Wednesday, January 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 January 2021

This Is Fine Edition

Tech News

  • A quick scan for currently available phones supported by LineageOS turned up the Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 and the OnePlus Nord.  Mostly they're at least two or three years old before they get support, so you'd have to buy a phone, wait, and hope, or buy one second-hand.

    But they also just released a build for the 2013 Nexus 7.  Since I have two of those and they still work fine except for the OS being hugely out of date and the Google apps slowly eating all the storage, I think I'll give that a try.


  • YouTube chat leaks memory like a firehose through a used Kleenex.  Just closed one tab with a busy chat (Amelia was streaming) and freed up 2GB of RAM and 4GB of swap.

    I mentioned a while back that I had a lot of trouble with Hololive livestreams?  It's nothing to do with the video.  It's that chat window.


  • Samsung has announced the 870 EVO SATA range.  (AnandTech)

    There's nothing noteworthy about them because they are completely throttled by the SATA interface.  Past time to move to USB-C.


  • Alibaba's share price shot up this morning after rumours circulated that CEO Jack Ma had not been offed by the government.  (Reuters)

    Actually, he appeared on a video call.  For less than a minute.  And it doesn't sound as if he answered any questions.  So...

    Lois McMaster Bujold's The Warrior's Apprentice, anyone?


  • MeWe has added 2.5 million users in one week.  (ZDNet)

    The article is actually coherent.  ZDNet has a couple of resident left-wing nutcases, but for the most part it actually reports the news:

    There has been a growing movement away from social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter recently.

    Users are getting fed up with relentless privacy violations, surveillance capitalism, political bias, targeting, and newsfeed manipulation by these companies.

    That's completely accurate, and not something you'd ever see in the mainstream media.


  • Two minutes looking at This Anime Does Not Exist and I have a migraine.  Literally.

    Some of them work.  Most are worse than anything Escher Girls ever posted.


  • Missed this among all the other chaos: Elastic has gone full fuckbiscuit and changed the license of their code.  (Elastic.co)

    Elasticsearch has over 1500 open-source contributors - or rather, had, past tense.  What it now has is 1500 forks of the last Apache-licensed version.

    The new license is hilariously, absurdly restrictive.  Also, their product sucks.


  • A review of the ThinkStation P620 - Lenovo's ThreadRipper Pro workstation.  (Serve the Home)

    I haven't read it what with the migraine but it's probably interesting.


  • Brave has integrated support for IPFS.  (Thurrott.com)

    This could be interesting.  IPFS is a sort-of distributed sort-of peer-to-peer sort-of filesystem thing.  How it works is a bit strange and needs explanation when I don't have a migraine.


  • This is going to be a shitshow and Big Tech richly deserves it.  (ZDNet)

    In the midst of all the drama Trump signed an executive order requiring all US IaaS services to keep details records of foreign customers, something likely to run head on into the GDPR.

    It seems stupid and unnecessary but then so is Google.


  • Haachama's latest stream got removed before it even aired.  Twice.



Disclaimer: Blurrrgh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:41 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 "YouTube chat leaks memory like a firehose through a used Kleenex."
I noticed yesterday the Reddit app--which is just stupid in so many ways, including "why would you want to see a page that has just your subscribed subs, when you can have the top 3/4 of the screen showing you the last three you've visited and today's top 3 trending ones instead?"--was using 450MB of RAM.  I don't even want to know, but I assume the answer is something akin to "it's just a thin reskin of the website using Electron and so we can keep you from using an adblocker."

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 21 2021 03:11 AM (eqaFC)

2 I've had a Gab account for some time now, but never even signed in until last week.  I thought it was a Twitter clone but it's really more of a Facebook one.  Anyway, slowness aside, it seems nice, and less dumbed-down than FB's been going for years.  I wonder how long, if ever, it will take for non-political groups to get over there, like local PC trades, tech forums like microcontroller discussions, dad joke groups, and so on.
Ditto mewe, which I created an account for awhile back, inconveniently right before my Windows profile got corrupted in a power outage hiccup causing me to lose my password.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 21 2021 03:14 AM (eqaFC)

3 On the way out the door, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentence of a bunch of people.  Many of them were criminals who'd reformed, or who were in the middle of long jail sentences that later legislation had reduced the sentencing of.  One of them was Andy Levandowski, the guy who "liberated" trade secrets from one of the self-driving car companies when he moved to anther one.  I can't be bothered to look up which two but I think he jumped to Uber.  I can't WAIT to see the outrage from the Arse Technicans when they find out--they hate Uber and IIRC they can't stand him.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 21 2021 03:23 AM (eqaFC)

4 Yep, Arse already wrote about it and the commenters are in full meltdown mode.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 21 2021 03:24 AM (eqaFC)

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




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