• The EU has fined Facebook 800 million euros for making the Facebook Marketplace part of Facebook.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Even Ars Technica knows this shit is coming to an end:

  In the past five years, EU regulators have also passed a landmark piece of legislation—the Digital Markets Act—with the aim to slow down dominant tech players and boost the local tech industry.

  There is no local tech industry.

  However, some observers expect the new commission, which is set to start a new 5-year term in weeks, to strike a more conciliatory tone over fears of retaliation from the incoming Trump administration.

  There are going to be so many tariffs.  Beautiful tarriffs.  You've never seen tariffs like them.

• Google has a new AI tool that alerts you when a caller is trying to scam you out of your money.  (Google)
  
  I thought they already announced that.
  
  
  
• UK phone company O2 has an AI tool that answers scam phone calls for you and pretends to have Alzheimer's until the scammers quit in despair.  (O2)
  
  That's more like it.
  
  
  
• Intel's integrated graphics in its Lunar Lake laptop chips are...  Pretty good actually.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This review puts Intel narrowly ahead of AMD here.   AMD begs to differ but I'll take the independent benchmarks over corporate ones
  
  Both processors averaged around 30W in the test, which is quite reasonable.
  
  On the CPU side of things there is no competition though with AMD being around 75% faster.
  
  
  

Holocure 0.7 Trailer Video of the Day

Holocure 0.7 is out today.

This is a Hololive-related game as the name would suggest, but unofficial, fan-made, and completely free.  (Hololive is perfectly happy with that although technically they own the IP.)

And it's good.

It's basically a Vampire Survivors clone where you battle swarms of annoying fans as one of - hang on - 47 playable characters, all with unique weapons and skills, and a crazy number of upgrades that switch around randomly between games.

It's also starting to be a Stardew Valley clone with home-building, farming, fishing, and mining (and slave labour), and apparently now a Jump King clone, and has a casino where you can bribe the dealer, and I don't know what else.

Small problem for the team working on the game is that Hololive is adding new talents faster than they can be added to the game.  There are two EN generations and four JP generations, with the latest group appearing only a week ago.

• The FBI raided the home of the CEO of betting platform Polymarket - which predicted the re-election of President Trump for some not very useful value of "predicted" - and seized his phone and other electronic devices because they felt like it.  (New York Post)
  
  No charges have been brought, nobody has been arrested, the FBI and DOJ haven't even hinted at an investigation.
  
  They just did it.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Solidigm, formerly Intel's SSD division, now part of SK Hynix, formerly Hyundai Electronics, has announced a 122TB SSD.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's available in various formats including a traditional 2.5" disk drive (albeit NVMe) and has a peak transfer rate of 7.4GBps.  Price not mentioned but it will be a lot.
  
  
  
• Bluesky now has 15 million users.  (The Verge)
  
  Bluesky has some good features, but to compete with Twitter it has to be what Twitter is not, and it has chosen to be a home for neurotic leftists who cannot tolerate dissenting views.
  
  It will die.
  
  
  
• Can AI solve advanced math problems?  No.  (Venture Beat)
  
  Oh well.
  
  
  
• xAI's new AI datacenter has been approved to increase its power consumption from 8MW to 150MW.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Half of my Phase Connect plushies have shipped.  (Just checked, actually 11 out of 17 have shipped.)
  
  Can't provide a link because this was a limited time offer and the page was taken down when they sold out - 18 months ago.  But they look derpy as heck.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 14 2024 10:02 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: David Eastman at Friday, November 15 2024 02:59 AM (aAyxl)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Friday, November 15 2024 08:35 AM (Ncog+)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 15 2024 11:48 AM (pnaK4)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, November 15 2024 12:36 PM (rcPLc)

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• 23andMe is laying off 40% of its employees and cancelling all its research work.  (BBC)
  
  The company has been on a downward spiral since it was hacked and information for nearly seven million users stolen.  This did not include genetic data, but did include family trees and other personal information.
  
  
  
• AMD meanwhile laid off 4% of its employees.  (WCCFTech)
  
  AMD is doing well overall but specific business units are lagging.

• Not announcing layoffs was TSMC, which instead reported that it is running at 100% capacity for 5nm and 3nm production.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Even Intel is using TSMC for its latest chips while it works on getting its 1.8nm technology into production.
  
  
  
• What if AI doesn't just keep getting better forever?  (Ars Technica)
  
  It isn't.  It won't.  Even the Ars commentariat is laughing at this sudden realisation that AI is a bubble:

  Anybody want a celebratory slice of glue pizza?

  
  
  
• The AI hype bubble is, if not bursting, then certainly deflating.  (Slack)
  
  While still popular at the CEO level, among workers excitement has cooled by 9% in the US and 12% in France - compared to just three months ago.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is killing the Mail and Calendar apps in Windows 11.  (The Verge)
  
  Back to Outlook it is.
  
  And they still have a better track record than Google.
  
  
  
• The hackers who breached AT&T's data at analytics company Snowflake have been arrested.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  AT&T was just one of 165 Snowflake customers who saw their data hacked on a massive scale.
  
  Last I saw, Snowflake was still blaming 165 individual customers for allowing their Snowflake accounts to be hacked.
  
  
  

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Thursday, November 14 2024 04:28 AM (KOtXO)

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• Bitcoin has surged to a record price of $84,000 following Donald Trump's re-election, which you may have heard about.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not clear yet who Trump might pick to head the SEC, but it's hard to imagine anyone more criminally antagonistic to crypto than Gary Gensler.  While the agency missed the FTX fraud case until it was already over, it has spent four years simultaneously refusing to specify the rules around crypto trading and prosecuting companies involved in crypto trading,
  
  
  
• Meanwhile AMD's 9000-series CPUs are at record lows.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 9900X in particular is nearly 30% cheaper than when it launched three months ago.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Anthropic has hired an AI welfare researcher as part of its philosophy welfare program.  (Transformer News)
  
  The role is utterly pointless and will likely produce nothing of value, but it keeps them off the streets.
  
  
  
• Somebody moved Britain's oldest satellite and nobody knows why.  (BBC)
  
  Or who.  They did figure out where though.
  
  
  
• VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion (for Mac) are now free for everyone, including commercial use.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which might mean the company has abandoned them.  Or might not.
  
  
  
• The QNX embedded operating system is now free at least for non-commercial use.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  QNX is owned by Blackberry.  Yes, that Blackberry.  Yes, they're still around.

Posted by: Amelia2 at Thursday, November 21 2024 08:14 PM (q9cjq)

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Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 12 2024 01:11 AM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 12 2024 07:53 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 12 2024 09:13 AM (pnaK4)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 12 2024 09:58 AM (rcPLc)

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• Beata Halassy had breast cancer - for the third time, despite chemotherapy and a mastectomy.
  
  She had cancer.
  
  She gave it measles and it died.  (Nature)
  
  Beata is a virologist so she prepared her own virus culture - a mild strain intended for vaccine production - and had a colleague administer it.  She has now been cancer-free for four years.
  
  Naturally she wanted to publish the results of her research - on herself.  That's where the real problems started, because scientific journals didn't want to touch it.
  
  On the upside - apart from the whole thing about being alive - she now has funding to repeat this research to try to cure cancer in pets.
  
  

• You can in fact upgrade the storage in your new M4 Mac Mini.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All you need is a surface-mount soldering and desoldering station, a set of compatible NAND flash chips - which you can find online but will cost you more than simply buying a complete SSD, and a second set of compatible NAND flash chips for when the first ones don't work. 
  
  And a second Mac to do a forced update to the first Mac now that its storage is blank.
  
  
  
• Google says the enhanced protection feature in Chrome now uses AI.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I recommend Brave or Vivaldi.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT usage now rivals the Chrome browser.  (Digital Trends)
  
  No it fucking doesn't you fucking morons.  You are comparing actual living human users with the number of individual requests.
  
  
  
• Sega is removing 60 classic games from Steam on December 6.  (Sega)
  
  And when I say classic, some of these games are older than I am, what with me being 29 and all.
  
  If you already own them, or buy them before December 6, you keep them, but there will be no new sales.
  
  
  
• As Firefox turns 20, Mozilla ponders how to restore it to its former glory.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Stop being communists.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk increased his net worth by more in a single day following the election than he spent to buy Twitter.  (The Register)
  
  Feel good story of the day.

• The PlayStation 5 Pro is here and it's eh.  (WCCFTech)
  
  While it is technically a significant upgrade over the base PlayStation 5, with a nearly 50% upgrade to the graphics performance, it still plays PlayStation 5 games, so mostly it doesn't matter.
  
  
  
• Scalpers who snapped up the first shipment are struggling to unload it even below retail price.  (TechSpot)
  
  Tragic.
  
  

• Crucial's 4TB T500 SSD is out and it's fine.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  By which I mean it's reasonably priced and one of the fastest drives around, but does have some performance hiccups under extremely heavy sustained write loads.  So not the best choice for enterprise database servers, but it doesn't claim to be.
  
  
  
• Apple's new M4 Mac Mini has modular storage.  (MacRumors)
  
  It's a little card like an M.2 2230 SSD from a laptop.
  
  Does that mean you can upgrade it?
  
  No.  Don't be silly.
  
  
  
• The CEO of Sony's PlayStation division says that maybe the company should show upcoming games to gamers before it spends $400 million developing them.  (WCCFTech)
  
  What a concept.
  
  
  
• MacOS runs apps inside a sandbox for added security.  Does it add security?  No.  (GitHub)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• DNA shows Pompeii's dead weren't who we thought there were.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They had - get this - a mix of European and Eastern Mediterranean genes.
  
  In other words, they were Roman.
  
  
  
• Slate is horrified to learn that tech billionaires care about money.  (Slate)  (archive site)
  
  I am horrified and somewhat bemused to learn that Slate has not yet gone bankrupt.
  
  
  

Tostada Video of the Day

Asmongold is no dummy.  He doesn't always agree with Trump, but he recognises a gravy train when it presents itself.

• We've already seen AMD's latest chip, the Ryzen 9800X3D, demolish the competition (including other AMD chips) for playing games.  But how does it perform for the kind of work I do, like running databases, compiling code, processing mathematical models?  (Phoronix)

  For the geo mean of the more than 300 benchmarks, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D surpassed the Core i9 14900K and landed just behind the prior gen Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 9 7950X3D processors. Compared to the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D delivered 1.34x the performance.

  This is an 8 core CPU competing against Intel chips with 24 cores.  Yes, the huge Phoronix benchmark suite compares both single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads, but then I run a mix of single-threaded and multi-threaded tasks in my daily work.
  
  Its performance here is nothing short of amazing.  35% faster than the preceding generation is huge.  I want one.
  
  
  
• And it's sold out.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Seems there was some pent-up demand out there; supplies are selling out as soon as they arrive in stores.

• The hate for Elon Musk has been put on hold while the crowd gathers to hate Jeff Bezos.  (The Verge)
  
  Bezos has committed the unforgivable crime of being cordial to president-elect Donald Trump.
  
  
  
• Block is scaling back Tidal and shuttering TBD in favour of BTC.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm sure it is.
  
  
  
• A crypto CEO was kidnapped off the street in Toronto and held until a ransom of $1 million was paid.  (CBC)

  Jameson Lopp, the co-founder and chief security officer of Casa, a security firm focused on protecting cryptocurrency users, has been keeping track of physical thefts designed to steal cryptocurrency for around a decade.
  
  He says Skurka's abduction is the 171st instance of suspects using physical violence to steal bitcoins, that he's aware of.

  Yay, Bitcoin is at a record high YOINK.

Posted by: vermindust at Friday, November 08 2024 09:41 PM (2ihj2)

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• Who are you and what have you done with AMD?
  
  AMD promised the new 9800X3D would be 8% faster than the previous generation's 7800X3D and 20% faster than Intel's latest high-end chip, the 285K.  Independent testing said otherwise.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Its 15% faster than the 7800X3D and 35% faster than Intel's 285K.
  
  The consistent theme of the reviews on YouTube is RIP Intel.  Not something the struggling company needs to be hearing right now.
  
  To be fair, until now AMD's Ryzen 9000 chips have also been met with a resounding meh.  But no longer.

• Windows Server 2025 is here.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's Windows.  It's a server.  It's Windows Server!
  
  
  
• What does Trump's election mean for EVs, Tesla, and Elon Musk?  (The Verge)
  
  Demented screeching.
  
  Okay then.
  
  
  
• What Trump's win might mean for Elon Musk.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Mostly good things.
  
  
  
• SpaceX is planning another Starship launch in the next two weeks.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Things like that.
  
  
  
• You can build your own gaming PC, faster than the PlayStation 5 Pro, for about the same price.  (PC Guide)
  
  The PS5 Pro may be many things, but cheap is not on the list.
  
  

They Are Becoming Self-Aware Video of the Day

Mint and Dokibird have been playing hardcore Minecraft for nine hours now.  Calli, IRyS, and Biboo have been playing Space Marine 2.  

And Hololive is adding new generations as fast as Nijisanji members can graduate.



hololive DEV_IS FLOW GLOW - the naming scheme is getting out of control - is basically the Gen 8 of the Japanese branch, or in other words, that branch's tenth generation, since the numbering scheme has also gotten out of control.

When I first started watching vtubers, back during the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, there was no Hololive EN, no Nijisanji EN, no Phase Connect or Prism Project.  I watched Hololive JP's Haachama and Coco, who spoke English, and Korone, who didn't really but she has so much energy and enthusiasm that it never mattered.

Now there's hundreds of them.  I even watched the election results being presented by a vtuber named Kirsche.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 07 2024 08:05 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, November 08 2024 01:36 AM (rcPLc)

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• The Verge is going through the five stages of election grief.  (The Verge)
  
  Denial.
  Bargaining.
  Blaming crypto.
  Calling for censorship.
  Going home early and getting drunk.
  
  
  
• Slashdot just posted Trump's win and left its commenters to handle the meltdown.  (Slashdot)
  
  Smart.  Efficient.

• If you want a PCIe 5.0 SSD that has high transfer rates and is reasonably cheap, the Corsair MP700 Elite is that.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Pretty much.
  
  
  
• A Samsung 990 Pro is cheaper, better in other respects, and would probably not be noticeably slower.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Samsung drive has a top speed of 7.5GBps vs. 10GBps for the Corsair model, but it's priced at $149 for 2TB compared to $249.
  
  I know which I would choose.
  
  
  
• Hacking 700 million Electronic Arts accounts.  (BattleDash)
  
  Ethically.
  
  No, really.
  
  
  
• Hundreds of code libraries on NPM try to install malicious code on your computer.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Not as malicious as NPM itself, but still...
  
  
  
• The Ampere One A192-32X is a 192 core 3.2GHz Arm-based server CPU.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I love this line:

  The AmpereOne A192-32X is important to keep in context. It is a 192-core 3.2GHz (hence A192-32X) part, which seems mundane by 2024 standards.

  Pfft.  192 cores?  Hardly worth getting out of bed.
  
  
  
• Sundar Pichai has told Google staff to take their political opinions, fold them until they are all sharp corners, and shove them up their Slack channels.  (Yahoo)
  
  Nature is healing.
  
  
  
• Mozilla (the company behind the Firefox browser) has laid off 30% of its staff and closed down its advocacy division.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Nature is fucking healing.  Trump gets results.
  
  
  
• A ransomware crew that hacked Schneider Electric has demanded payment of $125,000.  (The Register)
  
  Paid in baguettes.
  
  No, really.