What happened?
Twelve years!
You hit me with a cricket bat!
Ha! Twelve years!

Friday, June 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 June 2025

Earth Shattering Edition

Top Story


Tech News

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Just like a what?

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Thursday, June 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 June 2025

Binted Edition

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Tech News

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: ...

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Wednesday, June 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 June 2025

Butter Dog Edition

Top Story

  • Why it has suddenly become difficult to buy a handheld gaming device.  (The Verge)  (archive site)

    The popular models - the Switch 2 and Steam Deck OLED - are out of stock.

    The less popular models suddenly had price increases.

    The bad models are, well, bad.

    And the recently announced Xbox-branded handhelds are potentially all of those, but most importantly aren't out yet.


Tech News


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Why don't we just price paper notebooks like notebook computers?

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Tuesday, June 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 June 2025

Purple Snail Edition

Top Story

  • Intel's rumoured next-next generation Nova Lake processors have been rumoured again.  (WCCFTech)

    Albeit with more details this time.

    The top of the line Core 9 model will reportedly include 16 performance cores, 32 efficiency cores, and 4 low-power efficiency cores.

    Which would be a lot.

    The next models down would be the Core 7, with 14 P-cores, 24 E-cores, and 4 LPE-cores.

    However, both would use a base power of 150W, meaning - this being Intel - in reality they would run at more like 300W.

    Which is also a lot.

    They would also - according to a separate rumour - provide 32 PCIe 5.0 lanes and 16 PCIe 4.0 lanes.

    Not counting the PCIe 5.0 connection from the CPU to the chipset.

    The CPU provides the same number of I/O lanes - at the same speed - as AMD's current chips.  But the chipset does a lot better than AMD, providing 24 total PCIe 5.0 and 4.0 lanes, against AMD's 870E which uses two chips to provide just 12 PCIe 4.0 lanes.

    Oh, and DDR5-8000 memory.


Tech News


Educational Interlude



Musical Interlude


Song is Sharada by Skye Sweetnam.  Anime is of course The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.



Disclaimer: If you leave a DVD in your player long enough, it will turn into a random volume of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.  Established fact.

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Monday, June 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 June 2025

According To Keikaku Edition

Top Story

  • Why Johnny (class of '27) can't read.  (Substack)

    Only 5% of college English majors were able to understand the first seven paragraphs of Dickens' Bleak House.

    Now it's understandable that someone might not fully grasp the specifics of social roles in 19th century England - at least not if they haven't read Dickens or Austen or other great authors of the period before - but it is worse than that.

    Much worse.

    Paragraph from Bleak House:
    As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
    And here's the response.  Note that this is from a college English major:
    [Pause.] [Laughs.] So it’s like, um, [Pause.] the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no . . . [Pause.] so everything’s been like kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he’s says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill
    And this is when the students had access to freely look up anything with which they were unfamiliar.

    Kowalski, analysis:
    Like this subject, most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them.  In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.  Worse, their inability to understand figurative language was constant, even though most of the subjects had spent at least two years in literature classes that discussed figures of speech.
    Full depressing article here.


Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Why Genesis can't read.

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Sunday, June 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 June 2025

Wises The Muwun Edition

Top Story

Tech News


Musical Interlude



Song is Notice Me by Alexa Ray Joel.  Anime is Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun.



Disclaimer: Tanuki?

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Saturday, June 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 June 2025

Lizard Oil Edition

Top Story

  • How Palm died for a second time.  (Substack)

    Written by Phil McKinney, who was the CTO of Hewlett Packard at the time HP bought and then promptly murdered Palm.

    The CEO at the time of the acquisition was fired by the board before HP's new PalmOS products could launch, and the new CEO wanted nothing to do with hardware, and killed the entire lineup seven weeks after launch.

    While the CTO was out recovering from emergency surgery.

    And the new CEO was in turn fired by the board just months later, after spending $10 billion on British software company Autonomy and then being forced to write down its value by 80%.
    My first day back at HP will be burned into my memory forever. I was simply trying to grab lunch in the cafeteria at HP Labs when I found myself surrounded by what felt like the entire technical staff. They weren't there to welcome me back - they were there to hold me accountable.

    The scene was intense and unambiguous. Engineers and researchers who had watched the WebOS disaster unfold were pointing fingers and raising voices. Their message was crystal clear and brutal: "You can never take leave again - EVER!"

    Their exact words still echo in my mind: "The CEO and board need adult supervision."

    Indeed they did.  Those were dark days at Hewlett Packard.


Tech News

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Had to throw out two lizards today.  Don't know how they keep getting in.

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Friday, June 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 June 2025

Ouch Edition

Top Story

  • Google in the wiring closet with a lead pipe: The internet went down.  It was Google's fault.  (Tech Crunch)
    Google Cloud said it started investigating service issues affecting its customers at 11:46 a.m. PT. As of 2:23 p..m PT, the company said it had implemented mitigations, and expects to have its services back up and running within the hour.
    You started investigating issues 44 minutes after I was woken up by the outage?  Good work, guys.
    At 11:19 a.m. PT, Cloudflare also said it was investigating service disruptions affecting its customers, according to its status page.  At 12:12 p.m. PT, Cloudflare said it was starting to see its services recover after investigating the issue.
    Cloudflare KV was affected by the Google outage, and it in turn took down the rest of Cloudflare.

    And that took down everyone else, since Cloudflare handles about 20% of web traffic worldwide, so it's a rare site - like this one - that doesn't depend on it.

    Also, yes, they did post that note at 12:12 PM, but the "starting to see" does a lot of heavy lifting there.  An hour later and our sites at work that are routed through Cloudflare were still completely dead.
    "This is a Google Cloud outage," said Cloudflare spokesperson Ripley Park in an email to TechCrunch. "A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly. The core Cloudflare services were not impacted."
    The core Cloudflare services were not impacted, it was just that you couldn't reach them because everything else was on fire.


Tech News

  • AMD pre-announced its upcoming Zen 6 "Venice" server CPUs, and a little reading between the lines shows some significant changes.  (Tom's Hardware)

    These will lift the maximum core count from 192 to 256, increase performance by 70%, double I/O bandwidth, and increase memory bandwidth from 614GB per second (per CPU) to 1.6TB per second.

    More and faster cores is pretty normal, but doubling I/O bandwidth sounds like PCIe 6.0, which is exactly twice as fast as PCIe 5.0.

    That memory speed sounds like magic, though.  Gen 3 MRDIMMs would achieve that - with an effective transfer rate of 17.6GHz, by running multiplexing two or more chips per module at the same time - but MRDIMMs announced so far only deliver half that speed.


  • AMD also announced its MI350X and MI355X AI GPUs, which have stuff.  (Tom's Hardware)

    288GB of RAM and 256 CUs - compared with 16GB of RAM and 64 CUs on the latest 9070 XT consumer cards.  And 8TB per second of memory bandwidth compared with "only" 640GB per second.

    These are a slightly different design though, optimised for AI, called CDNA as opposed to RDNA used in AMD's laptop chips and consumer graphics cards.

    The next generation promises to provide "UDNA" which will unify the two designs.


  • Anker is recalling over a million power banks because they catch fire.  (The Verge)

    A good reason I suppose.


  • Meta has bought a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.9 billion.  (Yahoo)

    Scale AI is not an AI company.  It's a people company that uses actual intelligence to weed out bullshit before it is fed into new AI systems to drive them mad.


  • Evergreen headline: Free VPN apps you've never heard of on Apple and Google's app stores are run by China and watch everything you do online.  (Tech Transparency Project)

    These include the fourth-ranked VPN on Apple's App Store and the eleventh-ranked VPN on Google Play.  Many of them offer in-app purchases, so they charge you and steal your data.


  • The Bluesky backlash misses the point.  (Tech Crunch)

    No it doesn't.
    Without a more direct push to showcase the wider network of apps built on the open protocol that Bluesky’s team spearheaded, it was only a matter of time before the Bluesky brand became pigeon-holed as the liberal and leftist alternative to X.
    There is no wider network of apps.  Yes, the protocol is nominally open, but has no significant use.  Bluesky is it right now.

    So the backlash against Bluesky's totalitarian censorship - welcomed and enforced by Bluesky's own users - is exactly the point.
    Already, people are using the protocol that powers Bluesky to build social experiences for specific groups — like Blacksky is doing for the Black online community or like Gander Social is doing for social media users in Canada.
    Canada is not a real place.

    Though to be fair neither is Bluesky.

Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Do not herp the derps.

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Thursday, June 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 June 2025

Crochet Apocalypse Edition

Top Story

  • PCI SIG has released the final specification for PCIe 7.0, and is busy working on PCIe 8.0.  (Liliputing)

    PCIe 7.0 runs is twice as fast as PCIe 6.0, which is twice as fast as PCIe 5.0, and so on.  Even a single lane of PCIe 7.0 will keep your RTX 4090 happy.

    PCIe 6.0 isn't shipping in devices yet, though test rigs are showing up, and PCIe 5.0 graphics cards only appeared six months ago.  So don't expect the new slots soon - although PCIe 5.0 motherboards did reach the market surprisingly quickly.


Tech News



Musical Interlude




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Wednesday, June 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 June 2027

Bananacat Edition

Top Story

  • The Bluesky bubble hurts liberals and their causes. Here's why that's a good thing. (Washington Post) (archive site)

    Bluesky was an interesting attempt at redesigning the core architecture of Twitter, but had no natural userbase until Trump won the 2024 election, whereupon the craziest people on Twitter departed en masse all at once and created Bluesky accounts.

    That gave the site a massive boost in user numbers but at the same time a massive headache, because suddenly its users were overwhelming screamingly insane leftists with all the problems that come with them.
    For roughly a decade, Twitter hosted what is lightheartedly called the "national conversation" on issues of the day, particularly social justice and public health. Twitter never had that many users, compared with Instagram or Facebook. But it had a big group of influential users - politicians, policymakers, journalists and academics, all of whom were engaged in a 24/7 conversation about politics and current events.
    Mostly leftists, often far left, but at least, at the time, paying lip service to civility and rationality. Those days are far behind us.

    That's what they're trying to regain, but the more they tighten their grip, the more star systems slip through their fingers.
    That was a boon to progressives, who wielded outsize influence on the platform because they were early adopters who outnumbered the conservatives. They were also better organized and better networked, and had the sympathy of Twitter’s professional-class employees, who proved increasingly susceptible to liberals' demands for tighter moderation policies on things such as using male pronouns to refer to a transgender woman.
    Translation: Stalinists policing speech.
    It’s not surprising that progressives want to return to the good old days. But it’s not working, and I’m skeptical it ever will.
    Those were the days, my friend. Thought they would never end.
    Something similar has happened on Bluesky. The nasty fringe has become even nastier: A Bluesky technical adviser recently felt the need to clarify that "The 'let's tell anyone we don’t like to kill themselves' crowd are not welcome here" because left-wing trolls kept urging people who disagreed with them to commit suicide. And without the leavening influence of their opponents, Bluesky discourse appears even more censorious and doctrinaire than what progressives were saying on old Twitter.
    Jesse Singal, call your office.

    Oh yeah, the key point: Bluesky activity is down 50% since November; it's in a death spiral and there's likely no way out.


Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Oh nyo.

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