Replacing a TCP socket with a UNIX socket doesn’t affect the amount of headers you have to parse.

We rented our technology and could not read nor write.

25/10 for 65AUD/m (43USD/m). Australia, NBN (monopoly across entire country, technically government owned but run like a private corp because of politics). It’s the lowest speed now available, but it’s already overpriced. $780/year is far more than all of my wifi capable equipment is worth together, including laptops.

I am not so sure that it will end up faster or better.

**In theory: **A CPU scheduler should give programs as much CPU time as they want until you start nearing CPU resource saturation. Discord doesn’t need very large amounts of CPU (admittedly it’s a lot more than it should for a text chap app, but it’s still not diabolically bad). It will only start getting starved when you are highly utilising all cores. That can happen on my 2-core laptop, but I don’t have any games on my 6 core desktop that will eat everything. Nonetheless on my laptop I’d probably prefer my games take the resources (not Discord) and I’d happily suffer any reasonable drop in responsiveness of Discord as a result.

I don’t think that a new process (a new dedicated browser-client) instead of a new thread (tab in existing browser) is intrinsically faster or better. CPU schedulers are varied and complex, I wouldn’t be surprised if any differences in performance measurements would end up down in the noise. If anything the extra memory usage might cause more IO contention and memory starvation, making everything slower rather than faster. But this is all conjecture, so don’t give it much credit.

Basically, it’s faster to focus on painting a single canvas than it is to painting 3 at the same time.

I don’t think that’s much of a problem in practice, at least for Firefox: one tab can crash and stop rendering completely (or lock up 100% of 1 CPU core) but the others will keep going in other threads. For the most part they shouldn’t be able to affect each other’s performance.

In practice: What’s the actual metric that you think will be better or worse? I assume responsiveness to typing and clicks in the discord UI?

I’ve never seen discord lag or stutter from causes other than IO limitations (startup speed, network traffic, heavy IO on my machine) or silly design (having to refresh the page after leaving it open all day, I suspect it’s intentionally auto-disabling but I’m not sure). That’s not something that running a separate discord client in a separate dedicated/embedded browser will fix.

In Kerbal Space Program your ships sometimes catch the NaN virus. If one fuel tank level is reading NaN then whatever you do DON’T try and fill it from another (full) tank. I’m not sure if it can spread to physics (thrust, mass, etc) EDIT: Yes it can happen to physics, oh dear.

I wonder what would happen if you landed a NaN-infected spaceship on a planet.

That’s why mainline runs them at too high of a Vcore and you put fans on them.

Never use an SoC that’s not at least 5 years old ;)

Supply-side Jesus (short animation) is a brilliant take on trickle-down economics and circular arguments about why the successful are successful and the poor are poor.

“Tax cuts will double our revenues and ensure that the empire never declines or falls!”

“Should you feed the lepers, Supply side Jesus?”
“No Thomas, that would just make them lazy.”
“Then shouldn’t you at least heal them Supply Side Jesus?”
“No James, leprosy is a matter of personal responsibility. If people knew I was healing the lepers there would be no incentive to avoid leprosy”

SFF = Small Form Factor. It’s smaller than traditional ATX computers but can still take the same RAM, processors and disks. Motherboards and power supplies tend to be nonstandard however. Idle power consumptions are usually very good.

USFF = Ultra Small Form Factor. Typically a laptop chipset + CPU in a small box with an external power supply. Somewhat comparable with SBCs like Raspberry Pis. Very good idle power consumption, but less powerful than SFF (and/or louder due to smaller cooler) and often don’t have space for standard disks.

SBC = Single Board Computer.

I wouldn’t attack via USB, that path has already been too well thought out. I’d go for an interface with some sort of way to get DMA, such as:

• PCIE slots including M.2 and external thunderbolt. Some systems might support hotplug and there will surely be some autoloading device drivers that can be abused for DMA (such as a PCIE firewire card?)
• Laptop docking connectors (I can’t find a public pinout for the one on my Thinkpad, but I assume it’ll have something vulnerable/trusted like PCIE)
• Firewire (if you’re lucky, way too old to be found now)
• If you have enough funding: possibly even ones no-one has thought about like displayport + GPU + driver stack. I believe there have been some ethernet interface vulnerabilities previously (or were those just crash/DOS bugs?)

I recommend using a different set of flags so you can avoid the buffering problem @thenumbersmason@yiffit.net mentions.

This next example prevents all of your ram getting uselessly filled up during the wipe (which causes other programs to run slower whenever they need more mem, I notice my web browser lags as a result), allows the progress to actually be accurate (disk write speed instead of RAM write speed) and prevents the horrible hang at the end.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/somedisk status=progress oflag=sync bs=128M

“oflag” means output flag (to do with of=/dev/somedisk). “sync” means sync after every block. I’ve chosen 128M blocks as an arbitrary number, below a certain amount it gets slower (and potentially causes more write cycles on the individual flash cells) but 128MB should be massively more than that and perfectly safe. Bigger numbers will hog more ram to no advantage (and may return the problems we’re trying to avoid).

If it’s an SSD then I issue TRIM commands after this (“blkdiscard” command), this makes the drive look like zeroes without actually having to write the whole drive again with another dd command.

Hiring: Low level guys.

Opportunities: Adventurer interactions. Loot. Rumours before the bigger places hear about them.

– Dungeon management

https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio

A custom discord client that supports streaming with audio on Linux

Jaysus, I wish this were a world where stuff like that wasn’t necessary.

Uneducated question: what’s the benefit of a dedicated client over running it in a normal browser?

I’ve been using PipeWire this year on my Void Linux laptop & desktop. It’s been mostly OK but has a few problems. For years I have been using plain ALSA (with no custom configuration) because pulseaudio causes me regular issues across multiple machines (mostly silently failing).

Pros:

• I don’t have to use Chromium for my mic to work on online video conf (WTF Firefox)
• “EasyEffects” lets me quickly fix crappy youtube audio (bad gain normalisation, way too much sibilance) with a minimum of effort.

Cons:

• Sometimes breaks all audio until I manually restart it (hey, just like pulseaudio. This problem never happens when using ALSA straight)
• First time setup is complicated, involving environment variables, dbus user session buses and multiple daemons (running just pipewire isn’t enough). Why can’t it handle this all itself? Surely it should notice if these things are missing and just fix it itself? Compare this to straight ALSA where you (1) do nothing and then (2) everything works (except Firefox mic support)
• I can’t have multiple audio outputs all unmuted at the same time. Eg my headphone output and my rear speaker output. If I override this (using alsamixer) then it gets forgotten next boot anyway, it seems to be out of scope of PipeWire’s understanding.

Can you describe the issue? I don’t use Discord (and I presume the problem might depend on what browser you use).

N.B. to anyone reading this: ask your isp to “opt out of CG-NAT”. Talking about IPv6 may confuse the staffer you’re talking to, it’s partially related but not the fully picture.

Probably Windows update running in the background. On laptops it’s a particularly garbage experience (fan spins up & runs hot as you say) with no communication until it’s “done”. If you have deigned not to turn on Windows for a while (tisk tisk) then it might require multiple reboots and a forced fullscreen blue questioning about why you’re not using OneDrive and sharing more information (OOBE).

Are they still doing the MoDeRn standby thing where windows update runs when your laptop is “in standby” in your bag?

My approach to handling Windows Update is to use my imagination. You’re in an alternative dimension where a medieval super-powerful church-state controls technology. Windows update is a regular procedure required to obtain the necessary computing purity and state that has been deemed appropriate for your status. Those who choose to ford their own lazy path without it risk requiring the penance of reinstallation, or even worse, revocation. An occasional skip of your sessions is tolerated, but if you no longer habitually open your laptop for a few hours each morning then you will develop the symptoms.

Exactly this. Second hand thinkpads are stupidly cheap – I’m currently typing on my $180AUD laptop. I never buy new.

This has some similarities to the invite-tree method that lobste.rs uses. You have to convince another, existing user that you’re human to join. If a bot invites lots of other bots it’s easy to tree-ban them all, if a human is repeatedly fallible you can remove their invite privileges, but you still get bots in when they trick humans (lobsters isn’t handshakes-at-doorstep level by any margin).

I convinced another user to invite me over IRC. That’s probably the worst medium for convincing someone that you’re human, but hey, humanity through obscurity :)