It was a bad day. A lot of bad stuff happened. And I'd love to forget it all. But I don't. Not ever. Because this is what I do. Every time, every day, every second, this: On five, we're bringing down the government.
Monday, December 23
Daily News Stuff 23 December 2024
Again Dangerous Frisbees Edition
Disclaimer: Mostly dead is still partly alive.
Again Dangerous Frisbees Edition
Top Story
- OpenAI's next generation model, GPT-5, is ahead of schedule and coming in under budget. (WSJ / MSN)
Sorry, just kidding. GPT-5 is not working, may never work as planned, and each training run takes six months and costs half a billion dollars.OpenAI has conducted at least two large training runs, each of which entails months of crunching huge amounts of data, with the goal of making Orion smarter. Each time, new problems arose and the software fell short of the results researchers were hoping for, people close to the project say.
Also there's the tiny problem that with GPT-4, OpenAI already looted the entire public internet. GPT-5 needs a lot more data for its training, and there isn't more data.OpenAI’s solution was to create data from scratch.
But, you say, the internet contains all human knowledge. Won't trying to expand that significantly take a long time? Won't it cost a huge amount of money?It is hiring people to write fresh software code or solve math problems for Orion to learn from. The workers, some of whom are software engineers and mathematicians, also share explanations for their work with Orion.
Yes.The process is painfully slow. GPT-4 was trained on an estimated 13 trillion tokens. A thousand people writing 5,000 words a day would take months to produce a billion tokens.
What about using AI to train your new AI?OpenAI also started developing what is called synthetic data, or data created by AI, to help train Orion. The feedback loop of AI creating data for AI can often cause malfunctions or result in nonsensical answers, research has shown.
Scientists at OpenAI are paid to think that. They are paid a lot to think that.
Scientists at OpenAI think they can avoid those problems by using data generated by another of its AI models, called o1, people familiar with the matter said.
In short, your job is safe for now.
Tech News
- If you wanted to buy an ASML EXE:5000 Lego model, you can't. (Tom's Hardware)
Unless you work for ASML, so time to polish up your resume. Having 10 years experience in 2nm lithography is a good start.
- Asus' first all-new NUC is here after the company bought Intel's mini-PC operation. And as NUCs go, it is certainly one. (Liliputing)
Actually, this was reportedly designed at Intel before the NUC division sold, which hopefully is why it's pretty meh. It's fine as a business-priced business PC, but it doesn't have a great deal to offer consumers.
- A new diamond battery can consistently produce energy for thousands of years, based on carbon-14 as an internal power source. (Live Science)
The only problem is that it produces about 200 microwatts. So about 200 of these could run a Raspberry Pi Pico. 300 if you use WiFi.
- 2024 has been kind to AI startups, but less so to EV efforts. (Tech Crunch)
Apple spent billions of dollars in secret on its Apple Car only to confirm the project existed the same day it was shut down. Ford and GM both radically scalef back their work on electric vehicles.
And Arrival, Cake, Canoo, Cruise, Fisker, Ghost, Lilium, and Phantom are all either dead or close to it.
Disclaimer: Mostly dead is still partly alive.
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Sunday, December 22
Daily News Stuff 22 December 2024
Game Of Rat And Dragon Edition
Game Of Rat And Dragon Edition
Top Story
- Why AI is stupid garbage and everyone in the industry is lying frantically to cover up the truth. (Ars Technica)
Okay, I may have paraphrased Tim Lee at Ars just a little there, but if you look at the promises AI leaders have made against the mathematical problems they face, that is the gist of the situation.
AI - LLM-based generative AI, not the more interesting discriminative AI - uses a technology called transformers which lets it process data in a massively parallel way. This requires about the same amount of work as a traditional neural network on simple prompts, while being able to use highly parallel hardware like graphics cards, so you get the result much faster.
For simple prompts:The longer the context gets, the more attention operations (and therefore computing power) are needed to generate the next token.
So as you make your question more detailed and specific, the amount of time taken to produce an answer increases rapidly.This means that the total computing power required for attention grows quadratically with the total number of tokens. Suppose a 10-token prompt requires 414,720 attention operations. Then:
- Processing a 100-token prompt will require 45.6 million attention operations.
- Processing a 1,000-token prompt will require 4.6 billion attention operations.
- Processing a 10,000-token prompt will require 460 billion attention operations.
Work is now on to replace transformer models with classic neural networks, which don't have these limitations, but also don't have the magical ease of development of the transformer model.
But that means that promises of AGI next year are simply lies.
Tech News
- Embodied, the startup that produced an $800 robot for children and has now run out of money, is working to release code and documentation to allow hackers to keep the robots working after the company shuts down. (Ars Technica)
Good to hear.
- The jury in the Arm vs. Qualcomm suit has sided with Qualcomm on two of the three questions put to them. (Yahoo)
Qualcomm, which has a license to produce Arm chips, bought startup Nuvia, which had a license to produce Arm chips.
Qualcomm then produced chips based on Nuvia's design.
Arm sued Qualcomm saying Qualcomm was not licensed to do that.
The jury verdict said Qualcomm did not breach its Arm license in buying Nuvia or producing the chips - which are used in the new Arm based laptops which are not selling particularly well so far.
They did not reach a verdict on the question of whether Nuvia was in compliance with its Arm license. I'm not sure how relevant that is, though Arm plans to continue legal action.
- You're not fired. You're just locked out of the building and put on mandatory leave without pay. (Tech Crunch)
Electric van maker Canoo is not looking too healthy.
- What is Broadcom doing with VMWare? Slashing costs. A lot. (Ars Technica)
Not making many friends in the process, but they can worry about that after taking a dip in their swimming pool full of money. Based on the latest figures sales have increased only slightly, but costs have been cut in half.
In addition, Broadcom has effectively killed the VMWare reseller market, so that if you want to migrate your company off VMWare, you need to get technical support from Broadcom.
Happy Birthday Everyone Video of the Day
Disclaimer: You need to read the comments for once.
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Saturday, December 21
Daily News Stuff 21 December 2021
Heat Displacement Edition
Heat Displacement Edition
Top Story
- Here's a list of the 49 American AI startups that have raised $100 million or more in 2024. (Tech Crunch)
Top among them is OpenAI, which raised $6.6 billion this year, but close behind is Elon Musk's xAI, which raised $6 billion.
Interestingly Europe didn't miss the boat with Mistral leading the table there with $1.2 billion raised.
What all that money will achieve I don't know.
Tech News
- For consumer hardware, it's not achieving much. (Tom's Hardware)
AI PCs just aren't selling. That is, people are buying PCs, and some of them are labeled "AI", but nobody is buying a PC because it is labeled "AI".
Notable Qualcomm's sales of its new Arm-based Windows laptops can be best described as meh.
- Meanwhile here's an M.2 card that contains a 24 TOPS AI accelerator. (Tom's Hardware)
More precisely, four 6 TOPS accelerators.
Why? I don't know. But it costs $149, which is reasonable if you need one.
- How types make hard problems easy. (Mayhul)
Yes, thank you. We figured this out sixty years ago. Then JavaScript happened.
Disclaimer: There may be pizza.
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Friday, December 20
Daily News Stuff 20 December 2024
Gleep Gloop Edition
Gleep Gloop Edition
Top Story
- Oh yeah, don't use SMS for two-factor authentication either. (Gizmodo)
It was never ideal since your phone number could get SIM-swapped without you knowing, but now that the entire phone network has been hacked it's not very useful at all.
- Microsoft promises meanwhile to keep nagging you to use passkeys rather than passwords online. (The Register)
A passkey lets you log in to a website without the tedious logging in part, so long as you have already logged in to your device. This is actually fairly secure because the passkey consists of two parts - you have one part and the website has the other - and nobody can steal your password from the website and hack your account because effectively they only have half the password.
But if they hack your laptop, you're hosed. Though that is true regardless.
Tech News
- Chemosphere, which recently published a study warning of the dangers of flame retardant chemicals in black plastic utensils which was off by a factor of ten such that you are perfectly safe unless you make a habit of eating spatulas has been deindexed by the Web of Science for being a bit crap. (Ars Technica)
According to Retraction Watch, Chemosphere has retracted eight articles this month and published 60 expressions of concern since April.
The month is still young.
- Nintendo's Switch 2 can "only" run games at 4K / 30fps. (Notebook Check)
It's a handheld device for children. What do you expect?
- Amazon Haul is a Temu version of Shein. (The Verge) (archive site)
The same Chinese companies selling useless garbage at impossible prices and basically lying to everyone.
Though to be fair, the "Bicth" hat did indeed say "Bicth".
- Perplexity AI is a better search than Google. (The Register)
I just tried it with a few queries and it's actually not terrible. It does give stupid corporate-speak answers sometimes, but it also gives links.
How long AI search engines can survive in an AI web is another question.
Disclaimer: Bonk / oif.
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Thursday, December 19
Daily News Stuff 19 December 2024
Second Last Thursdayism Edition
Second Last Thursdayism Edition
Top Story
- The US government has warned politicians and government officials to avoid the phone network. (Reuters)
It's full of Chinese hackers and nobody can say when - or if - it will be secure again.The first recommendation: "Use only end-to-end encrypted communications."
Which they have been trying to ban.
- Meanwhile in the world of digital license plates, the absolutely thinkable happened: They got hacked. (Wired) (archive site)
Digital license plates aren't supposed to let you change your license plate number.
But of course they do. There's a programming port on the license plate which is secured by a sticker. Peel off the sticker, plug in a programmer, and you can do anything.
Tech News
- Interpol wants to rename "pig butchering" to "romance baiting". (Bleeping Computer)
Which is actually not a terrible idea. Every time I hear the term "pig butchering" I have to stop for a moment and realise that no, the one I'm thinking of is salami slicing and pig butchering is something different.
Romance baiting is more evocative on what the scam involves.
- Bluesky invited a million sociopaths in through the front door. They were not ready. (Tedium)
It's not a technical issue, it's a people issue. Well, commies aren't people, but not everyone on Bluesky is a communist.
- Not even slightly ready. (The Free Press)
Jesse Singal writes on Bluesky's Jesse Singal problem.
He still doesn't get it, of course:Bluesky happens to be left-wing, but I don’t think the lesson here is that left-wingers are particularly violent. Rather, the lesson is simply that humans are human, and online, their behavior is shaped by both the prevailing norms in their community, and whether rules constraining that behavior exist and are enforced.
So what he is saying is that left-wingers are particularly violent.
- The Radxa Orion O6 is an Arm motherboard that is a little more powerful than a Raspberry Pi. (CNX Software)
It has twelve Arm cores - eight A720 and four A520, so fairly powerful, coupled with up to 64GB of soldered RAM, an M.2 slot for storage, dual 5Gb Ethernet ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, USB-C with DisplayPort support, and a full-length PCIe x16 slot.
It's mini-ITX form factor, with the board starting at $199 with 8GB of RAM and a case going for $39.
- Australia wants to ban common encryption methods by 2030 because quantum. (The Register)
In theory quantum computers can break many existing encryption methods. But existing encryption methods exist, and everyone everywhere uses them all the time.
Disclaimer: Stupid!
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Wednesday, December 18
Daily News Stuff 18 December 2024
Orders Of Magnitude Edition
Orders Of Magnitude Edition
Top Story
- What happened to ChatGPT the other day? It wasn't DNS, but it wasn't not DNS either. (Try Parity)
OpenAI deployed a new system that had been running happily on their test servers for some time. About twenty minutes in, things started going horribly wrong, with the monitoring system that reports on all things production taking over and then taking out the production servers, because it had a hidden scaling problem that never showed up on the smaller test environment.
And with the monitoring process eating up all the bandwidth on the control network, the simple changes they needed to make to fix the problem couldn't be done because OpenAI's internal DNS was down.
Lesson of the day: Hard code all your IP addresses in your software.*
Tech News
- Nvidia has made its Jetson Orin Nano robotics development kit half the price and also up to twice as fast. (Serve the Home)
If you already have one, you can download the speed upgrade. Which is odd, because it doubles your memory bandwidth, which is a hardware function.
- AMD's Strix Halo laptop chip, with 16 Zen 5 CPU cores and 40 RDNA3.5 graphics cores, is coming soon to the Asus ROG Flow Z13... Tablet. (Hot Hardware)
Which is not as surprising as it seems because the current model of the Z13 can include dedicated a Nvidia RTX 4060, so a Strix Halo tuned to the lower power end of its spectrum would not use any more power than the current CPU and GPU combination.
- The Minisforum MGA1 is an external graphics card / dock thingy that dramatically speeds up laptops and mini-PCs except. (Notebook Check)
It's about as fast as a laptop version of the RTX 3080, but can only be connected via OCuLink. If your laptop or mini-PC doesn't have OCuLink - and most don't - it's a paperweight.
OCuLink is pure external PCI Express, so it's simpler, cheaper, and faster than Thunderbolt, but also a lot less common.
Disclaimer: * Do not actually do this.
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Tuesday, December 17
Daily News Stuff 17 December 2024
Incompetence Abounds Edition
Incompetence Abounds Edition
Top Story
- Zotac has leaked Nvidia's new RTX 5000 series graphics cards. (VideoCardz)
The lineup includes the RTX 5090, which you can't afford and probably won't be able to buy anyway, the 5090D which is a China-only edition for communists, the 5080 which will probably be overpriced and you won't want, the 5070 Ti which will probably be decent but expensive, and the 5070 which has 12GB of VRAM like the Intel B580 but which will definitely not cost $250 like the Intel B580.
The new cards all reportedly use GDDR7, so memory bandwidth is likely to be significantly better than 4000 series cards. GDDR7 memory uses trinary rather than binary signals - a technique known as PAM-3 - so it can move data 50% faster at the same clock speed.
Thunderbolt 5 also uses PAM-3 encoding but right now it's kind of useless so we should hope that's not a sign of things to come.
Tech News
- TSMC employees account for 1.8% of the children being born in Taiwan. (Boom)
That is not immediately noteworthy until you consider that TSMC employees account for 0.3% of all jobs in Taiwan.
So even if only one member of each couple is employed by the company, that's still three times the national average fertility rate.
- Hygon's 16 core server CPU is kind of bad. (Tom's Hardware)
It is literally a (licensed copy of) the original Zen architecture from 2017. And it behaves like it.
- Here's the full source code for the Commodore 64 version of Elite. (GitHub)
Did that version include the rescue mission where the ungrateful bastards kicked your cargo out of the hold to make room for themselves?
The GitHub repository is very comprehensive, with every line of code documented and extensive instructions on how to build and run the programs on modern systems. Also included are versions for the Apple II, BBC Micro, and the NES, and even Elite-A, a fan-made extended version.
- SoftBank has pledged to invest $100 billion in the United States over the next four years. (The Register)
That used to be a lot.
- The Framework 16 laptop now supports up to four M.2 SSDs. (Notebook Check)
The graphics card for this laptop lives in a plug-in module at the rear. If you don't need a dedicated graphics card it works fine without one, using the built-in AMD graphics on the CPU.
Now you can plug a different module in that holds two extra M.2 slots, and the good part is the module only costs $39.
Disclaimer: Frankly my dear, I don't give a hill of beans.
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Monday, December 16
Daily News Stuff 16 December 2024
Corinthian Edition
Corinthian Edition
Top Story
- A major laptop manufacturer is expected to show off an ion drive at CES. (Tom's Hardware)
The Frore Airjet uses a piezoelectric element to silently produce an airstream to cool whatever it is attached to. The problem is that it is not particularly power efficient - only about one fifth as effective as laptop fans, which are not themselves paragons of efficiency.
The Ventiva ICE is an ionic engine. Also silent, it ionises the air molecules to attract them to a metal grate, where they are deionised but keep right on moving, creating an airflow which cools your laptop.
This isn't the first time that someone has come up with this idea, though, so we're going to have to see whether they can make it work. Previous efforts have been very sensitive to dust buildup, which is enough of a problem with fans but renders ion blasters useless.
Tech News
- How to protect yourself in the face of the Salt Typhoon phone network hack. (The Intercept)
Don't say anything on a private phone call that you wouldn't shout in a crowded theatre.
Same goes double for text.
And remember, the FBI has your best interests in mind and is entirely trustworthy in every respect.
- If you want the new Intel B580 video card, try again next year. (WCCFTech)
It's sold out everywhere.
- Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says the federal government is taking decisive steps to combat the drones seen in the skies over New Jersey. (ABC News)
We have top men addressing the problem.
Top. Men.
- The new class of weight loss drugs - GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic - may also work to treat diabetes, sleep apnea, heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, substance abuse, and run-on sentences. (Ars Technica)
They may not. Anything linked directly to obesity is a likely win, and the drugs do seem to work against addictions. The others are more speculative but are undergoing clinical trials right now.
Disclaimer: Don't read the comments.
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Sunday, December 15
Daily News Stuff 15 December 2024
Poptop Edition
Poptop Edition
Top Story
- TSMC has announced performance specs for its upcoming 2nm node. (Tom's Hardware)
Compared with the current leading-edge 3nm process, it uses 24% less power for low-power mobile chips, and 35% less power for desktop chips. Or if you keep power the same, it runs about 15% faster.
Compared to 5nm, it uses around 48% to 55% less power, and compared to 7nm (which I'm running right now), the reduction is as much as 70%.
Chips will be coming off the production line in 2026.
Tech News
- If your company licenses the enterprise version of Windows, Copilot doesn't work and will never work. (Thurrott)
So you can go ahead and reassign the Copilot key on your keyboard now.
- A Transatlantic Tunnel, hurrah! (Newsweek)
Harry Harrison aside, this article is garbage. Newsweek was overpriced.
- Hackers are very clever idiots. (Ars Technica)
They went to extraordinary lengths to steal the credentials of 390,000 security professionals, and then installed a crypto miner guaranteeing they'd be spotted instantly.
- Canadia healthcare technology company Care1 leaked 4.8 million patient records totaling 2.2TB. (HackRead)
Nice work, guys.
Disclaimer: That was sarcasm.
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Saturday, December 14
Daily News Stuff 14 December 2024
Lying Suits Edition
Disclaimer: In time, all systems become rococo, and then rubble.
Lying Suits Edition
Top Story
- You can't sue your way to AGI, says OpenAI in response to Elon Musk's lawsuit over the non-profit organisation being taken over by snake-oil salesmen. (The Verge)
Believe us, we've tried.
AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence, a term invented by the snake oil salesmen when everyone figured out there was no snake in the snake oil.
OpenAI now says AGI will arrive as soon as next year, as a result of a convenient redefinition of AGI to mean "whatever we manage to ship next year".
- An OpenAI whistleblower has been found dead in his San Francisco apartment. (Tech Crunch)
Suchir Balaji called attention to what he believed was OpenAI's intentional breaches of copyright law in training ChatGPT.
Tech News
- If Tesla won't launch an AI-piloted taxi service, we will, says Zoox. (Tech Crunch)
What is a Zoox?
- A Waymo robotaxi got stuck in a roundabout. (Tech Crunch)
Yes, it was doing exactly what you think it was doing.
- Bluesky has found out what happens if you take millions of the most demented users from a much larger platform and make them your own problem: They become your own problem. (Tech Crunch)
Jesse Singal, who is generally an intelligent and affable idiot, has written extensively on the insanity of the chemical sterilisation and surgical mutilation of children. To be completely clear, despite his otherwise mainstream left-wing views, he is vehemently against this, and his writing and research in this area is solid.
He created a Bluesky account because, being left-wing, he is unhappy with Twitter.
Bluesky went insane. The one thing you are absolutely forbidden to do is to question the orthodoxy.He is now the most blocked user on the social network, and user outrage over his participation on the platform is growing. People are demanding that Bluesky take a stand: It’s either a place that promises it won’t host bad actors, or it’s a place that promises not to inflate the reach of bad actors thanks to its various moderation tools.
Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience simply don't exist for these people. Anyone daring to offer a different opinion must be revoked.
It cannot be both.
And if you read Bluesky, they mean that in the Brontitall sense.But many Bluesky users don’t want to just moderate and ignore Singal, they want him gone. It’s become a dealbreaker.
To be clear again, Singal is not a bad actor, and has not harassed anyone. This is just crazy people being crazy.
By keeping him, Bluesky risks harming the community, depleting its goodwill, and losing users, while also sending a signal to others that bad actors and harassers are welcome there.But by banning Singal, Bluesky could come under attack from the next head of the FCC, Brendan Carr, who is ready to come after social networks he believes are suppressing conservative views. Whatever Bluesky does here will attract attention, for better or for worse.
Start banning the crazy people. They are the problem. Nobody wants them.
If they represent the majority of your active users, your platform will die.
- The Minisforum MS-A1 is a big small PC. (Liliputing)
Measure about 8"x8"x2" it's a lot bigger than a small PC but a lot smaller than a big PC. And it supports desktop CPUs and laptop RAM, so it's easy to expand.
It's now available with a sixteen core 9950X if you need a very fast and quite small system. The only problem is that it doesn't have room for a graphics card, and the onboard graphics on the 9950X are... Meh.
A better option for most people is probably to install the Ryzen 8700G. It's only half as fast on the CPU side of things which makes sense as it only has eight cores, but it has twelve graphics cores against just two on all the 9000-series CPUs.
The 8700G is a laptop CPU adapted for desktop sockets. It doesn't look like we'll see a 9700G or anything similar, because the current Ryzen 370 laptop CPUs don't appear to have any support for socketed memory. (Though it's possible to work around this with CAMM2 modules.)
- AMD's 4124P is designed for low-end embedded servers, but it uses the standard desktop AM5 socket. So how does a four-core CPU stand up in gaming in 2024? (Tom's Hardware)
Actually, pretty well. You're not going to want to pair it with a 4090 (if you can even find one), but for $149 it does everything you would expect.
- Luon is an implementation of Oberon+ - a successor to Pascal developed by Niklaus Wirth - that targets the LuaJIT backend. (GitHub)
Which is a lot less crazy than it might sound, because Oberon+ is a clean and effective programming language, and LuaJIT runs anywhere and is extremely fast and efficient because Mike Pall is a robot from the future.
- Apple broke the ability to back up the operating system on MacOS. (ShirtPocket)
You can't write a program to do this; you have to use the operating system itself.
The operating system itself is broken.
Apple is turning Macs, step by step, into iPhones that don't work.
- Cognitive load is what matters. (GitHub)
A system that does everything perfectly that nobody understands is infinitely fragile.
A system that is simple but broken can be fixed.
Disclaimer: In time, all systems become rococo, and then rubble.
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