What is that?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?

Sunday, November 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 November 2024

AI Toasted Honey Buns Edition

Top Story

  • Elon Musk is directing harassment towards individual federal workers.  (The Verge)

    Is he indeed, O Verge?

    The example cited - the only example cited - is of Musk suggesting that Director of Climate Diversification at the International Development Finance Corporation was a "fake job".

    Now, "climate diversification" in this sense means recommending alternative crops to grow to make the food supply more robust against short and long term changes in weather.

    Which is a task that could easily by filled by a fairly small book.

    And in this case, it involves making those recommendations to other countries.

    So, never mind "individual workers".

    USAID, its 10,000 employees, and its $50 billion budget: Afuera!


Tech News

  • In a small bit of welcome news in the never-ending shitfest that is Australian federal politics, the government has abandoned one of its attempts to strangle free speech across the entire world.  (ABC)

    The so-called "misinformation bill" would have set up the government as the arbiter of truth, and anything untrue would have become illegal speech.  The bill did not specify how this was supposed to work; it just legislated it into reality.

    And now it's dead for the current session of Parliament, and the left-wing Labor government is likely to be out of power before Parliament votes on any new legislation.

    Still moving forward is the government's Won't Somebody Think of the Children Act, which bans minors under the age of 16 from using social networks, though again it never specifies how this is supposed to be achieved.  This has the support of the nominally conservative Liberal Party and is likely to pass in some form, even though it is obviously completely unworkable.

    That's the same party that previously wanted to ban encryption, claiming that Australia's laws superseded mathematics, so this betrayal of conservative principles comes as no surprise.


  • Lenovo's ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 uses the new CAMM2 memory module in place of SO-DIMMs, but with a twist.  (WCCFTech)

    Not only does it use the new, more compact modules, it uses LPDDR5X memory rather than regular DDR5.

    This reduces power (LP = low power) and also runs faster at 7500MHz.

    This is particularly welcome as AMD's Zen 5 laptop chips don't support regular DDR5, so without these modules, laptops based on those chips would not have any path for memory upgrades.


  • I don't remember if I wrote about this - the story is from six months ago - but yes, LPDDR6 is on its way.  (Hot Hardware)

    LPDDR6 promises initial transfer rates of 10.6GHz and eventually 14.4GHz, which is not dramatically faster than the best LPDDR5X chips available now.

    Except that the bus is also 50% wider, and instead of fetching 8 words at a time it fetches 12.

    Which makes 288 bits, which is not very useful for 64-bit computers, so the extra 32 bits at the end is used for very strong ECC (DECDED guaranteed).

    Which makes 10.6GHz LPDDR6 90% faster than 7500MHz LPDDR5.

    This matters because current integrated graphics solutions from AMD and Intel are bottlenecked not by the chips but by memory speeds.  Apple's higher-end M-series chips have (as far as I can tell) 256-bit or even 384-bit buses, and AMD's upcoming Strix Halo chips will also have a 256-bit bus, but regular laptops only offer 128-bit memory.

    So when LPDDR6 arrives we can expect a big jump in integrated graphics performance.

    (My new laptop has DDR4 memory running at 3200MHz.   So...  Yeah.)


  • Can ChatGPT-o1 complete a junior front-end developer's task?  (Charbel Ghossain)

    Well, yes, if you aren't worried about it working properly.

    The code produced for this example sort of works, in that it doesn't break the page.  But on a scale of 0 to 100, it only does anything at all for the range from 20 to 80.


  • It is shockingly easy to jailbreak LLM-driven robots.  (Hot Hardware)

    This is not shocking.  LLMs are notoriously insecure and unreliable.

    Simple solution: Don't fucking build LLM-driven robots.


  • Who the heck is the M4 iMac aimed at?  (The Verge)

    It's a lovely piece of engineering, but the screen is too small for serious work, the memory cannot ever be upgraded, and the network speed is limited to 1Gbit when even the Mac Mini has a 10Gbit option.  And Apple has long since abandoned monitor mode, where an aging iMac with a perfectly good screen could serve as a monitor for another computer.

    Which would all be forgivable if it were cheap.  

    The 10 core model with 16GB RAM and 512GB of SSD costs $1699.


  • Does GitHub Copilot improve code quality?  (GitHub)

    Yes, says GitHub.

    No, says literally everyone else.


Disclaimer: I accidentally threw out the fruit cake.

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Post contains 788 words, total size 7 kb.

Saturday, November 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 November 2024

The Horror Edition

Top Story

  • Elon Musk's new ideas for improving government efficiency are not in fact new.  (The Verge)

    Do tell, O Verge.
    Though DOGE isn’t a real department - and may in fact just be President-elect Donald Trump’s way of placating Musk by giving him the appearance of a real job - it represents a long-running right-wing attempt to gut the civil service, a plan the incoming administration fully supports.
    So it only appears to be a real job, but the administration fully supports it?
    In any case, Musk and Ramaswamy have proposed cutting "thousands" of federal regulations and determining the "minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions."
    Awesome.
    This time around, it's not clear whether the courts would stop Trump, who, in his first term, nominated more judges to the federal judiciary than any of his predecessors and will inherit an extremely friendly Supreme Court. And as Musk and Ramaswamy noted in their explanation of how DOGE will function, the incoming Trump administration has something new at its disposal: the recent Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the landmark case that overturned Chevron deference.
    Better and better!
    The goal is mass deregulation - a weakening of checks and balances and a major cut to basic government services, all in the name of concentrating power among a small group of plutocrats.
    As opposed to the way things are now, where government regulations are the primary tool for concentrating power among a small group of plutocrats?



Tech News

Disclaimer: Nothing will come of nothing, speak again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:56 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 454 words, total size 4 kb.

Friday, November 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 November 2024

Trucked Up Edition

Top Story

  • The problem is clear: Our customers are dumb.  (Intel)

    Intel commissioned a study to find out how much more efficient users were when equipped with a fancy new "AI PC".

    It turned out:
    At the same time, AI PCs offered a potentially transformative impact on people’s lives, saving individuals roughly 240 minutes a week on routine digital tasks. But the study also highlighted that current AI PC owners spend longer on tasks than their counterparts using traditional PCs. Study results show that greater consumer education is needed to bridge the gap between the promise and reality of AI PCs.
    AI PCs make things worse, but the real problem is the users.


  • Meanwhile at Microsoft.  (Business Insider)  (archive site)

    Microsoft Copilot is a little too efficient, it seems...  At sharing confidential information with people who shouldn't have it.



Tech News




Disclaimer: What is that in Scoville units?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:49 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 309 words, total size 3 kb.

Thursday, November 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 November 2024

Sky Pie Edition

Top Story

  • The DOJ is seeking to break up Google, or rather to chip off a very small part of it.  (AP News)

    They want to break off the Chrome browser, which has multiple competitors, including some like Brave which use the same open-source core and behave virtually identically.

    What this is expected to achieve is unclear.  It would break Google's direct influence over the browser, but so would people switching to Brave or Vivaldi.

    They also want to prevent Google from making Google Search the default search engine in Android, which is something we've been through before with browsers and achieves basically nothing.

    Experts are freaking out, because that is what experts do:
    "It is probably going a little beyond," Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh said of the Chrome breakup. "The remedies should match the harm, it should match the transgression. This does seem a little beyond that pale."
    He should see my proposal, which involves Tasmanian devils.


  • A Google employee union says, isn't there someone you forgot to ask?  (The Verge)

    I don't know what you mean.  The Tasmanian devils are fully on board.


Tech News

  • Ubuntu Linux has a decade-old bug in the needrestart tool that lets local users gain root access.  (Bleeping Computer)

    This is bad, but it doesn't allow remote hackers to do anything directly.  It does give them a way to completely take over your system if they are already logged in, though.

    To fix it, edit the file /etc/needrestart/needrestart.conf

    It will have a line containing

    #$nrconf{interpscan} = 0;

    Find that line, and delete the # to activate it.  This has been the recommended configuration since 2022 but doesn't seem to have been adopted.

    Or just apt upgrade needrestart


  • Microsoft didn't think people would actually want to play Flight Simulator 2024.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The servers that deliver the data stream have been overloaded and crashed entirely at least once.  Since you can't simply download the game once and play it, that makes it more or less unplayable:
    Our editors at Tom's Hardware attempted to install the game yesterday - two of our editors managed to hit around 70% before the installation failed, and one editor managed to install the game but could only access the main menu. So, unfortunately, we'll have to postpone our review of MSFS 2024 until Microsoft's game services are actually working.
    Nice work, Microsoft.


  • Panzer of the lake, what is your wisdom?  (Stack Exchange)

    Tracking down an eighty year old photo of a tank.  In a lake.


  • The OneXGPU 2 is an external GPU for laptops and mini-PCs with Thunderbolt, USB4, or OCuLink.    (Hot Hardware)

    It contains a Radeon 7800M laptop CPU, which is the 7800 XT desktop chip cut down to 12GB of RAM and a 192-bit memory bus (and also cut down from 265W to 180W).

    It also serves as a docking hub, with two USB ports, Ethernet, a micro-SD slot, and an M.2 slot in addition to the upstream USB4 and OCuLink ports and the three video outputs.

    And...  Basically, it works.


  • Reddit is back online.  (Tech Crunch)

    Some people actually noticed that it went down.


Complete Pile of Dog Crap Video of the Day




Disclaimer: Some people.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:13 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 537 words, total size 5 kb.

Wednesday, November 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 November 2024

Smirking Or Non-Smirking Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Disclaimer: And who wouldn't want that?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:24 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 430 words, total size 4 kb.

Tuesday, November 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 November 2024

Eleventy Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Disclaimer: Hypocrisy is different when we do it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 257 words, total size 3 kb.

Monday, November 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 November 2024

So That Happened Edition

Top Story

  • The Twitch Adpocalypse is here, with streamers reporting their income has suddenly declined by as much as 95% as the house of cards burns down, falls over, and sinks into the swamp.

    I don't have a link to a good story covering this yet, because the written articles are useless and the video coverage is obnoxious.  Twitch was offering absurdly favourable pay scales to its preferred coterie of lunatics, and the advertisers got fed up with the crap their ads were shown against and left.

    Jeff Bezos has a bad habit of buying companies and leaving them to be destroyed by lunatics.


  • So, yeah, that link yesterday in the item about Bluesky was totally wrong.  Being me, it pointed instead to a Twitter post about Lego mech suits for Hololive fan mascot plushies.  The only thing that could have made it more of a click magnet would be if the mechs were playing classic D&D.


Tech News



Disclaimer: Pebbles form up!  For the Childlike Empress!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:54 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 461 words, total size 4 kb.

Sunday, November 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 November 2024

I Am Chaos The End Of Ends Edition

Top Story

  • A million people have left Twitter for competitor Bluesky since the election.

    A million of the most annoying people on Twitter.

    Bluesky is getting what it deserves.  (Twitter)

    The tech is fine, but the people running Bluesky are the same ones Elon Musk fired from the Trust and Safety team the day he took charge.  They are all-in on censorship, and so are the people now flocking to the platform.

    And since there are no conservatives to fight, they are fighting each other.

    Content reports have soared by 4000% as they lash out at everyone and everything, and in a truly beautiful turnaround, the most committed lefties are getting permanently banned for claiming the election was stolen.

Tech New



Disclaimer: Well, that didn't happen.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:37 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 346 words, total size 3 kb.

Saturday, November 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 November 2024

Oops All Bombs Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Disclaimer: Buckwheat flour works great for making gluten-free fried chicken.  Just so you know.  Much better than general-purpose gluten-free flour.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:27 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 275 words, total size 3 kb.

Friday, November 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 November 2024

Trash Fire Trebuchet Edition

Top Story

  • The EU has fined Facebook 800 million euros for making the Facebook Marketplace part of Facebook.  (Ars Technica)

    Even Ars Technica knows this shit is coming to an end:
    In the past five years, EU regulators have also passed a landmark piece of legislation—the Digital Markets Act—with the aim to slow down dominant tech players and boost the local tech industry.
    There is no local tech industry.
    However, some observers expect the new commission, which is set to start a new 5-year term in weeks, to strike a more conciliatory tone over fears of retaliation from the incoming Trump administration.
    There are going to be so many tariffs.  Beautiful tarriffs.  You've never seen tariffs like them.


Tech News

Holocure 0.7 Trailer Video of the Day



Holocure 0.7 is out today.

This is a Hololive-related game as the name would suggest, but unofficial, fan-made, and completely free.  (Hololive is perfectly happy with that although technically they own the IP.)

And it's good.

It's basically a Vampire Survivors clone where you battle swarms of annoying fans as one of - hang on - 47 playable characters, all with unique weapons and skills, and a crazy number of upgrades that switch around randomly between games.

It's also starting to be a Stardew Valley clone with home-building, farming, fishing, and mining (and slave labour), and apparently now a Jump King clone, and has a casino where you can bribe the dealer, and I don't know what else.

Small problem for the team working on the game is that Hololive is adding new talents faster than they can be added to the game.  There are two EN generations and four JP generations, with the latest group appearing only a week ago.


Disclaimer: Flow Glow or not Flow Glow...

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Post contains 426 words, total size 4 kb.

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