farlight

As a long time desktop and server user, why do I look at changelogs...

New filesystems and major changes to existing ones (large performance improvements, new features like adding better compression standards which I now know I can use, fixes to long-standing bugs which open new use cases).

New protocols like wireguard when it was new and exciting (still is now that I think of it). When that was mainlined, I knew I had some network rearchitecting to do.

New device drivers like amdgpu when it was massive news. Less so these days since most hardware is well supported, and I don't buy the absolute latest.

New kernel APIs which I can use in my programs — like landlock, when it was merged I knew it was time to improve sandboxing in some of my stuff.

Though LWN and kernel newbies do it best, already linked by others.

Recent MySQL comes with a rewritten optimizer (which they call "hypergraph") that will soon become the default, but you can already use if you want to.

One application I'm working on (CRUD, but with fairly complicated business logic) is seeing large performance improvements, especially on reports which join many rows from 10+ tables.

I regularly test the same dataset on both PostgreSQL and MySQL -- we support both, and this new optimizer puts them pretty close.

The current default optimizer has some pathological cases where reports run 8-10 times slower on MySQL compared to PostgreSQL. Not with this one.

https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/the-hypergraph-optimizer-is-n...

They use US customary, not imperial, they're slightly different sets of units.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units

git rerere will resolve repeated conflicts for you automatically, you just need to enable it.

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-rerere

The only game hack I've ever discovered by myself (by being too cowardly to proceed through the main route when I was little, wasting time instead on the unatco base, and mindlessly throwing grenades around).

It doesn't work anymore in modern mods I've played through; they've patched it.

I am in Asia, this means nothing, it's the largest continent on earth. I don't pay as much for shipping as the author does, but his struggles are nevertheless relatable: most sellers refuse to ship here, most of those who do want dozens and dozens of dollars for it, and some (few, usually Chinese) sellers save the situation from being completely hopeless.

They were significantly more expensive for coding compared to DeepSeek's offering because of much higher cost of cache reads and lower cache hit rate. Now, after the price jump, the effective cost of deepseek.com API vs 3-rd party providers is about the same.

Thank you for bringing that up, such a rarity for this place to remember the other 80% of the world.

As someone from just such a country, DeepSeek 0731 was the first time I seriously started using an LLM for coding. All previous attempts were useless or ridiculously expensive.

Can't say the old prices felt "free", but it was affordable if you're careful with your cache hit rate.

The new pricing probably pushed it into the unaffordable territory for tasks where you can do without it. Probably will try opencode go if they don't also follow suite, or will have to go back to wetware.