Daily Tech News 31 December 2021

• One end of the scale: Police in Tokyo lost two floppy disks containing the personal information on 38 public housing applicants. (The Mainichi)
  
  If that makes the news, things are either going pretty well or so badly that you'll throw out anything at all as a smokescreen. Since Godzilla has not been sighted yet this year it looks like it might actually be the former.
  
  
  
• Other end of the scale: Kyoto University lost 77TB of research data - 34 million files - due to an error in their backup routine. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Seriously, folks, ZFS snapshots.
  
  Anyway, this is data produced by the university's 6 petaFLOP supercomputer cluster, which has storage bandwidth on the level of hundreds of gigabytes per second, and apparently not primary research data. So it can likely be recovered at the cost of slightly delaying other jobs for the cluster.

• So I switched my misbehaving keyboard (I have three other keyboards but they're all in boxes. My house is FULL of boxes. Nobody understands how many boxes I have.) from the little USB receiver to Bluetooth and it stopped misbehaving. Seriously all the little issues except for the problem with N-key rollover on [ and ] were resolved.
  
  Need to find a good wired mechanical keyboard though. I want one with no numeric keypad and 15 macro keys, but there aren't any unless you get a specialised POS (cash register) keyboard.
  
  
  
• Speaking of of boxes, monitors #3 and #4 for Starlab arrived. I thought this morning that I should at least clear the front hall of boxes because the monitors take up a lot of room, and then the courier showed up before 9AM when Amazon still had an ETA of the 6th of January.
  
  Yeah, Amazon. I know. But their Boxing Day (more boxes) sale saved me about 30% and at this rate all the cardboard boxes they're send me will very likely bankrupt them.
  
  
  
• Speakers are on the way as well. I'm replacing my Logitech 2.1 setup with a pair of Audioengine A2+ speakers. I don't really have anywhere good to place a subwoofer at my desk so it's off to one side which makes the sound unbalanced. A good basic stereo set is likely going to work a lot better.
  
  
  
• And I placed the third Starlab buildout order with a smaller Aussie online retailer, for the first of the 4TB SSDs and some minor bits and pieces.
  
  I was trying to convince myself that 3TB per laptop (the 1TB drive they come with and a 2TB in the second slot) would be enough and failed.
  
  I'm getting the Corsair MP400 R2. It's a QLC drive, which made me hesitate, but very large QLC drives are less of a problem because they just have so much space to balance out your writes. I likely wouldn't put one in a server, but for my development lab it should be fine.
  
  I have enough room in the budget to even go to 8TB on one system, but the difference in price between the 4TB and 8TB SSDs would buy me a 32TB external RAID array, which seems more useful right now. High capacity M.2 drives get expensive fast.
  
  Also, this is the R2 version and not the original one; I couldn't find details of the precise change but indications are that at 1TB and 2TB R2 is 20% slower on reads and 20% faster on writes, but at 4TB there's little difference because there's so much flash the changes don't matter.
  
  And credit to Corsair for actually labelling it R2, when Adata (for example) changed the hardware on one of their drives three times without any outwards indication.
  
  
  
• The CPU year in review. (AnandTech)
  
  AnandTech is know for it's in-depth analysis of new CPUs and this year has been, well, I won't say no exception because of the two big launches one - Apple's new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips - was so shrouded in secrecy that they airbrushed out an entire segment of the chip from the publicly released data. That kind of thing makes deep analysis difficult.
  
  Still an interesting roundup.
  
  
  
• Asus has a prototype adaptor card that lets you plug DDR4 RAM into a DDR5 motherboard. (AnandTech)
  
  There are no Alder Lake motherboards that support both memory types, but the CPUs themselves still do, so this adaptor takes advantage of that fact to trick the CPU into accepting DDR4 in a DDR5 slot.
  
  And the reason for this is because there is no DDR5.
  
  
  
• A year later AMD is still working towards approval for its acquisition of Xilinx. (AnandTech)
  
  Xilinx is one of the biggest companies in the FPGA space, alongside Altera which is now owned by Intel. Lattice and Microchip are the only other significant players I know of, so it's understandable that regulators are taking a close look.
  
  It does seem like a good fit for both companies, though.
  
  
  
• Asus has launched an official recall of its Z690 Hero motherboards. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The were already being replaced under regular RMA procedures, but because of the potential fire hazard they've escalated it to a full-blown recall.
  
  I think the time from the first public reports of problems to the recall was three days, which is pretty good.
  
  The problem is a manufacturing fault and not a design flaw and doesn't appear to affect any other models.
  
  
  
• Intel showed off an SSD running at 13.8GBps with a 12900K desktop CPU. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not one of their own SSDs though because they don't make them anymore, but an engineering sample of Samsung's upcoming PM1743 server drive.
  
  I'm not sure how much appreciable difference this makes, but more is better.
  
  
  
• Huawei and SMIC, blacklisted by the US Department of Commerce which actually seems to be properly performing one of its functions are collaborating on building a new chip fab. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This will likely be a 14nm factory since the most advanced manufacturing equipment all comes from the Netherlands - at this rate Dutch company ASML could become Europe's first trillion-dollar company - and China is banned from acquiring it.
  
  Hard to sneak it in either because the individual machines are each the size of a house.
  
  
  
• Intel's graphics cards and dedicated laptop graphics chips are set to arrive in March. (WCCFTech)
  
  Will they be any good?
  
  Maybe.
  
  The current DG1 cards are basically useless, because they are limited to the same performance as laptop chips and only function at all when paired with an 8th or 9th generation Intel CPU and a custom BIOS. But the current laptop chips perform pretty well for laptop chips, with 96 Intel EUs competing closely with AMD's 8 CU Vega parts.
  
  (Don't worry about the numbers; everyone counts GPU capacity differently.)
  
  The discrete graphics cards will go as high as 512 EUs - and almost certainly be clocked higher than laptop parts as well, so probably equal to 64 or 80 Vega CUs. That would make for a decent mid-range card, probably somewhere between AMD's 6700XT and 6800 non-XT.
  
  And we already know the drivers work pretty well, because Intel have been shipping this GPU design all year inside their 11th generation laptop chips.
  
  So given the scarcity of graphics cards generally, this is very welcome news.
  
  
  
• Given enough users, all bugs are features. (Hyrum's Law)
  
  If you provide a public API, then once you have enough users all behaviours, whether documented, undocumented, or obviously broken, will be relied upon by third-party software.
  
  This is also known as the Make Principle. (The weird syntax of makefiles has persisted for decades because by the time someone suggested a fix the program already had a dozen users.)
  
  
  
• Le CentOS est mort. (Serve the Home)
  
  CentOS 7 is I believe still supported but CentOS 8 support dies today, after IBM pulled forward the EOL date by a full five years.
  
  The alternatives are the live update CentOS Stream which is probably a no-go for many server environments, RHEL 8 where IBM is being pretty generous with free licenses even for commercial use, and Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux which aim to be 100% compatible with CentOS 8 and RHEL.
  
  Or do what I did and get so disgusted with how long CentOS 8 was taking in the first place that you jump ship to Ubuntu 16.04.
  
  Honestly been pretty happy with the change.
  
  
  
• Classic Blackberry devices are also biting the dust as of January 4. (9to5Mac)
  
  Not the later Android models, but the really old ones running Blackberry's own operating system and services.
  
  
  
• Google meanwhile will be updating the Pixel 6. (Thurott.com)
  
  The December software update was delayed just slightly because early adopters of the update found that it could stop the phone making phone calls.
  
  The updated update will arrive at, uh, some point in the future.
  
  
  
• Someone seems to have hacked the Twitter account of the FBI's fake chat app. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
  
• Using the oceans to store CO2 could help avert a climate catastrophe. (Bloomberg Law)
  
  Also, carbonated fish. Think of the marketing opportunities.
  
  
  
• A new report goes into more depths of Apple's $275 billion bribe to China. (9to5Mac)
  
  I did originally have a Mac in the Starlab buildout plan. It has since been removed from the shopping list, which freed up a fair bit of money for more directly relevant toys. Their industrial design is nice, and their CPU team is world class, but there are limits.
  
  
  
• Sega leaked sensitive data and an email list of 250,000 customers thanks to a misconfigured S3 bucket. (Engadget)
  
  Okay, sure, poor move on Sega's part. But have you seen the S3 bucket configuration dashboard? It's shit. It's complete and utter shit. Amazon hasn't updated it except to make it even more incomprehensible since 2006.
  
  The AWS dashboard is terrible in general - the Google Cloud dashboard is orders of magnitude better - but even within that swirling cesspool the S3 section stands out as an especially odoriferous piece of excrement.
  
  
  
• Won't the real fake Bored Ape Yacht Club please throw poop? (The Verge)
  
  Two fake NFT collections have been banned from the OpenSea marketplace because they pointed out that the original version was also worthless garbage. At least you could eat tulip bulbs.
  
  Frantically Googles "can you eat tulip bulbs"...
  
  Stet.
  
  
  
• Missouri Governor Mike Parson says he expects prosecutors to file charges against a journalist who uncovered a major security flaw in a state-run website by (checks notes) using the "show source" function in his browser. (St Louis Post-Dispatch)
  
  Given what we've seen of prosecutors lately, I expect the governor is not wrong on this. An idiot, yes, but not wrong.
  
  
  
• A bug in Polygon put $24 billion worth of ERC20 tokens at risk. (The Block)
  
  Not NFTs this time but cryptocurrencies.
  
  The bug has since been fixed - they deployed the fix prior to making any public announcements - but not before someone managed to sneak in and make off with $2 million in tokens.
  
  Polygon are eating the $2 million loss and you have to wonder if technically any crime was committed.
  
  I'm sure a prosecutor could be found to charge everyone in the building with third degree negligent arsonmurder or some such.

• On December 1, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was the company's flagship Arm v9 chip for 2022 or possibly vice-versa, there were no dumb 4k TVs, just other people's monitors, speaking of monitors the Zephyrus Duo G650 had two of them - in a laptop, some idiot wanted Twitter's new CEO to adopt a plan that would instantly kil... wait, we loved this guy, Tales of Seven Proxies, Twitter adopted a plan that would immediately ban most of its users, there was no serverless, there's only someone else's no server, Microsoft was two trillion dollars worth of crap in a one trillion dollar sack, which end-to-end encrypted messaging apps weren't, and Facebook was ordered to deGiphy itself.
  
  
  
• On December 2, we ordered a Pomu, Qualcomm's brand new 8cx Gen 3 was probably last year's Snapdragon 888, Mozilla's NSS library had a horrible security flaw, Nvidia's brand new RTX 2060 wasn't, light-weight web sites don't actually have to suck, Ubiquiti's big security breach earlier in the year was allegedly an extortion attempt by one of its own staff, Square became Block, and Qualcomm and Razer combined forces against the Steam Deck.
  
  
  
• On December 3, ellipse and ellipsis had the same plural, Twitter actually banned people who needed to be banned but also removed the content showing everyone why they needed to be banned which was retarded, people who attended Anime NYC came down with the sniffles, Google delisted over 100 torrent domains following a court order that didn't even mention Google, the Nvidia's acquisition of Arm looked increasingly dead in the water, TSMC started initial production (called "risk" production) of 3nm chips, Microsoft had daddy issues, and yeet your WiFi router straight out the window.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On December 4, Australia was the drunkest country on the planet of those sober enough to respond to the survey, I predicted I would get interrupted by work during my upcoming three weeks holiday, the new Lego AT-AT model couldn't be disassembled without a Lego chainsaw, two men were indicted over a long-running YouTube copyright claim scam, Alder Lake laptops were on their way, and Raptor Lake desktops were apparently on their way too.
  
  
  
• On December 5, we took a long walk down a windy beach to a cafe that was shut, Twitter found to their horror that their plan that would immediately ban most of its users was leading to it banning most of its users, Apple's M1 Max CPU had a double secret interconnect bus that was airbrushed out of published die photos, ActiLizzard management kinda sucked, Windows 11 was updated to let you choose your own browser - it still threw a tantrum if you didn't choose Edge but it let you do it, Real Hermaphroditic Cannibal Fishwives of San Diego, LocalStack was AWS in a box - for testing, not for production, and OnlySpiders.com was taken.
  
  
  
• On December 6, tech companies should pay their engineers more, Rule One of NPM Dependency Club, sharing function pointers on the blockchain, don't download that Mac, how to opt out of data sharing in WhatsApp, electronic voting here in New South Wales failed miserably (idiots) and the Electoral Commission very kindly promised not to issue fines to people whose votes they lost, and Apple's new payment plan was a novel combination of extortion and burglary.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On December 7, hold me closer tiny mixer, Imagination showed off its new range of not very good RISC-V cores, AMD's 4800S was a less-broken 4700S but you probably still shouldn't buy one, everyone scheduled their CES keynotes for January 4, Fastly said that Cloudflare was telling fibs but at least neither of them was actually down and destroying the internet that day, YouTube met the copyright abuse problem and it was them, thank you Australian government and welcome to 1968, crypto finance platforms lost $320 quintillion dollars in a single day give or take a dozen decimal places, and MongoDB said that Amazon's MongoDB-compatible DocumentDB wasn't and I have to admit they had a point but on the other hand they also had HUGE DATA CORRUPTION BUGS IN THREE SUCCESSIVE RELEASES.
  
  
  
• On December 8, AWS US-East-1 burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp - this caused two days of chaos at my day job and we don't even use AWS, Twitter bought and immediately killed chat platform Quill - the sale went through Wednesday and all user data was deleted 1pm Saturday, QNAP again, Western Digital's Blue SN570 was pretty good, benchmarks leaked of AMD's upcoming Rembrandt laptop chip and it was pretty good, Notepad went emo, and no, DARPA researchers did not create a fucking warp bubble.
  
  
  
• On December 9, everyone was burned out - here's why that was a good thing (spoiler: it wasn't), do not buy a recycled Opteron server CPU from 2013, Intel's upcoming Alder Lake-P laptop parts were coming up, a simple VM in 125 lines of C, Russia blamed TOR, and Windows 11's disk performance was crap.
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dkzpNyKtf8>
  
  
  
• On December 10, Dell's new Alder Lake desktop systems used DDR5 because, uh, we don't actually know why, AMD released a driver update for video cards from 2002 probably because that's how far back you had to go to find something in stock, Linux kernel patches confirmed all the leaks on AMD's next-generation server CPUs, once again we were wondering how both sides could lose, and we knew how many holes it took to fill the Albert Hall.
  
  
  
• On December 11, hackers stole the payroll for South Australia, other hackers - or maybe the same ones, who knows - stole Volvo's R&D data, other hackers - or whatever - hacked Brazilian government systems including the vaccination tracking program, we ordered some shoe racks - they're here now but still sitting in their box, Amazon's "fix things" button broke, Imagor was an image processing server written in Go - kind of useful, a concatenation of unfortunate bugs, there was a remote code exploit feature in the Log4j library but who uses that anyway oh Minecraft, and a Senate bill to force social networks to open their data to researchers couldn't possibly go horribly wrong.
  
  
  
• On December 12, starving programmers don't update their code, the director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had an MA in politics, philosophy, and economics from Oxford, do not cite the deep magic to me, Moore's law was scheduled to end - again - in 2028, probably around 3PM on a Friday so it can beat the traffic, CASE DEFAULT RED, faster, cheaper, lower power 10GbE from Intel, the QSW-M2108-2C was the only reasonably priced managed 2.5Gb switch actually available for purchase - a situation which has since been corrected, and new FDA approved eye drops could cause red eyes and headaches - but cured reading glasses.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On December 13, we went 24 hours without the internet collapsing, Little Jndi Tables hacked Apple, and playing Doom on a Minecraft server.
  
  
  
• On December 14, we threatened to do this - this, what you are reading right now, open source was in a quantum superposition of being broken and being broken but insisting it wasn't, AMD Navi 12 crypto mining cards were on sale in China where crypto mining was mostly illegal, even The Atlantic notice that progressive utopias invariably suck, there was no HDMI 2.0, do not install Linux GUI environments on servers, Google patched Chrome and refused to discuss exactly what they had fixed, Kronos got hit by a ransomware attack - possibly an early victim of Log4j before the problem caught wider attention, and Bluetooth broke WiFi security.
  
  
  
• On December 15, there was still a bug in the patched verions of Log4j, half of all corporate networks had been targeted specifically for this bug and the other half had too and just didn't know it yet, two trees good, four trees better, environmentally-friendly laptops were inexplicably ugly, and Nvidia rumours were recycled.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On December 16, Coinbase ushered in a new era of instant trillionaires, Hynix started sampling 24Gbit DDR5 RAM chips, it was all downhill after 1979, Microsoft's Azure Directory Services fell over but notably didn't take down the rest of the internet, a 16-port 25GbE desktop switch, Degoo was bullshit, and NYC banned methane.
  
  
  
• On December 17, Pomu arrvved. you could replace the entire Ethereum blockhain with a Raspberry Pi - probably the Model 400 because the bare boards are out of stock, don't enable cloud autoscaling unless your income also autoscales, ZFS snapshot your Minecraft servers, Log4j hackers were mining Monero - which worked out 50 time worse than just stealing your wallet, fossil fuels killed a million people a year - mostly in China, speaking of China you were no longer allowed to, and $8 billion was stolen from crypto investors in 2021 and we found it just a little hard to care.
  
  
  
• On December 18, my holiday was going just FINE thank you, the BMJ opened fire on Factbook's facecheckers, Princeton "researchers" were conducting an "experiment", the RTX 2050 wasn't, TSMC announced its performance-optimised N4X node, sixteen was the new six, a $2500 25" Kindle, Little Jndi Tables hacked Google, walk it off you big baby said Amazon, Google locked files on Google Drive if they considered them misleading, Verizon was caught spying on customers and fixed it by automatically opting them in to being spied upon, and US regulators targeted the two leading financial scams - Buy Now, Pay Later and stablecoins.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On December 19, we got a virtualised dedicated server right here in Sydney and it was actually pretty darn nice, those assholes at Princeton were proud of themselves right up until the lawyers got involved, the German Army played the Don't Mention the War card, on Kolmogorov and Stalin, Log4j 2.17 was out fixing the bug in 2.16 that fixed the bug in 2.15 that fixed the bug, putting lampshades on STUPID SCREEN NOTCHES, in a surprise move Wikipedia booted genocide apologists, fully automatic 675% markups R us, and Intel was showering its best engineers with cash and shares, a move I entirely approve of.
  
  
  
• On December 20, Facebook was the worst tech company of 2021, it wasn't time to upgrade to DDR5, a new AI algorithm actually did something useful and guessed pretty reliably at the 3D structure of proteins, exa was the new ls and it sucked, Rails 7 arrived, and former pirate site Fakku filed a DMCA takedown against torrent and pirate news site TorrentFreak.
  
  
  Meanwhile in January:
  
  
  
• On January 1 Farmville reached its sell-by date.
• On January 2 we predicted that pumping infinite money into the economy would produce inflation.
• On January 3 we didn't buy a TRENDnet 5GbE USB adaptor.
• On January 4 URL shorteners were spyware.
• On January 5 Sydney went into lockdown for the first time and so did Jack Ma.
• On January 6 Telegram let you triangulate the location of individual users.
• On January 7 everyone hated Microsoft's new newsfeed and ASRock's model numbers.
• On January 8 the SolarWinds debacle unsealed sealed court records and Blockchain Stalin was at it again.
• On January 9 the Purge hit full throttle with cloud providers banning everyone to the right of Peter Kropotkin.
• On January 10 I wasted time adding a Parler embed tag.
• On January 11 the Chinese Embassy was openly posting pro-genocide propaganda and Parler exited stage left.
• On January 12 everyone hated American big tech but everyone loved satay chicken.
• On January 13 Uganda very sensibly banned all social networks.
• On January 14 a minor flaw as discovered iOS security when it turned out to not be switched on.
• On January 15 Twitter got involved in a land war in Africa and we instantly corrupted NTFS.
• On January 16 messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp each suffered very different problems.
• On January 17 Intel killed consumer Optane and NASA test fired the SLS booster after 84 years in development.
• On January 18 Pixy had never seen such fuckery and also didn't see any groceries.
• On January 19 I got purged by Twitter and Facebook's potentially illegal deals with Google came to light.
• On January 20 the press went back to sleep after four years of moral outrage at being forced to pretend to do their jobs.
• On January 21 Intel started their rehiree program and the Pi Pico appeared and immediately went out of stock, setting the stage for the entire year.
• On January 22 Intel was on track for 7nm in 2023 and Twitter was sued for child sex trafficking.
• On January 23 the useful idiots were deemed surplus to requirements and SpaceX launched 143 satellites at once int polar orbit.
• On January 24 lots more Pi Pico news and Code of Cancer woes for the idiots who adopted it.
• On January 25 PGM indexes were black magic and SonicWall ate toxic dogfood.
• On January 26 Stasi's mom had it going on and CollapseOS ran anywhere.
• On January 27 Redditbroke the hedge funds and we couldn't have nice things.
• On January 28 discord sucked, Jen Psaki had the IQ of a dead armadillo beside a Texas highway in August, and AMD announced record sales even though none of its products could actually be found for sale anywhere.
• On January 29 we refused to live in our pods and eat our bugs.
• On January 30 Microsoft Edge had not yet been ruined.
• And on January 31 we discovered that the Asus PWS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi had a chipset fan.
  
  
  
  
• On December 21, let's not go to Politico's EU website - it is a silly place, the Gigabyte Z690 Aero G didn't have Thunderbolt, Ubisoft sucked, the QOI image format took off, fuck systemd, there were no Raspberry Pis*, and everyone involved in that giving-birth-in-the-front-seat-of-a-moving-Tesla story had the IQ of expired horseradish including the reporter and the car.
  
  * Except the Pi 400 - the C64 style model. Gonna get one of those to play with.
  
  While back in February:
  
  
• On February 1, for all X build your own X applied recursively.
• On February 2, Perth burned to the goround during a Bat Flu lockdown which must have been awkward.
• On February 3, Huawei's brand new totally-not-Android mobile OS still said Android on it.
• On February 4, Microsoft made popcorn while Google got into a slapfight with Australia.
• On February 5, Mass Effect edited Miranda's butt.
• On February 6, Myanmar very sensibly banned all social networks.
• On February 7, PCIe 5 SSDs were due next year and the worst privacy news article of all time.
• On February 8, Google couldn't be trusted with, basically, anything.
• On February 9, Tesla bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin and Monkeys R Us.
• On February 10, Haachama hit a million subscribers and I had no groceries again.
• On February 11, Amelia hit a million subscribers and I air fried baby potatoes probably because I didn't have anything else to eat.
• On February 12, Cover Corp announced auditions for EN Gen 2 - now known as the Council - and Audible censored a book on censorship.
• On February 13, YouTube shadowbanned absolutely everyone and Amazon announced itself above the law.
• On February 14, the Pimoroni Tiny was a smaller version of the Pi Pico.
• On February 15, the Pi Pico delivered VGA without any video hardware.
• On February 16, YouTube banned Sakura Miko and my router caught fire.
• On February 17, Coco hit a million subscribers and Texas froze over with both parties claiming these events were unrelated.
• On February 18, Facebook blocked Australia and there was much rejoicing.
• On February 19, we discovered Vyolfers.
• On February 20, ethicists were behaving unethically.
• On February 21, btis fell off Boeings.
• On February 22, Ethereum sucked and fascists were fascing.
• On February 23, Faceblook unblocked Australia and there was much sadness.
• On February 24, a Chrome extenion blocked Google.
• On February 25, Ubuntu took a much-needed chill pill.
• On February 26, Redbean was an all-in-one run-anywhere web server and the US did not have a monopoly on stupid politicians.
• On February 27, don't connect critical industrial control systems directly to the internet you idiots.
• On February 28, Redbean got Lua and we discovered cheap vanilla vodka.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On December 22, a programmer encountered paperwork for the first time, Zen 3 Threadripper Pro was finally on its way, the 4GB Raspberry Pi would probably be back in stock by Christmas next year, don't update your BIOS, the FBI returned the money it stole for once, and fake currencies considered harmful.
  
  And in March:
  
  
  
• On March 1, AMD's upcoming server chips were expected to have a lot of stuff.
• On March 2, Intel killed off the 665p with the 670p and the Pi Pico produced HDMI video [b>IN SOFTWARE[/b>.
• On March 3, more on the groundbreaking Pi Pico HDMI news and the US Navy convicted of piracy.
• On March 4, the Starship SN10 test flight was 99.44% successful
• On March 5, eBay banned Dr Seuss and YouTube banned Kiara.
• On March 6, Rocket Leak laked and was deemed "okay I guess".
• On March 7, Solasta: Crown of the Magister slipped in under the D&D woke expiry date and the Ballad of Little Boolean Bobby Drop Tables True.
• On March 8, Humble had a bundle and Google killed of Google Pay and replaced it with Google Pay.
• On March 9, the most efficent way to solve linear algebra turned out to be guessing.
• On March 10, Samsung announced the 980 Nothing and there was an RCE in Git.
• On March 11, why were you browsing North Korean websites in the first place?
• On March 12, our MongoDB cluster at my day job livened things up and Alder Lake would have a lot of PCIe lanes.
• On March 13, we were warned but didn't understand the message and there were no adults at Google. And it was the half-anniversary of Hololive EN - the first group. Good Lord that seems like a long time ago. They say that time speeds up as you get older but this year has lasted three entire decades.
• On March 14, Apple forced Crabhouse to change its name because it sounded like a game where you might build houses for crabs which is in fact exactly what it was.
• On March 15, AMD's EpycMilana arrived and Nvidia hacked its own drivers.
• On March 16, Azure Active Directory Services fell overand India considered banning cryptocurrencies and heck maybe social networks too
• On March 17, Thunderbolt expansion cards weren't and Apple matched Google in terrible UI.
• On March 18, the Radeon 6700XT was a graphics card and building a file server into the Linux kernel seemed like a great idea you guys let's do that what could possibly go wrong.
• On March 19, AMD didn't artificially limit crypto mining performance.
• On March 20, learn science, go to jail.
• On March 21, putting your Pi Pico on the internet and the unhackable got hacked.
• On March 22, Backblaze leaked all your filenames to... Facebook?
• On March 23, the main MongoDB cluster at my day job fell over again.
• On March 24, sorry folks, canal's closed - camel out front shoulda told ya.
• On March 25, Genshin Impact crossed the billion dollar mark.
• On March 26, SpaceX did what it does best: Tried again.
• On March 27, in DC the dumb were questioning the dumb.
• On March 28, Dave arrived and was loaded up with a backup Theodore.
• On March 29, I repaired that MongoDB cluster again.
• On March 30, an RTX 3060 for ants and the MongoDB cluster fell over again.
• And on March 31, the 11900K was an embarrassment.

• On December 23, another major outage hit AWS US-East-1, another critical security vulnerability at Azure, those dirtbags at Princeton discovered that the problem with human experimental test subjects was that they had lawyers, the Steam winter sale was on so I spent up big over at GOG, the Crucial P5 Plus was a pretty solid SSD, climate change was caused by lesbians, LG had a weird monitor, Intel came under fire for asking China to maybe turn down the genocide just a tiny bit, websockets were great right up until you actually had to make them work, what blockchains were actually useful for, the problem with big tech, and at least this time they didn't invade Poland.
  
  But in April April:
  
  
  
• On April 1, we took the world's fastest (commodity) server out for a test drive.
• On April 2, isEven as a service crashed my computer.
• On April 3, video drivers broke our mouse and we went fishing in Minecraft.
• On April 4, power apparently went out at our datacenter and we switched to a backup server but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 5, LG stopped making phones and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 6, the Erdős-Faber-Lovász conjecture was settled and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 7, fire, flood, and explosions, and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 8, EEVBlog returned from its outage and our server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 9, 600,000 stolen credit cards were stolen when a hacking site got hacked and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 10, dogs is dogs and cats is dogs and squirrels in cages is parrots and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 11, China slapped Alibaba with a $2.7 billion antitrust file and CEO Jack Ma was literally unavailable to comment, and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 12, AMD CPUs were in stock and being snapped up by turkeys peafowl and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 13, open war loomed as hackers held Dutch cheese to ransom and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 14, Apple and Google ruined everything and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 15, I installed a program from 2006 and it simply worked and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 16, and you get a power outage and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 17, everybody blocked Google FloC and the server was still down but things would be fixed in a day or two.
• On April 18, the trouble with LXD and THE SERVER WAS BACK.
• On April 19, no-one was driving the car, and even a dead squirrel could get hit on the head by an acorn.
• On April 20, a new new server and four SPOFs.
• On April 21, nothing was on fire and nobody offered me $12 billion.
• On April 22, it's just a perfectly normal knife fight and Linux banned Minnesota.
• On April 23, the best tablets of 2021 were mostly crap.
• On April 24, UNPLUG YOUR QNAP NAS RIGHT NOW.
• On April 25, Sabrina the Teenage Embezzler didn't click on the link.
• On April 26, the naming of names was all numinous natter, and Apple told its customers to go fuck themselves if they though just buying something meant it was theirs.
• On April 27, Basecamp hit the big red EMERGENCY DE-WOKE button and we lost a little on every sale but made it up in volume.
• On April 28, never run Google ads or MacOS.
• On April 29, Chia voided all your warranties and stop that you weirdo.
• And then on April 30, dammit Walter you should always trust a squirrel with fireworks.
  
  
  

• 
  
• On May 1, an entire useless third of the staff at Basecamp quit.
• On May 2, Turkey very sensibly banned cryptocurrency.
• On May 3, the future was chiplets in bat sauce.
• On May 4, Australia had the 3060 and the 3090 and nothing in between.
• On May 5, I had a phone and a tablet and Chia cross thed two exabyte Rubicon.
• On May 6, Bootstrap 5 was out and New York very sensibly proposed banning crupto mining.
• On May 7, China banned security researchers and Amazon played The Running Man.
• On May 8, everyhting new was old again when Chernobyl caught fire.
• On May 9, the Colonial Pipeline got hacked.
• On May 10, Twitter and TikTok were losing the war against information and Apple was winning the war against privacy.
• On May 11, congratualtions on your new iPhone made with only the very finest artisinal slave labour.
• On May 12, Boeing 787s turned out to be running on Windows 95 somehow.
• On May 13, it wasn't cancel culture, it was consequences, howled the mob.
• On May 14, the UK didn't negotiate with terrorists but Colonial Pipeline and the DC Police did.
• On May 15, Europe was useless.
• On May 16, we - personally - wasted 500 years each dayon CAPTCHAs.
• On May 17, we - personally - were Pomu.
• On May 18, Amazon started turning everything into paperclips except S3 access policies which are apparently some inviolate and unvarying fundamental force underlying both relativity and quantum mechanics for all the improvement they've seen in the past two decades.
• On May 19, we didn't by weird hybrid SSDs or use anything other than MOV.
• On May 20, the founder of Telgram aptly called Apple users "digital slaves" and Twitter put me back on double secret probation.
• On May 21, Google opened a cheese shop and the race to 1nm was on.
• On May 22, underwater flying cars were due Friday and the Pareto Principle applied recursively.
• On May 23, you owned nothing when the Bombay Bat Soup Death Plage came to town.
• On May 24, Apple said you totally weren't a slave and those chains were merely for your safety.
• On May 25, Mozilla fixed a bug that had been logged back when Gilgamesh was a cub scout.
• On May 26, I was irked, irked I tell you, and high end SSDs had 15 microsecond access times. I looked up the one I just ordered and it's around 60 microseconds - not too shabby I guess.
• On May 27, that thing with the mouse happened again.
• On May 28, AI's core competence was breaking things faster and more thouroughly than mere humans could hope for.
• On May 29, China hacked all the things and Russia hacked all the other things.
• On May 30, Microsoft ruined Edge and Iraq very sensibly banned crypto mining.
• And on May 31, the storage market was - what's the technical term - ah, yes, fucked.
  
  

• On December 25, was it even worth working on open source anymore, that thing rumoured the previous day got benchmarked, Giagbyte's new Aero16 was maybe interesting, so was the Iodyne Pro Data if you were spending someone else's money, and Door Dash made everyone in the company mop the floors and take out the trash because it built character. (And they were entirely correct in that.)
  
  On the other hand, in June:
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:13 AM

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