I landed on this article today about how to configure vLLM for AMD GPUs and it contained this specific snippet:

> Meta recently announced they’re running 100% of their live Llama 3.1 405B model traffic on AMD MI300X GPUs [...]

I thought that was an interesting piece of trivia and shows both how important it is for industrial partners to find alternatives to Nvidia and also how much AMD has improved its software suite to enable these use-cases.

Hi folks,

I have Alpine Linux installed in an encrypted LUKS partition. I came across this tutorial which shows how to setup a key in a USB drive and when the drive is inserted and the computer booted, the LUKS partition auto-unlocks with the key on the USB drive.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1414617/configure-ubuntu-22-04-zfs-for-automatic-luks-unlock-on-boot-via-usb-drive

I would like to setup the same thing but I do not have Alpine linux installed on ZFS, so I'm looking for ways to adapt the instructions.

So far, what I've done is:

1. I've setup the key on the usb stick and I can unlock the LUKS partition with that key.
2. create a /etc/mkinitfs/features.d/usb-unlock.sh script with the following content:

(the echo to /dev/kmesg was to check whether the script did indeed run at boot by trying to print to the kernel messages but I can't find anything in the kernel messages).

```sh #!/bin/sh

echo "usb-unlock script starting..." > /dev/kmsg

USB_MOUNT="/mnt/my-usb-key" # The USB stick mounting point LUKS_KEY_FILE="awesome.key" # The name of your keyfile on the USB stick

Search for the USB stick with the key

for device in $(ls /dev/disk/by-uuid/*); do mount $device $USB_MOUNT 2>/dev/null if [ -f "$USB_MOUNT/$LUKS_KEY_FILE" ]; then # Unlock the LUKS partition cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda3 cryptroot \ --key-file "$USB_MOUNT/$LUKS_KEY_FILE" && exit 0 fi umount $USB_MOUNT done echo "No USB key found, falling back to password prompt." # this message never appears, despite not having found the key on the usb stick

echo "usb-unlock script ending." > /dev/kmsg ```

3. I added usb-unlock to the features in mkinitfs.conf: mytestalpine:~# cat /etc/mkinitfs/mkinitfs.conf features="ata base ide scsi usb virtio ext4 cryptsetup keymap usb-unlock"

4. run mkinitfs to rebuild the initramfs. Then reboot to test the implementation, which was unsuccessful.

What am I missing / doing wrong? Thank you for your help!

Edit: forgot to add step 4

Hi folks,

I'm seeing there are multiple services which externalise the task of "identity provider" (e.g. login with Facebook, google or what not).

In my case, I am curious about Tailscale, a VPN service which allows one to chose an identity provider/SSO between Google, Microsoft, Github, Apple and OIDC.

How can I find out what data is actually communicates to the identity provider? Their task should simply be to decide whether I am who I claim to be, nothing more. But I'm guessing there may be some subtleties.

In the case of Tailscale, would the identity provider know where I'm trying to connect? Or more?

Answers and insights much appreciated! The topic does not seem to have much information online.

Hi folks, I'm considering setting up an offsite backup server and am seeking recommendations for a smallish form factor PC. Mainly, are there some suitable popular second hand PCs which meet the following requirements:

• fits 4x 3.5" HDD
• Smaller than a regular tower (e.g. mATX or ITX)
• Equipped with a 6th of 7th gen Intel CPU at least (for power efficiency and transcoding, in case I want it to actually to some transcoding) with video output.
• Ideally with upgradeable RAM

Do you know of something which meets those specs and is rather common on the second hand market?

Thanks!

Edit: I'm looking for a prebuilt system, such as a dell optiplex or similar.

Yesterday, there was a live scheduled by Louis Grossman, titled "Addressing futo license drama! Let's see if I get fired...". I was unable to watch it live, but now the stream seems to be gone from YouTube.

Did it air and was later removed? Or did it never happen in the first place?

Here's the link to where it was meant to happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTBYMobWQzk

Cheers

Edit: a new video was recently posted at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCjy2CHP7zU

I do not know if this was the supposedly edited and reuploaded video or if this is unrelated.

From Simon Willison: "Mistral tweet a link to a 281GB magnet BitTorrent of Mixtral 8x22B—their latest openly licensed model release, significantly larger than their previous best open model Mixtral 8x7B. I’ve not seen anyone get this running yet but it’s likely to perform extremely well, given how good the original Mixtral was."

Hi all,

I think around 1 or 2 years ago, I stumbled upon a personal blog of an asian woman (I think) working at OpenAI. She had numerous extensive fascinating blog posts on a black themed blog, going into the technical details of embeddings of language models and such.

I can no longer find that blog and have no other information to go by. Would anyone possibly know which blog I'm referring to? It would be very much appreciated.

Hi folks,

I seem to be having some internet connectivity issues lately and I would like to monitor my access to the internet. I have a homelab and was wondering whether someone had perhaps something like a docker container which pings a custom website every so often and plots a timescale of when the connection was successful and when it was not.

Or perhaps you have another suggestion? I know of dashboards like grafana but I don't know whether they can be configured to actually generate that data or whether they rely on a third party to feed them. Thanks!

Just wanted to share my appreciation of the game.

I grabbed a copy of this game a year ago, taking advantage of a sale and ahead of the massive update. Then forgot about it, never touched it.

Fast forward a year later, and now I got a steam deck and decided to dive into the game. I love it. I'm just a few hours in but I can already say this is among my favorite games. The broad openness of the world, the level of detail, the characters, the interactive dialogs, the items, the strategies, the game mechanics. It's a very involved game. It really is up there. Thank you CDPR for this game and this remake.

I was exploring the fps and refresh rate slider and I realized that when setting the framerate limiter to 25, the refresh rate was incorrectly set to 50Hz on the OLED version, when the 75 Hz setting would be a more appropriate setting, for the same reason 30 fps is at 90 Hz and not 60 Hz. Anyone else seeing the same behavior? Is there an explanation I'm missing here?

Hi folks, I'm looking for a specific YouTube video which I watched around 5 months ago.

The gist of the video is that it was comparing the transcoding performance of an Intel iGPU when used natively, compared to when passed through to a VM. From what I recall there was a significant performance hit and it was around 50% or so (in terms of fps transcoding). I believe the test was performed on jellyfin. I don't remember whether it was using xcpng, proxmox or another OS. I don't remember which channel published this video nor when it was published, just that I watched it sometime between April and June this year.

Anyone recall or know what video I'm talking about? Possible keywords include: quicksync, passthrough, sriov, iommu, transcoding, iGPU, encoding.

Thank you in advance!

Hi y'all,

I am exploring TrueNAS and configuring some ZFS datasets. As ZFS provides with some parameters to fine-tune its setup to the type of data, I was thinking it would be good to take advantage of it. So I'm here with the simple task of choosing the appropriate "record size".

Initially I thought, well this is simple, the dataset is meant to store videos, movies, tv shows for a jellyfin docker container, so in general large files and a record size of 1M sounds like a good idea (as suggested in Jim Salter's cheatsheet).

Out of curiosity, I ran Wendell's magic command from level1 tech to get a sense for the file size distribution:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l | awk '{ n=int(log($5)/log(2)); if (n<10) { n=10; } size[n]++ } END { for (i in size) printf("%d %d\n", 2^i, size[i]) }' | sort -n | awk 'function human(x) { x[1]/=1024; if (x[1]>=1024) { x[2]++; human(x) } } { a[1]=$1; a[2]=0; human(a); printf("%3d%s: %6d\n", a[1],substr("kMGTEPYZ",a[2]+1,1),$2) }'

Turns out, that's when I discovered it was not as simple. The directory is obviously filled with videos, but also tiny small files, for subtitiles, NFOs, and small illustration images, valuable for Jellyfin's media organization.

That's where I'm at. The way I see it, there are several options:

• 1. Let's not overcomplicate it, just run with the default 64K ZFS dataset recordsize and roll with it. It won't be such a big deal.
• 2. Let's try to be clever about it, make 2 datasets, one with a recordsize of 4K for the small files and one with a recordsize of 1M for the videos, then select one as the "main" dataset and use symbolic links for each file to the other dataset such that all content is "visible" from within one file structure. I haven't dug too much in how I would automate it, but might not play nicely with the *arr suite? Perhaps overly complicated...
• 3. Make all video files MKV files, embed the subtitles, rename the videos to make NFOs as unnecessary as possible for movies and tv shows (though this will still be useful for private videos, or YT downloads etc)
• 4. Other?

So what do you think? And also, how have your personally set it up? Would love to get some feedback, especially if you are also using ZFS and have a videos library with a dedicated dataset. Thanks!

Edit: Alright, so I found the following post by Jim Salter which goes through more detail regarding record size. It clarifies my misconception about recordsize not being the same as the block size, but also it can easily be changed at any time. It's just the size of the chunks of data to be read. So I'll be sticking to 1M recordsize and leave it at that despite having multiple smaller files, because the important will be to effectively stream the larger files. Thank you all!

Dave2d who's been supportive of Framework preordered the Laptop 16.

He's a bit concerned about the pricing and questions the upgradability of the Laptop 16 specifically.

Personally I understand his point, but I think the upgradability alone is probably not a good reason to buy the Laptop 16. It's always been a package, which includes:

• repairability
• modularity
• support of the movement/mission
• the versatility of reusing parts for other use cases (e.g. the motherboard as thin-client)
• a laptop that actually does not have Linux as an afterthought
• the openness with the expansion card and (hopefully expansion bay) ecosystem
• and maybe even more?

It's true that the laptop is expensive when you compare specs for specs but that was not the reason to buy it either. Do I wish it was cheaper? You bet. But like with all new startups, if it works out, if it scales, prices could come down. Long live Framework!

The verge got a hands on with the Framework Laptop 16 and wrote an article and published a YouTube video.

Article here: https://www.theverge.com/22665800/framework-laptop-16-hands-on-preview-modular-gaming-laptop

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xq8rOlwW5Y

Piped link: https://www.piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=7xq8rOlwW5Y

This is a great surprise, the pre-orders are open before the end of the Laptop 16 deep dives.

Quoting the blog post below:

> We’re excited to share that Framework Laptop 16 pre-orders are now open, with configurations powered by the latest AMD Ryzen™ CPUs and AMD Radeon™ GPUs. This is truly a notebook like no other: thin and refined, while empowering you with desktop PC-level customization, repairability, and upgradability, including a fully reconfigurable input deck and modular discrete graphics. Prices start at $1399 USD for DIY Edition and $1699 USD for pre-built systems with Ryzen™ 7 7840HS, and adding an AMD Radeon™ RX 7700S Graphics Module brings starting prices to $1799 and $2099 USD.

> Pre-orders that include a Graphics Module with an eligible AMD Radeon™ GPU will receive a free download code for one of the biggest games of the year: Starfield™ Premium Edition. Quantities are limited*, and we’ll be sending out the code prior to the game’s early access launch.

> As always, we’re following a batch ordering system, with the first batches shipping in Q4 2023. Ordering is open now in all of our current countries: US, Canada, Germany, France, UK, Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, and Australia. A fully refundable $100 deposit is all you need to get in line. We recommend getting your order in early if you’d like to get a system this year. We’re sharing much more detail today to help you decide if this is your next (and maybe final?) laptop.

> We’re not only using AMD Ryzen™ and Radeon™ silicon, but we developed this product in close collaboration with AMD as part of the AMD Advantage program. We’re leveraging AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series processors, the latest generation that we also use in Framework Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series), this time with HS-class parts optimized for gaming and creation. Configurations start with the Ryzen™ 7 7840HS with 8 Zen 4 CPU cores at up to 5.1GHz boost, and we also offer the totally overkill, top of the line Ryzen™ 9 7940HS with up to 5.2GHz boost. We worked with Cooler Master to design a thermal system with dual 75mm fans, three heatpipes, and a liquid metal thermal interface, enabling 45W continuous processor load while also keeping the laptop cool and quiet. There’s fantastic graphics performance built in too, with Radeon 780M graphics with 12 RDNA 3 cores, capable of running a range of modern game titles.

> If you want substantially more graphics horsepower, Framework Laptop 16 delivers the holy grail for high performance notebooks: optional discrete graphics using our new Expansion Bay system, allowing generation-over-generation graphics upgradeability. The first Graphics Module for the Expansion Bay features the AMD Radeon™ RX 7700S GPU. We’ve maxed out the capabilities of the chip, with 100W sustained TGP and 8GB GDDR6 at up to 18Gbps. Because the Graphics Module contains its own dedicated heatsink and higher CFM fans, both the CPU and GPU can run at full wattage simultaneously when needed. This GPU excels for both work and play, with 32 compute units at up to 2.2GHz, enabling high-end gaming, incredible rendering and encoding throughput, and excellent acceleration for AI and other applications.

> Of course, it’s not enough to have great silicon. A high-performance laptop demands thoughtful integration across every subsystem. We leverage a custom 16 inch 2560x1600 display, supporting 165Hz with FreeSync, 500 nit, 1500:1 contrast, and 100% DCI-P3 color gamut, making it excel across gaming, creation, and productivity. The 85Wh battery lasts you through a full workday, retains typically 80% capacity after 1,000 cycles, and is easy to replace if ever needed. Quad speakers connected to a smart amp provide high fidelity audio across a wide frequency band. For connectivity, we enabled WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 using AMD’s new RZ616 M.2 module. We built in a 1080p webcam with dual mics and hardware privacy switches, and for security we incorporated a Windows and Linux-compatible fingerprint reader.

> For I/O, we brought in the Expansion Card system that enables full customization of port selection, with three slots on each side. The rear two support USB4, the middle left handles USB 3.2+DisplayPort output, and the remaining three have USB 3.2. The back two slots on each side can take up to 240W power input over USB-C using USB-PD 3.1. We offer a compact, ultra high efficiency 180W GaN adapter with detachable cables, and with DIY Edition, you can choose to bring your own.

> We advanced laptop industrial design on both form and function, combining a refined form factor and unprecedented levels of customization. The Framework Laptop 16 is 17.95mm thick and 2.1kg (4.6lbs), going to 20.95mm in the back section and 2.4kg (5.3lbs) with a Graphics Module inserted. The chassis is made of robust and lightweight thixomolded magnesium alloy and CNC aluminum enclosure parts. As always for Framework products, user-friendly design goes below the surface too, with every internal module simple to replace or upgrade, including the Mainboard for generational processor upgrades.

> The input system is fully hot-swappable using Input Modules, letting you reconfigure between a centered keyboard or offset with a numpad. The keyboard and numpad look and feel excellent, with 1.5mm key travel, optional per-key RGB, NKRO, and fully open source QMK firmware. Input deck personalization goes even further, with Spacers in a range of colors, a programmable LED Matrix module, and an RGB Macropad all available as options. We’ve open sourced this system to enable third party and community development too, and we can’t wait to see the insanely cool modules that come from that.

> When ordering a Framework Laptop 16, you can choose between pre-built options that are ready to go out of the box with Windows 11 or the DIY Edition that you can configure more deeply, assemble yourself, and bring your preferred OS, including Linux. AMD has a strong focus on Linux drivers, and we provide in-house support and guides for Ubuntu LTS and Fedora. At order time for both pre-built and DIY Edition, you can choose your Input Modules, Expansion Cards, and Expansion Bay Modules. DIY Edition additionally lets you pick your Bezel color, memory (up to 64GB of DDR5-5600), storage (two M.2 NVMe drives), and power adapter. As always, you’ll be able to pick up additional modules or upgrades in the Framework Marketplace whenever you need.

> With the Framework Laptop 16, we’re taking our mission to the next level with a sleek, portable system that has the flexibility and generational upgradeability of a full desktop rig. This redefines what a high performance laptop can be: a machine that is uniquely yours to mold to your needs and use for as long as you’d like. We can’t wait to see what you do with it.

> *The free Starfield™ Premium Edition download code is a limited time and quantity offer. You may lose eligibility for this pre-order gift if you make certain order modifications, such as removing the Graphics Module from your pre-order. All canceled pre-orders will no longer be eligible to receive the free game code. For terms and conditions, see www.amdrewards.com/terms.

I'm curious and am playing around with a new EDA tool and am looking at practicing by designing a PCB which should be roughly 28x26mm footprint (give or take a few mm...).

It should be an LTE cat 4 device, connected by USB type C for the framework laptop and is unlikely to include antennas.

Where I struggle is identifying potential modems to use. The only one even remotely close is the u-blox LARA-L6, which is 24x26mm. What alternatives are there?

I am trying to see what gets sold in these USB dongles but there is little info. The few I have identified seem to make use of the Qualcomm 9207, but its's unclear to me if its a ready chip (which is what the MDM9207 is?) Or if it is an IP core to integrate in one's own chip?

A video I came across seem to indicate it (the MDM version) is tiny:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToCyUCIoXEM at 2:13

But will probably needadditional things to be integrated and I created an account at Qualcomm but they won't give anything unless I'm certified from a company to be a customer and actually integrate it...