AernaLingus [any]

Facebook (when that was still a platform young people used). I would obsessively scroll through it for hours each day, basically trying to look at and comment on EVERYTHING. On a whim, I decided to take a break from it for a month. By the time the month was up, I realized I didn’t miss it at all, and that was that. One of the big takeaways was that I thought that I was forming relationships with the people I’d comment back and forth with, but in reality these were people who I would never hang out with outside of school and barely even talk with in school (if at all); it was all just superficial, and I was better off spending time talking to my actual friends.

It wasn’t that bad, but in high school I mindlessly got into the habit of drinking a few cups of Coke each day (I think it started because I would get a 2 liter whenever I’d order pizza). I quit it pretty much cold turkey, and not only did I stop drinking it at home, I no longer order it at restaurants either, which is something I did ever since I was a little kid. The idea of just buying a bottle of soda and drinking it is straight honestly grosses me out now even though getting a can or bottle from a vending machine was something I’d do without thinking. The one exception is when I’m pigging out at the movies with a bucket of popcorn, but that’s pretty rare.

If you’re watching consecutive episodes of a series you can always just download them to your phone before you head to work. Not really viable if you hop around a lot, though.

Seconded, that beast (well, one of its predecessors) got me through college on the included toner cartridge alone and it’s still kicking

Link to the report

Thanks liberal justices, very cool!

“Owning a car = freedom”

“You need a big truck/SUV to haul things” (it’s just a coincidence that people drove much smaller cars before a multibillion dollar deluge of advertising)

“It’s consumers’ responsibility to reduce plastic pollution by recycling, and recycling is effective” (whoever came up with this one belongs in the PR scumfuck hall of fame)

Original Phoronix article which has all the individual benchmarks—weird that they didn’t link to it

Totally beside the point, but is it just me or is that article written really strangely? Overall it has a kinda high school newspaper vibe, but in particular the attempts at humor are both awkward and numerous.

The information itself is good, though, so thank you for sharing!

Presentation of the paper by one of its authors

There’s a variable that contains the number of cores (called cpus) which is hardcoded to max out at 8, but it doesn’t mean that cores aren’t utilized beyond 8 cores–it just means that the scheduling scaling factor will not change in either the linear or logarithmic case once you go above that number:

/*
 * Increase the granularity value when there are more CPUs,
 * because with more CPUs the 'effective latency' as visible
 * to users decreases. But the relationship is not linear,
 * so pick a second-best guess by going with the log2 of the
 * number of CPUs.
 *
 * This idea comes from the SD scheduler of Con Kolivas:
 */
static unsigned int get_update_sysctl_factor(void)
{
	unsigned int cpus = min_t(unsigned int, num_online_cpus(), 8);
	unsigned int factor;

	switch (sysctl_sched_tunable_scaling) {
	case SCHED_TUNABLESCALING_NONE:
		factor = 1;
		break;
	case SCHED_TUNABLESCALING_LINEAR:
		factor = cpus;
		break;
	case SCHED_TUNABLESCALING_LOG:
	default:
		factor = 1 + ilog2(cpus);
		break;
	}

	return factor;
}

The core claim is this:

It’s problematic that the kernel was hardcoded to a maximum of 8 cores (scaling factor of 4). It can’t be good to reschedule hundreds of tasks every few milliseconds, maybe on a different core, maybe on a different die. It can’t be good for performance and cache locality.

On this point, I have no idea (hope someone more knowledgeable will weigh in). But I’d say the headline is misleading at best.

I remember being wowed by Beowulf (which I think was the first high profile 3D movie in the most recent wave), and I also enjoyed Avatar in 3D. Other than those two movies I found that 3D detected detracted from the overall experience and I quickly stopped attending 3D showings.

edit: realized I made a typo three days later…embarrassing

MartSnack - okay, this one is kind of cheating because there’s only one video so far, but if you like obscure and highly technical video game challenges like the SM64 A Button Challenge, it’s one of the best damn videos on the internet right up there with pannenkoek’s classic Watch for Rolling Rocks - 0.5x A Presses. It’s satisfying, interesting, and also surprisingly funny and relaxing. I’ve watched it like 7 or 8 times by this point, and I’m gonna watch it again after I submit this comment. Also if you like it def subscribe and hit the bell, he’s been working on a new video for months and has been giving updates in the comments as recently as a few days ago, so hopefully it’ll come out eventually!

Church of Kondo - Repository for remastered video game OSTs (primarily the cartridge era). These aren’t just any old remastered, but the result of countless hours of painstaking research to identify the exact samples used in games, track them down in the highest possible quality, and recreate a “perfect quality” mix. They’ve got reams of spreadsheets detailing all the samples they’ve cataloged.

mklachu - Dope Otamatone covers with extremely cute Otamatone costumes

Retro Game Mechanics Explained - Probably the highest production value you’ll ever see for videos on this topic–combines a deep knowledge of retro game hardware and programming with beautiful visualizations and demos. His video on Pac-Man ghost behavior is pretty representative of how he takes a subject and drills down to the assembly to show you exactly what’s happening with some really cool graphics that show what the code does step by step.

Real babies in incubators

Imaginary babies in incubators

Holy shit. I’ll be honest, having quit using reddit for daily browsing and simply relegating it to its main productive purpose of “usable Google results,” I kind of assumed that the outrage over the API pricing ultimately didn’t have much of an effect. But this data is nuts. I guess it goes to show the effect that alienating power users can have on a site that’s so power-user driven, where a fraction of users even comment and a tiny fraction of that fraction posts content and an even tinier fraction of that tiny fraction moderates to keep things running smoothly.

O Tannentag, o Tannentag…