I restarted a 10 year old Xeon 174 times to delete 12 flags and gain 4 tps

Post is at least semi AI-generated and contains conflicting or misleading bits. It could (and should) have been expressed differently. It conflates changing one flag with permuting a flag at a time in different places, leaving me unable to understand what was actually tried. It has warnings on interpreting the results that make no sense. If flags were permuted, it isn’t possible to list their impact one-dimensionally, then also mixes up addition/removal of flags with permuting its individual value.

I regret giving this article a chance and wasting my time trying to figure out why the “author” was saying what they were saying. Flagged.

If you're still running a MacPro4,1->MacPro"5,1" conversion, be really careful attempting this: one of the few differences is that its bootrom only has a single VS_Cache (i.e. the real MacPro5,1 , manufactured 2010+, has two VS_Cache).

This can lead to a VS_Store corruption == noBOOT sadMAC

It turns out that the essentially no difference thing wasn't true... but fortunately these things are such antiquated beasts that just two people can fix this, via email, by custom "rebuilding your VS_Store firmware" – you'd have to search the forums.

One sad day soon... the "5,1"s won't boot (without pre-emptive maintenance, or an onboard reflow of the many-pinned bootROM chip). Every bootup... one step closer to its eWaste fate.

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Yes, it uses a lot of power, but my VEGA64 is about as fast as an RTX 5060Ti(8gb) for using Ollama, locally (eight year old design, but it used HBM2 !!).

In wintertimes, this thing has reliably acted as a monero-mining space-heater, albeit quite inefficiently (no: I do NOT have a reversible heatpump; spaceheaters, only == no net-cost).

Seems like this process itself should be incredibly amenable to automation. Here's 25 parameters, permute over them, perform this test on each loop.

But it sounds like there were other gremlins (like ulimit reverting itself) that would've thwarted automated testing.

Do you feel like there's a point where it would've made sense to automate?

Interesting results, but the piece is written in an almost repulsive claudglish (or geepeeteeglish). Can’t force myself to read more than a couple sentences.

I never want to read the phrase "heavy lifting" again.

“worth sitting with ” is in the way to overused scale :(

Can HN please ban AI generated slop ?

Please...

but why would you restart the whole machine?

(otherwise, congrats for discovering the scientific method!)