Blueman, DAITA, Zswap, Sleep, VAES, EU

1. Blueman the Bluetooth manager (bt) for Xubuntu / Ubuntu - Oh yeah, how many times per day simple application like that can crash? - The answer is MANY. Sigh. Huge problems started since 24.04 LTS update even with systems NOT equipped with Bluetooth which is kind of hilarious.

2. You.com optimizations, for specific keywords they'll server some template shortcut data without running the actual query through AI. Which really sucks. At least stock ticker, crypto and weather related queries seem to be shortcut really hard, triggering this pattern which renders the platform unusable, and requires user to engineer creative prompts which avoid these trigger words. Which is just totally silly. - I logged all devices out, some remain still logged in. As well after logout the login form doesn't work, etc. So many quite annoying flaws. When I reload the page after logout I'm again logged in. - This smells and badly.

3. Defense against AI-guided Traffic Analysis (DAITA) (@ mullvad.net) - Mullvad offers this protection feature with their VPN. Really, no new. It's well known fact that encryption doesn't help with network traffic pattern / data flow analysis.

4. Mullvad added shadow socks obfuscation for WireGuard (@ mullvad.net) - Very cool indeed. I've been wondering why services like this aren't being provided in larger scale earlier. - Yet their version probably doesn't yet support HTTP/3 which of course would be very efficient protocol for encapsulating / wrapping any other data inside it. Or even just running websockets over it. - Well, as I've said, anything over anything, it can be made to work, if necessary.

5. Someone said that I could / should use AI to fix grammar on my blog. - No freaking way. Now this is original stuff. If I run this through AI, after that this would be just like any AI generated content. I know the quality varies a lot, but that's life. This is weblog, there are good and there are bad days and things.

6. Zswap - I'm slightly saddened by the reality, that the zswap compresses data only in the memory page pool and when it writes data out to disk, the data is decompressed. Oh why?! Why it doesn't write the compressed data to disk, and only when needed, read it back and decompress it. At least in most of my use cases, the fact is that the stale data written to swap, won't most likely be ever needed, and will get discarded without being ever read back to RAM.

7. Element X - Image / media sharing works badly, no progress indicator. It just hangs until done. - Zooming some images on Android crashes the image view, it returns to chat, but you can't view any other images before restarting the client. And so on, list is long and those things getting triggered all the time are really bad for UX. kw: ElementX

8. Tested the performance difference between freeze and suspend modes. And found out that the practical difference is marginal. Therefore I didn't find any reasonable reason to use freeze instead of suspend when system is on idle. I just wanted to know the practical difference. But as we know, suspend is the way to suspend the system as planned. Freeze is mostly used for other tasks, where the system should be shortly stopped, like relocating VM without restart, debug, safe memory state dump, debug, etc.

9. Vector Advanced Encryption Standard (VAES) (@ Wikipedia) AVX-512/AVX10 / VEX / EVEX and AES-NI (@ Wikipedia) - I've been using so old hardware that I've completely missed this instruction set. Some of the systems do not even have AES-NI. With kernel 6.10 encryption performance should be vastly improved!

10. EU (@ Wikipedia) - should have it's own intelligence agency. kw: EU, INTCEN (@ Wikipedia), EEAS (@ eeas.europa.eu) / EEAS (@ Wikipedia), Single Intelligence Analysis Capacity (SIAC), EUMS (@Wikipedia), European Defence Industry Program (EDIP).

2025-05-25