tal

They don't say the scenario where that's happening, though. Unless your editor supports large file editing, a mode where it doesn't load the whole file into memory, unless it has filesize restrictions that make it just fail, if you throw a large enough file at it, it's invariably going to use a bunch of memory.

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=out.bin bs=1M count=500
500+0 records in
500+0 records out
524288000 bytes (524 MB, 500 MiB) copied, 0.100949 s, 5.2 GB/s
$ vim out.bin

On my system, after it (slowly) finishes opening that file, vim's using 511MB RSS. I know that vim has some sort of large file editing support, though not how to use it.

On emacs, large file editing support is from the vlf package.

$ emacs
M-x vlf RET
out.bin RET

Emacs is using 75.3 MB RSS after opening that.

pokes around on Google Maps

It looks like there's a fuel station ("Нефтемаркет") in Bogomyagkovo, Zabaykalsky Krai, Russia, 200 km down the road from Chita. I don't know if it has fuel available presently, but there's a review from two years ago, and it sounds like it was operational at that time:

Gas stations from the Soviet era, prices out of this world. They take advantage of the fact that this stretch of highway is practically deserted.

Chita is in Zabaikalsky Krai, so it's probably the same issue that was being complained about in Russia's Duma in this other United24 article:

https://lemmy.today/post/55908488

One of them, Vyacheslav Markhayev, said people were queuing 36 hours to get just 15 litres of gasoline in the far eastern Zabaikalsky region.

Anyway:

A driver heading home to Saint Petersburg spent 39 hours in line to buy fuel in the Siberian city of Chita, Meduza reported on July 3.

Vlad and his wife were driving home from Vladivostok, where they had collected a newly bought car, when they stopped in Chita to refuel. He recounted joining the line at a Rosneft station on the city's edge on June 28 at 11 p.m. The tank was not filled until June 30, in the early afternoon.

City stations were dispensing just 15 liters (4 gallons) per car, he explained, blaming suppliers who delivered only 500 liters (132 gallons) per outlet. The Rosneft station he chose capped each fill at 50 liters (13 gallons).

Chita has become a bottleneck for drivers crossing the country. Vlad noted that the last station to the east lies in Skovorodino, an 11-hour drive away, with no fuel in between, funneling westbound traffic from Vladivostok into the same lines.

So, if that that's kind of an important point for east-west road logistics for Russia, that seems like it's got potential to cause other cascading logistical issues from decoupling eastern and western Russia.

Russia does have the Trans-Siberian Railway, which is apparently handled by diesel trains, and there are diesel road vehicles. Diesel doesn't (at the moment, at any rate) suffer from the level of shortages that gasoline does.

EDIT: I also gotta say that if the guy is right about there being no fuel available between Skovorodino and Chita, at some point, I'd think that you just aren't going to make it from Chita to Skovorodino short of maybe going through the queue multiple times.

checks Google Maps

That's 924 km away. That's 574 miles, so if you get 13 gallons from this fuel station with the higher cap, and that's all you have in the tank, you'd need a vehicle capable of 44 mpg to make it to the next refueling point. I mean...a Prius or something like that can do that, but a lot of even newer vehicles here in the US can't.

That said, he was coming from Skovorodino. Maybe they're imposing separate fuel limits based on the direction you're going or something like that.

Two lawmakers from the Communist Party, which is nominally in opposition to the ruling United Russia faction but is ​usually fully supportive of the Kremlin, voiced scathing attacks on the government's handling of the issue ahead of a parliamentary election ⁠due in September.

One of them, Vyacheslav Markhayev, said people were queuing 36 hours to get just 15 litres of gasoline in the far eastern Zabaikalsky region.

So, that's just under 4 gallons.

Cars don't use that much fuel while idling, but at that point, even idling is using a substantial amount of the fuel.

https://carxplorer.com/how-much-gas-does-a-car-use-when-idling/

A modern car uses between 0.1 to 0.6 gallons of fuel per hour when idling, with the exact amount depending heavily on engine size and whether the air conditioner is running.

Even at the bottom end of the scale there, and assuming modern cars, a 36-hour queue would consume nearly all of the fuel you'd get waiting in line.

For a modern vehicle, it is almost always better to turn the engine off if you expect to be stopped for more than 30 seconds. The amount of fuel used to restart an engine is minimal and equivalent to only a few seconds of idling. This simple habit can lead to significant fuel savings.

I guess if they try to allow large gaps and don't worry about other cars cutting in the line, so that the restarts are infrequent, they can reduce that by keeping engines off as much as possible.

The fuel overhead from the queuing itself is gonna be meaningful, even aside from the human time overhead.

Early PCs didn't play beep-boop sounds when you typed or when displaying a letter on the screen either, so join the crowd. I mean, people would have shoved a screwdriver through the speaker diaphragm if they had to listen to that all day.

If you go all the way back to teletypes, okay, there was an impact sound, and computer keyboards were significantly noisier up until membrane and rubber domes became popular, but that's about as far as reality takes one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0B76rvI_Jk

A lot of explosions in movies are, as I understand it, gasoline explosions (which produce a deflagration). Those are impressive and very visible and orangy and don't actually create all that much pressure, so damage from the pressure wave or shrapnel isn't so much a thing. You can do the stoic walk out of an explosion thing.

I think that the video of the Beirut explosion, which is large and filmed from a distance, so you can see the shockwave traveling over time, drives home how there is a lot of force going on in the air.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNDhIGR-83w

Years back, I remembered watching the Wargames scene where the computer was trying to "guess a passcode". Which it was doing remotely. Determining one digit at a time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGNBdjVO04Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7qOV8xonfY

I said, "This is completely ridiculous. That's not how any kind of real world authentication system works." Dramatic, yes. Realistic? No, never happen.

Some years later, there was a severe remote exploit for the filesharing feature for Windows 95 and 98 systems. Not only had the Microsoft person who designed the thing stored the password to a share in plaintext instead of hashing it, which would have precluded this from working, but there was also a bug where the server's authentication system could be sent a malformed message and only validated as many bytes of the password as had been specified in the authentication message. Someone promptly went out and wrote an exploit to brute-force access to a share by just asking it to only validate the first byte, try each, get in in at most 256 tries. I look at that and say "yeah, but it also exposes the next byte of the password itself, and those probably persist even after the thing is patched, not to mention the potential for credentials reuse for other things". I go modify Samba's smbclient to iterate through the thing, extract the password one byte at a time. I message a buddy who has a Windows 98 machine on the network, "hey, can I break into your machine for a sec?" He comes up "Uh, okay. What are you up to, tal?"

I fire it up and we're sitting there watching his password be printed on my Linux box's screen, one letter at a time. I said, "This is exactly like that scene in Wargames that I said could never, ever happen in real life, was just Hollywood. Guess that showed me." He says, "fucking Microsoft".

There's a common theme in movies

since you can only hear one side of a phone conversation

of a character repeating a lot of what the other person said for the audience's benefit. I've seen some example conversations written out showing both sides that show how ludicrous such a conversation would have to be.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RepeatingSoTheAudienceCanHear

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEB-OoUrNuk

Gotcha, thanks!

EDIT: Hasn't emerged today tht I've seen. Dunno if it was another DDoS or load from scrapers or something else, but it hasn't appeared to show up today, at least that I can see.

So assuming that that's what's going on...these fleet cards would be used by fleet operators? Like...the Russian equivalent of, I guess, FedEx or trucking companies or taxi companies would basically be getting priority for available fuel?

EDIT: In support of your theory:

https://united24media.com/world/gasoline-disappears-from-all-filling-stations-in-russias-novorossiysk-amid-fuel-shortages-20417

In response to the crisis, the city administration launched an online map allowing residents to monitor fuel availability at local filling stations in real time. As of July 3, every station listed on the map had run out of gasoline, with only diesel fuel remaining in stock.

Despite the shortages for the general public, motorists with corporate fuel cards issued by employers are still able to refuel.

I was still seeing it yesterday

as well as a brief period of it returning some 500 HTTP error code

but not, so far, today. I'll follow up if it does show up.