Archives

Categories

New 18 Core CPU and NVMe

I just got a E5-2696 v3 CPU for my ML110 Gen9 home workstation, this has a Passmark score of 23326 which is almost 3 times faster than the E5-2620 v4 which rated 9224. Previously it took over 40 minutes real time to compile a 6.10 kernel that was based on the Debian kernel configuration, now it takes 14 minutes of real time, 202 minutes of user time, and 37 minutes of system CPU time. That’s a definite benefit of having a faster CPU, I don’t often compile kernels but when I do I don’t want to wait 40+ minutes for a result. I also expanded the system from 96G of RAM to 128G, most of the time I don’t need so much RAM but it’s better to have too much than too little, particularly as my friend got me a good deal on RAM. The extra RAM might have helped improve performance too, going from 6/8 DIMM slots full to 8/8 might help the CPU balance access.

That series of HP machines has a plastic mounting bracket for the CPU, see this video about the HP Proliant Smart Socket for details [1]. I was working on this with a friend who has the same model of HP server as I do, after buying myself a system I was so happy with it that I bought another the same when I saw it going for a good price and then sold it to my friend when I realised that I had too many tower servers at home. It turns out that getting the same model of computer as a friend is a really good strategy so then you can work together to solve problems with it. My friend’s first idea was to try and buy new clips for the new CPUs (which would have delayed things and cost more money), but Reddit and some blog posts suggested that you can just skip the smart-socket guide clip and when the chip was resting in the socket it felt secure as the protrusions on the sides of the socket fit firmly enough into the notches in the CPU to prevent it moving far enough to short a connection. Testing on 2 systems showed that you don’t need the clip. As an aside it would be nice if Intel made every CPU that fits a particular socket have the same physical dimensions so clips and heatsinks can work well on all CPUs.

The TDP of the new CPU is 145W and the old one was 85W. One would hope that in a server class system that wouldn’t make a lot of difference but unfortunately the difference was significant. Previously I could have the system running 7/8 cores with BOINC 24*7 and I wouldn’t notice the fans being louder. It is possible that 100% CPU use on a hot day might make the fans sound louder if I didn’t have an air-conditioner on that was loud enough to drown them out, but the noteworthy fact is that with the previous CPU the system fans were a minor annoyance. Now if I have 16 cores running BOINC it’s quite loud, the sort of noise that makes most people avoid using tower servers as workstations! I’ve found that if I limit it to 4 or 5 cores then the system is about as quiet as it was before. As a rough approximation I can use as much CPU power as before without making the fans louder but if I use more CPU power than was previously available it gets noisy.

I also got some new NVMe devices, I was previously using 2*Crucial 1TB P1 NVMes in a BTRFS RAID-1 and now I have 2*Crucial 1TB P3 NVMes (where P1 is the slowest Crucial offering, P3 is better and more expensive, P5 is even better, etc). When doing the BTRFS migrations to move my workstation to new NVMe devices and my server to the old NVMe devices I found that the P3 series seem to have a limit of about 70MB/s for sustained random writes and the P1 series is about 35MB/s. Apparently with the cheaper NVMe devices they slow down if you do lots of random writes, pity that all the review articles talking about GB/s speeds don’t mention this. To see how bad reviews are Google some reviews of these SSDs, you will find a couple of comment threads on places like Reddit of them slowing down with lots of writes and lots of review articles on well known sites that don’t mention it. Generally I’d recommend not upgrading from P1 to P3 NVMe devices, the benefit isn’t enough to cover the effort. For every capacity of NVMe devices the most expensive devices cost more than twice as much as the cheapest devices, and sometimes it will be worth the money. Getting the most expensive device won’t guarantee great performance but getting cheap devices will guarantee that it’s slow.

It seems that CPU development isn’t progressing as well as it used to, the CPU I just bought was released in 2015 and scored 23,343 according to Passmark [2]. The most expensive Intel CPU on offer at my local computer store is the i9-13900K which was released this year and scores 62,914 [3]. One might say that CPUs designed for servers are different from ones designed for desktop PCs, but the i9 in question has a “TDP Up” of 253W which is too big for the PSU I have! According to the HP web site the new ML110 Gen10 servers aren’t sold with a CPU as fast as the E5-2696 v3! In the period from 1988 to about 2015 every year there were new CPUs with new capabilities that were worth an upgrade. Now for the last 8 years or so there hasn’t been much improvement at all. Buy a new PC for better USB ports or something not for a faster CPU!

Intel vs AMD

In response to a post about my latest laptop I had someone ask why I chose an Intel CPU. I’ve been a fan of the Thinkpad series of laptops since the 90s. They have always seemed well constructed (given the constraints of being light etc) and had a good feature set. Also I really like the TrackPoint. I’ve been a fan of the smaller Thinkpads since I got an X-301 from e-waste [1] and the X1-Carbon series is the latest and greatest line of small Thinkpads.

AMD makes some nice laptop CPUs which appear to have low power use and good performance particularly for smaller numbers of threads, it seems that generally AMD CPUs are designed for fewer cores with higher performance per core which is good for laptops. But Lenovo only makes the Thinkpad Carbon X1 series with Intel CPUs so choosing that model of laptop means choosing Intel. It could be that for some combination of size, TDP, speed, etc Intel just happens to beat AMD for all the times when Lenovo was designing a new motherboard for the Carbon X1. But it seems more likely that Intel has been lobbying Lenovo for this. It would be nice if there was an anti-trust investigation into Intel, everyone who’s involved in the computer industry knows of some of the anti-competitive things that they have done.

Also it would be nice if Lenovo started shipping laptops with ARM CPUs across their entire range. But for the moment I guess I have to keep buying laptops with Intel CPUs.

T320 iDRAC Failure and new HP Z640

The Dell T320

Almost 2 years ago I made a Dell PowerEdge T320 my home server [1]. It was a decent upgrade from the PowerEdge T110 II that I had used previously. One benefit of that system was that I needed more RAM and the PowerEdge T1xx series use unbuffered ECC RAM which is unreasonably expensive as well as the DIMMs tending to be smaller (no Load Reduced DIMMS) and only having 4 slots. As I had bought two T320s I put all the RAM in a single server getting a total of 96G and then put some cheap DIMMs in the other one and sold it with 48G.

The T320 has all the server reliability features including hot-swap redundant PSUs and hot-swap hard drives. One thing it doesn’t have redundancy on is the motherboard management system known as iDRAC. 3 days ago my suburb had a power outage and when power came back on the T320 gave an error message about a failure to initialise the iDRAC and put all the fans on maximum speed, which is extremely loud. When a T320 is running in a room that’s not particularly hot and it doesn’t have SAS disks it’s a very quiet server, one of the quietest I’ve ever owned. When it goes into emergency cooling mode due to iDRAC failure it’s loud enough to be heard from the other end of the house with doors closed in between.

Googling this failure gave a few possible answers. One was for some combinations of booting with the iDRAC button held down, turning off for a while and booting with the iDRAC button held down, etc (this didn’t work). One was for putting a iDRAC firmware file on the SD card so iDRAC could automatically load it (which I tested even though I didn’t have the flashing LED which indicates that it is likely to work, but it didn’t do anything). The last was to enable serial console and configure the iDRAC to load new firmware via TFTP, I didn’t get a iDRAC message from the serial console just the regular BIOS stuff.

So it looks like I’ll have to sell the T320 for parts or find someone who wants to run it in it’s current form. Currently to boot it I have to press F1 a few times to bypass BIOS messages (someone on the Internet reported making a device to key-jam F1). Then when it boots it’s unreasonably loud, but apparently if you are really keen you can buy fans that have temperature sensors to control their own speed and bypass the motherboard control.

I’d appreciate any advice on how to get this going. At this stage I’m not going to go back to it but if I can get it working properly I can sell it for a decent price.

The HP Z640

I’ve replaced the T320 with a HP Z640 workstation with 32G of RAM which I had recently bought to play with Stable Diffusion. There were hundreds of Z640 workstations with NVidia Quadro M6000 GPUs going on eBay for under $400 each, it looked like a company that did a lot of ML work had either gone bankrupt or upgraded all their employees systems. The price for the systems was surprisingly cheap, at regular eBay prices it seems that the GPU and the RAM go for about the same price as the system. It turned out that Stable Diffusion didn’t like the video card in my setup for unknown reasons but also that the E5-1650v3 CPU could render an image in 15 minutes which is fast enough to test it out but not fast enough for serious use. I had been planning to blog about that.

When I bought the T320 server the DDR3 Registered ECC RAM it uses cost about $100 for 8*8G DIMMs, with 16G DIMMs being much more expensive. Now the DDR4 Registered ECC RAM used by my Z640 goes for about $120 for 2*16G DIMMs. In the near future I’ll upgrade that system to 64G of RAM. It’s disappointing that the Z640 only has 4 DIMM sockets per CPU so if you get a single-CPU version (as I did) and don’t get the really expensive Load Reduced RAM then you are limited to 64G. So the supposed capacity benefit of going from DDR3 to DDR4 doesn’t seem to apply to this upgrade.

The Z640 I got has 4 bays for hot-swap SAS/SATA 2.5″ SSD/HDDs and 2 internal bays for 3.5″ hard drives. The T320 has 8*3.5″ hot swap bays and I had 3 hard drives in them in a BTRFS RAID-10 configuration. Currently I’ve got one hard drive attached via USB but that’s obviously not a long-term solution. The 3 hard drives are 4TB, they have worked since 4TB was a good size. I have a spare 8TB disk so I could buy a second ($179 for a shingle HDD) to make a 8TB RAID-1 array. The other option is to pay $369 for a 4TB SSD (or $389 for a 4TB NVMe + $10 for the PCIe card) to keep the 3 device RAID-10. As tempting as 4TB SSDs are I’ll probably get a cheap 8TB disk which will take capacity from 6TB to 8TB and I could use some extra 4TB disks for backups.

I haven’t played with the AMT/MEBX features on this system, I presume that they will work the same way as AMT/MEBX on the HP Z420 I’ve used previously [2].

Update:

HP has free updates for the BIOS etc available here [3]. Unfortunately it seems to require loading a kernel module supplied by HP to do this. This is a bad thing, kernel code that isn’t in the mainline kernel is either of poor quality or isn’t licensed correctly.

I had to change my monitoring system to alert on temperatures over 100% of the “high” range while on the T320 I had it set at 95% of “high” and never got warnings. This is disappointing, enterprise class gear running in a reasonably cool environment (ambient temperature of about 22C) should be able to run all CPU cores at full performance without hitting 95% of the “high” temperature level.

Wayland in Bookworm

We are getting towards the freeze for Debian/Bookworm so the current state of packages isn’t going to change much before the release. Bugs will get fixed but missing features will mostly be missing until the next release.

Anarcat wrote an excellent blog post about using Wayland with the Sway window manager [1]. It seems pretty good if you like Sway, but I like KDE and plan to continue using it. Several of the important utility programs referenced by Anarcat won’t run with KDE/Wayland and give errors such as “Compositor doesn’t support wlr-output-management-unstable-v1”. One noteworthy thing about Wayland is the the Window manager and the equivalent to the X server are the same program so KDE has different Wayland code than Sway and doesn’t support some features. The lack of these features limits my ability to manage multiple displays and therefore makes KDE/Wayland unsuitable for many laptop uses. My work laptop runs Ubuntu 22.04 with KDE and wouldn’t correctly display on the pair of monitors on a USB-C dock that’s the standard desktop configuration where I work.

In my previous post about Wayland [2] I wrote about converting 2 of my systems to Wayland. Since then I had changed them back to X because of problems with supporting strange monitor configurations on laptops and also due to the KDE window manager crashing occasionally which terminates the session in Wayland but merely requires restarting the window manager in X. More recently I had a problem with the GPU in my main workstation sometimes not being recognised by the system (reporting no PCIe device), when I got a new one I couldn’t get X to work with the error “Cannot run in framebuffer mode. Please specify busIDs for all framebuffer devices” so I tried Wayland again. Now in the later stage of the Bookworm development process it seems that the problem with the KDE window manager crashing has been solved or mitigates and there is a new problem of the plasmashell process crashing. As I can restart plasmashell without logging out that’s much less annoying. So now my main workstation is running on Wayland with a slower GPU than I previously had while also giving a faster user experience so Wayland is providing a definite performance benefit.

Maybe for Trixie (the next release of Debian after Bookworm) we should have a release goal of having full Wayland support in all the major GUI systems.

Links January 2023

The Intercept has an amusing and interesting article about senior Facebook employees testifying that they don’t know where Facebook stores all it’s data on users [1]. One lesson all programmers can learn from this is to document all these things in an orderly manner.

Cory Doctorow wrote a short informative article about inflation from a modern monetary theory perspective [2].

Russ Allbery wrote an insightful blog post about effecive altruism and respect for disadvantaged people [3]. GiveDirectly sounds good.

The Conversation has an interesting article about the Google and Apple app stores providing different versions of apps for users in different regions [4]. Apparently there are specific versions to comply with GDPR and versions that differ in adverts. The hope that GDPR would affect enough people to become essentially a world-wide standard was apparently overly optimistic. We need political lobbying in all countries for laws like the GDPR to force the app stores to give us the better versions of apps.

Arya Voronova wrote an informative article about USB-C and extension or data blocker cables [5]. USB just keeps getting more horrible in technology while getting more useful in functionality. Laptops and phones catching fire will probably become more common in future.

John McBride wrote an insightful article about the problems in the security of the software supply chain [6]. His main suggestion for addressing problems is “If you are on a team that relies on some piece of open source software, allocate real engineering time to contributing”, the problem with this is that real engineering time means real money and companies don’t want to do that. Maybe having companies contribute moderate amounts of money to a foundation that hires people would be a viable option.

Toms Guide has an interesting article describing problems with the Tesla [7]. It doesn’t cover things like autopilot driving over children and bikers but instead covers issues of the user interface that make it less pleasant to drive and also remove concentration from the road.

The BBC has an interesting article about the way mathematical skill is correlated with the way language is used to express numbers [8]. Every country with a lesser way of expressing numbers should switch to some variation of the East-Asian way.

Science 2.0 has an interesting blog post about the JP Aerospace plans to use airships to get most of the way through the atmosphere and then a plane to get to orbit [9]. It’s a wild idea but seems plausible. The idea of going to space in balloons seems considerably scarier to me than the current space craft.

Interesting list of red team and physical entry gear with links to YouTube videos showing how to use them [10].

The Verge has an informative summary of the way Elon mismanaged Twitter after taking it over [11].

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014

In May 2014 I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition tablet (wikipedia page [1]) with 32G of storage. It’s display is 2560×1600 resolution which still compares well to the latest tablets. The Galaxy Tab S8 [2] is the latest high-end tablet series from Samsung and the 11 inch tablet in that series also has a 2560×1600 giving it a slightly lower DPI! The latest series also has 12.4″ and 14.6″ tablets with resolutions of 2800×1752 and 2960×1848 respectively. Obviously if you want a 14″ tablet then the latest offerings are good, but if you want a 10″ or 11″ tablet then Samsung hasn’t improved much. The Note 10.1 has 3G of RAM and a choice of 16G, 32G, or 64G of storage. The latest Tab S8 tablets have 8G to 16G of RAM and 128G to 512G of internal storage, which are great if you need such things. For many tasks 3G of RAM is quite adequate and as I chose the 32G model I haven’t had a problem with storage. The s-pen is a feature of this tablet which is also on the latest high-end Samsung tablets, it is useful for accessing small elements in web sites designed for desktop use and for graphics editing.

One noteworthy feature of this tablet is the fact that when in “landscape” orientation it has speakers on each side, which is the correct layout as the vast majority of video with stereo sound is in a landscape orientation.

After using that tablet for about 4 years I bought myself a newer tablet and gave it to my wife. She has since passed it on to another relative who is using it regularly. That tablet seems to have lasted well still being quite usable when it’s almost 9 years old. The price including delivery was $579, that works out to about $1.30 per week (disregarding interest and inflation). According to the Reserve Bank of Australia inflation calculator [3] $579 in 2014 is equivalent to $652 in 2021, they don’t have results for later than 2021 so I’ll assume it would be $675 in 2023.

Currently the main problems with this tablet are lack of USB-C support (which means it’s difficult to connect to an external display among other things) and lack of a recent version of Android, 4.4.2 was the latest OTA update available. The XDA Developers forum has a section for this tablet [4] which includes discussion of updates to Android 5.x for devices which didn’t get it automatically and for upgrading to very recent Android versions in LineageOS. I’m idly considering one of those options, but for the current user the Google Play store is a requirement.

Newer Samsung Tablets

The current equivalent Samsung tablet is the Galaxy Tab S8 which is currently being sold for $1055 which is 56% higher than the inflation adjusted price of my tablet. I don’t think this is reasonable given that I bought it 7 months after release and it’s now 11 months since the release of the Tab S8. The Tab S8 has more RAM, more storage, and a faster CPU due to improvements over the entire computer industry – replacing old parts with newer versions of the same things (including changing to USB-C) doesn’t justify a price rise. Increasing RAM size by a factor of 3-5 and increasing storage by a factor of 8 over the last 9 years doesn’t match the industry trends for PCs, also as an aside my latest laptop only has 8G of RAM and works well for much more demanding tasks. The Tab S8 series also has significantly better cameras, but I don’t think that’s a big deal, the 2Mp front camera in my tablet can provide adequate quality for video conferencing and usually saturate the upload bandwidth and again that’s an issue of the entire industry moving to newer hardware. I don’t think it’s bad to take a form factor and display that works well and put newer versions of the CPU, RAM, storage, cameras, and OS on it. But asking for 56% more money for the updated tablet seems unreasonable.

The current S8 Ultra is going for $1760 and the S8+ is $1479. I think those are ridiculous prices for tablets as there is a decent range of new laptops that are cheaper. I believe that the purpose of a tablet is to be easy to carry and quick to start using (no waiting for a laptop to connect to wifi after leaving suspend). The largest of the S8 Tabs is about the same length and width as a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with the benefits being that it’s thinner and lighter, but if you got a tablet case with keyboard then it would be thicker and heavier. The S8 seems like bad value for money and the S8+ and S8 Ultra don’t seem to compare well to laptops and Chromebooks with touch screens unless you have a specific need for Android tablet apps.

If Samsung are going to just make new tablets without any significant improvements other than refreshing to the latest CPU, RAM, storage, and Camera technology and force users to upgrade via a lack of new OS support then they shouldn’t charge so much. Stick well below $1000 and people will be more inclined to replace items, expensive items are expected to last.

Conclusion

Buying this tablet was definitely a good choice. It has performed well for many years and after a couple of years of light use it’s back in daily use again. The value for money it offered was significantly greater than newer tablets, when it was new it was really high-end, the current S8 Tab series of tablets aren’t anything special when compared to other tablets.

Links December 2022

Charles Stross wrote an informative summary of the problems with the UK monarchy [1], conveniently before the queen died.

The blog post “To The Next Mass Shooter, A Modest Proposal” is a well written suggestion to potential mass murderers [2].

The New Yorker has an interesting and amusing article about the former CIA employee who released the “Vault 7” collection of CIA attack software [3]. This exposes the ridiculously poor hiring practices of the CIA which involved far less background checks than the reporter writing the story did.

Wired has an interesting 6 part series about the hunt for Alpha02 – the admin of the Alphabay dark web marketplace [4].

The Atlantic has an interesting and informative article about Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the most horrible politicians in the world [5].

Anarcat wrote a long and detailed blog post about Matrix [6]. It’s mostly about comparing Matrix to other services and analysing the overall environment of IM systms. I recommend using Matrix, it is quite good although having a server with SSD storage is required for the database.

Edent wrote an interesting thought experiment on how one might try to regain access to all their digital data if a lightning strike destroyed everything in their home [7].

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about the crapification of literary contracts [8]. A lot of this applies to most contracts between corporations and individuals. We need legislation to restrict corporations from such abuse.

Jared A Brock wrote an insightful article about why AirBNB is horrible and how it will fail [9].

Habr has an interesting article on circumventing UEFI secure boot [10]. This doesn’t make secure boot worthless but does expose some weaknesses in it.

Matthew Garrett wrote an interesting blog post about stewartship of the UEFI boot ecosystem and how Microsoft has made some strange and possibly hypocritical decisions about it [11]. It also has a lot of background information on how UEFI can be used and misused.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article “Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe [12]. The idea is to use the Amazon search and reviews to find a product and then buy it elsewhere, a reverse of the “showrooming” practice where people look at products in stores and buy them online. There is already a browser plugin to search local libraries for Amazon books.

Charles Stross wrote an interesting blog post about the UK Tory plan to destroy higher education [13]. There’s a lot of similarities to what conservatives are doing in other countries.

Antoine Beaupré wrote an insightful blog post “How to nationalize the internet in Canada” [14]. They cover the technical issues to be addressed as well as some social justice points that are often missed when discussing such issues. Internet is not a luxuary nowadays, it’s an important part of daily life and the governments need to treat it the same way as roads and other national infrastructure.

Wall Facers

I’m currently reading the second book of the TriSolar Sci-Fi series by Cixin Liu, I’ve only just started it so this post can’t have spoilers for it and I will also only have minimal spoilers for the first book (nothing more than you will get from pop culture references to it).

In the second book there are people called “Wall Facers” who have broad powers to shape the course of the Human response to an alien invasion in 400+ years time. The idea is that as the aliens have an ability to see everything that can be seen on Earth any ideas that leave the brain of one person can be snooped on, so if some people act independently without communicating their plans they can take the aliens by surprise. While that is probably going to work out well in the books history in general seems to show that people who act independently without any useful feedback from others tend to perform poorly, every king and dictator seems to demonstrate this.

Efficient Work

I’ve been thinking about what I would do if I had significant powers to guide the response to an alien threat in some hundreds of years. The first thing to do would be to get all people working as efficiently as possible. Without the imminent threat of alien invasion we can have debates about how much time to spend working vs leisure time. Should we make 24 hours per week the new normal work week? But if the threat of annihilation is looming then the discussion should be about how to get as many people as possible working as much as possible.

Currently 1/4 of the world population lack access to safe drinking water [1], there’s a plan to “achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030”. But 2030 isn’t soon enough, another 8 years where 1/4 of children born won’t reach their potential due to poor water is unacceptable. Currently 13% of the world population don’t have access to electricity and 40% don’t have access to clean fuels for cooking [2]. Lack of energy access reduces health and opportunities for education. Healthcare is another major obstacle to human development and therefore economic development. Even some allegedly first-world countries like the US lack universal affordable healthcare.

I think we could reasonably get safe water to 99% of the world population before 2025 if we tried hard (IE applied a small fraction of the resources of a single war to it). Getting electricity to 95% of the world population and clean cooking fuels to 90% of the world population are probably achievable goals for 2025 as well.

Healthcare is a slightly harder problem as we need to train more nurses and doctors. A registered nurse apparently needs 3 years of training after completing high school. We may have to improve high schools to get more students up to the standard of nursing degrees. If it takes 3 years to improve schools in year 9+ and then 3 years to get more high school graduates that would mean that it would take about 9 years to get an increase in nurses. Doing this would require increasing the capacity of universities and making university almost free (as it was for decades). So in about 2031 we could start sending a significant number of nurses from developed countries to help out developing countries.

Becoming a doctor apparently requires 8 years of study plus a minimum of 3 years “residency”. So if doctors were entirely trained in first world countries then we wouldn’t be able to send many doctors to developing countries until 2039. If the “residency” was performed in other countries then it could be as early as 2036.

According to the WHO currently only half the world’s population have adequate healthcare [3]. To get adequate healthcare to the world we need to more than double the number of doctors because currently we don’t have enough in countries with decent healthcare systems such as Australia. It would probably take to at least 2060 to get enough doctors trained. The end goal of course would be to have every country able to train enough of it’s citizens to provide all medical services, but countries that have serious widespread healthcare problems that reduce the number of people who can pursue higher education will have difficulty in that until some of the healthcare problems are alleviated.

Education

Obviously education is important to all achievements. Currently education seems very poorly run, it is possible to create a school system that teaches children effectively without the bullying that is common in Australia and without the sort of pressure that South Korea is infamous for. One of the main issues to resolve with the school system is the idea that everyone should learn at the same speed, that goal can only be achieved by making the majority of the students learn slowly. Students should be able to freely skip ahead as their skill permits and finish school at any age. Also high school isn’t for everyone, the “tech” schools that teach trades need to be brought back.

Deceiving Aliens

A plot point in the TriSolar series is that the aliens can see each other’s thoughts, the local communication (their equivalent to talking) is based on reading each other’s thoughts without the possibility of deception. While deceptive written communication is potentially possible for them they haven’t developed skills in that area.

As a first step towards exploiting this humans could focus more on linguistic development that increases language complexity, such as the way the English language adopts words from other languages and gives them slightly different meanings – for example the difference between “driver” and “chauffeur” and the difference between “dog” and “hound” is not obvious to many Europeans who otherwise speak English fluently.

When involved in conversation it’s possible to convey meaning without directly stating things, this is used extensively by people who are interested in security. My observations of this are based on conversations with people who do government work, but I imagine that criminal organisations also do similar things for similar reasons.

An increased focus on poetry in schools might be helpful in developing skills for conveying ideas to people who think in human ways where the message is unclear to non-humans who have no experience of deception. I wonder whether the ability to understand human poetry would make aliens less hostile to humans, if they can think like us then they would be less likely to want to exterminate us.

Poker is a game that depends on the ability to deceive others, I’ve never been any good at it. I wonder if making it part of the school curriculum would help improve the overall human ability to deceive aliens. I don’t think that such schools would become dens of sociopathy as depicted in Kakegurui, but it might have some negative results.

Spreading education to a larger portion of the world’s population requires more use of electronic education. Anything learned via text can be more easily assimilated by aliens than things that are learned directly from other people. For high school and the basics of a university degree this is fine. But for more advanced education it seems that having a large face to face component might help keep the value away from the aliens.

More Ideas?

What do you think I missed on this list? I wasn’t trying to list every possibility, just the more important ones. Also for any goals other than increasing inequality for it’s own sake we should improve health and education for the world.

Pixel 6A

I have just bought a Pixel 6A [1] for my wife. It’s one of the latest Google phones that was released almost at the same time as the Pixel 7 series, so if you want to spend a lot of money on a phone that’s the latest and greatest then the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro are the options, but if you want to save some money and don’t need something really high end then the Pixel 6A is a good option.

The one I bought cost $550 when I bought it from Google which seemed like a good deal when it was advertised as being discounted from $750. Later I discovered that other retailers were selling it for $500 or for $550 when bundled with a Chromecast. Also one of the other retailers was a company that I could get discount gift cards for. So this is the type of item you should really shop around for. It doesn’t come with a charger so you don’t have the gray-market disadvantage of getting yet another charger that doesn’t fit the sockets in your country.

The main new feature of this phone is a fingerprint scanner built in to the screen. I don’t think this is a good thing, sure it’s neat technology to both display pictures and read fingerprints through the same piece of glass but there are benefits to using a different location. Huawei phones with a fingerprint reader at the rear of the phone allow the user to answer calls, drag down the notifications list, and scroll sideways via touching the fingerprint reader. So the Pixel 6A clearly gives less functionality than some Huawei phones in this regard.

One major annoyance with the phone is a combination of the phone hardware and Android 13 which gives no back arrow (swipe sideways) and no button to get the task list (swipe upwards at the correct speed from the bottom of the screen). The Android 12 way of swiping up from the bottom of the screen to get buttons for back, task-list, and home-screen is much better IMHO. Hopefully they will release a software update to make this a configuration option.

Generally this is a nice phone, but the lack of buttons for back and task-list is annoying. Maybe the lack of buttons is something you can get used to after using it for a while. But millions of people just taking whatever companies like Google offer isn’t what I imagined when I first hoped for a large portion of the world using Linux. On PCs we have a choice between KDE, GNOME, and other UIs. It would be nice if we had similar choices on phones.

USB-PD and GaN

photo of 2 USB-PD chargers

A recent development is cheap Gallium Nitride based power supplies that provide better efficiency in a smaller space than other technologies. Kogan recently had a special on such devices so I decided to try them out with my new Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 5 [1]. Google searches for power supplies for that Thinkpad included results for 30W PSUs which implies that any 30W USB-C PSU should work.

I bought a 30W charger for $10 that can supply 15V/2A or 20V/1.5A on a single USB-C port or 15W on the USB-C port and 15W on the USB-2 port at the same time and expected it to work as a laptop charger. Unfortunately it didn’t, I don’t know whether the adverts for 30W Thinkpad PSUs were false or whether the claim of the GaN charger I bought being 30W was false, all I know is that the KDE power applet said that the PSU couldn’t supply enough power.

I then bought a 68W charger for $28 that can supply 20.0V/3.0A on a single USB-C port if the USB-2 port isn’t used and 50W on the USB-C port if the USB-2 port is also being used. This worked well which wasn’t a great surprise as I had previously run the laptop on 45W PSUs. If I connect a phone to the USB-2 port while the laptop is being charged then the laptop will be briefly cut off, presumably the voltage and current are being renegotiated when that happens.

As you can see the 68W charger is significantly larger than the 30W charger, but still small enough to easily fit in a jacket pocket and smaller than a regular laptop charger. One of my uses for this will be to put it in a jacket pocket when I have my laptop in another pocket. Another use will be for charging in my car as the cables from the inverter to convert 12VDC to 240VAC takes enough space. I will probably get a ~50W USB-PD charger that connects to a car cigarette lighter socket when a GaN version of such a charger becomes available.