Something you’ll learn to live by once enter the workplace: your coworkers are not your friends. There might be a one in a thousand case that’s an exception to this rule, but most of the time you should not think of them as more than coworkers you have to work with to get your job done. I’ve witnessed too many cases of coworkers backstabbing each other for their own professional ambitions or where a coworker dies and everyone just completely forgets about him a few days later.

That doesn’t mean you should be overly pessimistic either. The idea is to be pragmatic. No one wants a toxic environment, so everyone will put in some effort to maintain a cozy facade, and you should too, as that minimizes tensions for everyone. The mistake would be forgetting that it’s all a facade and starting to think of them as something like a family, that’s a mistake most juniors make.

My motto is: smile at your coworkers but guard your damn ass when you turn your back to them.

They’re called MFAs (Made For AdSense), nothing changed since the early AdSense days. It’s unlikely that Google is knowingly boosting them, it’s just that search engines have always been easy to game with artificial link building and keyword density maximization, MFA owners happen to be among the people most likely to invest a lot in cheating their way to the top of search engine rankings. AI only made creating MFAs easier.

TIL!

and it’s mobile-friendly and distraction-free too

With how MS Teams and now CNN have been reported here to be blocking Firefox, you know that Firefox is doing things right. If web giants are ganging up against it, it’s all the more reason to switch to it to make a statement and prevent big tech from making privacy violation the norm.

Wayland reduces bugs

As I have to give a few lectures, I can’t say I’m pleased with how screen-sharing or using a projector in the classroom fails almost half of the time and always embarrasses me in front of everyone. I ended up purging the Wayland stuff and going back to good ol’ i3 and I haven’t had a display-related issue ever since.

X11 works, it may not be as sexy or modern as Wayland but it’s battle-tested and just works and for the vast majority of people, excluding Wayland’s bugs, the differences are not even noticeable.

It’s a lifelong learning nerding process

Bad track record with their privacy invasion via their Amazon shenanigans (which Richard Stallman called the Ubuntu Spyware), the shilling of Ubuntu One cloud and now Ubuntu Pro subscriptions that are reminiscent of Microsoft’s shilling of Microsoft accounts and OneDrive, Snap telemetry…

Good news for bubble tea lovers

This feels a lot like Elons’s “but, but, they tricked our algos to have them suggest those hateful tweets!”

Ubuntu is just Windows in Tux’ clothing

The case also needs a paint job

Noctua gang 🤝

That repo is just pure trolling, read the “Improved performance” section and open some source files and you’ll understand why.

A company accused by the far-right of being “too woke” is helping a far-right platform survive, the irony.

FreeBSD is now obsolete

Biased opinion here as I haven’t used GNOME since they made the switch to version 3 and I dislike it a lot: the animations are so slow that they demand a good GPU with high vRAM speed to hide that and thus they need to borrow techniques from game/GPU programming to make GNOME more fluid for users with less beefy cards.

Double and triple buffering are techniques in GPU rendering (also used in computing, up to double buffering only though as triple buffering is pointless when headless).

Without them, if you want to do some number crunching on your GPU and have your data on the host (“CPU”) memory, then you’d basically transfer a chunk of that data from the host to a buffer on the device (GPU) memory and then run your GPU algorithm on it. There’s one big issue here: during the memory transfer, your GPU is idle because you’re waiting for the copy to finish, so you’re wasting precious GPU compute.

So GPU programmers came up with a trick to try to reduce or even hide that latency: double buffering. As the name suggests, the idea is to have not just one but two buffers of the same size allocated on your GPU. Let’s call them buffer_0 and buffer_1. The idea is that if your algorithm is iterative, and you have a bunch of chunks on your host memory on which you want to apply that same GPU code, then you could for example at the first iteration take a chunk from host memory and send it to buffer_0, then run your GPU code asynchronously on that buffer. While it’s running, your CPU has the control back and it can do something else. Here you prepare immediately for the next iteration, you pick another chunk and send it asynchronously to buffer_1. When the previous asynchronous kernel run is finished, you rerun the same kernel but this time on buffer_1, again asynchronously. Then you copy, asynchronously again, another chunk from the host to buffer_0 this time and you keep swapping the buffers like this for the rest of your loop.

Now some GPU programmers don’t want to just compute stuff, they also might want to render stuff on the screen. So what happens when they try to copy from one of those buffers to the screen? It depends, if they copy in a synchronous way, we get the initial latency problem back. If they copy asynchronously, the host->GPU copy and/or the GPU kernel will keep overwriting buffers before they finish rendering on the screen, which will cause tearing.

So those programmers pushed the double buffering idea a bit further: just add an additional buffer to hide the latency from sending stuff to the screen, and that gives us triple buffering. You can guess how this one will work because it’s exactly the same principle.

“these bots”: Yeah, you are being an asshole

I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean his colleagues and is rather talking about the UiPath bots, it’s an IT automation tool… 🤖

If he’s a contractor it’s unlikely he’ll stay there for too long. I’d bring up the improvements and potential gains (faster processing, ideally no more UiPath license costs) directly with your boss. If they’re still not open to that then yeah I’d look elsewhere, because even as an IT automation job it just screams laziness.