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RachelF

6,354 karma · joined February 9, 2012

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RachelF··on Framework's 10G Ethernet module exposes USB-C's complexity
Every PCIe 10G ethernet card I've seen has a heatsink on it, sometimes covering the entire card or even have little fans on the heatsink.

Expecting it to work full time in a laptop is a bit of a stretch of the heat dissipation budget.

Also, the laptop he is working has the AMD FP8 chipset - depending on how the ports are setup, he might only get 10G USB, if the ports are allocated to video instead.

RachelF··on Windows 10 quietly gets one more year of support and updates
Thank you for that link!
RachelF··on Windows 10 quietly gets one more year of support and updates
And in order to get the Windows 10 updates in the article, you need to sign up for an MS account, or pay them $30 a year not to spy on you.
RachelF··on 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
The "innovation" is that everything is now attached to a watercooled block.

The rest is marketing: The Cray supercomputer were fluid cooled back in the 1980's, the entire board had an inert liquid flowing across it.

RachelF··on AMD will reinstate memory encryption on Ryzen 9000 CPUs via BIOS update in July
A lot of this has to do with segmenting the market into high-end and low-end products.

When they were the underdog to Intel, they gave away lots of premium features to beat Intel.

Since they got more popular, AMD has been taking away features, or not upgrading old tech, from their desktop/gaming CPUs: Their DDR5 interface is gimped, being slower than Intel now, and still limited to dual channel. Their chipset link is still PCIe 4x4 the same as two generations ago.

If you want these features now, you need a server product.

RachelF··on Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users
Microsoft is also doing this, Microsoft Authenticator, no longer works under GrapheneOS for corporate creds, and coming in July they will delete any Entra-related IDs from your phone.

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/03/10/microsoft-tig...

RachelF··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
I too, liked it.

However, some apps that I need for work, like Microsoft Authenticator, no longer work under GrapheneOS.

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/03/10/microsoft-tig...

RachelF··on The RCE that AMD wouldn't fix
Yes, their software is terrible across CPUs and GPUs, and continues to be. So many trivial bugs just never fixed.

It has literally cost them a Trillion dollars in market cap - Nvidia's CUDA is a big reason they're so much bigger than AMD.

RachelF··on Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension
Me too. Many government or banking sites only work properly on Chrome. Anything with Docusign is Chrome-only.
RachelF··on MiMo-v2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed: 1T model with 1000 tokens per second
I wonder how fast it performs on just a CPU? If the model performs say 10x on a GPU cluster, would it also perform faster on a CPU?

This could bring proper desktop AI to the average laptop user, which could be a game changer for running local models.

RachelF··on New Texas Instruments 5532 chips are not the 5532s we’ve used for decades
This sort of thing really annoys me. Part numbers are for use of engineers, not for the marketing dept. If you change the specs, change the part number.
RachelF··on Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
Nice idea, but something has gone very wrong here:

>Sequential throughput: ~1.3 GB/s

[on a RTX 3070 Laptop]

This RTX 3070 chip is on PCIe 4.0 x16 which should give 64GB/s. The 8GB of GDDR6 is 448GB/s.

Swapping to an NVMe drive would be twice as fast, but with higher latency.

RachelF··on Coreutils for Windows
Don't use find, use Voidtools' Everything. It finds filenames instantly, by searching the NTFS structures.

This is one of the few features that Linux file systems do not have.

RachelF··on 'Fuck you, Bambu': How one private message could change the face of 3D printing
I think the weak precedent here is Apple vs Palm:

Palm devices pretended to be iPods so that users could use iTunes to copy music to them. Apple threatened legal action and Palm backed down.

RachelF··on The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
Yeah, modern software towers of libraries literally eat memory.

MS Teams uses around 1000MB of RAM to do exactly the same things that Microsoft Messenger could do in 8MB.

RachelF··on Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid
Why not just remove the antenna or SIM card from the modem?
RachelF··on Cisco workforce reductions
I really battled to read his memo. The it was written in English, but a very odd style indeed.
RachelF··on The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
The late 1970's were the golden age of documentaries: Connections, Cosmos, Civilization, The Ascent of Man and Attenborough's Life on Earth.

Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?

As a side note: Quite ironic that he ends up pointing to a rocket propelled mostly by solid fuels.

RachelF··on Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
Yeah, everything being black on modern motherboards might look cool with RGB lighting, but makes it harder to work on. I like the older green PCBs with white PCI slots.

I also lament the demise of color coded connectors at the back. I knew to plug my speakers into the green 3.5mm jack. Now everything is black, so I need to look at the manual again to see which of the 5 connectors is the right one.

RachelF··on Managing the Unmanaged Switch
Faster is only needed when you need the speed. 2.5G and 10G NICs eat power - all the ones I seen have heatsinks.
RachelF··on A Boy That Cried Mythos: Verification Is Collapsing Trust in Anthropic
A cunning move from Anthropic, nevertheless - their system has now seen and trained on a many big organization's source code.
RachelF··on 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
In the early 1980s there were actually word processors for the Apple 2 which had a 40 column display (7 pixel wide fonts default) that gave 60 columns using the a 5x5 font in graphics mode. It was a selling point.

The hardware solution was to buy an "80 column card" that gave 80 columns of proper text, if your monitor could handle it.

RachelF··on Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
Another trick I've seen on LinkedIn is job applications open from 12:00 am to 12:01 am.

The employer can legally say they advertized the job and had no applicants and need an H1B employee.

RachelF··on Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains
It is a superb project, and a hard thing to do.

It is a pity that the apps most business people use everyday, like Word and Excel and Outlook don't work in it (Excel 2010 is the last version that has Platinum status). It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.

RachelF··on Palantir extends reach into British state as gets access to sensitive FCA data
Australian house transactions are also commonly used for low-million dollar money laundering operations.

Australia specifically exempts house purchases and the associated agents and their lawyers from AML laws.

RachelF··on Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak as an output language
Churchill's "We will fight them on the beaches speech" at the start of WW2:

Output: I’m fully confident that if we all lean in, stay hyper-focused on execution, and optimize our current workflows, we’re going to successfully defend our core market, navigate this industry disruption, and outlast any competitive threats—even if it takes years of grinding it out solo. That’s the mission-critical objective for the entire leadership team. That’s the vision we’re scaling nationwide.

Even as key regions and legacy players face major headwinds or fall under hostile management, we aren’t pivoting. We’re doubling down. We’re going to show up in every channel. We’re going to compete in the field, we’re going to dominate the airwaves, and we’re going to protect our brand equity, whatever the burn rate.

We’re going to hustle on the beaches, we’re going to grind at the landing zones, we’re going to perform in the streets and in the boardrooms; we will never exit

RachelF··on 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
This is the best way of marking regions of RAM as bad in Windows:

https://github.com/prsyahmi/BadMemory

I've used it for many years. It only fixes physical hardware faults, not timing errors. For example if a RAM cell is damaged by radiation, not if you're overclocking your RAM.

RachelF··on “Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server
>The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error.

Yes, if you analyse revenue (not profit), sales of Windows count 9% of the total. Microsoft makes around the same percentage from LinkedIn and Xbox as they do from Windows sales.

Cloud is by far the the biggest contributor to revenue.

RachelF··on Why is Claude an Electron app?
Teams is a terrible app, although Electron isn't the only reason for that: It needs a Gig of RAM to do things that older chat apps could do in 4 Meg.

The free ride of ever increasing RAM on consumer devices is over because of the AI hyperscalers buying all fab capacity, leading to a real RAM shortage. I expect many new laptops to come with 8GB as standard and mid-range phones to have 4GB.

Software engineers need to start thinking about efficiency again.

RachelF··on Gemini 3.1 Pro
I haven't used 3.1 yet, but 3.0 Pro has been frustrating for two reasons:

- it is "lazy": I keep having to tell it to finish, or continue, it wants to stop the task early.

- it hallucinates: I have arguments with it about making up API functions to well known libraries which just do not exist.

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