I’m down, but RISC-V has a looooot of ground to make up first. Last I checked, total number of RISC-V devices in existence was an order of magnitude less than what Qualcomm produces in a year.

Molly White’s coverage:

…maintained that they were merely developing privacy-preserving software, and that they were not responsible for criminal use of the software. Prosecutors have argued that the developers actively intended the software to be used for criminal purposes, pointing to marketing aimed at “Dark/Grey Market participants” and those engaged in “Illicit activity”.

Judge Cote cited a letter to the court in which Rodriguez continued to say that he was merely motivated by a desire to protect financial privacy and not “a desire to facilitate criminal activity” as evidence that Rodriguez “has not come to terms with what he did. … The letter indicated to me that you were very much still operating in a world with moral blinders on.”

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-96/#samourai-wallet

Year of ARM Linux gaming when? 2028?

You should have a “fake” network interface for your VPN connection. Your client should allow you to declare that it can only use a specific network interface (probably by binding to its specific IP instead of 0.0.0.0). So it’ll never even be aware of a world outside the VPN.

You can run Linux on ARM. I do. And let’s not act like x86 wasn’t full of Microsoft-led efforts to undermine Linux. Anyone who’s had to disembowel their BIOS settings to the tune of “Your PC will be unsafe! Are you sure you want to run a LEGACY OS???” is familiar.

I’m not a huge fan of the idea of buying CPU+GPU+RAM+mobo all as one unit. But like… that’s what tends to happen. Audio cards, SATA drives, network cards, these things all used to be separated until motherboards offered features to streamline things.

The real problem is not form factor, but lack of competition. If there were 10-15 Qualcomms out there, offering different combos and a la carte options, there’d be no problem. It’s only because there are a tiny number of dominant players in the space that technical consolidation automatically translates to abusing consumers.

Well… modularity is kinda coming to an end anyway, regardless of supply chain moves. Apple’s M series has shown that op decoders and unified memory are the low-hanging fruit for overall system performance improvements, and that means less modularity.

I think Valve sees the writing on the wall and is trying to get ahead of the game via FEX and the Steam Frame. Intel and AMD are pretty much stuck playing Nvidia’s game at this point, and Qualcomm has an incredible opportunity here. I’m still rooting for RISC-V, and I think it may end up being the long-term winner in like 10-15 years time.

But either way, x86-style modularity is not long for this world. From a purely technical standpoint, I think that’s good. Adding the political and economic situation into the mix… well… fuck, we’re mega-fucked. About the only thing we have going for us as consumers is the fact that this is already headed towards a reset. So if we do gain some leverage, we can make a big change all at once. If we don’t though… things will get much worse.

Eh, it’s fine. It has some bad choices baked into it, but what language doesn’t? And JS in 2025 is miles better than JS in 2005.

I wouldn’t choose it for every project, but it’s a reasonable choice in many cases.

I’m always on unstable. Any time I try to stick to stable, I invariably need something-or-other that’s only on unstable.

I hate this timeline so much

Like AI companies care about business ethics

only a tool

“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological”

Every tool contains within it a philosophy — a particular way of seeing the world.

But especially digital technologies… they give the developer the ability to embed their values into the tools. Like, is DoorDash just a tool?

Lemme share the tea for anyone who isn’t aware:

• Owl house is a show by Dana Terrace that ran on Disney
• It slowly developed into big pro-LGBTQ themes
• Disney panicked, cancelled the show, claimed it was unpopular despite excellent ratings
• Dana Terrace left with a bunch of others to form an independent studio
• Their first show (Knights of Guinevere) features a floating amusement park that rains garbage all over the workers below, and robots that have orbs on their heads that produce a silhouette strikingly similar to that of Mickey Mouse

To solve climate change, we need two fundamental beliefs:

• There is an urgent problem
• We are capable of taking meaningful action

This graph proves that we can take meaningful action. That proof is essential to our success.

I don’t understand the people who insist that while there is an urgent problem, we have never done anything to address it, we’re currently doing nothing to address, and we will never do anything to address it.

What is the point of that belief?

Perhaps the certainty of failure is more comforting than the vulnerability of working towards a success that isn’t guaranteed.

Those additional requests will reuse the existing connection, so they’ll have more bandwidth at that point.

Feels more like a home manager thing to me

I see what you’re saying, but the fact that it can be ambiguous is actually what makes it so useful to fascist organizers.

They thrive on phrases that allow them to wink at each other when they want to, but claim innocence if someone calls them out.

14kB club: “Amateurs!!!”

https://dev.to/shadowfaxrodeo/why-your-website-should-be-under-14kb-in-size-398n

a 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page — maybe 612ms faster — while the difference between a 15kB and a 16kB page is trivial.

This is because of the TCP slow start algorithm. This article will cover what that is, how it works, and why you should care.

The original source was much more sensible.

The comparison makes sense for evaluating whether you’re over-invested in something. Like, if Nvidia suddenly poofed out of existence, would it seriously be worth 16% of everything the whole country makes in a year to get it back?

Owning a car that’s worth 16% of your yearly income sounds reasonable, no matter what your actual income is. A Pokemon card collection that’s 16% of your income is probably too risky, no matter what your actual income is.

Also, GDP is a decent scale to use for charting investment in a productivity tool, because if GDP ramped up at the same time as investment then it looks less like a bubble, even if they both ramp up quickly.

But that’s not what we see. We see a sudden and volatile shift, nothing like the normal pattern before the hype.

I think maybe the biggest conceptual mistake in computer science was calling them “tests”.

That word has all sorts of incorrect connotations to it:

• That they should be made after the implementation
• That they’re only useful if you’re unsure of the implementation
• That they should be looking for deviations from intention, instead of giving you a richer palette with which to paint your intention

You get this notion of running off to apply a ruler and a level to some structure that’s already built, adding notes to a clipboard about what’s wrong with it.

You should think of it as a pencil and paper — a place where you can be abstract, not worry about the nitty-gritty details (unless you want to), and focus on what would be right about an implementation that adheres to this design.

Like “I don’t care how it does it, but if you unmount and remount this component it should show the previous state without waiting for an HTTP request”.

Very different mindset from “Okay, I implemented this caching system, now I’m gonna write tests to see if there are any off-by-one errors when retrieving indexed data”.

I think that, very often, writing tests after the impl is worse than not writing tests at all. Cuz unless you’re some sort of wizard, you probably didn’t write the impl with enough flexibility for your tests to be flexible too. So you end up with brittle tests that break for bad reasons and reproduce all of the same assumptions that the impl has.

You spent extra time on the task, and the result is that when you have to come back and change the impl you’ll have to spend extra time changing the tests too. Instead of the tests helping you write the code faster in the first place, and helping you limit your tests to only what you actually care about keeping the same long-term.