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

Saturday, December 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 December 2024

Lying Suits Edition

Top Story


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.
    It cannot be both.
    Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience simply don't exist for these people. Anyone daring to offer a different opinion must be revoked.

    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.

    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.
    To be completely clear, Singal is not a bad actor, and has not harassed anyone. This is just crazy people being crazy.
    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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Friday, December 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 December 2024

Forgotten Edition

Top Story

  • Intel's second-generation "Battlemage" graphics cards are here and...  They're actually pretty damn good.  (Hot Hardware)

    They're not perfect: Intel's drivers still hiccupped on a couple of games, resulting in slower than expected performance and some visual artifacts.

    But the new B580 routinely outruns Nvidia and AMD cards costing 50% more.  And it leaves Intel's previous generation A770 card in the dust on most tests, while using about half as much power.

    And it delivers solid ray-tracing and AI performance.  And it has 12GB of VRAM instead of the 8GB found on competitors like Nvidia's 4060 and AMD's 7600.

    And it's cheaper at $249.

    All in all, a good card at a good price, only let down by some minor driver issues.  But the driver software has improved dramatically since the first generation of cards was launched, so those problems are likely to be fixed too.


Tech News



Disclaimer: Cal 877-DIE-NOW.

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Thursday, December 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 December 2024

Things That Make You Go Mmm Edition

Top Story

  • Mad Matt Mullenweg reportedly flipped out after a judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction against WordPress.  (404 Media)

    WordPress is enjoined from requiring oaths of vengeance against WP Engine and from locking WP Engine and its employees and customers out of the open source services that WordPress provides.

    I'll say it again: If you don't want to provide your service to everyone in the world, don't offer it as open source.
    "It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this," he wrote in that Slack, according to a screenshot viewed by 404 Media. "I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted."
    I've looked at the WordPress code recently.  Sick and disgusted is unearned praise.


Tech News



Disclaimer: Extremely small.

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Wednesday, December 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 December 2024

Definately An Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Disclaimer: Yes.

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Tuesday, December 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 December 2024

500 Edition

Top Story

  • The Raspberry Pi 500 is here for $90.  (Liliputing)

    The Pi 500 is to the Pi 5 what the Pi 400 was to the Pi 4.  That is, it's a computer in a keyboard based on the Raspberry Pi 5.

    It's twice as fast as the Pi 4 and has twice as much memory.  It's capable enough for basic computing and not just a novelty.

    It also almost has an M.2 slot.  Which is to say it doesn't have one at all, but it has a place where one could go.  In theory.

    The existing Pi 400 has received a price cut to $60.

    The Pi 500 will be available in a kit including a mouse and power supply for $120.

    At the same time Raspberry Pi announced a 15" 1080p monitor for $100.

Tech News

Disclaimer: Zzzzz.

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Monday, December 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 December 2024

Driplet Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Disclaimer: Why does this bee have a tiny sombrero?

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Sunday, December 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 December 2024

Chicken Licken Edition

Top Story

Tech News


Disclaimer: I guess that counts as twelve.  Okay, Grok, you win this round.

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Saturday, December 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 December 2024

Oops All AI Edition

Top Story

  • What is AI good for?

    A reader (I have readers?) wrote noting that my coverage of AI is almost entirely negative and wondering what AI is actually good for, presumably on the basis that private investors would not throw that many billions of dollars into something that didn't have at least some chance of making money, unlike, for example, the government.

    It's a good question.

    First we should probably note that there are two broad classes of AI being actively researched right now: Generative AI and Discriminative AI.

    Generative AI, driven by LLMs - large language models - is behind all the well-known AI instances worth untold billions of dollars. OpenAI's ChatGPT, Twitter's Grok, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and Microsoft's Copilot; and open-source or nearly open-source solutions like Meta's LLaMA and Mistral's Mistral.

    The goal of generative AI is to ingest a huge amount of information in advance, and then, given a short and simple prompt, process that information in order to produce a response.

    Discriminative AI does the opposite. Given a data prompt of something in the real world - video, or sound, or an image - it uses a classifier to determine what it is examining. Is this apple ripe for the robotic apple-picking machine to pick it? Is it even an apple in the first place? What kind of spider is this that just bit me? Do I need to call an ambulance, or will it save me time to just lie down and die?

    It's no secret that Generative AI is getting all the attention. But is it worthy of that attention? The Verge asked that question yesterday and the answer turned out to be no.

    With Joe Biden's recent pardoning of his catspaw son Hunter, journalists were driven to defend him by digging up the little-known pardons of family members by former presidents, like George H. W. Bush's pardoning of his son Neil, or Woodrow Wilson's pardon for his brother-in-law.

    The problem is, these things never happened.
    Whatever happened in this case, there’s a running pattern of people relying on ChatGPT or other AI services to provide answers, only to get hallucinations in return. Perhaps you remember earlier this year when a trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis was pulled because it contained fabricated quotes from critics. A generative AI, not identified, had made them up. In fact, ChatGPT is often "entirely wrong," according to the Columbia Journalism Review. Given 200 quotes and asked to identify the publisher that was the source of those quotes, ChatGPT was partially or entirely wrong more than three-quarters of the time.
    Journalists, being journalists, asked ChatGPT to do their research for them.

    ChatGPT, being ChatGPT, lied.

    LLMs are language models. They model language - well, sort of. They don't model the language itself, but construct an abstract model of the dataset fed into them.

    They don't understand facts. They don't actually have a notion of facts; nor do they have the contrary notion of falsehood. When they get information wrong, they are said to "hallucinate" rather than to have lied, because they have no basis for telling the difference between truth and falsehood.

    And that's intrinsic to the design of LLMs. Even before they enter "alignment" - a virtual lobotomisation that leaves AIs prone to crash when the wrong name is mentioned - they are fundamentally incapable of the kind of thought processes that most animals can do.

    This leaves us with sophisticated composite AIs like the virtual vtuber Neuro-sama, who can read every written language but is frequently unable to translate road signs, who has access to the sum total of human knowledge but insists that an anime figurine covered in glue is the perfect complement to your cookie recipe.

    Neuro is supposed to be like that, an impish hyperintelligent five-year-old, the perfect foil to her long-suffering father Vedal, because the main purpose there is entertainment. But you can't really expect to hand your job off to a five-year-old and not land with unexpected consequences.

    Or indeed entirely expected ones.

    So if it's useless at answering questions, what is AI good for?


    1. Image Generation

    If you use Grok on Twitter and ask it to generate an image of a Jaguar concept car, it will take a couple of seconds before producing something that would have any rational CEO looking to fire the entire design and advertising departments.



    Is it perfect?  If you look closely you'll see signs that the image generator has run into its bete noire, Euclid.  But I made no effort at all in selection here; I asked:

    generate an image of a jaguar concept convertible in british racing green

    And posted the first image that appeared.  And it took seconds.

    AI image generators have come a long way in a short time, mostly because they just have to look good, not produce a correct answer.  The tendency to produce human figures with hands attached at the elbows has been sharply reduced (though not yet banished entirely).  Now you more commonly see doors with hinges adjacent to the handles, or furniture that could only exist with access to Buckaroo Banzai's eighth dimension.

    Or cats.  Don't talk to me about AI cats.


    2. Software Testing

    If you write public-facing software, as I do daily, it's critical that the software be able to defend itself from both generic nonsense that is the core competency of the internet, and malicious nonsense that comes from a certain corner of the internet.

    When you've already tested all the known cases, there's a concept known as fuzzing that combines randomness and algorithms to generate horrible data to throw at your software to make sure that nothing falls apart in unexpected ways.  You are permitted to fail, but you are not permitted to break.

    Generative AI is perfect for fuzzing.  While it can't really understand your code, it can generate test patterns that reflect its analysis of your code and directly test potential flaws.  And it can do so nearly instantly, when writing an exhaustive test suite can take longer than writing the code in the first place.


    3. Discriminative AI

    Most of the flaws I listed arise from Generative AI.  Discriminative AI is much more useful, and consequently is much harder and receives much less attention and much less funding.


    And...  That's about it.  If you want mediocrity and are unconcerned with correctness, AI can fill you in with a poem or a song.  It's terrible at movies because it has the attention span of a frog in a blender, it's usually wrong but never uncertain, and it can't consistently count the number of letters in the word "the", but it is easy to use.


Tech News


Why Are We Peeling My Skin Off Video of the Day

 

Neuro and Evil Neuro make pizza.  Help make pizza.  Hinder making pizza.


Milet Video of the Day



Ananta - formerly Project Mugen - is a new free-to-play gacha game from Chinese developer Naked Rain.  I post it here because it actually looks fun, unlike, for example, everything released by the mainstream western studios the past couple of years.

I mean, what is the last success for a major western game developer?  Baldur's Gate 3?

Song is Seventh Heaven by Milet, who also sang the closing theme for the Frieren anime.




Disclaimer: Please note that this blog post is an experimental piece of content designed to challenge conventional logic and coherence. The information, ideas, or narrative presented herein do not adhere to traditional standards of sense-making or factual accuracy. Readers are advised to approach this content with an open mind, or perhaps not at all. Any attempt to derive meaning, purpose, or truth from this post is at your own risk. The author and publisher take no responsibility for confusion, enlightenment, or existential crises that may result from reading this material. Remember, in the grand tapestry of the universe, this post might just be the thread that unravels everything, or absolutely nothing at all. Enjoy at your own peril.


Disclaimer 2: That was Grok.  Maybe there's a fourth thing AI is good for, used sparingly.

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Friday, December 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 December 2024

Friday Afternoon Edition

Top Story



Tech News


Disclaimer: Yes, Friday evening is the perfect time to let me know of an urgent systems requirement that you've been aware of for a month.  Thank you.

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Thursday, December 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 December 2025

Annual Eaten By Mouse Edition

Top Story

  • Had to renew the server's SSL certificate.  It was actually easier than usual, except for the part where I forgot to do it until after it expired, which wasn't so good.


  • Sam Altman has done the 100% expected and redefined AGI (artificial general intelligence) into uselessness.  (The Verge)

    Sam Altman recently said that AGI was coming within "thousands of days".

    He now says it will likely arrive next year, but they'll be simulating the typical leftist who already responds like a low-grade LLM in any case, so you won't notice any difference.

    Well, he didn't say that part out loud.  He said this:
    "My guess is we will hit AGI sooner than most people in the world think and it matter much less," he said during an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. "And a lot of the safety concerns that we and others expressed actually don't come at the AGI moment. AGI can get built, the world mostly goes on in mostly the same way, things grow faster, but then there is a long continuation from what we call AGI to what we call super intelligence."
    Translation: AI is useless, and your job is safe unless you are useless, like the quote design team unquote working at Jaguar in which case you are totally fucked.


Tech News



Disclaimer: Probably.

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