• AMD's Strix Halo laptop chip is here - or almost here; at least review embargoes have lifted on the Asus ROG Flow 13 which features it - and it's actually good.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This chip has 16 Zen 5 cores - full size ones, not the smaller and slower Zen 5c - along with 40 RDNA 3.5 cores and a 256-bit memory bus.
  
  CPU results range between solid and blowing everything else on the market into oblivion.  On Geekbench 6 multi-threaded, it's 66% faster than its nearest competition - despite both chips having the same number of cores.
  
  The selling point of this chip is the integrated graphics, which AMD promised to be competitive with Nvidia's RTX 4070.  Now, they did mean the laptop 4070, which is about 20% slower than the desktop version.  But this review includes multiple laptops equipped with the 4070 and the AMD chip's integrated graphics pretty consistently lands in the middle of that pack.
  
  It's not cheap by any means, but Best Buy has a 64GB ROG Flow 13 for $2199, which is not insane for one of the fastest laptops you can buy.

• Adding a full disk drive to your computer can speed up calculations.  (Qunta)
  
  If you are using a computing methodology that nobody in the world uses for anything practical.  Otherwise it will do exactly what you expect, which is nothing.
  
  
  
• Public interest groups - which is to say communists and grifters - have asked the Sixth Circuit to reconsider its decision that killed the FCCs Net Neutrality rules again.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  The one slight problem with that is that the FCC doesn't want Net Neutrality, so any ruling from the court - in either direction - would be completely irrelevant.
  
  
  
• Flash memory prices are down because - shockingly - nobody is buying gimmicky, unnecessary, and expensive AI laptops.  (The Register)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• Nokia is deploying a 4G cellphone network on the Moon.  (MIT)  (archive site)
  
  Briefly.  The Intuitive Machines lander carrying the 4G base station (to be launched of course on a SpaceX Falcon 9) is small and cheap and not designed to survive the long lunar night.  But it should be long enough to return some interesting data, as long as the bundled talk minutes don't run out.
  
  
  
• Acer, which ships most of its products from China, is planning to increase its prices in the US by 10% in response to 10% tariffs on products shipped from China.  (The Telegraph)
  
  But is also looking at moving manufacturing out of China, which is rather the point.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 19 2025 10:51 PM (NEIix)

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• Mexico is threatening to sue Google over correctly showing the Gulf of America on its maps.  (AP News)
  
  I'm not sure what Mexico thinks it's doing here.  Trying to join the EU?
  
  I mean, they don't even speak American.

• Reviews of AMD's Strix Halo chips could be dropping tomorrow.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This will be interesting - possibly disappointing, but interesting - as its high-end integrated graphics offer a relatively inexpensive way to get a graphics card with 96GB of VRAM.
  
  Still expensive, but professional cards with specs like that run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and this is merely thousands.
  
  And given how the graphics card market is a complete train wreck right now, that offers us something to look forward to.
  
  
  
• The game PirateFi on Steam turned out to pirate your passwords.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Even though it was free, it only had 1300 downloads before it was caught and forced to walk the plank.
  
  
  
• Reddit mods need help in their fight to keep AI slop off the platform.  (Ars Technica)
  
  In the war between robots and the commies, I side with the robots.
  
  
  
• Nvidia is working with Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix to develop a high-bandwidth memory module.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's not clear exactly what technology it will use, just that it is planned to be fast, cheap, and user-upgradeable.
  
  
  
• The Lenovo Thinkbook Flip has two screens.  (Liliputing)
  
  One exactly where you expect it to be, and another one on top of that, where nobody would want it.
  
  I don't know why.
  
  
  
• The war on DEI is a smokescreen.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  You see when the Republicans want to destroy DEI because it is an evil and illegal concoction of racism, sexism, and communism, in service of the Eternal Grift, what they really mean is...  Exactly that.
  
  And Democrats are pissed about it.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 19 2025 10:13 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 19 2025 10:14 AM (NEIix)

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• OpenAI is "trying" to uncensor ChatGPT.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oh, this is going to be comedy gold.

  For example, the company says ChatGPT should assert that "Black lives matter," but also that "all lives matter."

  Worse than literally Hitler.

  Instead of refusing to answer or picking a side on political issues, OpenAI says it wants ChatGPT to affirm its "love for humanity" generally, then offer context about each movement.

  Worse than Chamberlain.
  
  Astoundingly, they almost admit it:

  While it's impossible to say whether OpenAI was truly suppressing certain points of view, it's a sheer fact that AI chatbots lean left across the board.

  The whole article is Tech Crunch waking up from a coma.
  
  Don't worry, though.  The Verge is still batshit insane.

• The Lenovo Yoga Slim 9 14 Gen 10 is...  Almost great, but probably an interesting failure.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's 14" laptop as one of the numbers in there suggests.  It has a 120Hz 3840x2400 OLED display, which is phenomenal.  It has an Intel 258V Lunar Lake CPU, which means 32GB of soldered RAM, which is adequate.  And it has an M.2 2242 SSD, which is meh.
  
  In terms of ports, it has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and that's it.
  
  It doesn't have the Four Essential Keys, but it does have four keys where the Four Essential Keys would go, so a quick trip into Microsoft PowerToys can remap those for you.
  
  And it weighs in at a light 1.2kg.
  
  Problem is that it also weighs in at a hefty $1900.
  
  
  
• You know what else has a limited port selection but a great screen?  The Lenovo (sometimes Legion) Tab.
  
  It's the only good small Android tablet on the market, which is annoying because it's expensive, lacks either a headphone jack or a microSD slot, and wasn't even sold in Australia.
  
  Wasn't.  Is now.
  
  It's about triple the price of an adequate large tablet, but I don't want a large tablet, I want a small one.
  
  
  
• Karol Herbst has stepped down as the maintainer of the open-source Nvidia driver for Linux due to - apparently - being an insufferable leftist prick.  (Phoronix)
  
  He didn't phrase it that way, of course.  He said:

  The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:
  
  "we are the thin blue line"
  
  This isn't okay.  This isn't creating an inclusive environment.  This isn't okay with the current political situation especially in the US.  A maintainer speaking those words can't be kept.  No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn.  Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people.  Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.
  
  I can't in good faith remain to be part of a project and its community where those words are tolerated.  Those words are not technical, they are a political statement.  Even if unintentionally, such words carry power, they carry meanings one needs to be aware of.  They do cause an immense amount of harm.

  Well...  Bye.
  
  
  
• There is no 1875 epoch.  (iter.ca)
  
  This requires a little unpacking.
  
  Elon Musk and the DOGE team recently noted that Social Security benefits were being paid out to a number of people who are - according to the system - 150 years old.
  
  A smug woke asshole on Twitter asserted that the epoch - the start of time - for COBOL systems was 1875, which could make people with no birth date show up as 150 years old.  Now, the claimed epoch start date was in May of 1875 (I don't know why)* which is only 149 years ago, but maybe Musk was rounding up, so that's not dispositive.
  
  The smug wokeness is irrelevant if the claim is true.
  
  The big problem is that the core of Social Security system first went live in 1962, when people born prior to 1875 were still around, and 26 years before the 1875 date became standardised in ISO 8601.
  
  Oh, and ISO 8601 records dates and times as readable text, not as numbers.  It does - or did - standardise on 20 May 1875 as a reference date but that was never an epoch.  It doesn't store dates numerically, so it doesn't even use an epoch.
  
  Also, the SSA released an anonymised sample dataset in 2007, and there was no spike in dates of birth in 1875.
  
  So no, 150 year olds were just getting paid Social Security.
  
  And nobody questioned it.
  
  * Found out why.
  
  
  
• Firefly Aerospace's new lunar orbiter has, uh, arrived in lunar orbit.  (Spaceflight Now)
  
  The Blue Ghost orbiter launched on a Falcon 9 last month, and carries multiple experimental payloads, including ten from NASA.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 18 2025 07:21 AM (ecVXt)

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• The launch prices of AMD's 9070 XT and 9070 have been revealed - probably - at $750 and $650 respectively.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They won't sell at those prices, not against Nvidia's $550 5070 and $750 5070 Ti.  AMD is done in graphics.  The 9070 XT needs to be at least $150 cheaper than the 5070 Ti to compete at all, even if it is faster.
  
  
  
• The actual retail price of Nvidia's $750 5070 Ti looks to be $900.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Oh.
  
  Nvidia is toast too.
  

• Could AMD's announcement that there would be no 32GB model of the 9070 XT have been a modified limited hangout?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Alleged leaks from alleged graphics card partners are that there is indeed at 32GB model on the way, just that it may have a different model number.
  
  
  
• The Khadas Mind 2s is a very expensive mini-PC.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Its 16 core Intel 255H has good single-threaded performance but is well behind AMD's 12 core Ryzen 370 on multi-threaded tests.
  
  That's coupled with soldered RAM (bad) but 64GB of it (good), and a single M.2 2230 slot for storage (meh).
  
  That costs you $1599.
  
  Then you need to buy a dock (a more reasonable $179) and probably a graphics module ($999 for and 8GB 4060 Ti, or $1099 for 16GB).
  
  And an M.2 2230 SSD.
  
  It's not badly designed, as such.  It would be quite interesting at one third the price.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: normal at Sunday, February 16 2025 07:18 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, February 16 2025 08:08 PM (QE7eq)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, February 17 2025 03:11 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Monday, February 17 2025 04:16 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: rose at Tuesday, February 18 2025 05:34 PM (nFvc0)

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• Nvidia has delayed the launch of its RTX 5070 card - a $549 high-end model - until after AMD's announcement on the 28th.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The article points out something I hadn't noticed before: The 5070 is likely to be markedly slower than the 4070 Super, since it cuts the number of shaders from 7168 to 6144.  The 5070 Ti is pretty much a wash; it increases the core count slightly but decreases clock speeds a little.
  
  The 5090 and 5080 meanwhile are overpriced, irrelevant, and not available for purchase anywhere.  The $750 5070 Ti will launch next week, and is expected to be more of the same.
  
  The mainstream market is now AMD's race to lose, and they probably will.

• Feel-good story of the day: The technical staff of Elizabeth Warren's unconstitutional plaything the CFPB has been "gutted".  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Cue the utterly predictable wailing that all the information collected by the CFPB is no longer in the hands of incompetents and thieves.
  
  
  
• Nintendo's legal pursuit of Palworld, which has been described as "Pokemon with guns" and has sold tens of millions of copies on the basis of simply not being lazy garbage, has hit a snag after the US Patent Office denied 22 of the 23 patent claims that Nintendo wanted to use against Palworld developer Pocketpair.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Oops.
  
  With only one patent in dispute the case is likely to end up with a minor settlement from Pocketpair to Nintendo and some small changes to the game.  Given that Pocketpair is a small company and swimming in cash, this isn't going to slow them down.
  
  Recent sales numbers haven't been published but Palworld sold 25 million copies in the first month after release last year, netting the company hundreds of millions of dollars off a budget around $7 million.
  
  
  
• We were wrong about GPUs.  (Fly.io)
  
  Minor but interesting point: Nobody is looking to deploy their own LLMs on cloud servers.  They either use their own hardware or APIs from one of the big players.
  
  Fly.io is a small cloud provider with a GPU offering.  They're not canceling the product, but they're not planning major upgrades or expansions either.
  
  
  
• There are now five makers promising Ryzen 370 mini-PCs with upgradeable memory.  (Liliputing)
  
  Minisforum, GMK, Geekom, Acemagic, and AOOSTAR, making Beelink the only Chinese player in this space without an announcement.
  
  The articles (this one links to the others) note the similarities between the models, with the author also suspecting that there are rather fewer than five distinct motherboard models.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, February 16 2025 04:07 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, February 16 2025 05:12 AM (KOtXO)

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• AMD will not be releasing a 32GB model of the upcoming Radeon 9070XT.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But they will be holding a launch event on February 28, with cards expected at retail in the first week of March.
  
  
  
• If 32GB of memory on your graphics card isn't enough how about 4TB?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  SanDisk has announced high-bandwidth flash.
  
  Similar to high-bandwidth memory (HMB) it uses a stack of flash dies connected to a very wide bus to deliver hundreds of gigabytes per second of bandwidth.
  
  And then, in SanDisk's plan, you put it on a video card so you have terabytes of local memory - since flash is much cheaper and smaller than DRAM.
  
  Problem is of course that it's also a lot slower, at least for writes.  But if your entire dataset can live semi-permanently on your video card, is that a problem anymore?

• The MSXBOOK is an MSX laptop.  (Hackster)
  
  MSX was a Microsoft-led home computer standard from the 1980s, with sound and graphics and ROM cartridges and joysticks.
  
  This laptop uses an FPGA to emulate the original hardware - up to 20x faster than the original hardware - and includes compatible ports for the joysticks and cartridges, along with 2MB of RAM - very rare at the time, a 1024x768 display, also rare, and 4GB of flash storage, which was totally unheard of.
  
  
  
• The Crow Pi 3 is a Raspberry Pi 5 powered hobby / education kit for learning electronics and programming.  (Liliputing)
  
  Or will be once it's available which it isn't yet.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• Oracle chairman Larry Ellison says governments should unify all their data into a single feed for training AI. (MSN)

  Fragmented sets of data about a population’s health, agriculture, infrastructure, procurement and borders should be unified into a single, secure database that can be accessed by AI models.

  This is not unreasonable for already-public broad-scale data. Getting it all into a standard format so that AI - and non-AI computer tools - can analyse it could be valuable. If all of USAID's funding had been out there so that anyone could plug it into a spreadsheet and look for fraud...
  
  Actually, people have been doing that for years and hardly anyone cared.
  
  Anyway. He also wants your DNA. (The Register)
  
  So that's a no.

• Intel's new Core Ultra 9 285H - the top of the line of the middle-of-the-line Arrow Lake H series - is here. Is it any good? (Hot Hardware)
  
  Actually, yes. Intel's Lunar Lake laptop chips are a bit limiting, since memory is soldered directly onto the CPU and there are just four fast cores and four slow ones. Now you can have memory soldered onto the motherboard and six fast cores and ten slow ones.
  
  Which is better.
  
  And it performs very well in tests, including - on this specific laptop - battery life. A big part of that is the MSI Prestige 16's 99Wh battery, but it lasts just shy of 24 hours playing video constantly, and weighs 3.3lbs which is pretty light for a 16" laptop.
  
  
  
• Emojis and other Unicode characters can be hacked to smuggle data invisibly. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I've said before that Unicode is a semantic Superfund site.
  
  Now I think that ASCII was a mistake and we should all go back to SIXBIT.
  
  
  
• Why firing programmers and replacing them with AI is a mistake. (Defrag Zone)
  
  Because AI is shit.
  
  All the points made are obvious, but they are also correct.
  
  
  
• AI is shit. (The Register)
  
  At summarising news headlines, but at many other things too.
  
  
  
• A neutrino moving with the energy of a ping pong ball has been detected by a deep sea telescope. (Phys.org)
  
  Ping pong balls don't have that much energy by macroscopic standards, but neutrinos are about as far from macroscopic as you can get without ceasing to exist entirely. The single particle was so energetic that it triggered a third of the detectors in the telescope all by itself.
  
  
  

Minecraft Modpack Mischief

1. Turkeys lay chicken eggs.  This was fixed last year, but since then the developers of the Let's Do series of mods have rearranged things and it seems to have become unfixed.
   
   
2. Pressing B for my backpack when it's in the Curios slot on my back doesn't let me access the inventory.  The backpack works, you just have to access it from your main inventory, or put it down and access it that way.  Not sure why; I fiddle with my key mappings but got nowhere.  (This was with a Traveler's Backpacks backpack; I haven't tried yet with a backpacks from Let's Do Camping.)
   
   Update: If you equip the backpack via the backpack's own UI, the B key works - and leaves the Curios slot on your back free so you can also carry a quiver for your arrows.  Not sure why it doesn't work otherwise, but this way is better so I'm not going to worry about it.  And it all renders properly, so you are running around wearing exactly the customised backpack you created.

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, February 14 2025 04:25 AM (KOtXO)

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• Average CPU speed actually went down in 2024, for the first time in twenty years.  (Twitter)
  
  There's a lot of speculation as to why, but no clear answers.  The fastest available desktop CPUs are two years old, with no replacement models in sight.  Meanwhile Intel has dropped its hyper-threading support - multiple threads per CPU core - which meant multi-threaded scores declined for newer chips.
  
  But this average includes AMD chips which still have hyper-threading, and Apple chips which never had hyper-threading, so who knows?

• A new attack on Google's Gemini AI lets users permanently plant false memories into the system, so that they are shared with unsuspecting users on the same account.  (Ars Technica)
  
  As far as I can tell, this doesn't affect the core Gemini training data; that's fixed irrevocably.  So it doesn't persist across Google accounts, limiting the damage it can do.
  
  But LLMs are fundamentally insecure to this kind of attack, like kindly grandmothers with confidence tricksters, and every patch is just a Band-Aid atop a growing heap of Band-Aids.
  
  
  
• How Elon Musk's bid for OpenAI could gum up Sam Altman's for-profit conversion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI is still, in theory, a non-profit operation with a secondary for-profit company commercialising the product.  The bid was made for the non-profit group which owns all the intellectual property.
  
  The state attorneys general in California and Delaware have already filed inquiries with OpenAI over its plans and the valuation of the nonprofit entity, so Sam Altman and the commercial side of OpenAI cannot underbid in their attempt to wrest control.

  "Musk is throwing a spanner into the works," said Stephen Diamond, a lawyer who represented Musk's opponents in corporate governance battles at Tesla, in an interview with TechCrunch. "He's exploiting the fiduciary obligation of the nonprofit board to not undersell the asset. [Musk's bid] is something OpenAI has to pay attention to."

  Which is the last thing Altman wants right now.
  
  
  
• While Tech Crunch has a sane article mentioning Elon Musk, other sites have gone as insane as The Verge.  (The Register)
  
  The writer feebly attempts to liken Elon Musk's team rooting out waste and fraud to a CPU microcode exploit, ignoring the fact that in such an analogy the CPU would be on fire to begin with.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AI Google is considering using it to make Chrome change compromised passwords for you automatically.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I assume they mean in navigating the password change process for each compromised website; this is not otherwise complicated.
  
  
  
• Smol GPU is an open-source GPU for RISC-V designs.  (GitHub)
  
  Meant more as a learning tool than a real product, but if you are synthesizing a small RISC-V core on an FPGA - and who isn't, these days - and need a GPU to go with it, it might be worth a look.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, February 12 2025 06:55 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 13 2025 09:57 AM (CTqWg)

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• A group of investors led by Elon Musk has made a $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said "no thanks" and offered to buy Twitter, but neither decision is up to him.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile French president Emmanuel Macron said that Europe is not in the AI race.  (CNN)
  
  Ignoring the fact that increasingly Europe is not in the anything race.

• Meanwhile Microsoft asked the question "Is AI making us dumber?" and found that the answer is yes.  No.  What was the question again?  (404 Media)

  So, does this mean AI is making us dumb, is inherently bad, and should be abolished to save humanity's collective intelligence from being atrophied? That's an understandable response to evidence suggesting that AI tools are reducing critical thinking among nurses, teachers, and commodity traders, but the researchers' perspective is not that simple.  As they correctly point out, humanity has a long history of "offloading" cognitive tasks to new technologies as they emerge and that people are always worried these technologies will destroy human intelligence.

  In other words, yes.
  
  
  
  
• The Yao conjecture on the time taken to fill the last empty slot in a nearly full hash table turns out to be false.  (Quanta)
  
  For forty years that time has thought to be O(n).  It's actually just O((log n)2).
  
  Don't you feel much better knowing that?
  
  
  
• If you need a single-board computer with more memory and I/O than the Raspberry Pi, the ROCK 5T from Radxa is one.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's not a lot faster than the Raspberry Pi - it has the same four A76 cores, but also has four slower A55 cores that the Pi lacks.  But it has up to 32GB of RAM, dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, and two M.2 slots for storage as standard.
  
  It does start to get expensive though.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, February 11 2025 07:16 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 12 2025 11:01 AM (NEIix)

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• Did Google fake the AI output in its Super Bowl ad?  Yes.  (The Verge)
  
  Not only was it wrong, it was a verbatim copy of text that has appeared on the web since 2020, before Google Gemini existed.

  But Google maintained that the website description was written by Gemini all along. In addition to showing Gemini "generate" the description in the commercial, Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler said on X that the Gouda stat was "not a hallucination," adding that "Gemini is grounded in the Web."

  Well, if by "grounded in" you mean "a human copying and pasting directly from", then sure.
  
  The original text claimed that Gouda accounts for 50 to 60 percent of cheese consumption worldwide, and is "one of" the most most popular varieties of cheese, which is comical.
  
  Everyone knows that's Venezuelan beaver cheese.

• Brainfly is a high-performance Brainfuck JIT and AOT compiler built on top of C# type system.  (GitHub)
  
  Why it is, we don't know.
  
  
  
• The Brave browser is getting a feature like the old Firefox Tampermonkey plugin, to let you automatically add scripts to web pages.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This lets you adjust the page layout of sites that fill the entire screen with a banner image, for example.
  
  
  
• How close is Elon Musk to controlling a nuclear weapon?  (The Verge)
  
  They got their answer:

  Launching a nuke requires physical access to the weapon itself.  Missileers have to turn keys.  A submarine crew must prep and fire a missile.  A bomber crew must pull levers and hone in on targets.  Short of Musk or his employees entering a silo, climbing onto a stealth bomber, or getting into a submarine, it’s not going to happen.

  The entire article is pointing out that the premise is insane.  But The Verge published it anyway, because so are they.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Tuesday, February 11 2025 04:29 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, February 11 2025 08:57 AM (rcPLc)

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