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mastax

6,420 karma · joined January 15, 2015

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mastax··on America's Cyber Defense Agency Is Burning Down and Nobody's Coming to Put It Out
Then we must repeal the state laws criminalizing electors not voting in line with the states popular vote allocation, and directly elect electors to ensure they are people of sound morals and judgement rather than partisan hacks. Because at the moment the electoral college serves no function besides distorting the popular vote. Any other possible function has been removed by law.
mastax··on Intel will start making GPUs
Intel has been using a fair bit of TSMC in their CPU manufacturing recently, yes. Most recently they’ve been assembling “tiles” of silicon from many process nodes into a single CPU package and IIRC they have been using TSMC for the GPU tiles.
mastax··on The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal
The passage of the alien and sedition acts without constitutional amendment disproves that idea.
mastax··on Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
Withdrawing permits for in construction offshore wind projects, and forcing utilities to keep operating coal plants they want to shut down is picking winners and losers.
mastax··on Unity's Mono problem: C# code runs slower than it should
Does unity have source generators support? Could make for a good alternative to reflection.
mastax··on Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out
Plenty of blame to go around.

Probably the worst thing MS did was kill GitHub’s nascent CI project and replace it with Azure DevOps. Though to be fair the fundamental flaws with that approach didn’t really become apparent for a few years. And GitHub’s feature development pace was far too slow compared to its competitors at the time. Of course GitHub used to be a lot more reliable…

Now they’re cramming in half baked AI stuff everywhere but that’s hardly a MS specific sin.

MS GitHub has been worse about DMCA and sanctioned country related takedowns than I remember pre acquisition GitHub being.

Did I miss anything?

mastax··on Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash
https://www.reuters.com/business/nvidias-huang-joins-tech-ti...
mastax··on FPGAs Need a New Future
My prediction is one of the Chinese FPGA makers will embrace open source, hire a handful of talented open source contributors, and within a handful of years end up with tooling that is way easier to use for hobbyists, students, and small businesses. They use this as an inroad and slowly move upmarket. Basically the Espressif strategy.

Xilinx, Altera, and Lattice are culturally incapable of doing this. For lattice especially it seems like a no brainer but they don’t understand the appeal of open source still.

mastax··on Getting bitten by Intel's poor naming schemes
Also technically the code names are only for unreleased products so on ark it’ll say “products formerly Ice Lake” but the intel will continue to calm them Ice Lake.
mastax··on Rust GCC backend: Why and how
> On that note: GCC doesn't provide a nice library to give access to its internals (unlike LLVM). So we have to use libgccjit which, unlike the "jit" ("just in time", meaning compiling sub-parts of the code on the fly, only when needed for performance reasons and often used in script languages like Javascript) part in its name implies, can be used as "aot" ("ahead of time", meaning you compile everything at once, allowing you to spend more time on optimization).

Is libgccjit not “a nice library to give access to its internals?”

mastax··on Jujutsu worktrees are convenient (2024)
You push branch A, then switch to branch B and start working on that. CI failed on branch A, so you stash branch B and switch back to branch A to fix it.
mastax··on Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices
You may be shocked to hear that there are no seas in the Himalayas.
mastax··on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros
People were happy when Netflix was the streaming service and it cost $7.99. People will be unhappy if Netflix is the streaming service and it costs $159.99. The glory days were only possible because the streaming market didn’t matter.
mastax··on The RAM shortage comes for us all
> And those companies all realized they can make billions more dollars making RAM just for AI datacenter products, and neglect the rest of the market.

> So they're shutting down their consumer memory lines, and devoting all production to AI.

Okay this was the missing piece for me. I was wondering why AI demand, which should be mostly HBM, would have such an impact on DDR prices, which I’m quite sure are produced on separate lines. I’d appreciate a citation so I could read more.

mastax··on Inside Rust's std and parking_lot mutexes – who wins?
You can pass the mutex by value and it does continue to protect its value.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

mastax··on Blender 5.0
Yeah, KiCad has improved immensely in the past 5 years. It still has a long way to go to really compete with Altium et. al. though. The thing is: Altium is basically finished software. They keep trying to add features to it but I'm certain if you polled the users the only thing they really want is fewer crashes and bugs. Every year KiCad gets closer and closer.
mastax··on Mysterious drones have been spotted at airports across Europe
Have they been conclusively spotted? With evidence? Sorry I only skimmed the article. Until there is, I’m going to keep believing it’s some sort of mass delusion like UFO sightings. Not because I think some sort of drone attack is particularly unlikely, but because these sorts of mass delusions are evidently very common - like happened in New Jersey.
mastax··on Steam Frame
Why are you assuming the fob would use the same WiFi channel as your regular 6GHz network? That would be extremely poor channel selection.
mastax··on My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4
He lives in Switzerland. $3K barely pays for a lunch and an espresso.
mastax··on Ubiquiti SFP Wizard
I made the same conclusions but got burned with Omada. Cheaper, yes, but fewer features and buggier than Unifi (and that’s a pretty low bar). I migrated back to Unifi.
mastax··on System.LongBool
Don’t they use int-size bools in Solaris? I think I remember seeing those in ZFS.
mastax··on WebDAV isn't dead yet
Relatedly, is there a good way to expose a directory of files via the S3 API? I could only find alpha quality things like rclone serve s3 and things like garage which have their own on disk format rather than regular files.
mastax··on Harnessing America's heat pump moment
Isn’t it important to right-size non-heat-pump installs anyway? Too large a system causes short cycling, humidity problems, temperature swings. I have read installers habitually guesstimate over size to over charge (rather than do the proper calculations).
mastax··on Typst 0.14
> Meanwhile, in HTML and SVG export, PDFs are converted to an embedded SVG on-the-fly. And, finally, in PNG export and the web app preview, PDFs are rasterized. All of this PDF processing functionality lives right in the Typst compiler, with no system dependencies. This is only possible thanks to the amazing work of community member @LaurenzV, who created a new PDF processing library called hayro from scratch. The library is 100% written in the programming language Rust (which is also the language we use for the Typst compiler) and is thus highly portable.

Wow! That must’ve been quite an effort.

mastax··on US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety
If you were trying to evaluate that code deployed willy nilly in the wider world, sure. But that code exists within a framework which is deliberately limiting rollout in order to reduce risk. What matters is the performance of the combined code and risk management framework, which has proven to be quite good.

Airbus A320s wouldn’t be very safe if we let Joe Schmo off the street fly them however he likes, but we don’t. An A320 piloted within a regulated commercial aviation regime is very safe.

What matters is the safety of the entire system including the non-technological parts.

mastax··on OpenMaxIO: Forked UI for MinIO Object Storage
MinIO has gotten rid of the admin UI from the OSS version and is erasing documentation. Even if they stop here that's enough to need a community fork, but I don't expect them to stop here. Their obvious intent is for the OSS version to only be useful as a trial version of the commercial paid product.
mastax··on US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces
Up to 2025 they maintained a reasonable facade of impartiality. During Trump's first term they told him no a lot.
mastax··on Farming Hard Drives (2012)
I don't think it is immoral to purchase products from retail stores.
mastax··on The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)
> While that provides a plausible origin story, it doesn't stand to reason why the 2.4 GHz carrier frequency has been sustained for so long. For toy or prototype purposes, sure, the FCC could say "put them next to the microwave ovens." But Wi-Fi is, at this point, a critical national security utility, or even as you put it yourself, "serious business."

Yes, but it started out as a little experiment using the scraps of free spectrum available while wireless carriers were paying billions for spectrum licenses. As WiFi has gotten more and more critical, the FCC and industry have worked to overcome many different technical and regulatory challenges to make more and more spectrum available to WiFi notably the 5GHz, 6GHz, 45GHz, and 60GHz bands. The FCC has a financial incentive to not make more unlicensed spectrum available (when they could charge license fees for it instead) and under your theory they'd have national security incentives to keep everything on 2.4GHz as well. Yet they keep making more and more spectrum available unlicensed to WiFi anyway because it's just that important now.

> Logically, that's one of the most energy-inefficient frequencies one could choose, and a terrible design choice for personal wireless communication technology.

That is just not true. 2.4GHz works great for WiFi, that's why it's still being used. It penetrates walls pretty well while still being able to handle a decent data rate. Furthermore, all radio frequencies are absorbed by the body, and 2.4 GHz does not have any special higher absorption rate from what I can see. The actual resonance is at about 80MHz: http://niremf.ifac.cnr.it/docs/HANDBOOK/chp3-3-1.htm#336

I don't find it hard to believe that the government has an interest in using radios for through wall imaging/surveillance purposes but the idea that that had some influence on the decision to use 2.4GHz radio for wifi in 2025 doesn't fit the evidence. Additionally, they'd need to have receivers spread around to be able to capture this surveillance data so they could also spread transmitters around at whatever frequency suits their fancy. They don't need to use WiFi for that.

mastax··on Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout
Google Adsense is an intermediary between advertisers and websites. It operates an auction where advertisers compete to pay the highest for the space (squeezing advertisers) then it determines how large of a cut it can take before paying the websites (squeezing websites).
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