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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • The feds are actually disturbingly fair about this. You can deduct your legal fees as a business expense.

    wikipedia excerpt

    While embezzlers, thieves, and the like are forced to report their illegally acquired income for tax purposes, they may also take deductions for costs relating to criminal activity. For example, in Commissioner v. Tellier, a taxpayer was found guilty of engaging in business activities that violated the Securities Act of 1933.[8] The taxpayer subsequently deducted the legal fees he spent while defending himself.[8] The U.S. Supreme Court held that the taxpayer was allowed to deduct the legal fees from his gross income because they meet the requirements of §162(a),[9] which allows the taxpayer to deduct all the “ordinary and necessary expenses paid or incurred during the taxable year in carrying on a trade or business.”[10] The Court reasoned (and the Internal Revenue Service did not contest the point) that it was ordinary and necessary for a person engaged in a business to expect to have legal fees associated with that business, even though such things may only happen once in a lifetime.[9] Therefore, the taxpayer in Tellier was allowed to deduct his legal fees from his gross income, even though he incurred the fees because of his crime. The U.S. Supreme Court in Tellier reiterated that the purpose of the tax code was to tax net income, not punish unlawful behavior.[11] The Court suggested that if this was not the case, Congress would change the tax code to include special tax rules for illegal conduct





  • The whole idea behind Manjero’s update scheme is just generally a landmine. LTS releases typically work by maintaining a older branch that gets updates. In this way you delay features not patches. If you run Firefox on such a system it will be Firefox LTS with this week’s patches (this is kinda important for security reasons). Manjaro doesn’t do this instead it just holds everything back artificially one or two weeks.

    Bluntly doing this with a browser or other security critical software should be a crime.

    Manjero just generally feels very amaturish and its history of taking down Arch’s servers is not helping here.



  • From the perspective of a computer engineer SSDs are painfully slow. Waiting for data on disk is slow enough that it is typically done by asking the OS for the data and having the OS schedule another process onto the CPU while it waits. RAM is also slow although not nearly as slow. Ideally you want your data in the L1 cache which is fast enough to minimally stall the CPU. The L2 and L3 caches are slower but larger and more likely to have the data you want. If the caches are empty and you have to read RAM your CPU will either do a lot of speculative execution or more likely stall.

    Speculative execution on CPUs is a desperate attempt to deal with the fact that all memory access is slow by just continuing through the code as if you know what is in memory. If the speculative execution is wrong a lot of work gets thrown out (hopefully nothing unsound happens) and the delay is more noticable.

    Bluntly an SSD only system would probably be an order of magnitude slower. I’m also not sure switching to a new process (or even thread) to load from SSD would be viable without RAM as it would likely invalidate a lot of cache triggering more loads.





  • Getting anti-cheat that technically already works enabled on Linux has been a lot of work and Epic still won’t enable it. Piracy protection systems will also be an issue. Most EA games inspect your CPU to see if they like it on startup (I think this is using vmprotect and some non-OS x86 calls but don’t quote me on that). These kinds on anti virtualization checks are really common (not just in games ProctorU and lock down browser do them too). I don’t think valve running an open virtualization layer will be well received by companies and they will probably ban it from running games. MMOs (due to botting) and anything with anticheat will look particularly askance at this. I also suspect Valve won’t want to try hiding the VM signatures as it borders on violating DMCA.

    Newer games will probably get ported if a large part of the market buys into ARM. Unity stuff might get re-released as it is .net if the publishers can be bothered. Minecraft java edition will also always love you (the launcher might not though).