Weirdly, I think it all got me my first job. I interviewed at a graphics card manufacturer and the interviewer placed one of their cards on the table and said “tell me what’s on that card”.

I picked it up and pointed out all the components because I knew them all by their part numbers that were written on them. I hadn’t seen them before, but I knew they were options in XFree86. Then add in that the regular array of chips was likely VRAM and the chips with the same logo on them as was above the door where the companies own video processors.

I didn’t know how any of it worked, but he didn’t know that. All he saw was a fresh graduate that just effortlessly identified some quite esoteric components of a design he’d personally made.

The thing that sticks with me is video card support. Back then (before Nvidia, 3dfx, etc) you had VGA cards that had one of a number of chipsets on, but it would be paired with a video timing chip and a RAMDAC. Buying a card required knowing which combination of parts it used and which combinations had support in XFree86. Then writing the configuration required knowing the video timings supported by your monitor. Not just frequencies, but blanking periods and such like.

EDID solved that last problem.

Israel clothes itself in the garments of the Jewish people and uses them to defend it’s actions. It claims that any action against it is an action against the Jewish people.

Now I know that there are Jewish people around the world saying “not in my name”, but it’s also why so many supporters of Israel exist. You can’t divorce the religious aspect from this war. If it wasn’t there this wouldn’t be allowed to happen.

I don’t seen how else you do it.

“Removing the stigma” is desensitizing by definition. So you want to desensitize through… what? Education?

Yeah I mean it’s just a more easy to use Photoshop basically.

Photoshop has the same technology baked into it now. Sure, it has “safeguards” so it may not generate nudes, but it would have no trouble depicting someone “having dinner with Bill Cosby” or whatever you feel is reputation destroying.

Technically and legally the photos would be considered child porn

I don’t think that has been tested in court. It would be a reasonable legal argument to say that the image isn’t a photo of anyone. It doesn’t depict reality, so it can’t depict anyone.

I think at best you can argue it’s a form of photo manipulation, and the intent is to create a false impression about someone. A form of image based libel, but I don’t think that’s currently a legal concept. It’s also a concept where you would have to protect works of fiction otherwise you’ve just made the visual effects industry illegal if you’re not careful.

In fact, that raises an interesting simily. We do not allow animals to be abused, but we allow images of animal abuse in films as long as they are faked. We allow images of human physical abuse as long as they are faked. Children are often in horror films, and creating the images we see is very strictly managed so that the child actor is not exposed to anything that could distress them. The resulting “works of art” are not under such limitations as far as I’m aware.

What’s the line here? Parental consent? I think that could lead to some very concerning outcomes. We all know abusive parents exist.

I say all of this, not because I want to defend anyone, but because I think we’re about to set some really bad legal precidents if we’re not careful. Ones that will potentially do a lot of harm. Personally, I don’t think the concept of any image, or any other piece of data, being illegal holds water. Police people’s actions, not data.

They are safe on the space station. They have all the time they need to sort it out. They can even wait for another craft to arrive.

Since Apple’s keynote this week.

You are, if you’re calling for Apple like features.

You might argue that “private cloud” is privacy preserving, but you can only implement that with the cash of Apple. I would also argue that anything leaving my machine, to a bunch of servers I don’t control, without my knowledge is NOT preserving my privacy.

While I was vacating my colleagues…

I’m reminded of a scene from The Wire:

https://youtu.be/h5d82ndui_s

(I know. I removed a comma from the quote, but that’s how I read it)

It does matter in distributed application on LANs. The thin client model is still in operation at a lot of HPC and similar environments. Laptops and Desktops just display what is being done elsewhere.

Remote X11 is a better user experience in that environment than anything else I’ve tried. It feels like the application is local even if it’s not.

Still worth trying.

The word “support” is used in a very corporate way in the ROCm docs. They mean in terms of support contracts, sending engineers out to customer sites, having people dedicated to specific customers.

The code works on more devices than they list, but they won’t enter into a support contract with anyone using anything but their latest and greatest.

“set the magic environment variable because the tool chain will mis-detect the architecture of your unsupported card”

I don’t think it’s misdetecting it. Rather it detects it correctly, tries to use specific support for that device, but then finds that the support was switched off at compile time. The environment variable forces it to pretend to be a different (very similar) device.

Clunky, yes.

Why is the cheque redacted?

Who and what is being protected?

Maybe not peaked in terms of performance, but in terms of rate of development … Absolutely.

I keep trying catalog but it doesn’t do anything.

Slashdot.org and digg.com

I’m old school.

For me the answer is always “snapshots” and normally because of docker.

If you run a docker image store on a BTRFS drive, docker creates snapshots at various times. It never cleans them up; It has no commands that clean them up, and it means that if you delete a file it doesn’t free any space because the snapshots keep the file alive.

They’ve got problems in their tests though. There are 5 packages in core that are “unreproducible” and one is the kernel. Pretty significant package, except it fails because of a timeout.

Our new moral guides.

Techno-priests