aard
@aard@kyu.de
- Comment on Why buy a film canister when I can design and print one? 3 days ago:
I guess empty ones are hard to find - but some manufacturers (like Foma) are selling their films in them. In other news, I’m drowning in those things.
- Comment on How screwed would one be if their email provider shuts down? 4 days ago:
Some years age when I was still using some more google stuff (like an account for calling out from my PBX) I had each service assigned to its own google account to limit the impact of google doing something crazy to an account.
Apart from playstore youtube red is now the only service left - and that’s about to go as they now made it too expensive, especially taking into account that they enshittified it so much that we’ve blocked it on the TV, and “adfree on TV” was the main use case there…
- Comment on TSA silent on CrowdStrike’s claim Delta skipped required security update 3 weeks ago:
So CrowStrikes strategy is “you installed CrowStrike while TSA told you not to install it, as was clearly proven by us taking down your network, so we’re not at fault”?
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
If you can afford it see if Eaton has a smaller tower UPS suitable for you.
- Comment on Tesla issues 5th recall for the new Cybertruck within a year, the latest due to rearview camera 1 month ago:
Recall is a legal term for the car industry which includes stuff like reporting obligations. So if the defect meets the severity level of a recall it should be called as such, even if it is ‘just’ a software update. Ambiguous terms for safety violations are dangerous and may cost lives.
- Comment on European iPhones are more fun now 2 months ago:
The space used by the smallest solar charger I’ve seen on Amazon seems to be similar to 6 or more batteries in the format the N900 was taking - so if you look at space, slow charging from solar charger, and reliance on sun conditions taking individual batteries seems to be the better option for a few days hike. It’s also easier to stow individual batteries to wherever you still have space left.
- Comment on European iPhones are more fun now 2 months ago:
With my N900 I used to travel with 6 to 10 charged batteries to have a few days of runtime. Things got better now with powerbanks - but for something like hiking just carrying a few spares would still be smaller and lighter.
- Comment on There is no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs — any damage is permanent 3 months ago:
I did not sign with them after I had some issues with the contract provided, and the resulting interactions with my future manager. I’d say at least for someone from Europe the company culture is less than ideal from that encounter.
- Comment on There is no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs — any damage is permanent 3 months ago:
AMD keeps some older generations in production as their budget options - and as they had excellent CPUs for multiple generations now you also get pretty good computers out of that. Even better - with some planning you’ll be able to upgrade to another CPU later when checking chipset lifecycle.
AMD has established by now that they deliver what they promise - and intel couldn’t compete with them for a few generations over pretty much the complete product line - so they can afford now to have the bleeding edge hardware at higher prices. It’s still far away from what intel was charging when they were dominant 10 years ago - and if you need that performance for work well worth the money. For most private systems I’d always recommend getting last gen, though.
- Comment on Microsoft says EU to blame for the world's worst IT outage | Euronews 3 months ago:
This doesn’t have anything to do with user control - modern windows versions need drivers to be WHQL signed to get that kind of access. Alternatively you’ll need to enable developer mode on your system, and install your own developer certificate into its keyring for running own code, which has its own drawbacks.
Crowdstrike is implemented as a device driver - but as there is no device Microsoft could’ve argued that this is abusing the APIs, and refused the WHQL certification. Microsofts own security solution (Defender) also is implemented as a device driver, though, and that’s what the EU ruling is about: Microsoft needs to provide the same access they’re using in their own products to competitors. Which is a good thing - but if Microsoft didn’t have Defender, or they’d have done it without that type of access it’d have been fully legal for them to deny the certification for Crowdstrike.
Both MacOS and Linux have the ability to run the type of thing that requires those privileges on Windows in an unprivileged process - and on newer Linux versions Crowdstrike is using that (older versions got broken by them the same way they now broke Windows). So Microsoft now trying to blame the EU can be seen as an attempt to keep people from questioning why Microsoft didn’t implement a low privilege API as well, which would’ve prevented this whole mess.
- Comment on Intel breaks silence on 13th and 14th-gen Raptor Lake desktop CPU instability issues 3 months ago:
I have a 96 core one. While it’ll be fine as a desktop for compiling I’d stick with an AMD system.
The devkit has 6 memory channels, and you’ll want to fill them all - there’s a surprisingly high performance penalty if you don’t. Even then, compiling a code base which could be spread over hundreds of cores is still significantly slower on the ampere compared to my old 3970x.
- Comment on Prusa slicer 2.8 UI changes 4 months ago:
Does Apple lack a feature to turn off or hide the file menu?
I have no idea. They decided to put a notch with the webcam in the middle of the screen, so I’d not be able to use that space properly with anything else anyway.
My point here wasn’t about mac, though (it was just handy for doing the screenshot at this moment , though it’s my least used platform for this: I had it upgraded, and as I have no intention of upgrading it on my Linux system after that experience I made the screenshot before the downgrade) - my point was the needless waste of space in the newer PrusaSlicer, which applies on all platforms.
- Submitted 4 months ago to 3dprinting@lemmy.world | 11 comments
- Comment on Authy got hacked, and 33 million user phone numbers were stolen 4 months ago:
And as soon as I learned about that I stopped using it. Turns out it was the right choice - since then more then one company had breaches where authenticator seeds extracted from a google account were used to bypass 2fa.
- Comment on Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs 4 months 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 4 months 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 4 months 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 4 months 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.. 5 months 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 6 months 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 6 months ago:
No, most companies also have mostly incompetent engineers.
- Comment on Roku OS home screen is getting video ads for the first time 6 months 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 7 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? 7 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? 7 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 8 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? 9 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.