Notices by Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@mas.to)

The good folks at #Gentoo are looking for new infrastructure sponsors. They're mostly looking for rack-space, power and connectivity and they'll provide the hardware. Preferably outside the US, but not necessarily.

https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/10/07/infrastructure-sponsors-wanted.html

@mhoye when you're filthy rich and the Catholic church doesn't side with you it means you fucked up spectacularly

Don't you fear you'll be left behind? No, fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Riding bikes is - by itself - an extremely safe activity.

It's the cars that are dangerous.

Since when refusing to use a tool made you an extremist?

It's worth adding that this is a much bigger problem on small QLC drives and to a lesser extent TLC ones. Old MLC/SLC drives are largely unaffected. I have a 13 year old Intel S3500 600 GB MLC drive which accumulated 50 terabytes of writes and it still reports 100% of its write endurance and no spare flash used.

The problem with multi-level flash is that each generation doubles the number of bits per cell, halving the signal-to-noise-ratio. So it becomes exponentially harder to reliably read and write bits from them, and thus endurance suffers significantly.

This is completely unsurprising and it's not a problem with the Neo alone. Any Windows machine with a small SSD has the same problem, and it boils down to two things: swap and log-like writes. The former issue is being exacerbated by poor coding and high resource usage, but the latter is really an effect of how applications are being developed. With a lot of apps being basically a browser in disguise the amount of stuff that gets logged to disk via sqlite or similar libraries is becoming ridiculous. Vibe-coding is turbo-charging these trends by making applications even more resource intensive and even more inclined to use structured and inefficient storage.

https://www.techpowerup.com/352178/macbook-neo-burns-through-ssd-cycles-at-an-alarming-rate

For some anecdotal evidence I've seen this problem even on machines with 512 GB drives. In particular I encountered a four year old Windows machine with a 512 GB QLC drive that had already burned through 40% of the flash write endurance. That's a lot for something used for regular browsing/e-mail/office work. This machine had 8 GiB of RAM so it's possible that swap made it worse. Either way, it seems we went from SSD endurance a solved problem to it becoming a potentially major source of failures.

BTW, when SSD drives exhaust their write endurance they don't just cease to work, they can still be used but they're frozen in read-only mode. So keep a backup of the keys used for encryption (BitLocker in particular) as the keys kept in the TPM will become suddenly unusable. Without a recovery key you won't be able to access the data on the disk. And get the data out of it ASAP as flash contents can degrade in a matter of months, especially on an SSD that reached the end of its life.

The Ponzi schemers have asked to slow down the Ponzi scheme so that... uh, the scheme can go on a little bit longer before people figure out they've been had?

@dalias we're unlikely to ever leave the twenties. After twenty-twenty nine comes twenty-twenty ten, twenty-twenty eleven and so on

@dalias yes and also deliberately deflects what is causing the addiction. It's like saying that people who suffer from alcoholism have a problem with "bottle time".

I hate with a passion any kind of reporting that describes problems among teenagers as caused by "screen time". It depicts it as some kind of flaw among young people who deliberately spend too much time on their phones.

Call it for what it is: abusive practices by a handful of tech corporations. They profit from products deliberately designed to create addiction, and particularly so among children and teenagers.

Stop blaming victims and start blaming the perpetrators.

@Infoseepage you've got a very good point there that whoever is rich enough to be able to buy these cards (two of them!) is also rich enough the be lawyered up to their eyeballs

@Infoseepage apparently they picked them because the overall design was cheaper (including the board) and it shows

Another example of the shocking inefficiency of everything involving genAI: developer claims DLSS5 "improves the character lighting model" while later mentioning that it HALVES THE FRAMERATE.

My brother in computer development, there are excellent lighting models available if you are willing to accept *doubling the frame time on a last-generation GPU*. Especially so if you're restricting yourself to foreground characters. None of them requires proprietary slop.

https://www.techpowerup.com/352160/warhorse-developer-defends-dlss-5-says-its-not-an-ai-slop-filter

LMAO

https://www.techpowerup.com/352412/dlss-5-testing-ends-in-a-melted-rtx-5090-connector-power-shoots-past-600-w

@eniko rep stosb performance varies wildly by CPU type, length and alignment, but for very short bursts it's almost always not a good option. glibc has a bunch of tunables, you might take a peek to see what works best for you: https://sourceware.org/pipermail/glibc-cvs/2020q3/070125.html

Happy "Oracle has lost more than 60% of its value since the peak one year ago" to all those who celebrate

The sharks are smelling blood. Interesting that they're going after Anthropic first. My guess is that they know there's still some money to be extracted before the bubble bursts.

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/music-publishers-sue-anthropic-allege-161034128.html