POSTs are how federation works (ActivityPub is a Push-based protocol). When you “subscribe” to a community on say lemmy.ml, you are telling it to periodically send you updates about that community. This comes in the form of POSTS.

As to the frequency of the POSTs, I can imagine something like lemmy.ml having a lot of activity that it needs to inform your instance of (new votes, new comments, new posts, etc)… but I’m not sure if one request per second is reasonable or not.

I think this is missing an article link: https://www.phoronix.com/review/downfall

Downfall, or as Intel prefers to call it is GDS: Gather Data Sampling. GDS/Downfall affects the gather instruction with AVX2 and AVX-512 enabled processors. At least the latest-generation Intel CPUs are not affected but Tigerlake / Ice Lake back to Sandy Bridge is confirmed to be impacted. There is microcode mitigation available but it will be costly for AVX2/AVX-512 workloads with GATHER instructions in hot code-paths and thus widespread software exposure particularly for HPC and other compute-intensive workloads that have relied on AVX2/AVX-512 for better performance.

Rough day for CPU makers…

Update: Of course there is a dedicated page for it: https://downfall.page/

I’m a fan (and contributor) to Photon. This is my main lemmy client on desktop and on mobile (I usually use the compact view, which I implemented).

Oh yeah, I forgot this existed… I just setup the Firefox Redirector extension to send NPR links to the text only version of the site now. Thanks for reminding me.

Seems to have been down all day. Earlier it loaded with a completely empty Lemmy :|