aard

aard, 16 days ago

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

aard, 11 days 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.

aard, 2 days ago

Generally yes, but you still need hardware support (mostly kernel and mesa). They upstream - but generally you currently want packages built from their git for that.

Also the installer is very mac hardware specific.

aard, 25 days ago (edited 25 days ago)

RDS and related protocols like TMC have specifications for both FM and AM transmitters. Those are used to stop playback if an urgent message comes. I’m assuming you have AM stations with such signals in the US (I don’t think we have in the EU) - otherwise the AM radio mandate would indeed be stupid.

edit: did some digging (it’s been almost 30 years since I cared about that stuff) - seems the US was pretty late to the party for radio data channels, and side channels for AM (which wasn’t of that much interest here due to the FM heavy radio landscape in Europe) only was discussed in the early 90s for the US specific variants. I couldn’t find any details if that actually ever got implemented. Given that most documentation available on that topic is heavily focusing on EU I’d guess it never got that much use in the US.

aard, 25 days ago

Ability for AM radios to interrupt other playback for announcements has been around at least since the 90s. Back then it was commonly used to pause cassette playback when traffic announcements were made.

This just requires for the device to monitor radio when on, and to be on - and with how integrated it is in modern days cars functionality I’d say the chance for them to be on is higher than it was in the 90s. So having that functionality is a pretty good way to reach a lot of car drivers.

aard, 26 days ago

Admittedly I’m just toying around for entertainment purposes - but I didn’t really have any problems of getting anything I wanted to try out with rocm support. Bigger annoyance was different projects targetting specific distributions or specific software versions (mostly ancient python), but as I’m doing everything in containers anyway that also was manageable.

aard, 26 days ago

For AI and compute… They’re far behind. CUDA just wins. I hope a joint standard will be coming up soon, but until then Nvidia wins

I got a W6800 recently. I know a nvidia model of the same generation would be faster for AI - but that thing is fast enough to run stable diffusion variants with high resolution pictures locally without getting too annoyed.

aard, 11 days ago

That’s already the friendly variant. Traditional find has a mandatory path as first argument, so to find in the current directory you need to do find .

It also doesn’t know if it really is a path - it just prints that as a likely error. You might just have messed up quoting an argument.

aard, 7 days ago

A lot of the Zen based APUs don’t support ECC. The next thing is if it supports registered or unregistered modules - everything up to threadripper is unregistered (though I think some of the pro parts are registered), Epycs are registered.

That makes a huge difference in how much RAM you can add, and how much you pay for it.

aard, 3 days ago

One thing I like about bluesky is that your identity doesn’t have to be tied to an instance domain - you’d still have issues if you want to change is later, but if you plan ahead and use your domain you can just move it between instances.

aard, 11 days ago

Is it a ‘death by quantity’ thing?

Pretty much that - those companies rely on open projects to sort it for them, so they’re pretty much scraping open databases, and selling good data they pull from there. That’s why they were complaining about the kernel stuff - the info required was there already, just you needed to put effort in, so they were asking for CVEs. Now they got their CVEs - but to profit from it they’d still need to put the same effort in as they’d had to without CVEs in place.

aard, 12 days ago

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.

aard, 11 days ago

Was mich immer nervt ist dass anscheinend niemand der das nutzt sich ueber sowas Gedanken macht, und wenn man das anspricht wird man ausgelacht. Prominentes Beispiel waere Uber - ich hatte die damals nicht genutzt weil einfach klar ist dass die den Taxipreis nur schlagen koennen wenn sie Teile der Taxidienstleistungen nicht bieten, und/oder die Fahrer verhungern lassen. Beides haben sie gemacht - siehe z.B. surge pricing. Taxi hat Befoerderungspflicht und feste Preise.

Essenslieferdienste sind ein anderes Beispiel, da wurde massiv Restauranteigene Inrastruktur zerstoert, und sowohl fuer Kunden als auch Fahrer sind die Bedingungen schlechter. Absolut absehbar, und haette man verhindern koennen wenn man von Anfang an die entsprechenden Dienste vermieden haette. War ich aber auch wieder wohl praktisch der einzige - ich hab die letzten Monate dann doch mal ueber Foodora bestellt weil alles andere jetzt eben weg ist.

aard, 4 days ago (edited 2 hours ago)

Gibt da dummerweise noch mindestens CAS, sowie Hersteller die bei keinem davon mitmachen. Lustigerweise scheint Steinel sowohl bei CAS als auch Power for all dabei zu sein.

Dazu kommt dann noch dass z.B. Bosch mindestens 4 verschiedene Akkusysteme hat - zwei 12V und zwei 18V. Die Heimwerkerversion (“gruen”) von beiden Spannungen ist power for all, die Profiversion (“blau”) ist separat. Die blauen Akkus sind sauteuer - aber klar darauf ausgelegt dass die notfalls auch in einem aktiven Kriegsgebiet ueberleben.

aard, 23 days 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.

aard, 26 days ago

Funny timing, I’m currently going through a stack of Sun hardware in my garage to decide what to keep, and for what I’ll try to find a good home (or eventually dispose of it).