Josef “Jeff” Sipek

I’m going to try something new. Instead of sharing individual links per post as I come across them, I’m going to try to dump them whenever I have enough of them. It does mean that some of these links aren’t as “hot off the press”. Here’s the first batch.

How We’re Predicting AI — or Failing To

How Typography Shapes Our Perception Of Truth

Bitcoin mining on a 55 year old IBM 1401 mainframe: 80 seconds per hash

What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of “modified versions”?

SourceForge grabs GIMP for Windows’ account, wraps installer in bundle-pushing adware

 Speed tape looks like duct tape but isn’t.

Every so often, I do a nightly build of illumos on my laptop. This is a long and very CPU intensive process. During the build (which takes about 2.75 hours), the load average is rarely below 8 and most of the time it hovers in the low twenties. (This is a full debug and non-debug build with lint and all the other checking. If I need a build quickly, I can limit it to just what I need and then we’re talking minutes or seconds.)

Anyway, as you might imagine this sort of load puts some pressure on the CPUs. As a result, some interactive processes suffer a bit. Specifically, Firefox doesn’t get enough cycles to render the modern web (read: JavaScript cesspool). Instead of suffering for almost three hours, I just change Firefox’s scheduling class from IA (interactive) to RT (real time):

# priocntl -s -c RT `pgrep firefox`

This allows Firefox to preempt just about everything on my laptop. This works because Firefox actually yields the CPU properly. This will probably bite me sometime in the future when I end up on a page with such a busted JavaScript turd that it takes over a CPU and won’t let go. Till then, I have a pretty good workaround.