aard
@aard@kyu.de
- Comment on Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs 1 week ago:
You still had a 4GB memory limit for processes, as well as a total memory limit of 64GB. Especially the first one was a problem for Java apps before AMD introduced 64bit extensions and a reason to use Sun servers for that.
- Comment on What tool do you use to display your self-hosting infrastructure 1 week ago:
I was referring to work setups with the overengineering - if I had a cent for every time I had to argue with somebody at work to not make things more complex than we actually need I’d have retired a long time ago.
- Comment on What tool do you use to display your self-hosting infrastructure 1 week ago:
Unless you are gunning for a job in infrastructure you don’t need to go into kubernetes or terraform or anything like that,
Even then knowing when not to use k8s or similar things is often more valuable than having deep knowledge of those - a lot of stuff where I see k8s or similar stuff used doesn’t have the uptime requirements to warrant the complexity. If I have something that just should be up during working hours, and have reliable monitoring plus the ability to re-deploy it via ansible within 10 minutes if it goes poof maybe putting a few additional layers that can blow up in between isn’t the best idea.
- Comment on What tool do you use to display your self-hosting infrastructure 1 week ago:
Everything is deployed via ansible - including nameservices. So I already have the description of my infra in ansible, and rest is just a matter of writing scripts to pull it in a more readable form, and maybe add a few comment labels that also get extracted for easily forgettable admin URLs.
- Comment on The decline of Intel.. 1 month 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.
- Comment on How Open Hardware Empowers Users | iFixit News 1 month 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.
- Comment on Roku OS home screen is getting video ads for the first time 1 month ago:
No, most companies also have mostly incompetent engineers.
- Comment on Roku OS home screen is getting video ads for the first time 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.
- Comment on Offline llama3 sends corrections back to Meta's server; I was not aware of it 2 months 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.
- Comment on Apple keeps flogging 8GB of RAM for its Mac computers but it's still a dead horse 2 months 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).
- Comment on Apple keeps flogging 8GB of RAM for its Mac computers but it's still a dead horse 2 months 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.
- Comment on Recommendation for outgoing-only SMTP server 2 months 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.
- Comment on Thoughts on these SATA/M.2-->SATA/2.5" adapters? 2 months ago:
Because it does JBOD if the controller supports it. Pretty much none of the controllers you’ll find in consumer hardware support that.
- Comment on Thoughts on these SATA/M.2-->SATA/2.5" adapters? 2 months 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.
- Comment on Sandpaper Adapter for Oscillating Multitool 3 months ago:
Bosch has a bunch that are quite useful for sanding in corners: boschtools.com/…/sanding-polishing-43817-ocs-ac/
- Comment on What would happen if I put sandpaper in my printer? 5 months ago:
For an inkjet printer with paper feed issues pulling it through a few times might actually fix those - the print head should be far enough away from the paper that it will not get damaged, and there shouldn’t be other parts close enough. I’ve prolonged quite a few inkjet printers life in the 90s by just sanding the rollers a bit (in some cases you could even get maintenance kits from the manufacturers - which just would be an overpriced tiny piece of sandpaper).
In a laser printer I’d be worried about some of the internals, though.
- Comment on What would happen if I put sandpaper in my printer? 5 months ago:
You’ll get different results depending on the printer type, though. For example, that kitchen paper would work in a inkjet printer (as in, would get pulled through, but you couldn’t read the result), and work perfectly in a dot matrix printer. I know the latter as I used to print, err, learning aids on paper handkerchiefs with my dot matrix printer in the 90s. A few times teachers were suspecting something, in which case I’d just use it to clean my nose, and toss it. Nobody ever was curious enough to continue their investigation afterwards.
- Comment on life hacks 5 months ago:
Make sure you use a long extension cord to a fuse without RCD for the hair dryer, though - otherwise the constant resetting of the breaker will eat up all your time savings.
- Comment on USB-PD is a de-facto low-power DC voltage standard, with USB-C being the universal plug. Hurray! 5 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.
- Comment on USB-PD is a de-facto low-power DC voltage standard, with USB-C being the universal plug. Hurray! 5 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.
- Comment on USB-PD is a de-facto low-power DC voltage standard, with USB-C being the universal plug. Hurray! 5 months ago:
Older notebooks, battery chargers, PMR radios, pretty much everything taking less than 100W DC current.
- Comment on USB-PD is a de-facto low-power DC voltage standard, with USB-C being the universal plug. Hurray! 5 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.
- Comment on Gamecube is the most underrated console while it was in circulation. 5 months ago:
What you’re referring to as family friendly I would say is more accurately described as social gaming or couch co-op. The physical aspect of multiplayer gaming on the Wii certainly added something unique to local multiplayer on the console, an experience wholly unlike a group of players sitting on a couch holding more traditional controllers.
Pretty much everybody copied it afterwards - Microsoft has Kinect, Sony has some support to use their camera for that. Switch controls can be detached for that kind of play - but there never was the high amount of well done movement games available on any other platform afterwards, and never again the good haptics of the wii remote.
We have the wii and on of our switches hooked up to the TV - in that mode we pretty much exclusively use the wii. I recently downloaded pretty much all remaining sports and dance games to get some more variety. For the switch the cool stuff is the mario cart with physical carts, and the Labo.
Being able to use the wii controllers and the balance board on the switch would’ve been a great thing.
- Comment on Prusa MK4 vs Bambu P1S 5 months ago:
From what I’ve seen the Bambu might do better prints - but having started 3d printing with a Flashforge printer a few years ago with the main issues I had related to their closed source slicer and some problems with spare parts I’d never buy into a closed ecosystem again. And Flashforge was doing variants of open designs, so you still could put in more effort to rebuild parts to non-Flashforge-components on issues - no such luck on the Bambu.
- Comment on Gamecube is the most underrated console while it was in circulation. 5 months ago:
And for the family friendly aspect nothing after the wii beat it.
The multiplayer games there are just better than something like the switch offers, and the controllers are a good size and weight for emulating whatever they are representing in games. Stuff like tennis with the tiny light switch controllers just feels wrong.
- Comment on Do any of you have that one service that just breaks constantly? I'd love to love Nextcloud, but it sure makes that difficult at times 5 months ago:
I’m using opensuse tumbleweed a lot - this summer I’ve found an installation not touched for 2 years. Was about to reinstall when I decided to give updating it a try. I needed to manually force in a few packages related to zypper, and make choices for conflicts in a bit over 20 packages - but much to my surprise the rest went smoothly.
- Comment on German Art 5 months ago:
While failing at art he was still Austrian.
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th unless you pay extra for ad-free 5 months ago:
When I still was paying for prime (cancelled it last price increase) I was pirating any prime videos as that was easier than dealing with the shitty prime video UI.
- Comment on What are your homelab stats? 6 months ago:
Not really doing much docker, but a lot of LXC - everything scripted with ansible. I define basic container metadata in a yaml parsed by a custom inventory plugin - and that is sufficient for deploying a container before doing provisioning in it.
- Comment on Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine 6 months ago:
Outside of tech circles pretty much nobody seems to have noticed how bad google search has become over the least years - unfortunately there’s no single search engine that’s “general purpose good”, like google used to be.
It’s somewhat ironic that nowadays using metasearch engines often makes sense again - for those too young to remember, that was the default way of searching in the mid to late 90s, until google came along with consistently good search results.