Looking at the "GitHub" prefix in the title, I was half-expecting this to point to a report explaining the outage a week ago... But rest assured, it is a new outage!

Oh I thought it was about the one from yesterday :)

Are their CI/CD toys that shiny that people still willingly choose them even with all the issues?

I find myself regularly asking this — about every major SaaS used for critical ops stuff like this.

Work choose GitHub (we are a MicroSoft shop), I have to say, I like GitHub a lot. The disruptions have been annoying sometimes, that's true. But due to the nature of Git I could always just keep working.

I thought it was going to be a Postmortem. I couldn't have been more wrong!

One good thing to always keep in mind is that China structurally maintains the status quo of a Leninist state --- IMO, the entire reason they banned crypto is that crypto's goal --- relative anonymity, privacy, and freedom of where to move one's money --- goes directly _against_ China's closed, tightly regulated financial system. The bureaucrats at their Ministry of Finance must be absolutely appalled by the idea that one could transfer money via bitcoin easily outside China without any sort of authorization.

I suspect what is triggering this crackdown is that the enforcement of capital controls is becoming more critical as more people are nervous of a financial crisis in China because of bad debt / bad banks. Need to make sure those depositors have no place to go.

Though to be honest I don't understand how bitcoin can be used for getting money out of the country. Who would be willing to accept onshore CNY in payment for bitcoin in volumes if everyone is trying to move out?

Someone who needs CNY, that can then buy real goods and export them.

OK, so that may have worked before the ban, but unless you have a way to export under the counter, I presume this route is gone after the btc transaction ban.

Well, you'd have to do an off the books / private transaction of BTC-for-CNY, but there's presumably an infinite number of ways for someone to loan / give CNY for (to the government) nothing (and in reality, BTC, etc).

And with the CNY, you can buy real goods. And with those real goods, you can export them. And with those exports, you can sell them for foreign currency.

So as long as they're running an export-oriented economy, it's going to be very hard to fundamentally stamp out crypto as an option. This mostly strikes retail traders / buyers.

But my point is any time you export some physical good, you have a transaction going under the nose of the authorities. That's where they can stop you and ask some questions on the transaction that paid for those goods.

You paid for the transaction in CNY which is perfectly legal & normal (I would assume). The volume of exports from China is crazy and investigating every single transaction is not practical.

Yeah so part of it is in CNY and part of it is in btc. Can gov really say "wow you payed too little for that!"

Not even that. Although that's definitely another option!

I was thinking of two separate transactions with two separate parties: (BTC -> CNY, hidden as gift or loan) then (CNY -> goods, perfectly legal and normal).

The don't live in china after they cash out, they have the money to immigrate to a better country.

Probably around 80% of wealth is stored as real estate of which 60% is probably is stored as the relative proximity of people. So capital control is as simple as forbidding land from walking away and foreign countries not accepting migration of a billion people. basically a solved problem.

I have always imagined China to have more sophisticated tools for monitoring financial flows than Soviet Russia. Crypto (at least Bitcoin) isn't all that anonymous, nor outside CCP control so long as there are exchanges and miners located inside China. For instance, there were (probably unfounded) fears that the CCP could control Bitcoin by proxy if more than 50% of the hash rate was owned by Chinese miners.

I suspect the recent crackdown is more related to a fear of uncontrolled capital flight due to regulatory changes and anticipated slowdown of the economy.

I doubt it. It's not that hard to figure it out if every other capital flow is being tracked.

I'm guessing it has to do with preventing people from moving wealth out of the country.

I'd imagine it'd be hard for MSVC and gcc to fade away --- gcc has some notable architectural differences from llvm (such as having multiple, layered IRs) and on some optimizations gcc is stronger. While for MSVC they target Microsoft's own ABI. Unlike other technologies that already feature a monocultural landscape I guess it's fair to say there's no one, single, best way to design a compiler that accounts for the wide-ranging differences of backend architectures and frontend languages (in addition, when you compare the costs of developing a brand new compiler with say, developing a new CPU architecture, you'll find the price associated with the former is much more affordable, and might be reasonable under different circumstances).

There's also a Chinese-made equivalent of Shodan: https://www.zoomeye.org/

> It killed a lot of other interesting architectures and gave nothing in return.

What sort of architectures (if any) got killed as a direct result of developing IA-64?

That aside, though odd and impractical, I found Itanium to be at least a technically interesting perspective (both in terms of architecture, ie VLIW, and in terms of the amount of technical work it inspired at HP and Intel, such as the Itanium C++ abi [1])

[1] https://itanium-cxx-abi.github.io/cxx-abi/abi-eh.html

>What sort of architectures (if any) got killed as a direct result of developing IA-64?

Alpha?

And HP-PA and, later, MIPS (as a mainstream computer). MIPS survives in some routers.

MIPS is very, very close to dead now.

To be fair though, I think its death is more attributable to ARM than Itanium. And RISC-V is killing off anything that remained.

MIPS the brand was bought for cheap from a bankruptcy, and resurrected by its new owner… to be an ARM partner building ARM chips.

Arguably it was the nail in the coffin for alpha

Itanium may have been the nail in the coffin, but by the time the hammer fell on that nail, Alpha was already basically dead due to bad business structure and incentives that were inherited from DEC. They had many of the same problems that Intel has been having recently (low yields, failure to keep up with performance increases) without Intel's long-standing business agreements or inertia to hold up the product line through a difficult period.

Alpha, HP-PA.

This is a fair point. To say that personality can be purely characterized in full using a few adjectives is grossly over-generalizing. It seems like a better model of "the four quadrants" would be to add a dimension, the dimension of personality when it comes to dealing with different things in life. For instance, while one can be passively conformist in a particular area, say, following the rules of society, one can be aggressively independent in one's own discipline or expertise.

For instance, you could expect a brilliant academic to be socially conformist, while academically aggressive and independent. Some sort of criminal or outlaw would be aggressively independent when it comes to following the laws of society, and maybe conformist when it comes to following the criminal discipline (this is when you have mobs and gangs --- outlaws find each other and form groups, too).

And it is a combination of these different styles that make up the overall personality profile.

What a blatantly false statement. There is no sound scientific definition of "half" the antibodies.

Next big idea: Straight2Spam detection.

That's the monetization plan.

Someone who also did not get the joke is going to read your comment, and suggest that libcurl being closed source somehow fixes the problem.