Espi

The problem is that there are many issues where there is no “compromise” or centrist view available, so the “balanced” opinion just supports one or the other side fully.

Wow, I really like WD SSDs, I got an SN850X and it’s blazing fast. I really like that you can change the sector size as well, most SSDs don’t bother with 4k sectors and just leave you with 512b ones.

If you use modern hardware it doesn’t behave quite well and gets worse battery life. If you use any tools from Microsoft (WSL, Office, Windows Terminal, etc) most of those are incompatible or a pain to install. If you use anything from the Microsoft Store, including Game Pass, since it just doesn’t include the Microsoft Store.

While I like secure boot and leave it enabled when possible, to be honest it only protects against a type of attack so elaborate its pretty much useless. Whenever its minorly inconvenient I just disable it without worry.

I really like the razors, here Hanlon’s razor is relevant:

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

I’m sure Elon has no grand plan behind any of this, just a chain of impulsive actions.

RADV is the default community Mesa driver, made by Valve engineers.

AMD’s own Vulkan implementation is called AMDVLK, which is just a port of their Windows Vulkan libraries repackaged for Linux. AMDVLK usually moves faster than RADV and got raytracing much earlier. And even though RADV added raytracing as well, RADVs raytracing is much slower than AMDVLK. Maybe this changes will finally close the gap?

I like this way better than Microsoft just showing popups trying you to stick to their browser.

All these kind of CPU level vulnerabilities are the same, they are only really “risky” if there is malicious software running in the computer in the first place.

The real problem is that these CPU-level vulnerabilities all break one of the core concepts of computers, which is process separation and virtual memory. If process separation is broken then all other levels of security become pointless.

While for desktops this isn’t a huge problem (except when sometimes vulnerabilities might even be able to be exploited though browsers), this is a huge problem for servers, where the modern cloud usually has multiple users in virtual machines in a single server and a malicious user could steal information across virtual machines.

I can’t believe Microsoft is still using this piece of crap filesystem. If they had a CoW filesystem they could even paper over the mess that is Windows Update without having to actually fix it, they could save petabytes of storage over the world and significantly improve reliability all in one go. Let’s not even mention how NTFS is amazingly slow on hard drives, manages to fragment to hell and back without doing anything, requires offline repairs like it was FAT32 and its compression barely does anything while massively slowing down the computer.

Yet here I am envying btrfs, APFS, ZFS and even fucking XFS for their reflinks and CoW.

In fact, not even WSL uses a modern FS, I think Microsoft is allergic to modern FSs.

The perfect plan

step 1: spend billions buying an extremely recognizable brand
step 2: rebrand it

I actually can’t believe he is going forward with this. Twitter achieved the goal of becoming a verb, “tweeting”. Companies kill for that, and he’s just throwing it away? all the mindshare and recognition? for what?