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As an example of this, Sarah Langs uses a synthesized voice due to the progression of her ALS symptoms.

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

You seem to just be extrapolating based on old information and bad comparisons. Click through the $269 link. The M2 listing redirects to an Intel Mac mini model.

Apple trade-in value is currently $565 for the base 16GB/256GB M4 mini. (up from $480 a couple weeks ago)

https://i.imgur.com/9qgKSZd.png

I paid $500 for it. Why would I sell it to you for $300?

jolanon The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)

They are very close in benchmarks. https://i.imgur.com/Bk5Dcfb.jpeg

I think we will continue to see some performance improvements for both systems over the next coming months.

It works great if you turn the BC-250 on, play games, and turn it off.

By jank, I mean it's not a streamlined console experience like the Steam Machine. There's no suspend/resume and the idle power is quite high. If you want wifi/bluetooth, you'll have to pick a chipset well supported by Linux. (I use ethernet and a steam controller). If you want USB ports and a power button in the front like a console would have, you'll have to pick a solution for those. Carefully read over the options for power and cooling. They're very important if you're going for max performance. All the little extras add to the over-all cost as well.

https://mosfet.party/ sells a bunch of BC-250 add-ons to give you an idea of price and options.

jolanon The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)

I bought one while waiting to see if my Steam Machine reservation would be fulfilled.

I paid ~$186 shipped for the board on eBay 5 weeks ago. I use an ATX power supply and NVMe that I had laying around and I printed a big case for it[0].

I seem to have gotten a good one as it has no problems after unlocking the extra CPU/GPU cores.

I run vanilla Arch on mine configured to boot into Steam. The jank factor is pretty high but it does trade blows with the Steam Machine for a fraction of the price.[1]

I did end up going through with the purchase of a 512GB Steam Machine for $1160 w/tax and swapped in a 2TB NVMe. It is definitely a more polished/living room-ready product and I'm happy with the hardware but it's definitely a questionable value.

It's worth reading over the docs[2] first before committing. There are lots of options for cooling, storage, and power supplies. Just depends on what you want to get out of it and how much time you want to invest in it. There are pre-made images so you don't necessarily need to be a Linux expert but it would help if you want to stay on top of the latest developments. There is still on-going work to get even more performance[3]

- [0] https://www.printables.com/model/1789618-bc-250-atx-case-dua...

- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Sw1SdU9buQ

- [2] https://elektricm.github.io/amd-bc250-docs/

- [3] https://github.com/lonewolf0622/BC250-Native-Mesh-Shaders-

jolanon Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

Cloudflare offers domain registration/renewal with no markup if you're looking for an option. I moved to them after AWS increased fees.

jolanon Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

Tony Chen from Microsoft gave a talk called "Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story" and he explains that they want any sort of physical attack to cost at least the price of 10 games ($600 at the time).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo&t=715s

jolanon Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

This attack is on the early models that didn't have those protections enabled. The researcher surmised that later models do indeed have anti-glitching mechanisms enabled.

jolanon Amazon EC2 M9g Instances

FYI, it's been almost two years since us-east-1-chi-2 launched and it's still missing on the site. Any reason for this? Kind of feels like local zones are a 2nd class citizen even at AWS itself.

Thank you for maintaining this, I do use it every few months at $DAYJOB and it's quite useful for my capacity/deployment planning.

jolanon Andrej Karpathy's YC AI SUS talk on the future of the industry

I think he meant the audio output itself sounds like an infomercial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfr4BP4V1R8

jolanon The Toyota Prius transformed the auto industry

This is a great series by a Toyota mechanic:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeFzfl0Q8rQUOHwFNOMTu...

He goes into the practicalities of owning/maintaining/repairing as well as the engineering.

jolanon Hardware Security Exploit Research – Xbox 360

Yes that revision is patched to specifically counter RGH. Microsoft disabled the ability to get the precise timing needed from the CPU and also added more filtering/robustness so the system will reset properly instead of getting into the inconsistent state of the old revisions.

jolanon Hardware Security Exploit Research – Xbox 360

The Winchester revision is still considered unhackable afaik. It's crazy how many Xbox 360 revisions there were compared to other consoles.

jolanon OpenWRT One Released: First Router Designed Specifically for OpenWrt

If you want a more polished product, GL.iNet's Flint 2 is almost identical, has more ports, and runs stock OpenWrt just fine:

https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-mt6000

jolanon Private Cloud Compute Security Guide

https://x.com/_saagarjha/status/1804130898482466923

https://x.com/frogandtoadbook/status/1734575421792920018

jolanon “Absurd”: Google, Amazon rebuked over unsupported Chromebooks still for sale

Would be great if EOL models could be officially transitioned to ChromeOS Flex in some way.

jolanon Wi-Fi 6 is designed to reduce congestion from devices

Yes, WiFi 6 has a lot of major improvements to reduce latency.

Intel has a good write up here:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/resources/wif...

jolanon L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

52% of Swedish households are 1 person households[1] so they were sort of self-isolating by default. As you can see from the other replies, that wasn't enough to keep transmission at bay.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...

jolanon AMD Threadripper 3970X under heavy AVX2 load: Defective by design?

I picked the ASRock X570 Taichi since I needed 3 PCIe slots and it was on sale for ~$260. Very happy with it and yeah I'm not overclocking or using any of the quasi-overclock settings either.

jolanon AMD Threadripper 3970X under heavy AVX2 load: Defective by design?

I see similar behavior with a 105W 3950X when running prime95. I haven't experienced instability otherwise over the 2 months I've had this build running.

Google's stressapptest runs fine for long durations, building a kernel with make -j32 succeeds (and can boot it), every parallelized archiver like 7z,pbzip2,pigz,xz is ok, and even gaming on a Windows VM using 8c/16t + GPU passthrough works well.

This is my first Ryzen system so I chalked it up to a possible carry over of DDR4 issues from earlier generations. I didn't investigate further since the 3950x had just been released and I couldn't find any other reports of prime95-only instability until now. And just to reiterate, it is perfectly stable otherwise.

Heavy AVX2 workload breaking things fits better so will have to try to collect more data.

jolanon Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

You can verify whether you received a genuine key at:

https://www.yubico.com/genuine/

jolanon VSCodium: Binary releases of VSCode without MS branding, telemetry and licensing

If you want to send as little data as possible to Microsoft there are other settings to consider:

        "telemetry.enableCrashReporter": false,
        "code-runner.enableAppInsights": false,
        "update.channel": "none",
        "extensions.autoUpdate": false,
        "extensions.ignoreRecommendations": true,
        "workbench.settings.enableNaturalLanguageSearch": false

jolanon Intel Has a Big Problem

Is there an embargo? Is it a silly play on the James Bond reference that Spectre represented? Either way pretty funny since you can't know for sure after this fiasco.

Botched micro code updates, Intel engineers arguing with each other on the linux kernel mailing list, etc. Intel's best and brightest have had 6+ months to work on proper mitigations in secret and this is the result.

https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=151559244214217&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=151559367514704&w=2

jolanon Intel Has a Big Problem

It's not even close to being over -- https://skyfallattack.com/

jolanon Linux 4.7 Released

The RX480 w/AMDGPU-PRO works pretty well in most cases for desktop/gaming/OpenCL use.

AMD's Linux team is in the middle of a big push to modernize the driver and software stack. It seems they consider it a mostly working preliminary version.

You can choose-your-own-adventure with the totally open amdgpu+mesa stack or use the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO. You can follow development of the open source parts on this mailing list:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/

I do agree with others that NVIDIA is a better choice if you want something that just works and you don't care about proprietary vs. open source.

jolanon Tor Exit Nodes in Libraries – Pilot

> no hassle (if not an exit)

Not 100% true, your server's IP will be banned along side the IPs of exit nodes. It seems a lot of blacklists don't bother to make the distinction.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/2abne1/hulu_blocked_af...

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/doc/ListOf...

jolanon Who's doing this to my internet?

Just reeks of being a whiny niche webfotainment consumer.

> I've really loved listening to SoundCloud over the past couple years since mainstream radio sucks, for the same reasons that mainstream TV used to (needing to target the lowest common denominator so as to not upset advertisers.)

Boohoo, now my favorite sites are going mainstream since I spend hours on their sites/consuming their bandwidth and they need to cover costs.

Alexa time on site:

facebook: 21:23 reddit: 18:30 youtube: 17:52 tumblr: 12:46 twitter: 7:41 soundcloud: 4:24

That's an hour and a half of a person's day.

> There have to be business models that allow the creativity of sites like XKCD, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, to flourish. There has to be a way to save the walled garden of bland banality that the internet is becoming.

But you're still going to these sites despite the banality.

> Who's doing this to my internet?

You are.

> But most importantly, who will solve it?

Consider nominating yourself.

jolanon Intel delays chip-making changes

IIRC, upcoming to Xeon Skylake processors not mainstream ones.

jolanon Intel delays chip-making changes

I hope Intel uses this pause to implement things like DJB's suggestions for the Intel instruction set:

http://blog.cr.yp.to/20140517-insns.html

jolanon Match Group Buys PlentyOfFish for $575M

Not sure how major they are but there's Coffee Meets Bagel as well. They got some traction from being on Shark Tank.

jolanon Google Takes Stricter Approach to Costs

Firefox for Android + your favorite extension will work.