AernaLingus [any]

From 2008 to 2011, Li made CRACK99 a reliable black-market marketplace, one that netted an estimated $100 million in sales. His inventory, investigators later said, was valued at over $1 billion.

Since it’s not clear from this write-up, those eye-popping figures (the ones concocted by the Department of Justice) are derived from the prices that the licenses were being sold for by the original companies, so it’s not $100 million in sales but $100 million in “value” (the idea of calculating a $1 billion valuation for the digital “inventory” is even more ridiculous). If you look on the actual crack99 website, you’ll see that most of the cracked software was being sold for anywhere from twenty bucks to maybe a few hundred dollars—this guy was not making millions from this. The government’s sentencing memorandum has the details; this includes the absurd figure of $3,812,241.57 for a single software license of some CAD software called “Catia VR520”, which Li sold to at least one other customer for the princely sum of $100.

Shoutout to my dumbass relatives for sending their DNA to this company—thanks for nothing!

Thank you for sharing–that was a really neat demonstration, and I enjoyed seeing all the troubleshooting as well. Will definitely be subscribing and checking out more of their videos!

I feel like there’s not much to fight about. I can understand the latter perspective, but from a practical point of view it just makes sense to consistently assign it to AM/PM rather than creating an unnecessary edge case (lord knows there are enough of those with date/time systems). Also this is all made moot by the superior system: the 24-hour clock (now THERE’S something I bet you could have a good argument about!).

I can’t remember the specifics (both because it was dumb and because it’s so embarrassing I think my brain is trying to protect me), but from what I recall I got into a heated argument on the internet with someone because I felt that fans weren’t cheering hard enough for a band I liked at a concert.

…yeah, I know. I’m grateful, though, because it was so colossally stupid and pointless that I had a come-to-Jesus moment and swore off internet arguments entirely. I can only imagine the countless hours of my life it’s saved me in the intervening years.

out-of-order

MyAnonamouse

Boston Chicken & KFC Rotisserie Style Chicken.txt

lmao

Full res (source)

The description:

Someone programming a website in HTML. But also a photo suitable for hackers. ;)

There’s a variable that contains the number of cores (called cpus) which is hardcoded to max out at 8, but it doesn’t mean that cores aren’t utilized beyond 8 cores–it just means that the scheduling scaling factor will not change in either the linear or logarithmic case once you go above that number:

/*
 * Increase the granularity value when there are more CPUs,
 * because with more CPUs the 'effective latency' as visible
 * to users decreases. But the relationship is not linear,
 * so pick a second-best guess by going with the log2 of the
 * number of CPUs.
 *
 * This idea comes from the SD scheduler of Con Kolivas:
 */
static unsigned int get_update_sysctl_factor(void)
{
	unsigned int cpus = min_t(unsigned int, num_online_cpus(), 8);
	unsigned int factor;

	switch (sysctl_sched_tunable_scaling) {
	case SCHED_TUNABLESCALING_NONE:
		factor = 1;
		break;
	case SCHED_TUNABLESCALING_LINEAR:
		factor = cpus;
		break;
	case SCHED_TUNABLESCALING_LOG:
	default:
		factor = 1 + ilog2(cpus);
		break;
	}

	return factor;
}

The core claim is this:

It’s problematic that the kernel was hardcoded to a maximum of 8 cores (scaling factor of 4). It can’t be good to reschedule hundreds of tasks every few milliseconds, maybe on a different core, maybe on a different die. It can’t be good for performance and cache locality.

On this point, I have no idea (hope someone more knowledgeable will weigh in). But I’d say the headline is misleading at best.

I remember being wowed by Beowulf (which I think was the first high profile 3D movie in the most recent wave), and I also enjoyed Avatar in 3D. Other than those two movies I found that 3D detected detracted from the overall experience and I quickly stopped attending 3D showings.

edit: realized I made a typo three days later…embarrassing

MartSnack - okay, this one is kind of cheating because there’s only one video so far, but if you like obscure and highly technical video game challenges like the SM64 A Button Challenge, it’s one of the best damn videos on the internet right up there with pannenkoek’s classic Watch for Rolling Rocks - 0.5x A Presses. It’s satisfying, interesting, and also surprisingly funny and relaxing. I’ve watched it like 7 or 8 times by this point, and I’m gonna watch it again after I submit this comment. Also if you like it def subscribe and hit the bell, he’s been working on a new video for months and has been giving updates in the comments as recently as a few days ago, so hopefully it’ll come out eventually!

Church of Kondo - Repository for remastered video game OSTs (primarily the cartridge era). These aren’t just any old remastered, but the result of countless hours of painstaking research to identify the exact samples used in games, track them down in the highest possible quality, and recreate a “perfect quality” mix. They’ve got reams of spreadsheets detailing all the samples they’ve cataloged.

mklachu - Dope Otamatone covers with extremely cute Otamatone costumes

Retro Game Mechanics Explained - Probably the highest production value you’ll ever see for videos on this topic–combines a deep knowledge of retro game hardware and programming with beautiful visualizations and demos. His video on Pac-Man ghost behavior is pretty representative of how he takes a subject and drills down to the assembly to show you exactly what’s happening with some really cool graphics that show what the code does step by step.