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You probably know the "marshmellow experiment": have one marshmellow now, or delay the gratification by some time, then get two. What the experiment is supposed to measure is something like intelligence or impulse control.

Hot take: what it also measures, and much more so when it comes to reality, is trust. If I don't trust the other side to be both able and willing to deliver on the promise later, I will rather secure the smaller reward right now.

So AMD is introducing new CPUs with NPUs, aka Ryzen AI, for inferencing, but only for some of the lineup, making Ryzen AI even less relevant.

Not to mention that AMD comes up with new HW that nobody knows how to use, that no SW exists for, and...

Oh, wait. Making AI capable HW while completely failing on the SW side. Now it makes sense. It's just AMD being AMD.

New GitHub Copilot Research Finds 'Downward Pressure on Code Quality': https://visualstudiomagazine.com/ar...

No shit, who would have thought that automated garbage generation could hamper quality?

Last day of our current Indian offshore dev. Talked with her about an issue we had, being aware that it was about her closing time.

She actually offered to put in additional time. Asked her not to do that, I'd figure things out with her successor, and asked her to enjoy her well-deserved long Indian weekend.

Me to my PM: we're chaotic, but we aren't assholes. He smiled. :)

How I confused an Indian co-worker.
I noticed that his office desk was using a multi-outlet power strip connected to another one, and then one more after that, because the cable length was too short.
Me: pointing out that this is not allowed in our company.
Him: dafuq-look.
Me: yeah, electrical safety, we need to replace this. Gonna ask IT whether they have something (they did), replaced it.
Him: different dafuq-look.
Me: I guess that's the most German thing you've run into, right?
Him: uh, yes, but I can see the point. :)

JS devs be like...

Interesting read: https://observablehq.com/@eeeps/...

TL;DR: Diminishing returns from higher smartphone resolutions. The visual jump from 1x images to 2x is huge, but more than 2x res images in the img/picture scrset isn't worth the additional loading time.

Happy new year, and those last of us running truly static websites: change your footer year!

That's funny: Pagespeed says that google.com has SEO issues.

Splash pages. Remember that crap from 20 years ago? That was a home page with some "click to enter" nonsense to get to the actual home page. Laughably stupid.

Today's empty home pages where you have to scroll down to get to any real content is exactly the same moronic pattern, just by another name: showing off useless design wankery and forcing user interaction to bypass it. Fuck you if you still do that shit.

Customer demands some complicated shit be done within a few hours to align with their schedule.
Me: this is not aligned with reality.
Customer: ...

Bootcrap. Just looked at their main page, and it's a whopping 75k of markup plus 294k of CSS (W-T-F?!), and 224k of JS. All of that shit for a page that shouldn't be more than 10k of markup, 16k of CSS, and that has no reason to even use JS at all.

<a class="d-flex flex-column flex-lg-row justify-content-center align-items-center mb-4 text-dark lh-sm text-decoration-none

Yeah, that crap is supposed to be "easier" to write. That's what you get for totally failing to understand how HTML/CSS even work, clinging to late 1990s practices, and ditching decades of progress since then.

Although the Bootcrap folks do manage to write valid HTML. As low as that sounds, but that counts already as an exceptional skill in the notoriously low-skilled frontend "dev" world that is all about making shitty websites.

Oh, and the rest like Failwind and Bulimia aren't any better. They already fail at delivering valid HTML on their websites.

If you ever get bored with how far Linux has come these days, there is a solution: BSD. That shit catapults you easily back by 25 years.

So if Arch isn't shitty enough for your desire as late born and you really want to know what a piece of crap Linux was in the late 90s, have a look at BSD.

"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: