uep

A small number of companies control the meat supply in the United States. If you decide that you don't want to buy that $50 hot dog, you likely won't have many comparable options.

I've noticed a lot of astroturfing lately. It really bothers me, because it was kind of my last bastion of sanity for online tech discourse. Every forum I've used is now full of marketing and dishonesty by bots, paid shills, and bad actors.

They said IE was the best browser, not the most popular. I wouldn't dispute that IE was more commonly used at the time.

Just checked your link and this fits with what I thought in terms of marketshare. You can see that Firefox was ~25% of marketshare in 2009. Which is an enormous share of the pie when you consider that they couldn't stick a download link on the front page of the most dominant search engine, and it didn't come preinstalled.

Never used Maxthon.

Damn, this also reminded me that RSS feeds were everywhere back then, and the browser supported it directly.

I agree with you on everything except the browser. I'm pretty sure I was using Firefox (or maybe Opera?) on Windows before the release of Vista. I know I was still using IE for some ActiveX web apps for a while. This was the era that I switched over to Linux full-time, but both Windows 2000 and XP were great OSes at this time. Linux was painful to adopt, but I really loved the promise of "full-control" over my computer.

My peeve today is how bad modern chat programs feel compared to the old instant messengers. The modern programs all feel slow and clunky in comparison. I felt that all of the messengers I used (MSN, AIM, ICQ) were more responsive than their modern day equivalents.

I hate to wade into this cesspool. How about some of the real obvious ones:

  * Crypto currency rug pulls (World Liberty Financial)
  * Donations linked with pardons (Binance)
  * Pardoning failed rebels of a coup that favored him (Capitol rioters)
  * Bringing baseless charges against political enemies and journalists (Comey, Letitia James, Don Lemon)
  * Musk (DOGE) killing government regulatory agencies that had investigations and cases against his companies

What is interesting that while 'Dilbert empire' fell in the process for not accepting white inferiority, full blown resistance marketing market is taking ( or maybe has taken already ) shape fueled largely by highly polarized populace.

I must be daft. There must be some cultural context I'm missing so that I don't even understand what you're saying. Accepting white inferiority? Full blown resistance marketing market? Huh?

This isn't my area, but wouldn't this still be quite effective if it automatically grouped and batched those jobs for you? At low throughput levels, it doesn't need giant batches, and could just timeout after a very short time, and submit smaller batches. At high throughput, they would be full batches. Either way, it seems like this would still serve the purpose, wouldn't it?

My knowledge is outdated, as I last seriously looked at it about nine years ago, but I doubt Binder is even better than dbus; it was not good. I'm quite surprised with people suggesting it. There was that recent kernel Binder bug even with the rust implementation. It was rewritten in rust because it has had a never-ending string of serious security bugs. On top of that, it had very poor throughput. I'm guessing this improved with the rust implementation.

It was a toy created by former OS devs who really didn't want to use Linux, but wanted their pet IPC from their former OS. It even used to be the case that Binder would dynamically create threads in the receiving process without userspace knowing. As in, your process would magically have function calls coming in from threads that you never created. Imagine the issues this can create with locking, forking, etc. This ended up being changed to get it upstreamed, but I consider this absolutely insane behavior.

I used to work for a general contractor who did residential remodels and construction, and a little bit of commercial work. He exclusively used cargo vans. He would carpet the interior to protect the cargo and your knees. It made me question why anyone would use a truck. As you alluded to, it doesn't just protect from the elements, but also from thieves stealing tools out of the back of your truck.

Do we even think that was real? I think social media has been astroturfed for a long time now. If enough people make those claims, it starts to feel true even without evidence to support it.

Did they ever open source anything that really make you think "wow"? The best I could see was them "embracing" Linux, but embrace, extend, extinguish was always a core part of their strategy.

I think you missed an important point in the parent comment. You can override the allocation for C++ coroutines. You do have control over details like allocation.

C++ coroutines are so lightweight and customizable (for good and ill), that in 2018 Gor Nishanov did a presentation where he scheduled binary searches around cache prefetching using coroutines. And yes, he modified the allocation behavior, though he said it only resulted in a modest improvement on performance.

What is the reason you included Claude 3.5 instead of 3.7 in this?

Lots of crazy stuff in here.

Initially, the FSB was mainly interested in getting its hands on our equipment, presumably in the hopes of confirming its hypothesis regarding our links with the CIA. ... The FSB officers feigned surprise and promised to return the missing items immediately but succeeded in doing so only after 40 minutes had passed. Although they failed to bypass the pin codes on the phones or computer, the Kremlin’s agents did manage to install a tracker on Roman’s laptop, which he discovered within minutes.

I had a weirdly similar experience shortly thereafter, not in Moscow, but — shockingly — in Berlin. Flying back from a screening of Navalny in New York and on the way to another one in the Hague, I was just passing via the German capital for a few hours to speak at a conference. The event was held at a pompous hotel in the city’s suburbs. ... During the event, I looked up the ownership of the hotel only to discover it was owned by a German, quite literally, “friend of Vladimir Putin”. I rushed out to get my suitcase, and the bellboy took a whopping twenty minutes to find it. On the way to the airport, I discovered a hard disk was missing from the suticase. I alerted the police who rushed to the hotel, only to be told that the security cameras had been down for maintenance.

Does this imply that the conference was held at this hotel purely to get access to his devices?

The scheme was replete with cars bearing fake license plates, a route that avoided traffic surveillance cameras, and two speed boats that would need to be sunk at the end of the operation.

Later on, a source in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) informed Roman that Kyiv’s intelligence services had gathered information showing that a Ukrainian criminal group had received an “order” from Moscow to kidnap him and take him to Russia. A reward of $50,000 was offered for his capture.

At one point, one of them even booked a seat next to him on a flight from Budapest to Berlin, wearing a hidden camera to record his screen while he texted me. Their attempt to get his smartphone pin code was off by only one digit.

How many people were working full-time to get this guy?

My suspicion is the same as yours, that this may have been caused by local ISPs being overwhelmed, but it could be a million other things too. I had network issues. I live in a heavily populated suburban area. I have family who live 1000+ miles away in a slightly less populated suburban area, they had no issues at all.

This is how it was for me growing up blue collar in the northeastern USA in the 80s. My father fixed everything in the house and the vehicles. I inherited my older siblings clothes, and my younger siblings inherited mine. My mother would hem pant legs shorter when we were young, and then let them back out as we grew older. If you wore a knee or an elbow out of clothes, it was getting patched.

This instilled some good and bad tendencies in me. I do almost all of the repairs around the house myself. I work too much though, so I don't always have enough time or energy. Even though I can easily afford it, I have a hard time paying someone else to do them. This means I live with broken stuff longer than I should.

I'd probably have more money if I spent that time working on side projects instead of doing maintenance and repairs.

It would be absolutely devastating to me too. I only do my gaming on Linux, and my large game catalog is through Steam. Which means that even if they can't really shutdown Proton because it's open source, it still might amount to destroying my game library.

I guess it depends on what level you're generating the events at. On Linux, it would be completely reasonable to inject the input events at the input device level.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/input/event-codes.htm...

This is very straightforward (EV_REL) and requires a very small amount of code. There can be different problems to deal with when working at this level, but in my experience, everything works as expected with keyboards, mice, and gamepads.

This is really interesting for me to read. I encountered a DMA lockup in the hardware by an Ethernet MAC implementation on an ARM chip. It was a Synopsys Designware MAC implementation. It would specifically lockup when PTP was enabled. From my testing, it seemed like it would specifically lockup if some internal queue was overrun. This was speculation on my part, because it would only lockup if I tried to enable timestamping on all packets. It seemed to work alright if the hardware filter was used to only timestamp PTP packets. This can be a significant limitation though, as it can prevent PTP from working with VLANs or DSA switch tags, since the hardware can't identify PTP packets with those extra prefixes.

The PTP timestamps would arrive as a separate DMA transaction after the packet DMA transaction. It very possibly could have been poor integration into the ARM SOC, but your PTP-specific issue on x86 makes me wonder.

Wow. It feels like that "Got it!" dialog box has to violate privacy laws at least somewhere in the world.

Has anyone here has used FreeNX? I had read good things about its performance over the network (and even cell networks), but I've never encountered anyone who's actually used it. I guess I'm going to have to be the person to try it so I can be the "person who's used it" to others. And to those wondering, I think this is relevant to this link, as I believe FreeNX is more-or-less the X11 protocol, but does much more caching and compression.

Maybe not the right thread for this, but it seems there are downsides.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6363527/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7014832/

There are, in fact, a few things that windows does better straight out of the box than most linux distributions. Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind.

This hasn't been my experience. Printers and gaming are the only two on this list that I think Windows does better out-of-the-box. There is one thing missing from this list that I think Windows does better, and that's power management (suspend/resume) for laptops.

Other than printers, I would say Linux generally performs worse on these things because the companies making the printers, games, and laptops don't support Linux. Printer manufacturers don't support Linux that well, but I also think printer handling on Linux is not as good even when it is supported.

After following a few links through this one. It sounds like it might be the "LG Homehack vulnerability" discussed here:

https://www.ibtimes.com/homehack-attack-vulnerability-lg-app...

For those purposes, I run Windows in a VM? In my case, the only reason I even need to run it at all, is that my employer has some software that requires it.

To me, this shows radical leadership, and that he is very unattached to societal norms. Radical leadership meaning that this is kind of the antithesis of a follower mentality. I think it's a kind of genius, but also a personal failing. I really appreciate people who are willing to "question everything", because there are a lot of things we take for granted without thinking about why.

The failures I think this comes from are a form of ignorance and arrogance, and possibly a lack of empathy about how they're perceived. I personally know someone like this that is very intelligent, and thinks that they have all the right answers. There seems to be a mentality of, I have this information facts, given these facts, and that as a goal, *this* is the solution.

With the person I know, a significant problem with their reasoning is that they have important gaps in their knowledge (ignorance). They believe other people just aren't as enlightened as they are (arrogance), and if they were, they would have come to the same conclusion.

For my acquaintance, I believe that the mentality comes from a history of often being right, but also a prolonged social isolation that allowed them to build a myth in their head that they are always right.

Am I sure about what? If it is auto-vectorizing? Yes. If the performance difference at O2 for both compilers is that dramatic? Yes. If the vectorization is the ultimate difference in the performance? No, not really.

I looked at the disassembly with objdump. I tend to build with both clang and GCC regularly, for some reason I like comparing them. Since I'm sending many rays and bounces, a 50% reduction in time is very noticeable, so I looked at the generated code. I mentioned the GCC version because it is slightly unfair to compare a very new clang to GCC from a few years back. The GCC output has some vectorization as well, but the clang output seems to generate smaller code with more vectorization. It would be interesting to compare it side-by-side on godbolt, but I'd have to cut-and-paste a bunch of files to do so, and it's not a priority at the moment.

Maybe I should have responded to another comment here. The intention of my previous comment was to bolster the idea that more typical naive and less-optimized code might benefit more than already-optimized code like in the article. 3d math in general is obviously a domain that can benefit from vectorization more than most.

Another fun find, was that sharing the PRNG state among threads destroyed performance. I have other higher priority side-projects, so I haven't had a chance to investigate why yet. Whether it was something like the cache-line bouncing between cores (I wouldn't be surprised if the PRNG was the hottest code in the whole program), or a cascading effect on the generated code. A lot of my code is visible to the compiler for the ray tracing hot path, so it's also possible it broke inlining or some other compiler optimizations.

I have a simple C++ raytracer I wrote by going through Ray Tracing in One Weekend. I have not even made an attempt to optimize it. I really only made it parallel by splitting it up into tiles.

Clang 10 was able to automatically vectorize the code, so it performs >2x as fast as GCC 8.3. To be fair to GCC, I'm using my distro's GCC, but I built a newer Clang for C++ coroutine support.

A ton of old web games and animations have suddenly just become inaccessible. I wonder if the flash player could be ported to webasm for legacy applications.

They also work great as low-powered servers for open source services. I have a pi on my network that only uses a few watts of power, but it acts as a DNS proxy, voice chat server, media server, web server, and it holds my git repos.

I suppose that might be true of a lot of the western world. The good thing about regular blood tests is that, in theory, you can catch things early before you have symptoms and they become serious problems.

Every blood test I've had, has come back with good results. I have low blood pressure, and I don't take anything other than a few dietary vitamins daily. I'm fortunate in that I established good dietary habits back in my early twenties. It can be difficult to break old habits though, so we'll see how I fare now that I've crossed the age where things start going downhill.