Category Archives: News

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Re-examining the chip Shortage: Legacy node decommissions

Posted on 2023-04-09 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The general claim that the pause in orders of long-term-support parts on old nodes from industrial and automotive markets caused fabs to shut down their legacy lines, and the chip shortage really exploded when orders from those sectors resumed is something I've seen a lot and find highly plausible. I was wild-assed-guessing it was Renesas, Infineon, Microchip, and/or ST that were the root-cause because of what became unavailable, but this piece claims it was TSMC decommissioning their ancient ~250nm ASML lithography machines that kicked it off. I'm suspicious that they got one specific case in several and attributed root-cause to it, but in any case it's a fascinating study in very deep, very proprietary supply lines.
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The Bitcoin Whitepaper is hidden in every modern copy of macOS

Posted on 2023-04-05 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: Bitcoin finds a small, subtle additional way to be a giant waste of resources.

While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.

I’ve asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to confirm, and it was there for every one of them. The file is found in every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version (Ventura), but isn’t in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier.

A peculiar find indeed, considering the utter uselessness and wastefulness that is cryptocurrency.

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The day Windows died

Posted on 2023-04-02 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: Using Windows is starting to induce the same feeling that using the Web without an ad-blocker has had for a long time, or coming face to face with someones' toolbar-infested browser did in the bad old days. That very clear sensation that the technology is working for someone-not-you.

So, there is basically little you can do with Windows out of the box but buy subscriptions and log into pre-installed social media apps. One thing I knew right on the spot: That’s not an environment I want my kid to make his first steps “on a real computer.” Not in a hundred years. Never.

Some people recommended tools to me which can be used to switch most of those things off. But honestly: How do you trust a system (or its manufacturer) if you can’t even know if those settings, which you deliberately chose, persist? What if I remove app x for a reason, and it suddenly pops up again after the next Windows update? Or the news section in the search menu? No way. I can no longer see a good use case for it, at least not in my home.

Windows 11 is a dystopian experience.

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iAPX432: Gordon Moore, Risk and Intel’s Super-CISC Failure

Posted on 2023-04-02 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The 432 tale is always interesting. The HN thread is one of the few places I've seen someone-not-me make the Burroughs large system done wrong comparison, and a place to make my usual "learning to hide whatever cutting edge processor behind a fancy dynamic JIT-in-hardware was the winning trick" argument about why many of the ambitious designs of the 90s failed and the P6/K6 designs basically ended ISAs.
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There’s something off about LED bulbs

Posted on 2023-03-30 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: ...There's something off if you buy _absolute garbage_ bulbs and/or use them in ways not indicated. If you use the ones with chopper power supply designs that probably say "Not Dimmable" on the box with an upstream chopper dimmer, their power supply dies. If you buy the dollar store bulbs driving the cheapest LEDs they could find at 110% of their rated current through a power supply at 110% of the rated output for the design the manufacture made a cost-cut clone of then built with no-name crapacitors, they die. If you buy the ones with the cheapest LEDs pumping the cheapest phosphor coatings, they throw terrible notchy spectrum light. Quality LEDs driven with quality PSUs in quality envelopes are only moderately more expensive and are excellent. Cool. Efficient. No flicker. High CRI. Long-lived. It's just a problem that identifying the ones that aren't garbage is harder than it should be because the market is flooded with cost-cut trash.
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H26Forge: Exploiting Vulnerabilities in the H.264 Decoders of iOS, Firefox, VLC [pdf]

Posted on 2023-03-29 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The design of the domain specific Fuzzer is really cool. The profusion of exploitable edge cases part of video decoding is ...obvious in retrospect, but it's such a big space it's actually hard to explore.
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Modern software performance is firmly in its “beyond parody” stage

Posted on 2023-03-28 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is one of my favorite things about retro-computing. Some things on old machines are _slow_ (like disc access; sitting and listening to the older flavors of spinning rust buzz is an experience), but in general software is dramatically more responsive in orders of magnitude less compute power and memory.
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Tech Companies Are Ruining Their Apps, Websites, Internet

Posted on 2023-03-27 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I don't even need to comment, it's exhaustively correct. Tech incumbents are engaging in dumb fad chasing for market manipulation purposes, and fucking up everything they do in the process.
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The TikTok ban is a betrayal of the open internet

Posted on 2023-03-27 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: We don't need to "Ban TikTok!" because it's likely a Chinese intelligence op, we need real data-protection laws that ban _everyone_ from engaging in that kind of invasive data collection behavior. But our government is broken and the interests of the domestic competitors to TikTok, the interests of the domestic intelligence agencies, and the interests of the domestic public manipulators are all aligning to make the discussion about setting up some kind of national ban/firewall on TikTok and fucking up the Internet by letting the US government censor "undesirables" (determined by those currently in power) online, instead of fixing the Internet and forbidding the problematic data collection behavior for all players.
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Arduino Uno R4

Posted on 2023-03-26 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Calling a device that isn't based on an ATMega 8/168/328 compatible an "Arduino Uno" seems like a bad decision ecosystem comprehensibility wise. Especially with a Renesas part, they are not known for their accessible high-quality documentation.
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