I'm in the future. Like hundreds of years in the future. I've been dead for centuries.
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?

Sunday, June 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 June 2023

Cherry Bomb Edition

Top Story

Tech News

How That Bottle of Cherry Soda Gets from the Farm to Your Fridge USDA Documentary Video of the Day


God bless the food scientists, because they know what goes into this stuff and they still drink it.



Disclaimer: It's paint thinner!  You're drinking paint thinner!  Oh, and a bottle of dry cleaning solution that's been sitting in the cupboard for sixteen years for added flavour.

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Saturday, June 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 June 2023

The Emperor's New Tube Edition

Top Story




Tech News

  • Maybe reality is setting in with the global recession and they need the viewers, even nasty right-wing ones.

    The valuation of design software company Canva has been marked down by 67.6%, and buy-now-pay-more-later company Klarna by 85%.  (Tech Crunch)

    Reddit meanwhile is down by 41% since last year.

    All of these are private companies so there's no public share price to track, just individual investors prepared to actualise their losses for tax reasons.


  • AMD's Epyc Rome (2nd generation) server chips could hang after 1044 days of uptime.  (Tom's Hardware)

    There's some kind of timer overflow that prevents the individual CPU cores from waking up after being put into low-power sleep mode.  

    The solution is to either keep them so busy they never sleep, reboot the server once every three years, or turn off sleep mode...  Which requires a reboot anyway.


  • Lenovo's Yoga Book 9i is a rather neat laptop with dual 13" 2880x1800 OLED displays, a detachable keyboard, and pen support.  (Notebook Check)

    It can lie completely flat on a desk and you can use it with a pen, or you can clip on the keyboard and use it like a normal laptop, or you can stand it upright to use both screens side by side or one above the other with the keyboard detached.

    Only problem is, for the same price you could buy a regular laptop, an external 4k monitor, a decent graphics tablet, a good Android tablet, and whatever keyboard you prefer, and still have change left over.  (I know this because those are all things I've bought in the past two years and I just added them up.)


  • The Beelink EQ12 Pro almost doesn't suck.  (Serve the Home)

    This is a NUC - a palm-sized computer - that uses Intel's N305 CPU, which has 8 E cores and no P cores at all.

    Which means it is an Atom chip, though Intel prefers not to use that name anymore because for many, many years, their Atom CPU range completely sucked.

    This one doesn't completely suck: Compared to the 2017 Dell Ryzen 1700 system I used until I moved house last year it is 15% faster in single-threaded performance, though 30% slower in multi-threaded performance.

    That AMD chip was 65W and the N305 uses just 15W, so I'll cut it some slack.

    And compared to the 2015 Atom N3050, the new N305 is more than four times faster single-threaded and 15 times faster multi-threaded.

    Unfortunately the overall system still sucks, hamstrung by the other problem with Atom chips: Their limited I/O.  It supports just a single memory module, and while it has an NVMe slot (again, just one), it only supports one lane of PCIe 3, so it's 1/16th the speed of the latest models, or more reasonably, 1/8th the speed of a decent and not insanely expensive SSD.

    Given the pricing there are likely better options.  If it were passively cooled thanks to the Atom design's low power consumption things might be different - but Atom's power consumption has never been that low.  It has not just one fan, but two.


Disclaimer: I am not one of them.

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Friday, June 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 June 2023

Censor Delete Thyself Edition

Top Story


Tech News

  • Reddit is planning to charge lots of money for its API, just like Twitter.  (The Verge)

    Not quite as lots, but still lots, with the cited number being $12,000 per 50 million API calls.

    As a baseline example, blockchain gateway Infura charges $1000 per month for 150 million API calls, while at the other end of the scale Twitter charges anything up to $2 per API call.  Not $2 per million, $2 per call.

    A reasonably configured server should be able to handle 10 million API calls per day, meaning that Infura has something like an 80% margin to cover all their costs beyond the bare hardware, Reddit has around 99%, and Twitter 100%.

    Which used to be a lot.

    One Reddit user commented:

    They're digging their own grave.

    Reddit used to very much a bit player behind market leader Digg, until Digg released a hugely unpopular update and told users who complained to fuck off.  

    And fuck off they did, in droves, to Reddit.  I'm not sure if Digg is still alive.

    Update: Sort of.  The top post on Digg right now links to a Reddit thread.


  • Intel is planning to release 40 core Arrow Lake desktop chips next year.  (WCCFTech)

    This year the company is not expected to release a new generation of desktop chips at all.

    Next year's 15th generation though should bring a substantial upgrade, though not all that substantial, as 32 out of those 40 cores will be half-speed quarter-size "Efficiency" cores.

    I'd much rather see 16P + 16E cores, but that would make for a substantially larger chip.



Disclaimer: Pipipipipipipipipi!

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Thursday, June 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 June 2023

Zap! Edition

Top Story

  • Silence those annoying little negative voices in your head - by electrocuting the bastards.  (The Bulletin)

    Interesting first-person account of tDCS - transcranial direct current stimulation - by an avowed skeptic, who found the effects instant and obvious.  As soon as the current was turned on she went into a state that programmers call flow, where she was focused on the task at hand to the exclusion of all else, to such a degree that her sense of time was off by a factor of 10 when the experiment concluded.

    The literature for tDCS and tMS - transcranial magnetic stimulation - is mixed, and I lean on the skeptical side myself, but it's harder to discount this particular report.

Tech News

  • Adata has showed off its next-generation memory modules for laptops and servers, due later this year.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Not just new DIMMs - only one of these is a DIMM - but new module types entirely.

    Of particular interest is CAMM, originally designed by Dell and released as an industry standard.  This takes the LPDDR memory chips commonly used in laptops and puts them on a module, making laptop memory upgradeable again.

    The electrical characteristics of LPDDR make it faster and less power-hungry than regular DDR RAM but also mean it can't work in regular DIMM slots, so right now everyone (except Dell) solders it directly to the motherboard.

    And they only put 16GB in, so your shiny new laptop becomes e-waste if you need more than that.

    I'm very much looking forward to this seeing widespread adoption.


  • There's a potential firmware backdoor in 271 models of Gigabyte motherboard.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It's not as nasty as it first sounded, though it's not good: The BIOS checks for firmware updates to give you a download alert in Windows, but it doesn't check that the site it connects to is actually Gigabyte's real download site.  So if someone can compromise your DNS to point you at a fake download site, it will happily prompt you to download and install a fake BIOS release.

    So...  Don't take your desktop computer to a cafe and connect it over untrusted wifi.  Or just turn off the updater.  That works too.


  • This is the first x-ray taken of a single atom.  (Ars Technica)

    The atom is pregnant.


Disclaimer: With twins.

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Wednesday, May 31

Geek

Daily News Stuff 31 May 2023

Rest Of The Owl Edition

Top Story

  • The current AI boom is the crypto boom of recent memory, except without even the benefits of libertarian wish-fulfilment.  The "AI bros" are just idiots:



    No, Kody, I've never wondered what the rest of the Mona Lisa looks like, because there is no rest of the Mona Lisa.

    His thread has accrued 6000 quote tweets so far, none of them kind.


Tech News



Disclaimer: And if it causes trouble you can always dispose of it in a vat of molten iron.

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Tuesday, May 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 May 2023

Euphemistic Eucalypt Edition

Top Story

  • AI makes shit up.  (PowerLine)
    Crawford H. "Chet" Taylor served as the 14th governor of South Dakota, from 1949 to 1951. Taylor was born on July 23, 1915, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and he grew up in nearby Flandreau. Taylor attended the University of South Dakota, where he earned a law degree.
    Of course, this is ChatGPT "hallucinating" again.  Chet Taylor not only was never elected governor of South Dakota, no such person ever existed.

    While Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is announcing incomprehensibly expensive AI supercomputers at Computex, the actual results of generative AI - in the field of language and information, where all the interest and the big money is right now - are frankly, shit.

    Things are looking much better when it comes to AI-generated art, because there the look of the thing is what matters.  Is that a period-accurate representation of 2nd century Rome in the background behind the topless gladiatrix?  Nobody cares, so long as it looks good.

    Well, one person cares.  We'll get to him.

    And Chet Taylor looks good too.  He's just not real.  And since ChatGPT can't sustain a hallucination long enough to form a coherent short story, just for a couple of paragraphs, so it's utterly valueless.

    Nvidia still has a valuation greater than AMD and Intel combined, but at least one corner of that market cap is built on sand.

Tech News

That Guy Video of the Day

He actually discusses the historicity of topless Roman gladiatrices in another video (spoiler: they were real, and spectacular).   Here he's just debunking the notion - nearly Jaynesian in its vapidity - that the ancient Greeks couldn't see the colour blue.



Well-researched and well-argued, including a deconstruction of an old RadioLab episode that I had assumed was largely accurate.  He is careful to address the argument rather than attacking the arguer except in the case of the BBC, who just made shit up and fully deserve it.



Disclaimer: It's doesn't look blue, it just looks like it looks blue.

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Monday, May 29

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 May 2023

Automated Poop Emojis Edition

Top Story


Tech News

  • The Snapdragon 8cx gen 4 is 32% faster than Apple's M4, at least on one benchmark.  (WCCFTech)

    Of course, neither chip is out yet, so take that with a sack of salt.

    But it does look like the commodity Arm market is finally shaking off the dust and competing seriously with Intel and AMD for laptop parts.


  • Meanwhile Arm announced an entire family of new cores, with 40% better performance, making them 15% faster.  (AnandTech)

    The catch there is that mobile chips come with a mix of fast, power-hungry cores, and slower more efficient cores.  It's the slower cores that are 40% faster, and the faster cores are only 15% faster.  That fast core - the Cortex X4 - is alternatively 40% more efficient for the same performance, but expect phone manufacturers to take the 15% and sacrifice your battery.

    But the mid-tier and low-end A720 and A520 cores are both faster and more efficient, so if you're in the market for a $500 phone - or a $250 one - rather than a $1000 model, things look a bit brighter.


Disclaimer: Ceci n'est pas une cuillère

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Sunday, May 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 May 2023

Frostbite Falls Edition

Top Story

  • Elon Musk has withdrawn Twitter from the European Union's "voluntary" program to control online "disinformation". (Tech Crunch)

    The media, and the bureaucrats, who believe they have the sole right to spread disinformation, are taking this about about as well as can be expected, with Thierry Breton, head of the European Union's Josef Goebbels Memorial Happy Fun Time Administration, issuing unveiled threats.

    What they're really upset about is that Twitter isn't playing the game:
    The pan-EU law, which entered into force back in November, requires VLOPs like Twitter to assess and mitigate systemic risks to civic discourse and electoral processes, such as disinformation.

    The deadline for VLOPs’ compliance with obligations in the DSA is three months from now.

    A request for comment emailed to Twitter’s press office returned an automated reply containing a poop emoji.
    (My italics.)

    You don't have to follow the rules. You're entirely expected to cheat. But you have to play the game.


Tech News

  • ChatGPT, Ace Attorney. (Volokh Conspiracy)

    A lawyer needed to file a motion to dismiss. Being busy, lazy, or probably both, he assigned the actual work of drafting the motion to another lawyer at his firm.

    Likewise busy, lazy, or probably both, the second lawyer handed the task to ChatGPT.

    Being a pathological liar in a box, ChatGPT invented multiple entirely imaginary cases as precedent.

    The judge is not amused.

    This is just the start of it. Expect a lot more of this until OpenAI becomes a penny stock and everyone goes back to looking up stuff on paper.


  • The "Hot Pixel" attack can leak data from almost any CPU at a rate of 100mbps. (Tom's Hardware)

    Note the lower case m. We're talking millibits - so about one letter or digit per minute.

    And it only works under perfect conditions, and requires access to run arbitrary code on the machine in question, so it's very likely you have more pressing concerns.


  • Fancy a bit of light housekeeping? Here's your chance. (The Guardian)

    The US government is giving away excess lighthouses made redundant by GPS, though you have to be a federal, state, or local government entity or an approved registered non-profit to qualify for a freebie.

    If nobody on the list wants the lighthouses they will go to public auction.


  • Amazon office workers are planning to go on strike over, uh, over having to work in an office. (CNN)

    Thanks, said Amazon in a short note, though we weren't planning to announce the next round of layoffs just yet.


  • Where's that story where the paid staff at a mostly-volunteer help line unionised and were all fired and replaced with ChatGPT?

    Oh, here we go. (Gizmodo)

    Right under an ad proclaiming that ChatGPT is revolutionising customer service. Yes indeedy.

    You'd need to have a kidney of stone not to laugh.

    Attention kids: ChatGPT ain't gonna put plumbers out of work, and you won't have $160k in student debt.


  • Sales of the newly launched RTX 4060 Ti and Radeon 7600 graphics card are even more miserable than the miserable sales of other miserable graphics cards in this miserable generation. (Notebook Check)

    Part of the problem is inflation, particularly that official inflation figures are a lie, and that where gamers expect graphics cards to get cheaper with each passing year, for once the costs to manufacture the cards have increased sharply.

    And part of it is that Nvidia is coming off three years of government lockdowns, crypto mining crazes, and money printer go brrr where they could sell everything as fast as they could make it, and now that the economy has predictably gone splut nobody is in the mood anymore.

    Nvidia doesn't care because it's happily selling high end cards at the price of a new car to the tech scam du jour, which is to say, AI. 

    And all AMD needs to do is be slightly cheaper than Nvidia.  AMD created the chips for both the Xbox Series S / X and PlayStation 5 anyway, so they have that entire segment of the market locked up.

    Gamers for whom money is no object, and professionals for whom time is money, have already bought high-end cards. Those who need to watch their budgets are buying last year's models on clearance. Nvidia's RTX 3060 12GB model (not the cut-down 8GB model), and AMD's Radeon 6700, 6700 XT, and 6800 are all good options.

    And there's also Intel, which seems to have cleaned up its early driver mess, and is offering the Arc A750 at very attractive prices.  If Intel can just make a decent card at a decent price with its upcoming "Battlemage" and "Celestial" cards, it might stand a chance of gaining significant marketshare.  But those aren't expected to start showing up until at least the end of the year, and more likely next year.



Disclaimer: There is no spoon. Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock.

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Saturday, May 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 May 2023

Termites R Us Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • Why have air conditioning when we could all live like termites?  (Ars Technica)

    Well, apart from the fact that you're talk about demolishing every human dwelling in the world and rebuilding from scratch, apart from the infrastructure problems of such dense living spaces - not to mention the psychological and sociological ones, apart from the fact that termite mounds are found in very few and specific locations in the world for a very good reason, apart from the fact that the one example presented is located in a city at an altitude of a mile where nobody needs AC in the first place, apart from the fact that in any cold climate the people on the outer edge of the building - you know, the only part that has windows - would all freeze to death when winter arrives - termite mounds not notably common in Norway, for example, apart from all that, the square-cube law would mean that twice a day you'd have hurricane-speed winds blasting through the insides of your incomprehensibly expensive new megastructures.

    Apart from that, sure.  Eat the bugs and live like them too.  I'll be over here.  In my house.  Eating steak.  Or chicken nuggets anyway, given the price of a good steak.


  • Electric truck maker Nikola is at risk of being deleted from NASDAQ mostly because it hasn't made any electric trucks.  (Tech Crunch)

    It has faked some videos of electric trucks, though, so maybe Disney will buy it.


  • IMEC - the global body that tries to manage the semiconductor industry the way an ailurophobe manages thirty to fifty feral cats - has laid out plans to reach the 2A node by 2036.  (Tom's Hardware)

    2A - two Angstroms - is 0.2 nanometres.  Which is slightly smaller than a single silicon atom.

    It might seem impossible to construct silicon chips with features smaller than silicon itself, and you'd be correct, except for the fact that these are not engineering numbers but marketing numbers, which is to say, lies.

    And that would mean the whole plan is nonsense except for the fact that the current mainstream production nodes - 7nm and 5nm - are also marketing numbers.

    So, yeah, chips are going to keep getting larger and smaller and more complicated at a rapid pace for at least another decade.


  • Am I the asshole unethical one?  (Daily Nous)

    An ethics professor - I've made my opinions on the field of ethics clear before - made it very clear to his class that if they cheated on their exam, they would fail.

    Then he posted a sample exam with obviously incorrect answers to a known cheating site.  We're talking about 2 + 2 = banana kind of answers.

    Then his students cheated.  

    At least he didn't have to fail them for cheating, because they failed in the old-fashioned way of getting zero on the test.

    I think they have a bright future as ethicists.


  • Don't buy HP printers.  (The Verge)

    HP offers a "Plus" program where - if you sign up within seven days of buying your new printer - you get "free" ink for "six months".

    Oh and also HP locks your printer to prevent you ever buying non-HP ink cartridges, even if you later cancel your subscription, even though HP inkjet printers are certified as not locking out third-party ink cartridges.

    Epson and Brother both sell inkjet printers with ink tanks that - this is complicated, so bear with me - you fill with ink.


  • "China's" "home-grown" "Powerstar" CPU is a painted-over Intel 10th generation Core i3.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Not in the sense that China stole Intel's design and made the chips itself while claiming credit for the design effort, since Intel's 10th generation chips were made on a 14nm process and China does have 14nm production capability, but in the sense that these are made by Intel and then literally painted over with new part numbers.

    Which is one way to do it, I guess.


  • Meanwhile in Real China TSMC is preparing a 6x reticle size CoWoS-L super carrier interposer for extreme SiP processors.  (AnandTech)

    You know how a few years ago AMD launched its new Zen CPUs, and rather than making an 8-core chip for desktops and a 16-core chip for workstations and a 32-core chip for servers (which they couldn't do because they didn't have any money), they made a single 8-core design that you could use one or two or four of according to your need?

    That's what this is about.  Only six times bigger.



Disclaimer: Nothing in the above content, or in the below content, if any, or in any other content to either side, in front of, behind, or in any other orthogonal or non-orthogonal dimension, at any distance, should be taken, construed, inferred, or assumed to be a statement of fact, opinion, or an orthographically, grammatically, or syntactically correct sentence in any language, extant, extinct, imaginary, or hypothetical.  There is a spoon.  Just $4.99, or $24.99 for a package of four.  What a deal.

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Friday, May 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 May 2023

Let's Not And Say We Did Edition

Top Story

  • An idea so bad even the crazies at Ars Technica are calling it out: Google Search has started rolling out "ChatGPT-style" generative AI results.  (Ars Technica)

    The only thing we want from a search engine is to report accurately on what has been said on the web relating to our search term.

    The most notable thing about ChatGPT and its relatives is that it will simply make shit up, including quotes that were never said and scientific papers that were never published.

    This is going to be a disaster.

    It's opt-in for now.

    For now.


  • JPMorgan says hold my Bud Light as plans leak for a ChatGPT-based investment advice service.  (CNBC)

    To be fair, the company hasn't officially announced anything; this could just be a case of staking a claim on a trademark to make sure nobody else nabs it.

    To continue being fair, on the scale of dumb ideas this is a polar ice cap to Google's iceberg.

    Either one entirely capable of sinking the Titanic, mind you.



Tech News

  • Acer's new Swift Edge 16 is a laptop.  (Liliputing)

    It has the latest Ryzen 7840U - the lower-power variant of the 7840HS - with 8 Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RDNA3 GPU cores.

    The screen is a 16" 120Hz 3200x2000 OLED model covering 100% of DCI-P3 colour and reaching 400 nits brightness, all of which sounds good.  It has two USB 4 ports, two USB 3 ports, HDMI, microSD, and a headphone jack, plus a 1440p webcam (commonly these are 1080p or even just 720p) and the latest WiFi 7.

    The Four Essential Keys are present in the form of a three-column numeric keypad, which is not perfect but something I can live with.  Price starts at $1299 with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, and there's a second M.2 slot for expansion.

    Memory is soldered (LPDDR4 according to the article, which I suspect is wrong), but at least there's a 32GB model on the way though pricing for that is not mentioned.

    The other point of note is that it weighs 1.23kg, which is actually lighter than my current 14" laptop.  Could be worth checking out.  There are plenty of more powerful 16" laptops with better keyboard layouts, but they are also anything between 50% and 100% heavier than this one.


  • Western Digital's 2TB SN850X is available for $135.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This is a good drive.  It's TLC, has a DRAM cache, and supports PCIe 4 with a top transfer rate over 7GB per second.  It's a little more expensive than other models in the current market, but even so costs less than the cheapest, nastiest 2TB drives from just one year ago.


  • Final Cut Pro is here for the iPad.  It sucks.  (9to5Mac)

    Not because Final Cut Pro is bad.  Not because the iPad hardware isn't capable of running it.  But because Apple has deliberately crippled iOS to such a degree that it is useless for any remotely serious task.

    For example, if you edit your video in Final Cut Pro, start exporting the final compressed version, and then switch over to play some Flappy Bird while that runs, your export will simply die, because iOS won't do that.

    Can.  iOS is Unix.  Just won't.


Disclaimer: Can Do, Won't WBAGNFARB.

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