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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2025

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  • I agree with you, mostly. Margins in the datacenter are thin for some players. Not Nvidia, they are at like 60% pure profit per chip, including software and RnD. That will have an effect on how we design stuff in the next few years.

    I think we’ll need both ”GPU” and traditional CPUs for the foreseeable future. GPU-style for bandwidth or compute constrained workloads and CPU-style for latency sensitive workloads or pointer chasing. Now, I do think we’ll slap them both on top of the same memory, APU-style á la MI300A.

    That is, as long as x86 has the single-threaded advantage, RISC-V won’t take over that marked, and as long as GPUs have higher bandwidth, RISC-V won’t take over that market.

    Finally, I doubt we’ll see a performant RISC-V chip from China the next decade - they simply lack the EUV fabs. From outside of China, maybe, but the demand isn’t nearly as large.


  • Not economical. Storage is already done on far larger fab nodes than CPUs and other components. This is a case where higher density actually can be cheaper. ”Mature” nodes are most likely cheaper than the ”ancient” process nodes simply due to age and efficiency. (See also the disaster in the auto industry during covid. Car makers stopped ordering parts made on ancient process nodes, so the nodes were shut down permanently due to cost. After covid, fun times for automakers that had to modernise.)

    Go compare prices, new NVMe M.2 will most likely be cheaper than SATA 2.5” per TB. The extra plastic shell, extra shipping volume and SATA-controller is that difference. 3.5” would make it even worse. In the datacenter, we are moving towards ”rulers” with 61TB available now, probably 120TB soon. Now, these are expensive, but the cost per TB is actually not that horrible when compared to consumer drives.






  • Unless you have actual tooling (i.e. RedHat erratas + some service on top of that), just don’t even try.

    Stop downloading random shit from dockerhub and github. Pick a distro that has whatever you need packaged, install from the repositories and turn on automatic updates. If you need stuff outside of repos, use first party packages and turn on auto updates. If there aren’t any decent packages, just don’t do it. There is a reason people pay RedHat a shitton of money, and that’s because they deal with much of this bullshit for you.

    At home, I simply won’t install anything unless I can enable automatic updates. Nixos solves much of it. Two times a year I need to bump the distro version, bump the nextcloud release, and deal with depreciations, and that’s it.

    I also highly recommend turning on automatic periodic reboots, so you actually get new kernels running…




  • Well, I’d just go for a reverse proxy I guess. If you are lazy, just expose it as an ip without any dns. For working DNS, you can just add a public A-record for the local IP of the Pi. For certs, you can’t rely on the default http-method that letsencrypt use, you’ll need to do it via DNS or wildcards or something.

    But the thing is, as your traffic is on a VPN, you can fuck up DNS and TLS and Auth all you want without getting pwnd.



  • I’d recommend setting up a VPN, like tailscale. The internet is an evil place where everyone hates you and a single tiny mistake will mess you up. Remove risk and enjoy the hobby more.

    Some people will argue that serving stuff on open ports to the public internet is fine. They are not wrong, but don’t do it until you know, understand and accept the risks.(’normal_distribution_meme.pbm’)

    Remember, risk is ’probability’ times ’shitshow’, and other people can, in general, only help you determine the probability.



  • I don’t believe those MBA types should be in the discussion at this level at all.

    That’s the thing. They are in the discussion. It doesn’t matter what we think about it. If touching Rust risks yielding lower profits this quarter, it’s an automatic ”fuck off you filthy hobbyists”. Even having the discussion costs money.

    Rust in the kernel isn’t about technology, it’s about economics and risk management. I’d like to see the discussion move on from ”C bad unsafe rust gud typesaf” to a level where the suggested benefits of Rust are made clear to the people holding the bags of money, preferably presenting some actual monetary benefits. (Oh, and to make things worse, there are thousands of different stakeholders, with different interests, many of which are in conflict. Good luck!)

    So yeah, I get that you don’t care about it. But you probably should.


  • I’m still kind of on the fence about Rust in the kernel. Linux isn’t some random hobby project, there are serious people working for serious companies in the project. Rust has a clear value proposition w.r.t. it’s qualities as a language, but I don’t think it’s as clear on a system level.

    Say I’m working for a large company as a dev, maintaining a subsystem (let’s say a driver). Letting other people (filthy casual hobbyists) mess around with their filthy type safety will eventually spill into my subsystem and cause extra work. I don’t want the extra work, I just want to have my driver working and then go home. And even if I’m okay with the extra work, my boss won’t be. Even the risk of extra costs down the line will be enough for some to shut it down completely.

    There are boring people working for huge corporations with huge stakes in the Linux kernel. I don’t think they see that much value in Rust at the moment, and I think the Rust crowd might need to hire some MBAs if they want to expand their presence in the kernel.