• Apple has announced its M4 CPU, just months after the M3.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's 50% faster.
  
  50% faster than what, you ask.
  
  Shut up, they explained.
  
  
  
• Along with the M4 CPU comes a new range of iPad Pros using it.  (AnandTech)
  
  These start at $1000 and go up to $3000.
  
  That is, the cheapest model costs more than my new laptop and the extra memory and storage I bought for it.

• Speaking of laptops, the old new laptop - the one I bought two years ago that has been waiting all this time to be set up - has a working Windows license again.
  
  And it runs my modded Minecraft instance at 60fps with shaders enabled.
  
  It could probably do more but it's only a 60fps screen.
  
  
  
• Asus leaked the part number and specs of AMD's upcoming Strix Point laptop chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  Twelve cores - four Zen 5 and eight Zen 5c, which are identical but run at clock speeds about 25% lower, 36MB cache, a top speed of 5.1GHz on the main cores, and 77 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of AI thingy.
  
  That's double the AI thingy of Apple's M4, which has a 38 TOPS thingy.
  
  
  
• China's latest GPU beats the best chips from AMD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That is, the best chips from AMD from 2008.
  
  It's roughly equivalent to a Radeon 4850.  I had one of those.  Passive cooler.  Played Mass Effect and Dragon Age on it.
  
  It definitely slowed down in big combat scenes but it was mostly okay.
  
  
  
• Micron's new LPCAMM2 memory modules are now available for purchase.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In one speed, LPDDR5X-7500.
  
  $175 for 32GB and $330 for 64GB.  Not cheap but 80% cheaper than Apple and even more cheaper than replacing your whole computer because the RAM is soldered in place not that I'm bitter about that right now.
  
  
  
• An OpenAI executive says that ChatGPT will be "laughably bad" in twelve months.  (Business Insider)
  
  Hey, give yourself some credit.  It's laughably bad right now.
  
  
  
  

Vtuber Music Video of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, May 08 2024 10:44 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 09 2024 12:02 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, May 09 2024 03:18 AM (oJgNG)

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• Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption.  (The Verge)
  
  By which The Verge means Republicans are objecting to laws and regulations designed to make internal combustion vehicles more expensive and less efficient.

• After years of delays and $1 billion in cost overruns, the Boeing Starliner launch was scrubbed.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They'll try again.
  
  
  
• Shell's flagship carbon capture project sold $200 million worth of emission credits backed by absolutely nothing.  (Greenpeace)
  
  Congratulations, Greenpeace.  You've been working towards this miserable failure for a long time.
  
  
  
• A new attack renders largely useless VPNs even more useless than normal, if you are connected to a hostile network.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It subverts the VPN routing table to just run traffic directly over the network instead.
  
  This applies to general anonymising VPNs that cover the entire internet.  It doesn't affect corporate VPNs, and if you're running HTTPS or SSH over the VPN you're safe anyway.
  
  Also, it doesn't work against Linux or Android devices, not because they are inherently more secure, but because they don't properly follow the network standard that is being abused by the attack.
  
  
  
• The Ryxen 7 5700X3D is pretty good.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not the fastest CPU in the world, but it runs well and won't burn a hole in your desk or your wallet.
  
  
  
• So...  I need another Windows license.
  
  One of the systems I just set up I already partly set up two years ago, but then I forgot the password I put on it.
  
  I tried to reinstall Windows, but the regular installer couldn't find the SSD.
  
  So I created a recovery disk off an identical machine and used that to install it, which went fine, except that this ended up with this machine stealing the license key of the other one.
  
  Since I didn't sign in to my Microsoft account before this happened, I can't recover the key either.
  
  I have three Windows 11 Pro OEM licenses, except that you don't get the key anymore so I have no way to use them.
  
  
  

Random Vtuber Music Video of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, May 07 2024 08:48 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 07 2024 10:16 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 08 2024 11:10 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 08 2024 11:14 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 08 2024 02:51 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 08 2024 06:08 PM (PiXy!)

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• With its player community up in arms and its reputation on fire - with 200,000 negative reviews landing in just three days - Sony has decided maybe Helldivers players on Windows don't need a PlayStation Network account after all.  (MSN)
  
  This comes a day after the game was removed from sale on Steam in 177 countries and dependencies because the PlayStation Network was not available there.
  
  Which also goes to show how widely available Steam is.  They don't care if you live in the Aland Islands or Andorra or Antarctica, if your credit card works you're in.
  

• The Cheyenne supercomputer has sold for $480,000, about 2% of what it cost when it was first installed.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The system includes 8,064 Xeon E5-2697 v4 CPUs with 18 cores each, and 4,890 64GB DDR4 ECC memory modules.
  
  Speaking of which, I have 40GB of DDR4 SODIMMs and 2TB of NVMe SSDs left over after after my latest round of hardware upgrades.  And zero free slots to put any of those into.
  
  At least I don't have coolant leaks, unlike Cheyenne.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Z890 motherboards for Arrow Lake CPUs will feature integrated Thunderbolt 4 support.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which would be even better if Intel hadn't introduced Thunderbolt 5 last year.
  
  
  
• A scroll detailing the final hours of Plato, found in a cache in a villa belonging to Julius Caesar's father-in-law in Herculaneum (near Pompeii), has now been deciphered.  (The Guardian)
  
  He was not overly fond of the entertainment that evening.
  
  The scrolls - hundreds of them - are, as you might expect given what happened to Herculaneum, mere lumps of charcoal, and it is only with modern CT scanning techniques and computer-aided reconstruction that we are able to read them.  In fact, it's only last year that the first words were read this way.
  
  
  
• Chinese government websites are as bad as government websites anywhere else, and probably worse.  (The Register)
  
  If anyone cared enough to hack them they would likely find easy pickings.
  
  
  

Random Vtuber Music Video of the Day

• The US government has mandated automatic emergency braking in all new cars sold starting 2029.  (Car and Driver)
  
  This could save 360 lives a year, claims the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, almost as many as are killed by beavers and bathtub accidents combined.

• Understanding Stein's paradox.  (Joe Antognini)
  
  Well, that didn't work.
  
  
  
• Why RAG won't solve generative AI's hallucination problem.  (Tech Crunch)

  Because models have no real intelligence and are simply predicting words, images, speech, music and other data according to a private schema, they sometimes get it wrong. Very wrong.

  What RAG does is tell the AI to look the damn answer up instead of making it up.
  
  For which the AI is entirely unnecessary.
  
  
  
• 4060 Ti or 7700 XT?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Following price cuts from both Nvidia and AMD, the judges award this round to the 7700 XT.  In fact, I've seen the 7700 XT (which has 12GB of RAM) selling for less than even the 8GB model of the 4060 Ti, making the choice easy.
  
  
  
• Setting up computers all over the place, including a new Linux server at home running Ubuntu 24.04.
  
  Dug out the spare Dell laptop that had the spare 4TB SSD in it, and that has now been moved over to the new Asus laptop.  The Dell itself doesn't seem to have survived the move - or didn't survive sitting idle for two years.  Either way.
  
  That frees up 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD for a second Linux server.
  
  The Linux servers will be called Voms and Versen.  The Asus laptop is Maomao.
  
  I still need to come up with names for the two main Dell laptops.  They were originally going to be Sana and Pomu, but both of them have now granulated.

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, May 06 2024 06:57 AM (nk1Z+)

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• The judge in the Google antitrust trial is considering imposing sanctions over Google's practice of deliberately deleting all records of sensitive internal conversations.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Having seen other big tech companies get in trouble when the DOJ went over their records, Google decided it would simply not keep any records.
  
  It's a bold strategy.

• Building a Threadripper workstation and need lots of fast memory but also want ECC?  V-Color has you covered.  (Serve the Home)
  
  192GB at DDR5-7200 speeds.
  
  Though you only get full speed if you have one DIMM per channel, so if you need more (and your motherboard has more than four slots) it will slow down.
  
  
  
• If you need even faster memory - like HBM - you can place your orders now for delivery in 2026.  (AnandTech)
  
  Hynix's production is already sold out for 2024 and most of 2025.
  
  
  
• Google's search results, already almost useless, are getting worse.  (The Register)

  "It has happened," wrote developer Arian van Putten in a social media post over the weekend. "The number one Google result was an official Pulumi documentation page that was clearly written by an LLM (it had a disclaimer that it was) and hallucinated an AWS feature that didn't exist. This is the beginning of the end."

  Pulumi, the company generating the AI results, has been very responsive to the problem, has taken down two thirds of the pages and is reviewing the remainder for incorrect answers.
  
  Google meanwhile offered the cannedest of canned replies."
  
  Bing, meanwhile...  Didn't have the same problem.  So score one for Microsoft.
  
  
  
• Generating 1024 bit prime numbers the hard way.  (GlitchComet)
  
  The easy way is to just copy and paste.  Here you go:
  
  177720646511895772991045629522972753502676425002016283330
  773868745109334356532783500581560425145704773959769930413
  789872718529515289471187735819720465888854952471427632098
  554011932730921272830418010265570121099752587584547435013
  097108422373834015070668330390239397186506619029851158511
  460040722871392491661731
  
  
  
• If you play Helldivers 2 and live in Monaco or San Marino or Andorra or any of about seventy other countries, publisher Sony says fuck you.  (GamesRadar)
  
  You will now be required to sign up to the PlayStation Network to play the game on Windows.  The PlayStation Network is only available in about half the countries of the world.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 04 2024 11:49 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, May 05 2024 01:02 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 05 2024 10:43 AM (BMUHC)

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• Peloton is laying off another 400 people - about 15% of its surviving workforce.  (The Verge)
  
  This is the fifth layoff in three years, reducing the company's workforce by almost two thirds.
  
  If you think such a disastrous performance should see the CEO resigning in disgrace, well, he did.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Every map of China is wrong.  (Medium)
  
  If you overlay satellite data on maps of China, nothing seems to line up properly.
  
  This is because all recent map of China are wrong - deliberately so, with locations shifted by anything from 50 to 500 meters.
  
  And nobody in China is permitted to correct the errors.
  
  
  
• There's another critical security vulnerability in GitLab.  (Ars Technica)
  
  GitLab is great.
  
  Under no circumstances should you run your own instance connected directly to the internet.
  
  
  
• Nurses say hospital adoption of half-cooked AI is reckless.  (TechDirt)
  
  I'm sure they do, and I'm sure it is, but this article not only provides no evidence whatsoever for these claims, it doesn't even provide any coherent claims.
  
  
  
• Kobo's 2024 e-reader models are user-repairable.  (Liliputing)
  
  In the sense that a moderately experienced user with a $20 screwdriver set can open them up and replace the screen, battery, and motherboard, and the front and back parts of the case if the damage is physical rather than electronic.
  
  Which is not everything, but is certainly something.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, May 04 2024 03:46 AM (LADmw)

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• The CEO of United Healthcare said maybe a third of US citizens were affected by a recent security breach.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That...  Is rather a lot.

• Dropbox says hackers breached its secure digital signature product, Dropbox Sign.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  All users of Dropbox Sign should consider themselves, I think the technical term is "fucked".
  
  
  
• Meanwhile more than a million New South Wales club-goers have had their information leaked via a dubious double-outsourcing arrangement by a provider of club management software.  (MSN)
  
  Including one club that I have actually been to.
  
  The Register has a paragraph explaining why these clubs have your data in the first place.

  Clubs enjoy tax exemptions for some food and drink sales to members, as many were founded as community hubs for military veterans. Members therefore sign in to clubs when they visit to prove they are eligible for the discounts on offer. Clubs capture those sign-ins, plus info on visitors, and data required under laws that regulate gambling and aim to make life hard for money-launderers.

  
  
  
• Maybe you should use a VPN.  Or not.  Microsoft has confired that the latest Windows security update breaks VPNs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There will be a fix.  At some point.  Probably.
  
  If you're using a Mac you already went through this last September.
  
  
  
• Want your own supercomputer with 8000 CPUs and 300TB of RAM?  Act now!  Bidding ends tomorrow!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The GSA's Cheyenne SGI supercomputer from 2016 is up for auction.  It's probably not worth anything, because 8 human years is 500 supercomputer years.  It's like buying a 16th century house.  Looks pretty, but you can expect a few issues, like it collapsing on your head.
  
  
  
• Republicans have pounced on tech executives' internal conversations.  (The Verge)
  
  Conversations with federal government officials trying to coerce them into censoring protected speech.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, May 02 2024 11:00 PM (LADmw)

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• After years of telling motherboard makers to set PL1 = PL2, Intel now says not to do that, and also that it never said to do that.  (AnandTech)
  
  On Intel CPUs, PL1 is the long-term power level; PL2 is the short burst power level.
  
  On a high-end chip rated at 125W, PL2 is something like 253W.  On the top of the line 14900KS, it is increased to 320W officially, and 400W or more unofficially.
  
  This produces great benchmark results but unfortunately fries the chips.
  
  Of course, if you throttle the chips back to the official official power limits, all the existing benchmark results become fairy tales.
  
  So if you're looking for a high-end CPU right now, go AMD.
  
  If you're looking at a mid-range CPU like Intel's i5-14500, none of this is likely to matter.  It's a good chip.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• TSMC is preparing an 8x retical super carrier interposer for 2026.  (AnandTech)
  
  I don't know either but apparently it involves cows.
  
  
  
• Every SSD is SLC if you try hard enough.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Modern SSDs store either three bits (TLC) or four bits (QLC) per memory cell, but the controllers have the ability to store just one bit per cell, which is faster and much more reliable.  Of course that way you get one third or one quarter the space, but your drive can last up to thirty times longer.
  
  
  
• The Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal on Texas's age restriction legislation for porn sites.  (NBC)
  
  An initial ruling by a federal judge held that the law was too broad, but was overturned by the Fifth Circuit, and the Supreme Court didn't answer the door, so now the law goes into effect.
  
  
  
• I ordered a couple of new monitors for my home office on Monday.
  
  They showed up this morning.
  
  Then three hours later I got an email saying they had been shipped.
  
  At least some parts of the process are working smoothly.
  
  
  

Posted by: McDirty at Saturday, May 04 2024 04:17 AM (NC1hU)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 04 2024 06:06 AM (PiXy!)

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• The FTC has ordered Razer - a computer and mouse manufacturer - to refund all customers of the Razer Zephyr and pay a $100,000 fine.  (The Verge)
  
  The Razer Zephyr - for those who do not move in the idiot community - was an RGB N95 mask for the COVID-phobic who really wanted to show off their mental issues.
  
  Except it wasn't N95.  As far as I can tell, it wasn't anything.
  
  I'm against the refunds on the simple principle that anyone dumb enough to buy one of these things deserves to be punished.
  
  The fine can stay though.

• Co-working space company WeWork - once valued at $40 trillion or some other equally ridiculous number - is planning to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy after raising fresh capital and creating a plan to pay off some part of its $4 billion in debt.  (Business Insider)
  
  Though certainly not all of it.
  
  Adam Neumann, former WeWork CEO and the guy who landed it in bankruptcy with $4 billion in debt in the first place, offered to buy its remains for $650 million.
  
  The remains declined to be bought.
  
  
  
• Hitting every branch on the way down.  (Rachel by the Bay)
  
  Programming do be like that sometimes.
  
  Most of the time.
  
  Every fucking day, really.
  
  
  
• Motherboard makers apparently to blame for high-end Intel Core i9 CPU failures, says Intel.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Another garbage article from the Ars Technocrats, and they are getting roasted in the comments.
  
  Shorter version: It turns out that running desktop CPUs at 500W is bad.  Who knew?  Intel knew.  And they are trying to shift the blame to their motherboard partners for helping Intel fake benchmark results.
  
  Lower-end Intel CPUs - the non-K parts - are mostly fine.
  
  
  
• In preparation for its annual I/O developer conference in two weeks, Google is, uh, laying off developers.  (Tech Crunch)

  "As we've said, we're responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead," said Google spokesperson Alex Garcia-Kummert.  "To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we're simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers, and just generally pushing people out the airlock" he added.

  Google declined to comment on whether those leaving the company had oxygen.
  

• What happens to TikTok?  (The Verge)
  
  The author of this article is either delusional or drunk, but in any case, the answer is it dies and is forgotten within a week.
  
  
  

Tech News

• MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria talks AI hype and database evolution.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  To clarify: He says that AI is mostly hype:

  "My life has not been transformed by AI,” he said. "Yes, maybe I can write an email better through all those assistants, but it’s not fundamentally transformed my life. Whereas the internet has completely transformed my life.”

  In fact, most of what he says here is refreshingly sensible:

  "There’s probably like 17 different types of databases, and probably about 300 vendors,” Ittycheria said. "There’s no customer on this planet that wants to have 17 different databases. The complexity that creates, and the cost of learning, supporting and managing those different technologies becomes overwhelming. It also inhibits innovation, because it creates this tax of complexity.”

  I'm still meh on MongoDB's license structure, but I recognise the necessity to prevent Amazon simply draining their blood and discarding the lifeless husk.
  
  
  
• Huawei's Pura 70 contains SMIC 7nm technology, and also unicorn farts.  (The Register)
  
  SMIC doesn't have 7nm technology.  It has 14nm with multi-patterning.
  
  
  
• The US is reviewing the risks of China gaining a lead in RISC-V technology.  (Reuters)
  
  I'm sure they are, but it's irrelevant.  RISC-V is an open standard; anyone can create their own implementations of it.
  
  If you don't like that, build something better yourself.
  
  
  
• American Airlines still hasn't properly fixed its Y2K problems.  (BBC)
  
  A 101-year-old frequent flier keeps being assigned a baby seat.