@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

stardreamer

@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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stardreamer,
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True story:

Grabs Cat2 cable out of lab storage and hooks everything up to it

“Why is everything so slow?”

stardreamer,
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Pretty sure the biggest cost of crimping your own cables is finding a place to store the remaining spool.

Or ensuring the spool is still useful 15 years later while everything has migrated to SFP/QSFP

stardreamer,
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Isn’t the whole point of these things the “bloated” (CI/CD, issue tracker, merge requests, mirroring, etc) part? Otherwise we’d all be using bare git repos over ssh (which works great btw!)

It’s like complaining about IDE bloat while not using a text editor. Or complaining there’s too many knives in a knife set instead of buying just the chef knife.

stardreamer,
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

That’s just a Thinkpad. If they keep making them smaller eventually it will fit in your pocket.

stardreamer, (edited )
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I’m not familiar with the topic but couldn’t they cut straight to the source and directly contact Corning? Or alternatively, one of those Chinese high end OLED knock offs? I’ve heard they’re basically less than 1 generation apart in terms of quality.

edit: alternatively, I assume all cables/connectors are standard. What’s preventing Jim next door from starting a group buy to manufacture replacement OLED screens/upgrade kits?

stardreamer, (edited )
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Funny how a game about fearing the unknown is being hated on by a group that fears the (relatively) unknown.

stardreamer, (edited )
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Don’t have a steam deck, but what I used to do on Linux when upgrading drives is just dd the old drive over. Sure it’s inefficient as hell, but with pcie 4.0 speeds You’re looking at 20 min to make a byte-for-byte copy of your old 1 tb drive, which you can then extend your partitions to make them bigger.

What's the most efficient way for peeling potatoes by hand? (sh.itjust.works)

Like, I get comments from people telling me it’s weird I always try to peel potatoes like I am trying to make the worlds longest 1-piece potato peel. To me it feels way for efficient and fun to continu down a potato in 1 peel, while circling around it, instead of randomly scraping a hundred different pieces of peel off and...

stardreamer,
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How the heck do you end up peeling off 1g of edible potato?

stardreamer,
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I’m just going to put this information here: the use case for 46Gb WiFi is going to be extremely niche. There is nearly no legitimate use case where you can achieve that speed on your phone.

The problem here is that:

  1. The majority of internet traffic is TCP
  2. TCP protocol processing is atomic (i.e. your speed is bottlenecked by a single CPU)
  3. The bottleneck is the receiver (i.e. downloader)
  4. TCP is too complex for efficient receiver-side hardware offloads (i.e. can’t workaround this issue by adding more special hardware)

What does this mean?

Your connection speed on a wifi 7 device WILL be bottlenecked by your single-core CPU speed, even if you are doing absolutely nothing except transmitting data. This assumes you are only using a TCP single connection (e.g. downloading a file from a website). But that’s the majority of use cases unless you are running a server (in this case on your phone).

I haven’t checked what CPU the Pixel 8 uses. But my Pixel 7 has a Cortex A-78. I also don’t have the raw data handy for the 3Ghz A-78, but I do have data from the 2Ghz A-53 connected to a 100Gbps Ethernet NIC which is around 8-9Gbps. The A78 generally outperforms the A53 by 1.5x (At least that’s the characteristics on the Nvidia Bluefield DPUs). So we can assume 12-14Gbps max for a single connection with Wifi 7 running on a state-of-the-art ARM CPU.

That is still nowhere near 46Gbps. It’s like mounting a Vulcan Minigun on a bicycle.

To use the full wifi bandwidth, you would need to have multiple connections running on different cores. That’s also not including the switches/servers connected to the wifi AP. Unless you are running a Redis server on your phone, I see no reason why Wifi 7 would be needed unless the remaining hardware is upgraded significantly.

stardreamer, (edited )
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

It’s overkill, but 50Gbps is not enough for a Public University these days. A single core switch in NYC can see an average of 2.6Tbps of traffic. You’ll probably need at least 200-400Gbps for an entire university.

But yeah, still overkill for a phone.

stardreamer, (edited )
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Didn’t know one is in-order and the other is OoO. The A53 is still being used for new products by Nvidia in 2020 (Bluefield-2). So there must be some merit to it or Nvidia is cheaping out on stuff

The BlueField-3 uses the A78 and unfortunately I don’t have one to test. I’m basing everything I know based on conference talks. I do know apparently the A78 does not have working performance counters for perf which makes it a pain to debug.

That being said, a 2023 Mid-end Xeon gets you up to 60Gbps TCP single flow (100Gbps ConnectX-6 NIC) So maybe that’s a better comparison? Might need to account for all the other x86 optimizations

Also, I think the bottleneck for TCP processing is branching, not memory access. So I’m not sure if OoO execution would help much. Would the A78 have improved branch predictors?

stardreamer,
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

It’s the AVX-2/AVX-512 instructions that have issues. In most cases unless you’re running a server CPU (or extremely recent consumer CPU) you’ll be fine.

Scary for HPC/AI? Yes. For most people? Not really.

stardreamer,
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I would say you’ll be fine. Most games don’t compile with avx-2 anyways since it’ll crash if you run it on something that doesn’t have them (which is a lot of CPUs) and AVX-512 is straight up only available on Xeons, Epyc and zen 4. Nobody is going to use that for consumer software.

The only game I can think of using AVX is a Skyrim mod for realistic physics, where the author provided binaries for AVX-2/AVX-512. So it won’t affect most compiled applications much since you need to compile with it first (which almost nobody does).

stardreamer, (edited )
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

ELI5, or ELIAFYCSS (Explain like I’m a first year CS student): modern x86 CPUs have lots of optimized instructions for specific functionality. One of these is “vector instructions”, where the instruction is optimized for running the same function (e.g. matrix multiply add) on lots of data (e.g. 32 rows or 512 rows). These instructions were slowly added over time, so there are multiple “sets” of vector instructions like MMX, AVX, AVX-2, AVX-512, AMX…

While the names all sound different, the way how all these vector instructions work is similar: they store internal state in hidden registers that the programmer cannot access. So to the user (application programmer or compiler designer) it looks like a simple function that does what you need without having to micromanage registers. Neat, right?

Well, problem is somewhere along the lines someone found a bug: when using instructions from the AVX-2/AVX-512 sets, if you combine it with an incorrect ordering of branch instructions (aka JX, basically the if/else of assembly) you get to see what’s inside these hidden registers, including from different programs. Oops. So Charlie’s “Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, B, A, A” using AVX/JX allows him to see what Alice’s “encrypt this zip file with this password” program is doing. Uh oh.

So, that sounds bad. But lets take a step back: how bad would this affect existing consumer devices (e.g. Non-Xeon, non-Epyc CPUs)?

Well good news: AVX-512 is not available on most Intel/AMD consumer CPUs until recently (13th gen/zen 4, and zen 4 isn’t affected). So 1) your CPU most likely doesn’t support it and 2) even if your CPU supports it most pre-compiled programs won’t use it because the program would crash on everyone else’s computer that doesn’t have AVX-512. AVX-512 is a non-issue unless you’re running Finite Element Analysis programs (LS-DYNA) for fun.

AVX-2 has a similar problem: while released in 2013, some low end CPUs (e.g. Intel Atom) didn’t have them for a long time (this year I think?). So most compiled programs wouldn’t compile with AVX-2 enabled. This means whatever game you are running now, you probably won’t see a performance drop after patching since your computer/program was never using the optimized vector instructions in the first place.

So, the affect on consumer devices is minimal. But what do you need to do to ensure that your PC is secure?

Three different ideas off the top of my head:

  1. BIOS update. The CPU has a some low level firmware code called microcode which is included in the BIOS. The new patched version adds additional checks to ensure no data is leaked.
  2. Update the microcode package in Linux. The microcode can also be loaded from the OS. If you have an up-to-date version of Intel-microcode here this would achieve the same as (1)
  3. Re-compile everything without AVX-2/AVX-512. If you’re running something like Gentoo, you can simply tell GCC to not use AVX-2/AVX-512 regardless of whether your CPU supports it. As mentioned earlier the performance loss is probably going to be fine unless you’re doing some serious math (FEA/AI/etc) on your machine.
stardreamer,
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Of course I don’t carry 5 external drives with me all the time, that would be ridiculous.

I carry the whole HBA.

stardreamer,
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar
  1. ChatGPT gives bad command, system fails to boot
  2. Drops into emergency shell
  3. Ask ChatGPT how to fix fstab from emergency shell
  4. Goto 1), rinse and repeat

You can also replace ChatGPT with Devin and achieve the same results*

*Your mileage may vary depending on the quality of your Devin

stardreamer, (edited )
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

CrowdSec has completely replaced fail2ban for me. It’s a bit harder to setup but it’s way more flexible with bans/statistics/etc. Also uses less ram.

It’s also fun to watch the ban counter go up for things that I would never think about configuring on fail2ban, such as nginx CVEs.

Edit: fixed url. Oops!

stardreamer,
@stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Wistram from The Wandering Inn. With all the secrets, drama, bureaucracy, and faction infighting it feels like a real school.

That being said, no way would I attend that place. I’m going to stay the hell away from that place and watch with popcorn at a distance.

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