aard

aard , 1 day ago

Intel is well known for requiring a new board for each new CPU generation, even if it is the same socket. AMD on the other hand is known to push stuff to its physical limits before they break compatibility.

aard , 3 days ago

I nowadays manage my private stuff with the ansible scripts I develop for work - so mostly my own stuff is a development environment for work, and therefore doesn't need to be done on private time.

aard , 7 days ago

One thing I like about bluesky is that your identity doesn't have to be tied to an instance domain - you'd still have issues if you want to change is later, but if you plan ahead and use your domain you can just move it between instances.

aard , 11 days ago

A lot of the Zen based APUs don't support ECC. The next thing is if it supports registered or unregistered modules - everything up to threadripper is unregistered (though I think some of the pro parts are registered), Epycs are registered.

That makes a huge difference in how much RAM you can add, and how much you pay for it.

aard , 15 days ago

Not just that - intel did dual core CPUs as a response to AMD doing just that, by gluing two cores together. Which is pretty funny when you look at intels 2017 campaign of discrediting ryzen by calling it a glued together CPU.

AMDs Opteron was wiping the floor with intel stuff for years - but not every vendor offered systems as they got paid off by intel. I remember helping a friend with building a kernel for one of the first available Opteron setups - that thing was impressive.

And then there's the whole 64bit thing which intel eventually had to license from AMD.

Most of the big CPU innovations (at least in x86 space) of the last decade were by AMD - and the chiplet design of ryzen is just another one.

aard , 15 days ago

That's already the friendly variant. Traditional find has a mandatory path as first argument, so to find in the current directory you need to do find .

It also doesn't know if it really is a path - it just prints that as a likely error. You might just have messed up quoting an argument.

aard , 27 days ago

One fascinating example is one owner that replaced the DC barrel jack with a USB-C port, so they could utilize USB-PD for external power.

Oddly enough that's also an example for bad design in that notebook: The barrel jack is soldered in. With a module that is plugged into the board that'd be significantly easier to replace - and also provide strain relief for power jack abuse. All my old thinkpads were trivial to move to USB-C PD because they use a separate power jack with attached cable.

The transparent bottom also isn't very functional - it is pretty annoying to remove and put back, due to the large amount of screws required. For a notebook designed for tinkering I'd have wanted some kind of quick release for that. Also annoying is the lack of USB ports on the board - there's enough space to integrate a USB hub, but just doing that on the board and providing extra ports would've been way more sensible.

The CPU module also is a bit of a mixed bag - it pretty much is designed for the first module they developed, and later modules don't have full support for the existing ports. I was expecting that, though - many projects trying to offer that kind of modular upgrade path run into that sooner or later, and for that kind of small project with all its teething problems 'sooner' was to be expected. It still is very interesting for some prototyping needs - but that's mostly companies or very dedicated hackers, not the average linux user.

aard , 1 month ago

Roku always was a company with great engineers and shitty money grabbing management. The new user creation always requested data not necessary for basic operation.

aard , 1 month ago

No, most companies also have mostly incompetent engineers.

aard , 1 month ago

I find this situation rather entertaining. It shows yet again how important it is to educate people on the basics of how LLM work, including how they are being executed - I'm guessing with just a tiny bit more knowledge it'd also have been obvious nonsense to you.

aard , 1 month ago

It also is perfectly fine for running a few minute long compile cycles - without running into thermal throttling. I guess if you do some hour long stuff it might eventually become an issue - but generally the CPUs available in the Airs seem to be perfectly fine with passive cooling even for longer peak loads. Definitely usable as a developer machine, though, if you can live with the low memory (16GB for the M1, which I have).

I bought some Apple hardware for a customer project - which was pretty much first time seriously touching Apple stuff since the 90s, as i'm not much of a friend of them - and was pretty surprised about performance as well as lack of heat. That thing is now running Linux, and it made me replace my aging Thinkpad x230 with a Macbook Pro - where active cooling clearly is required, but you also get a lot of performance out of it.

The real big thing is that they managed to scale power usage nicely over the complete load range. For the Max/Ultra variants you get comparable performance (and power draw/heat) on high load to the top Ryzen mobile CPUs - but for low load you still get a responsive system at significantly less power draw than the Ryzens.

Intel is playing a completely different game - they did manage to catch up a bit, but generally are still running hot, and are power hogs. Currently it's just a race between Apple and AMD - and AMD is gimped by nobody building proper notebooks with their CPUs. Prices Apple is charging for RAM and SSDs are insane, though - they do get additional performance out of their design (unlike pretty much all x86 notebooks, where soldered RAM will offer the same throughput as a socketed on), but having a M.2 slot for a lower speed extra SSD would be very welcome.

aard , 1 month ago

Not entirely sure about that. I have a bunch of systems with the current 8cx, and that's pretty much 10 years behind Apple performance wise, while being similar in heat and power consumed. It is perfectly fine for the average office and webbrowsing workload, though - a 10 year old mobile i7 still is an acceptable CPU for that nowadays, the more problematic areas of IO speed are better with the Snapdragon. (That's also the reason why Apple is getting away with that 8GB thing - the performance impact caused by that still keeps a usable system for the average user. The lie is not that it doesn't work - the lie is that it doesn't have an impact).

From the articles I see about the Snapdragon Elite it seems to have something like double the multicore performance of the 8cx - which is a nice improvement, but still quite a bit away from catching up to the Apple chips. You could have a large percentage of office workers use them and be happy - but for demanding workloads you'd still need to go intel/AMD/Apple. I don't think many companies will go for Windows/Arm when they can't really switch everybody over. Plus, the deployment tools for ARM are not very stable yet - and big parts of what you'd need for doing deployments in an organization have just been available for ARM for a few months now (I've been waiting for that, but didn't have a time to evaluate if they're working).

aard , 1 month ago

It has been a while since I touched ssmtp, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt.

Problem with ssmtp and related when I was testing it was its behaviour in error conditions - due to a lack of any kind of spool it doesn't fail very gracefully, and if the sending software doesn't expect it and implement a spool itself (which it typically doesn't have a reason to, as pretty much the only situation where something like sendmail would fail is a situation where it also wouldn't be able to write a spool) this can very easily lead to loss of mails.

I already had a working SMTP client capable of fishing mails out of a Maildir at that point, so I ended up just doing a simple sendmail program throwing whatever it receives into a Maildir, and a cronjob to send this forward. This might be the most minimalistic setup for reliably sending out mail (and I'm using it an all my computers behind Emacs to do so) - but it is badly documented, so if you don't care about reliability postfix might be a better choice, or if you don't just go with ssmtp or similar. Or if you do want to dig into that message me, and I'll help making things more user friendly.

aard , 1 month ago

It surely is a bubble - so probably a bit different than many other bubbles.

I think OpenAI made the right call (for them) to commercialize when they did - as that pretty much was their only chance to do so. Things has moved fast over the last 1.5 years - and what used to take a decade in tech has happened within months: OpenAI is the dinosaur company grandfathered in, while for already about a year it's been more sensible for anybody wanting to do something with LLM to selfhost (or buy hosting capacity, but put up own data) one of the more open language models, and possibly adjust or re-train it.

As a company owner I get a ridiculous amount of spam for a year already from all kinds of companies building products on top of OpenAI stack, or are trying to sell training or conferences. All those companies will be left with nothing once all the slower users realize technology has moved on. It's like somebody trying to build all their product offerings based on VMWare stack nowadays.

If you as a company want to offer something around AI right now the safest option is probably offering hosting, or if you want to do more hands on, adjustment of open models. Both of those are very risky, and many will go bust in years to come - but not as suicidal as building on top of a closed dinosaur.

aard , 1 month ago

A problem of this bubble is that it is making AI synonymous with LLM - and when it goes down will burn other more sensibly forms of AI.

aard , 1 month ago

JBOD relies on an optional SATA extension, which most of your controllers won't have.

That leaves you with RAID in the controller - which is a bad idea, as you don't have much control over what is going on, and recovery if it fails will possibly messy.

aard , 1 month ago

Because it does JBOD if the controller supports it. Pretty much none of the controllers you'll find in consumer hardware support that.

aard , 3 months ago

RCS is just stupid. When I was still building phones a decade ago we had some operators ask for it - but after reading the standards decided to just ignore it and hope it passes. Pretty much everybody did that, until google got interested - presumably because they figured it'd be a good way to get control of messaging on a lower level. As that's exactly what RCS is: control of messaging, and ideally the option to charge for it, just like SMS and MMS before that.

aard , 3 months ago

They used to link to my dig wrapper on my homepage for having their clients debug DNS problems for many years - even with translations of my UI in the various language help sites. I always found it amusing that a hoster of their size does that, instead of spending a lunchbreak to throw something together that integrates with their help page.

There also was a non significant number of users which didn't understand that my homepage had nothing to do with OVH, and ended up mailing me about their DNS problems.

aard , 3 months ago

His first colony will be a death trap.

That's a feature, not a bug. His family got rich with mines in south africa, exploiting the locals. For getting more rich by mining mars you'll have to bring your own locals to exploit, and there's no need to make it to comfortable for them.

aard , 3 months ago

https://kyu.de/pictrs/image/ebfe40ed-a98c-468b-89f0-57bed3803d99.png

aard , 4 months ago

Preordering made sense when games came in nice boxes, and you wanted to be sure to play it on the day of release instead of waiting for restocking. With digital downloads now which are not limited in quantity it is just stupid.

aard , 4 months ago

You nowadays even need to pay attention on Android as you might get an "software related to what you're currently trying to install" with an install button on top of the install button you want - in the location where the install button used to be in googles playstore. Whoever came up with that stupid idea needs their computer privileges revoked for the rest of their life.

aard , 4 months ago

https://kyu.de/pictrs/image/11cfb7f1-b495-41e0-a673-423547a9f95f.png

aard , 4 months ago

Actually I can’t think of anything that raspberry pi does that can’t be done better by a less expensive alternative.

That has been true even before the price increase - what still makes me use pis now and then is that just so many people are familiar with them, the standardized form factor with lots of extension modules, and the software support - pretty much any software targeting that kind of use has been tested on pi variants.

I'd nowadays go for using compute modules, though - they're smaller, and you can get them with flash, eliminating the SD card problem many pis had. You can get carrier boards for the compute modules in the classic pi form factor, so you can have the best of both worlds.

aard , 4 months ago

A small form factor, small high density connector. Most interfaces are not populated, as on the regular pis, but just lead out via the connector, so you can decide what you want to expose on your compute module carrier. It has a gbit ethernet chip on board, and a pcie chip - rpi4 also has pcie, but it is hooked up to USB3 there. With the compute module you can decide what you want to do with that.

aard , 4 months ago

The problems come when the woman turns around and keeps closing the notebook with her breasts.

aard , 4 months ago

RAM is cheap, and even if you're just doing absolute basic shit your current PC will work better with 16GB of RAM (also looking at you here, Apple). If it's not a phone you're buying don't get anything with less than 16GB.

aard , 4 months ago

On a phone the additional power draw of larger modules can be an issue - plus phones are designed to freeze background apps to conserve memory, so you can get away with less.

I currently have 6GB in my phone, which mostly is fine. In a few situations I'd have preferred having 8, though. 4 or less hasn't made sense for a few years now.

aard , 4 months ago

I guess it depends on how you are using your phone. If you're mostly using it between charges (possibly replacing other devices) it indeed doesn't matter. If you care about standby time, or use it as music player or similar tasks more than active use it does matter.

aard , 4 months ago

Wall is a linguist, which influenced several of his design choices. You have a wide variety of expressing what you want in perl, just as with natural languages - some ways are maybe a bit harder to read for newcomers, while others are not worse than something like python. Typically you'd have coding guides for projects.

I did a webchat in perl in the 90s, and eventually rewrote it in php3 - php was easier to manage properly isolated between users than perl via the CGI interface, so it became popular with hosters very quickly. I went back to doing all my web scripting in perl once I started hosting my own servers,though.

aard , 4 months ago

I'm in my 40s and therefore generally in the "get off my lawn, kids" age.

But I totally agree with that article. I've converted quite a few legacy devices with barrel jack to USB-C - and got rid of a huge box of junky old power bricks. Especially for devices I only use occasionally I don't want to search for the matching power bricks - I just want to plug it into one of the 4 USB-C PD sockets I have installed into my desk.

aard , 4 months ago

Older notebooks, battery chargers, PMR radios, pretty much everything taking less than 100W DC current.

aard , 4 months ago

It mainly depends on the space available in the case of whatever you want to convert. If there's a lot of space you just get a larger USB-C PD converter board with nice soldering points for the cables. The less space available the smaller the module you need to get, up to worst case trying to do your own.

aard , 4 months ago

That's pretty much the "we should all put PoE everywhere" debate, and I don't think that'll happen (or is a good idea) - and that's coming from me as someone with switches providing 1.5kW of PoE power budget in the garage.

The alternative would be a shared conductor like we have now - and while that is working will in data centres doing a conductor in the required dimensions for that would be too big, and potentially dangerous, so that'll happen even less.

aard , 4 months ago

I wasn't quite sure what to think about this, so I've asked my local LLM. Seems it is fine.

https://kyu.de/pictrs/image/75740d07-1543-4702-8f61-3a71212aa04b.png

aard , 5 months ago

I'm not aware of any correct email validations. I'm still looking for something accepting a space in the localpart.

Also a surprising number of sites mess with the casing of the localpart. Don't do that - many mailservers do accept arbitrary case, but not all. MyName@example.com and myname@example.com are two different mail addresses, which may point to the same mailbox if you are lucky.

aard , 5 months ago

Problem nowadays is that changing partition tables is so rare that parted changes their commands between uses, and I never remember if fdisk nowadays has all the GPT related issues that made me try parted in the first place ironed out. Plus I can't remeber the new GPT commands and partition IDs.

I still mostly just read the help text every time because nothing else is installed - but from the speed I might be a bit faster with a well designed GUI nowadays if it is about modifying GPT disks. MBR disks I still can do with fdisk in my sleep.

aard , 8 months ago

I'll murder anyone trying to talk to me before I had my 430ml of strong black tea in the morning. I have two cats and hate dogs. Never been to the UK.