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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Quite the contrary! They effectively sell their cards at a ~20% discount to a bunch of AI companies by “investing” in the companies for a promise to use that money to buy their cards.

    It’s as dumb as it sounds and textbook unsustainable economic bubble behavior, but NVidia don’t care because more sales = more stonks = more money to “invest” = more sales = more stonks = more yachts for Jensen. So what if it makes 1929 look like a walk in the park, it’s not their problem.



  • Real answer: it depends.

    • Deleting a file in use: no problemo. File is removed from the directory immediately, but exists on disk until last program who had the file open closes. Everyone wins! (Unless you’re trying to free up space by deleting a huge file that’s being held open by a program and not understanding why the filesystem usage didn’t go down)
    • Unmounting a hard drive in use: Will error out similarly to Windows. lsof can tell you which process has which files open. There’s nuance with lazy unmounts and whatnot but that should not be used in most cases.

    Now in practice you should be wary of one very important thing that changes compared to Windows: Writes are asynchronous on Linux. First the kernel writes to RAM, then it flushes to disk at a later time for performance reasons (this is one of the reasons why writing a bunch of small files is many times faster on Linux than Windows). The upshot is that just because your file copy is “done” doesn’t mean you can just yank the USB cable. Always safely unmount before unplugging a storage device on Linux.


  • And Hytale got shitcanned!

    It’s actually amazing that in an industry so hell-bent on copying successful formulas ad-nauseam (e.g. Quake&Doom spawning the whole genre of First Person Shooters), Minecraft has not seen anything reach the status of spiritual successor in over 15 years of charts-topping sales performance. Not from its own studio, not from its former creator, not with the Late Hypixel Studios.

    There are survival games and base-building games and exploration games, but none of them are “Minecraft-likes” in the way that early FPS were “Quake-likes”. CS has Valorant. LoL has Dota. Tekken has Street Fighter. PUBG has Fortnite has Roblox. Minecraft somehow remains truly one-of-a-kind, a gaming UFO that eludes suits looking for a replicable formula. I actually believe Mojang themselves don’t understand why Minecraft works in the first place either, which is why every update seemingly either underwhelms or angers everyone. That game is lightning in a bottle and no-one knows what to do with it.

    If Nadella had a stroke so bad he decided to make Minecraft FOSS, I’d be really interested to see what would happen. If any for-profit company was allowed to make direct Minecraft derivatives, I do think we would see a level of creativity and innovation that would dwarf even the already extremely prolific current modding scene.



  • I can’t prove it but I think there is a real sociolinguistic phenomenon where Americans are unusually obsessed with “safety through temperature”. Like they hear “fire = no germs” as children and somehow internalize that steaks should be somewhere between well done and burnt beyond recognition, and dishwashers should boil your plates like you’re sterilizing a hospital gown that’s been thrown up on by an Ebola patient.

    Soap, bitches. It works. Even at 40 °C (with modern detergent and washing cycles). Good thing too because I don’t want to know how y’all are having sex if you think boiling water is the only decent cleaning procedure for putting things in your mouth.


  • Technology Connections and Hank Green have been shouting this for a while, but that whole issue is way overblown. Some first gen EVs around 2010 had issues, but every major manufacturer since then has way exceeded expectations on battery lifetime thanks to advanced BMS and thermal controls. Car batteries don’t just rapidly degrade out of the blue, the tech has nothing in common with what’s in your phone. But public sentiment has not caught up because most people think Li-Ion = smartphone = dead after 2-5 years, so second hand EVs are way undervalued. Which is great for buyers.

    It’s not like you can’t easily total a second-hand ICE by mechanical failure. Just ask anyone who own(ed) a puretech engine. If you went by manufacturer recommendations, the fucking thing might just eat your timing belt one day and grenade itself. And there’s no way a full engine swap on a 5-10 year old economy car is economically viable.

    There’s always something that could go wrong when you buy a car. Unless you get comprehensive insurance and warranty, you need to accept the fact that losing the entire car to an accident, catastrophic mechanical failure, or theft is always a risk. If that’s too much anxiety to deal with, get a lease.


  • azertyfun@sh.itjust.workstoScience Memes@mander.xyzFight me
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    20 days ago

    If we’re going to be pedantic, let’s do it correctly.

    Even with the blinds shut, a space heater will emit a surprisingly large amount of radio waves (mine actually disrupts USB devices with a small EMP when it turns on, and anyone with an RTL-SDR can tell you those 50 Hz harmonics are rough). Some of those radio waves will penetrate the walls/blinds and a tiny fraction might escape the atmosphere and head off into space. From there some will find their way to interstellar space and potentially drift “forever” (well, until the heat death of the universe or whichever theory you subscribe to; I think at that point saying “the photon never got converted into heat energy” is a good enough approximation).


  • Speed limits are trickier than structural safety margins because of several factors:

    • In some areas, particularly remote areas, the process isn’t very well defined. Sometimes the speed limit will be set by one guy who just felt like that was fine. Doesn’t even have to be an engineer really.
    • Standards evolve over time (trending towards lower speed limits) but speed limits only change when a tragedy or major road renovation happens. Where I live there’s sometimes a 40 km/h spread on posted speed limits for similar roads depending on whether they were rebuilt last year or 50 years ago.
    • Car culture means drivers hold a ton of political power. There are a myriad of traffic devices that cannot be built not because of practical or financial constraints, only because they would “inconvenience drivers”. Lower speed limits are often one of those. People complain so the government backs down despite engineering recommendations.
    • A driver is always liable if they drive too fast for the conditions, not the traffic engineer. That goes to the previous point, with zero penalty for not sticking to the sensible engineering choice, political pressure easily wins out. Hard to argue against a work order when the person signing off on it cannot be sued for negligence.

    The upshot is speed limits in my local experience have a lot more to do with the municipality/region’s political climate than engineering standards and safety factors. Sometimes I feel like I could safely go 2x, sometimes the limit is 90 km/h on a two-way one lane road with 30 m of visibility where 30 km/h feels like I’m pushing it.




  • Assuming you like eating chicken, when is it wrong to pair chicken with vegetables? I made a vegetable-mushroom-chicken soup last week and it was delish. Whether chicken is or isn’t a vegetable is an academic concern, not a culinary one.

    Try putting mushrooms or chicken in the sangria however and you’ll be rightfully prosecuted for crimes against humanity.




  • THANK YOU.

    I migrated services from LXC to kubernetes. One of these services has been exhibiting concerning memory footprint issues. Everyone immediately went “REEEEEEEE KUBERNETES BAD EVERYTHING WAS FINE BEFORE WHAT IS ALL THIS ABSTRACTION >:(((((”.

    I just spent three months doing optimization work. For memory/resource leaks in that old C codebase. Kubernetes didn’t have fuck-all to do with any of those (which is obvious to literally anyone who has any clue how containerization works under the hood). The codebase just had very old-fashioned manual memory management leaks as well as a weird interaction between jemalloc and RHEL’s default kernel settings.

    The only reason I spent all that time optimizing and we aren’t just throwing more RAM at the problem? Due to incredible levels of incompetence business-side I’ll spare you the details of, our 30 day growth predictions have error bars so many orders of magnitude wide that we are stuck in a stupid loop of “won’t order hardware we probably won’t need but if we do get a best-case user influx the lead time on new hardware is too long to get you the RAM we need”. Basically the virtual price of RAM is super high because the suits keep pinky-promising that we’ll get a bunch of users soon but are also constantly wrong about that.


  • Being able to assign a nameserver per interface with a domain wildcard is a fucking godsend. I use it every day with a hook script because my job uses some private domains but I don’t want to send my entire DNS history through the VPN. Now ~job.com goes to tun0 and that’s the end of it.

    systemd-resolved is not perfect but with libnss’s overly rigid nature the only alternative for my use-case would be to recreate similar functionality to resolved with dnsmasq – which is just objectively worse especially when you want to use DHCP sometimes but not always. Why reinvent the wheel? resolved does its job and does it well. I had some issues with it a few years ago but have been using it for the past couple years without complaint.