Monthly Archives: August 2020

Article note: I've been expecting "Cheap multirotor with a shrapnel-throwing explosive device" to become a major fixture in small-actor warfare for years. Here they are.

Article note: Oh shit, this is the closest to "The Internet is broken" I've seen in a while. I just spent half an hour nervously trying to figure out why my webserver and house weren't talking, discovered that if I went through an intermediary they could, _then_ checked the news. Looks like CenturyLink (formerly Level3) is closing routes but leaving them in their BGP tables, so lots of traffic is going on dead routes through the backbones.

Article note: This is half of _why_ open, interoperable protocols are so important. Zoom is not quite a full-on mono-culture (Teams is honestly a much better product for running classes and I'm pretty skeptical of Miscrosoft in general, Google has a couple products in that space, there are a bunch of other not-terrible video conferencing options, etc.) it just has network effects making it the default, and inertia that makes it tricky to move elsewhere. However. We don't have global email outages because it's all clients talking over a protocol, just local disruptions. We don't have the whole web go down, just local failures (sometimes big ones when we let things like Cloudflare, or AWS, or EIG get too big for their britches). It seems like getting something standard and federated (maybe jitsi...) would be in everyone's best interest, but things are too dumb and desperate for that lately.

Article note: Holy shit, UK is actually up overall on several metrics. The program I work with most is up 15%, but I was expecting a small loss overall. Enrollment up 2%, first year retention up to 86.4%, new freshmen count landed between pre- and post- COVID estimates... that looks good. 20% Reduction in international students because of pandemic and Trump is not great but expected. $62M reduction in revenue from spring in a $72M shortfall, $14 million of that was refunds on room&board last semester... because we're financially a lifestyle residential community with a university attached, like most big schools.

Article note: That's _wild_. Zen2 parts are automatically mirroring the memory operand in a 0-latency hidden register for certain sequences of operations. It can do it through some stack manipulations and pointer+index calculations, and on several kinds of data. My MS involved some thinking about the problems with memory-tagged cached values, and it's firmly doable, but a trip.

Article note: Huh, that's a cute little alternet I didn't know existed, looks like there are a bunch of them, and many are vaguely-federated. Very much in the old big shared unix host tradition (that SDF has been the standard-bearer for), which is not that different from the BBS tradition, but with some modern flourishes compared to either.

Article note: I'm not $400 sold, especially because I tend to do colors in my informational doodling, but it sure is a cool gadget. The fact that it doesn't do well as an ereader from text-based formats, but is a great PDF reader is an interesting inversion from Kindles. The intentional FOSS/Hacker friendly design is about 50% of the appeal.

Article note: Well, the second season was awful, so...

Article note: Yuup.