February 2021

“Love the smell of thermal detonator in the morning”

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Biden decided to bomb Syria cos it’s what the US does, after all. Bomb the shit out of brown people.

We’ve got some memes going around (this is but one example) about Democrats continuing the Republican tradition.

If it actually happens IRL many lulz will be had at Biden’s expense and he’ll fucken deserve it.

That and Kamala is probably pissed that pigs en’t getting money to terrorize people of color.

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Rust: move fast and break people’s wallets

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Rewrite-it-in-Rust has become a moral imperative. Well, here’s a moral argument: throwing away serviceable computers every couple of years to upgrade is a privilege that not all of your users have, contributes to climate change, and fills up landfills. As far as security is concerned, some matters demand leaving the norm: old hardware is the only kind that can avoid proprietary firmware blobs, Intel ME or AMD PSP, and UEFI. Novel hardware which addresses issues like microcode and open hardware, like POWER9 and RISC-V, are also suffering under Rust’s mainstream-or-bust regime. Anyone left behind is forced to use the legacy C codebase you’ve abandoned, which is much worse for their security than the hypothetical bugs you’re trying to save them from.

Source: Drew DeVault’s blog

As someone who almost exclusively uses older hardware I am extremely annoyed by developers and system administrators who tell me I need to switch out my hardware every 3 to 5 years for the sake of convenience. It’s a very entitled position to take and it got me annoyed enough to go on a little twitter rant about it. If your old hardware works it should be used for as long as possible. You don’t need a server with an AMD Epyc CPU with 1 TB RAM and multipe SSDs with ZFS to… run a simple WordPress blog like this one.

I certainly don’t have the money to develop software in Rust-recommended hardware, which can also double as gaming hardware with the addition of a nice GPU.

How about a memory safe language that can run on “old” or “slow” hardware of the sort that is most often used outside of the US and Europe? If you were to listen to these people they’ll tell you it can’t be done.

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Always has been the same lie

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No one I’ve talked to in Texas has mentioned the government. They know better than to expect anything from it. Anyone who has lived in Texas for any period of time and experienced any kind of dire need knows that the government is not going to help you. It’s controlled by men who care more about their pockets than their people. It’s one thing to come to terms with that level of neglect when it’s being enacted in the service of denying people individual rights to decisions over their body, or ensuring that everyone can carry a gun at all times. But it’s something else to see the consequences of the government’s callousness borne out in the crashing of a power grid. Even libertarians think that the government should make sure the roads are safe and that people can heat their homes.

Source: It’s Always The Same Lie | Defector

And that’s why it’s usually people high up in Texas government that are the first to pipe up about seceding. For the same reason Texas gave up this bit of land:

Map of Texas pointing to the no-mans-land that became the Oklahoma Panhandle

That bit of land is north of the Missouri Compromise line. Texas gave up this land because it wanted slavery more and secession would certainly give them a way to bring it back.

They won’t call it that outright. They’ll call it something nicer than “indentured servitude” though.

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Wish for quiet toys

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About a month ago we picked up at work a SuperMicro X9SCM-F in a 4U rackable case; we didn’t know who the case maker was until @thegpfury noticed it was a Norco case.

SuperMicro X9SCM-F
SuperMicro X9SCM-F
SuperMicro X9SCM-F
SuperMicro X9SCM-F
SuperMicro X9SCM-F

This is all well and good but we had a major problem for usage: The noise! This being enterprise hardware no consideration was made for acoustics since the device would live in a datacenter but in my case we want to use it at home.

This is what it sounds with all the fans on (NBM-MAT case fans, the lot of them):

Norco DS-24H

Super loud. Like a 70s VW Bug that has had zero maintenance.

So then I tried with only the fans in the back:

Norco DS-24H

And finally with only the CPU fan

Norco DS-24H

At this point it was clear all the fans were buggered to hell. With them all being 80x80x25 it turned out Noctua do have great replacements available; for the backplane I got NF-R8 redux-1200 and for the read I got the NF-R8 redux-1800 PWM so the motherboard can control the speed on them. The power supply is still fully functional and with it being a Corsair AX760 we know we don’t have to worry about the noise coming from it.

This is how it sounds with two backplane fans and both back fans installed:

Norco DS-24H
Much, much better! So quiet very stealth!!!

For the time being it should be okay to run it with just these fans; the apartment is kind of cold and the additional cooling will not be needed until the summer, by which point the thing will probably get upgraded storage. If only more manufacturers had in consideration the acoustics of their devices; there’s an HP ProLiant DL160 G6 laying around that is also loud as fuck but there’s no clear path to making it quieter; I know 1U devices don’t have the most space but even 2U devices are still loud as hell when they can be much improved.

Perhaps a 2U system with quiet fans and good gaming hardware, mounted under a desk top. That’d be nice. Like a Lack rack but for actual desk use. That’d be nice.

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