberry's own operating system and services.
- Google meanwhile will be updating the Pixel 6. (Thurott.com)
The December software update was delayed just slightly because early adopters of the update found that it could stop the phone making phone calls.
The updated update will arrive at, uh, some point in the future.
- Someone seems to have hacked the Twitter account of the FBI's fake chat app. (Bleeping Computer)
- Using the oceans to store CO2 could help avert a climate catastrophe. (Bloomberg Law)
Also, carbonated fish. Think of the marketing opportunities.
- A new report goes into more depths of Apple's $275 billion bribe to China. (9to5Mac)
I did originally have a Mac in the Starlab buildout plan. It has since been removed from the shopping list, which freed up a fair bit of money for more directly relevant toys. Their industrial design is nice, and their CPU team is world class, but there are limits.
- Sega leaked sensitive data and an email list of 250,000 customers thanks to a misconfigured S3 bucket. (Engadget)
Okay, sure, poor move on Sega's part. But have you seen the S3 bucket configuration dashboard? It's shit. It's complete and utter shit. Amazon hasn't updated it except to make it even more incomprehensible since 2006.
The AWS dashboard is terrible in general - the Google Cloud dashboard is orders of magnitude better - but even within that swirling cesspool the S3 section stands out as an especially odoriferous piece of excrement.
- Won't the real fake Bored Ape Yacht Club please throw poop? (The Verge)
Two fake NFT collections have been banned from the OpenSea marketplace because they pointed out that the original version was also worthless garbage. At least you could eat tulip bulbs.
Frantically Googles "can you eat tulip bulbs"...
Stet.
- Missouri Governor Mike Parson says he expects prosecutors to file charges against a journalist who uncovered a major security flaw in a state-run website by (checks notes) using the "show source" function in his browser. (St Louis Post-Dispatch)
Given what we've seen of prosecutors lately, I expect the governor is not wrong on this. An idiot, yes, but not wrong.
- A bug in Polygon put $24 billion worth of ERC20 tokens at risk. (The Block)
Not NFTs this time but cryptocurrencies.
The bug has since been fixed - they deployed the fix prior to making any public announcements - but not before someone managed to sneak in and make off with $2 million in tokens.
Polygon are eating the $2 million loss and you have to wonder if technically any crime was committed.
I'm sure a prosecutor could be found to charge everyone in the building with third degree negligent arsonmurder or some such.
December
- On December 1, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was the company's flagship Arm v9 chip for 2022 or possibly vice-versa, there were no dumb 4k TVs, just other people's monitors, speaking of monitors the Zephyrus Duo G650 had two of them - in a laptop, some idiot wanted Twitter's new CEO to adopt a plan that would instantly kil... wait, we loved this guy, Tales of Seven Proxies, Twitter adopted a plan that would immediately ban most of its users, there was no serverless, there's only someone else's no server, Microsoft was two trillion dollars worth of crap in a one trillion dollar sack, which end-to-end encrypted messaging apps weren't, and Facebook was ordered to deGiphy itself.
- On December 2, we ordered a Pomu, Qualcomm's brand new 8cx Gen 3 was probably last year's Snapdragon 888, Mozilla's NSS library had a horrible security flaw, Nvidia's brand new RTX 2060 wasn't, light-weight web sites don't actually have to suck, Ubiquiti's big security breach earlier in the year was allegedly an extortion attempt by one of its own staff, Square became Block, and Qualcomm and Razer combined forces against the Steam Deck.
- On December 3, ellipse and ellipsis had the same plural, Twitter actually banned people who needed to be banned but also removed the content showing everyone why they needed to be banned which was retarded, people who attended Anime NYC came down with the sniffles, Google delisted over 100 torrent domains following a court order that didn't even mention Google, the Nvidia's acquisition of Arm looked increasingly dead in the water, TSMC started initial production (called "risk" production) of 3nm chips, Microsoft had daddy issues, and yeet your WiFi router straight out the window.
- On December 4, Australia was the drunkest country on the planet of those sober enough to respond to the survey, I predicted I would get interrupted by work during my upcoming three weeks holiday, the new Lego AT-AT model couldn't be disassembled without a Lego chainsaw, two men were indicted over a long-running YouTube copyright claim scam, Alder Lake laptops were on their way, and Raptor Lake desktops were apparently on their way too.
- On December 5, we took a long walk down a windy beach to a cafe that was shut, Twitter found to their horror that their plan that would immediately ban most of its users was leading to it banning most of its users, Apple's M1 Max CPU had a double secret interconnect bus that was airbrushed out of published die photos, ActiLizzard management kinda sucked, Windows 11 was updated to let you choose your own browser - it still threw a tantrum if you didn't choose Edge but it let you do it, Real Hermaphroditic Cannibal Fishwives of San Diego, LocalStack was AWS in a box - for testing, not for production, and OnlySpiders.com was taken.
- On December 6, tech companies should pay their engineers more, Rule One of NPM Dependency Club, sharing function pointers on the blockchain, don't download that Mac, how to opt out of data sharing in WhatsApp, electronic voting here in New South Wales failed miserably (idiots) and the Electoral Commission very kindly promised not to issue fines to people whose votes they lost, and Apple's new payment plan was a novel combination of extortion and burglary.
- On December 7, hold me closer tiny mixer, Imagination showed off its new range of not very good RISC-V cores, AMD's 4800S was a less-broken 4700S but you probably still shouldn't buy one, everyone scheduled their CES keynotes for January 4, Fastly said that Cloudflare was telling fibs but at least neither of them was actually down and destroying the internet that day, YouTube met the copyright abuse problem and it was them, thank you Australian government and welcome to 1968, crypto finance platforms lost $320 quintillion dollars in a single day give or take a dozen decimal places, and MongoDB said that Amazon's MongoDB-compatible DocumentDB wasn't and I have to admit they had a point but on the other hand they also had HUGE DATA CORRUPTION BUGS IN THREE SUCCESSIVE RELEASES.
- On December 8, AWS US-East-1 burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp - this caused two days of chaos at my day job and we don't even use AWS, Twitter bought and immediately killed chat platform Quill - the sale went through Wednesday and all user data was deleted 1pm Saturday, QNAP again, Western Digital's Blue SN570 was pretty good, benchmarks leaked of AMD's upcoming Rembrandt laptop chip and it was pretty good, Notepad went emo, and no, DARPA researchers did not create a fucking warp bubble.
- On December 9, everyone was burned out - here's why that was a good thing (spoiler: it wasn't), do not buy a recycled Opteron server CPU from 2013, Intel's upcoming Alder Lake-P laptop parts were coming up, a simple VM in 125 lines of C, Russia blamed TOR, and Windows 11's disk performance was crap.
- On December 10, Dell's new Alder Lake desktop systems used DDR5 because, uh, we don't actually know why, AMD released a driver update for video cards from 2002 probably because that's how far back you had to go to find something in stock, Linux kernel patches confirmed all the leaks on AMD's next-generation server CPUs, once again we were wondering how both sides could lose, and we knew how many holes it took to fill the Albert Hall.
- On December 11, hackers stole the payroll for South Australia, other hackers - or maybe the same ones, who knows - stole Volvo's R&D data, other hackers - or whatever - hacked Brazilian government systems including the vaccination tracking program, we ordered some shoe racks - they're here now but still sitting in their box, Amazon's "fix things" button broke, Imagor was an image processing server written in Go - kind of useful, a concatenation of unfortunate bugs, there was a remote code
exploitfeature in the Log4j library but who uses that anyway oh Minecraft, and a Senate bill to force social networks to open their data to researchers couldn't possibly go horribly wrong.
- On December 12, starving programmers don't update their code, the director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had an MA in politics, philosophy, and economics from Oxford, do not cite the deep magic to me, Moore's law was scheduled to end - again - in 2028, probably around 3PM on a Friday so it can beat the traffic, CASE DEFAULT RED, faster, cheaper, lower power 10GbE from Intel, the QSW-M2108-2C was the only reasonably priced managed 2.5Gb switch actually available for purchase - a situation which has since been corrected, and new FDA approved eye drops could cause red eyes and headaches - but cured reading glasses.
- On December 13, we went 24 hours without the internet collapsing, Little Jndi Tables hacked Apple, and playing Doom on a Minecraft server.
- On December 14, we threatened to do this - this, what you are reading right now, open source was in a quantum superposition of being broken and being broken but insisting it wasn't, AMD Navi 12 crypto mining cards were on sale in China where crypto mining was mostly illegal, even The Atlantic noticed that progressive utopias invariably suck, there was no HDMI 2.0, do not install Linux GUI environments on servers, Google patched Chrome and refused to discuss exactly what they had fixed, Kronos got hit by a ransomware attack - possibly an early victim of Log4j before the problem caught wider attention, and Bluetooth broke WiFi security.
- On December 15, there was still a bug in the patched verions of Log4j, half of all corporate networks had been targeted specifically for this bug and the other half had too and just didn't know it yet, two trees good, four trees better, environmentally-friendly laptops were inexplicably ugly, and Nvidia rumours were recycled.
- On December 16, Coinbase ushered in a new era of instant trillionaires, Hynix started sampling 24Gbit DDR5 RAM chips, it was all downhill after 1979, Microsoft's Azure Directory Services fell over but notably didn't take down the rest of the internet, a 16-port 25GbE desktop switch, Degoo was bullshit, and NYC banned methane.
- On December 17, Pomu arrived. you could replace the entire Ethereum blockchain with a Raspberry Pi - probably the Model 400 because the bare boards are out of stock, don't enable cloud autoscaling unless your income also autoscales, ZFS snapshot your Minecraft servers, Log4j hackers were mining Monero - which worked out 50 time worse than just stealing your wallet, fossil fuels killed a million people a year - mostly in China, speaking of China you were no longer allowed to, and $8 billion was stolen from crypto investors in 2021 and we found it just a little hard to care.
- On December 18, my holiday was going just FINE thank you, the BMJ opened fire on Factbook's facecheckers, Princeton "researchers" were conducting an "experiment", the RTX 2050 wasn't, TSMC announced its performance-optimised N4X node, sixteen was the new six, a $2500 25" Kindle, Little Jndi Tables hacked Google, walk it off you big baby said Amazon, Google locked files on Google Drive if they considered them misleading, Verizon was caught spying on customers and fixed it by automatically opting them in to being spied upon, and US regulators targeted the two leading financial scams - Buy Now, Pay Later and stablecoins.
- On December 19, we got a virtualised dedicated server right here in Sydney and it was actually pretty darn nice, those assholes at Princeton were proud of themselves right up until the lawyers got involved, the German Army played the Don't Mention the War card, on Kolmogorov and Stalin, Log4j 2.17 was out fixing the bug in 2.16 that fixed the bug in 2.15 that fixed the bug, putting lampshades on STUPID SCREEN NOTCHES, in a surprise move Wikipedia booted genocide apologists, fully automatic 675% markups R us, and Intel was showering its best engineers with cash and shares, a move I entirely approve of.
- On December 20, Facebook was the worst tech company of 2021, it wasn't time to upgrade to DDR5, a new AI algorithm actually did something useful and guessed pretty reliably at the 3D structure of proteins, exa was the new ls and it sucked, Rails 7 arrived, and former pirate site Fakku filed a DMCA takedown against torrent and pirate news site TorrentFreak.
Meanwhile in January:
- On January 1 Farmville reached its sell-by date.
- On January 2 we predicted that pumping infinite money into the economy would produce inflation.
- On January 3 we didn't buy a TRENDnet 5GbE USB adaptor.
- On January 4 URL shorteners were spyware.
- On January 5 Sydney went into lockdown for the first time and so did Jack Ma.
- On January 6 Telegram let you triangulate the location of individual users.
- On January 7 everyone hated Microsoft's new newsfeed and ASRock's model numbers.
- On January 8 the SolarWinds debacle unsealed sealed court records and Blockchain Stalin was at it again.
- On January 9 the Purge hit full throttle with cloud providers banning everyone to the right of Peter Kropotkin.
- On January 10 I wasted time adding a Parler embed tag.
- On January 11 the Chinese Embassy was openly posting pro-genocide propaganda and Parler exited stage left.
- On January 12 everyone hated American big tech but everyone loved satay chicken.
- On January 13 Uganda very sensibly banned all social networks.
- On January 14 a minor flaw was discovered iOS security when it turned out to not be switched on.
- On January 15 Twitter got involved in a land war in Africa and we instantly corrupted NTFS.
- On January 16 messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp each suffered very different problems.
- On January 17 Intel killed consumer Optane and NASA test fired the SLS booster after 84 years in development.
- On January 18 Pixy had never seen such fuckery and also didn't see any groceries.
- On January 19 I got purged by Twitter and Facebook's potentially illegal deals with Google came to light.
- On January 20 the press went back to sleep after four years of moral outrage at being forced to pretend to do their jobs.
- On January 21 Intel started their rehiree program and the Pi Pico appeared and immediately went out of stock, setting the stage for the entire year.
- On January 22 Intel was on track for 7nm in 2023 and Twitter was sued for child sex trafficking.
- On January 23 the useful idiots were deemed surplus to requirements and SpaceX launched 143 satellites at once into polar orbit.
- On January 24 lots more Pi Pico news and Code of Cancer woes for the idiots who adopted it.
- On January 25 PGM indexes were black magic and SonicWall ate toxic dogfood.
- On January 26 Stasi's mom had it going on and CollapseOS ran anywhere.
- On January 27 Reddit broke the hedge funds and we couldn't have nice things.
- On January 28 discord sucked, Jen Psaki had the IQ of a dead armadillo beside a Texas highway in August, and AMD announced record sales even though none of its products could actually be found for sale anywhere.
- On January 29 we refused to live in our pods and eat our bugs.
- On January 30 Microsoft Edge had not yet been ruined.
- And on January 31 we discovered that the Asus PWS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi had a chipset fan.
- On December 21, let's not go to Politico's EU website - it is a silly place, the Gigabyte Z690 Aero G didn't have Thunderbolt, Ubisoft sucked, the QOI image format took off, fuck systemd, there were no Raspberry Pis*, and everyone involved in that giving-birth-in-the-front-seat-of-a-moving-Tesla story had the IQ of expired horseradish including the reporter and the car.
* Except the Pi 400 - the C64 style model. Gonna get one of those to play with.
While back in February:
- On February 1, for all X build your own X applied recursively.
- On February 2, Perth burned to the ground during a Bat Flu lockdown which must have been awkward.
- On February 3, Huawei's brand new totally-not-Android mobile OS still said Android on it.
- On February 4, Microsoft made popcorn while Google got into a slapfight with Australia.
- On February 5, Mass Effect edited Miranda's butt.
- On February 6, Myanmar very sensibly banned all social networks.
- On February 7, PCIe 5 SSDs were due next year and the worst privacy news article of all time.
- On February 8, Google couldn't be trusted with, basically, anything.
- On February 9, Tesla bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin and Monkeys R Us.
- On February 10, Haachama hit a million subscribers and I had no groceries again.
- On February 11, Amelia hit a million subscribers and I air fried baby potatoes probably because I didn't have anything else to eat.
- On February 12, Cover Corp announced auditions for EN Gen 2 - now known as the Council - and Audible censored a book on censorship.
- On February 13, YouTube shadowbanned absolutely everyone and Amazon announced itself above the law.
- On February 14, the Pimoroni Tiny was a smaller version of the Pi Pico.
- On February 15, the Pi Pico delivered VGA without any video hardware.
- On February 16, YouTube banned Sakura Miko and my router caught fire.
- On February 17, Coco hit a million subscribers and Texas froze over with both parties claiming these events were unrelated.
- On February 18, Facebook blocked Australia and there was much rejoicing.
- On February 19, we discovered Vyolfers.
- On February 20, ethicists were behaving unethically.
- On February 21, bits fell off Boeings.
- On February 22, Ethereum sucked and fascists were fascing.
- On February 23, Facebook unblocked Australia and there was much sadness.
- On February 24, a Chrome extension blocked Google.
- On February 25, Ubuntu took a much-needed chill pill.
- On February 26, Redbean was an all-in-one run-anywhere web server and the US did not have a monopoly on stupid politicians.
- On February 27, don't connect critical industrial control systems directly to the internet you idiots.
- On February 28, Redbean got Lua and we discovered cheap vanilla vodka.
- On December 22, a programmer encountered paperwork for the first time, Zen 3 Threadripper Pro was finally on its way, the 4GB Raspberry Pi would probably be back in stock by Christmas next year, don't update your BIOS, the FBI returned the money it stole for once, and fake currencies considered harmful.
And in March:
- On March 1, AMD's upcoming server chips were expected to have a lot of stuff.
- On March 2, Intel killed off the 665p with the 670p and the Pi Pico produced HDMI video IN SOFTWARE.
- On March 3, more on the groundbreaking Pi Pico HDMI news and the US Navy convicted of piracy.
- On March 4, the Starship SN10 test flight was 99.44% successful
- On March 5, eBay banned Dr Seuss and YouTube banned Kiara.
- On March 6, Rocket Leak laked and was deemed "okay I guess".
- On March 7, Solasta: Crown of the Magister slipped in under the D&D woke expiry date and the Ballad of Little Boolean Bobby Drop Tables True.
- On March 8, Humble had a bundle and Google killed off Google Pay and replaced it with Google Pay.
- On March 9, the most efficient way to solve linear algebra turned out to be guessing.
- On March 10, Samsung announced the 980 Nothing and there was an RCE in Git.
- On March 11, why were you browsing North Korean websites in the first place?
- On March 12, our MongoDB cluster at my day job livened things up and Alder Lake would have a lot of PCIe lanes.
- On March 13, we were warned but didn't understand the message and there were no adults at Google. And it was the half-anniversary of Hololive EN - the first group. Good Lord that seems like a long time ago. They say that time speeds up as you get older but this year has lasted three entire decades.
- On March 14, Apple forced Crabhouse to change its name because it sounded like a game where you might build houses for crabs which is in fact exactly what it was.
- On March 15, AMD's Epyc Milan arrived and Nvidia hacked its own drivers.
- On March 16, Azure Active Directory Services fell over and India considered banning cryptocurrencies and heck maybe social networks too
- On March 17, Thunderbolt expansion cards weren't and Apple matched Google in terrible UI.
- On March 18, the Radeon 6700XT was a graphics card and building a file server into the Linux kernel seemed like a great idea you guys let's do that what could possibly go wrong.
- On March 19, AMD didn't artificially limit crypto mining performance.
- On March 20, learn science, go to jail.
- On March 21, putting your Pi Pico on the internet and the unhackable got hacked.
- On March 22, Backblaze leaked all your filenames to... Facebook?
- On March 23, the main MongoDB cluster at my day job fell over again.
- On March 24, sorry folks, canal's closed - camel out front shoulda told ya.
- On March 25, Genshin Impact crossed the billion dollar mark.
- On March 26, SpaceX did what it does best: Tried again.
- On March 27, in DC the dumb were questioning the dumb.
- On March 28, Dave arrived and was loaded up with a backup Theodore.
- On March 29, I repaired that MongoDB cluster again.
- On March 30, an RTX 3060 for ants and the MongoDB cluster fell over again.
- And on March 31, the 11900K was an embarrassment.
- On December 23, another major outage hit AWS US-East-1, another critical security vulnerability at Azure, those dirtbags at Princeton discovered that the problem with human experimental test subjects was that they had lawyers, the Steam winter sale was on so I spent up big over at GOG, the Crucial P5 Plus was a pretty solid SSD, climate change was caused by lesbians, LG had a weird monitor, Intel came under fire for asking China to maybe turn down the genocide just a tiny bit, websockets were great right up until you actually had to make them work, what blockchains were actually useful for, the problem with big tech, and at least this time they didn't invade Poland.
But in April April:
- On April 1, we took the world's fastest (commodity) server out for a test drive.
- On April 2, isEven as a service crashed my computer.
- On April 3, video drivers broke our mouse and we went fishing in Minecraft.
- On April 4, power apparently went out at our datacenter and we switched to a backup server but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 5, LG stopped making phones and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 6, the Erdős-Faber-Lovász conjecture was settled and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 7, fire, flood, and explosions, and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 8, EEVBlog returned from its outage and our server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 9, 600,000 stolen credit cards were stolen when a hacking site got hacked and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 10, dogs is dogs and cats is dogs and squirrels in cages is parrots and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 11, China slapped Alibaba with a $2.7 billion antitrust file and CEO Jack Ma was literally unavailable to comment, and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 12, AMD CPUs were in stock and being snapped up by
turkeyspeafowl and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two. - On April 13, open war loomed as hackers held Dutch cheese to ransom and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 14, Apple and Google ruined everything and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 15, I installed a program from 2006 and it simply worked and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 16, and you get a power outage and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 17, everybody blocked Google FloC and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 18, the trouble with LXD and THE SERVER WAS BACK.
- On April 19, no-one was driving the car, and even a dead squirrel could get hit on the head by an acorn.
- On April 20, a new new server and four SPOFs.
- On April 21, nothing was on fire and nobody offered me $12 billion.
- On April 22, it's just a perfectly normal knife fight and Linux banned Minnesota.
- On April 23, the best tablets of 2021 were mostly crap.
- On April 24, UNPLUG YOUR QNAP NAS RIGHT NOW.
- On April 25, Sabrina the Teenage Embezzler didn't click on the link.
- On April 26, the naming of names was all numinous natter, and Apple told its customers to go fuck themselves if they though just buying something meant it was theirs.
- On April 27, Basecamp hit the big red EMERGENCY DE-WOKE button and we lost a little on every sale but made it up in volume.
- On April 28, never run Google ads or MacOS.
- On April 29, Chia voided all your warranties and stop that you weirdo.
- And then on April 30, dammit Walter you should always trust a squirrel with fireworks.
-
On December 24, Intel apologised for asking its Chinese suppliers to maybe slow their roll on that whole genocide dealio, Threadripper 5000 went dual socket, the GPD Pocket 3 was a 1920x1200 8" tablet for A$1561, Ethereum 2 was apparently on board the Ever Given seeing as how long it was taking to arrive, Samsung was preparing PCIE 5 SSDs, overclocked crap was still crap, and Quanta rounded up the year's advances in Science.
But in May:
- On May 1, an entire useless third of the staff at Basecamp quit.
- On May 2, Turkey very sensibly banned cryptocurrency.
- On May 3, the future was chiplets in bat sauce.
- On May 4, Australia had the 3060 and the 3090 and nothing in between.
- On May 5, I had a phone and a tablet and Chia crossed the two exabyte Rubicon.
- On May 6, Bootstrap 5 was out and New York very sensibly proposed banning crypto mining.
- On May 7, China banned security researchers and Amazon played The Running Man.
- On May 8, everything new was old again when Chernobyl caught fire.
- On May 9, the Colonial Pipeline got hacked.
- On May 10, Twitter and TikTok were losing the war against information and Apple was winning the war against privacy.
- On May 11, congratulations on your new iPhone made with only the very finest artisanal slave labour.
- On May 12, Boeing 787s turned out to be running on Windows 95 somehow.
- On May 13, it wasn't cancel culture, it was consequences, howled the mob.
- On May 14, the UK didn't negotiate with terrorists but Colonial Pipeline and the DC Police did.
- On May 15, Europe was useless.
- On May 16, we - personally - wasted 500 years each day on CAPTCHAs.
- On May 17, we - personally - were Pomu.
- On May 18, Amazon started turning everything into paperclips except S3 access policies which are apparently some inviolate and unvarying fundamental force underlying both relativity and quantum mechanics for all the improvement they've seen in the past two decades.
- On May 19, we didn't by weird hybrid SSDs or use anything other than MOV.
- On May 20, the founder of Telegram aptly called Apple users "digital slaves" and Twitter put me back on double secret probation.
- On May 21, Google opened a cheese shop and the race to 1nm was on.
- On May 22, underwater flying cars were due Friday and the Pareto Principle applied recursively.
- On May 23, you owned nothing when the Bombay Bat Soup Death Plague came to town.
- On May 24, Apple said you totally weren't a slave and those chains were merely for your safety.
- On May 25, Mozilla fixed a bug that had been logged back when Gilgamesh was a cub scout.
- On May 26, I was irked, irked I tell you, and high end SSDs had 15 microsecond access times. I looked up the one I just ordered and it's around 60 microseconds - not too shabby I guess.
- On May 27, that thing with the mouse happened again.
- On May 28, AI's core competence was breaking things faster and more thoroughly than mere humans could hope for.
- On May 29, China hacked all the things and Russia hacked all the other things.
- On May 30, Microsoft ruined Edge and Iraq very sensibly banned crypto mining.
- And on May 31, the storage market was - what's the technical term - ah, yes, fucked.
- On December 25, was it even worth working on open source anymore, that thing rumoured the previous day got benchmarked, Giagbyte's new Aero16 was maybe interesting, so was the Iodyne Pro Data if you were spending someone else's money, and Door Dash made everyone in the company mop the floors and take out the trash because it built character. (And they were entirely correct in that.)
On the other hand, in June:
- On June 1, all future Ryzen desktop CPUs would have integrated graphics - finally.
- On June 2, Russia hacked our steak and bacon and we got magical metamaterial microscopes.
- On June 3, Amazon's warehouse injury rates were somehow, like, totally off the charts, man.
- On June 4, the Supremes squash abuse of the CFAA and it was time to firewall your firewalls.
- On June 5, Medium tried hitting the EMERGENCY DE-WOKE button and DON'T CONNECT CRITICAL FUCKING INFRASTRUCTURE DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET.
- On June 6, Apple decided that maybe burning out SSDs soldered to the motherboard was a bad idea.
- On June 7, Microsoft edge deepened its death spiral and Chia ruined everything.
- On June 8, we learned Rule One of Never Trust Anyone Club.
- On June 9, everyone's favourite foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza dragon announced her retirement.
- On June 10, a certain foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza indie vtuber gained 200,000 followers overnight.
- On June 11, Melbourne, quite frankly, sucked, and I say that as a former Melbournanian.
- On June 12, BuzzFeed won a Pulitzer Prize - which they genuinely earned for their work documenting China's genocide.
- On June 13, Codecov and VW got hacked because they are retards.
- On June 14, any sufficiently profound incompetence was indistinguishable from malice.
- On June 15, everyone got hit by ransomware and the new US National Security Advisor was a complete wanker.
- On June 16, Windows 11 leaked and exercise bikes got hacked.
- On June 17, Datadog left something unwelcome on the carpet.
- On June 18, it was time to stop worrying and start panicking.
- On June 19, Russia banned VPNs that were too secure for their liking which is a good way to keep track of which ones you should use.
- On June 20, the news was increasingly a rerun of old Doctor Who episodes and not always good ones.
- On June 21, the New Yorker - I swear I am not making this up - tried to blame anime on Donald Trump.
- On June 22, being 100% compatible meant reproducing all the bugs too.
- On June 23, the beatings would continue until the smiles improved.
- On June 24, a couple of kids in South Africa made off with $3.6 billion in Bitcoin - I wonder if their remains were ever found, and John McAfee was found dead in a Spanish prison after posting a "I did not commit suicide" note.
- On June 25, Sydney had its first serious Bat Flu lockdown and we remembered when $600 billion was a lot of money.
- On June 26, Macs couldn't run Windows or corporate VPNs.
- On June 27, Microsoft's own flagship Surface Studio 2 wasn't on the Windows 11 compatibility list but they did find time to digitally sign a Chinese rootkit.
- On June 28, the Eternal October began.
- On June 29, the SafeDollar stable coin turned out to be none of those when it plunged in value by 100% overnight.
- And on June 30, Microsoft apologised for the confusion over Windows 11 and explained that the cheese was supposed to go in the silver cup and the addled mice in the bronze soup bowl and not - as the previous bulletin had stated - the other way around.
- On December 26, the James Web Space Telescope was launched and an exhausted 2021 apparently didn't notice in time because it did not explode on the launchpad or run into the last of female of an endangered species of Andean condor and doom both itself and the birds to extinction, fusion was 80% bullshit, AI was 95% bullshit, even Ars Technica though slavery was bad, the Scorptec Nuctop had a dumb name but was exactly the laptop I had been looking for the entire year, and there were no bandwidth charges between any of Vultr's 20 datacenters and Backblaze.
Unfortunately in July:
- On July 1, the worlds fastest SSD was fast and everyone's favourite foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza dragon went out with a bang with 490,000 people tuning in for her farewell stream.
- On July 2, the FTC voted itself new powers, I - apparently by pure psychic energy - voted myself a raise.
- On July 3, the usual suspects had learned to love Big Tech.
- On July 4, STOP OUTSOURCING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE and also DON'T CONNECT CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET.
- On July 5, managed services companies were disease vectors in a plague-ridden world
- On July 6, we wondered how much it would cost to bribe a bear, and QNAP had another critical vulnerability.
- On July 7, Australia was getting a shiny new computer for the National Minecraft and Also Some Astronomy Centre and there was a BIG bug in Windows printing.
- On July 8, npm audit was broken by design - as well as being broken accidentally and in every other way.
- On July 9, if you're going to hold people to random it helps to tie them up or lock the door or something and not just let them call an Uber and go home.
- On July 10, nothing went horribly wrong in the tech world for an entire day.
- On July 11, Hope descended a little too hard. Again.
- On July 12, a free and open internet was under attack said, uh, Google.
- On July 13, there was that whole rainbow dildo butt monkey incident.
- On July 14, 83% of the world's software developers were burned out and the other 17% were apparently dead.
- On July 15, it hurt to live.
- On July 16, it's not censorship if it's a private company said the government censors paying private companies to do their bidding.
- On July 17, Google banned distributing anything they don't like for any reason by anyone.
- On July 18, Facebook hit back at claims that it wasn't a fascist-run shithole.
- On July 19, there was ANOTHER BIG BUG in Windows printing.
- On July 20, President Biden made it perfectly clear that Facebook was not mowing down people in the streets as far as he was aware, at least not recently.
- On July 21, another BIG BUG in Windows (not printing this time), oh and while we were at it, fuck systemd.
- On July 22, yet another BIG bug in Windows printing, just not Microsoft's fault this time.
- On July 23, we were going to move to a new server - this time for sure!
- On July 24, we threw the blockchain people into a volcano and there was much rejoicing.
- On July 25,an update to ChromeOS had a teeny tiny bug that meant nobody could ever log in to it ever again.
- On July 26, we fed the world with demethylated potatoes.
- On July 27, Intel launched its 7nm process by, uh, renaming its existing 10nm process to 7nm.
- On July 28, they came for our gaming PCs and the EFF sued the Post Office for illegal domestic espionage.
- On July 29, Apple workers of the world rise up - no, wait, let me get some popcorn... Okay, now rise up!
- On July 30, that telepathic raise kicked in.
- And then on July 31, we learned the important difference between idiots and maniacs.
- On December 27, Intel's low-end Alder Lake parts were here - they weren't supposed to be, but they were, Tumblr was having a hard time because they were idiots, CPM Magnacut was not a retro operating system, JavaScript frameworks ruined the web, Google was watching you for artcrime, and I found that you could buy the Lenovo Tab M8 FHD on Amazon Australia. I ordered one yesterday. Let's see how that goes. Also got a 400GB microSD card for it, the combination making it about a third the price of the iPad Mini but with nearly double the storage.
Though it didn't help that in August:
- On August 1, physicists built the world's first time crystal - this being the 21st century or something.
- On August 2, we planned to get three of the slimline Intel NUCs and they were immediately discontinued.
- On August 3, the Pentagon's new AI could predict what day it would be several days in advance.
- On August 4, the server crashed and I promised to get us migrated to a new server soon and we all know how that turned out - which is to say, yeah, working on it.
- On August 5, my twin HP Spectre X2s turned out to be toast thanks to battery bloat which still ticks me off.
- On August 6, Apple explained that they weren't spying on you - they were spying on your children.
- On August 7, an internal Apple memo called people who opposed their plans to spy on children "the screeching voices of the minority".
- On August 8, the Tame Apple Press finally bit the hand that beat it.
- On August 9, Edge threw caution to the wind and apparently sanity too and dived head-first into a giant swirling cauldron of suck.
- On August 10, anti-government hackers hacked the entire Belarus government.
- On August 11, hackers stole $600 million from Poly Network, a cryptocurrency exchange.
- On August 12, the hacker who stole $600 million from Poly Network sent them $256 million and a thank you note.
- On August 13, physicists - apparently feeling their oats -created a Wigner Crystal this time.
- On August 14, Apple "regretted" "confusion" over its plans to spy on your children, and rolled out checklists to "explain" to customers why it was spying on their children.
- On August 15, 64GB of RAM is enough for anybody, if you have two of them.
- On August 16, everyone seriously wished they had waited a week before airing their dirty laundry.
- On August 17, the entire secret terrorist watchlist got leaked onto the internet and indexed by search engines - top men, folks, top men.
- On August 18, Poly Network got all its money back and offered the hacker half a million bucks and the position of chief security advisor, which seemed appropriate.
- On August 19, researchers showed that Apple's "perpceptual" neural hashes were broken.
- On August 20, OnlyFans committed autotumblrisation and TikTok was collecting biometric data on its users because of course they were.
- On August 21, Apple announced - we swear we are not making this up - that they were "the greatest platform for distributing child porn" - a direct quote and phrase you might wish to avoid accidentally pasting into your search bar like I did while writing up that story.
- On August 22, a judge ruled that California voters had infringed upon the rights of California politicians by, uh, voting, which summed up the year perfectly.
- On August 23, puppy murder and Bus Factor Zero, and there was a sudden outbreak of very, very Australian vtubers.
- On August 24, over 1000 apps built with Microsoft's Power Apps tool leaked private data because nobody ticked the "don't leak private data" box.
- On August 25, a hacker stole 600,000 private photos from iCloud by, uh, pretending to be from Apple tech support.
- On August 26, OnlyFans adopted antidesentumblrarianism - which is to say, they hit the big red EMERGENCY DE-WOKE button.
- On August 27, with all the component swapping in SSDs we suggested you just buy a 970 Evo Plus - which turned out to also have been the victim of component swapping.
- On August 28, there was a teeny tiny HUGE FUCKING APOCALYPTIC CASE NIGHTMARE HELIOTROPE BUG in Microsoft's Cosmos DB cloud database.
- On August 29, that Cosmos DB bug was called "the worst cloud vulnerability you can imagine at least until December when expectations will get reset like you couldn't believe".
- On August 30, 40% of code suggestions by GitHub's new AI tool Copilot contained security vulnerabilities because of course they did.
- And then on August 31, Arm China hoisted the black flag and began slitting throats. I mean, seriously.
- On December 28, the Internet Association - a lobbying group for Big Tech - closed its doors because, and I quote, "fuck you and the horse you rode in on", Tumblr was run by idiots, the Eve Spectrum Bunchanumbers was a pretty good monitor, TSMC's new 2nm factory would cost a trillion dollars, something weird was going on with LastPass, something weird was going on with QNAP, and here's a nickel kid, go lick a spark plug said Alexa.
Which doesn't change the fact that in September:
- On September 1, the Australian Federal Police were granted sweeping powers to control Australian social networks of which there are none, which is about how things go in the legislative process down under.
- On September 2, AWS AP-Northeast-1 burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, setting a theme for the remainder of the year.
- On September 3, GM shut down all but four of its US factories due to the global nugget crisis and the 1170 words banned by Copilot.
- On September 4, surprised by backlash from every sentient being in the entire galaxy and even some journalists, Apple postponed its plans to (checks notes) spy on children.
- On September 5, Cloudflare turned HEADs into GETs which is rather more of a problem than it might sound.
- On September 6, spammers gave up running their own mail servers or hacking other people's and just, uh, signed up with Salesforce.
- On September 7, even ProtonMail wouldn't take a bullet for you.
- On September 8, end-to-end encryption was only as secure as the ends
- On September 9, Australia's High Court pooped in everyone's cornflakes.
- On September 10, it was time to stop worrying and start panicking - again.
- On September 11, both sides in the Epic vs. Apple case managed to lose and there was much rejoicing.
- On September 12, the average quality of the information in a social network was inversely proportional to the square of the size of the network which explains a lot about the past decade.
- On September 13, we asked people to please stop reinventing XML poorly.
- On September 14, Australia still didn't have a digital vaccine passport - and still didn't as of two weeks ago when NSW lifted restrictions, because sometimes government inefficiency is its only saving grace.
- On September 15, Apple announced a new range of cameras with phones attached to them and a small tablet with HUGE BEZELS.
- On September 16, Microsoft announced the future was passwordless and if you were running certain Azure services that future was now. It wasn't supposed to be, it just was.
- On September 17, China's property market imploded - both figuratively and literally.
- On September 18, there was a wee bit of a kerfuffle down in Melbourne
- On September 19, glowies gonna glow.
- On September 20, the patch to fix the glaringly obvious security flaw in the SMB server embedded in the Linux kernel which was a terrible idea from the beginning had a security flaw because of course it did.
- On September 21, the southerly kerfuffle continued unabated.
- On September 22, the Victorian police banned news helicopters because it's difficult for a communist dictator to claim that a protest is just a small group of troublemakers when live footage shows it stretching for miles not that this actually stops them mind you it just makes it difficult, and so did the Biden Administration with respect to Del Rio, Texas, and Twitter banned me for suggesting that one of the many communist dictators - I'm not sure it matters a great deal which one - should either resign or be thrown into a volcano, whatever worked. It was that kind of day.
- On September 23, Bat Flu lockdowns worked - if your goal was to increase cases, hospitalisations, and deaths... Not so much otherwise.
- On September 24, Facebook allegedly tried to bribe the FTC according to a shareholder lawsuit - to the tune of five BILLION dollars.
- On September 25, critical updates were released for Chrome, Microsoft Exchange, VMWare vCenter, iOS, IOS (which is a different thing), SonicWall, and the European Union.
- On September 26, the BBC brought back Russell T Davies in a doomed attempt to undo what they had done to Doctor Who - and then proceeded to make things much much worse in the remaining episodes before then.
- On September 27, chipmakers tried to persuade carmakers to use chips that were obviously unsuitable to anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of the subject making you wonder what the fuckity fuck is going on with senior corporate executives.
- On September 28, the FCC created a fund to help smaller organisations rip Chinese spyware out of their networks which seems like a sensible idea so I should check back and find out how it's all going horribly wrong.
- On September 29, we discovered why absolutely everything was out of stock absolutely everywhere and nobody understood just how much rice Mumei made.
- And then on September 30, hackers could steal money from your iPhone while it was locked and still in your pocket because of course they could.
- On December 29, Steam's big winter sale was on so I went over to GOG and dropped $250 on stuff I might get to play ten years from now, Intel's 12700 non-K seem like it might not entirely suck, have you seen this bronze Roman dodecahedron, Log4j 2.17.1 was out because of course it was, don't use passwords, retailers gave up on the whole returning stuff that doesn't work idea, 13 separate battery gigafactories were at various stages of construction across the USA, and CES was moved to a Slack channel.
But that didn't matter because in October:
- On October 1, Let's Encrypt's root certificate expired and broke approximately a third of the internet for a week.
- On October 2, do not use SMS-based 2FA.
- On October 3, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Cisco, SAP, and Atlassian joined forces to establish Trusted Cloud Principles, which principles are apparently "fuck you, give me my money".
- On October 4, Russian ransomware gangs were getting ripped off by rival gangs offering discount decryption services.
- On October 5, all Facebook services went down for six hours which caused secondary problems for everyone from Pokemon to Verizon.
- On October 6, there was a file leak bug in the most common web server in the world because, and I quote, THIS IS
SPARTA2021. - On October 7, the Democrats launched a pre-fab whistleblower in their ongoing fight with Facebook for the stupid m-f heavyweight crown.
- On October 8, TSMC to the Biden Administration: bite me.
- On October 9, we asked where exactly was Tether's $69 billion.
- On October 10, we were sick of these mother-beeping outages on this mother-beeping server
- On October 11, Australian big tech industry association DiGi went went recursively Big Brother - not that there is much Australian big tech in the first place.
- On October 12, we can haz laptops, apparently.
- On October 13, global hosting provider OVH announced routine network maintenance and then five minutes later every single one of their servers went offline because it's just been that kind of year.
- On October 14, Microsoft patched the problem that made Windows 11 run slow on AMD processors and made everything much worse because it's just been that kind of year.
- On October 15, Belarus sent everyone to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 rubles.
- On October 16, 7-Eleven Australia decided to build a biometric database of all their customers without actually informing anyone of this intent.
- On October 17, the last best Socket AM4 motherboard and the first worst Socket 1700 motherboards.
- On October 18, nobody wrote code anymore.
- On October 19, Apple announced their new 14" and 16" MacBook Pro models complete with STUPID DISPLAY NOTCH and someone hijacked the REvil ransomware group's servers.
- On October 20, Apple's 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro was 8% faster than Dell's Inspiron 16 Plus - at twice the price.
- On October 21, the US Senate gave NASA $100 million and told it to run a multi-billion dollar program which is about typical for those idiots.
- On October 22, we remade Love Canal in Chernobyl and knelt before Qod.
- On October 23, all these programming language were yours except Node.js - attempt no coding there.
- On October 24, we survived YANA - Yet Another Node.js Apocalypse - and all we got was these rather nice screen-printed 100% cotton t-shirts.
- On October 25, Dell had service manuals and we ventured inside Google and Facebook's secret and possibly illegal back-room deals.
- On October 26, a deep dive into Apple's M1 Pro and M1 Max and a deep dive into MacOS 12 (quick precis: avoid).
- On October 27, Hell Week of the Eternal October commenced.
- On October 28, Hell Week escalated, like, a lot.
- On October 29, the blockchain was a database server with a thousand-dollar-a-day crack habit.
- On October 30, Sananana returned to us and OpenWorm was an open worm (possibly Yatagarasu).
- On October 31, key takeaways from the Facebook Papers - spoiler: you're a Nazi.
- On December 30, if the cap's reversed your board is cursed, we ordered the only decent small Android tablet available ANYWHERE, Nvidia was spending $6.9 billion in
bribesprepayments to secure its chip production quotas, Centaur technology was no more, Intel sold off its SSD division to Hynix, and stay in your damn pod and eat your damn bugs said Apple.
But we didn't listen because in November:
- On November 1, forcing users to link their desktop logins to a cloud account was a bad idea for a company with a history of catastrophically bad cloud security.
- On November 2, notched quanta could pack 500TB of data onto a tiny glass disk that you would immediately drop and shatter into dust.
- On November 3, Zillow used AI to make a mint on the real estate market - for other people. Oops.
- On November 4, Gen X was going to be stuck maintaining code forever and Australia prepared two lunar rovers for launch.
- On November 5, our mission is to provide people with the choice of what we view as the best.
- On November 6, the Eternal October went on hiatus for a couple of days.
- On November 7, complexity was still killing software developers and so were terrible websites full of garbage articles but don't dare suggest that programming was hard.
- On November 8, the supply chain crisis went from worser to worsest and the Samsung jokes wrote themselves.
- On November 9, the leaks were coming from inside the leaky things and we fought for our right to start to party.
- On November 10, Microsoft's Surface Laptop SE was compact, lightweight, repairable, cheap, and kind of crap, because it's just been that kind of year.
- On November 11, we hid malware in plain site with Unicode because why nê™®t am I right?
- On November 12, the cheque must have bounced because the US government banned Huawei and ZTC from receiving FTC licenses.
- On November 13, nobody didn't like squirrelwaffles and the FBI was sending out phishing email to tech workers because it was just that kind of year..
- On November 14, Intel senior management was, against all the odds, dumber than Joe Biden.
- On November 15, the best laid plans of Pixies and men are actually going about half-way to keikaku.
- On November 16, Russia blew up one of its own satellites BECAUSE IT WAS JUST THAT KIND OF YEAR.
- On November 17, we paid cash for you to delete your NPM module, or other people's for that matter - we're not that picky.
- On November 18, Asus beat their Vivobook Pro 16X with the ugly stick, I mean, seriously, what the hell?
- On November 19, developers rejected new technology because they quite correctly judged that it mostly sucked.
- On November 20, Amazon were amoral scum, but elsewhere we were very briefly grey-pilled.
- On November 21, SquirrelWaffle did not in fact drop QakBot, and the Wuhan Bat Flu Lab was not 100 yards from the Wuhan Bat Soup Market - a different disease lab was 100 yards from the Wuhan Bat Soup Market.
- On November 22, the UK recognised octopi as sentient, paving the way for the same recognition to one day apply to journalists and politicians.
- On November 23, South Australia achieved energy sufficiency for five minutes.
- On November 24, GoDaddy leaked details of 1.2 million WordPress sites including plaintext database passwords because 2021 basically.
- On November 25, your cat was Turing-complete and 7% of paint splatters were not valid Perl programs - these two facts not being directly linked so far as this blog is aware.
- On November 26, Ninja Science Team HoloX appeared from nowhere.
- On November 27, the world endured the correlates of quantum coddling.
- On November 28, the entire moderation team for Rust resigned and nothing of value was lost - unless it was, the story gets murky.
- On November 29, Australia's federal government went to war with the social networks and we wondered how they could both lose.
- But on November 30, Twitter could not possibly become an ocean of suck because it was already an entire galactic supercluster of hazardous waste.
- And on December 31, having somehow survived the gauntlet of gauntlets, it was two floppies of one, 77TB of the other, Asus had a DDR4 to DDR5 adaptor - and a recall of their fiery motherboards, Intel's dedicated graphics were inbound for March, CentOS 8 was dead and so were Blackberries and the FBI's fake chat app, carbonated fish, Apple's $275 bribe, and you could in fact eat tulip bulbs.
But we were too busy getting plastered because during December:
- On December 1, some idiot wanted Twitter's new CEO to adopt a plan that would instantly destroy the company... wait, no, we loved this guy.
- On December 2, we ordered a Pomu.
- On December 3, Twitter actually banned people who needed to be banned but also removed the content showing everyone why they needed to be banned which was retarded but that's Twitter for you.
- On December 4, Australia was the drunkest country on the planet of those sober enough to respond to the survey.
- On December 5, Apple's M1 Max CPU had a double secret interconnect bus that was airbrushed out of published die photos because Apple simply can't help itself.
- On December 6, tech companies should pay their engineers more just like every other day.
- On December 7, HUGE DATA CORRUPTION BUGS R US.
- On December 8, AWS US-East-1 burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, causing two days of chaos at my day job and we don't even use AWS
- On December 9, everyone was burned out except those of us who were actually dead.
- On December 10, DDR5 was not all that.
- On December 11, hackers stole everything that wasn't nailed down and also everything that was and also the nails and it seemed there was some kind of bug in some Java logging library that probably wouldn't cause any major problems.
- On December 12, the world discovered that starving programmers don't update their code.
- On December 13, Little Jndi Tables hacked Apple and played Doom on a Minecraft server.
- On December 14, we threatened to do this - this, what you are reading right now - but nah.
- On December 15, there was still a bug in the patched verions of Log4j, but that probably wouldn't affect anything.
- On December 16, Coinbase ushered in the exciting new world of instant trillionaires.
- On December 17, you could replace the entire Ethereum blockchain with a Raspberry Pi and we were rather hoping you would.
- On December 18, the BMJ opened fire on Factbook's facecheckers and Princeton "researchers" were conducting an "experiment" which was going extremely "well" for them.
- On December 19, Log4j 2.17 was out fixing the bug in 2.16 that fixed the bug in 2.15 that fixed the bug so good that was all settled then.
- On December 20, a new AI algorithm actually did something useful.
- On December 21, let's not go to Politico's EU website - it is a silly place.
- On December 22, a programmer encountered paperwork for the first time.
- On December 23, we had another major outage at AWS US-East-1 and another critical security vulnerability at Azure just to round out the year.
- On December 24, Intel apologised for apologising for its apology.
- On December 25, was it even worth working on open source anymore? No.
- On December 26, the James Web Space Telescope was launched and... NOTHING WENT WRONG.
- On December 27, Tumblr was having a hard time because they were idiots.
- On December 28, the Internet Association - a lobbying group for Big Tech - closed its doors because, and I quote, "bleep you right in the bleep you bleeping bleeper".
- On December 29, Steam's big winter sale was on so I cleared out my GOG wishlist.
- On December 30, if the cap's reversed your board is cursed.
- And finally on December 31, it was very much a two floppies of one, 77TB of the other kind of year and we were very glad it was over.
In Memoria
Dungeons & Dragons, 1974-2021
Stick a fauchard-fork in it, it's done.
Ghostbusters, 1984-2015, 2017-
Ghostbusters 2016 has been very explicitly excluded from the new Blu-Ray box set (due January 2) and the usual suspects are salty as a salt lick in a salt lake.
Quebec 1867-2020
Party Like It's 2016 Video of the Day
Like OK Go's other videos this one is mostly real. That is, it's filmed in zero gravity aboard the Vomit Comet but that only provides thirty second stretches of free fall, which are edited together very skilfully.
The same with the Rube Goldberg machine - it looks like one continuous shot, but there's actually a cut in the middle. I know where it is and I still can't see it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:26 PM
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Thursday, December 30
Two Hours Later In Kansas Edition
Top Story
- I found out how to do shared directories properly under LXD. I had an older and rather complicated guide that sent me fleeing in the opposite direction, but when I was looking for it again yesterday I discovered a newer and much simpler guide using the latest version of LXD and tried it out and, uh, it worked.
Had to go back and enable a particular kernel module, but other than that it was very simple to set up and worked perfectly.
- If the cap's reversed, your board is cursed. (WCCFTech)
The Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero has one tiny flaw: It catches fire.The issue potentially affects units manufactured in 2021 with the part number 90MB18E0-MVAAY0 and serial number starting with MA, MB, or MC.
Some units - not all, but it's not clear what percentage, but "units manufactured in 2021" doesn't cut it down much - have a critical capacitor placed backwards, shunting unwanted current into the power circuitry so that sooner or later the whole board fails, if you're lucky, or explodes, if you're not.
The article shows how to spot this - it's a component near the memory slots that's rotated 180 degrees. If the stripe is on the right (with the I/O ports on the left), you're fine. If the stripe is on the left, your board will die; it's just a question of how soon and how violently.
All affected boards will be replaced, though if you have a family member with a surface-mount soldering station it's a pretty easy thing to fix.
- Went ahead and ordered the Lenovo M8 FHD from Amazon. It has the same CPU and display resolution as my current M10 FHD Gen 2, but in a smaller, lighter package with less storage.
When I first spotted it, it was A$266, but today it's A$232. With a 400GB microSD card - it only has 32GB on board - it comes to A$299 exactly.
The M10 supports adoptable storage so I'm assuming the M8 does too, and I'll end up with a single pool of 380GB or so available. That should be enough.
Also 3x Asus 2.5GbE USB adaptors and two dual 2.5" external USB 3.1 Gen 2 enclosures, since those a tricky or expensive to find locally so I bundled all the stuff from the US into one order.
Monitors #3 and #4 have shipped, as have the speakers; the rest of the orders so far are still being processed.
Tech News
- Nvidia is spending $6.9 billion in prepayments for capacity on TSMC's 5nm production line and Samsung's whichever. (WCCFTech)
Nvidia's current generation of cards are pretty good and are built on Samsung's 8nm process, which is behind current 7nm processes let alone the new 5nm. 2022 should be a good year for video cards - if you can find one.
- Linux patches from Intel allow for updating your BIOS without rebooting. (Tom's Hardware)
It's called PFRUT.
- Via has shut down its Centaur Technology site after selling its CPU development team to Intel. (Tom's Hardware)
It's totally not slavery though.
- Meanwhile Intel has sold its SSD business to Korean electronics group Hynix. (Serve the Home)
Intel hasn't been making any good consumer SSDs for some time. Expensive enterprise stuff at one end and cheap QLC devices at the other.
- Sweden's Northvolt just produced Europe's first lithium-ion battery. (Teslarati)
Yay, I guess.
- Here's what to expect from Apple in 2022... (9to5Mac)
- ... Stay in your pod and eat your bugs. (9to5Mac)
"Quit whining and do as you're told", said Apple.
November
- On November 1, it turned out - unexpectedly - that forcing users to link their desktop logins to a cloud account was a bad idea for a company with a history of catastrophically bad cloud security, everything was going to get worse, the Google Pixel 6 Pro was a thing that existed, and we weren't sure what the heck was going on with neutrinos.
- On November 2, the Surface Pro 8 was not terrible, notched quanta could pack 500TB of data onto a tiny glass disk that you would immediately drop and shatter into dust, Nvidia rumours were playing on loop, complexity was killing software developers but we had a cure, and MacOS updates were bricking Macs again.
- On November 3, when everything is monetised, only Monet will have... wait, Zillow used AI to make a mint on the real estate market - for other people, Facebook was "shutting down" its face recognition project and "deleting" all the data, 30,000 GitLab servers needed updating, and Google's new phone CPU was great at things you don't do on a phone.
- On November 4, Gen X was going to be stuck maintaining code forever, Australia prepared two lunar rovers for launch, Stardock prepared Start11 for launch, AMD prepared Zen 4, Zen 4c, and Zen 5 for launch, and McDonalds announced a zero-calorie gluten-free vegan McRib. No, I don't know why either.
- On November 5, Alder Lake arrived and promptly melted the polar ice caps, though the cheapest part - the 12600K - wasn't bad, the Asus ROG Maximums Z690 Hero was an Alder Lake motherboard [DON'T BUY THAT ONE IT CATCHES FIRE -- Future Pixy], engineers moved on from PCIe 5 to PCIe 6, people were the problem, and another choice quote from Apple:
Our mission is to provide people with the choice of what we view as the best.
- On November 6, the Eternal October went on hiatus for a couple of days, the Intel's new 12900K Blast Furnace Edition was sold out everywhere, unless you got a prebuilt system like the Falcon Northwest Talon or the Alienware Aurora R13 which were HOLY CRAP THAT'S EXPENSIVE, Intel bought Centaur Technology from VIA - or something, it wasn't entirely clear, 86 motherboards on the wall, using the Pi Pico as a VGA adaptor for a Z80, the snipping tool in Windows 11 broke because of an expired certificate somewhere, nobody trusted Google, never update anything, how to dump Chrome, you couldn't replace the screen on an iPhone 13 and never would because of critical security thingies, MacOS was a wretched hive of scum and villainy according to Apple, and Shmedish shmomestic shmerrorists.
- On November 7, complexity was still killing software developers and so were terrible websites full of garbage articles, programming was definitely not hard though, there was already no DDR5 RAM anywhere, Amazon planned to extend its satellite fleet to a total of 7774 from the current, uh, zero, someone with a drone tried to blow up a power substation, Intel's desktop integrated graphics were kind of meh, DON'T USED MANAGED DATABASES, the chip industry was spending a combined $2 billion per week to expand production, and Microsoft published a free report that basically said "Buy a new computer already damn you".
- On November 8, the supply chain crisis went from worse to worser, Intel caught up with AMD as long as you had a private nuclear reactor, we formed a POSSE, Arm Macs leaked memory like a big leaky thing with a leak in it, no, stop, go back, IoT done right, Microsoft threatened to add AI to Office, how was Henry Kissinger still alive anyway, and the jokes wrote themselves.
- On November 9, the leaks were coming from inside the leaky thing, AMD confirmed both Zen 4 and Zen 4c and a 96TFLOP double precision accelerator card, Robinhood leaked to the poor, Visual Studio 2022 was here, the NBN started testing FttN upgrades after thirteen bleedin' years, and DRM considered shitty.
Plus we started to party like it was 1979.
- On November 10, Microsoft's Surface Laptop SE was compact, lightweight, repairable, cheap, and kind of crap, Rolls-Royce was building nuclear reactors and so was France, OWC offered a $13k 64TB SSD, those critical security thingies on the iPhone 13 suddenly vanished, how to save millions on your storage needs - spoiler: start by spending tens of millions and cut it by ten percent, don't use Docker, don't use Exchange Server, don't use SolarWinds, and Apple said to its users if you don't want to live in a pod and eat bugs why don't you just go buy an Android device.
- On November 11, hiding malware in plain site with Unicode, testing that rather nice Framework laptop under Linux, three out of four adults correctly diagnosed Facebook, YouTube removed the dislike counter after their own counter triggered an overflow error on a 64 bit int, and Google lost its appeal against a $2.7 billion EU antitrust ruling.
- On November 12, the US government banned Huawei and ZTC from receiving FTC licenses, so it sounds like cheque bounced, Patreon was building its own video platform and, well, good luck with that, Microsoft was playing notice me senpai with the DOJ's antitrust division, cut your losses and just buy a Switch, we accidentally subscribed to Adobe again, yet another Python JIT compiler, and Ars Technica had always been at war with Ars Technica.
- On November 13, Australia was number one, 50 more Z690 motherboard you shouldn't buy, leaked benchmarks of Intel's upcoming 12700H laptop chips seemed rather bakwards, no earth, no sea, no sky, only Kryo, nobody didn't like squirrelwaffles, and managers weren't worried about keeping tech workers happy NO SHIT SHERLOCK.
- Still on November 13, the FBI was sending out phishing email to tech workers, and Sana and her sisters.
- On November 14, I took my new pressure washer out of the box to clean the back deck and discovered that my garden hose had died of COVID, Intel senior management was, against all the odds, dumber than Joe Biden, their engineers could still produce decent chips though, the top twelve tech turkeys of 2021, and the real reason everyone wants to shove ads into everything - spoiler: it's exactly what you think it is.
- On November 15, we laid out the plans for Starlab (my new home office), IBM announced a quantum computer with 127 qubits, Yabai was a thing that did stuff, asynchronous Rust kinda sucked, used tractors were the new RTX 3090, and testing out a server with ten tractors on board.
- On November 16, Russia blew up one of its own satellites, New York City passed regulations controlling the use of AI in hiring decision and actually somehow got it right, Windows 10 was slightly faster than Windows 11, or to put it another way, Windows 11 was only slightly slower than Windows 10, hackers were taking over Alibaba servers to min crypto because if you're going to commit one crime why stop there, surface freight was so screwed up that air freight was becoming competitive, and the 4004 turned 50.
- On November 17, we paid cash for you to delete your NPM module, or other people's for that matter, Brave browser now bundled a crypto wallet because money, Kioxia announced new M.2 2230 SSDs, Windows 10 21H2 was here, the final six-monthly update before Windows settled down to a relatively sane yearly schedule, and Australia's Blueprint for Critical Technologies was dumb.
- On November 18, AMD and Qualcomm were looking to use Samsung's 3nm process, Asus beat their Vivobook Pro 16X with the ugly stick, blink if you're under duress, die by the online cancellation, Reservoir NFTs, and Minecraft 1.18 got a date.
- On November 19, I broke things, the NFT Bay provided 20TB of NFT data, developers rejected new technology because it mostly sucked, SpaceX was planning an orbital flight of their Starship, Twitter deamped, and 25 people were poisoned by bullshit "alkalized water".
- On November 20, Amazon were amoral scum, we were very briefly grey-pilled, DDR6 and GDDR7 but no DDR5, China was lying about its supercomputers, open the car door please Hal, a cheap but also terrible Arm-based PC, the FDA wanted 55 years to deliver public records on Bat Flu vaccines to the public, DO NOT TRUST SMS-BASED 2FA, and the CEO of Citadel outbid a bunch of cryptoweenies for an actual copy of the actual Constitution.
- On November 21, the NFT Bay actually provided 10GB of NFT data and 19.9TB of zeroes, SquirrelWaffle did not in fact drop QakBot, the Wuhan Bat Flu Lab was not 100 yards from the Wuhan Bat Soup Market - a different disease lab was 100 yards from the Wuhan Bat Soup Market, and Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Extreme was Extreme-ly overpriced.
- On November 22, leftist lunatics came together to mourn the passing of a child rapist, Intel was spending over $200 billion on fab expansion, the UK recognised octopi as sentient, paving the way for the same recognition to one day apply to journalists and politicians, that's not a tasselled wobbegong, how to download Windows 10, and Zebras were black with white stripes.
- On November 23, to shuck or not to shuck, Windows on Arm sucked, the best Windows laptops of 2021 sucked, and South Australia achieved energy sufficiency for five minutes.
- On November 24, there was still no DDR5, eight cores is enough for anyone, GoDaddy leaked details of 1.2million WordPress sites including plaintext database passwords, the review score of Apple's Podcasts app was a lie, Samsung announced a new $17 billion factory in Texas, India proposed banning cryptocurrencies entirely which seemed like a grand idea to me, Russia demanded hostages, and that STUPID DISPLAY NOTCH.
- On November 25, communists gonna communist, China suspended Tencent from updating any of its apps, the Department of Commerce actually did its job, your cat was Turing-complete, 7% of paint splatters were not valid Perl programs, and Sweden told the rest of Europe to ban crypto mining and then resigned.
- On November 26, Ninja Science Team HoloX, the Kremlin started naming who exactly needed to hand over hostages, high-speed low-latency DDR5 RAM really didn't make a difference, PHP 8.1 was here for some reason, Australia needed a bigger volcano - or really any at all, and Walmart announced the children's toy of the year.
"It's about taking five grams of cocaine and being alone … It's a very depressing song," Tanner said.
- On November 27, correlates of quantum coddling, the Seaberry mini-ITX board sold out in five minutes, there were absolutely no miles-long lines of trucks waiting to enter the Port of Oakland, AWS reduced its bandwidth pricing by a factor of (5ei/sqrt(jk)-16m**-4y)%, a brand new image format played QOI, the Biden Administration banned travel from Eswatini, Microsoft fucked everything up, they said we were mad to build a museum on a swamp, it was time to bring back TurboPascal, MongoDB 5.1 entered a quantum superposition of uselessness, MariaDB 10.7 entered RC status, and FastAPI looked like it might not suck.
- On November 28, the entire moderation team for Rust resigned, another tech news site filled with crap, DDR5 still was neither available nor worth the expense which was a pretty good tradeoff, pop psychology killed the villain, GitHub went down, we were all doomed, smoking a turkey with Prometheus who was probably a pretty cool dude and seriously never try to outdrink him because he grows a new liver every night, Bokeh looked like it didn't suck, and police in Sydney linked arms with anti-lockdown protestors instead of, as was the case recently in Melbourne, kerb-stomping and pepper-spraying them.
- On November 29, Australia's federal government went to war with the social networks and we wondered how they could both lose, the Bus Factor for PHP was reduced from 2 to 1, a big step in the right direction, mining in 22 seconds, YouTube went to war with Ninja Science Team HoloX, and Brixels.
- And on November 30, Twitter would not become an ocean of suck because it was already an entire galaxy of sewage, a compact 700W passively-cooled power supply, no 4K dumb televisions, yes 4K large-format monitors, a survey of 7000 companies found that only 3% were dumb enough to trust all their data with a single cloud provider, a proposed change to Ethereum gas calculations wouldn't help anyone, and three ex-Googlers sued the company for being evil.
Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day
Dammit, who let Pixy near the record player?
Party Like It's 1979 Properly This Time Video of the Day
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:38 PM
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LXD is great. The problem is, it's deceptively complex - it's very easy to get up and running with containers, and it all works perfectly for basic tasks, but under the hood there's a ton of clever stuff going on and a huge set of features and options and when you try to do something complicated that was easy on older container systems like OpenVZ you can quickly run aground on restrictions imposed by the newer security model.
Case in point, shared directories.
Under LXD it works too, sort of. The problem is that user IDs in LXD containers are different to user IDs on the host, and user IDs between any two containers are also different, even if you cloned a container, so permissions are a nightmare.
Anyway, there's an easy solution to this when it comes to shared directories and it's built right into LXD.
# lsmod | grep shiftfs
By default it's probably not. If you get no result from that command, run these two commands:
# snap set lxd shiftfs.enable=true
# systemctl reload snap.lxd.daemon
Let's assume you already have a directory you want to share across a couple of containers. Let's call it /test, and it's owned by user test in group test:
drwxrwx--- 2 test test 4 Dec 29 17:38 test/
And you have created containers called test1 and test2, which are each set up with a user test as well.
# lxc config device add test1 testdisk disk path=/test source=/test shift=true
# lxc config device add test2 testdisk disk path=/test source=/test shift=true
"testdisk" here can be any name you want; LXD will assign it to the virtual device it creates.
shift=true
that does the magic. That uses shiftfs to map the users between the host and the containers for you automatically.But Wait There's More
That shared directory is part of your general ZFS pool, not your containers. This means:
- When you snapshot a small container with a ton of shared data, that snapshot isn't burdened with the shared data. Just what is actually running in the container itself.
- You can see the contents from the host without fussing around with namespaces.
- You can snapshot the contents with ZFS, and then you can see the contents of the snapshot directly in the filesystem. You can take a snapshot and then just rsync off a backup.
- How the hell did I get that working for the existing server without this? Because I know I did.
- Anyway.
- Let's say you have fifty apps running. You can have separate shared directories for all their databases under one ZFS pool and snapshot all of them in one go. Back them all up in one go.
- Let's say those fifty apps are using some non-Euclidean mix of MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, Neo4j, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, and who knows what else. When you take that snapshot, you snapshot them all together at a single point in time, so you have as close as possible to a consistent backup of the entire eldritch mess.
- You can set up a tree of ZFS datasets under a parent and adjust their individual configurations (e.g. recordsize and compression algorithm) to suit the speciifc databases and then use
zfs snapshot -r
to snapshot the whole lot at once.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Wednesday, December 29
More In Anger Than In Sorrow Edition
Top Story
- Steam's Winter Sale is now on so I cleared out my wishlist and spent A$200 to buy a couple of dozen games and DLC on GOG.
Which seemed a lot to me because I've been spoiled by Humble Bundle where I get twelve games a month for twelve bucks a month. (And never play them.) But A$200 is maybe two full-priced games.
Anyway, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, that new D&D game I mentioned, and its DLC, Outer Worlds, which I was looking forward to but got exclusived by Epic who I loathe, The Witcher 3 which was finally cheap enough to just throw in the cart, Sunless Skies, the followup to Sunless Seas, the classic Metal Slug games, Xcom, Xcom 2, and all their DLC, and the really old Warlords series.
Which I'll likely get to play in approximately never.
- Intel's upcoming 12700 non-K may be a little faster than AMD's 5800X. (WCCFTech)
And may use less power too, since it's rated at 65W compared to 105W for the AMD chip.
There are cheaper motherboards for Alder Lake on the way for early in the new year as well, making it all a more attractive proposition.
Tech News
- We keep finding these bronze Roman dodecahedrons but nobody knows what they were used for. (Mental Floss)
Barbarians.
- Log4j 2.17.1 is out now, fixing a fourth security flaw. (Bleeping Computer)
Because it's just been that kind of year.
- Don't store your passwords in your browser. (Bleeping Computer)
- Don't store your passwords in a password manager. (Bleeping Computer)
Not sure what options we're being left with here.
- Retailers are giving up and saying "just keep the damn thing" for small value returns. (Axios)
This will have the minor side effect of increasing prices on everything for everyone.
- 13 battery gigafactories are under construction in the US to come online by 2025. (Electrek)
Those manufacturing jobs aren't coming back, they said.
- CES is going to be held in a Slack channel at this rate. (Tom's Hardware)
And nothing of value was lost.
October
- On October 1, I filed my seventh appeal with Twitter over my latest ban, not expecting or receiving a better response than the previous six attempts, Let's Encrypt's root certificate expired and caused outages all over the internet, Intel's new AI chip rated 10 milliHamsters, Corsair's Xeneon 32QHD165 covered 84% of Rec.2020 or about two feet seventeen inches in Imperial measures, how to bypass that TPM report, and QNAP had another RCE*.
* Remote code execution vulnerability, meaning someone else can run their code on your computer.
- On October 2, the least worst state government leader in Australia - mine - got caught up in a corruption investigation and resigned, do not use SMS 2FA, the Acer FA100 was a pretty decent basic SSD, Backblaze data showed SSDs failing nearly as often as hard drives, Arm server CPUs offered pretty good performance for the price, Crypto trading platform Compound wasn't hacked, they were just dumb, the genius of Amazon is they make you pay for the telescreen, and where there's smoke there's a dead graphics card.
- On October 3, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Cisco, SAP, and Atlassian joined forces to establish Trusted Cloud Principles, which are apparently "fuck you, give me my money", Ruby was the latest bunch of idiots to dive headfirst into a code of conduct war, HP's Chromebook x2 looked nice without going to the bother of being nice, don't buy an Xbox Series S even though it's the only non-portable game console you can buy - hang on - sorry, that's not available either anymore, Sony undoomed the PlayStation 4, Apple put an RCE in the AirTag interface despite being told specifically that they had done that, and all about JIT compilers.
- On October 4, M1X Macbooks might have been on their way - spoiler: they were, the chip shortage would continue until morale improved, why carmakers couldn't just switch to newer chips - spoiler: because people get upset when cars crash, ransomware gangs were getting ripped off by rival gangs offering discount decryption services, a reboot of Babylon 5, and against all odds the new premier of NSW was better than the previous one.
- On October 5, all Facebook services went down for six hours which caused secondary problems for everyone from Pokemon to Verizon, really, really don't trust SMS-based 2FA, Windows 11 was here, Android 12 too, and a file containing the personal data of 1.5 billion users turned out to be fake.
- On October 6, there was a file leak bug in the most common web server in the world because 2021, there would be no victims of crime if we simply made being a victim a crime in itself, Windows 11 was perfectly fine mostly, the Surface Pro 8 was also fine, the perfect answer for programming job interviews, how IBM lost the cloud, and WHAT ARE YOU IDIOTS DOING?
- On October 7, the Democrats launched a pre-fab whistleblower in their ongoing fight with Facebook which they are too dumb to realise is their best friend in the world, Windows 11 was all about forcing you to upgrade your hardware, Linux almost kinda sorta ran on Arm-based Macs, I ordered that monitor I wanted (two of them in fact) and they shipped the same day, and a 4chan user called Twitch a disgusting toxic cesspool - and then leaked all their source code.
- On October 8, my monitors arrived, the Ampere Altra Max server CPU hovered somewhere in the no mans land between amazing and meh, Samsung announced a 17nm process node - actually old reliable 28nm updated with FINFETs, TSMC to the Biden Administration: bite me, Google and Apple were facing antitrust investigations in Japan, a judge ruled that CDNs don't in themselves constitute contributory infringement, Intel passed over Britain for new fabs because continental Europe offered bigger bribes, stablecoins weren't very, and I discovered bamboo and pandas - in Minecraft.
- On October 9, throwing politicians into volcanoes, where exactly was Tether's $69 billion, unexpected sanity from two left-wing Sydney institutions, hydrogen was still a terrible fuel, the .NET Foundation kerfuffle was updated to a brouhaha, Apache has released an emergency update for the incomplete fix in the emergency update for the bug they introduced introduced in the recent update - something that would become a theme as the year wrapped up, and I established Camp Pandaton - in Minecraft.
- On October 10, we were sick of these mother-beeping outages on this mother-beeping server, Firefox sent every character you typed into the URL bar to its ad network, Vivaldi blocked Googles snoopy new API, Nvidia graphics cards could have done with more RAM except the 3060 and 3090 - and the A4000, and Step One of Fixing Windows 11 Club was Don't install Windows 11.
- On October 11, Australian big tech industry association DiGi went went recursively Big Brother, NEC was building a half-petabit transatlantic fiber link just for Facebook, HP leaked specs of Intel's 12th generation and AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs, and we built a rail line from Camp Pandaton all the way home to Riverbend through the Nether.
- On October 12, laptop Availability was improving here in Oz, which PCIe 4 SSD for your laptop, memory prices were predicted to fall, if your software stack is generally crap adding encryption in just one place wouldn't fix it, and under CDA Section 230 Wikipedia wasn't responsible for its idiot users.
- On October 13, the Polygon blockchain raised its gas prices by factor of thirty overnight, improving things that should never have existed, Zen 4 would include PCIe 5 after all, and global hosting provider OVH announced routine network maintenance and then five minutes later every single one of their servers went offline because it's just been that kind of year.
- On October 14, well don't do that then, Microsoft patched the problem that made Windows 11 run slow on AMD processors and made everything much worse because it's just been that kind of year, new Nvidia graphics cards were on their way unless they weren't, a 100MHz 6502, Southwest Airlines said it was lag, and Apple pushed back against the idea that people own the electronic devices they own.
- On October 15, Ubuntu 21.10 was here, Belarus sent everyone to jail, Google Distributed Cloud ran the cloud on your own servers - which wasn't as dumb as it sounded, Apple had a looming announcement, and Crystal 1.2 was out.
- On October 16, 7-Eleven Australia decided to build a biometric database of all their customers without actually informing anyone of this intent, PinePhone announced a new model that was basically adequate, there was an update for that patch for that AMD performance bug in Windows 11 but no-one ever explained what the bug was, time to bust some trusts, Apple fired the leader of the AppleToo movement, Tether paid a $41 million settlement to the CFTC over not actually being tethered, Valve banned the blockchain and there was much rejoicing, and putting guns on robot dogs because what could possibly go wrong.
- On October 17, the last best Socket AM4 motherboard, the first worst Socket 1700 motherboards - maybe not actually worst but it rhymes, Alder Lake vs DRM, Canon got hit with a well-deserved class-action lawsuit, a look at the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9, and fighting ransomware by making sure there is nothing worth ransoming.
- On October 18, my new notebooks were pretty good, Microsoft was really pushy, and Windows doesn't tell you where your disk space has gone, JavaScript metastatised, does nobody write code anymore, and if you have a 9000 sq ft home you can probably afford an expensive WiFi router.
- On October 19, Apple announced their new 14" and 16" MacBook Pro models complete with STUPID DISPLAY NOTCH, AMD's next-plus-one generation laptop chip would have sixteen cores, someone hijacked the REvil ransomware group's servers, and enabling Windows 11's "God mode".
- On October 20, Apple's new M1 Pro and M1 Max were good but not nearly as good as groundbreaking as Apple claimed - for example, the 16" MacBook Pro with M1 Max was about 8% faster than my Dell on CPU tests and 30% slower on average on GPU tests - and twice the price, the Alienware x15 had four non-essential keys right where the Four Essential Keys should be, the QNAP NASbook, running Windows 11 on a 2006 Pentium 4, 15 more security vulnerabilities in Windows 11, Nim reached 1.6, a fairly standard setup for a 100GbE switch, Microsoft killed off UWP - ish, and China opened its VPN market to foreign investment in perhaps the single most disingenuous government policy announcement in the history of the Universe.
- On October 21, next-gen Ryzen 6000 mobile chips were spotted - and possibly striped, TSMC scheduled 3nm for Q1 2023, Microsoft rolled out support for Android apps to Windows 11 beta testers, Windows 10 meanwhile designated Deluge as a PUP, I picked up the full version of Corel Painter (formerly Fractal Design) at 90% off, the US Senate gave NASA $100 million and told it to run a multi-billion dollar program, and thinking about 8TB laptop SSDs.
- On October 22, remaking Love Canal in Chernobyl, kneel before Qod, Affinity Photo was also mentioned, and Microsoft finally rolled out the actual fix for that AMD performance bug and still refused to say what the bug was.
- On October 23, all these programming language are yours except Node.js - attempt no coding there, the M1 Max was closer to a 3050 than a 3080, Intel's graphics cards were scheduled for Q1, the ASRock X570S Riptide had six PCIe slots, a security researcher did not steal $600 million from the Polygon blockchain and was rewarded $2 million for it, DDR5 RAM was expected to be 60% more expensive than DDR4 which turned out to be hopelessly optimistic, working in tech kind of sucked - partly because of the people complaining that working in tech kind of sucked, and Safari was the new Internet Explorer, ruining the web for everyone else.
- On October 24, Intel's upcoming 12900HK laptop part was faster than the M1 Max on both single and multi-threaded benchmarks, all of Dell's new laptop models removed the Four Essential Keys where their predecessors had them, fucking magnets how do they work asked YouTube, Microsoft removed .NET hot reload support for CLI developers and then immediately put it back again, we survived YANA - Yet Another Node.js Apocalypse - and all we got was these rather nice screen-printed 100% cotton t-shirts, an Egyptian art robot was arrested by border security, and the Democrats rolled out another prefab Facebook "whistleblower".
Fan-made closing credits for Hololive EN Season 1.
- On October 25, Dell had service manuals, inside Google and Facebook's secret and possibly illegal back-room deals, Prince of Persia was ported to the Atari XL, and AMD's Zen 3D chips entered production.
- On October 26, a deep dive into Apple's M1 Pro and M1 Max, a deep dive into MacOS 12 (avoid), Node.js was being Node.js, and a close look at the Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi which seems to no longer be available.
- On October 27, Hell Week of the Eternal October commenced, AMD reported another record quarter with revenue up 137% over Q3 2020, a new Penric and Desdemona story from Lois McMaster Bujold, we were shocked, shocked, to see Ethereum 2.0 delayed, again, and Microsoft force-installed the Windows 11 upgrade checker n Windows 10 that it could tell you that you couldn't upgrade.
- On October 28, Hell Week escalated, like, a lot, Intel's Alder Lake was inbound, the best cheap tablets of 2021 all sucked, and Protonmail was not a telco.
- On October 29, the blockchain was a database server with a thousand-dollar-a-day crack habit, THAT STUPID DISPLAY NOTCH, AMD's Zen 5 server chips could go as high as 256 cores, MANGA was the new FAANG, and everybody made a shit ton of money. Including me, finally, because this is when my second raise of the year kicked in.
- On October 30, Sananana returned to us, unexpected sanity (though it was later revoked, at least I got to sleep at night for a while), get your RTX 3080 in the cloud where it's completely useless, AMD's next generation GPU taped out, OpenWorm was an open worm (possibly Yatagarasu), and Samsung was tripling its fab capacity.
- And on October 31, two down, two to go in Hell Week, key takeaways from the Facebook Papers - spoiler: you're a Nazi, new features in Python 3.10, the 11 worst features of Windows 11, and Fuck Razer.
Party Like It's 2012 Video of the Day
Party Like It's 1979 Vide of the Day
Disclaimer: Did we get it?
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Tuesday, December 28
One Trillion Dollars Edition
Top Story
- The Internet Association - a lobbying group for Big Tech - is closing down because all the Big Tech companies suck and none of them want to be associated the the bad reputations of the others. (Ars Technica)
Four of the largest member companies - Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google - are under antitrust investigation, leaving the other members wondering if there was any value in the rather expensive membership.
Weirdly the left-wing crazies at Ars Technica echo my own views - that Microsoft is the least worst of the lot, with their bad behaviour stemming mostly from good old-fashioned greed and incompetence rather than being clinically insane control freaks and/or communists.
- Placed the second order for the Starlab buildout: 128GB of RAM to upgrade my laptops, a new high-end WiFi router since the old one caught fire and the cheap router provided by my ISP is meh at best, a new Ethernet switch and a pile of Cat6 cables, and a set of Audioengine A2+ speakers.
With those speakers I might not need the little mixer I bought previously - they support input from a 1/8" audio jack, dual RCA jacks, USB, and/or Bluetooth which is plenty for three laptops. But I'll keep the mixer around anyway.
They were out of stock for a while so I had planned to get a little Yamaha shelf hifi system instead, but now they're back so I ordered them before they could disappear again.
- Next are the SSDs but I still haven't quite decided what size to get. I think I'll just go with the 2TB 970 Evo Plus. Good 4TB TLC M.2 drives cost four times as much as 2TB models, so much that I could get a NUC and an 8TB SATA SSD. And I have two smaller laptops that I can swap the 2TB drives into if I upgrade the main laptops again later.
Tech News
- Followup to yesterday's story about Tumblr getting banned by Apple. They were working on a banned word list to filter posts out of the iOS app so that Apple's app reviews wouldn't see BAD STUFF.
As everyone knows, this is an approach that always works perfectly and never causes any problems.
- The Eve Spectrum ES07D03 is a 27" 4K monitor that checks all the boxes. (Tom's Hardware)
98% DCI-P3, G-Sync and FreeSync up to 144Hz, DisplayHDR 600, with USB-C, DisplayPort, and dual HDMI inputs. Near perfect brightness and colour uniformity make it a great monitor for gaming and also for semi-professional work.
On the other hand at $898 with stand it's not the cheapest monitor around. On the third hand it probably doesn't catch fire.
- TSMC's 2nm chip factories could cost a trillion dollars. (WCCFTech)
Taiwan dollars, that is. About $30 billion in real money, which is a lot but not that much compared with the numbers regularly batted about in terms of fab investments.
- Is something weird going on with LastPass? (Hacker News)
It might be a case of overly scary emails for failed login attempts, or it could be something bad.
Given how 2021 has gone so far, I'm putting 50 quatloos on something bad.
- Speaking of how 2021 has gone so far QNAP devices have been hit by a wave of ransomware attacks. (Bleeping Computer)
Not clear whether this is just unpatched devices or possibly a new bug.
Remember Safety Rule One, kids: Never attach network attached storage to a network.
Your files can't be stolen if the server is switched off and unplugged. Or at least the thieves need to put some effort into it.
- Here's a nickel, kid. Go lick a spark plug.
- Safe. Secure. Affordable. Pick one.
- The James Webb Space Telescope will rewrite cosmic history. (Quanta)
Or not. One of those.
- China has unveiled a Kafkabot. (The Byte)
The author of the article calls itpart Robocop and part Minority Report
which is also apt and shows that someone is awake.
A prosecutor claims that the automated criminal prosecution system is 97% accurate, which, given what we know about prosecutors generally, should send people fleeing in all directions.
September
- On September 1, the Australian Federal Police were granted sweeping powers to control Australia social networks of which there are none, a Node.js library had a remote code execution vulnerability - it's called Node.js, the vaccination target before NSW opened back up was at 70%, the Vampire V4+ had a 68060, and the Asus ProArt B550 Creator had dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, dual M.2 slots, and a pear in a partridge tree.
- On September 2, Amazon tried to block Starlink at the FCC until they could launch their own competing service sometime in the year 2525, Cloudflare ditched Intel for AMD, AWS AP-Northeast-1 burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, setting a theme for the remainder of the year, Professor Plum in the EVGA factory with the lead-free solder, and we was kings.
- On September 3, yes, we had no Intel NUCs, we also had no chicken nuggets or Dell laptops, GM shut down all but four of its US factories due to the ongoing nugget crisis, IBM's new mainframe CPUs had no L3 cache, Windows 11 got a date, the 1170 words banned by GitHub's Copilot, UK ISP Sky Broadband cut out the middleman and fed your bandwidth data straight to lawyers so that they could target you for copyright suits, China was stealing from Chinese companies for a change, and the ProArt Studiobook Pro was a real thing that was real.
- On September 4, surprised by backlash from every sentient being in the entire galaxy and even some journalists, Apple postponed its plans to (checks notes) spy on children, fascists gonna fasc, we looked at the HP Pavilion Aero - from a great distance, because it still hasn't officially launched in Australia, Alder Lake got a date, Gzip got turbo boost - at least on IBM mainframes, stop plastering ads over everything Microsoft, Atlassian Confluence had its day in the supernova, we weren't sure what the difference was between a fake Banksy NFT and a real one, and a very, very large wind turbine was actually three small turbines in a trenchcoat.
- On September 5, the Rolling Stone embarrassed itself again, the best APU you couldn't buy, AMD's next-generation Rembrandt chips entered production - so given the lead time on 7n manufacturing the first chips should be ready in about a month, Cloudflare turned HEADs into GETs, and the Razer Raptor 27 was "overpriced crap".
- On September 6, spammers found a new email delivery tool - Salesforce, chicken nuggets were listed as being in stock, Chia miners started selling off disk drives and SSDs and marking them as new, and Nvidia repurposed failed high-end GPU chips for crypto mining. And when we say high-end, we don't mean $4000 graphics cards, we mean $20,000 graphics cards. Oh, and we hired a grey-haired BOFH at my day job and there was much rejoicing because until then I'd had to fill that role.
- On September 7, even ProtonMail wouldn't take a bullet for you, what it took to run Mangadex, and Gigabyte's Aorus 7000s SSD was very very fast.
- On September 8, end-to-end encryption was only as secure as the ends, McDonalds put the database password in an error message and then connected the database directly to the internet, IBM's Power 10 was on its way, the SEC sued Coinbase over a product that didn't even exist, GitHub created useless garbage merges according to the inventor of Git, the unfolding disaster could have been worse, Intel was spending $80 billion on new fabs in Europe in addition to the $120 billion it was spending in the US, and we reviewed the StatusCake monitoring agent and pronounced it shockingly sensible.
- On September 9, Australia's High Court pooped in everyone's cornflakes, Intel announced their NUX X15 laptop reference platform - this is what I just discovered being sold locally as the Scorptec Nuctop, 11th generation Xeon parts arrived, Russian internet giant Yandex got knocked off the net by a massive DDoS attack which is something they kept doing to my servers before I blocked them, and Acronis True Image was renamed Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office Plus Ultra Case Nightmare Green.
- On September 10, Germany was arresting people for being insufficiently servile, China doubled down on economic suicide, never click the enable editing button, if you ran Azure Cloud containers it was time to stop worrying and start panicking, mathematicians learned the lesson from Fermat and got some broader margins, and SD express was almost here.
- On September 11, both sides in the Epic vs. Apple case managed to lose and there was much rejoicing, Alder Lake's PCIe configuration was slightly weird but there was at least a lot of it, Thunderbolt adaptors weren't, don't use Rust, Quadranet was facing a lawsuit over what seemed to be quaternary contribution to alleged copyright infringement, and the Sydney Bat Flu lockdown reached new heights of everyone simply ignoring the rules.
- On September 12, how to install Windows 11 without an internet connection, both sides appealed the Epic vs. Apple ruling, how to get any website instantly deindexed, China banned new video games and then redoubled its efforts to destroy its own economy, the average quality of the information in a social network was inversely proportional to the square of the size of the network, and a budget 4K resin-based 3D printer that you couldn't buy.
- On September 13, more thoughts on the Epic vs. Apple mess, please stop reinventing XML, Nvidia might have been planning to bring back the RTX 2060 - spoiler: it was and it did, and why Firefox was losing users.
- On September 14, Facebook's new file compression method looked like an accident waiting to happen, Australia still didn't have a digital vaccine passport - and still didn't as of two weeks ago when NSW lifted restrictions, Microsoft said no Windows on Arm-based Macs, something was weird in the state of Ethereum, and YouTube took down a stream of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony over use of a 107-year-old recording of a song.
- On September 15, Apple announced a new range of cameras with phones attached to them and a small tablet with HUGE BEZELS, rare earth prices were up, Kioxia was making SLC drives again, and Russia fined Google and Facebook a combined total of $4.26.
- On September 16, we discovered bread, Microsoft announced the future was passwordless, if you were running certain Azure services that future was now, comparing the Xiaomi 11T to the 11T Pro, Intel cut server CPU prices - just not for you, when Stack Overflow goes bad, that's not burnout, this is burnout, don't pass mutable default values to Python functions, and ExpressVPN hired a former UAE spy as its CIO.
- On September 17, Australia signed a deal for a fleet of nuclear submarines and there was not much rejoicing from France or the lunatic lefties here at home, China's property market imploded - figuratively and literally, the Solana blockchain went down after a peak transaction load of 400,000 TPS which number I frankly do not believe, South Africa got encrypted, you could still buy Microsoft Office rather than renting it, and slot machine chain Dotty's suffered a data breach and leaked customers' social security numbers, drivers license and state ID numbers, passport details, financial account information, health insurance, treatment information, biometric data, MEDICAL RECORDS, tax details, and credit card numbers and expiry dates, because those are all things a slot machine needs to know.
- On September 18, the same people who thought company towns were great the first time, then criticised them for a hundred years, were back to thinking they were great, speaking of company towns there was a bit of a kerfuffle down in Melbourne, a chipset driver bug affected security on all AMD desktops and laptops, low-end Alder Lake chips would escape the blight of "efficiency" cores, and sysadmins had a really bad week.
- On September 19, glowies gonna glow, AMD's next gen graphics cards should be faster than the current gen and might even be available to purchase, eventually, and [techie filter off] KySync was a multi-threaded file-distribution protocol based on Zsync, Excision's CRISPR HIV therapy was cleared for human testing by the FDA, Sysz was an fzf terminal UI for systemctl, Toshiba's N300 18TB NAS drives used FC-MAMR, an open source DRM driver wsas available for Mediatek AI cores, AMD and Valve were focusing on a P-State / CPPC driver with Schedutil [techie filter on] and Google reset the permissions on billions of installed apps - for very good reasons.
- On September 20, there were too many states starting with O, there is no serverless, the patch to fix the glaringly obvious security flaw in the SMB server embedded in the Linux kernel which was a terrible idea from the beginning had a security flaw, and the Surface Pro 8 leaked.
- On September 21, the southerly kerfuffle continued unabated, Python got a case statement, Amazon filled its search results with ads, and after 30 years of PC Load Letter we finally advanced to Connect to printer Windows cannot connect to the printer. Operation failed with error 0x0000011b which I'm sure we can all agree was a huge improvement.
- On September 22, the Victorian police banned news helicopters because it's difficult for a communist dictator to claim that a protest is just a small group of troublemakers when live footage shows it stretching for miles not that this actually stops them mind you it just makes it difficult, and so did the Biden Administration with respect to Del Rio, Texas, Twitter banned me for suggesting that one of the many communist dictators - I'm not sure it matters a great deal which one - should either resign or be thrown into a volcano, whatever worked, the Windows 11 Update Checker had only one setting - no Windows 11 for you, goats were damp and squishy, the Framework laptop ran Linux just fine, Atlassian's Trello fell over, and the FBI had the keys all along.
- On September 23, Bat Flu experts who praised Melbourne's lockdown and criticised Sydney's relative openness were strangely silent when statistics showed Melbourne had twice the number of confirmed cases and reportedly four times the number of hospitalisations, laptops and glasses arrived on my doorstep together, Microsoft's Surface Pro 8 arrived, and the little Surface Duo 2, when we said don't use "chicken123" as your password we didn't mean "change it to chicken456", and if you were stuck on Android older than 6.0 it was time to install Firefox.
- On September 24, Sydney lifted alcohol bans in public parks so that people would have somewhere to get drunk while the pubs were closed over Bat Flu fears because some things are important, I clicked that damn button 1595 times, Facebook allegedly tried to bribe the FTC according to a shareholder lawsuit, the EU pushed to make USB-C the standard phone connector - which except for one particular bunch of jerks it already is, three new vulnerabilities in iOS exposed your heart rate, count of detected atrial fibrillation and irregular heart rhythm events, menstrual cycle length, biological sex and age, sexual activity, and cervical mucus quality, which made us really wonder where people were putting their iPhones, Minecraft Dungeons hit Steam, Twitter added Bitcoin tipping so that if you wanted to slip someone a couple of bucks to thank them for their funny comment and/or commiserate with their upcoming expulsion you could pay ten times that in transaction fees to do so, and California declared war on Amazon.
- On September 25, the alarm that alerted my if the server went down, went down, critical updates were released for Chrome, Microsoft Exchange, VMWare vCenter, iOS, IOS (which is a different thing), SonicWall, and the European Union, China banned cryptocurrencies and there was much rejoicing, a teenager on TikTok ruined the careers of thousands of scientists who were very bad at that science thing, your face was not a bar code but your butthole was, and using Nim for data processing.
- On September 26, the BBC brought back Russell T Davies in a doomed attempt to undo what they had done to Doctor Who, Germany decided that civil rights were something that happened to other countries, which VPN sucked least, and hands on with the new HP Pavilion Aero.
- On September 27, Blue Check journalists went very publicly insane and yet I'm the one who got banned, chipmakers tried to persuade carmakers to use chips that wouldn't work, AMD hit 16% market share in the server space, replacing complex AI with an inverse FFT, and a teeny tiny raytraced Minecraft clone running on homebrew hardware.
- On September 28, Facebook abandoned the idea of Instagram for Kids after receiving over a trillion emails, phone calls, and postcards uniformly opposing the plan, a $3 iPhone app that killed Google AMP, the trouble with blockchain, a double charm tetraquark, Sydney was full exiting lockdown on December 1, wait December 15, wait, no, still December 15, and the FCC created a fund to help smaller organisations rip Chinese spyware out of their networks.
- On September 29, why absolutely everything was out of stock absolutely everywhere, a notebook with a 3000x2000 display that you can't have, Twitter fell over and there was much rejoicing, Microsoft's 2FA for Office fell over and somehow only affected non-cloud users, we installed Windows 11 on a potato, Microsoft rushed to fix a security flaw that they'd known about since 2017, the new iPad Mini 6 was designed for maximal jelly, RemObjects Elements was available for $199 per year, and nobody understood just how much rice Mumei made.
- On September 30, 96% of pre-configured containers deployed to the cloud contained known vulnerabilities, the new Commerce Secretary was a goddamn idiot, everyone was always wrong, Russia arrested the head of a security company on treason charges, hackers could steal money from your iPhone while it was locked and still in your pocket, and hackers could steal money from your Android phone but they had to actually put some work into it.
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Monday, December 27
Can But Won't Edition
Top Story
- Intel's low-end non-K Alder Lake parts are here. (WCCFTech)
They're not supposed to be. They just are.
The K on the end of an Intel CPU number indicates that it's unlocked and overclockable and burns power like a refrigerator with the doors open on the surface of the Sun. So if you're not looking to get 900fps in Contrastrike or whatever, the parts without the K are likely a better bet for you.
As for them being here, well, sort of. We'll get to that in a moment.
Tech News
- Intel ships a lot of engineering samples before a new product is launched, and although those samples are supposed to remain in the possession of Intel's approved engineering partners, sometimes they end up all over eBay and find their way into the hands of some guy named Steve with 1.5 million YouTube subscribers.
This isn't a fully-enabled part but it does show the potential benefits of these lower-end parts: On a benchmark where the 12900K uses 240W, this part uses 70W. It's slower, yes, but not that much slower.
- Tumblr is having a hard time getting its app approved by Apple. (Tumblr)
In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits’ and finding porn. Sometimes they would search something more innocuous like 'socks’ (yeah, i know) and find porn. Sometimes they would search something completely innocent and find porn anyways. Tumblr would get rejected.
Tumblr used to used to serve a useful function for humanity. Not in that it hosted porn, but in that it hosted weird creepy porn so that all the otherkin demisexual newsoul types - if you don't know what that means then God bless you and keep you safe - all those furry pervert weirdos stayed on Tumblr.
It was a containment field for the dregs of humanity.
Then someone posted something too weird and creepy and Apple yanked Tumblr's app. Tumblr immediately removed that content, but since Apple wouldn't provide any clear guidance on what was and was not allowed - Rule One of Big Tech is Never explain, never apologise - Tumblr was left flailing around when Apple kept rejecting the app even though the creepiest of the creepy porn was now gone. Tumblr couldn't get their app reinstated even though other apps on the App Store also had weird creepy porn, so in the end they banned all adult content from their site.
And without their fix the creepy porn fetishists scattered to the four winds, infecting and destroying other sites. Like Twitter. All of this was Apple's fault.Anywho, that’s Apple for you. Why am I still an iOS developer? I dunno, I got bills to pay.
And that was how I got banned from Twitter for the first time, for calling someonean exceptionally retarded bowl of cold oatmeal
You can't use the R-word around these retards because it's too effective an insult - they are retards and on some level they know it.
- Py2Cr is a Python to Crystal translator. (GitHub)
Not something you'd want to use to produce production code, and possibly not something you could use to produce production code, but still potentially handy.
- CPM Magnacut - not an 80s operating system but a new steel specifically for knives. (Knife Steel Nerds)
This is an equal opportunity tech thread and though it's mostly computer stuff I'll happily toss in cool new tech from other fields as well.
This is from back in March, though, since it can take a while for really specialised sites like Knife Steel Nerds to percolate through the nerd ecosystem and catch my attention.
- Have Single-Page Apps ruined the web? No, JavaScript frameworks ruined the web. (HTMX)
Those, and Apple.
- Google is scanning your email and files for artcrime. (Forbes)
I particularly like the way Forbes is proud to say that as no criminal charges have been filed they won't be identifying the artist - and then spend an entire paragraph triangulating them with hints.
On the other hand this would land a whole lot of the useless weirdos plaguing the tech industry in jail for the rest of their lives. I'm torn.
- Lenovo's Tab M8 FHD is for sale on Amazon Australia.
That's nice, even though I need to pay A$266 for something that sells for US$99, because literally the only available alternative for a decent small tablet (8" or so and at least 1920x1200 resolution) is Apple's iPad Mini starting at A$749.
I've been using my Tab M10 lately because my ancient Nexus 7s are, well, ancient, but it's too large for comfort when reading in bed.
Gonna get one.
- The funds are in for the Starlab buildout - my software testing and reliability lab - and I've kicked off the purchases with another two LG 27UP850 4k monitors. These have pretty much everything I want - four inputs including USB-C, a USB 3 hub, 95% DCI-P3 and 100% sRGB, height adjustable stand with tilt, swivel, and pivot, HDR, and Freesync, though they can only go up to 60Hz and I'm running them from laptops with Nvidia graphics so Freesync isn't going to do anything too amazing anyway.
Right now they're about 25% off from Amazon. About 20% off what I paid previously plus free delivery, and delivery wasn't cheap for the first two.
Next up, RAM upgrades, SSDs, miscellaneous goodies, and just possibly an LG Gram 17 because it's 30% off. I might not, though, because for that price I can get a whole bunch more miscellaneous goodies that will be of more immediate use - double the SSD and hard drive capacity for a start.
August
- On August 1, I ventured out into occupied Sydney and bought chicken nuggets, Russia hacked 27 US Attorney's offices, Chinese hackers hacked insecure home routers, physicists built the world's first time crystal - this being the 21st century or something, the GAO told Jeff Bezos to hit the road, Intel's Itanium was finally dead, praise the cube, and the Asus ProArt Studiopro Pro 16 Pro leaked on Amazon China - wait, Amazon China?
- On August 2, we planned to get three of the slimline Intel NUCs and they were immediately discontinued, Thunderbolt 5 was trinary, Google scrapped Google Reader, YAPSP, and Paul Hansmeier continued running the scam that landed him in jail from his jail cell.
- On August 3, Huawei set up an Arm-based datacenter in Moscow for when you want your data backed up by all the world's major intelligence agencies, a dual-socket Epyc motherboard for just over a grand, Windows 10 started blocking PUPs which could have been useful if it worked properly but it doesn't so it isn't, China was hacking phone companies throughout Southeast Asia, and the Pentagon's new AI could predict what day it would be several days in advance.
- On August 4, the server crashed and I promised to get us migrated to a new server soon and we all know how that turned out - which is to say, I just got a database snapshot over to my new development server, the US government tried to fund $1 trillion of expenditures with $28 billion in revenue, Apple had new video cards, and a keyboard that somehow only worked on a couple of specific Mac models, build your own CDN in 5 hours, Journalists for Censorship were at it again, DRAMless SSDs - just say no, I was getting a Dell - which I did, and it was very nice, and was immediately discontinued, Microsoft ran out of servers, supply chain attacks were getting worse, ten-year-old unpatched Android devices finally lost support, and South Korea declared war on Apple and Google's payment monopolies.
- On August 5, our friend Brickmuppet suffered a stroke - and blogged about it while waiting for the ambulance, my twin HP Spectre X2s turned out to be toast thanks to battery bloat, supercomputing could fix the blockchain said idiots, and the IRS seized $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency.
- On August 6, Apple wasn't spying on you - they were spying on your children, Apple cared so much about your privacy that they wouldn't permit anyone else to violate it, Intel's upcoming Alder Lake chips with their super-efficient low-power cores would eat electricity like popcorn, I was getting a second Dell laptop - and in fact I now have two of that model since it didn't get immediately discontinued, getting put on a secret list as a service (GPOASLAAS), the US government planned to track you everywhere you went, and Google's new cameras worked.
- On August 7, an internal Apple memo called people who opposed their plans to spy on children "the screeching voices of the minority", perpceptual* hashes had the same problem as all AI - they're 90% A and only 10% I, the Tame Apple Press got shredded, WhatsApp joined the pile-on, CalyxOS was Android without the Google, Intel was investing $120 billion in a new chip fab location, the TSVs were coming from inside the die, venue shopping above and beyond, and just how doomed was the blockchain exactly.
* I mean "perceptual" but that typo is too good to fix.
- On August 8, Sydney pissed on the lockdown rules, the Tame Apple Press bit the hand that beat it, you could finally expand the storage on your Playstation 5 which you don't have because you can't get it anywhere, why CAPTCHA photos are so depressig, yeet that router, octal considered harmful to everyone, everyone was collateral damage in the Elastic War, and a long way to a small angry your mom joke.
- On August 9, we looked at SCEditor and pronounced it pretty darn good, th first of those Dells arrived, Edge dived head-first into a giant swirling cauldron of suck, a DMCA takedown notice was sent to Google demanding the removal of links to 127.0.0.1, a long list of broken stuff in Windows 11, testing high-end SSDs across different CPUs, and a 256MB boot partition, why?
- On August 10, Brickmuppet came back to us at the turn of the tide, anti-government hackers hacked the entire Belarus government, Intel's Arrow Lake targeted AMD's Zen 5 - probably sometime in 2024, Synology took its turn in the massive security vulnerability chair, and the second hardest naturally-occurring substance.
- On August 11, the Radeon 6600XT was a video card, you could finally run Windows 11 on an Arm-based Mac and it sucked, hackers stole $600 million from Poly Network, a cyrptocurrency exchange, what's wrong with Ethereum: a wrong answer, both QNAP and Synology NASes got targeted by ransomware - though not mine because they're unplugged and turned off right now, and Amazon was awarded a double-top-secret contract to provide cloud services to the NSA because sure why not.
- On August 12, Samsung flipped and folder, the hacker who stole $600 million from Poly Network sent them $256 million and a thank you note, NSW police arrested a man posting mean tweets... involving threats to harm horses, so yeah, throw the book at him, and Stardock announced Start11.
- On August 13, Apple needed to be thrown in a volcano - and many Apple employees agreed, DDR5-4800 was the new DDR4-3200, physicists created a Wigner Crystal this time, Reddit was valued at $10 billion somehow, and Twitter push an update that everyone hated. I couldn't remember which one this was - it was their own stupid font. They're still using that thing but they've banned me again so it doesn't really bother me since I rarely see it.
- On August 14, Apple "regretted" "confusion" over its plans to spy on your children, and rolled out checklists to "explain" to customers why it was spying on their children, the WD Black SN750 4TB model was real, the Wuhan Bat Virus Lab was not actually across the road from the Wuhan Bat Soup Market, MacOS 11.5.2 was a 2.5GB patch that fixed - Apple wasn't saying so we don't know, a look at a new QNAP NAS, and Facebook Messenger got end-to-end encryption.
- On August 15, 64GB of RAM is enough for anybody, if you have two of them, it wasn't 1Password's fault that MacOS sucked, and the Perl development community disintegrated.
- On August 16, the Biden Administration admonished the Taliban for being insufficiently woke, everyone wished they had waited a week before airing their dirty laundry, Microsoft wanted to emulate the Belarussian secret police, Russia was caught doing exactly what everyone already knew they were doing, Huawei was caught doing exactly what everyone already knew they were doing, T-Mobile said they may or may not have been hacked (spoiler - they were hacked), do not buy the Crucial P2, Nestflix and chill, and this incident report:
An SUV collided with a bus. The bus collided with a power pole, which fell on the bus and took power out.
The fire station is right next door, but the doors are electrically operated. When they crank them open manually, there are live electrical cables blocking access. The rear exit is blocked by an electrically operated gate.
Meanwhile the SUV is on fire but the passengers on the bus are trapped by the downed power cables.
Then things get complicated.
- On August 17, the Biden Administration leaked the entire secret terrorist watchlist onto the internet - it even got indexed by search engines, the Memorial Health System got hacked, T-Mobile confirmed that it got hacked which everyone already knew, and Chase Bank wasn't hacked - they were just idiots.
- On August 18, Poly Network got all its money back and offerered the hacker half a million bucks and the position of chief security advisor, which seems appropriate, Reichskaren Ardern locked down New Zealand over a single case of Bat Flu, memory prices were coming down, new Threadripper and Threadripper Pro parts were expected soon - which didn't happen, an Earth-shattering kaboom, and the critical flaw was coming from inside the house.
- On August 19, researchers showed that Apple's magical neural hashes were broken, this is how you get consent decrees, Raptor Lake would have up to 24 cores sort of, the US Census Bureau got hacked - last year, 46.8 million past and present T-Mobile users had a bad day, and with the ongoing Chinese implosion TSMC was the most valuable company in Asia.
- On August 20, Intel announced the announcement of Alder Lake, their GPU team went full chuuni, Apple's neural hashes collided with reality, LinkedIn had a tiny flaw that let anyone post a job opening on any company's LinkedIn page, OnlyFans committed autotumblrisation, and TikTok was collecting biometric data on its users because of course they were.
- On August 21, Apple announced - we swear we are not making this up - that they were "the greatest platform for distributing child porn" - a direct quote and phrase you might wish to avoid accidentally pasting into your search bar like I just did, Google handed your location data to the police, collaborative filtering didn't work for Chatroulette, and Tesla's D1 hit 362 TFLOPs or 80mpg, whichever came first.
- On August 22, Intel's 12th gen parts outperformed 11th gen parts - on a GPU benchmark, how to beat Windows 11 into submission, Google bribed game developers not to abandon the Play Store, AT&T said they definitely weren't hacked and the database of 70 million customers was fake - which is actually plausible,because these lists are sold to other hackers and its easier to fake it than to actually hack in and get the real data, GM recalled 73,000 faulty Bolts, a judge ruled that California voters had infringed upon the rights of California politicians by, uh, voting, and I found the perfect monitor and it was out of stock - but it eventually came back into stock and right now is on sale at about 25% off so I'm going to get two more of them.
- On August 23, Bus Factor Zero, puppy murder was not the vote grabber it used to be, ShotSpotter was decidedl sus, the latest Firecuda was very fast indeed, Samsung showed of 512GB DDR5 memory modules, a new Mac Mini was allegedly on its way, AMD discussed 2D, 2.5D, 3D, and 4D chiplet technology using hydrophilic Dielectric-Dielectric Bonding with Direct CU-CU bonded interconnects, the book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty was based on fake data, and how to get admin access to any Windows machine with a mouse and, um, no, pretty much just the mouse. Oh,and there was a sudden outbreak of very, very Australian vtubers.
- On August 24, over 1000 apps built with Microsoft's Power Apps tool leaked private data because nobody ticked the "don't leak private data" box, Western Digital silently swapped out the flash chips in their SN550, AMD CPU pricing returned to Earth, though GPUs remained in orbit somewhere beyond Mars, and IBM's new mainframe CPUs were big chips full of stuff.
- On August 25, the Cerebras CS-2 was a single chip with 850,000 cores using 15kW of power, Google's new motto appeared to be "If you control language, you control thought", Google told its slaves to shut up and get back to work, a hacker stole 600,000 private photos from iCloud by pretending to be from Apple tech support, if you unlocked the bootloader on a Galaxy Z Fold 3 the wheels fell off, and Hololive Indonesia announced auditions for Gen 3.
- On August 26, slavery with benefits, Intel's upcoming 12900K showed early signs of not completely sucking, CanIStillUse was a site tracking feature deprecation the way CanIUse tracked implementation, OnlyFans adopted antidesentumblrarianism, there was a big bug in Geth, and how to escape a hungry bear using math.
- On August 27, with all the component swapping in SSDs we we suggested you just buy a970 Evo Plus - which turned out to also have been the victim of component swapping, Synology had another big bug, though in its networking gear rather than its NASes, and Reddit said no to the Nazis. The real Nazis - the ones who call everybody else Nazis.
- On August 28, Microsoft consigned hundreds of millions of PCs to the landfill, Fractal Design's new case was recalled before it burned anyone's house down which was a nice change, Uncaught RangeError: Value undefined out of range for undefined options property undefined, which Android tablet was right for you, and a teeny tiny HUGE FUCKING BUG in Microsoft's Cosmos cloud database.
- On August 29, Microsoft announced that if you manually install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware you wouldn't get any updates and there was much rejoicing, Asus NUCs had no audio because there were no audio chips, Alder Lake chips could draw up to 350W, that Cosmos DB bug was called "the worst cloud vulnerability you can imagine at least until December when expectations will get reset like you couldn't believe", and Facebook was banning certain Bat Flu links in private messages.
- On August 30, I added the third verse:
January 20, 2021 -
That was posted originally to Twitter in three parts. They've since banned me and deleted it, but that's a story for another day.
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?
- Still on August 30, 40% of code suggestions by GitHub's new AI tool Copilot contained security vulnerabilities, the new Threadripper Pro 5995WX was 40% faster than the 3995W - if it ever showed up, Google Play turned a profit of $8.5 billion on presumably net revenue of $11.2 billion, and a very large computer case.
- And on August 31, Arm China hoisted the black flag and began slitting throats, China generally was busy scrubbing that internet thing clean of facts, a roundup of the best consumer hard drives, there was one good small Android tablet - but it was completely unavailable in Australia, a situation I just discovered has been corrected, and a bug in Google's search app prevented some phones from, um, making phone calls.
Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day
I mean, it was either that or I See Red, because Split Enz didn't get really good until the 1980s, but fortunately for us that's just a few days away now.
Disclaimer: A few days forward and forty years backward, as all things should be.
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Sunday, December 26
Letelescope C'est Moi Edition
Top Story
- After 25 years in development, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched safely and is on its way. (CBC)
The telescope is designed to work in the near-infrared. That's not a magical spectrum, it's just hard to work with here on Earth where basically everything around it is radiating in the infrared, and worse, the atmosphere blocks most of the infrared light from space.
The telescope is now heading out to its long term base of operations at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, about a million miles straight out from the Sun past the Earth. That's a lot further away that the Hubble so there's no easy way to repair this one if it needs glasses.
And yes, they did test it first.
- Meanwhile, this being apparently the 21st century or something, work is underway to turn an old superfund site into the world's leading fusion research program. (Boston Globe / MSN)
The $2 billion project has been funded in part by Bill Gates and Google, and has been criticised by sustainable energy activists for taking attention away from more critical matters, by which they mean, themselves. Because if fusion can be made to work - or rather, be made to work in a less dramatic fashion than what we have had for the past 70 years - then their grift train is derailed permanently.
Tech News
- I was wondering why there were no Alder Lake motherboards which could run dual PCIe slots in a x8/x8 configuration, and then I realised that it was likely due to the cost and difficulty of running two sets of PCIe 5 signals - at 32Gbps - to those slots.
Then I poked around a bit and found that there are actually plenty of such boards, but every single one of them uses DDR5 RAM, and you'd have to be daft (or spending someone else's money) to go with DDR5 right now. Given the pricing of some of those motherboards my surmise that the lack of dual slots was due to cost is probably not wide of the mark, either.
And then I realised that the reason I wanted that second slot was so I could hook up more than four monitors (I want three or four monitors, a drawing tablet that needs its own HDMI, and possibly also a TV) and the motherboard I had selected for the build itself has HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, each capable of 4K/60Hz.
From the integrated graphics, yes, so no good for gaming, but just fine for a drawing tablet or watching movies.
- The Philadelphia 76ers just partnered with a company that "applies tech and AI to the entertainment industry". (Defector)
They apply this in rather innovative ways: The company's own CEO appears to be an AI program. Which might be news to NASDAQ where the company's shares are listed.
90% of AI is bullshit, and the other 10% is swearing because the code you've spent years working on just did something embarrassingly stupid. Again.
- What real AI looks like. (Louis Bouchard)
Some examples actual research papers from the past year:
- Automatic detection and quantification of floating marine macro-litter in aerial images
- High-Resolution Photorealistic Image Translation in Real-Time: A Laplacian Pyramid Translation Network
- The Cocktail Fork Problem: Three-Stem Audio Separation for Real-World Soundtracks
- Deep nets: What have they ever done for vision?
- A Christmas miracle: It turns out that even the crazies over at Ars Technica think that slave labour camps run by communist dictators are a bad idea. (Ars Technica)
Intel sent a message to its Chinese suppliers to tell them to stop using slave labour.
A day later the company apologised profusely for suggesting that companies controlled by a totalitarian state that can disappear CEOs on a whim might ever be inclined to do anything immoral.
The left-wing commentariat over at Ars Technica responded - to my surprise - with entirely appropriate levels of scorn, redoubled when a genocide apologist showed up right there in the thread.
- The Scorptec Nuctop has a dumb name. (Scorptec)
But it also has the Four Essential Keys (since someone asked - PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End - you use those all the time as a developer), an Intel Core i7 11800H, RTX 3070 graphics, a 15.6" 165Hz QHD (2560x1440) IPS display, 32GB of RAM (upgradeable to 64GB), 1TB of NVMe SSD (specifically a Samsung 970 EVO Plus which is a very good choice, and upgradeable to as much as you can jam into two M.2 2280 slots), Thunderbolt 4, HDMI, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (10Gbps), a full size SD card slot, headphone jack, wired 2.5Gb Ethernet, and an optical/mechanical keyboard with per-key backlight control.
It has a hefty 94WHr battery and weighs a relatively svelte 1.95kg. And runs Windows 10 Pro, where you are more likely to get landed with 11 Home on a laptop like this.
I don't know who the OEM is - Scorptec is an Australian chain of computer stores (and online store) and did not make this themselves - but the specs are pretty much perfect and the design is a nice restrained magnesium alloy case in basic black.
Might need to investigate this one, since I was planning to order a pile of stuff from Scorptec in the next week anyway.
Update: The OEM is, um, Intel. This appears to be their NUC X15 Laptop Kit - model LAPKC71F.
I might rail against Intel's idiotic management, but there are worse companies to buy computers from. I think I might get one of these.
- I think I missed this at the time: There are no bandwidth charges between Vultr's cloud servers and Backblaze B2 storage. (Backblaze)
I mean, it would be nice if Vultr offered object storage in every one of their locations, but for a small company, keeping cloud servers running smoothly in 13 countries on 5 continents is already a pretty big job - particularly for prices starting at $2.50 per month.
July
- On July 1, the world's fastest SSD was fast - ish, how to install Windows 11 on a Raspberry Pi, yes, we had no Xboxen, launching virgins into orbit, and everyone's favourite foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza dragon went out with a bang, with 490,000 people tuning in for her farewell stream.
- On July 2, Humble Bundle was not so humble, the Optane P1600X was perfect for doing nothing very quickly, the FTC voted itself new powers, I - apparently by pure psychic energy - voted myself a raise, and Amazon was unhappy with stuff.
- On July 3, Facebook went full Stasi and the usual subjects loved them for it, the Zenfone 8 headed to the US, Oppo merged with OnePlus saving everyone the bother of pretending they were different companies, Intel signed a deal to produce chips at TSMC, dodging that TPM report, Russia launched another attack on US businesses, the tame Apple press were busy conducting that Russian domesticated fox experiment on themselves, kill your IoT devices with an axe, Instagram claimed that it wasn't Instagram, and Twitter moved to protect its target market of drooling idiots from the consequences of their own actions.
- On July 4, Windows 11 was all about security - not yours, theirs, Samsung had a new small tablet that kinda sucked, the Ryzen 5700G kinda didn't suck, Qualcomm headed back to making custom cores, Intel might have been bringing Sapphire Rapids to the desktop - but probably not until 2023, and STOP OUTSOURCING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE and also DON'T CONNECT CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET.
- On July 5, managed services companies were disease vectors in a plague-ridden world, how to install Windows 11 in a virtual machine, Qualcomm was headed forwards to 4nm, an SSL certificate chain got taken out by a cosmic ray, Windows on Arm still sucked, and rent seekers sought rent.
- On July 6, we wondered how much it would cost to bribe a bear, how to uninstall Windows 11, we thought - stupidly - that GPU prices would continue to come down, QNAP had another critical vulnerability, and yes, Audacity was suddenly spyware.
- On July 7, Australia was getting a shiny new computer for the National Minecraft and Also Some Astronomy Centre, YouTube went too far and had to walk backwards, Oppo was cheating on benchmarks - poorly, JEDI was cancelled - which turned out to maybe have been the right decision though for the wrong reasons, there was a BIG bug in Windows printing, WSL2 was great unless you did I/O, and the Biden Administration considered sending a sternly worded note to Russia.
- On July 8, npm audit was broken by design - as well as being broken accidentally, the 10Gb switch situation still sucked, neurons used pulse-coded signalling like everyone except apparently neuroscientists thought all along, what browser should you use to replace Chrome (Brave), China was for some bizarre reason gathering DNA samples of millions of women, and YouTube banned Hololive's Houshou Marine - just a small account with 1.4 million subscribers, no reason to check first.
- On July 9, the massive Russian ransomware attack affecting 1500 companies around the world didn't touch backups so everyone just restored from backup and went on with their day, the new Atari console had solid hardware and crap software, API pagination was surprisingly complicated, and by "surprisingly complicated" we mean "a complete nightmare", don't buy the Lexar NM620 SSD, Google dropped their Play Services - for 2013 releases of Android which was kind of understandable, California insisted people were not fleeing the state and that sorry no-one was available to discuss it because they had all moved to Tennessee, and we discovered Pina Pengin.
- On July 10, nothing went horribly wrong in the tech world for an entire day, the NSW state government finally lost the plot (the premier at the time has since resigned and been replaced with someone substantially better), Samsung's 3nm GAA process was on track for 2022 risk production, Backblaze pointed out that you couldn't make money farming Chia, Tencent was spying on children, which I suppose is better than just enslaving them, and Samsung's mobile app to control their washing machines needed access to everything.
- On July 11, just buy Stardock's Object Desktop and be done with it, Journalists for Fascism was at it again, how to merge two Apple IDs into one and other ways to ruin your life, Science Based Medicine imploded their hard-won reputation for not being batshit insane leftist ideologues, and Hope descended a little too hard. (Hope is currently playing Terraria.)
- On July 12, Kaseya - the managed services company that helped 1500 other companies get hacked - patched the vulnerabilities involved, giant pandas were no longer endangered, and a free and open internet was under attack said, uh, Google.
- On July 13, AMD's Threadripper 5000 was expected to launch in August - something I'm pretty damn sure didn't happen, the rainbow dildo butt monkey incident, OpenSearch reached 1.0, SolarWinds again, nuclear powered Bitcoin mining, and the Salton Sea could supply 40% of the world's lithium.
- On July 14, 83% of the world's software developers were burned out, give me /events not webhooks, RabbitMQ had streams, Alder Lake might not suck, AMD-based NUCs didn't suck, Russia took the day off and let have a turn China hacking US companies for a bit, Amazon rolled out end-to-end encryption for doorbells, Adobe updated Fucking Acrobat (TM), how Intel fucked up, Firefox broke Facebook and there was great rejoicing, and the Great EN Vtuber Explosion hit full steam with Nijisanji's second wave.
- On July 15, it hurt to live.
- Still on July 15, if you can't code, that routine would let anyone straight in if they simply didn't enter a password, and thus 1500 companies had their data wiped, China hacked governments in Asia instead of companies in America for a while, Microsoft patched 117 vulnerabilities, Twitter scuttled Fleets, firewall your firewalls, and I wasn't biased against Apple, I just hated everyone.
- On July 16, it's not censorship if it's a private company said the censors, Ukraine shut down a football mining operation, Windows printing had another BIG bug, it might be possible to know how many numbers there are, unsafe at any speed including parked in the driveway, and the Steam Deck looked pretty cool.
- On July 17, Google banned distributing anything they don't like for any reason by anyone, Oberon+, Threadripper Pro, NASA got the Hubble working again, an RCE in CDNJS, 25,000 years after walls were invented, scientists figured out what they were for, and Pocket Casts was bought by WordPress.
- On July 18, why, though, HP Australia kinda sucked, Lenovo Australia kinda sucked, more on the UK Post Office embezzlement debacle that turned out to just be buggy accounting software, installing Z/OS on your laptop, Facebook hit back at claims that it wasn't a fascist-run shithole, and the Freedom Phone looked distinctly sus.
- On July 19, there was ANOTHER BIG BUG in Windows printing, BubbaBot as prior art, SQL was annoying, a Pi Pico with a ton of connectors, and a billion rows per minute into SQLite.
- On July 20, President Biden made it perfectly clear that Facebook was not mowing down people in the streets as far as he was aware, the Radeon 6600 and 6600 XT were set to launch, Black 3.0 was even blacker than Black 2.0, Audacity apparently was mowing down people in the streets, China in the computer room with a jumper cable, why I buy Dell, Android TV became recursively worse, and Apple removed an app for spotting fake reviews because Amazon apparently found it inconvenient.
- On July 21, IP addresses randomly disappeared, another BIG BUG in Windows (not printing this time), Amazon's New World vs the RTX 3090, China hacked 13 US oil and gas pipelines - in 2013, the EU banned arithmetic, and fuck systemd.
- On July 22, everyone agreed that the keyboard on the new Razer Blade 14 sucked, what was the definition of NUC anyway, and yet another BIG bug in Windows printing, just not Microsoft's fault this time.
- On July 23, we were going to move to a new server - and will this week, even Global Foundries was expanding, the new Dell XPS 17 also had a crappy keyboard, the Washington Post streamed porn, and free ransomware unlocking keys.
- On July 24, we threw the blockchain people into a volcano, oh, yeah, those idiots, something was sus in the state of Alder Lake, a time of redemption for crappy GPUs, that nifty Framework laptop shipped, our fascist overlords were the only defense against their fascist overlords, and Journalists for Censorship were at it again again.
- On July 25, Haachama came back to us at the turn of the tide, an update to ChromeOS had a teeny tiny bug, China partied like it was 2010, Apple fixed some teeny tiny WiFi bugs, Microsoft fixed a teeny tiny Windows Domain Controller Bug, Apple's mantra was fuck developers, and we were mad as hell and weren't going to eat bugs anymore.
- On July 26, never look a duck bearing lemons in the mouth, it was too good to be true, nuclear power was expected to decline in efficiency - by 0.5% over thirty years, an feeding the world with demethylated potatoes.
- On July 27, Intel launched its new 7nm process by the simple expedient of renaming 10nm to 7nm, 2023's Meteor Lake could have 192 graphics cores, 2022's 7900XT could have 240 graphics cores (rather more powerful ones), just throw all the blockchain people into the volcano, and the EU threatened to sue every single member state except Germany.
- On July 28, then they came for our gaming PCs, Microsoft said you couldn't dodge the Windows 11 hardware requirements - which turned out to be a lie, Kioxia demonstrated six-level flash memory cells which lasted as much as (checks notes) two hours before losing your data, Cassandra 4.0 and MongoDB 5.0 were out, and the EFF sued the US Post Office over its illegal domestic espionage activities.
- On July 29, the Democrats named people aren't complete idiots as the greatest threat to their grip on power, cutting all of the cords, Google and Facebook required workers who never set foot in an office to be vaccinated, and Apple shut down internal Slack channels because they hate their employees almost as much as they hate their developers and their customers. Apple workers - unionise. No, wait. ... Okay, I have popcorn. Now unionise.
- On July 30, that telepathic raise I mentioned kicked in and was even backdated, which didn't make up for the sleepless nights but was at least something, a standard arrived for LPDDR5X, Dell was just a big doodoo head said other gaming PC makers, Safari was filled with bugs and just generally crappy, China entered into a new era of economic suicide, and HP laptops apparently existed, even in Australia.
- And on July 31, I was looking at buying a couple of new computers - and five months later I still am, although I have bought a couple of new computers in that timespan, conservatives in Australia attempted political suicide and were only saved by one of their leaders getting caught up in a corruption investigation, resigning, and being replaced by someone at least partly sane, Static.Wiki was Wikipedia only static, idiots and maniacs, obvious security risk was obvious, the EU fined Amazon $888 million, more nastiness on PyPi, and what's a dead hobo here or there?
Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Offer void where prohibited by law and in Canada.
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Saturday, December 25
Goat Of Christmas Past Edition
Top Story
- Is it even worth working on open source software anymore? (Gavin Howard)
The world largely runs on open source software, but not only is 99.9% of the revenue swallowed up by huge corporations, those corporations work tirelessly to make sure that the people that made that revenue possible will never see a penny of it.
This is why GPL - and AGPL - exist. Richard Stallman might be crazy, but he's not wrong.
The same author notes that the problems are not isolated to open source software, but plague the entire industry.
I think that's one reason so many developers jumped on cryptononsense - you can skim the money off directly without needing anything from Big Tech.
- Yesterday we reported on upcoming dual-socket Threadripper workstations and today there's a benchmark of a dual-socket Threadripper workstation. (Tom's Hardware)
Except that this benchmark is of current-generation chips, not next-generation.
This is more marketing than engineering because Threadripper chips are exactly the same hardware as Epyc server chips, just configured with different power/performance curves. The motherboards are different, but there's no fundamental reason you couldn't just two Threadrippers into a server board.
Tech News
- Gigabyte's 2022 Aero 16 will have the Four Essential Keys. (VideoCardz)
And the new 12900HK CPU, new 3070 Ti or 3080 Ti graphics, and according to the article a 16" 3840x2600 display. That's an odd resolution but it's roughly 3:2 which is becoming popular. And it's an OLED display, with 100% coverage of DCI-P3 and HDR500 support.
But looking at the photos it seems to have lost many of the ports of the 2021 model - it only has three USB-C and a headphone jack, where the current model also has HDMI, mini-DisplayPort, USB-A, and wired Ethernet.
- Chrome release 100 will be out soon, wreaking havoc for users of badly-written websites. (Cyber Kendra)
Not because it changes anything, but because those sites sort in alphabetical order rather than numeric and won't understand that version 100 is newer than version 99.
- The Iodyne Pro Data is interesting but horribly overpriced. (Serve the Home)
It offers 12 M.2 slots in a fairly compact case, and eight Thunderbolt ports so you can connect multiple computers to it. It handles RAID and some sort of filesystem sharing though it's not clear exactly what, since it's not a conventional NAS.
- Door Dash will require all employees to spend a day doing deliveries once a month. (MarketWatch)
All employees are understandably upset, but this is overall a good idea. A lot of companies would be less terrible if everyone had to spend a day a month performing the shitty jobs at the very roots of the corporate tree.
June
- On June 1, Ryzen desktop CPUs received integrated graphics, the 3080 Ti arrived because why not, Wikpedia's own Wikipedia page got hit with a DMCA takedown notice, and Microsoft announced a package manager for managing packages.
- On June 2, Russian hackers - which is to say, Russia - targeted meat processor JBS, everyone banned Belarus, Amazon scored 75,000 own goals, and magical metamaterial microscopes.
- On June 3, Amazon's warehouse injury rates were somehow, like, totally off the charts, man, video cards were HOLY CRAP THAT'S EXPENSIVE, the next version of windows loomed, there would never be a Python 4, Huawei launched its own operating system - Harmony OS - which was a very hastily papered-over version of Android, and don't use Chinese web browsers.
- On June 4, the Supremes reined in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which had been seen by prosecutors as a convenient way to double criminal charges on almost anything, we gave up and ordered pizzas, firewall your firewalls, and Cloudflare was a big fat bag of money waiting to be sued.
- On June 5, Microsoft blamed "human error" for the suspicious disappearance of inconvenient search results, the Radeon Pro W6800 was a very expensive way to buy a Radeon 6800, Medium was the latest company to post a "no communism on company time" notice, there was nothing more expensive than a free tier, Apple really hated its own developers, and DON'T CONNECT CRITICAL FUCKING INFRASTRUCTURE DIRECTLY TO THE INTERNET.
- On June 6, Apple fixed the problem frying M1 Macs' SSDs - which cannot be repair or replaced, all Zen 4 desktop CPUs would have integrated graphics (latest news is that it will just be four RDNA2 clusters, which isn't enough for gaming but is better than nothing), Big Tech discovered that getting socialists elected is a terrible idea, Windows 11, and Amelia from Hololive raised $18,000 for an animal shelter... In three minutes.
- On June 7, Microsoft Edge continued its descent into crapware, Chia ruined everything, and the USAF contracted SpaceX to deliver rocketmail.
- On June 8, Rule One of Never Trust Anyone Club, Quis stealodiet ipsos stealodes, it was the one week of the year when Apple pretended not to hate all its own developers, CPUs were back in stock, and antivirus software became indistinguishable from a virus.
- On June 9, paging James Burke, laptop makers ran out not of CPUs or GPUs or RAM or anything like that but the power interface chip needed to provide Thunderbolt powers, patch all your Adobes, patch all your Windows, and everyone's favourite foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza dragon announced her retirement.
- On June 10, Bitcoin vs. the volcano, ransoming cows, the 3070 Ti arrived in reviewers' hands to a resounding meh, Western Digital and Seagate ramped up production of disk drives - just a bit, knowning full well that Chia would crash, patch your Chrome, Ring said, and a certain foul-mouthed shit-posting drug-dealing USDA-approved Yakuza indie vtuber gained 200,000 followers overnight.
- On June 11, networks didn't, Intel offered $2 billion for RISC-V designer SiFive, dirt as a service, hackers broke into Electronic Arts' network and discovered there are worse things than chipped Cthulhu on toast, Samsung's security kinda sucked, and Melbourne really sucked.
- On June 12, Microsoft promised they would finally stop updating Windows 10 in 2025, the 11900KB was as fast as the 11900K at half the power and you couldn't have one, TSMC expanded the expansion of its expansion plans, BuzzFeed won a Pulitzer Prize - for documenting China's genocide, where the New York Times won the same prize for covering up Stalin's genocide, Slack considere harmful, and the New York state senate passed a right to repair bill - sort of but not really.
- On June 13, Codecov got hacked because they are retards, Audi / VW got hacked because they are retards, McDonalds got hacked, blockchain ruined everything, China ruined blockchain which was maybe a good thing, no-one was silly enough to announce PLC flash, click on this link, and when in doubt bribe the reviewer.
- On June 14, any sufficiently profound incompetence was indistinguishable from malice, 80% of the audience of the Microsoft / Bethesda E3 stream was watching Hololive, dude, where's my flying car, room 222 got banned, and a prebuilt system that didn't suck.
- On June 15, Apple ruined everything, GaN chargers were small but expensive, there was a new Razer laptop which didn't have the Four Essential Keys because they never do, everyone got hit by ransomware, and the new US National Security Advisor was a complete wanker.
- On June 16, Windows 11 leaked, Amazon blocked FloC too, RAID expansion arrived for ZFS, Google's phishing protection sucked, and exercise bikes got hacked, somehow.
- On June 17, GPU prices were dropping - just not very much, upcoming motherboards for the upcoming Alder Lake CPUs where coming up, Tim Cook said that fundamental human rights were all well and good but not at the expense of, well, expense, President Biden gave Russia a list of things not to attack - yes, really, Amazon blamed everyone else, and Datadog left something unwelcome on the carpet.
- On June 18, it was time to stop worrying and start panicking, update your Chrome - yes, again, Carnival joined the ransomware fleet, Ukrainian hackers actually got arrested, and AMD's latest high-end video card was not actually available to purchase, at all, anywhere.
- On June 19, Windows had eight inconsistent UI designs, the US Senate proposed tax credits for new silicon chip fabs - which is far from the worst waste of money they've come up with recently, handy HTML tricks, Russia banned VPNs that were too secure for their liking - and hacked Poland's email servers, Oregon legalised human composting, and I forgot that I was the one who came up with that name
- On June 20, DDR5 RAM was here - only to disappear once there was actually a use for it, QNAP had a dual 100GbE adaptor so you could get hacked 100x faster, North Korea hacked South Korea, yet another news story that was previously an episode of Doctor Who, and journalists turned mental illness into performance art.
- On June 21, the New Yorker tried to blame anime on Donald Trump, carbonised chikuwas, the Asus ROG Swift PG32UQX was honestly not worth it, Intel promised that its GPUs would eventually not entirely suck, we all sang the Doom song, and I wisely excluded Rust from the list of the three most important programming languages.
- On June 22, we got a leak of the upcoming Ryzen V3000 embedded chip and it looked exactly the same as the latest leak of the upcoming Ryzen 6000 laptop chip - because it is, China continued ruining crypto mining and therewas great rejoicing, being 100% compatible meant reproducing all the bugs too, and ADATA was in the news.
- On June 23, AMD's upscaking solution worked pretty okayish sort of, SiFive caught up with Arm chips from 2017, Brave had its own search engine sort of, a bug found in 800,000 firewalls got patched sort of and the beatings would continue until the smiles improved.
- On June 24, a couple of kids in South Africa made off with $3.6 billion in Bitcoin - I wonder if their remains were ever found, John McAfee was found dead in a Spanish prison, NewsBlur got hacked and held to ransom and restored from backups and was back online in a couple of hours, the Microsoft Store was crashing on Windows but fortuntely not on any of the other operating systems that it doesn't run on anyway, "What they should do is tell the Chinese government to shove a pumpkin up its ass and sing Lili Marlene.", and West Taiwain was working its way forward into 2014.
- On June 25, Microsoft actually got around to announcing Windows 11, you need to fill out the TPM report first, Sydney had its first brush with Bat Flu lockdowns, we remembered when $600 billion was a lot of money, Hong Kong's Apple Daily got written to the blockchain, and someone needed to go into orbit, unplug the Hubble, blow on the connector, and plug it back in.
- On June 26, Macs couldn't run Windows or corporate VPNs, update your Dell SupportAssist - or uninstall it, either works, we had no computers that could run Windows 11 either, kids these days, Mozilla announced Rally, a 100% secure data sharing system that didn't exist, making it really easy for the thiees, and right to unglue.
- On June 27, Microsoft's own flagship Surface Studio 2 wasn't on the Windows 11 compatibility list, Google delayed Floc by two years after the entire world told them to shove it, genocide, schmenocide said YouTube, Huawei was sus, Microsoft signed the package of a Chinese rootkit, and NASA did a software update of a helicopter on Mars.
- On June 28, the Eternal October begins, Windows 11 didn't need TPM, it just required it, Unicode 14.0 supported Toto, Cypro-Minoan - which no-one can read, Vithkuqi, Tangsa, and Old Uyghur, Binance was refused licenses to operate anywhere, and open offices sucked.
- On June 29, Microsoft didn't know what hardware you needed to run Windows 11 so please stop asking, the Fuck You software pattern, the SafeDollar stable coin plunged in value by, uh, exactly 100%, and with everyone fleeing Google's AMP they rebaited the hook and started fishing again.
- And on June 30, Microsoft apologised for the confusion over Windows 11 and explained that the cheese was supposed to go in the silver cup and the addled mice in the bronze soup bowl, the HP Pavilion Aero looked pretty good actually expect for the limit of 16GB of RAM, yes, those WD My Books got hacked, because the master password was, um, commented out, Russia hacked Denmkar's central bank, and the 700 million publicly accessible emails of LinkedIn users were publicly accessible because they were publicly accessible.
Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day
For Australia, New Zealand, Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, and most of Central and South America, and people with VPNs, this studio version has much better audio.
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Friday, December 24
Crimbus Eve Edition
Top Story
- Intel has apologised for asking its Chinese suppliers to please stop committing genocide. (Tom's Hardware)
Jesus tapdancing Christ would it kill you fuckers to grow a spine?
- On the other side of the CPU aisle, there may be a reason that Asus Threadripper motherboard has been EOL'd: Threadripper Pro 5000 might be going dual socket. (Tom's Hardware)
There is absolutely nothing to prevent this; all the hardware is already present on the chip and is supported by Windows and Linux. Might not even need a new motherboard if they repurposed existing dual socket server boards.
The article notes that Asus will be releasing a new Threadripper Pro motherboard, but doesn't go into any details beyond that.
Tech News
- I want a new 8" tablet with a resolution of at least 1920x1200. The GPD Pocket 3 is that. (IndieGogo)
It is a little expensive at A$1561 fully kitted out, and rather hefty at over 700 grams. On the other hand it has 16GB of RAM, a 1TB NVMe SSD, an Intel Core i7-1195G7 CPU, Thunderbolt 4, wired 2.5Gb Ethernet, a stylus, and a physical keyboard.
If that makes it sound like a very, very small laptop, it is.
- Ethereum 2 is coming. (Tom's Hardware)
Still.
This update will kill mining for Ethereum, though the miners will mostly just move on to other currencies.
- Samsung is preparing PCIe 5 SSDs. (Tom's Hardware)
They'll go into production in Q1 and be available in Q2.
The company is also working on PCIe 6 SSDs which will arrive a little later.
- With water cooling you can overclock the integrated graphics on Intel's Alder Lake desktop parts by 60%. (WCCFTech)
And it still sucks.
- Some EC2 servers and EBS volumes at AWS US-East-1 didn't survive the power outage. (The Register)
By which they mean not that they went down, but that they are toast. Permanently.
Hope you have good backups.
- The year in biology. (Quanta)
- The year in math and computer science. (Quanta)
They do indeed have more roundups covering fields other than physics.
May
- On May 1, one third of the staff at Basecamp quit after management put up a sign saying "no communism during business hours", Taiwan banned China, Zen 3+ was/was not cancelled, and PornHub sent out five million DMCA takedown notices.
- On May 2, the Opera browser did something pointless, Ethereum was useless, Turkey very sensibly banned cryptocurrency, Huawei was planning a 3:2 desktop monitor - which has now shipped but isn't easy to find, fuck Apple part 793,682, Rocky Linux arrived to avenge the fallen CentOS, octal still considered harmful, and there was no way any of this would immediately go horribly wrong.
- On May 3, being able to skip an update as a service (BATSAUAAS - pronounced "bat sauce"), the future was chiplets, three different words got sued, how to stop Windows 10 from snitching on you, I used some bad words about Twitter but it was entirely justified, nuclear reactors don't freeze, and nice reputation you have there, shame if anything happened to it.
- On May 4, I used bad words about the NBN but it was entirely justified, there was nothing in Australia between the 3060 and the 3090, the end of Flash, and we wondered how Apple and Epic could both lose.
- On May 5, I had a phone and a pen - well, a phone and a tablet, Chia crossed the two exabyte mark, Cinder was a performance-oriented fork of Python - I wonder if that project is still active okay last update was 41 minutes ago I'll take that as a yes, if you updated your Dell's BIOS any time in the last twelve years you had a local RCE, the Exim mail server did that five years better, Instagram stopped the Signal, and the US government broke its own laws.
- On May 6, Bootstrap 5 was out, New York proposed banning crypto mining, nobody knew what AMD CEO Lisa Su would announce at Computex (it turned out to be desktop APUs, mobile GPUs, and V-Cache), Belgium crashed, and Twitter rolled out a mean tweet early warning system.
- On May 7, China banned security researchers, Amazon awarded double points for pedestrians, IBM showed off the world's first working GAAFET chip - and has since showed off something better/faster/cheaper, delayed ACKs vs. Nagle's algorithm, Google was the single biggest threat to your online security, and the HP Zbook Fury mobile workstation went up to 128GB of RAM and yet is somehow only available with a basic 1080p display.
- On May 8, even among iOS users only 4% were dumb enough to explicitly allow apps to track them, Intel's desktop integrated graphics kinda sucked, 128 million iOS users got free malware, make sure to update your Foxits, the ACIC declared that only criminals use encryption, and Chernobyl caught fire. Again.
- On May 9, AMD's upcoming Rembrandt APUs were upcoming, the web went backwards, how to do things to stuff, rebooting your computer with another computer, and Colonial Pipeline got hacked.
- On May 10, Twitter and TikTok were losing the war against COVID information, Apple's AirTags blew a huge hole in privacy for everyone, AMD achieved its highest server market share in basically ever, and worm sushi.
- On May 11, congratulations on your purchase of new iPhone, made using slave labour under a genocidal fascist regime, Amazon destroyed 2 million counterfeit - or "counterfeit" products, MIT declared that you're sciencing it wrong, one socket good, two sockets better, gas supplies were set to resume in the Eastern US - eventually, and America was run by retards.
- On May 12, Intel's 11th generation laptop chips arrived and were actually pretty good (I now have a couple and can confirm this), Samsung threatened us with Arm laptops, Boeing 787s apparently were running on Windows 95, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, a the time worth a combined $5.5 trillion, called for government bailouts, and Apple's developer website fell over so maybe they had a point there.
- On May 13, Xiaomi? More like Xiaomeh, the 5.9" Asus Zenfone 8 was one of the smallest Android phones on the market, Gigabyte had a fancy-schmancy 43" 4K monitor but it was pretty expens - hey, that's $500 off right now and I actually have money to spend for a change, and it's not "Cancel Culture", it's consequences, howled the mob as it waved its flaming torches and brandished its pitchforks.
- On May 14, the Biden Administration boosted its cyber posture, the UK didn't negotiate with terrorists, Colonial Pipeline allegedly did, so did the DC Police Department, Samsung committed $150 billion to expanding its semiconductor fabs, Microsoft killed its private blockchain service because who uses blockchains anyway, the answer was six, and the price of the Surface Duo crashed from four times what it should be to merely twice.
- On May 15, Europe was useless, AmigaOS 3.2 was out, making Python half as fast as PyPy already is, the Radeon 6600 and 6600 XT were on their way, the Tame Apple press looked at Apple's new products and said meh, and propaganda efforts went fractal.
- On May 16, Framework's modular laptop opened up pre-orders - and turned out to be genuinely good though it still lacks the Four Essential Keys, we waste 500 years each day on CAPTCHAs - well I know I certainly do, and you can't do that in Rust.
- On May 17, the secret was to bang the rocks together, aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com was an URL lengthener, Apple introduced a completely pointless audio technology and at the same time removed the headphone jack, we called bullshit on magic batteries, Huawei was monitoring phone calls in the Netherlands for ten years, and we were Pomu.
- On May 18, Amazon launched Operation Universal Paperclips, Intel's Tiger Lake-H high-end laptop chips arrived and turned out to be pretty good, Amazon S3 access policies were fucked, researchers linked Linear A to Linear B - the name was probably a clue, genocide, schmenocide yet again, and Apple very generously didn't take a cut on products it didn't sell.
- On May 19, which weird hybrid SSD should you buy (hint, the answer rhymes with "none of them"), movcc was a C compiler that only used MOV instructions, Chrome would automatically change your passwords for you because that couldn't possibly cause any problems, Ethereum 2 was coming, no, really you guys, and Twitter climbed into bed with Russia which to be fair is not actively engaging in genocide right this minute. So far as I know.
- On May 20, I was back on double secret probation for suggesting that maybe Jews would no longer willingly climb into boxcars, Libera.Chat sprang from the ashes of Freenode after the owners of Freenode went insane, the founder of Telegram called Apple users "digital slaves", hosting company Hetzner banned crypto mining, Apple's Senior VP for Software Development called MacOS an open sewer, and China got settled into a steady rhythm of banning absolutely everything.
- On May 21, HP's Omen 16 and 17 hade the four essential keys - though this seems to have been corrected with the latest models, the hedgehog knew one very important thing, the Irish High Court declared crime illegal, Google opened a cheese shop, the iPad Pro matched solid hardware with an operating system designed to prevent you from using it, and a breakthrough in the race to 1nm.
- On May 22, underwater flying cars by Friday, dual actuator drives were dumb, Apple said that Apple's App Story monopoly wasn't a monopoly because the company was run by idiots, and the company's digital slaves didn't deserve any better anyway, China continued its communist implosion, the Pareto Principle applied recursively, Microsoft reclaimed the Outer Worlds, the replication crisis accelerated and applied recursively, and Linux kernel maintainers finished cleaning up after the malicious fucks at the University of Minnesota.
- On May 23, you owned nothing, AM5 was on its way, the ThinkPad X1 Nano had the Four Essential Keys, and Bombay Bat Soup Death Plague arrived.
- On May 24, Apple was protecting its customers the same way a farmer protects chickens from foxes, Chia passed the 10 exabyte mark, there were half a million unfilled computer security jobs in the US alone, and a cheap no-name 2.5GbE USB adapter turned out to be pretty good actually.
- On May 25, Mozilla fixed a 21 year old bug, the 5600H beat the 11400H, next year's graphics cards that you won't be able to get ware expected to be twice as fast as the cards that you can't currently get, and Apple was working hard on removing existing features that people actively use.
- On May 26, I was irked by Microsoft, Arm announced three new Arm cores, a million PCs were being sold worldwide each day, the FPGAvoradio, a partial solution to Hilbert's 12 problem, Russia fined Google twelve cents, 15 microsecond access times.
- On May 27, that thing with the mouse that is fixed by disabling HDCP happened to me again, blockchain ruins everything, the 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti were on their way, AMD's sales grew 93% year-on-year, Freenode completely imploded, Amazon was buying MGM - did that go through? Still under review as of last month it seems - and it was a fine line between working from home and living at work.
- On May 28, Intel's Alder Lake was expected to arrive before the end of the year - and did, we expected October to be insane which turned out to be hopelessly optimistic, how to do all your work on an iPad (the trick is to not have a real job), and AI's core competence was breaking things.
- On May 29, China hacked all the things, Russia hacked whatever China didn't, security hardware was insecure, Twitch replicated YouTube's screwups from around 2010, USB power delivery got amped up - or rather, volted up, Twitter charged people for the privilege of getting banned for no reason and then lied to, and Apple hated developers nearly as much as users.
- On May 30, Intel quietly released Tiger Lake B and basically no-one noticed, Zen 3 Threadrippers could arrive in August - spoiler: they did not, Microsoft ruined Edge, and Iraq very sensibly banned Bitcoin mining.
- On May 31, the storage market was - the technical term is fucked - with prices for some drives doubling in the space of a month, Microsoft threatened us with a Windows 10 update, something we would all too soon be nostalgic about, and Apple's next Mac Mini would fix the problems they created with the current Mac Mini, yep, definitely.
Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day
Not my favourite Kate Bush song, but 1979 will be 1979.
Disclaimer: Except occasionally when it's 1980.
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Thursday, December 23
Top Story
- Another day, another major outage at AWS US-East-1. (Bleeping Computer)
There was a power outage that took out AZ4 in the northern Virginia location. Services affected included (deep breath) Amazon itself, Hulu, Coinbase, Slack, Imgur, Asana (oops, we use that at work), Zendesk (double oops), and HubSpot (triple oops).
- What's next for the Microsoft Cloud? (ZDNet)
With all these AWS outages Microsoft is sitting pretty - what's that, Lassie? Another critical security vulnerability that went undetected for four years? (The Record)
I guess if no-one can reach your server it's perfectly secure.
Tech News
- Those dirtbags at Princeton have issued a formal apology and cancelled their "research" project. (Princeton)
The "privacy study" consisted of emailing thinly-veiled legal threats from fake addresses and watching how the victims responded.
That's it. That's the research.
- Quanta has a quick roundup of real research for the past year. (Quanta)
This one is just physics; I'll see if they have more posts covering other fields.
- The Steam winter sale is now on. (Steam)
The D&D game I mentioned yesterday - Solasta: Crown of the Magister - is half price. It seems consistently well-regarded, so I'll pick it up. Given how Wizards of the Coast (the publisher of D&D these days) is destroying itself, this might be the last good D&D game ever.
- The Crucial P5 Plus is kind of meh. (Serve the Home)
If your expectations are extremely high. It can hit 6.8GBps on reads, and worst case sustained writes average 500MBps.
The benchmark comparisons do show that the rather pricey Gigabyte Aorus 7000s may be worth the money if you need serious write performance.
- LLVM's HIPSPV Coming Together For AMD HIP To SPIR-V For OpenCL Execution (Phoronix)
Nope, no idea.
- Climate change is caused by lesbians. (Reddit)
Makes sense.
- AMD is expected to announce stuff at CES. (Tom's Hardware)
Ryzen 6000 laptop chips with updated graphics, a Zen 3 desktop refresh with up to 192MB of V-Cache, the new Zen 3 workstation chips, and Zen 4 due later in 2022.
- LG has unveiled a 16:18 monitor. (Tom's Hardware)
The DualUp is a 27" monitor with a resolution of 2560x2880 which is interesting, but what I really want is a large ultrawide screen with a resolution of 7680x2880 - essentially three of these in one monitor.
- Adata has shown off its first PCIe 5 M.2 SSDs. (Tom's Hardware)
Read speeds up to 14GBps and writes up to 12GBps, with capacities up to 8TB. Don't expect these to be cheap.
- Intel has come under fire in China for (checks notes) asking its suppliers not to use child slaves. (Bloomberg)
Fuck China.
- One of the cofounders of Twitch set up an NFT website and it promptly got hacked. (Kotaku)
In fairness, when compared to recent DeFi hacks this was so small in scope that it barely registers.
- Is Omicron over before it even began? (Washington Post)
Cases already seem to be ebbing in South Africa.
- Micron says that memory shipments are limited by non-memory components. (WCCFTech)
If you want to buy individual DDR5 chips, no problem. If you want to buy completed modules, though, there are none to be found because a 50 cent power management chips has a nine month lead time.
- The 27-inch iMac and/or iMac Pro may or may not be on its way with or without a mini-LED display. (WCCFTech)
Or not.
- Websockets are great. (Adama)
Right up until you try to make them work reliably. Which is not a problem with websockets, which work exactly as specified, but a problem with making anything work reliably in an unreliable world.
- Jug provides task-based parallel programming for Python. (GitHub)
I need to look at Python task queues.
- What problem blockchains actually solve. (Solution Space)
Blockchains do actually solve a problem, but they are mostly applied to problems they do not solve.
- The problem with big tech. (Paul le fou)
Okay, the guy got banned from Tinder for bullshit reasons - after paying for a platinum subscription. Not a huge deal.
But the general case is accurately identified: There's no punishment for false positives. Big tech never suffers for banning people who did nothing wrong. It's expected. And there's no recourse.
- Germany is taking 4GW of nuclear capacity offline because fuck you, that's why. (BNN Bloomberg)
The plants aren't at the end of their life. They're not excess capacity. Energy futures are already spiking to record highs.
The lost capacity is going to be covered by coal plants when renewable power runs low, so this is a clear net negative for the environment, and they know it.
- Intel has mediocre video cards on the way. (WCCFTech)
The ARC A350 and A380 are expected to slot in below the low end from AMD and Nvidia. But if you just want a card for a multi-monitor solution and not for gaming, they'll likely do just fine, and they'll run even in systems with tiny PSUs and no PCIe power leads available.
Expected in Q1.
April
- On April 1, the ASRock Z590 Taichi had a thing that spins, TSMC was investing $100 billion in fab expansion and R&D, the EmDrive still didn't work, and taking the world's fastest server out for a drive.
Plus Hololive EN got new costumes.
- On April 2, my main dekstop PC started crashing if I played two YouTube videos at once, Intel's i5-11400 was in stock and not terrible, AMD increased production of Ryzen CPUs and it was eventually enough, and isEven as a service (iEAAS).
- On April 3, we updated our video drivers and our mouse stopped working - the solution is to disable HDCP, I enjoyed my first weekend off in a couple of months and went fishing - in Minecraft, Hynix invested $106 billion in new fabs and R&D, Rocket Lake Xeons were on the way, and Rust leaked your username.
- On April 4, the best CPU was the one you could find on store shelves, the best GPU likewise, GitHub was being used to mine crypto, personal details of half a billion Facebook users were floating around the internet, and power went out at our dataenter, I had to switch over to the backup server and hide some old content but it should all be fixed in a day or two.
- On April 5, LG stopped making phones, disabling PSF cost 1% in performance, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 6, Oracle lost its long running copyright suit against Google, Edge grew three sizes that day, the Erdős-Faber-Lovász conjecture was settled, the new Razer Book 13 lacked the Four Essential Keys, Azure went down dure to a DNS problem, fuck Coloroado, it was a bubble - and still is, speaking of which $2 trillion in cryptocurrency, Yahoo Answers shut down, the anwer was not to hire communists in the first place, everything was in short supply, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 7, fire, flood, and explosions, Ice Lake Xeons scaled up to 40 cores - when AMD already offered 64, 7% of Americans were smart enough to stay off the internet, Autralia was considering its own Section 230, the RIAA was run by idiots, sometimes a silly idea that works is still a silly idea, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 8, EEVBlog returned from its little fire/flood/explosion hiatus, Amazon's SC1 storage was $15 per TB per month, Alienware announced its first AMD laptop since 2007, GnuCOBOL, Twitch Bans Everyone, Facebook didn't give a shit, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 9, Asus announced Ryzen 5000 NUCs which all used Ryzen 4000 CPUs, Intel's DG2 was rumoured to compete with the RTX 3070, 600,000 stolen credit cards were stolen when a hacking site got hacked, LinkedIn joined the 500 million user leak club, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 10, we submitted a price list to the EU Parliament, Linux was coming to Arm-based Macs - and still is and forever will be, the Ryzen 5900 non-X leaked, dogs is dogs and cats is dogs and squirrels in cages is parrots, an app for installing apps installed malware, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 11, China slapped Alibaba with a $2.7 billion antitrust file and CEO Jack Ma was literally unavailable to comment, everyone got integrated graphics, web sites didn't need to be accessible to people who didn't have internet access, why HJKL, genocide schmenocide, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 12, AMD CPUs were in stock and being snapped up by
turkeyspeafowl, the 5700G was real, Duck blocked FloC, Apple found a useful feature and fixed it, the legacy media lost its shit, inside Intel's fat NUC, potato chips, Coca Cola, ketchup, Fruche, and quail eggs, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 13, AMD announced the 5800 and 5900 non-X, a different server exploded this time, Amazon release OpenSearch, verbing weirded HTTP, hackers held Dutch cheese to ransom, the Unit Conjecture was false, Intel looked at its record profits and demanded a government bailout, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 14, the HoloEN Minecraft server expired, scammers used fake product recalls to get their hands on graphics cards, Apple ruined everything, Apple and also Google ruined everything, the Dell Inpiron 14 7000 looked nice and I just managed to get one before they stopped making it, millions of IoPoC devices were insecure - gain, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 15, Journalists for Cenorship was at it again, a motherboard only a mother could love, Washington State passed a pro-municipal broadband law, I installed Cinescore - and it worked, bath pizza, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 16, there was a power outage at TSMC's FAB14A, there was a power outage during a storm in Ogden, Utah, Nvidia called RTX 3000 its best product launch ever and you couldn't get one anywhere, don't use Chrome, Twitter worked to reduce bias in its algorithms but not - critical point - in its employees, testing the Raisin 5900X, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 17, everybidy blocked Google's FloC, an encrypted penguin was still a penguin, Python mostly worked, a passively cooled i9-10900, knots in the family tree, Dell spun VMWare back out, the Asus ZenBook Duo 14 lacked the Four Essential Keys but for good reason, Elon Musk channeled his inner D. D. Harriman, and the server was still down but should be back in a day or two.
- On April 18, the trouble with LXD, Beethoven's hamster, and the server was still down but wait - the server was back!
- Still on April 18 but with a working server, always use --instance-only, or --optimized-storage, that works too, thanks for the bonus, I quit, Twitter went down and nothing of value was lost, Intel's midrange 11th gen desktop parts were not terrible, one card only, Intagram for kids was a bad idea, and Facebook allowed governments to lie, something that had never happened before in all human history.
- On April 19, AMD's Epyc Milan was the world's fastest CPU, Van Gogh didn't exist, an Nginx cheat sheet, no-one was driving the car, and even a dead squirrel could get hit on the head by an acorn.
- On April 20, we got a new new server, what good was AI anyway, barking dogs, screaming babies, and IoT, and multiplying a SPOF by four just creates four SPOFs.
- On April 21, nothing was on fire right at that moment, an 850,000 core CPU, Alder Lake-S Xeon W-1400, Mongita was SQLite for MongoDB, the M1 iMac arrived, Discord turned down $12 billion, and the Geico gecko sprung a leak.
- On April 22, teenagers having knife fights was perfectly normal, the Linux Foundation banned the University of Minnesota, the Zenbook 13 had the Four Essential Keys, a 6k Docker container, we ran Linux GUI apps on Windows, the Russians showed that they could be just as stupid as anyone else, and Intel defeated a zombie patent troll.
- On April 23, we cursed Cogent backhaul links, I got a day off - well, a night off anyway, the best tablets of 2021 were not particularly good, the Post Office was spying on everyone, the EFF sued Proctorio - no, not the game, IBM corrected a mistake, phishing emails looking to steal Twitter account details turned out to be genuine emails sent by Twitter because Twitter was run by idiots, the iMac was overpriced, and honey entered the modern era.
- On April 24, I ate lunch, you couldn't buy a Land Rover, dozens of fraud convictions were overturned in Britain when it was proven that the Post Office couldn't count, unplug your QNAP NAS right now and leave it like that, and we encountered cascading containment failure.
- On April 25, SSDNodes launched in Sydney and I have two servers there that I basically haven't used because this entire year was chaos but at least they're cheap, this is how you get a regulatory crackdown, don't click on this link, the University of Minnesota apologised for getting caught, and Sabrina the Teenage Embezzler.
- On April 26, the naming of names was a nomenclature matter, Apple said that no reasonable person would assume they owned the things they bought, hackers stole Apple's schematics and for some strange reason no-one cared, Twitter was blocking tweets crital of the government, we lost a little on every sale but made it up on volume, we reminded ourselves to look into Envoy, and the Linux Foundation told the University of Minnesota to take a long walk off a short pier.
- On April 27, Basecamp went woke, started going broke, and unlike most companies put two and two together, it was not a defective Xbox CPU, TSMC was preparing to release 4nm and 3nm chips, the MacOS malware filters had a hole in them big enough to drive the Ever Given through sideways.
- On April 28, Arm announced the upcoming V1 and N2 server cores, AMD also announced a record quarter, never run Google ads, Microsoft also blocked FloC, Mangadex was still offline, streaming web browsers to your web browser, and MacOS went one step sideways and two steps down.
- On April 29, Chia voided your warranty, AI dungeon leaked your creepy fetishes you weirdo, and Experian leaked absolutely everything about absolutely everyone.
- On April 30, Chia ate an exabyte, dammit Walter, another reason not to buy an Arm based Mac, Vivaldi blocked those damn cookie popups, and always trust a squirrel with fireworks.
Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Chitter chitter weresquirrels of Jakarta.
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