I bought $1000USD of Doge back when it took 12 of them to make a single penny just to have fun with on IRC. We set up a doge wallet bot and used tipping in Doge as a way to encourage productive/constructive comments and contributions to our little channel, as well as educating people about crypto. I ended up giving away at least half of the Doges to various channel dwellers just for the fun of it. (Using random soaks & tips of 100 doge here & there.)

Fast forward to now it's around .13c per doge and the coin I so liberally threw around like confetti actually has some value. It feels really good to have contributed in a positive way to crypto-currency awareness and to see those contributions actually have value.

I still have quite a bit of Doge left and it has oddly turned out to be one of the most entertaining & enjoyable successful investments I've made.

TO THE MOON!

Moving at even pedestrian speeds in Las Vegas is quite an unpleasant task, having done so myself on a few occasions.

https://lynx.browser.org/

Used with Julian Assange's "Surfraw" is an amazing combination.

Actually, they probably do front-run trades, just indirectly. Not robinhood themselves, but the exchange they route the orders too might by virtue of timing latencies to the consolidated tape. This is not specifically illegal but it is exploited.

Basically the way it works is that trading specialists with servers sitting right next to the major exchanges can arbitrage a trade that comes up on one exchange with a better price that exists on another exchange. This is in addition to payments for routing. Arbitrage in of itself is perfectly reasonable, that's how many trades can get execution. But it can be exploited in ways that slowly drain money from frequent traders without those traders actually understanding that it is happening.

So Robinhood basically just has to route the order to the worst exchange (which would likely be BATS) and stays just on the legal side of the law. Since robinhood's investors are idiots who day-trade, the cumulative payments and losses from poor order flow execution and delays wind up being significant.

--

In anycase, as a long-time investor myself it is very obvious to me that robinhood is exploiting the stupidity of its investor base. People with no experience trying to execute complex options trades (or even normal trades using 'intelligent' trading modes such as stop-loss orders) are virtually guaranteed to lose all of their money. Experience rules the roost here. Gambling addictions make it worse. Particularly when options are used... it is very easy for an inexperienced retail investor to see a few 'wins' from their day-trading and unconsciously discard the losses... not realizing that they are actually taking on inordinate risk and losing their nest-egg until they've actually lost most of it.

-Matt

The actual ECC handling is done by the CPU, not the motherboard. So it doesn't matter if its a cheap motherboard or an expensive one. The motherboard support itself amounts to early-boot configuration of the memory controller by the BIOS.

For AMD, all AGESA updates (part of the BIOS image) as of around 2 years or so ago included full detection and enablement support for ECC on Zen, Zen+, and Zen 2 platforms.

There really isn't much of a distinction between 'cheap' motherboards and 'expensive' motherboards any more these days. It really just comes down to overclockability and how beefy the VRMs are and after that you are simply paying for board features.

In fact, there is almost no distinction between commercial and consumer motherboards any more these days either... it again just comes down to what bits of hardware the mobo maker puts on the motherboard. So, e.g. any modern AMD motherboard with IPMI is effectively server(colo, machine-room, rack)-capable.

-Matt

That's not really how it works. Both file data and filesystem meta-data is cached in memory. If you have 128GB of ram, then that's up to potentially 128GB worth of data and meta-data subject to bit-rot.

Many modern filesystems must update significants amount of meta-data whenever they synchronize modifications to storage. Even small modifications can result in hundreds of kilobytes being written to storage. Much of that is meta-data that had been cached in ram and then modified as part of the topology sync.

You certainly cannot depend on getting 'application errors' when ram goes bad. That sort of thing is far more likely if the CPU messes up (e.g. due to an unstable overclock for example). Bitrot in ram can be far more insideous.

-Matt

Unless you are gaming at a low resolution like 1080p, or have an extreme refresh-rate monitor (120hz or higher), the fps differences are irrelevant. And even if you do, if you game at any decent resolution (1280p maybe, but mostly 1440p or higher), the game will be gpu-bound and the differences will not really be noticable.

I look at it this way... why spend an extra few hundred dollars on an Intel chip when you could instead spend that extra dough on a better GPU or more memory and still get a CPU that's just as fast? Intel just isn't price competitive against AMD any more these days. So unless you are on an unlimited budget, AMD is the better choice.

In anycase, PBO isn't going to do much better than stock settings. It really comes down to how much power you are willing to burn to get performance, cooling, and memory, and that's it. So you really need to line-up the balls to lift-off from stock settings. i.e. you need to use DDR 3800 (3733) (i.e. max out the IF in 1:1 mode) and a good liquid or tower cooler, along with good case cooling for the VRMs, to see a performance uplift vs stock.

The same is true for a modern Intel CPU these days as well. Though it is modestly easier to O.C. an Intel chip the power consumption goes into insane-land a whole lot quicker. It often comes down to just how much power (and thus heat), and noise you are willing to tolerate to get the O.C. you want. For many people it just isn't worth the heat and noise.

-Matt

In terms of the value of ECC, there are several components to answering this question. The first thing to note is that DDR4 has error detection and retry for physical trace errors built-in so normal non-ECC DDR4 will be considerably less error-prone than non-ECC DDR3 (or earlier) ever was.

In terms of whether the ECC helps on top of that, the answer basically comes down to a combination of the use-case, amount of memory installed, and uptime.

So, for example, I would never even consider putting non-ECC sticks into a thread-ripper system with loads of memory in it. That's just asking for bit rot to happen. I will always use ECC for any system with lots of storage (it doesn't have to be a NAS). For example, my home server. The last thing I want is for a large multi-terabyte filesystem to become corrupted because machine memory got hit by a cosmic ray.

But, say, my two primary desktop systems, which I only use for chrome, xterms, games, and stuff like that, do not have ECC in them. Most of my test boxes do not either. The kitchen machine we use to lookup recipes doesn't either.

The nice thing about ECC in a modern AMD machine is that it 'just works'. You still have to use the right kind of course. Ryzen and Threadripper take unbuffered DIMMs while EPYC takes registered DIMMs.

-Matt

Yes, basically all AMD motherboards that take Zen/Zen+/Zen2 architecture cpus support and implement ECC. This includes many of the original Zen mobos which did not have it enabled in the BIOS but subsequently made the feature available after a BIOS update.

The main trade-off is that virtually no ECC sticks are certified for overclocking out of the box, meaning that you have to overclock them yourself if you want to match non-ECC DDR4 that you can buy OCd out of the box. This isn't difficult to do, but is not everyone's cup of tea. And, generally speaking, most people wouldn't notice the improvement in performance anyway.

All Ryzen and Threadripper systems take unbuffered DDR4 (ECC or non-ECC). All EPYC systems take registered DDR4 (ECC or non-ECC). Not sure if you can stick unbuffered sticks into an EPYC but you definitely cannot stick registered sticks into a ryzen or TR mobo.

-Matt

You will wish you had used dark mode your whole life, instead of starting just last week :-). Truthfully, though, white backgrounds push a lot of light directly into your eyes and face, and having sat in front of CRTs ever since I was around 12 years old, I learned fairly quickly that I could pull much longer stints in front of displays that weren't blaring bright white pixels at me (well, bright green pixels way back then) 24x7.

I thank that insight now that I'm over 50.

My personal preference... a dark (but not black) background with modest (but not excessive) contrast and minimal bleeding:

xterm*background: #100010000000
xterm*foreground: #7FFFDFFFDFFF

-Matt

I take it you have never lived in the mountains ? During certain parts of the year on clear nights the day-v-night temperature delta can be as much as 80F. A 50F delta is more typical, though. But its still a lot.

-Matt

The duck curve was a worry a decade ago, but only because researchers thought there might be problems stabilizing the grid without base load. It turned out to be a non-problem... the (for example) CA grid is actually more stable now with less base load than at any time in the past.

The reason is that DC inverters used with solar and battery systems can react to changes in voltage and frequency on the grid in mere milliseconds, even microseconds, whereas traditional base-load sources actually take on the order of hours and even NG peaking plants take 30 minutes if they are cold and 5 minutes if they are hot.

The problem now is how to deal with the situation where renewables generation is able to take 100% of the load at certain times during the day. In California, this happens in the spring and fall (lots of sun, very little air conditioning needed). At the moment CA is forced to load-shed the solar a little during these periods in order to allow less-agile generation sources to continue operating.

-Matt

It actually doesn't, because the ambient temperature of the air will keep it 'warm' relative to the near absolute zero of space that it is radiating into.

But again, we are not talking very much power generation here. Only a few watts per meter squared at night, at best.

-Matt

At best it can take away a few watts per meter squared and during the day you have roughly 1000W/m^2 hitting the panel. So as a cooling mechanism for the panel in the daytime its a big fail.

-Matt

The only way to do this is to radiate at frequencies that punch through the atmosphere, which is precisely what these radiative panels do. With careful selection of the frequency, the panel is basically 'seeing' the near absolute zero temperature of space and can thus radiate into it.

However, the efficiency of this mechanism is quite low. We're talking, at best, a few watts per meter squared (verses one to two orders of magnitude more energy when operating normally as a solar panel during the day).

So in terms of power generation at night, not so much. But it isn't a total loss. The radiative mechanism works 24x7 so on a 24x7 basis it can add around 10-15% more energy production to normal operation. And at night even though the power generation is very low, its high enough to provide voltage and frequency services to the grid.

-Matt