• The Chief Technology Officer, Chief Research Officer, and VP of Research have all left OpenAI this week as Doc Sam "Snake Oil" Altman tightens his grip on the company.  (Ars Technica)
  
   The core issue is the change of OpenAI's status from a public benefit company to slush fund for the select few to loot.  Altman himself is looking at a $10 billion payday at current valuation.
  
  This is likely a disaster for the company and its shareholders.
  
  
  
• As for the researchers fleeing the oncoming catastrophe they are likely to do just fine.
  
  Google is paying $2.7 billion to rehire an early employee who built an AI chatbot years before ChatGPT.  (MSN)
  
  Specifically, he left Google and founded his own company, and Google has paid $2.7 billion to license that company's technology with the proviso that he return to work at Google.
  
  The amounts of money being flushed down the drain on this are insane.

• Wordpress has declared war on Wordpress hosting company WP Engine.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Wordpress itself is open source and anyone can download it and use it, or offer it as a commercial service to their customers.
  
  Apparently the entire fuss is over the use of the letters W and P.  Wordpress chief Matt Mullenweg is accusing WP Engine of everything short of serial genocide over those two letters.
  
  
  
• HP is adding AI to its printers.  (Ars Technica)
  
  We're already not buying your printers, guys.  You can stop making them worse.
  
  
  
• Speaking of HP the HP EliteBook X G1a actually looks good.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It has a Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 375 CPU, a 2880x1800 14" OLED display, and almost the four essential keys (Home shares a key with F12).
  
  No pricing yet.
  
  
  
• Why Volvo changed its "EV or bust" strategy.  (The Verge)
  
  Because the customers said "okay, bust it is".
  
  
  
• There's a five alarm fire vulnerability in every version of Linux unless there isn't.  (HackRead)
  
  If you're a sysadmin you might want to drink heavily in preparation for actual useful details on October 6.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 27 2024 09:07 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 27 2024 10:54 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 27 2024 11:04 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, September 28 2024 09:26 AM (nk1Z+)

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• Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman-Fried's right-hand woman in the FTX kerfuffle, has been sentenced to two years in prison for her part in the fuffling and ordered to pay $11 billion in restitution.  (Ars Technica)
  
  That restitution order confused me, because that's the entire amount under management by FTX at the time it collapsed, and (thanks to the continuing rise in  Bitcoin prices) all the customers have already been made whole, with interest.
  
  Ellison certainly doesn't have $11 billion, and there is little prospect of her ever having $11 billion.
  
  What it means, rather, is that if Ellison has squirreled away a few million from the collapse, the court has already laid claim to it.
  
  
  

Tech News 

• Facebooks current smart glasses have everything you might want in a pair of smart glasses, except a display.  The company's new glasses codenamed Orion, do.  (The Verge)
  
  They're rather chunkier than the current model, but they're still at the prototype stage, and they look like you're wearing ugly glasses rather your head being eaten by a robot crab.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new 990 Evo Plus SSDs are 45% faster than the existing 990 Evo models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because the existing models were slow.  "Only" 5GB per second.
  
  
  
• Intel's Lunar Lake is here and it's not terrible.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Battery life is solid, and performance is not terrible.  It is just an eight-core chip though, and on heavy workloads like video editing and 3d rendering AMD's current twelve-core chips leave it in the dust, completing tasks around 60% faster.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD the company's 9900X3D desktop chip is expected next month.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's a pretty fast follow-up to the launch of the mainstream versions of Zen 5, but sales of those have been slow.  They're not bad chips, but AMD is competing with itself as well as Intel.
  
  An eight core 9700X is the same price as the previous generation's twelve core 7900X, while being significantly slower.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 26 2024 10:04 PM (pnaK4)

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• Intel has launched its Xeon 6 server processors, boasting up to 128 cores (full-size, not "efficiency" cores) and using up to 500W of power, to compete with AMD.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Intel has been far behind AMD in this space since the first Epyc processors launched in 2017.  Intel hopes to start taking back market share with these new chips, priced starting at...
  
  Well, you can't actually buy them, but when you can they'll be great.  Really.
  
  
  

Tech News

• California Governor Gavin Noisome has vetoed a bill that would have required browsers to allow users to tell websites not to sell their fucking personal data to every criminal organisation in the world.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Even the Ars Technica commentariat didn't like that.
  
  
  
• Booting Linux on an Intel 4004.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 4004 is running an emulator because it lacks most of the hardware (not to mention the address space) to run Linux directly, but it's real Linux on a real 4004 chip from 1971.
  
  It takes almost five days to boot, and sixteen hours to list the contents of a directory.
  
  
  
• The DOJ is suing Visa for "profound and persistent weaselry".  (The Verge)
  
  Sounds about right.
  
  
  
• The world's largest banks are lining up to support nuclear power, with plans to triple the world's nuclear capacity by 2050.  (Business Insider)
  
  That should drive the degrowthers into a tizzy.
  
  Also mentioned in the article is that Microsoft has tapped a well-known nuclear power plant to run its AI datacenters - namely Three Mile Island.
  
  
  
• US air traffic control systems are fucked.  (The Register)
  
  That's it.  That's the story.
  
  
  

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Thursday, September 26 2024 03:18 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 26 2024 07:47 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 26 2024 07:50 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, September 26 2024 01:25 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 26 2024 02:30 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, September 27 2024 09:46 AM (rcPLc)

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Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 25 2024 01:22 PM (bg2DR)

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• AI superintelligence will be here in 20 years says Sam Altman who would never ever lie about such a thing.  (Ars Technica)

  "It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there," he wrote.

  Wanna bet, Sam?

  It's easy to criticize Altman's vagueness here; no one can truly predict the future, but Altman, as CEO of OpenAI, is likely privy to AI research techniques coming down the pipeline that aren't broadly known to the public.

  No.  He's not.

  So even when couched with a broad time frame, the claim comes from a noteworthy source in the AI field-albeit one who is heavily invested in making sure that AI progress does not stall.

  No.  It doesn't.

  Elsewhere in the essay, Altman frames our present era as the dawn of "The Intelligence Age," the next transformative technology era in human history, following the Stone Age, Agricultural Age, and Industrial Age. He credits the success of deep learning algorithms as the catalyst for this new era, stating simply: "How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity? In three words: deep learning worked."

  The problem with that is that "deep learning" hasn't worked, and can't.  There's no point making ever larger and more expensive models - if there ever was - because we've run out of data to feed them.

  Not everyone shares Altman's optimism and enthusiasm. Computer scientist and frequent AI critic Grady Booch quoted Altman's "few thousand days" prediction and wrote on X, "I am so freaking tired of all the AI hype: it has no basis in reality and serves only to inflate valuations, inflame the public, garnet [sic] headlines, and distract from the real work going on in computing."

  Yes.

• Redis users are considering jumping ship.  (The Register)
  
  Redis used to be open source.  Now it isn't.
  
  Which is a problem for Redis.
  
  
  
• Because now Valkey exists.  (Valkey)
  
  It only exists because Redis used to be open source, but Redis did use to be open source.
  
  Meaning that Valkey could take the last open source version of Redis, and create its own version.
  
  And then add features that Redis never had (like multi-threading) and then ship it as open source.
  
  The only thing Valkey can't do is stop being open source, which is a feature rather than a bug.
  
  
  
• The Arc browser: Why you need a better browser than Chrome.  (The Verge)
  
  Chrome used to be the best.  Now it's...  Meh.
  
  Arc is designed to be an operating system for web applications.  Should you try it?

  So, the origin of The Browser Company is I was a political appointee in the Obama White House and after the 2016 election, I was personally devastated by the result. I felt like technology and the technology industry had an impact on the things I didn’t like, and I was very motivated to try to do something about it.

  No.
  
  
  
• Intel's Razer Lake CPUs will follow after Nova Lake now that the Arrow Lake Refresh has been cancelled.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Look, I follow this stuff every single day, and if you told me that Veronica Lake was now set to follow Swan Lake because Rose Madder Lake had been cancelled I would have no idea whether that was real or not.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 25 2024 01:24 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 26 2024 02:32 PM (pnaK4)

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• EU Bookburner General Terry Britain is gone, stabbed in the back by his political masters and dumped in an alley like a diseased dog even the Haitians won't touch, but the EU is still a giant socialist hagfish looking for its next meal, so what do America's big tech companies have to look forward to from his replacement?  (Ars Technica)
  
  We don't know.  This is a Wired article, so it is 100% content-free.
  
  Britain is being replaced by a Finnish center-right politician, Henna Virkkunen.  But she's been in the European Parliament for ten years now, plenty of time for the Helsinki to rub off and the Brussels to soak in.

• The entire human genome on a poker chip.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ew.
  
  Etched by laser.
  
  Never mind.
  
  The storage device, using glass or quartz discs up to the size of a CD, can store up to 360TB and last more or less forever unless you hit them with a hammer.
  
  The problem is that you need a high power laser to write the data in the first place; you can't stamp them out in bulk.
  
  
  
• Keeping Firewire alive on Linux.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Recent versions of Windows and MacOS have abandoned Firewire entirely, so if you need to maintain support for some unusual hardware device, Linux is really your only option.
  
  Or stick with Windows 10.
  
  
  
• Running C code natively from JavaScript.  (The New Stack)
  
  You seem to be attempting to summon Cthulhu.  Would you like me to help with that?
  
  
  
• Are Facebook's Ray Ban smart glasses actually not terrible?  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, they're marketed as AI, but what's more important is that they contain a microphone, a camera, and speakers, all of which work - and reportedly work pretty well - without any AI bullshit.
  
  And they're glasses; they don't cover most of your face and make your neck hurt.  If you already wear glasses you can get them with your prescription.
  
  And they cost $299, not $3499.
  
  What they don't have in their current iteration is a display.  There are other smart glasses like this that do have displays - not full VR but little HUDs, which can be very useful.
  
  If these features can come together maybe the Apple Vision Pro can quietly die and be forgotten.

Something Important Was Forgotten Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 23 2024 09:08 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 26 2024 02:35 PM (pnaK4)

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• If you want to run Final Fantasy XVI at 4k 60Hz, you will need at least an RTX 5090, a graphics card that does not exist.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, if you turn on AI upscaling and frame generation an RTX 4090 will do it - just barely, and if you can find one.
  
  If you have a mere mortal video card like the RTX 4070 - not at all a slow card - you're looking at 1080p medium settings with upscaling and frame generation, and 41fps 1% lows.
  
  Why is a pretty normal game so demanding?  Nobody knows.

• How to run your own generative AI instances on your own computer.  (Nature)
  
  Still useless - this is a how article, not a why article - but at least it doesn't steal all your data and sell it to the lowest bidder.
  
  
  
• 80% of software developers are unhappy.  (ShiftMag)
  
  The other 20% are day drinking.
  
  
  
• Beelink's new Ryzen AI 9 370 mini-PC delivers great performance and soldered RAM for just... $999.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It is a lot faster than the models I have, but I have three of those and this costs about five times as much.
  
  
  
• Minisforum's UM890 is a lot cheaper but also a lot slower.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's a previous generation Ryzen 8945HS.  Eight CPU cores rather than the twelve in the Beelink model - but half the price.
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, September 25 2024 09:44 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: muddasir96 at Monday, September 30 2024 10:25 PM (qpRrH)

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• Qualcomm is reportedly in talks to acquire Intel.  (The Verge)
  
  Intel's stock price is in the toilet after years of mismanagement, which is what makes this at all viable.  The company is valued at less than Nvidia or AMD, and half as much as Qualcomm.
  
  Which is a little odd because none of those other companies have Intel's massive manufacturing capacity, and is testament to how badly Intel has screwed up.
  
  I very much doubt this deal will go anywhere.  Intel is betting everything on its upcoming 18A and 14A process nodes (1.8nm and 1.4nm respectively).  If those are successful then all is forgiven.  If not, then who would want to buy them?

• Speaking of AMD the company's upcoming Strix Point Halo laptop chip has been spotted in a test sample of an HP ZBook Ultra.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Specifically the Ryzen AI 390 variant with 12 Zen 5 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores.
  
  Since it's a ZBook - HP's workstation line - it will not be cheap, but it does come with 64GB of RAM standard.
  
  
  
• Which is just enough to run the latest edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The game recommends 64GB of RAM, at least a 12-core CPU, and an Nividia RTX 4080 or AMD Radeon 7900 XT.
  
  Which is a lot.
  
  
  
• Concord reportedly cost a total of $400 million to develop.  (PlayStation Lifestyle)
  
  This is the game that Sony shut down less than two weeks after launch, at which point it had around 100 players.  Total.  Worldwide.
  
  Insiders have said that the game had already cost $200 million to develop by the start of 2023, at which point it was in a "laughable state".  Sony spent another $200 million getting additional studios to clean it up and create pre-rendered content.
  
  That part seems to have worked because the problem when it launched last month was not bugs - it appeared to be technically competent - but that the game was ugly and boring.  
  
  And that part was because nobody was permitted to offer any criticism, for the entire eight years it was in development, what the article calls "toxic positivity".  No-one was permitted to speak out, and no-one dared to blow the whistle because they were dealing with the kind of people who would follow them to their next job just to libel them to HR.
  
  
  
• You can now reprogram the Windows Copilot key if (a) you are stuck with a Windows version with Copilot and (b) your keyboard has a Copilot key.  (Tom's Hardware)
  

  We discovered that the Copilot key returns the F23 key, a key hearkening back to the IBM era when IBM keyboards came equipped with function keys from F1 all the way to F24.

  This took me a minute.  They're not talking about PC keyboards, they're talking about mainframe terminals.
  
  Apparently I'm not that old just yet.
  
  
  
• You can get a 1.5TB Intel 905p for $299.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Why would you want to do that?  That sounds expensive.
  
  The answer is, you probably wouldn't.  This is one of Intel's Optane models, and there's a reason the company doesn't make them anymore.
  
  But if you have an application that is very sensitive to read latency, these drives are five times faster than any flash-based SSD, and last basically forever.
  
  For sequential transfer rates, though, it is five times slower than the latest PCIe 5 M.2 drives.
  
  
  

Posted by: SMM Panel at Tuesday, September 24 2024 05:55 PM (0o5Nk)

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• Elon Musk's reposts of Kamala Harris AI parodies may not fly under California's new law banning Elon Musk from reposting Kamala Harris AI parodies.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Space rocks.
  
  
  
• The creator of said Kamala Harris AI parody has sued California over its law banning the creation of Kamala Harris AI parodies, noting that the law not only violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments, but wipes its bum with them and then blows its nose on what remains.  (Politico)
  

  Newsom spokesperson Izzy Gardon said in a statement that Kohls had already labeled the post as a parody on X.

  "Requiring them to use the word "parody" on the actual video avoids further misleading the public as the video is shared across the platform," Gardon said. "It's unclear why this conservative activist is suing California. This new disclosure law for election misinformation isn’t any more onerous than laws already passed in other states, including Alabama."

  At time of writing, there are zero major social networks headquartered in Alabama.

• As mentioned yesterday, Nintendo and the Pokemon Company have filed suite against Palworld developer Pocketpair over patent violation.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The question remaining is, what patent?
  
  Nintendo has somehow forgotten to include that information.
  
  
  
• The Ryzen AI Max appears to be on its way.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is AMD's new high-end laptop chip with up to 16 Zen 5 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores in the top-of-the-line Ryzen AI Max 395+.
  
  That compares to 4 Zen 5 and 8 slower Zen 5c cores with 16 GPU cores in the current Ryzen AI 370.  So this will be a beast.
  
  
  
• You are in a maze of twisty little licenses, all alike.  (CSVBase)
  
  A review of an a rant about open source licenses.
  
  
  
• Earth is set to get a mini-moon for a couple of months.  (CBS)
  
  Are those Moon months or mini-moon months?
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 20 2024 10:40 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 21 2024 07:13 PM (rcPLc)

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• Nintendo and the Pokemon Company are officially suing Palworld creator Pocketpair.  (WCCFTech)
  
  At issue is the idea of catching and training weird animals, that Nintendo asserts it stole fair and square.
  
  Japanese patent law is a bit weird and unlike western patents, so whether they have a case is uncertain.  One major problem is that Pocketpair now has a billion dollars to fund its defense.
  
  
  
• Speaking of western patents Congress has decided that now is the perfect time to fuck everything up.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The Supreme Court has already thrown out entire categories of patent.  You can't patent something that is already commonplace "but on a computer", and you can't patent people's genes.
  
  The proposed bill is supported by the larger pharmaceutical companies and opposed by literally everyone else.

• Congress is also working on legislation that would require AM radios in all new cars made in the US.  (The Verge)
  
  As standard equipment, with no bullshit.
  
  Car makers are upset because this could add as much as a dollar to the cost of building a car.
  
  It's not for music or talk radio, but to provide a standard method for emergency broadcasts.
  
  
  
• When you run AVX-512 tasks on AMD's new Ryzen 9950X it slows down from 5.7GHz to 5.3GHz.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's hardly anything given that AVX-512 runs twice as fast on the new CPUs than on Zen 4.  And Intel's implementation of AVX-512 - before they killed it on consumer CPUs - could cut clock speeds in half.
  
  
  
• SpaceX plans to sue the FAA over its ongoing bullshit.  (Axios)
  
  The FAA twice announced at the last minute that it could not process SpaceX's plan requests in time for launch, and then fined SpaceX when it went ahead with the launches as planned.
  
  No other company is getting this treatment, though it's true that no other company operates at the scale of SpaceX.
  
  
  
• Twitter is using Cloudflare to provide service in Brazil.  (The Guardian)
  
  Cloudflare handles something like a quarter of the web traffic in the world, so blocking Cloudflare would cause complete chaos for Brazil's internet users.
  
  

Posted by: SMM World Panel at Thursday, September 19 2024 07:47 PM (0o5Nk)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, September 19 2024 08:07 PM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Thursday, September 19 2024 11:33 PM (hRoyQ)

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