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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  3d ago (text post)   367 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for June 03, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Homies: Ride or Die and also my Tron lighting project have not had much progress this week. Instead I became consumed by

(rant follows)

a silicon degradation issue in my Intel i9-14900k.

I bought an i9-14900k about a year ago and it was fine for a few months. Then I started having random segfaults in browser processes and also when running compile jobs. I noticed that 95% of them were happening on core 4 so I disabled that and life was mostly okay again.

But not completely. Once in awhile I'd run make clean and then make and one random compilation unit would segfault. Re-running make would be fine. I tried either clang or gcc and the same thing kept happening. It would happen within like 2 seconds if I let all cores get used.

Weirdly, it wouldn't happen if I ran a more traditional CPU benchmark like stress-ng letting that run for hours and hours, and it wouldn't happen if I played an intensive FPS game since I guess those do all of their parallel tasks on the GPU. Apparently nothing stresses a CPU like big compilation jobs.

I tried dicking with BIOS settings for awhile before finally giving up and deciding to replace it with a Ryzen 9 7950x, which was supposed to be comparably powerful but doesn't have notorious silicon degradation issues like the Intel does.

Unfortunately this meant I needed to also get a new mainboard and upgrade the 128GB of RAM I have to DDR5. Also a new CPU cooler.

The Ryzen stack arrived and I rebuilt my PC with it (e.g. swapped the PSU and case and some NVMe drives) and I'm relieved to say it's been humming along beautifully.

Now I'm barking up Intel's tree to at least RMA the busted CPU so I can look to either build another PC with it (at this point I just need a PSU and case) and hand it down to my kid, or maybe I should try to sell it as a complete system and recover some of my losses. I expect if I try selling it all I'll about $800 on this experiment due to the mainboard and RAM and cooler being used.

Why didn't I just RMA the Intel CPU with the cross-shipping option where they send you the new CPU first and then you can return the broken one? Because I just was so done with Intel. I can understand a CPU not working from day one, but something about it degrading with time and this being such a widespread issue is really crazy-making.

Oh yeah while I was trying to make this decision yet another Intel CPU security issue was discovered https://comsec.ethz.ch/research/microarch/branch-privilege-injection/

Basically sealed it for me. How far Intel has fallen.

In the meantime I decided to switch my diff tool to difftastic, since it understands the ASTs of 30 different programming languages (thanks to tree-sitter) and it can show you AST related diffs that are better at displaying what meaningfully changed rather than mere line/word diffs. Should reap insane efficiency gains.

I want so badly to believe in Intel, but it just keeps getting worse. Sorry you got burned.

I'm still happy as a clam with my 5800X3D and an RTX 4070S to go with it. But I'm throwing $50 a month into a "New Computer" fund whenever I decide it's finally time to upgrade. Who knows when that'll be. Since switching to Linux Mint things generally seem much snappier. I know it boots it like 10 seconds versus the 60+ Windows 10 takes these days. Really makes you think how much of that feeling of "Ugh, my computer has gotten slow" is just Windows cruft. Linux Mint feels as fast as the day I first built this thing (when it was a Ryzen 3700X and an RTX 2070S) and was blown away at how much faster a NVMe drive was to boot from.

Stupid planned obsolescence.

Thanks.

I think Intel was desperate to have the fastest single thread performance, even if it means losing at energy efficiency and risking physically killing the chip. Worse, despite these sacrifices it can't even sustain the top speed for very long.

Re: Windows, I don't fucking get why Microsoft doesn't worry about performance more. Even if you aggressively tune Windows and disable a bunch of crap any default Linux distro feels more responsive.

What made you select Mint?

Re: Windows, I don't fucking get why Microsoft doesn't worry about performance more.

Honestly, I'm pretty sure Microsoft just doesn't care about Windows anymore, period. Their money-maker is O365 and Azure subscriptions, which they will gladly sell you on any platform of your choice.

I think they've quietly given up on Windows in general shortly after giving up on Windows Phone. After admitting they were not going to own pocket computing, they must have understood that their monopolistic hold on the software ecosystem was inevitably going to get shattered. Without owning the software market, they have to compete on the quality of the operating system, and developing a state-of-the-art operating system costs too much, and it's too hard to extract money from it compared to cloud services.

Add to that their multiple failures at taking control of PC game distribution which cemented, even before the Steam Deck and SteamOS, that gamers were going to follow Valve wherever they go, not Microsoft.

The fact that I'm a Linux newb and it was supposed to be the most user friendly. I don't think I see myself distro hopping either, I just want something that works, and it does. But who knows, maybe I'll find myself with more time than sense and going down rabbit holes.

Oh. There probably isn't much substantive difference between desktop distros if you do a mainstream one. Mint might come with nicer defaults out of the box and that's cool but if you can flip over to a Mac or Chromebook without much trouble than a random distro like Ubuntu probably wouldn't be any more wack.

Yeah, Ubuntu was going to be my first choice because it seems so ubiquitous and stuff like Steam claims to only support Ubuntu. But a friend of me talked me out of it because Ubuntu began gathering telemetry or something? And a lot of the places I used to see evangelizing Ubuntu shifted to Mint?

I donno man. I'm an outsider looking in.

Oh. There's some. Telemetry for a Linux distro will be pretty weaksauce compared to the rest of the world because of how fickle Linux users are.

But yeah no harm in Mint if you want the full anti-corpo experience.

I also know geeks who have limited Linux experience, but know they don’t want Ubuntu because of the telemetry scandal… which was, what, like 12 years ago or something, and completely irrelevant to modern Ubuntu?

The movement towards desktop Linux among techies has been driven largely by Microsoft telemetry in Windows, so it’s not entirely surprising to me that “avoid telemetry at all costs” would be an essential driver for them, even if people don’t really understand what the scandal was about and what modern Ubuntu is like. (Which, to be fair, has its own details that alienate a lot of greybeards.)

The big one was embedded amazon web search in the start-menu equivalent from 2013-2016; Cortana is obnoxious enough that I don't think anyone wants a Linux version. Not an issue in modern versions. Ubuntu OS itself now is just limited to an on-install and on-wakeup 'here's my system specs' sorta stuff, which I agree basically rounds to not mattering, but I will caveat that the Snap Store is more aggressive (sending on-program-start info, at minimum) that it may have additional concerns.

The good news is that the Snap Store is so badly maintained and especially filtered that you should basically never use it -- Snaps are slow to launch, they're often out-of-date (even by downstream standards), they're bloated even compared to flatpak, and Ubuntu has been extremely willing to let outright obvious malware into the store. The downside is that Canonical really wants everything moved to Snap, and unless you uninstall snapd you can get surprised to find things like your web browser or IDE can 'upgrade' to their Snap version.

((This is not an advocacy of flatpak. Just damning Snap with faint praise.))

That said, you can remove Snap, and I think it stays gone, so still better than Windows. Just a lot of footgun opportunity compared to something like Mint.

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