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vetrom

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I do stuff with Linux and distributed systems. Embedded hardware too, nowadays.

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IDK about OPs setup, but I run a pile of E5-2683v4 Xeon recycled servers for Ceph and self hosted business SaaS usage.

One node's ipmitool sensor report (and self-monitoring PSU, so grain of salt, but my UPS side monitoring tracks closely), reports 250-300w average power use. This though, mind you is for running 22 spinning disks, 2 SAS/SATA SSDs, and 4 NVME ssds, and 768GB of DDR4.

Mid-gen 2015ish Xeons were not great at power reduction, but if you are pegging the cores, they were never particularly slow, and they did have lots of PCIe lanes. This boils down to the CPU/mobo itself not being that big a cost floor, especially if you have high utilization rates.

As a comparison, my main desktop development machine, running a Threadripper 9970X, 128GB of DDR5, a RDNA4 GPU, and a small pile of NVME drives has a power floor of roughly 250W. Some CPU centric workloads you'll definitely lose out on on the older gens of machines, but they are by no means impractical.

Maybe for a desktop usecase they are absolutely suboptimal nowadays, but for a lot of realworld usecases I would say they're still relevant.

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Like the author posts for the LLM usecase, I think optimizing the hardware choice to the application and not leaving levers unpulled is a big key, especially considering how wide a variety of bandwidth/power draw/peak frequency/corecount SKUs exist in the Xeon lines. Without knowing what you intend to run and fitting the correct processor to it, you will end up with a disappointingly poor environment fit.

Take the volume and mass of lobbying by all of data broker companies, data collection companies, and executive agencies.

Combine that with the character of practically every law written involving data privacy, use, IP, and associated regulation of activity around these since the 1990s. It becomes painfully clear that the interests of private citizens have not had a seat at the table, and the Constitution has been taken as an inconvenience to bypass, not a guiding document.

The core sticking point is, I think, is that Section 230 was envisioned as a 'common carrier' exception. Common carriers do not apply editorial control to the content they transmit.

In the modern landscape, where practically every mainstream (and most of the non mainstream even) platform has extensive policies and applies them in a manner that's equivalent to editorial control, they are no longer a common carrier, they are a publisher.

Should that exemption and safe harbor be expanded to all publishers? If no, do you really want the Government picking and choosing favorites? Either way you choose, I believe there will be many first and further order implications.

You can either get Congress to modify the definition, or you could try to get a case through the courts to clarify its interpretation. As one of those indirect implications, I am actually not sure which one would be more of a footgun.

Well tinygo takes some go bindings they implemented for llvm, https://github.com/tinygo-org/go-llvm, uses the Go standard library for parsing, and wires it up to a LLVM IR generator, with a set of flexible backend/machine definition machinery.

You could likely improve gobee to use tinygo's packages directly, instead of transpiling to C and calling into clang, and the licenses of the two projects look compatible. You'll still need to deal with defining a subset to pass the verifier, of course.

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From the README:

Replace clang. clang's BPF backend gives us CO-RE, BTF, and verifier-friendly codegen for free. Reimplementing that costs years and gains nothing.

The primary gotcha you may hit if you try this is how much of the BPF features are implemented by clang, and how much is instead implemented in core LLVM. Even with a LLVM sitting next door you could pull out, the harnesses may not exist independent of clang, but I have not looked THAT deep.

The title says 'standard library'. Are you saying that, in the context of C, that it is an error to take that to mean an implementation of libc?

Yes, I know the author's writeup then goes on to say that it is not a libc with a pile of questionable justfication. This is a custom runtime, in a single header no less, which is admittedly impressive, especially considering it provides runtime and thread safety primitives. This does not rise to the level of claiming the idea of a 'standard libarary' though, IMO. In that, I think the author misses the point.

can be both, psql has pluggable storage engines. See any of the numerous columnar or sharding extensions for postgres for examples of prior art.

The point isnt the apologists that pop up whereever CF gets mentioned, the point is that they more or less have a built reputation for deceptive loss leader marketing.

Maybe early/MVP product engineers should know better, but CFs own education materials do not teach you to expect that.

I think you have to look at the history of disclosure from the 90s to get a good grip here --

The CVE system arose as something of a mediating factor to enable coordinated disclosure of discovered issues and make something of a standard that vendors could point to and they they were being responsive, vs wondering if a random exposure on Bugtraq in the 90s would ruin your week.

If it no longer aids in that, then it has ceased to be a system useful for its original purpose, and it would be foolish to continue to feed it resources. It probably doesn't help that all sides viciously game the CVE system these days.

Papal visits to the United States have fairly long intervals to begin with. Wikipedia reports 10 trips between 1965 and 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_visits_to_the_United_Sta...). Given the relative rarity of visits, not having planned a trip during any given presidency would even be normal. It doesn't surprise me at all.

That's still a good question, though. Do any of them have anything more substantial than 'anonymous' sources, or even their own anonymous sources not linked to the breaking article's?

I am generally suspicious when anonymous sources quoted these days, but I am rather more suspicious of reports that only come from a single source and get repeated in multiple outlets more or less immediately.

I know there is some amount of synchronicity induced by syndicated news feed outlets like AP, but like many single source/anonymous stories, this reads to me like some 'suggested copy' was sent out to some reporters or outlets ahead of time.

Anonymous sources are important for the integrity of reporting, but it must also be recognized that they are essentially non-authenticatable information.

The author of the secondary source I see most mainstream sources quoting (Mattia Ferraresi) has also come out and said people are stretching and misrepresenting what he wrote: https://xcancel.com/mattiaferraresi/status/20424925662396866...

There is at least one outlet that appears to have asked the both Pentagon and the Church what was up and both parties told them the meeting was overstated as well: https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/nuncios-pentagon-meeting-wa...

EFF is leaving X 3 months ago

My impression is that as EFF's executive leadership has evolved over time, the driving motivations and attitudes of that leadership has changed EFFs style of execution.

It has probably helped increase their raw numbers, but it has also induced "mission drift".

EFF is leaving X 3 months ago

What does it say? EFF has not bothered to engage with basically anyone that replies to them on X the platform at least since Dec 1, 2025. Searching for EFF replies from older posts also shows that they basically never engage with X users, apart from using it as an advertising firehose.

If they spent any appreciable amount of time replying to people and not just themselves, their X impressions would be considerably larger. X themselves has been clear that engagement weights impressions/recommendations/algorithmic display, and EFF has done none of that.

It looks to me like a people at EFF problem, not an X problem.

It seems to me at its root, that it's a question of available ad attention, and the value thereof.

The classic value prop for ads has been so badly destroyed by bad curation and content invasiveness that the basis value of that attention has dropped trough the floor. The growing prevalence of ad blocking is only a symptom of that.

This has become bad enough it even invades special interest nonprofit rags like the AAA, American Legion, and USPSA newsletters, for example.

There is a very important consideration here that this opinion doesn't really touch on, but I think is invited down the road for future cases and legislation: Can you compel the speech of a third party to aid in exploratory evidence gathering (aka fishing expeditions) without a clear, well defined, and particular, cause of action at court to issue a subpoena?

In most classic U.S. jurisdiction, no, you cannot. Compelled activity or speech is generally frowned upon. The most important part of this case, IMO, was the Supreme Court constraining the Fourth Circuit's interpretation of contributory liability and attempting to turn the DMCA system into one for enabling those fishing expeditions.

So, merely selling 'with intent' for the van to be used in a robbery I don't think meets the bar as the opinion is written. In particular, I read "...which can be shown only if the party induced the infringement or the provided service is tailored to that infringement;"

In that vein, merely selling a tool even if a predominant use or intention of that tool is infringement, the infringement must be actively induced or invited by the seller. This is also affirmed in detail in the USSC opinion: "The Court has repeatedly made clear—see Kalem Co. v. Harper Brothers, 222 U. S. 55, Sony, and Grokster—that mere knowledge that a service will be used to infringe is insufficient to establish the required intent to infringe."

This is the primary part of the opinion, the first 7 of 27 pages. I'm still reading the rest and will update when finished. (Concurring Opinion and Dissents I believe)

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The meat of the opinion has some interesting elements as well:

* "Internet service providers, such as Cox, have limited knowledge about how their Internet services are used and who uses them. They do know which IP address corresponds to which subscriber’s account, but they cannot distinguish one individual user from another...However, because online infringement is so widespread, pursuing each individual infringer does little to stem the tide.": mere IP logs are not enough to establish liability, perhaps. More importantly, it is opined that individual fishing expeditions dont actually serve the end of eliminating infringement. This does not absolve individual liability, but it becomes important later.

* "Holding Cox liable merely for failing to terminate Internet service to infringing accounts would expand secondary copyright liability beyond our precedents ... The Fourth Circuit’s holding thus went beyond the two forms of liability recognized in Grokster and Sony. It also conflicted with this Court’s repeated admonition that contributory liability cannot rest only on a provider’s knowledge of infringement and insufficient action to prevent it.": This points to another case where Circuit and District courts have been ignoring the instruction of higher courts, in this case, inventing new liabilities where none existed. This doesn't go so far as to repudiate entirely the idea of fishing expeditions having teeth, but it places a clear guardrail around expanding liability without laws establishing such.

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The Sotomayor concurrence on judgment states that the Justice does not believe the methods used by the majority opinion are correct, but still agrees with the judgement because of insufficient information presented by Sony. I think the analysis gone into in this section is flawed, but it is also not precedential since it is not the Order part of the opinion. I am also out of time to poke at that part for the moment. It does relate this case to the closest recent big case on secondary liability though, that of Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, so its worth reading even if the justifying analysis I think does not fit.

The big difference I guess is whether you think negative jurisdiction (limiting what the government can do) vs positive jurisdiction (further enabling the government) is more important, but considering HN and the exhortations against divisive commentary, I'd rather not dive into the weeds arguing that part here.

where overwhelming amount of USED guns are used to accompany crime

I do not think this holds up to a factual analysis if you look at any cross section of defensive gun use reports. I don't think that parts actually relevant here though. If you were to use a similar standard as the USSC court applies here: Impressions don't matter to qualify for inducement. The action must be actively invited.

You will first probably need Congress to legislate away the long standing prohibitions against offering (easily) user-modifiable RF devices on the market.

Self ownership and full 'right to repair' has carve-outs in the FCC's regulations in the name of limiting unintentional broadcasting/radiation. Maybe a challenge to those would survive in the post-Chevron environment. I wouldn't expect any Congress in the last 25 years to pass a law which would go against the incumbent telecom lobbyist interests though, and I'd expect such a hole if it did hit case law, to get 'patched' fairly quickly.

About the only way to really solve that would be to embarrass vendors enough to open their moats.

It is telling that in one of the seminal works about accessibility and rural public health, "Where There Is No Doctor", by David Werner, roughly 10% of the book needs to be devoted to wound and general sanitation and exhortations to keep anything sanitation sensitive the hell away from dirt and nightsoil.

I have lived in places like that, and absolutely prep like that when the environment calls for it. I'd expect a non zero proportion of the HN readership has as well. See: Burning Man, the fanciest refugee camp on Earth, where you need to schedule, plan, haul in, and haul back out again everything you need to survive.

(I've also spent time living in legit BFE where the closest store for something can be more than an hour away, YMMV)

Say what you will about Mormons, but they take the idea of local stockpiles amazingly seriously. It rises to the point where they subsidize stores selling bulk food product direct to customers, at a scale that otherwise you'd need a Sysco or commercial restaurant license in most places to get access to.

Source: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-center... (In older literature & analysis it used to be called the LDS Cannery or LDS Dry Cannery, but I guess they recently rebranded it.)

This is a reductionist view of even the suburban United States IMO. There are plenty of locales in what I'd call 'middle suburbia', which I'd define as less than an hour from whatever their geographical city center is. Even in these areas, multiple day power outages, or other localized or regional disasters have been endemic in the last 25 years; often due to utility or local resource mismanagement.

Take, for example, the 2018 California Camp Fire, the various southern winter flash power outages, or the endemic hurricane season pretty much everywhere exposed to the middle or southern pacific.

"For hurricanes" is a cute way to minimize it, but in much of the country it's rather little that separates you from being left to your own devices, at least for a little while, even when you're just suburban and haven't even looked out to the rural U.S.

There is a real deferred maintenance and resource mismanagement issue in this country. The increasing evidence of "preppers" and items like ration buckets becoming prevalent at bulk store operations like Walmart & Costco are early indications of the increasing prevalence of these issues.

Take a survey of the items that are always available at most Costos or Sam's Clubs across the country and you'll see similar results. They essentially market decentralized infrastructure for those that can afford it (or those who can't afford not to have it).

There's a ton of bad reporting here, because the publications, or writers, are lazy about sourcing their reporting.

In this case, there is a kernel of truth: The 2021-2022 "Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act" (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684...) directs NHTSA to develop an in-vehicle driver system to detect some definition of impaired driving.

In particular, "SEC. 24220" (searchable by that string in the above bill text.) directs NHTSA to either write and publish a rule implementing such, or make a yearly report to Congress as to why said technology is not implementable.

This is the 2026 report: https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2026-03/Report-t...

In essence, they state that while they have prototypes, the technology is not yet sufficient. There's nothing in a proposed or final rule yet, to the best of my knowledge.

Personally, I'm wary of this type of rule-making, as it essentially remains 'hidden' from public comment until the notices of final rule-making, making it in my eyes an end-run around the Administrative Procedure Act. I don't expect that to be a very widely held position though.

(Edit: I linked the 2023 report first, not the 2026 one. Whoopsy.)