Monday, November 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 November 2021

I Will Not Eat Bugs Dayo Edition

Top Story

  • PixyLab TNG: 24 cores, 176GB RAM, 10TB SSD, 100TB HDD, and 30 million pixels of glorious 95% DCI-P3 colour.

    Just... Not all in one system.


  • No qubits though. IBM has announced a new quantum computer with 127 qubits. (Bloomberg)

    This allows it to do, um, stuff. In theory the compute capacity of a quantum computer is exponential with the number of qubits, so this should be able to do almost anything - like find the password for your crypto wallet containing 50 Bitcoin. Or find the password for someone else's crypto wallet containing 50 Bitcoin.

    In practice, well, not a whole lot seems to be happening.


Tech News

  • yabai is a tiling window manager for macOS High Sierra 10.13.6, Mojave 10.14.4+, Catalina 10.15.0+ and Big Sur 11.0.1. (GitHub)
    It automatically modifies your window layout using a binary space partitioning algorithm to allow you to focus on the content of your windows without distractions.

    A flexible and easy-to-grok command line interface allows you to control and query windows, spaces and displays to enable powerful integration with tools like ↗ skhd to allow you to work more efficiently with macOS. Create custom keybindings to control windows, spaces and displays in practically no time and get your hands off the mouse and trackpad and back onto the keyboard where actual work gets done.
    Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to learn to speak English.


  • Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work. (eta)

    Rust is a systems programming language. Systems are not asynchronous, not in that sense. They just aren't; that's not how computers work. Use threads, or use a different language.


  • Used tractors are the new GPU. (Bloomberg)

    There aren't enough of them to go around and the price index is at a record high. The difference is that if there aren't enough tractors, that affects more than some kid's score in League of Apex.


  • Speaking of GPUs, Serve the Home tried out some GPU servers.

    Four cards - or rather, modules.
    Eight cards.
    Ten cards.

    And, uh, 3.5" drive bays. Why? Who is going to pair 500 TFLOPS of compute capacity with spinning rust?


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day



Video is from the following year, but the song charted in '79.



Speaking of Used Tractors Video of the Day



Nvidia's RTX 2060 - nearly three years old at this point - is back again, only now it has 12GB of RAM.

Why? Because what are you going to do, buy a new tractor? Good luck finding one!



Disclaimer: Twirls mustache, exits stage left, laughs all the way to the bank.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:19 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 451 words, total size 4 kb.

1 If you can't buy a tractor, maybe you can just make one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xDj45zF-l0


Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 16 2021 01:45 AM (LADmw)

2 Anyone who uses gray-on-black text loses all rights to tell me how to manage my windows. Also, permanently disabling System Integrity Protection is... probably not a good idea.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 16 2021 02:18 AM (ZlYZd)

3 gray-on-white text isn't great, either.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 16 2021 03:21 AM (Z0GF0)

4 I actually double-checked my knee-jerk reaction: his syntax-highlighted function names are 34% gray on 15% gray, which is even worse!

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 16 2021 06:47 AM (ZlYZd)

5 Given that the background is (to my eyes) tinted slightly brown, the function names aren't as bad as I've seen on a ton of blogs that use the same shade on white.  That's a lot harder to read, and is the reason I started using the Stylish mod.  90% of my customizations are "change text to black, enlarge stupid 8px font size, replace obnoxious font faces with more readable ones."

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 16 2021 07:35 AM (Z0GF0)

6 "Whenever you touch one of these gray controls that are labelled in gray on a gray background, a little gray light lights up gray to let you know you've done it."

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 16 2021 07:41 AM (PiXy!)

7 +1

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 16 2021 07:52 AM (Z0GF0)

8 Yes, but grey on gray text has a certain something . . . I think we call it "pretentious dogshit".

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 16 2021 08:01 AM (obo9H)

9 Also, on the 3.5" drive bays:  it's probably just for flexibility.  I mean, some people might really want to have huge tracts of spinning rust right in the box.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 16 2021 08:09 AM (obo9H)

10 It would tell you something about my alleged 'design methodology' that I wonder about dynamically shifting the shade of gray on different parts of the text.

Suggested take away: I spend far too much time trying to figure stupider ways to do things.

Also, I like and trust the old 3.5 inch HDD.  As a practical matter, right now while it is possible that someone is crazy enough to give me a budget to build a dream workstation, it has not happened.  Frankly, I expect that if something like that did happen, the people providing the funding would either want to hold my hand, or make sure I am up to speed on modern hardware. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 16 2021 02:17 PM (r9O5h)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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