intel bugs, surveys, random shit

Well i've been following the whole "spectre" and "meltdown" saga over the last week or so. Apart from the pretty offensive development of branding (ugh) for a set of mostly unrelated bugs, loads of pro-intel FUD, misdirection and so on, it's been a bit of a fun ride of stupidity.

I haven't seen any patches for my laptop or work computers so far - one because i don't run any av software on microsoft? Ugh, what a fucking mess. I barely use that machine any more anyway, even less so while running that junk.

What's most appalling is that the problem has been sat on for 6 months under "responsible disclosure" while intel continued selling gimped hardware based on bogus benchmarks. And yet the linux and *bsd developers are either only just starting on or working on cleaning up fixes very recently - even intel is still fucking around with microcode updates.

The tech press, apart from The Register (who really broke this story) has been pretty shithouse too. "big nothingburger" for a massive massive security hole that isn't actually fixed by any of these OS kernel patches, merely mitigated. It's a big big serious problem, with big big serious costs, and the handling the disclosure has been an utter disaster - seemingly designed to spread fud about the impacts and costs. Still, if you relied on a single supplier - and particularly a nefarious piece of shit company like Intel - for any serious hardware investment, sucked in I guess? We all have to pay for your stupidity in the end regardless.

Blah.

I was insomniac[sic] late night and bored so I took the latest stack overflow survey. Apart from some pretty strange questions it's pretty clear why nobody reads my blog - no mention of almost any of the technologies I use day to day. Well at least they had the brains to identify C and C++ as two separate languages I suppose.

Some of the "order these in importance to you" questions I just skipped - I didn't care about the topic at all. A minor problem was a bit of confusion with "framework" "language", etc - where would OpenCL fit if they even included it? No CUDA either for that matter. Plenty of questions about advertising. No I don't use an ad-blocker but I turn off javascript which makes the site oh so much faster and kills most adverts as a bonus.

Sleep has been pretty miserable lately - probably a side-effect of overdoing it a bit, but I think i've gained enough weight again for the sleep apnoea to kick in. One example of overdoing it was the last weekend. Hit the beach Saturday afternoon, dropped in at a mates place - drank a carton of (bloody expensive) piss, went to a party (total strangers apart from him), was up all night whilst everyone else was falling asleep, back to his place to pick my bike up - for a couple more, another dip, and finally dropped by the pub on the way home for a fast (very slow!) one. Barmaid thought i was managing well all things considered but maybe that's because I always look exhausted and feel like shit? Nothing like a 36 hour day to get you tired; and then I was awake after only 4 hours of bloody sleep. For a couple of silly reasons I also got sunburnt to a crisp, oops.

Finally kicking into summer mode!