aard

@aard@kyu.de
1 Post – 349 Comments
Joined 1 years 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.

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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.

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While failing at art he was still Austrian.

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Making an exception for one organisation, pressured by politicians, would be harmful. BBC has the following policy about neutral reporting:

We don't use loaded words like "evil" or "cowardly". We don't talk about "terrorists". And we're not the only ones to follow this line. Some of the world's most respected news organisations have exactly the same policy

This feature also has the potential of endangering those drivers. If I were a driver I'd definitely not opt in to a function like this.

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51% support slower employee response time outside of work hours

Uh, what? That does not compute. Either it's work, or it is not work (and I don't respond to anything, and don't get contacted in the first place)

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All my software can be configured using dedicated configuration files (.c)

After my Russian wife was browsing the internal news yesterday to see what level of information is provided over there she mentioned that their solution in the abortion debate is to have everyone give birth, and just give up the kids to be raised by the state if you don't want them.

Also there seems to be a proposal to exclude women from higher education unless they've given birth.

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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.

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What kind of monster stores bananas in the fridge?

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Short version: A bunch of shitty companies have as business model to sell open databases to companies to track security vulnerabilities - at pretty much zero effort to themselves. So they've been bugging the kernel folks to start issuing CVEs and do impact analysis so they have more to sell - and the kernel folks just went "it is the kernel, everything is critical"

tl;dr: this is pretty much an elaborate "go fuck yourself" towards shady 'security' companies.

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

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It's been shown over and over again for the last two decades that you can't build a reliable archive on platforms outside of your control. Stuff like Instagram can be useful for trying to draw traffic to your own platform - but you always should treat those platforms as throwaway content.

this has helped me realize the unhealthy relationship I had with Reddit and was a good way to break that

Exactly, now that I have an unhealthy relationship with Lemmy I can't put effort into the one with Reddit.

Somebody is pretty salty for no good reason. The maintainers own patch is nicer code than the suggested patch - and the change is small enough that there just isn't anything available to guide the reporter to a better solution without wasting everyone's time.

I'd probably have added a thanks for debugging effort into the commit message myself - but "please accept my patch because I want to have code in the kernel" is a very stupid thing to say, and the maintainer offering a suitable problem to fix is more than I'd have done in that situation.

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I just took my cat to the petrol station to give it a try, and have to report that not only does she not have any indicators like this, she also was vehemently opposed to being refuelled and scratched me up badly.

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I'm running both physical hardware and cloud stuff for different customers. The problem with maintaining physical hardware is getting a team of people with relevant skills together, not the actual work - the effort is small enough that you can't justify hiring a dedicated network guy, for example, and same applies for other specialities, so you need people capable of debugging and maintaining a wide variety of things.

Getting those always was difficult - and (partially thanks to the cloud stuff) it has become even more difficult by now.

The actual overhead - even when you're racking the stuff yourself - is minimal. "Put the server in the rack and cable it up" is not hard - my last rack was filled by a high school student in a part of an afternoon, after explaining once how to cable and label everything. I didn't need to correct anything - which is a better result than many highly paid people I've worked with...

So paying for remote hands in the DC, or - if you're big enough - just order complete racks with racked and pre-cabled servers gets rid of the "put the hardware in".

Next step is firmware patching and bootstrapping - that happens automatically via network boot. After that it's provisioning the containers/VMs to run on there - which at this stage isn't different from how you'd provision it in the cloud.

You do have some minor overhead for hardware monitoring - but you hopefully have some monitoring solution anyway, so adding hardware, and maybe have the DC guys walk past and inform you of any red LEDs isn't much of an overhead. If hardware fails you can just fail over to a different system - the cost difference to cloud is so big that just having those spare systems is worth it.

I'm not at all surprised by those numbers - about two years ago somebody was considering moving our stuff into the cloud, and asked us to do some math. We'd have ended up paying roughly our yearly hardware budget (including the hours spent on working with hardware we wouldn't have with a cloud) to host a single of one of our largest servers in the cloud - and we'd have to pay that every year again, while with our own hardware and proper maintenance planned we can let old servers we paid for years ago slowly age out naturally.

There were some rumours that he was pushing the commercial side too fast, potentially ignoring ethical issues. Given Altmans lobbying against AI regulation in the EU I find that plausible.

Since now apparently the investors won it proves that the special structure of for-profit owned by non-profit intended to keep them honest does not work - and we urgently need to have regulation in place, as self-regulation does not work.

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In Germany it's also mandatory - but learning the language at school unfortunately doesn't necessarily mean you can speak it. LucasArts adventures contributed more to my language skills than my first English teacher. I'm always shocked about the lack of English skills in a lot of Germans when I'm back visiting. Rather surprisingly one of my uncles born in the 30s spoke pretty good English, though.

We're now living in Finland - me German, wife Russian, we each speak to the kids in our native language, between each other English. So they're growing up with 4 languages.

It's quite interesting to watch them grow up in that situation. When learning about a new historical figure my daughter always asks which languages they spoke - and few weeks ago she was surprised someone only spoke two languages. So I explained that some people only speak one language - she gave me a very weird look, and it took a while to convince her that I'm not just making a bad joke.

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Parts of that make me pretty angry. I prevented cross origin iframes for years, and refused to buy on pages which were embedding payment verification screens like that instead of just going to that page - and back then one of my banks even was sensible enough to fail verifications if loaded in an iframe.

But nowadays pretty much none of the authentication bits work if you don't allow those. It was always obvious it is a bad idea, and if it were not for those idiot designers we could just have removed support for cross origin iframes from browsers years ago. Nobody needs that, they just shouldn't be supported at all.

Almost a decade ago there was a discussion how to draw into display buffers for Wayland. Everybody agreed on using Mesa GBM, nvidia wasn't really interested, but said they'd do EGLstreams.

As nvidia wasn't interested, and generally is a dick to everybody anyway Wayland development just progressed ignoring nvidia, and now they have to catch up to where all the other graphics driver were at already years ago. While ignoring most of the things those others learned, because they want to keep their own tiny proprietary island.

Just avoid supporting nvidias dickish behaviour by not giving them money, and eventually they might learn and change.

especially if you have Nvidia

This is something that needs to be highlighted over and over again: Don't buy nvidia if there's ever a chance of running anything but Windows.

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And if the code was merged into Nvidia’s database after “extensive edits and feedback loops by other employees,” then Valeo says it’s “unrealistic” to think it could ever be fully removed.

This also is the reason why people should be careful with copilot or similar code assistance systems until the first major AI copyright lawsuits are settled. If those don't swing in favour of AI people using those tools risk losing their codebase.

For the usual candidates I either keep detailed notes, or make sure I can quickly find an earlier conversation (chat, email, whatever).

So in that case I'm then just answering "As we've discussed on 14.04. at 13:39, 17.04 14:30 and 20.04 at 14:15 already..."

They typically get the hint that when I'm capable of remembering in detail when we discussed it they maybe should make an effort of remembering what we discussed.

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I guess we can give GIMP a pass to be a bit slower in migrating to new versions of the _G_IMP _T_ool_K_it than others...

The problem is that they want to route control through their own servers for making sure you can't use some of the extra features without paying.

A few years back they dropped some clients (including the one for my old TV) because they were dropping support for legacy SSL ciphers on their servers - and those devices didn't have support for the new ciphers. This is a pretty stupid dependency due to the way they want to do things - so I moved to jellyfin back then, and have been encouraging people to drop plex ever since.

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Big problem here is that Microsoft seems to have given up on sleep states, and just does S5 and then hibernates (which is horribly slow), so S3 on newer machines is often horribly broken in the firmware and can't really be used. I'm not really interested in my system going to S5 - I want it in S3.

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The bit where you have a small view on a large virtual display exists in xorg (I assume it is still there - when I used that it was XFree86).

You'd configure a virtual screen with whatever resolution you want, and your physical resolution generates a view on that which is moving with the mouse focus. I used to run a 1200x1600 desktop on a 640x480 screen until my girlfriend said she got sick watching me and bought me a large screen.

Might be useful if you quickly want to prototype the general idea.

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First step, in case you didn't do that yet: Create a disk image of the partition - you don't want to try data recovery on the actual data. Easiest is just using dd to dump the disk to another drive.

Next try running testdisk on the image to see if it can find the backup superblocks - if it does you can feed that to fsck to restore the filesystem.

If you know the blocksize of the filesystem you can also run mke2fs with the -S parameter - this will just write the superblocks. Again, only do that on a disk image, not the actual drive.

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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.

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He probably needs a comaintainer. We could select one of us and then try pressuring him into accepting that.

I recently spent about two weeks trying to figure out why an intercontinental connection between two of our sites was broken. Not really my job, I just care about application level, but the network guys were beyond useless.

In the end I had the problem isolated to a specific network segment in India, which made them look at the right system and fix things. The reason? "We put up a firewall the day your problems started which blocks everything, if we allow your connection it works".

A week ago, my mom figured out how to get through my bedroom door lock: using a screwdriver.

That doesn't help you, but: My kids were 4 when they figured that out - by themselves.

Assuming you're old enough that your mom doesn't have to worry about you cutting your hair with the paper scissors or something like that this behaviour doesn't sound normal - and while it might be useful in the short term to be able to properly close your door it'll most likely just shift conflict in the longer term, and you'll have to look into actually resolving that. We have a saying in IT - 'you can't solve social problems with technical solutions'. This might apply here.

Would be interesting if this is more on Firefox side, or on compositor side. I've been running Firefox in Wayland for about 9 months now, without any issues.

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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.

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Friendly reminder: just don't buy nvidia

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I don't think infotainment systems need a concept of copy/paste but having to write:

Having lived through the whole "phones don't need copy and paste debate", which fortunately got solved by now having it everywhere I'm in the camp "just stick that everywhere, just in case somebody might use it one day"

Nowadays it matters if you use a compression algorithm that can utilize multiple cores for packing/unpacking larger data. For a multiple GB archive that can be the difference between "I'll grab a coffee until this is ready" or "I'll go for lunch and hope it is done when I come back"

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A major difference is how they interact with feedback - the main reason I never did my own mastodon instance is the developers attitude. "We're not interested in helping you because you didn't set it up exactly as in the guide" was (and maybe still is) all over the mastodon bug tracker.

That was the first thing I looked for when lemmy became popular - and found they were taking deployment issues to even the most absurd system seriously.

Additionally they treat suggestions seriously - even if they personally think it is stupid - and even implement some of that. Pretty much no chance of anything of that happening with mastodon.

That attack is via bluetooth, not NFC. And the article states exactly that (just checked).