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Cake day: December 26th, 2023

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  • I’ve used it a fair amount for memory mapped IO where the hardware defined bitfields. It is also useful when you have a data format with bitfields. I’d say it is also useful when your data does not respect byte boundaries, but the only time I’ve run into that involved the bit order being “backwards”, which means that I still had to bittwidle things back together.

    From a performance perspective, a cache line is only 64 bytes. Space in registers, low level memory caches, and memory throughout are all limited as well.


  • I’ve had a couple of issues like this:

    • Wireless mouse has a flaky connection. Turns out the issue was the USB port it was plugged into (probably RF interference as other devices worked fine on that port)

    • We had a couple of radio receivers in a server rack. The scale of the project had shrunk over the years, so what used to fill up 2 racks now only half filled them (mostly because of upgraded components becoming faster and smaller over the years). Another project needed needed some rackspace, so we reracked everything into a single rack. When we were done, we found that one of our receivers couldn’t get a signal, and another would lose it regularly. Checked over all of our connections and the antennas, but everything seemed normal. Turns out something in the other project was blasting out RF interference.

    • We would occasionally need to manually move data on/off a server using a USB2.0 hard drive. This worked fine for years, until one day we had a server that would randomly disconnect from the drive a few seconds into the transfer. Tried different ports, same issue. The drive itself worked with all the others, so we decided the issue must be with the server. We swapped it out for a brand new one with plans to send the old one back for warranty repairs. Except the new one has the exact same issue. Both servers came from a newish batch from the OEM. Turns out that the earlier versions had a hardware “bug” where the USB ports would source more than the 500ma allowed by the spec. Since they fixed that, our drive would trigger the current limit during sustained use and temporarily depower the port. Solution: get a USB Y cable and power provider power from a wall block

    • I had a mouse that would double click (or more) when you pushed the button. This was pretty obviously a hardware issue, but I figured I could just tell the computer to ignore double clicks that happened “too fast” and avoid needing a new mouse. In theory that should have worked, but the input stack on Linux turned out to be a giant web that I couldn’t figure out, so I ended up opening the mouse and soldering on a random capacitor I had lieing around.

    • We had a laptop with a dead monitor that would mysteriously work at times. It turns out that most of the time, it was sitting on another laptop (of the same type). Those laptops had a magnet latch to hold them shut. It turns out that said magnet also was used as part of a “laptop closed” sensor that would disable the monitor, and the bottom laptop would trigger the sensor in the top one.





  • Interested to see how this plays out.

    Prohibiting Holocaust denial is relatively easy, because we have the benefit of it being history, and we have an ample historical record and a clear consensus among historians. Plus, no one can credibly claim that the legislatures were not thinking of the Holocaust when they wrote the law.

    However, how are they planning on applying the law to contemporary international crimes? People make accusations of them all the time. And the other side always denied them. And the actual facts are generally obscured by a massive fog of war that can take years to see through, if ever.

    There is also plenty of history where the answer is less clear. Do we really want courts involved in determining if the 15th century conquest of the Canary Islands counts as a genocide. Or if some unnamed mass grave an archeologists unearths was caused by an invading army killing all of a city’s adult males, or simply a burial site for fallen soldiers?

    What about the book of Esther. Taken literally, it ends with what is arguably a genocide committed by the Jews against the Persians. However, outside of some Israeli hardliners reinterpreting that ending for contemporary political purposes, it is widely understood that that ending is a literary device, not a literal telling of events. Did my Hebrew school teachers violate this law when they told me we didn’t actually kill 75,000 Persians? [0].

    What about the ongoing genocide against white Afrikaners going on in South Africa today? Am I violating the law when I say that genocide is not real, and just something the rightwing in the US invented for domestic political purposes. If the US has such a law, could Trump use it to jail his political opponents who criticized his recent stunt of accepting 60 Afrikaner refugees?

    Do we defer to an international body like the ICC or ICJ? In that case, you have just outlawed disagreeing with those bodies.

    The UN has repeatedly found it to be a massive human rights violation. Does disagreeing with those findings violate this new law?

    [0] As an aside, secular historians generally consider all of Esther to be fiction.




  • homura1650@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    I was shopping for a new vacuum cleaner when a saw a portable carpet cleaner. Basically a vacuum with a precision nozel bolted to a water sprayer. It has been a complete game danger for cleaning up the mess my cats would sometimes leave. Although it is still not as effective as the course of dewormer their vet prescribed.











  • And what happens after you kill the Houthi leadership? Do all of the Houthi forces turn over their weapons and go home? Get taken over by a more radical leadership? Split up into a bunch of cells with no centralized leadership?

    The Houthis are not a force for good on the region. However, compared with other terrorist groups, they are relatively rational and constrained. If even half of their forces want to go more extreme, they will have a proximate reason to do so, and no leadership to stop them.

    The likely result is the Gaza war expands into having a full war on the Yemen front (which is, admittadly, on track to happen anyway), against an enemy that no longer has the capacity to negotiate or surrender.

    As a fun side note, a bunch of those cells are also going to be freshly angry at the US, which is very much not in her interest.

    We’ve tried killing terrorist leadership before. It tends to not end well.