aard

aard, 3 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, 6 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, 6 days ago (edited 6 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, 6 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).

aard, 7 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, 6 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, 7 days ago

Leberwurstersatz hab ich bisher noch nichts gefunden - weder fuer aufs Brot, noch die Grobe fuer Schlachtplatte. Fuer letzteres braeuchte man auch noch Blutwurstersatz. Rest der Liste stimmt aber.

aard, 10 days 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.

aard, 10 days ago

No, most companies also have mostly incompetent engineers.

aard, 14 days 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.

aard, 14 days ago

Gut dass das kommt, aber leider zu spaet. Ich denke mit konsequenter Anwendung der existierenden Gesetzgebung gegen Scheinselbstaendigkeit haette man da auch schon viel machen koennen - jetzt ist viel zerstoert das wohl auch nicht mehr zurueckkommt. Hier gibts glaub ich nur noch ein einziges Restaurant das an eigenen Fahrern (mit gestellten Fahrzeugen) festgehalten hat.

Bei den anderen wird das jetzt halt vermutlich weiterhin teurer werden - was auf die Kunden umgelegt wird. Umstellung von eigenen Fahrern zu Lieferdiensten hat bei praktisch allen Restaurants zur Einfuehrung von Liefergebuehren ueber die Plattform gefuehrt - und Bedingungen fuer die Fahrer sind trotzdem schlechter als vorher.

aard, 17 days ago

Ist man in anderen EU-Staaten normalerweise auch, nur fuer insgesamt billiger. Vergleiche schauen leider haeufig nur einen Teil der Abgaben an (oft nur Steuern): Ich zahle hier in Finnland zwar mehr Steuern, aber dafuer ist da mehr drin das in Deutschland noch separat abgerechnet werden wuerde. Insgesamt komme ich hier besser weg als in Deutschland.

aard, 20 days ago

Dazu kommt dann noch der zusaetzliche Schaden in der Wirtschaft, auch von Leuten die so aussehen als wuerden sie sich bemuehen: Bestenfalls koennen wir die Bewerbung direkt aussortieren, und verschwenden nur ein paar Minuten damit, schlimmstenfalls stellen wir dann jemand ein der versucht in der Probezeit wieder entlassen zu werden.

Langfristig gehen wir eh in Richtung weniger Beschaeftigung - statt hier Leute zu gaengeln die nicht wollen, und damit noch Kollateralschaden verursachen sollte man das einfach akzeptieren, und schauen dass wir Produktionsmittel die Arbeitsplaetze ersetzen so besteuern dass wir uns leisten koennen wenn jemand nicht arbeiten will.

aard, 20 days ago

Überweisung auf Papier […] Und Gott bewahre, wenn du Münzgeld haben oder bringen willst.

Das sind Leistungen bei denen ich tatsaechlich auch meine dass das separat abgerechnet werden sollte. Basis sollte eine kostenlose bzw. von der Grundgebuehr abgedeckte Nutzung des Kontos im Selfservice sein - also alles Online oder an Selbstbedienungsterminals, sowie uebliche Kartennutzung im Eurogebiet. Fuer Sachen die man selbermachen kann eine Person beschaeftigen zu wollen ist ein Luxusproblem - und dafuer kann man dann auch zahlen.

aard, 20 days ago

Briefkasten leeren, Leser fuettern, bei Fehlern schauen was los ist. Mal abgesehen davon dass man einen Leser fuer etwas unterhalten muss das seit zwei Jahrzehnten obsolet ist. Kann natuerlich gerne ueber eine Grundgebuehr gemacht werden - aber dann bitte als separates Amish-Konto das die Kosten fuer die Leser und aehnliches ohne Quersubvention deckt.

aard, 20 days ago

Waren an der Mueritz ist ne fette Chilloutzone.

aard, 20 days ago

Enter und Shift sind unterschiedlich (die Deutsche Entertaste ist doof). Ich hatte Tastaturen ohne staggering getestet, fand ich doof (kann aber natuerlich auch muscle memory als vielschreiber sein - das unvoreingenommen testen wird vermutlich schwierig wenn man mehrere Jahrzehnte blind getippt hat)

aard, 21 days ago

Vanilla teams is a a stinking pile of shit. Corporate policies just add a bit of bonus nuclear waste to that.

aard, 20 days 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.

aard, 20 days 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).

aard, 25 days ago

I see you’re not working in any industry having to deal with Qualcomm.

aard, 24 days ago

It starts with them only doing initial talks about buying their hardware for a project with you for a 7-figure payment, and doesn’t improve from there.

aard, 25 days 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.

aard, 25 days ago

It surely is a bubble - so probably a bit different than many other bubbles.

I think OpenAI made the right call (for them) to commercialize when they did - as that pretty much was their only chance to do so. Things has moved fast over the last 1.5 years - and what used to take a decade in tech has happened within months: OpenAI is the dinosaur company grandfathered in, while for already about a year it’s been more sensible for anybody wanting to do something with LLM to selfhost (or buy hosting capacity, but put up own data) one of the more open language models, and possibly adjust or re-train it.

As a company owner I get a ridiculous amount of spam for a year already from all kinds of companies building products on top of OpenAI stack, or are trying to sell training or conferences. All those companies will be left with nothing once all the slower users realize technology has moved on. It’s like somebody trying to build all their product offerings based on VMWare stack nowadays.

If you as a company want to offer something around AI right now the safest option is probably offering hosting, or if you want to do more hands on, adjustment of open models. Both of those are very risky, and many will go bust in years to come - but not as suicidal as building on top of a closed dinosaur.

aard, 25 days ago

A problem of this bubble is that it is making AI synonymous with LLM - and when it goes down will burn other more sensibly forms of AI.