Wednesday, March 27
Strawberry Fields For Never Edition
Top Story
- Canva, an online design collaboration platform, is buying Affinity, a traditional software development house that creates good applications and sells them to you. (The Verge)
I'm hoping Canva doesn't turn Affinity into a subscription service, because right now you can buy the entire Affinity suite - photo editing, design, and publishing apps for Windows, Mac, and iOS - for around $120.
Not per year; once.
Tech News
- The Lenovo Legion Tab is officially coming to Europe and Asia. (Lenovo)
This month. Better get a move on, because there's not much of this month left.
Downside is that at 599 Euros the price is not much cheaper than importing the Japanese version.
On paper though it's a great device, with a 2560x1600 8.8" screen, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. CPU is a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, which has a Cortex X2 as its main core, so it's both recent and fast.
It includes a microSD slot and two USB-C ports. Either one can be used for charging, so you can charge while it is connected to a monitor or a headphone adapter (no separate headphone port).
I'll buy one since there is no real competition. Not two though, not at that price.
- I did buy the Asus M1505, the cheaper of the two Asus models I've highlighted recently.
Ryzen 7730U CPU (8 Zen 3 CPU cores and 8 Vega graphics cores), 16GB of RAM which I'm upgrading to 40GB, 512GB of SSD which I'm upgrading to 2TB, the Four Essential Keys in the form of a three-column numeric keypad - not ideal but better than not having them, and the standout feature, a 15.6" 2880x1620 120Hz OLED display.
Roughly $1000 as configured.
- If you have Mac Studio envy the FN60G sold by Topton is basically a shrunk-in-the-wash version. (Liliputing)
It's bigger than a regular NUC but still very small; it uses an Intel desktop CPU and a laptop graphics module. No expansion slots apart from memory and storage, so what you buy it with is all you get.
Apart from those two memory slots and two M.2 slots, it has two HDMI ports, two DisplayPort ports, one USB-C port which can also drive a display for up to five monitors in total; two 2.5Gbit network ports, and four USB-A ports on the back. On the front, another two USB-A ports, one USB-C, headphone jack, and a full-size SD card slot. Which is a pretty good complement of ports for a small system.
Prices fully configured start around $1000 and go up to $2000, which is not terrible but you can certainly build a regular PC for the same price.
- No further Minecraft crashes since I disabled the Strawberry Fields in Mystic's Biomes. Though given the number of new biomes in the modpack (over 200) and the number I've seen during testing (maybe 30) there could be something still lurking.
It's not entirely happy running in the default 4GB heap, but it certainly runs smoothly with 16GB of RAM, which my original efforts didn't.
If I don't trip over anything else I'll publish it to Curseforge this weekend.
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Tuesday, March 26
Also, now I seem to have a schrödinbug.
The current "full" version of the modpack now runs in the default 4GB heap, though I suspect it might run into trouble in more complex regions, since it's hovering around 3.5GB.
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Chalkled Edition
Top Story
- Europe is investigating Apple for its malicious compliance with the new Digital Markets Act. (The Register)
And Google.
And Facebook.
Do all three companies lie and cheat and steal? Sure.
Are they all woke beyond possibility of redemption? Well, Google certainly is. Apple while woke as hell notably produces genuinely well-engineered hardware on a regular schedule.
Do they suck less than the European government even after granting all of that? Absolutely.
Tech News
- Federation is the future of social media, says federated social media CEO. (The Verge)
We had that.
It was called Usenet.
- iOS 18 is to set to deliver new customisation features, bringing it into parity with, uh, Android 6.0. (9to5Mac)
On the other hand, 6.0 was the last Android update worth caring about.
- Criminals can't do crimes, that's illegal, explains... Don Lemon. (The Verge)
It's obvious that the writer of this piece knows she's lying, knows Don Lemon is an imbecile, and knows that Elon Musk is right about everything, but it's either this or writing two game guides a week for Kotaku.
- Speaking of Kotaku, the editor-in-chief of the alleged gaming news site resigned after being told by the site owners to write about gaming news. (Games Industry)
Kotaku's wokeness is to Google as red fuming nitric acid is to balsamic vinegar.
- Land near nuclear power plants is seeing a rise in value as AI datacenters seek cheap and reliably power which renewables ain't. (The Register)
I for one welcome our new glow-in-the-dark robot overlords.
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Monday, March 25
Quick one today because I'm a brown paper package tied up with string.
Tech News
- Apple's M4 CPUs could appear as soon as Q1 of next year. (WCCFTech)
Which is not all that soon, come to think of it. By then it will be competing with AMD's Zen 5, Qualcomm's X Elite series, and Intel's Apollo Lake and Lunar Lake ranges.
- That didn't take long: Redict is a fork of Redis that makes it free again. (Redict)
Redis Labs recently changed to license of Redis so that while source code is available it comes with restrictions on use.
Redict takes the last unrestricted version and keeps it unrestricted, meaning that the original Redis is basically dead.
- Emergent abilities in LLMs - where as an LLM grows it suddenly gains new abilities - are nothing but a measurement error. (Quanta)
LLMs don't know how to do arithmetic. The more data you shove into them, the better they become at guessing, that's all.
If you test them and give anything less than 100% a failing grade, the ability to do arithmetic suddenly appears out of nowhere. But the same thing would happen if you did that with children.
- The Chinese government has banned the Chines government from using Intel and AMD CPUs. (WCCFTech)
Their loss.
It does serve to give the Chinese CPU makers a guaranteed market for their products, which are not great but are basically adequate.
- As part of an investigation, the FBI posted videos publicly to YouTube, sent the links to the suspects, and then demanded Google hand over all details of the accounts of anyone who watched the videos. (Mashable)
The judge not only allowed it, but required Google to keep silent about it.
This is what warrant canaries are for. Unfortunately those are as dead as the passenger pigeon.
- Got a notice that my Myth Mascot plushies were about to ship, and it reminded me to check if the re-release of the original Myth plushies was still in stock. When they first came out, the world was still in Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague mode and they weren't shipping to Australia.
They were.
I bought them.
- Got my Minecraft modpack trimmed down to the point where it runs smoothly with the default memory settings, and is perfectly happy on my 16GB laptop.
That involved getting rid of some of the less-vanilla stuff, but I think the feel of this version is much better.
I'd like to add Critters and Companions, which will apparently be released for 1.20.1 very soon. Other than that it's pretty solid.
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Sunday, March 24
Lone Pine Mall Edition
Top Story
- The global economy runs through a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. (Tom's Hardware)
That road leads to a mine producing the purest quartz in the world, and the factory that processes it. There is no naturally occurring substitute.
The quartz is used to create crucibles which are used to produced silicon wafers, which are in turn sliced and cooked and dice to produce computer chips.
It is possible to make the quartz synthetically; we just don't right now because there's an enormous pile of it sitting underground in this one spot. But it would be a few difficult years if anything happened there.
Tech News
- This seems like a bad idea: EVGA changed the connector layout of its GQ 1000W power supply without changing the model number. (Tom's Hardware)
If you buy a new one the cables have changed too, and everything works.
If you have one already, and it's faulty and is replaced under warranty, then congratulations! Your existing cables will plug in just fine and deliver 12V on the 5V line to all your disk drives.
- The CEO and founder of Stability AI - creator of Stable Diffusion - has resigned. (Tech Crunch)
The official announcement doesn't say much and neither do his own tweets, but reading between the lines it seems he's pushing hard for actual open source solutions and the company's investors want bullshit that makes money like ChatGPT.
Doubly interesting in that he apparently owns a controlling interest in Stability AI. This is the same kind of conflict that recently roiled OpenAI, and led to Elon Musk's pending lawsuit against that company.
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I was wondering why memory usage and load time seemed to be increasing exponentially as my Minecraft modpack grew.
The answer turns out to be that it seems that way because it is.
And the culprit turns out to be the utterly innocuous and very useful Every Compat (Wood Good), which is in itself only 2MB.
What this mod does is let you create any wooden item from any type of wood, whether the item and the wood are in the base game or in a mod.
That mod is also just 2MB.
And if you add a mod that adds new type of wood, like the mauve wood in Regions Unexplored, that can be used to craft doors and pickaxes and any other wooden item in the game, automatically.
That mod is still small at 5MB.
But when you have a couple of dozen mods of each type, adding in Every Compat multiples them together and eats as much memory as all the other mods combined - about 2.5GB.
So now I'm well within the 4GB limit again, and can put back some of the mods I took out.
- Dropped Naturalist in favour of Untamed Wilds and Exotic Birds.
- Removed Sky Villages because neat as it is, there's no config file and they keep showing up at spawn.
- Further trimming is likely. Base Minecraft 1.20.1 has 1146 different items in it. My modpack increases that to 29,675, or counting Chisels and Bits, around 1012000.
- Rebuilt a "lite" version that runs acceptably in the default Minecraft memory settings (4GB heap).
- Lite version removes most of the large mods, including BetterEnd, BetterNether, Blue Skies, Twilight Forest, Aether addons, and Biomes O' Plenty.
- Still includes Nullscape, Incendium, base Aether mod, and also Create and the Steam and Rails addon. Additional biomes are supported by Terralith (100+) and Regions Unexplored (70+).
- Item count is now 19,167, including 1146 from Minecraft itself, while reducing the modpack size from 949MB to 232MB. Plus the 1012000 from Chisels and Bits.
- Also includes the new wolf variants that will be in 1.21, plus four original wolf variants, four cat variants, a new fox variant, and many variants of chickens, sheep, cows, and pigs.
- Also an annoying camel.
- Bird life added with Exotic Birds.
- Fish life expanded thanks to Unusual Fish.
- Miscellaneous mammalia introduced by Untamed Wilds.
- Arthropods courtesy of Canes Wonderful Spiders.
- Reptiles provided by What the Geck'o.
- Creepers supplied by Creeper Overhaul. You're welcome.
- Big box of crayons purchased at Dye Depot, doubling the regular in-game dyes to 32. This works with wool, carpets, terracotta (including glazed terracotta), glass, and concrete.
- Big boxes of chalk found at Chalk and Chalked - one for building and one for writing.
- Quarks irradiated by Quark.
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Saturday, March 23
Fragility Plus Edition
Top Story
- If I'm presented with two resumes for a new hire, one a recent Harvard graduate with a PhD in precisely the field I am hiring for, and the other a community college dropout whose only programming experience is putting together a popular Minecraft modpack, I'm hiring the Minecraft kid.
Just saying.
- A quick and perhaps useful summary of the Apple antitrust case. (Tech Crunch)
The one thing of note is this line describing Apple's response to the suit:And in regulating the behaviors that the DOJ claims are monopolistic, Apple’s competitive advantage in the market would be diminished and iPhone customers negatively impacted in the process.
Well, yeah.
Diminishing competitive advantage in the market is the entire point of antitrust actions.
And Apple claiming that following the law would negatively affect its customers has been the company's response to every interaction with regulators for the past decade at least.
It's kind of boring, guys. At least come up with a new lie.
- Meanwhile The Verge barfed up this. (The Verge)
There were some in yesterday's comment section arguing I was favoring the woke fascist idiots at the DOJ over the woke fascist idiots at Apple who at the end of the day at least produce something.
But if you read even a small part of this pile of drivel - and I certainly wouldn't suggest reading more than that - I think we can all agree that the worst of the lot are the journalists reporting on this story.
In this case we're dealing with Sarah Jeong, the journalistic equivalent of Cymothoa exigua.
Don't look that up if you don't want nightmares.
You should probably avoid looking up C. exigua as well.
Tech News
- Micron has shown off samples of its new DDR5-8800 256GB MCR memory modules. (AnandTech)
These use two sets of memory chips the same way other high-capacity modules do, but with a difference: The chips are interleaved so that bytes of data are read from both banks of chips at once, doubling the bandwidth.
This is how a high-capacity server module can be as fast as the best overclocked desktop modules.
Kind of neat, but not something that's likely to trickle down to the consumer space any time soon.
It does give a single-socket 4th generation Epyc server nearly 900GB per second of memory bandwidth, though. That used to be a lot.
- The first nuclear fusion rocket engine is ready for delivery. (Interesting Engineering)
I'm not sure how seriously to take this report, but the device does spray ionising radiation all over the place, so it's doing something.
- Users are complaining on Twitter that Instagram and Threads are restricting political content from recommendation results. (Ars Technica)
This apparently is a new setting in the respective apps, which silently appeared and was silently turned on for everyone.
On the other hand, Threads did specifically announce that they intended to do this.
- 34 nations met in Brussels to pledge to build more nuclear reactors. (Associated Press)
This has upset all the right people."Nuclear, all the evidence shows, is too slow to build. It’s too expensive. Much more expensive than having peasants ploughing the fields by hand," said the remarkably named Lorelei Limousin of Greenpeace. "The government must focus on developing real solutions that work for people - like abandoning the poor to starve in the dark while I swan off to Majorca - not nuclear energy which has been established as safe and reliable for decades. Shit. One of you polish that up before it goes to press."
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So I added in Create, and Create: Steam and Rails, and Botania, and Graveyards, and When Dungeons Arise, and Born in Chaos, and my modpack still loads and plays fine on my work laptop.
Main Features
- Botania
- Create
- Blocks +
- Chisels and Bits
- Chipped
- Dawn of Time
- Every Compat (Wood Good)
- Diagonal Fences / Walls / Windows
- Macaw's Doors / Fences / Roofs / Walls / Windows
- Seafoam's Dyeable Blocks
- Stoneworks
- Born in Chaos
- Canes Wonderful Spiders
- Creeper Overhaul
- The Dawn Era
- Enderman Overhaul
- Friends and Foes
- Naturalist
- Plenty of Golems
- Unusual Fish
- Biomes O'Plenty
- Ecologics
- Geophilic
- Graveyard
- Immersive Weathering
- Nyctophobia
- Serene Seasons
- Tectonic
- Terralith
- Incendium
- Nullscape
- The Aether
- The Twilight Forest
- Better Villages
- Overhauled Village
- Repurposed Structures
- Sky Villages
- Tidal Towns
- The Lost Castle
- Underground Villages
- When Dungeons Arise
- Yung's Better (everything)
- Immersive Aircraft
- Mythic Mounts
- Small Ships
- Steam and Rails
- Aquaculture
- Croptopia
- Farmers Delight (plus addons)
- Clutter
- Quark
- Supplementaries
- Trails and Tales +
- Better F3
- Corpse
- Death Finder
- Pickable Pets
- Save the Pets
- Save Your Pets
- Skin Layers 3D
I'm making a clean rebuild and so far it's using 2.6GB out of 4GB of heap. I've removed Naturalist, Born in Chaos, and When Dungeons Arise for now, each for different reasons.
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Friday, March 22
Top Story
- Nobody ever said anything about it keeping the lawyer away: The DOJ has filed its very long awaited antitrust lawsuit against Apple. (The Verge)
While Apple isn't a monopoly in terms of total market control, it does control about two thirds of the US smartphone market, and it certainly abuses that market dominance to the detriment of its customers.
And as we've seen, Apple has been playing the malicious compliance game with market regulators for the past decade.
Interestingly, California is one of the sixteen states joining the DOJ in this lawsuit. New York is another. Woke idiot governments gone to war with woke idiot businesses?
- Nuh uh, said Apple, arguing that the lawsuit could prevent it looting the corpses of crippled orphans. (9to5Mac)
That is kind of the point, Apple.
Tech News
- Apple is not a monopoly like Windows was a monopoly. (Tech Crunch)
No.
Windows succeeded because anyone could develop and sell software for it without having to give Microsoft 30% of every transaction.
- Oh, and there's this: An security flaw in all Apple Silicon Macs leaks encryption keys if an attacker can get you to run suspect code. (Ars Technica)
It's another "side channel" attack; these are subtle and not very efficient but very hard to avoid. Intel, AMD, and Arm have all seen side channel attacks in recent years.
It's kind of like figuring out someone's password just by listening to them type, and matching the sounds of the keys to letter frequencies. Takes forever - or 26 minutes, whichever comes first - but very hard to guard against.
Encryption software can be rewritten to avoid the flaw, but that will make it much slower.
Minecraft Modpack Mayhem
If you figure that each 1MB of mod will need 10MB of memory, you'll be pretty close. I took an axe to the existing pack starting with the largest mods. Sorry, Better Nether, but you were using close to 1GB of RAM all by yourself.
What Year Is It Videos of the Day
Opens today.
The trailer doesn't entirely sell me but this is a direct sequel to the 2021 Ghostbusters Afterlife and that was actually good.
Yep, that one is back too.
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Thursday, March 21
All Roads Lead To RAM Edition
Top Story
- The US House of Representatives is doing something vaguely useful for once: It just passed a bill banning the sale of your private information to the nation's enemies. (The Verge)
No, not Washington DC. They already have your information. The other enemies.
Tech News
- Dungeons and Dragons is dying of acute woke poisoning but I still kind of want this D&D Lego set. (The Verge)
It comes with a dragon, a beholder, a displacer beast, a gelatinous cube, an owlbear, and a mimic, as well as a team of adventurers for them to menace.
- MacOS 14.4 may have another trick up its sleeve: Deleting your files. (MacRumors)
If you're using iCloud for storage because you bought a 256GB MacBook Air and it filled up instantly and you can't upgrade the storage, well, if you delete the local copy of a file you have on iCloud it might just delete all the backups on iCloud as well.
This is not good.
- The Asus Vivobook 15 OLED has received a little upgrade this year.
While it still has a Ryzen 7730U CPU and comes with 16GB of RAM upgradable to 40GB (8GB soldered and one SO-DIMM slot), the screen has improved from a 1920x1080 60Hz panel to 2880x1620 120Hz.
So 50% better in X and Y and 100% better in T.
It costs A$1200 vs. A$2200 for the Zenbook 15 OLED I mentioned recently (about $800 vs. $1450).
The differences are:
* It has a Ryzen 7730U vs. the 7735U in the more expensive model
* It's half a pound heavier
* Despite that, it actually has a smaller battery
So obviously the Zenbook is built and priced as a premium model, but the screen in the cheaper Vivobook is identical (and excellent), the CPU performance is identical, and it's 40% cheaper.
I looked at getting the previous model Vivobook a couple of years ago but passed it up. With the updated screen I think I'll get one, and swap in 32GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD from my old HP laptop which has developed a couple of minor issues... Like just switching itself off whenever it feels like it.
My preferred online store says they'll have it in stock on Monday.
- And that should solve my Minecraft modpack woes.
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