Autarchy of the Private Cave

I’m looking at AI/ML-powered coding assistants (such as mutable.ai, github’s CoPilot, tabnine, and even Alibaba AI assistant – but there everything was in Chinese so I didn’t proceed at all with it), and found – with sadness – that Kite, one of the longer-existing solutions (since 2014!) has gone out of business…

Here is Kite’s farewell for you to read.

Kite did open-source many parts of their technology/software stack, though I didn’t check how comprehensive those parts are, and if that is anywhere near enough to fork/continue their work.
I wonder if there already exists an open-source project focusing on ML-based code completion for e.g. Python – let me know in the comments if you know one!

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After an extremely long time offline, this blog is alive/online again!

There’s still a ton of maintenance work needed, but at least it’s accessible again .

The blog went offline in early April 2021 – because the trusty physical server at home, built sometime before 2008 from off-the-shelf components, finally malfunctioned badly enough to not be fixable remotely over ssh.
(Or maybe it was still fixable, but at 13+ years old I thought it’s better not to fix anymore.)

It had previously survived (and recovered from) several hardware failures:
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This is unusual enough to blog about it.

There is a special font, called Sans Forgetica, designed to better retain the text that you read… Wow.

I can see how this may become abused – for example, for advertising

Anyway, you can download the font, and even a Chrome extension to show any text chunk in this Unforgettable font from the font’s website: http://sansforgetica.rmit/.

Here’s my blog URL for you to remember, hehe

Your software needs tons of RAM, and runs a bit too slow on your super-duper HPC cluster? Read this: Slow memory allocation due to Transparent Huge Pages (THP)

…is worth a listen: https://castbox.fm/episode/The-World-Cup’s-Mysterious-Path-to-Russia-id463650-id81720904

The 2018 World Cup is now underway in Russia. The story of how it ended up there involves some names you might recognize: James Comey, Robert Mueller and Christopher Steele. Guest: Ken Bensinger, author of “Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World’s Biggest Sports Scandal,” who has written about this story for The New York Times.

My initial reason for merging these two partitions was the need to have two more partitions on the disk – and with 3 primary partitions already in place (system reserved, windows 10 itself, and recovery) on the MBR disk that was only possible by adding an extended partition and then adding both new partitions to it – which is not what I wanted.

An additional reason appeared when I started researching the topic.
Apparently, Windows 10 no longer even creates the recovery partition during installation!
The entire WinRE is now stored on that same system reserved partition, which contains your window’s BCD!
The recovery partitions should only be present on Windows 10 installations which were either upgrades from a previous Windows version, or (as in my case) were installed within about 6 months after Windows 10 became available.

These instructions are also useful if you wish to increase the size of your system reserved partition – for example, if Windows 10 updates are failing because of that partition’s lack of free space.

WARNING: changing partition tables on your hard/solid-state disk may easily result in complete data loss!
Instructions below are provided as-is, to be used at your own risk. See full disclaimer on the About page.

WARNING: although it is also possible to merge the system reserved partition and windows 10 partition (so that the entire Windows 10 uses only 1 primary partition), I do not (and will not) offer instructions to do so. In fact, I recommend that you don’t merge the system reserved and windows 10 partitions.

Merging system reserved and recovery partitions, step by step.
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On paper, these two devices are very similar: both have 4GB RAM, both are upgradable to Android 7, both have octacore CPUs.
It seems as if the only differences are:

• camera: Honor has an extra low-res “depth” camera, while Lenovo doesn’t
• frame/body: Lenovo has a metal unibody design and performed ok in the scratch/burn/bend test, while Honor has a plastic body, easy to scratch screen, and did not perform as good as Lenovo in the test
• Lenovo has a bigger battery

For about the same price (Lenovo P2 being a bit more expensive) one can buy a 4GB/32GB Lenovo P2 or a 4GB/64GB Honor 6X.

After using both phones for a while, I feel that Honor is a much better value overall.
Here’s a brief comparison, based on my use.

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