GeForce GT 610.

It was the cheapest GPU available at the time, imagine my disappointment when I tried to run Minecraft with shaders and barely got more than a slideshow.

Traditional graphics code works by having the CPU generate a sequence of commands which are packed together and sent to the GPU to run. This extension let’s you write code which runs on the GPU to generate commands, and then execute those same commands on the GPU without involving the CPU at all.

This is a super powerful feature which makes it possible to do things which simply weren’t feasible in the traditional model. Vulkan improved on OpenGL by allowing people to build command buffers on multiple threads, and also re-use existing command buffers, but GPU pipelines are getting so wide that scenes containing many objects with different render settings are bottlenecked by the rate at which the CPU can prepare commands, not by GPU throughput. Letting the GPU generate its own commands means you can leverage the GPU’s massive parallelism for the entire render process, and can also make render state changes much cheaper.

(For anyone familiar, this is basically a more fleshed out version of NVIDIA’s proprietary NV_command_list extension for OpenGL, except that it’s in Vulkan and standardized across all GPU drivers)

“Better” in the sense that it actually has the ability to check for corruption at all, as all metadata and data are checksummed.

• An object at motion stays in motion
• An object at rest stays at rest
• Don’t push the big red button

In Switzerland, at least where I am, people normally use rakes on their yard and they send a street sweeper along every road/sidewalk at least once a week.

Anom -> Anon -> Anonymous

4chan has done it again

I’ve spent the last year or so trying to get myself to not jump out of my pants every time I see one of these things. Then roughly a month ago, I get up at 2am to take a piss, and as I’m opening the door this little fucker falls down no more than 10cm away from my face, lands right on my foot and would have probably run up my pyjamas if I hadn’t managed to reflexively kick and launch it flying across the room. I think it must have been either sitting on top of the door or been trying to climb through the doorframe just as I opened it. Pretty sure I woke up everyone in the house, and probably the neighbors too.

Anyway, my phobia of these little shits is now 100 times worse than it was.

That’s like 1/7th of the cost of a single passenger car. I’m sure they can easily afford to take that hit if it doesn’t end up panning out.

Because none of that unused land is set up to allow a machine to easily roll over it and automatically place/replace/clean the panels. Putting panels between the tracks means you get that for free, as the tracks are there anyway, and are already have electrical infrastructure all along their length.

The point of the experiment is to see if those benefits end up outweighing the presumably higher chance of panels getting damaged. In the worst case it ends up not being worth while and there isn’t a huge loss, in the best case we end up being able to add a bunch of additional solar capacity without having to build much new infrastructure or cover any previously unused land.

And it would be trivially easy to have a train run over the tracks to clean the panels, there are already trains which use compressed air/sandblasters/lasers to remove leaves and stuff from the rails. Just add a few more compressed air nozzles in between and boom, all your panels are now clean.

This is Switzerland, outside of a small number of corridors the majority of tracks see virtually nothing but passenger trains.

Okay, but the commenter said “my laptop with jts integrated GPU”. Obviously, laptops with a dedicated AMD GPU would be affected by this change.

It specifically says the change only applies to dedicated GPUs, not integrated ones.

It’s not that obscure - I had a use case a while back where I had multiple rocksdb instances running on the same machine and wanted each of them to store their WAL only on SSD storage with compression and have the main tables be stored uncompressed on an HDD array with write-through SSD cache (ideally using the same set of SSDs for cost). I eventually did it, but it required partitioning the SSDs in half, using one half for a bcache (not bcachefs) in front of the HDDs and then using the other half of the SSDs to create a compressed filesystem which I then created subdirectories on and bind mounted each into the corresponding rocksdb database.

Yes, it works, but it’s also ugly as sin and the SSD allocation between the cache and the WAL storage is also fixed (I’d like to use as much space as possible for caching). This would be just a few simple commands using bcachefs, and would also be completely transparent once configured (no messing around with dozens of fstab entries or bind mounts).

ext4 aims to not lose data under the assumption that the single underlying drive is reliable. btrfs/bcachefs/ZFS assume that one/many of the perhaps dozens of underlying drives could fail entirely or start returning garbage at any time, and try to ensure that the bad drive can be kicked out and replaced without losing any data or interrupting the system. They’re both aiming for stability, but stability requirements are much different at scale than a “dumb” filesystem can offer, because once you have enough drives one of them WILL fail and ext4 cannot save you in that situation.

Complaining that datacenter-grade filesystems are unreliable when using them in your home computer is like removing all but one of the engines from a 747 and then complaining that it’s prone to crashing. Of course it is, because it was designed under the assumption that there would be redundancy.

XFS still isn’t a multi-device filesystem, though… of course you can run it on top of mdraid/LVM, but that still doesn’t come close to the flexibility of what these specialized filesystems can do. Being able to simply run btrfs device add /dev/sdx1 / and immediately having the new space available is far less hassle than adding a device to an md array, then resizing the partition and then resizing the filesystem (and removing a device is even worse). Snapshots are a similar deal - sure, LVM can let you snapshot your entire virtual block device, but your snapshots are block devices themselves which need to be explicitly mounted, while in btrfs/bcachefs a snapshot is just a directory, and can be isolated to a specific subvolume rather than the entire block device.

Data checksums are also substantially less useful when the filesystem can’t address the underlying devices individually, because it makes repairing the data from a replica impossible. If you have a file on an md RAID1 device and one of the replicas has a bad block, you might be able to detect the bitrot by verifying the checksum, but you can’t actually fix it, because even though there is a second copy of the data on another drive, mdadm simply exposes a simple block device and doesn’t provide any way to read from “the other copy”. mdraid can recover from total drive failure, but not data corruption.

ext4 is intended for a completely different use case, though? bcachefs is competing with btrfs and ZFS in big storage arrays spanning multiple drives, probably with SSD cache. ext4 is a nice filesystem for client devices, but doesn’t support some things which are kinda fundamental at larger scales like data checksumming, snapshots, or transparent compression.

bcachefs is way more flexible than btrfs on multi-device filesystems. You can group storage devices together based on performance/capacity/whatever else, and then do funky things like assigning a group of SSDs as a write-through/write-back cache for a bigger array of HDDs. You can also configure a ton of properties for individual files or directories, including the cache+main storage group, amount of data replicas, compression type, and quite a bit more.

So you could have two files in the same folder, one of them stored compressed on an array of HDDs in RAID10 and the other one stored on a different array of HDDs uncompressed in RAID5 with a write-back SSD cache, and wouldn’t have to fiddle around with multiple filesystems and bind mounts - everything can be configured by simply setting xattr values. You could even have a third file which is striped across both groups of HDDs without having to partition them up.

It’s not their fault, they’ve all got the mispeling vyrus.

Or worse, Excel, which translates the function names but doesn’t do it automatically, so you can only open a spreadsheet if your Excel is configured to the same language as the spreadsheet was created in.

Same for German literature, tbh