Monthly Archives: October 2023

Bcachefs Merged into the Linux 6.7 Kernel

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Oh neat. I've been hesitant to deal with ZFS (out of tree due to incompatible licensing makes for brittle updates), fairly happy with EXT4 for simple setups (but it is missing the fancy and not super performant), and using BTRFS in the two-spindle-redundant mode for arrays and places where redundancy and/or CoW is useful, but bcachefs seems like it might cover all use cases better.
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The Future of Drone Warfare

Source: Schneier on Security

Article note: I love the asymmetry of how a sub $500 pile of commodity parts with 2kg of explosives is a threat to nation state actor's capital hardware. ..I'm also pretty sure it's why a bunch of nation states got real nervous about benign hobby aircraft in recent years and started slandering and restricting.

Ukraine is using $400 drones to destroy tanks:

Facing an enemy with superior numbers of troops and armor, the Ukrainian defenders are holding on with the help of tiny drones flown by operators like Firsov that, for a few hundred dollars, can deliver an explosive charge capable of destroying a Russian tank worth more than $2 million.

[…]

A typical FPV weighs up to one kilogram, has four small engines, a battery, a frame and a camera connected wirelessly to goggles worn by a pilot operating it remotely. It can carry up to 2.5 kilograms of explosives and strike a target at a speed of up to 150 kilometers per hour, explains Pavlo Tsybenko, acting director of the Dronarium military academy outside Kyiv.

“This drone costs up to $400 and can be made anywhere. We made ours using microchips imported from China and details we bought on AliExpress. We made the carbon frame ourselves. And, yeah, the batteries are from Tesla. One car has like 1,100 batteries that can be used to power these little guys,” Tsybenko told POLITICO on a recent visit, showing the custom-made FPV drones used by the academy to train future drone pilots.

“It is almost impossible to shoot it down,” he said. “Only a net can help. And I predict that soon we will have to put up such nets above our cities, or at least government buildings, all over Europe.”

Science fiction authors have been writing about drone swarms for decades. Now they are reality. Tanks today. Soon it will be ships (probably with more expensive drones). Feels like this will be a major change in warfare.

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Google Brain founder says big tech is lying about AI danger

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Tech bros trying to generate the conditions for regulatory capture is also one of my primary thoughts on a lot of the apocalyptic AI prognostication. There is a bunch of mundane bad shit that "AI" will facilitate, but it's mostly just the result of vesting institutional power in bogus tech.
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I accidentally saved my company half a million dollars

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's such an amazing (horrifying) story of modern organizations.
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Windows 11’s default mail client will show ads starting 2024

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's so strange how Microsoft does so much good engineering AND so much heinous user hostile rentseeking design.
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The Academic Great Gatsby Curve

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I suspect a lot of that now is because of niche capture as a winning academic career strategy. If you're working in a specialist area, any kind of blind review is bogus because the primary handful of people publishing in that niche know each other and what they're working on. They are usually aligned into one or more shared-stance cabals lead by the first person or handful of people to establish themselves in that particular niche, and filled out largely by their current and former students and collaborators. Those groups are then the established experts in the area and review, consciously or not, to ensure that them and theirs get published and anything that challenges their stance/narrative/methods/choke-hold doesn't. I think everyone who has spent much time in academia has a few pieces of "un-publishable work" tucked away, not because it was bad work, but because it would be inconvenient for someone with clout in the area and is thus not worth the hassle. I sure have a couple, and I'm not exactly senior.
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Dave Cutler: the secret history of Microsoft Windows

Source: OSNews

Article note: I've watched some excerpts from this and they were all fascinating, I need to find time for the whole thing. Dave Cutler is one of the only human beings to architect a successful platform of the scale he has... and he's done it more than once.

Dave Cutler is a seminal figure in computer science, renowned for his contributions to operating systems. Born in 1942, he played pivotal roles in the development of several OSes, most notably VMS for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Windows NT for Microsoft. Cutler’s design principles emphasize performance, reliability, and scalability. His work on Windows NT laid the foundation for many subsequent Windows versions, solidifying its place in enterprise and personal computing. A stickler for detail and a rigorous engineer, Cutler’s influence is evident in modern OS design and architecture. He’s a recipient of the Computer History Museum’s Fellow Award for his unparalleled contributions.

I don’t often link to videos, but when I do, it’s a good one.

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Using LEDs To Determine a Video Camera’s True Framerate

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: Someone who worked with the same research group I was was several years ago was supposed to rig ...basically this with a few extra LEDs to code the timing... over a summer, and it's not clear they ever made even a serious effort. Looking at this, the encoding half should have been trivial.

Interpolation and digital cropping are two techniques which are commonly used by marketing folk to embellish the true specifications of a device. Using digital cropping a fictitious zoom level can be listed among the bullet points, and with frame interpolation the number of frames per second (FPS) recorded by the sensor is artificially padded. This latter point is something which [Yuri D’Elia] came across with a recently purchased smartphone that lists a 960 FPS recording rate at 720p. A closer look reveals that this is not quite the case.

The smartphone in question is the Motorola Edge 30 Fusion, which is claimed to support 240 and 960 FPS framerates at 720p, yet the 50 MP OmniVision OV50A sensor in the rear camera is reported as only supporting up to 480 FPS at 720p. To conclusively prove that the Motorola phone wasn’t somehow unlocking an unreported feature in this sensor, [Yuri] set up an experiment using three LEDs, each of which was configured to blink at either 120, 240 or 480 Hz in a side-by-side configuration.

As [Yuri] explains in the blog post, each of these blinking frequencies would result in a specific pattern in the captured video, allowing one to determine whether the actual captured framerate was equal to, less than or higher than the LED’s frequency. Perhaps most disappointingly about the results is that this smartphone didn’t even manage to hit the 480 FPS supported by the OV50A sensor, and instead pegged out at a pedestrian 240 FPS. Chalk another one up for the marketing department.

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Reddit finally takes its API war where it belongs: to AI companies

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Reddit's whole proposition is hosting communities without the hassle of setting up infrastructure and joining separate communities. They in turn get to capture value by selling access to those communities as much as they can without interfering with their function. The draw to new users is that it is where the user-created content that isn't _completely_ overrun by corpo bullshit and SEO spam is. Breaking discoverability and indexing (this) is an even larger violation of that arrangement than breaking clients and management tools (last dumb) as a way to try to squeeze extra value. Stop worrying that someone else might make a dime off the content you host and start worrying that people might stop letting you rentseek off of it for only the cost of web hosting.
Business person searching browsing internet data information networking concept.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Reddit ignited a war this year. Dramatic changes in API access pricing (from free to unaffordable) was one of its most polarizing moves ever. It resulted in apps beloved by long-time Reddit users, including moderators and people with accessibility needs, closing shop. Community trust was sacrificed, too. Disgusted with Reddit for how it handled third-party apps, abruptly ushered in pricing changes, and treated moderators who protested, numerous valuable, knowledgeable users quit the platform.

Originally, Reddit framed its API pricing changes as a way to prevent generative AI companies from using Reddit data to train large language models (LLMs) without Reddit getting anything in return. With Reddit no longer dealing with small third-party developers—all of which are now either paying Reddit or getting some sort of exemption—Reddit is reportedly taking the fight to where it should have been focused the entire time: generative AI firms.

Can Reddit survive without search?

On Friday, The Washington Post, as spotted by The Verge, said Reddit "has met with top generative AI companies about being paid for its data," citing an anonymous source.

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Nvidia to make Arm-based PC chips in major new challenge to Intel

Source: Hacker News

Article note: All I want to know is how the platform code/bootloader/firmware situation will be on these things. It keeps being bullshit _even compared to UEFI on x86_64_ which is really an accomplishment.
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