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drewg123on Hetzner Price Adjustment

The AI bubble has increased the prices of nand and ram by a factor of 4, so a 3x increase seems reasonable. Companies that are not big enough to have long term contracts with ram/nand vendors have been hit really, really hard by this.

drewg123on I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of

It would be great if there was a list of OSes in the collection.

drewg123on The Emacsification of Software

This really resonates with me. The ability to quickly writing one off, personalized apps really seems to be the strong suite of GenAI.

A month or so ago, I had claude write a visualizer for some data. There is an existing python viewer, but it bogs down & is painfully slow at the scale I need. So I asked Claude to port it to a compiled language. After 2 hours of iterating, I had the tool that I wanted.

Note that its throwaway, dumpster fire code. But for a one-off tool like that, its fine.

drewg123on You can beat the binary search

One thing that makes me nervous about the increased use of SIMD in new ways is that more processes will be using SIMD. This, in turn, make context switches that much more expensive as the SIMD registers must be saved and restored when switching to a new process that also uses SIMD.

drewg123on Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen

At least in the US, its hard to find single-purpose over the counter medicines. Most "cold" remedies now also include acetaminophen. So that makes it easier to OD on acetaminophen if you take some by itself and then don't realize that your cough syrup also includes it. I think this (bundling acetaminophen) should be banned for safety reasons.

drewg123on Kernel code removals driven by LLM-created security reports

Linux is actively hostile to out-of-tree drivers. There is no stable driver API, and interfaces change at the drop of a hat. Maintaining an out of tree driver is a constant nightmare where you're always dealing with interfaces changing out from under you.

I wrote and maintained 10GbE drivers for a small company in the 2000s, and just the SHIM file for our driver on Linux to massage over API differences was well over 1000 lines. I think it was close to the same size as the entire driver for one of the BSDs.

drewg123on Bluesky April 2026 Outage Post-Mortem

Golang's use of a potentially unbounded number of threads is just insane. I used to be fairly bullish on golang, but this, combined with the fact that its garbage collected, makes me feel its just unsuitable for production use.

drewg123on HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)

I'll always despise them (and their Itanium) for killing the DEC Alpha CPU off after they acquired it along with Compaq.

drewg123on [dead]

Not really a fuck up, but I was having it translate from a hardware spec into a C header file, and for page 00h of a register bank, it started naming things "P00", so enum fields were named like:

CMIS_P00_ID = 128, /* SFF-8024 Identifier copy */"

drewg123on Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

I'm the demographic. I became vegan a several years ago when I was in my late 40s for health reasons -- all males in my family my age or older have had multiple heart attacks except for me. I didn't become vegan because I like eating salads. I miss the taste of meat, and beyond does a decent job of it (Impossible is far better).

If animal agriculture was not subsidized, I expect plant based "meats" would be on par or cheaper than real meat.

drewg123on Hisense TVs add unskippable startup ads before live TV

I don't have a reference, but I remember reading that some Samsung TVs require internet access to get past initial setup and allow access to HDMI. So we might already be here..

drewg123on FreeBSD 14.4-Release Announcement

If you're installing FreeBSD today, use 15.0

Or just run -current in production, like we do. See https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf

Or https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/fosdem/looney-netflix_and_fr...

drewg123on Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability

Do they still block third party PCIe (eg, wifi) devices in their firmware?

drewg123on Linuxulator on FreeBSD Feels Like Magic

The best way to run linux compat on FreeBSD is in an Linux jail. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxJails

The difference is that with the standard linuxulator, the linux env. is maintained by the FreeBSD package manager, and can sometimes be out of date. Further, the standard linux compat package will install a red hat based distro, which is often not the easiest to deal with in terms of compat with random things you might want to run. I often found I had libraries that were either missing, or were a version out of date when trying to run stuff with linux compat from packages/ports. With a linux jail, you can install an ubuntu based distro & let it keep itself up to date via apt.

drewg123on An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review

What speed is the PCIe slot? The Minisforum site talks about it being x8, but doesn't mention if its Gen4 or Gen5

drewg123on Why vampires live forever

So maybe they were on to something with leeches?

drewg123on Parking lots as economic drains

In a large metro with an extant, functional, mass transit system, sure. But do this in a cold place with no existing mass transit, and all you'll do is kill off downtown businesses and reduce property values to 0.

This experiment was kind of done in Buffalo in the 70s. They blocked off large swathes of downtown to build the above ground section of metro rail. This encouraged business to close downtown locations and move to suburban malls. That kind of retail never came back to downtown in the roughly 1 decade after completion of the metro. So you had a mass transit system that went effectively from nowhere to nowhere, and managed to kill the downtown retail corridor.

drewg123on Can you slim macOS down?

I'm a power user. I do FreeBSD kernel performance work for Netflix.

I have a macbook as my work laptop. I use it as a dumb terminal to my FreeBSD desktop, a platform for corp. video conferencing, and to surf the web. Any actual work happens on my desktop (Unless I'm working on something arm64 specific, and am using a VM on the laptop ... but then I'm probably ssh'ed in from my desktop.

Why the macbook? I have never gotten along with Windows (have tried on a few separate occasions). And I'm too lazy to put effort into getting Linux running well on a laptop, since that would still be just a dumb terminal for FreeBSD dev. And I'm not enough of a masochist to run FreeBSD on a laptop. So the macbook is the path of least resistance. It works well as a laptop (suspend / resume, connects to random wifi) and comes with a terminal and ssh client that require zero effort to get working.

drewg123on Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

What gets me is the "play/pause" button behavior on a firestick remote. How many presses of play/pause would you think it takes to pause then resume playing? 2? Oh, no. Its 4! Pressing play/pause on the remote brings up the UI, like a mouse-over on some crappy web-player. You have to hit pause twice to actually pause the video. Then play again brings up the UI, then you have to hit it again to play again.

And don't even get me started on the times where the app opens and plays OK. Then you go to ff/rw and all it will let you do is pause. So you have to re-start the app to get control. Then it forgets where you are.

drewg123on Vietnam bans unskippable ads

they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion

I wonder how much risk there is to brands due to this sort of thing? I tend to feel the same way; are we just uncommon?

The only place I see ads is Amazon Prime Video (b/c I'm still irked they changed the deal and added ads). I've come to hate those companies whose ads I see over and over and over again and I've resolved to never buy anything from them. I even used one of their products regularly and switched to a competitor due to their ads.

drewg123on Show HN: DoNotNotify – Log and intelligently block notifications on Android

Is there anything like this for iOS? Or is something like this impossible for a 3rd party to do on iOS?

drewg123on It's Always TCP_NODELAY

From a CDN perspective, whats missing is there is no kernel stack on FreeBSD / Linux, and no support for sendfile/sendpage and no support for segmentation offload entirely in hardware. So you can't just send an entire file (or a large range) and forget about it, like you can with TCP.

Some NICs, like Broadcom's newer ones, support crypto offloads, but this is not enough to be competitive with TCP / TLS. Especially since support for those offloads are not in any mainline kernel in Linux or BSD.

drewg123on iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

Third-party accessories like smart watches will be able to receive notifications from the iPhone

This seems incorrect, or at least misleading. I have always (since I switched to iPhone in 2020) been receive notifications on my Garmin Fenix watch. In fact, the only problem I have with notifications is that I have no ability to blacklist apps from notifying on my watch, and its all or nothing. This is a huge downgrade from Android, and I wish whomever is responsible could fix that.. That's probably my biggest annoyance with my iphone.

drewg123on It's Always TCP_NODELAY

There is nothing magic about the congestion control in QUIC. It shares a lot with TCP BBR.

Unlike TLS over TCP, QUIC is still not able to be offloaded to NICs. And most stacks are in userspace. So it is horrifically expensive in terms of watts/byte or cycles/byte sent for a CDN workload (something like 8x as a expensive the last time I looked), and its primarily used and advocated for by people who have metrics for latency, but not server side costs.

drewg123on An SVG is all you need

I hate that slack doesn't support svg. So we end up taking screenshots of svg flame graphs when discussing things.

drewg123on Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux

Thank you. I was shopping for a TV to use as a display device for an Apple TV. I was considering a Samsung, but now I no longer am.

drewg123on Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

My desktop progression has been 1989: twm 1995: ctwm 2000: kde 2022: lxde

I moved from ctwm to kde because they accepted a patch that allowed me to maintain some modifier/mouse shortcuts I had configured in twm. Gnome rejected my patch

Moved to lxde because kde got too complex and hard to deal with

Still run tcsh with a .cshrc migrated from one i cloned from a friend at university

I’ve been on a bsd based workstation since the 80s with a few years on Mac and linux. Sunos->ultrix->osf/1 -> FreeBSD (on alpha) -> FreeBSD i386 -> macOS x -> Ubuntu-> FreeBSD/amd64

drewg123on John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote:

When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am..

And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream.

Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.

drewg123on SmartTube Compromised

It has a far better user interface than the official YT interface. And that interface can be heavily customized to your exact preferences.

My wife has YT Premium, and we find ourselves watching YT in SmartTube just because the interface is so much better.

drewg123on A vision of chocolate's future in an Amsterdam brownie

I regularly consume impossible, and use it in pretty much any recipe that calls for ground beef.