• The Gateway 14.1 Ultra Slim Notebook is $279 from Walmart.  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, Cowputers is still around though now it's a Walmart house brand.
  
  Anyway, this model has the 11th generation i5-1135G7 - only a little slower than the laptop I used all last year while moving house, a 1080p IPS display, 16GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD.  (The RAM is soldered to the motherboard, though nothing says that anywhere.)
  
  And the Four Essential Keys.
  
  The 2022 update dropped the four essential keys, and is also significantly more expensive, so don't buy that one.
  
  The screen isn't high-end and the trackpad is a bit finicky, but it's $279.
  
  And it's blue.

• Nvidia is using neural texture compression to save memory on its graphics cards.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Or they could just install more memory.
  
  
  
• Doubling the RAM on a Radeon 5600 XT more than doubled performance on high-resolution graphics benchmarks.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  If you try to do this on an Nvidia card, it won't work.  They don't want you making your $600 card run like their $1600 card.
  
  
  
• NEO Semiconductor has unveiled 3D X-RAM, which is RAM but 3D.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  3D stacking saved flash memory, which was becoming unreliable as memory cell sizes shrank.  Cell sizes are now larger than they used to be, but they stack them over a hundred deep so the chip capacity is much larger as well.
  
  The plan here is to initially stack eight DRAM storage cells on top of each other to produce a 128 gigabit memory chip by 2024.  Which is next year.  The largest chips currently in production are 24 gigabit.
  
  That would mean a laptop with two DIMM slots could be upgraded to 512GB of RAM, and a four-slot desktop to a terabyte.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Is the Crucial P3 Plus any good?  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's okay for desktop use.  Speeds are very good until the drive fills up, whereupon they plummet to spinning disk levels.
  
  The Team MP34 is probably a better bet.  Its peak transfer rates are lower, but it retains that speed even when full.

Posted by: normal at Monday, May 08 2023 09:49 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Sam P at Tuesday, May 09 2023 01:21 AM (51gsz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 09 2023 11:24 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, May 11 2023 03:35 AM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 11 2023 07:43 AM (BMUHC)

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• Those monthly unique reader numbers from the story on Vice's demise yesterday were thousands.  I thought they had to be, but it didn't say so.
  
  So those sites are dying but not actually dead.  Not yet.
  
  
  
• Same goes for OpenAI: Google and OpenAI are Walmarts besieged by fruit stands.   (Tech Crunch)
  

  GPT-4 is like a Walmart. No one actually wants to go there, so the company makes damn sure there’s no other option.

  But customers are starting to wonder, why am I walking through 50 aisles of junk to buy a few apples? Why am I hiring the services of the largest and most general-purpose AI model ever created if all I want to do is exert some intelligence in matching the language of this contract against a couple hundred other ones? At the risk of torturing the metaphor (to say nothing of the reader), if GPT-4 is the Walmart you go to for apples, what happens when a fruit stand opens in the parking lot?

  And the fruit stand's apples are free.  And they don't call you a racist.
  
  OpenAI had its chance.  It's done.
  
  
  

Tech News

• OpenAI's regulatory woes are just beginning.  (The Verge)
  
  This story has it exactly wrong, of course.  OpenAI's only hope for fending off smaller and less retarded commercial rivals is to have the industry regulated within an inch of its life with layer upon layer of incomprehensible and infeasibly expensive red tape.
  
  Good plan, except that it's not the commercial rivals that are eating OpenAI's lunch, it's open source software.
  
  
  
• That article was about the EU's efforts, but the Biden Administration is all-in on regulatory capture too.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though like everything else they do, it will fail utterly.
  
  
  
• RedisRaft is a strongly consistent Redis cluster.  (GitHub)
  
  Redis has had replication for a long time, but this is a full-on clustering solution.  Once an update is confirmed, the data won't be lost unless more than half of the nodes in the cluster die at the same time.
  
  There are a few Redis commands that aren't supported, but the bulk of the functionality works just as with a single Redis node.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 08 2023 01:26 AM (r9O5h)

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• Vice Media is preparing for a fire sale to existing investors including George Soros, at a valuation of $400 million, down 93% from its 2017 high of $5.7 billion.  (Variety)
  
  Expect things to get much, much worse at Vice, very quickly.  I sometimes link to their Motherboard tech news site - formerly separate, now just a subsection of the main site.  I doubt that will survive long, or if it does, that it will have any content worth reading.
  
  I might still link to it, but as a cautionary tale.
  
  There is something very, very interesting in that article though: A chart showing the readership numbers (unique visitors) of a lot of these "new media" companies.
  
  The numbers are miserable.  Every company on that list is fucked.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Crypto mining is racist, says the Biden White House.  (Engadget)
  
  They want to add a federal excise on electricity use for crypto mining, because racism.
  
  
  
• New York Attorney General Letitia James wants to regulate the crypto industry, calling it "a wretched hive of scum and villainy".  (Bloomberg)
  
  She's not wrong, she's just an asshole.
  
  Actual quote:

  "Millions of investors have lost hundreds of billions in the value of their cryptocurrency investments because of rampant fraud, including market manipulation, hacking, and opaque business practices," James said.

  Is she right?  We checked crypto news site Web3 Is Going Great:
  
  WallStreetBets coin tanks 90% after insider dumps holding.
  Former OpenSea exec convicted of fraud and money laundering in NFT insider trading case.
  
  Both dated May 3.  So as I noted above, she's not wrong.  I don't expect the resultant laws to be anything but garbage though, because she is still an asshole.
  
  
  
• When "free forever" means "free for four months".  (Zulip)
  
  Mattermost - a Slack competitor, which is to say, a chat board for businesses - had a free plan for its online service that they promised would be forever and now isn't, thanks to the strongest economy ever.
  
  So you should move to Zulip, which will be free forever.
  
  To be fair, they do explain architectural reasons why they are able to offer services more cheaply.  Also, both platforms are open source and you can run them yourself.  Mattermost is even bundled into GitLab, which is also free to download and run on your own servers.  (But does eat 8GB of RAM these days.)
  
  
  
• Releasing 3B and 7B RedPajama-INCITE family of models including base, instruction-tuned & chat models.  (Together)
  
  What does any of that mean?
  
  RedPajama is one of the flock of open source Large Language Models stemming from Facebook's release of its own LLaMA.  It's very much like ChatGPT, but it doesn't constantly tell you you're racist unless you want it to.
  
  And you don't need to pay for it.  It's free to download, and can run on any PC with a decent graphics card.  Where by "decent" we don't mean a $1600 RTX 4090, but an RTX 2070, which you can find second-hand for under $200.  And will also work to play games.
  
  
  
• Or an RTX 4060 Ti, which is due out soon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though you might be better off with a 3060 Ti, or even a 3060, as Nvidia has taken the opportunity to cut memory bandwidth in half.
  
  
  
• Some clown edited 90,000 Wikipedia articles to replace "comprised of" with "composed of".  (Hacker News)
  
  Surprisingly, he still can't get laid.
  
  
  
• Mojo is a compiled superset of Python.  (The Register)
  
  Or rather, it will be some day.  Right now it lacks a lot of core Python features, and if you try to use it as a faster Python rather than its own language, you will have a bad time.
  
  
  
• An overview of BlueSky's federation architecture.  (BlueSkyWeb)
  
  This is drivel.  The company is fucked.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, May 06 2023 06:30 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, May 07 2023 12:41 AM (obo9H)

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• OpenAI is both irrrelevant and fucked.  (SemiAnalysis)
  
  This is allegedly a leaked document from Google, but whether that's true or not the analysis is accurate.  It explains in detail how OpenAI went in a matter of weeks from a tech darling - a purveyor of complete crap, yes, but that doesn't matter to the investors - to utterly irrelevant.
  
  Free software that you can not only run, but train, on consumer-level hardware is now nearly as capable as ChatGPT and free of the biases OpenAI cripples its own software with.
  
  This is exactly what befell OpenAI's Dall-E image generation AI.  In two years it went from being the market leader to not even being thought about, mostly because of OpenAI's mishandling.

• Google has announced the Pixel Fold.  (The Verge)
  
  It's a $170 7" tablet that costs $1700 because it folds.
  
  
  
• Corsair has announced the PCIe 5 MP700 SSD.  (AnandTech)
  
  Problem is, you can get two PCIe 4 SSDs and put them in RAID-0, and they will be faster, cheaper, and give you twice as much storage.
  
  
  
• A look at the Beelink SER6 Pro, which is the current version of their AMD NUC rather than the new version with the crazy price.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Now that Ryzen 7000 NUCs have been announced, Ryzen 6000 NUCs are actually available.  At least Intel ships on time.  Sort of.
  
  
  
• Check for integer overflows.  (Mayer)
  
  Or someone might steal $20 million worth of imaginary JPEGs.
  
  
  
• Speaking of imaginary JPEGs and AI image generators you'll never guess what Amnesty International has been up to.  (The Guardian)
  
  Or maybe you will.

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 05 2023 09:34 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 06 2023 01:27 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 06 2023 02:10 AM (BMUHC)

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• Amazon's Prime video streaming service managed to cut its server bill by 90%.  (Prime Video Tech)
  
  By moving away from AWS managed services.
  
  Where the A in AWS is Amazon.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AMD has announced its Ryzen 7040U laptop processor range.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The leaks were 100% accurate, so all we learned today is that the base model Z1 used in the Asus ROG Ally is a 7540U.
  
  
  
• Framework announced it's new AMD laptop models.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I mean, the already did, but they couldn't talk about the specifics before because the CPUs hadn't been officially announced.
  
  One drawback compared to the Intel models is that one of the four swappable ports doesn't support video - you can only have three external monitors.
  
  On the Intel models you can have four external monitors but that shuts off the laptop's own screen.
  
  Also, it doesn't have the four essential keys.
  
  
  
• Orange Pi, a company that makes a cheap board to compete with the Raspberry Pi, announced its own competitor to the Steam Deck and the Asus ROG Ally, powered by a Ryzen 7840U.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Can't get a decent sub-10" tablet, but there's a swarm of these things.
  
  
  
• AI can't replace human writers.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I think you'll find that it can.  The one thing ChatGPT and systems like it are good at is writing mediocre fiction.  It doesn't necessarily know that it is doing that, of course, but neither do Hollywood writers.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, May 04 2023 10:19 PM (fxDKh)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 05 2023 12:59 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, May 05 2023 03:50 AM (fxDKh)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, May 05 2023 04:27 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 05 2023 10:57 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 05 2023 11:12 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 05 2023 11:45 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 05 2023 11:55 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 05 2023 05:58 PM (PiXy!)

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• Reader Rick C pointed out that the Liliputing article on the new Beelink Ryzen NUCs has been updated to note that those absurdly high prices are just placeholders on Aliexpress.
  
  Good.
  
  The current generation Beelink SER 6 is available for $520 with 32GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD - and it's not much slower - so a $1299 base price for the new model seems slightly excessive.

Top Story

• AMD's consumer chip sales are down even more than Intel's - by a massive 65%. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unlike Intel, though, AMD's other divisions - servers, gaming, and embedded - saw pretty solid performance, with gaming down slightly and embedded up by 163% thanks mostly to the Xilinx acquisition.
  
  They still lost money for the quarter, but $140 million compared to Intel's $2.8 billion in red ink.
  
  Strongest economy ever.

• Part of the reason was that AMD's new mainstream laptop chips were delayed from March to May, pushing those sales out of the quarter entirely. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These chips are featured in a ton of new products, from the Beelink desktop mentioned above, to the Asus ROG Ally and an infinite number of other Steam Deck clones, to the new AMD model laptop from Framework.
  
  But they didn't have any, so they couldn't sell any.
  
  
  
• There's a bug in AMD's TPM security module which lets hackers compromise your secret keys if (checks notes) they have complete access to the insides of your computer. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is almost the equivalent of having a door lock that is easily picked - but only from the inside.
  
  Not quite, but almost.
  
  
  
• Samsung has banned its staff from using ChatGPT and similar pieces of crap. (CNBC)
  
  Not mentioned in this article is that Samsung caught three leaks of proprietary data in the space of a month, all traceable to use of ChatGPT.
  
  
  
• Twitter hiccupped briefly. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  You might have had to log in again.
  
  
  
• The gang's all here: Linode also has a datacenter in Sydney. Since 2019, apparently. Guess I wasn't paying attention.
  
  So that's Vultr (who were first), Aussie company Binary Lane, DigitalOcean, Linode, and SSDNodes on the bargain side of things. Also AWS competes in the $5 server market with its Lightsail range. For Amazon it's likely a loss leader to pull people into its more expensive offerings.
  
  I'm reconfiguring stuff right now to work better and save me some money. I was starting to do that last year then the whole buying-a-house-and-moving-three-hundred-miles thing happened, and everything else got put on hold.
  
  I also have new servers for the websites - a pair of AMD 5950X systems with 128GB of RAM each - and they'll be going into production in the next few weeks.
  
  
  
• Vice Media, parent of the soon-to-be-defunct Waypoint, is looking pretty defunct itself. (New York Times)
  
  The entire company is looking at bankruptcy after trying and failing to find a buyer.
  
  Lol.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 04 2023 12:22 AM (BMUHC)

2 Vice, another scummy media company, about to go out of business?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 04 2023 12:28 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: furball321 at Thursday, May 04 2023 06:21 AM (vVbbK)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 04 2023 06:37 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 05 2023 04:38 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: furball321 at Friday, May 05 2023 09:42 AM (vVbbK)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 05 2023 10:47 AM (BMUHC)

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• Geoffey Hinton, the quote godfather of AI unquote who previously boasted that his work would eradicate the need for radiologists has quit Google so that he can warn the world about the dangers of, well, Geoffrey Hinton.  (Insane)
  
  What the dangers are, he has not actually specified.  Radiologists are not notably a dying breed.
  
  
  
• What are notably a dying breed are crappy internet news sites like Waypoint.  (Culture)
  
  BuzzFeed News is dead and that actually reported stories on occasion, so it's no surprised that Waypoint, a part of the sprawling Vice clusterfuck founded on the notion that games journalists spend too much time talking about games - and are basically all fascists anyway - is shutting down in a month with all hands reported lost.
  
  And there was much rejoicing.

• What's that, Lassie?  I have two other cloud servers that I forgot about that just renewed for a year?
  
  SSDNodes.  Cheap, not top-tier performance, but actually pretty reliable.  One of them had been up for 632 days until I upgraded it to Ubuntu 22.04 just now.
  
  And when I say cheap, I mean less per year than DigitalOcean charges per month.  Which is why I didn't notice the bill right away.
  
  The one flaw is that you can't do a custom install so getting ZFS and LXD working is a bit of a pain.  Also they seem to run local storage and not redundant network storage so if your host node fails, your server goes down and so do your backups.  Hence ZFS and LXD which make it easy to take snapshot backups and ship them off site.
  
  
  
• IBM is planning to replace 30% of administrative staff with AI over the next five years.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Since at least 30% of administrative staff do absolutely nothing, this plan seems viable.
  
  
  
• If you want to fire 30% of your own administrative staff, MLC LLM, a chatbot based on Vicuna-7B-V1.1, which is in turn based on Meta's (that is, Facebook's) open-source LLaMA, is small enough to run on a phone if that phone is reasonably capable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not hosted on a server and accessed from your phone, but the entire thing running on your phone with no other resources required.
  
  Or you could just find the 30% doing nothing and fire them and call it a day.
  
  
  
• The Asus Zenbook S13 OLED 2023 is available with 32GB of RAM.  (The Verge)
  
  And it has one of those 2880x1800 OLED screens.  They're ubiquitous, but they're actually good.
  
  CPU is an i7-1355U which only has two P cores (and eight E cores), so it's kind of meh but not terrible.  No 4EK but you pays your money and you takes your chances.
  
  
  
• Beelink has two new NUCs with AMD's latest 7840HS and 7940HS CPUs.  (Liliputing)
  
  These will have some of the best CPU and graphics performance of anything this size, but the pricing - they start at $1299 without memory, storage, or an operating system - is ridiculous.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 02 2023 11:43 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 02 2023 11:51 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 03 2023 03:21 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 03 2023 06:46 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: furball321 at Wednesday, May 03 2023 01:52 PM (vVbbK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 03 2023 03:19 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: furball321 at Thursday, May 04 2023 06:16 AM (vVbbK)

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• We interviewed the quote engineer unquote Google fired for saying its AI had come to life.  (Futurism)
  
  Blake Lemoine, the "engineer" in question, was fired for violating NDA.
  
  Being a gibbering imbecile is just icing on the cake.
  
  
  
• OpenAI CTO Mira Murati on shepherding her own gibbering imbecile.  (Security Week)
  
  I think the people who really stand to lose their jobs here are the ones who write about AI, who could all be replace by a TRS-80 Model 1 Level 1.

  We’re far from the point of having a safe, reliable, aligned AGI system. Our path to getting there has a couple of important vectors. From a research standpoint, we’re trying to build systems that have a robust understanding of the world similarly to how we do as humans. Systems like GPT-3 initially were trained only on text data, but our world is not only made of text, so we have images as well and then we started introducing other modalities. The other angle has been scaling these systems to increase their generality. With GPT-4, we’re dealing with a much more capable system, specifically from the angle of reasoning about things. This capability is key. If the model is smart enough to understand an ambiguous direction or a high-level direction, then you can figure out how to make it follow this direction. But if it doesn’t even understand that high-level goal or high-level direction, it’s much harder to align it. It’s not enough to build this technology in a vacuum in a lab. We really need this contact with reality, with the real world, to see where are the weaknesses, where are the breakage points, and try to do so in a way that’s controlled and low risk and get as much feedback as possible.

  The vapidity is astonishing.

• A quick look inside the Asus Flashstor 6.  (Serve the Home)
  
  You can install the drives without even a screwdriver, and it looks like the CPU is just fast enough to handle 10Gb Ethernet rates from a RAID-5 array.  This model doesn't have 10GbE so it maxes out at about 50% CPU load.
  
  
  
• A quick look at the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023).  (Notebook Check)
  
  The is a great laptop except of course it lacks the Four Essential Keys.  I was looking at the model with 4060 graphics before settling for a much cheaper HP that had those keys.  The version reviewed here, though, has an RTX 4090 which some might consider overkill for a 14" laptop.
  
  
  
• Maybe you should store passwords in plaintext.  (Qword)
  
  I mean, no, you shouldn't, and if anyone seriously suggests that you should set them on fire, but what this article is actually discussing is the nature of incentives for technology workers, and why all large organisations suck.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Tuesday, May 02 2023 01:51 AM (UiCgU)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 02 2023 04:51 AM (BMUHC)

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• Broadcast TV here I come, right back where I started from: The future of streaming services looks an awful lot like the 1950s, except for one small difference.  (The Verge)
  
  We've seen that promise of a bright future, made it real, and killed it.

• Microsoft has been quietly - very quietly - supporting right-to-repair legislation.  (Grist)
  
  Apple is the Wicked Witch here.  Microsoft has actually made small improvements, like user-replaceable storage in many of its Surface tablets.  Apple meanwhile is at war with its own authorised repair centers, requiring them to sign NDAs forbidding them from even mentioning the existence of the NDA.
  
  
  
• AMD's Radeon 7800 graphics cards will have 16GB of RAM.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There's been a lot of fuss recently over the fact that 8GB of VRAM - as found on the previous generation's 3070 Ti - is no longer enough to run some new games at full resolution.  Performance isn't just a little bit slower; in some cases the 3070 Ti is slower than the much cheaper 3060 because that card has 12GB of VRAM.
  
  So AMD is making a fuss about its high-mid-range cards having 16GB, as much VRAM as Nvidia's 4080 at half the price.
  
  The Radeon 7700 will have 12GB of VRAM like the 6700 - the article doesn't mention this but knowing AMD's RDNA3 cache design, 48MB of cache means 12GB of VRAM.  12GB is probably fine for a low-mid-range card like this.
  
  
  

• The AOKZOE A1 Pro has AMD's latest Ryzen 7840U and up to 64GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD.  (Liliputing)
  
  That should make it close to twice as fast on the CPU side as my new laptop and more than twice as fast on the GPU side.  Memory isn't upgradeable but since the entry model has 32GB and 64GB is available as an option, that's not a problem.
  
  Confusingly, it also has a 1920x1200 8" screen covering 100% of sRGB and the other four essential keys - the A, B, X, and Y buttons from an Xbox controller.
  
  Because it's a handheld gaming device and not a tablet or a laptop.  It's like they've been reading all my complaints and did their best to produce the perfect device but spilled coffee on the plans at some point.
  
  The Asus ROG Ally has similar specs but is limited to 16GB of RAM and uses a smaller 7" 1920x1080 display.  It also nominally uses the AMD Z1 Extreme CPU, but that's just a rebranded 7840U.
  
  Same thing for the Aya Neo Air Plus, Neo 2S, Neo Geek 1S, and the forthcoming Neo Slide.
  
  The Neo Slide being a little different because it actually has a keyboard.  Would have been a very useful thing to have when I travelled more - full laptop power that fits in a coat pocket.

• Lenovo's Yoga 9i Gen 8 has an Intel 1360P, a 14" 3840x2400 OLED screen, and four non-essential keys where the Four Essential Keys should be so you can reprogram them with Power Toys to do the right thing.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  And a maximum of 16GB of soldered RAM because we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• The Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen 8 has an Intel 13700H CPU, a 14" 2880x1800 OLED screen, and two DIMM slots for up to 64GB of RAM.  (Liliputing)
  
  And is missing the Four Essential Keys BWCHNT.
  
  I've lost count of the number of pairs like this where if either one borrowed just one feature from the other it would be perfect, but literally nobody has got it right.
  
  
  
• OpenAI, creator of virtual Berkeley English lit sophomore ChatGPT, has raised $300 million on a valuation of of $27 billion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I look forward to these suckers losing all their money.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 30 2023 12:21 AM (obo9H)

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