khm @khm@mastodon.sdf.org

@KinkTodd

@neauoire xd(1)

@royniang You'll want scripts to set upasname before calling marshal, and some tricks in /mail/lib/rewrite to set specific smtp(1) connections depending on the From: address.

9front uses nupas instead of upas; if you're on 9front I recommend sending a message to the 9front mailing list asking for pointers here; the only person I know with this kind of experience is sl. A lot of his configuration is here: http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/mail/lib/

@bartleby @bhtooefr @nimbius one hasn't lived until one has rolled up to a motorcycle rally full of Tough Serious Harley People to watch the cognitive dissonance caused by blasting the GTA Vice City Fever 105 soundtrack from a motorcycle with US Army veteran plates. They want to yell "faggot" but that would be disrespecting the troops, resulting in a sort of angry paralysis from which they can't seem to break free

@bartleby @bhtooefr @nimbius I never had back pain until I bought a Road Glide. I never have back pain since selling it and buying a BMW GS. I do miss the ridiculous stereo though, not gonna lie.

@bhtooefr I owned a new FLTRU. Wanted the warranty. Never made it more than six months between breakdowns. Sold it and bought a 20-year-old BMW and haven't had any breakdowns since.

I'll pass on the HD touring bikes, but I bet there will be a surge in the trailer market!

somehow I wound up with two long-running public webshits (a blog and a radio show) without attaching my name to either of them

it's a lot of work but at least I don't have to take responsibility for any of it

@neauoire I always took it as 'a shiny trash bag is still a trash bag.' I'm a professional linux-toucher, and it's probably my least-favorite unixlike operating system, but it's effectively inescapable since so many companies have put so much money into gilding it.

@neauoire

@henesy @neauoire @eel The aesthetics side of the website is mostly sl and myself. We're children of the Cold War and subverting imperialistic imagery from the era probably won't ever get old for us. When based on this people accuse us of actual imperialism I frankly just get bewildered.

@henesy @neauoire @eel This sort of thing is the best possible outcome, from my perspective. Everyone always gets mad at us for not doing enough, but the last thing in the world we ever wanted was control. All the gatekeeping is to protect the people we care about, to phalanx up and make sure the internet doesn't wash it all away. Setting up other places to do shit is excellent and necessary. I don't want a "9front community" so much as a dozen communities with different styles/priorities

@henesy @neauoire @eel We're like this after half a decade of (mostly 4chan) showing up and eating up a tremendous amount of people's time and energy. There were only a handful of us, but people expected the kind of response you'd get from a whole cadre of users and experts -- and then they'd get FURIOUS when we failed them. We've been spamflooded, DDoSed, so much more. The worst is when people show up and expect us to defend something Uriel wrote... I never even agreed with him half the time

@henesy @neauoire @eel I was there in small times; I know why we're like that, for better or worse. Someone in cat-v was dangerously close to working himself to death trying to appease the constant influx of drive-by demands from a stream of people who never stuck around. It was horrible to see. At the same time everything we did was regarded by the Old Guard as a direct personal attack on the original architects. We built walls. Maybe they've outlived their usefulness. It wasn't malice.

For those who might be curious, one of the current computer things I think is cool is Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture: the idea that you can just wire really fast compute elements ("multiply these numbers", "sort this text", etc) together and write a compiler smart enough to analyze code and dispatch things efficiently.

It's SORT OF like how CPUs work today, but flexible enough to aim the hardware DIRECTLY at a specific problem space. Semi-bespoke computing.

I suggested a specific book to someone and I think they read it and that's pretty much all I've got to show for this summer.

successful summer. great book.

@allison It's the old catch-22: if you care enough about performance to spend HPC money, it's hard to justify spending money on reinventing the speed wheel.

Given:
- everyone but Mellanox has given up on innovating interconnects (everything's IB or Ethernet);
- everyone has given up on innovating OSes (everything's RHEL or Suse);
- everyone has given up on innovating parallelism (everything's MPI/RDMA);

we're primed for stagnation, hopefully followed by a real leap forward.

(Blue Genes run Linux, although there was for a while a star-crossed effort to port Plan 9 to them.)

@Shufei In fact substituting the 'bus' in your idea with the 'fabric' in practice, you've pretty much described the modern supercomputer architecture in general, except instead of CPUs we do it with whole servers (turns out it's cheaper that way than with custom processors, sadly).

@Shufei I disagree with those suggesting Plan 9. Plan 9 is a distributed OS, but not a clustered OS. What you're describing sounds more to me like the architecture of the IBM Blue Gene supercomputers.

You have up to 16 "compute cards" and zero, one, or two "I/O cards". These plug into a "node card" and you plug as many node cards as you need into a cabinet. Cabinets can be interconnected. Need more compute? Plug in more compute cards. Need faster disc access? More I/O cards. etc