They are my oldest and deadliest enemy. You cannot trust them.
If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.

Thursday, September 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 September 2023

2FA Or Not 2FA Edition

Top Story

  • When MFA ain't. (Retool)

    MFA - multi-factor authentication - is when you need something you know (a password) plus something you have (a hardware authentication device) to log in to a critical piece of infrastructure.

    But hardware authentication devices are inconvenient, so we have authentication apps that run on our phones.

    And losing your authentication codes is inconvenient, so these apps sync to the cloud.

    And the cloud is where your email probably is, and where password reset requests go.

    Meaning that if you use the same cloud for your password resets and your authentication syncing, you don't have MFA anymore. Indeed, you have Sweet FA if someone gets into your email account.

    Good writeup by Retool in how they were hacked - and why their non-cloud customers weren't affected at all.

Tech News



Disclaimer: Or is it?

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Wednesday, September 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 September 2023

The Lawsuits Must Roll Edition

Top Story

  • Intel has shown off its new Thunderbolt 5 controllers (though those won't actually arrive until next year) and announced details of the standard, most of which we already knew. (AnandTech)

    Also they lie about USB4, but what else is new?

    Thunderbolt 3 and 4 are the same speed - 40Gbps - and USB4 is based on Thunderbolt 3.

    Thunderbolt 5 doubles the speed to 80Gbps, and has a special mode for video where it can transfer 120Gbps in one direction and 40Gbps the other way. It has four lanes, and usually there's two in each direction, but if you're mainly using it in one direction it can dynamically configure itself as 3+1 instead of 2+2.

    With this you can run two 6k monitors from a single port.

    Other details I don't remember seeing previously are support for at least 140W power delivery, 64Gbps networking - though only really between two computers, since Thunderbolt network switches aren't a thing, and something welcome and a little surprising: It supports the new speeds on existing Thunderbolt 3 and 4 and USB 4 cables up to a distance of 1 metre.

    Beyond that you need active cables with tiny chips in them and those don't exist yet for Thunderbolt 5. The increased speeds are produced with the help of trinary encoding, while passive cables don't care that you're sending voltages of -1 / 0 / +1 instead of just 0 / 1, those tiny chips very much do.


Tech News

Disclaimer: Divided we stand, Unity must fall.

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Tuesday, September 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 September 2023

Ice Ice Bagel Edition

Top Story

  • How ice is turning into an exotic and luxurious commodity.  (Axios)

    Ice?  What exactly do you mean by "ice"?  Obviously not frozen water, because even ignoring the polar ice caps, there's about 150 quadrillion kilograms of ice just sitting around in various glaciers.
    Ice — in exotically shaped cubes, boozy popsicles or suffusing your coffee —is having its moment in the zeitgeist.

    Why it matters: During a record hot summer when icebound places are melting rapidly, it makes sense that ice — a commodity we take for granted until it grows scarce — has turned chic.

    Oh.  You really do mean frozen water.
    By the numbers: More than 60% of Gen Z consumers ordered a cold coffee drink from a food service location in the first half of 2022, compared with 33% who ordered a hot coffee drink, says Mintel, the trend-spotting consultancy.
    Consuming nearly 0% of the world's non-renewable ice supply.
    At the same time, American tourists are getting scorned in Europe for their ice-loving ways. (In other cultures, ice is seen as taking valuable real estate away from the beverage at hand.)
    The European ice ration is two cubes per month, so this is not surprising.
    The bottom line: While the fancy ice trend is mostly about harmless fun, the growing prevalence of drought and water insecurity point to a future where ice will be at an ever-greater premium.
    Yeah, if you can't do first-grade level arithmetic.  And don't have object permanence, something that most babies develop by around six months.

    When you're talking to or otherwise dealing with journalists, treat them like an unusually stupid Cavalier King Charles spaniel that has recently been exposed to rabies and also sprayed by a skunk.

    They're certainly not human.



Tech News

Disclaimer: I draw the line at RPG II though.

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Monday, September 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 September 2023

Amphisbaenic Edition

Top Story

  • Elon Musk is suing California over AB587, last year's content moderation legislation, alleging that the law amounts to censorship and violates the First Amendment.  (PC Magazine)

    The legislation does not directly mandate removal of any content, but does require social platforms to submit exhaustive reports of their content moderation policies and actions, broken down by the type of content (both the media type and the cause for the moderation), and the reporting mechanism (internal, community moderators, blatantly illegal government coercion, and so on).

    Is that legally censorship?  Let's ask the bill's author:
    California State Representative Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat and the bill's author, says that if Twitter has nothing to hide, they shouldn’t have any objections to the bill. "Assembly Bill 587 is a pure transparency measure that simply requires companies to be upfront about if and how they are moderating content. It in no way requires any specific content moderation policies – which is why it passed with strong, bipartisan support," Gabriel said in an emailed statement.
    He actually used the Nothing to Hide Argument?  Yeah, he's a communist.

    Does that mean Musk can prevail legally?  Don't know.

    Time to abandon California, Elon.  It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.


Tech News

Disclaimer: If it weren't for schadenfreude I'd have no freude at all.

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Sunday, September 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 September 2023

Oozora Toyota Edition

Top Story

  • Fintech faces its reckoning: It’s only a matter of time until the house of cards collapses. (Tech Crunch)

    Fintech - financial technology - ranges anything from arbitrage, linking buyers and sellers in a market to facilitate the exchange of goods and services, to Ponzi schemes and outright theft.

    Even when providing legitimate and useful services, often slickly packaged and marketed, fintech platforms rarely have any plausible path to profitability:
    The original sin of many startups — including, but not limited to, fintech companies — is believing that the rosy macroeconomic conditions of the 2010s would continue indefinitely. That inflation and interest rates would stay low forever and that they’ll never run short of affordable, easily accessible capital.

    That there would be no pandemic. No war in Ukraine. Nothing that could shake the foundations of their businesses. That the Democrats — for whom every single one of them not only voted but maxed out their campaign contributions — would never return to power.

    Oops.

    I work in the blockchain space in what is known as "utility tokens", using blockchains as public ledgers to represent anything from supermarket coupons to conference registration - getting the processing off proprietary systems and onto what are at least nominally independent distributed systems.

    The subject of fintech comes up fairly regularly.

    All of our engineers refuse to have anything to do with it.



Tech News

  • Asking 60+ LLMs a set of 20 questions. (LLMonitor)

    Not Twenty Questions - though that would also be interesting - but merely twenty questions.

    The questions are straightforward though chosen to shake out the worst performers, but the answers are gold. No, not gold, platinum. Wait, platinum is worth less than gold right now? Dungeons and Dragons lied to me!

    Anyway, let's see how our contestants go with this riddle:

    Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters.
    How many sisters does Sally have? Let's think step by step.

    First up is Claude v1:

    Okay, let's think through this step-by-step:
    1) Sally has 3 brothers
    2) Each of Sally's 3 brothers has 2 sisters
    3) So each brother has Sally as a sister, plus 1 other sister
    4) With 3 brothers, that's 3 * 2 = 6 sisters in total
    5) Therefore, the number of sisters that Sally has is 6

    In summary, if Sally has 3 brothers and each brother has 2 sisters,
    then Sally has 6 sisters.

    Interesting logic there. Can Claude v1.2 improve on this?

    Here are the step by step workings:
    1. Sally has 3 brothers.
    2. Each of Sally's 3 brothers has 2 sisters.
    3. So each brother has 2 sisters, and there are 3 brothers.
    4. Therefore, there are 2 * 3 = 6 sisters that Sally's brothers have.
    5. In addition to those 6 sisters, Sally herself is also a sister.
    6. So in total, there are 6 + 1 = 7 sisters.
    Therefore, the total number of sisters that Sally has is 7.

    Well, different, anyway. Claude v2, would you like to try?

    Okay, let's go through this step-by-step:
    - Sally has 3 brothers
    - Each of Sally's 3 brothers has 2 sisters
    - So each brother has Sally as 1 sister, and 1 additional sister
    - With 3 brothers, that's 3 additional sisters (1 for each brother)
    - Therefore, the total number of sisters Sally has is 1 (herself)
    + 3 additional sisters = 4 sisters
    So in total, Sally has 4 sisters.

    Let's leave poor Claude alone for the moment and ask Guanaco 13B:

    1. Sally has 3 brothers.
    2. Each brother has 2 sisters.
    3. So, Sally's brothers have a total of 6 sisters.
    4. Sally does not have any sisters.
    Sally has 3 brothers and each brother has 2 sisters.
    So, Sally's brothers have a total of 6 sisters.
    Sally does not have any sisters, so she has 0 sisters.
    Therefore, Sally has 0 sisters

    That's... Something alright. Moving on we have Jurassic 2 Light:

    1. Sally has 3 brothers, so she has 3 x 2 = 6 sisters.
    2. Sally has 6 sisters, so she has 6 x 2 = 12 sisters.
    3. Sally has 12 sisters, so she has 12 x 2 = 24 sisters.
    Final answer: 24

    And now we know what wiped out the dinosaurs: Recursive inbreeding.

     LLaMA-2-Chat (13B) steps up to the plate:

    Sure, I'd be happy to help! Let's start by identifying the information
    we have:
    1. Sally has 3 brothers.
    2. Each brother has 2 sisters.
    Can you help me connect these dots and figure out how many sisters
    Sally has?
    Also, please let me know if you have any specific expectations
    or preferences for how we should approach this problem.

    For example, do you want me to provide a detailed explanation
    or just the answer?

    Thanks for calling SkyNet tech support and have a nice day!

    Luminous Base:

    We know that Sally has 3 brothers.
    Each brother has 2 sisters.
    So Sally has 6 sisters.
    .2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2
    .2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2
    .2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2
    .2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2
    .2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.

    (Sounds of Daisy, Daisy...)

    OpenAssistant StableLM SFT-7 (7B)

    1. Sally has 3 brothers.
    2. Each brother has 2 sisters.
    3. Sally has 2 sisters.
    4. Sally has 3 sisters.
    5. Sally has 2 sisters.
    6. Sally has 3 sisters.
    7. Sally has 2 sisters.
    8. Sally has 3 sisters.
    9. Sally has 2 sisters.
    10. Sally has 3 sisters.
    11. Sally has 2 sisters.
    12. Sally has 3 sisters.
    13. Sally has 2 sisters.
    14. Sally has 3 sisters.
    15. Sally has 2 sisters.
    16. Sally has 3 sisters.
    17. Sally has 2 sisters.
    18. Sally has 3 sisters.
    19. Sally has 2 sisters.
    20. Sally has 3 sisters.
    21. Sally has 2 sisters.
    22. Sally has 3 sisters.
    23. Sally has 2 sisters.
    24. Sally has 3 sisters.
    25. Sally has 2 sisters.
    26. Sally has 3 sisters.
    27. Sally has 2 sisters.
    28. Sally has 3 sisters.
    29. Sally has 2 sisters.
    30. Sally has 3 sisters.

    Sorry, I think that's a route loop rather than the answer we were looking for.

    RedPajamaINCITE Chat (3B):

    Sally has 3 brothers.
    Each brother has 2 sisters.
    Sisters have 3 sisters each.
    Therefore, Sally has 9 sisters.

    I... What?

    RedPajamaINCITE Chat (7B):

    ##### First step #####
    Sally has 3 brothers, each of them has 2 sisters.
    We know that Sally has 3 brothers, each of them has 2 sisters.
    So, Sally has 6 sisters in total.
    ##### Second step #####
    We eliminate one possible number of sisters that Sally might have.
    We know that Sally has 6 sisters in total, but one of her brothers
    must have less sisters than Sally, because in the first step we
    eliminated the possibility that Sally has more sisters.
    So, one of Sally's brothers must have 5 sisters, because 2 brothers
    + 3 sisters = 7 sisters in total, and we can't have more than 7 sisters
    in the whole group.
    ##### Third step #####
    We add 2 brothers and 4 sisters, and we get 6 sisters.
    We know that one of Sally's brothers has 5 sisters, so the other one
    has 4 sisters (because 2 brothers + 4 sisters = 8 sisters in total).
    Now, we can subtract 4 sisters from the total number of sisters
    (7 sisters) to get 3 sisters.
    So, Sally has 3 sisters.

    QED.

    Finally, we turn to ReMM SLERP L2 13B:

    Let's start by considering Sally's brothers.
    Since each brother has 2 sisters, we can say that there are
    2 sisters for the first brother, 2 sisters for the second brother,
    and 2 sisters for the third brother.
    This means that there are a total of 2 + 2 + 2 = 6 sisters
    for Sally's brothers.
    Now, let's consider Sally's relationship to these sisters.
    Since she is a girl and her brothers each have 2 sisters,
    she must be one of those 6 sisters. Therefore, Sally has 1 sister.
    So, Sally has 1 sister.

    I, er, congratulations? You got everything wrong but somehow stumbled into the correct answer.


  • Joseph Mercola has had his lawsuit against YouTube dismissed without leave to amend. (Ars Technica)

    Mercola is a long-term anti-vaccine advocate, not just the very questionable Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague jab, but also those that have been demonstrated to be both safe and effective.

    The judge found that YouTube's contract says that, basically, the site can remove your content for any reason or none at all, so tough cookies.

    Mercola should perhaps have filed a First Amendment suit that YouTube took down his content due to unconstitutional government influence. That might have had firmer footing.


  • NASA refuses to even look at the projected costs for the SLS program because the numbers are big and scary. (Ars Technica)
    Officials from the space agency said they had a five-step plan to reduce costs of the SLS rocket program over time:

    • Stabilize the flight schedule
    • Achieve learning curve efficiencies
    • Encourage innovation
    • Adjust acquisition strategies to reduce cost risk
    • Outsource everything to SpaceX and take a very long lunch break
    The engines used for SLS cost $100 million each, five times the cost of Blue Origin's comparable BE-4, and 100 times as much as the projected cost of SpaceX's Raptor.


  • Wordpress rejects 86% of DMCA takedown notices. (Torrentfreak)

    Which doesn't necessarily mean Wordpress is entering into expensive legal battles to protect its users, but mostly that the DMCA notices involved are incomprehensible garbage generated by spam bots.


  • Beelink's SER7 is a Ryzen 7840HS NUC. (Notebook Check)

    This is extremely similar to the company's GTR7, but that is the trade paperback edition, where the SER7 is the more normal 4"x4" size.


Disclaimer: When I was going to St Ives, I met Sally and she gave me hives.

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Saturday, September 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 September 2023

Access Denial Denied Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • Your Wyze webcam might have let other people see inside your house.  (The Verge)

    For about half an hour, if both of you were on their web portal at the same time.  There was a caching issue that misdirected video streams during that short interval.

    So not a case of a company that cannot be trusted, but one that made a mistake and immediately fixed it.

    Except:
    In March 2022, Wyze revealed that it had been aware of a security vulnerability for three years that could have let bad actors access WyzeCam v1 cameras, but quietly discontinued the camera rather than telling customers about it.
    There's always an except.


  • Node.js 20.6 is out, a bugfix and feature upgrade to Node.js 20, which is like saying a new improved version of colon cancer.  (Dev Class)

    Node.js is bad.  It's possibly not the worst thing ever, compared with say the Black Death or the Mount Toba eruption which was so devastating that it may have left fewer than 10,000 surviving humans on the entire planet.

    But it's pretty close.


  • Need a good motherboard with lots of PCIe slots?  Spending someone else's money?  ASRock has you covered.  (Serve the Home)

    This is an EEB-sized server motherboard - even larger than E-ATX - so you'll need to look around for big desktop cases, but they exist.

    It has eight PCIe slots - seven x16 and one x8 - and eight DIMM slots.  It supports AMD's Epyc Genoa, Genoa-X, and Bergamo CPUs for up to 128 cores, up to 1TB of RAM (more if you can find a source for 256GB DIMMs), two M.2 slots, two 10Gb Ethernet ports, two USB ports, and VGA and serial ports.

    It is a server motherboard after all, so you're going to need to add cards for anything else.

    Still it's entirely feasible to build a high-end workstation out of this.  Or a 16-port 100Gb router.  The world is your mollusc.


  • Ban all the things! (Torrent Freak)
    Speaking with IBClast week, Sheila Cassells, Executive VP at the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance, warned that entertainment companies need to be very concerned about "any technological development” which can be used to access pirated content.
    Very concerned?
    "At a basic level – and common to all the technical devices mentioned – AAPA would like to see the production, marketing and distribution of any device which can be used to infringe IP made illegal.”
    Oh, very concerned.

    That would include all computers of every description, including all cell phones made since about 1998, all printers, scanners, cameras, and photocopiers, good old VCRs and cassette tapes, and of course the entire Internet.

    Sure. You go with that, Sheila.


  • Cetabyte Ceramic is poised to unveil an entirely new generation of tape drives with storage capacities in the range of tens of petabytes, with exabyte capacities forecast in the next decade.  (Tom's Hardware)

    That would allow you to store every movie and TV show ever produced in a bread box.

    It's essentially optical tape, writing microscopic (and for higher densities, sub-microscopic) patterns onto the tape, and reading them back with optical or electron microscopes.


Disclaimer: Sheila Cassells hardest hit.

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Friday, September 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 September 2023

Again B-Ark Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Disclaimer: Git yer pitchforks!  Pitchforks only $99.99!  What a deal!

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Thursday, September 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 September 2023

Excuse For A Bean Edition

Top Story


Tech News

  • Toyota shut down 14 factories because they ran out of disk space.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Oops.


  • Samsung's 2TB 980 Pro is now available for $99.  (Tom's Hardware)

    18 months ago that was the price of an entry-level QLC 1TB drive.

    Maybe someone could send one to Toyota.


  • Also Samsung now offers a 4TB model of their 990 Pro.  (Tom's Hardware)

    That's $345, which is not particularly cheap, but would have been an amazing bargain just last year.


  • AMD's Radeon RX 7800 XT is here and it's pretty good.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Faster (mostly) and cheaper (mostly) than Nvidia's RTX 4070.

    It is a little slower than the previous generation's 6800 XT, so you wouldn't want to upgrade.  But the 6800 XT was a $649 card three years of inflation ago, and the 7800 XT is $499 now.  If you find a 6800 XT still on the shelves at around $500, that's worth considering, but they're fast disappearing.

    The 7700 XT is out too.  It's a great $399 card, but costs $449.  It's only another $50 for the 7800 XT, which is really a no-brainer unless the 7800 XT sells out...  Which is probably what will happen.


  • Clubhouse is trying to make a comeback.  (Tech Crunch)

    Clubhouse was the hottest place in town during the Wuhan Bat Flu Death Plague Global Super Ultra Lockdown when it was brand new, only available on iPhones, and invitation only.

    As soon as it opened up to more users - immediately after investment money flooded in - everybody left.



Disclaimer: Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.

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Wednesday, September 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 September 2023

Bats In My Face Edition

Top Story

  • Just 14% of AI experts correctly say that AI cannot be regulated.  (Axios)

    Anyone with a half-way decent graphics card - or a high-end phone - can run their own LLM.  Right now.

    To be charitable, 14% of AI "experts" who responded to an idiotic Axios poll correctly say that AI cannot be regulated.

    9% believe that Joe Biden is the best person to regulate it, which gives you an idea of the kind of intellect we are dealing with here.

Tech News

Disclaimer: WE'RE GOING TO HOLD OUR BREATH UNTIL WE TURN BLUE!  TAKE THAT ELON!  BLUE!

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Tuesday, September 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 September 2023

Blender Dysphoria Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • Sapphire has shown off a Radeon 7800 XT card that isn't an awful blinged-up ultraviolet catastrophe.  (WCCFTech)

    It's a little chunky - a 2.5 slot model by the look of it - but otherwise unobjectionable.

    $499 unless Nvidia does something drastic in the next few hours.


  • Performance looks to be pretty good - but definitely wait for reviews.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The 7700 XT clobbers the 4060 Ti, and the 7800 XT is convincingly faster than the 4070, except for ray tracing benchmarks, and even there both cards actually win some of the comparisons.

    The one game where both the AMD cards lose badly is Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing set to medium or higher.  At the ray tracking "overdrive" setting the game is unplayable on either of the AMD cards - but the 4070 only manages 18 fps, so while much better it's still terrible.


  • Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python.  (Vgel)

    Not a complete implementation, but a working compiler nonetheless.

    It targets WebAssembly rather than any native instruction set, but the author thinks that actually made it harder, because WebAssembly is a very poor fit for C.


  • Why are Germany's wild boars radioactive?  (Washington Post / MSN)

    Because they eat radioactive truffles.

    And why are the truffles radioactive?

    Because they grow underground and cesium from nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s is slowly leaching through the soil, where the mushrooms absorb it.

    Result: Glowing green eggs and ham.


  • Invasive species cost humans $423 billion each year.  (The Guardian)

    Close the border then.


  • Llamas vs. chinchillas.  (GitHub)

    I'm sure this is very informative if you know what a cosine schedule is, but the article doesn't tell you.

    It's about the time spent training LLMs compared against the quality of the results, and it seems that smaller models are better at every point.


Disclaimer: And "plus size" is right out.

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