Author Archives: pappp

This Central Kentucky church reopened on May 10 and became a COVID-19 hot spot

Posted on 2020-06-05 by pappp

Source: Kentucky.com -- Fayette County

Article note: From the guilty party "I don’t know of anything we could’ve done differently. I don’t. That’s why I just feel so bad." - Then you shouldn't be in a position of authority, asshole. You could have done what virtually everyone else did and told everyone to maintain distancing.

An Independent Fundamental Baptist church in Jessamine County that resumed in-person services in mid-May, and whose pastor pressured the governor to reopen churches early, is now the site of a … Click to Continue »

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The Trojan Horse in Trump’s anti-Twitter executive order

Posted on 2020-06-05 by pappp

Source: Engadget

Article note: This is a very weird piece, in one paragraph they fantasize about censoring undesirables from the de-facto commons, and in the next they seem to acknowledge that such tools will primarily be used to attack the worthy and vulnerable, as they always have. Censorship allowing "only the good transgressions" is always pulling up the ladder behind you, if you build tools to repress the socially unacceptable, what you are really saying is, to rewrite their musings, "I like to imagine where we might be if these companies had treated abolitionists, suffragettes, and LGBT activists with the same zeal for censorship and eradication from platforms, had given them no place to organize and recruit, or to plan and network."
Approximately 100 years ago (May 28, 2020) the White House put social media websites in its (very crowded) crosshairs. This was in the form of an executive order to regulate what Mr. Trump believes to be online censorship, specifically calling Twitte...
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University of Kentucky to remove controversial Memorial Hall mural, president says

Posted on 2020-06-05 by pappp

Source: Kentucky.com -- Education

Article note: I'm not sure that its a wrong decision, but the idea of erasing art that offends our modern sensibilities and choosing whose historicity counts [more] always makes me profoundly uncomfortable.

The University of Kentucky will begin the process of taking down the controversial Memorial Hall mural that depicts black workers — possibly slaves — planting tobacco, an email sent to … Click to Continue »

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Lattice FPGA adds ‘no reversing’ clause for SDK built on reversed bitstreams

Posted on 2020-06-04 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: "We built our toolchain by adopting FOSS parts, but don't you dare do your own work to support our products in your FOSS projects" I keep wanting to fiddle with Lattice parts, because the Xilinx bits are proprietary and obnoxious and their parts are rather expensive, but they really don't make it easy.
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Researcher questions years of work with reexamination of fMRI data

Posted on 2020-06-04 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Yeah. fMRI studies have not been as reliable as anyone hoped under any layer of scrutiny. It's a real problem.
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IBM to power down Power-powered virtual private cloud, GPU-accelerated options

Posted on 2020-06-03 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: Huh. The POWER+GPU arrangement made me think those were spinoff tech from the POWER9 NVLink fancy from the HPC market, I'm curious if it's a "No one who wanted to run Linux wanted to deal with POWER quirks" or "Nvidia is making this a pain in the ass." because both are trends in the industry.

Customers given 80 days before instance deletion and the suggested replacement doesn't yet support Linux

IBM has given users of its IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC on Power 80 days to find a new home.…

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Lawsuit: UK should’ve refunded some tuition, fees after COVID-19 closed campus

Posted on 2020-06-03 by pappp

Source: Kentucky.com -- Education

Article note: Well, that was entirely expected. That money is spent within a couple weeks of the beginning of the semester, so it'll be a bad time if they get anywhere at scale.

The University of Kentucky should have reduced and refunded mandatory fees and tuition when it switched to online-only classes because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a student’s lawsuit argues. The lawsuit … Click to Continue »

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Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines

Posted on 2020-06-02 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: That is a really cool bit of forensics. AMD K6-2s did much more sophisticated uop decomposition and scheduling for complicated instructions (specifically LOOP) and worse with handling programmer/compiler generated simple instruction sequence, while contemporary Intel parts were the opposite; their errata suggested using the simpler instructions like building your loop on JCXZ instead of using LOOP. So code that did limited precision timer comparisons on either end of fixed-length LOOPs failed with a divide by 0 on AMD parts at lower clocks than on Intel parts.
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I was emailed after abandoning a registration form. I did not click Submit

Posted on 2020-06-01 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: A new low in "Turning the web into a runtime was a terrible, terrible mistake."
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AppGet ‘really helped us,’ Microsoft says, but offers no apology to dev for killing open-source package manager

Posted on 2020-06-01 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: As I was musing with a friend the other day, the "court a dev who make something cool on your platform, pump them for information, then squash them with a first-party clone" maneuver might as well be called "Pulling an Apple," but here is Microsoft doing it. OTOH, in this case "Windows gets a package manager" would have been welcome news any time since 1994 (and this is only marginally a real package manager since it doesn't do dependency management and the install actions execute arbitrary binaries that may do things it can't roll back), so it is perhaps not surprising that Microsoft finally acted.

Windows bod acknowledges project's influence on WinGet

Microsoft's Andrew Clinick, a group program manager in the Windows team who is involved with the development of the WinGet package manager, has tried to make good with the open-source community by publishing an acknowledgement of what was borrowed from the existing AppGet project.…

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