ianhowson

24 ms·

31.
by ianhowson 6y ago
> people claiming that 8 GB isn't enough for the average user I'm not claiming anything of the sort. My point is that memory consumption seems to be greatly reduced in Big Sur, and that might make 8GB machines much better to us
32.
by ianhowson 6y ago
I don't think retain/release perf has anything to do with memory consumption, but I have seen a bunch of reviews claiming that 8GB is perfectly fine. This is fascinating to me, because: (a) every 8GB Mac I've used in the pa
33.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Hard drives lie. SMART data is not thorough and it is not trustworthy. Across dozens of drive failures over the years, I've never seen SMART predict a failure before ZFS detected data loss or the OS reported 'drive is slow'
34.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Don't forget about the I-Series! If you're still interested in hardware, there's the NVIDIA BlueField 2 and its regex accelerator: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/networking/products/data-proces...
35.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Sorry, I wasn't clear. PhotoSync copies the photos from your device to some destination (NAS, SMB, S3, whatever.) It doesn't interact with Google Photos. When it copies stuff it copies the original HEIC/JPEG/RAW/wha
36.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Keep in mind that the photos you download from Takeout have the GPS data stripped out, so (sibling commentors) already have an incomplete backup. PhotoSync ( https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html ) lets you do a good-old-fa
37.
by ianhowson 6y ago
> Or can I mount an OVH virtual drive that I know will survive across VM migrations? Yes, Block Storage: https://us.ovhcloud.com/public-cloud/block-storage/ > Do they at least support the same API? Yes >
38.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Allow me to educate you :-) > I don't know how good OVH is with outage and availability. I've personally observed failure rates similar to AWS EC2 and EBS. You need to plan for failure, like any cloud provider. > the raw com
39.
by ianhowson 6y ago
> if you're implementing some algorithm directly at the gate level for cryptography or signal processing or whatever then being able to arrange inputs outputs into dataflows is a big win with no roundrips to general purpose register
40.
by ianhowson 6y ago
It's the usual "fundamental difficulty" with FPGAs -- CPUs and GPUs are faster and more power efficient for compute-intensive tasks. An algorithm on FPGA needs to overcome the 20x worse architectural efficiency just to break
41.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Couldn't you buy four 10 year old laptops?
42.
by ianhowson 6y ago
You could get an off-the-shelf x86 machine in the same form factor and run the cluster nodes in VMs, for instance. Maybe you could argue that four RPis on a network are more reliable than a single x86 with VMs, but that doesn't seem
43.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Huh. I almost missed that, but can confirm. On a past project we had two DDR RAMs and a NOR Flash on the same bus. There was one hardware engineer, and he laid out the memory subsystem in about a day. (The power supplies were dramatically m
44.
by ianhowson 6y ago
My beef with the Pi is that it's not just EUR40 for the device; you also need to add on: - power supply - quality SD card - heatsinks - a case and then deal with - non-x86 - thermal issues - SD cards - the CPU is too tiny to do anyth
45.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Seconding this. X200/210/220 are dirt cheap, come with modern CPUs, cooling fans (!), quality Ethernet ports and run x86-64 containers unmodified. You can cram 16GB of RAM and SATA SSDs into an X220. Much less hassle and similar p
46.
by ianhowson 6y ago
There are a bunch of BLE splits at https://zmkfirmware.dev/docs/hardware
47.
by ianhowson 6y ago
I modded my Kinesis Edge with Holtite sockets to get hotswap capability. I use Zilents on my daily driver. They're pretty quiet as far as mech switches go, but still a lot noisier than a standard laptop keyboard. No complaints so far.
48.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Yes. - Small children don't really understand "mummy's working, talk to me instead." Interruptions are death to productivity. Children can't interrupt you if you're not present. - Most daycares are closed or at
49.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Hey, I still do this today for non-revenue-generating services. Pretty much every bigcorp I've ever worked for has some crucial service on a box under someone's desk...
50.
by ianhowson 6y ago
MISRA and the JPL standards are required reading if you're doing safety-critical work. They tend to warp the structure of your software and prevent usage of many useful language features. If you're not doing safety work, the Linux
51.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Nanoseconds if you can respond inside the interrupt handler ('top half' in Linux.) Microseconds to milliseconds with significant variability if you need to be scheduled ('bottom half'.)
52.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Cherry ML are terrible. I'd prefer rubber domes.
53.
by ianhowson 6y ago
I recently built a Dactyl Manuform and thought the same thing with the 1.5u outer columns. For me, at least, it's not a big win. I'm mostly touching the inner edge of the key because my pinkies aren't that laterally flexible.
54.
by ianhowson 6y ago
> bitstream ... Is that a sane expectation? No. Bitstream formats are not in any way compatible across devices. Because timing is a factor, even if you had the same physical layout of LUTs and routing, it's unlikely that your desig
55.
by ianhowson 6y ago
IOPS limitations and network latency are the reason I want to run my Postgres replicas in k8s. Every machine gets NVMe and a replica instance. They're still cattle, but they can serve a lot of requests. Database CPU usage is neglig
56.
by ianhowson 6y ago
Bingo. Estimates vary wildly, but I've seen figures saying that Axx CPUs cost Apple about $50 each. Even if it's more like $100, that's still an insane amount of additional profit per unit to be extracted. They don't nee
57.
by ianhowson 6y ago
> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference. Once you look closely at power profiles on modern mach
58.
by ianhowson 6y ago
> wide TDP range of designs Keep in mind that this doesn't imply a different chip design. TDP is primarily a function of intended application and cooling capacity, not chip tech. That said, they've already demonstrated ability
59.
by ianhowson 6y ago
I believe the theory that it's 5k iMac panels that Apple rejected. I have a few stuck pixels but I never notice because they're so small. I have a blue stuck-on in the lower-right quadrant and I can't even find it now. I have
60.
by ianhowson 6y ago
I've got a Planar IX2790 and it's great. Article is spot-on re. scaling -- it's much nicer to look at all day (native 2x scaling) vs. 4k at 1.5x scaling.

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