Ambient Irony

Friday, December 31

Daily News Stuff 31 December 2021

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 ~~exploit~~ feature 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 ErdÅ‘s-Faber-LovÃ¡sz 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 ~~turkeys~~ peafowl 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 ~~SPARTA~~ 2021.
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 ~~bribes~~ prepayments 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

Winnie the westie does not approve.

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.

Disclaimer: What does the box say?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:26 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 11485 words, total size 110 kb.

1 Congratulations on the most meta post of 2021.
Happy New Year, Pixie. ðŸ¾ðŸŽ‰

Posted by: Tex Lovera at Saturday, January 01 2022 06:49 AM (sC4Dc)

2 I would put a decent bet on Dec 32nd bein' even more meta.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 01 2022 08:50 AM (obo9H)

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