"Smart" home gym equipment: expensive hardware for some grand, proprietary software, and ongoing subscription fees in the $50/mo ballpark.

The SW is usually designed so that even shit that could have been local is instead stored remote as to make the subscription look more worthwhile. The large front-up cost serves not only as revenue, but also to anchor the vendor lock-in.

Open source hackers could potentially unchain the HW so that users would actually own what they purchased, but there is a catch: the HW is sold at a loss, and the subscription is the business model.

Freeing up the HW would render the subscription rather useless, and ramping up the HW sales prices to profitability would destroy any demand.

Basically, it's products that are technically feasible, but not economically viable. Which is why they are not the future of home gyms.

Bethesda is full of shit. Starfield somehow needs a super new PC because it alledgedly uses modern SW tech.

Strange point: while a high-end PC with 7800X3D and 4090 makes the performance bearable (though not great), the graphics don't look spectacular. In fact, they look outdated.

No Bethesda, you don't use modern tech. You require modern HW tech to make up somewhat for your shitty engine and incompetent devs.

The Vivaldi team: open source is cool. It gave us Chromium to fork from, that's more than 90% of "our" code base!

Question to the Vivaldi team: then why don't you open source your Vivaldi code?

The Vivaldi team: uhm, when it comes to our browser, open source isn't cool because we fear someone might fork it. We need to protect ourselves from that possibility.

My Ryzen CPU got quite hot, and hence also loud, under sustained all-core workloads. The CPU boost doesn't bring that much performance in these workloads (but it does in gaming), so I made two Linux bash scripts.

One does the actual boosting, cpu-boost.sh: https://pastebin.com/K9YShNM6

The other uses Zenity as GUI wrapper so that this can be hooked into the start menu, cpu-boost-gui.sh: https://pastebin.com/X7rhZ8DV

Now I can change it on the fly, even via GUI. Thanks to some sudoers settings (see comments in the first script), I don't even need to enter a password. Obviously, this is only for personal machines, not advisable on servers.

Maybe someone else finds this useful.

So LTT is now more or less officially Linus Trash Tips. Nothing new, but the level of ineptitude and denial is remarkable. He should have stayed at pure entertainment videos with goofing around.

Gamers Nexus' take:
https://youtube.com/watch/...
https://youtube.com/watch/...

I had a config option where some shit would either be dimmed down or switched off. I called them "fade-out" and "hard-off" in UI and documentation.

Luckily, it dawned on me in time that I'd better rename the latter option to "cut-off".

With the shitty weather, WFH is quite attractive this year.

The Pythagorean theorem is pretty important. You should be able to represent it graphically because it shows that you are a thinking creature to the point of math.

Works also if you have no other common basis for communication, not even mimics. That might well save you from a live autopsy in case you get abducted by aliens because it would make them curious.

Red Hat lashes out against Red Hat clones: https://redhat.com/en/blog/...
Alma Linux caught off guard: https://almalinux.org/blog/...

Xmas party, held at an external location. After some drinks, a co-worker whom I was friends with started flirting up one of the waitresses. Now, he was tall, well-trained, and quite attractive for women. It was just that he also was married and had a child.

I quietly sought out that waitress and told her about that, asking her to turn him down because nothing good would come out of that. She appreciated it and stayed out of his way.

Felt kind of back-stabbing him, but at the same time, also saving his ass from himself.

Installing a GPU is easy - except if it doesn't fit in the case. I had to saw off 3cm of the upper, 5.25" bay. Just removing the bay cage entirely was not an option because I still need that for my DVD drive.

My bow saw wouldn't have enough space, and the cage is riveted. So despite terrible ergonomics, I used the metal saw of a fucking Swiss Army knife for 24cm of cut length through 1mm steel. Then I filed off the cuts so that I won't injure myself later.

However, I was too lazy to take out the mobo and shit, so I protected it professionally against potential metal dust - with a towel.

Friday 13th. Superstition.

0655, got WFH laptop going. 0700, VPN'ed in. Bluescreen, first in ages. Yes, Windows, the hatred is mutual. Rebooted. Windows claimed memory fault, offered check, 40 minutes. Noped out. Started machine. VPN'ed in. Some strange script error that I'd never seen before. Rebooted. Script error again. Shut down machine, then rebooted, same problem. 0715, fuck, still wearing sweaters, my e-scooter not charged, and an important Teams call at 0800.

Got dressed, stuffed laptop into backpack, hurried up by foot. Took the bus. Fuck, the next connection on the change station just had gone off. Took a taxi to make it. Arrived at the company, plugged in the laptop, started with no issues. Had the important call.

Took the laptop to IT. Tested it with external network connection and VPN. Worked with no script error. Had it checked for RAM issues. No issue. WTF had happened in the morning?!

PyTorch.

2018: uh, what happens when someone uses a same name attack? - No big deal. https://github.com/pypa/pip/...
2020: I think that's a security issue. - Nanana, it's not. https://github.com/pypa/pip/...
2022: malicious package extracts sensitive user data on nightly. https://bleepingcomputer.com/news/...

You had years to react, you clowns.

So, this is 2023, a year with a prime number, Windows updates will be fast, the Linux desktop will have a breakthrough, and AMD will have 25% dGPU market share.

Tried to use chatGPT. These motherfuckers want a phone number. Yeah no assholes, fuck you.

Gamers Nexus has a really unique benchmark for the new AMD GPUs where AMD actually manages to pull ahead of Nvidia:

So the tests for the AMD RX 7000 GPUs are out. Business as usual: superb for non-RT gaming given the price, crap at everything else - including energy efficiency in FPS/W.

Pro tip to the AMD marketing: you don't highlight features like energy where you suck relative to the competition. You point out your strong points. Admittedly, you don't have much to work with here.

Interesting: how to hack websites right upon installation. Basically, monitoring issued TLS certificates and trying to access e.g. WordPress installations before the user was able to configure a password.

That relies on a sloppy deployment process, of course - like making a live installation that is online immediately.

Source: https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/...

Nvidia at it again. After receiving backlash for trying to pass off a 4070 as 4080/12GB, und "unlaunching" it, they did the same shit again.

This time with a 3060/8GB. Yes, as RTX 3060, a well established product with a lot of reviews, intentionally misleading the customers who think that a 3060 is always the regular 12GB model. And the new shit isn't even cheaper.

The main issue isn't the reduced amount of VRAM, it's cutting down the memory bus from 192 to 128 bits, that costs quite some performance.

So if you see a 3060 and think it might be a bargain, watch out that you don't accidentally end up with the "bait and switch" 8GB model.

Or even better, consider a 6650 XT that is both faster and cheaper than a 3060, and RT is lackluster on the small RTX cards anyway.

I got two lines of code done today, and they were just changing numeric defines. Time to do that: 2 seconds.

Time for analysing the measurement data of various runs in order to know which numbers will work out: the rest of the day.

Ever heard of the broken windows theory?

Here we go: Windows is broken!

​​​​​​

My GPU blocks the airflow from the lower front intake fan to the CPU, so I wanted to have a fan in the 5.25" drive bay directly targeting the CPU.

While that bay fits a 140mm fan nicely, there was no mounting point. I ended up making four fan struts out of the metal covers for the 5.25" inserts, the ones that you wiggle out. Drilled holes into the case, a bit of foam above and below the fan to seal the larger gaps, and done.

The trick is ofc that the 5.25" case covers are meshed and hence act both as air intake and dust filter. The CPU runs a few K cooler under load.

Trained model with L2 regularisation. Didn't really see much of a difference to L1. Checked everything again... turned out I had re-run the L1 setup instead of the L2. *facepalm*

Haha - whoever says Azure is totally fine unless people are too stupid to configure it might want to think again. Apparently, that shit is so difficult to configure securely that even Microsoft fails to do it: https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/202...

Google cripples ad and tracking blockers: In January, Chromium will switch to Manifest V3 which removes an essential API in favour of an inferior one. As usually, Google is being deceitful and touts security concerns as pretext.

That hits all Chromium based browser, such as my beloved Vivaldi. The team argues with their own browser internal blocker, but that's far worse than uBlock Origin. One of Vivaldi's core promises was privacy, and that will go out of the window. The team simply doesn't react to people pointing that out. They're fucked, and they know it.

So what now? Well, going back to Firefox because that will include the crippled new API for extension compatibility, but also keep the powerful old one specifically so that ad and tracking blockers will keep working. Google has just handed Mozilla a major unique selling point, and miraculously, Mozilla didn't fuck it up.

Fuck you, Nvidia. Uhm no, this time not from Torvalds, but EVGA: they're fed up with Nvidia's antics towards their AIB partners. No 4000 series EVGA GPUs anymore.

Source: https://forums.evga.com/Official-Me...

25 years Judgement Day! 🥳

Linux Mint 21 has been released! 🥳

Details: https://blog.linuxmint.com

WOOOOOSH!

Did you see him? That's the superhero we need and deserve: Weekendman!