• An 81 year old Montana man has been sentenced to six months in prison and three years probation, and ordered to pay $24,000 after he cloned and bred a race of giant sheep. (ABC)
  
  He used genes from the Marco Polo variety of sheep found in central Asia, which weigh up to 300 pounds and have horns up to five feet long, which he crossed with existing Bighorn sheep to create an even larger hybrid population he called the Montana Mountain King.
  
  As for the giant sheep, they've been ordered to be killed and their meat donated to create a race of giant pigs.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AMD has increased the performance of the Ryzen 9600X and 9700X models by increasing the TDP. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These currently run at 65W by default, but with a new BIOS update will be configurable to run at 105W, with the 60% extra power giving that 10% extra performance.
  
  You could do the same thing with overclocking, of course, so the only real change is that this is fully supported under warranty.
  
  
  
• AMD has also released two small language models. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are just like large language models, only small. With 135 million tokens, they will run on any functioning graphics card; you don't need an RTX 4090.
  
  
  
• Star Wars Outlaws has sold a million copies. (WCCFTech)
  
  For a major game release, that's not good. Dwarf Fortress has sold a million copies, but that has two developers, not hundreds.
  
  Ubisoft needs to sell at least four million copies of this game to break even on the development costs, never mind the licensing costs. That won't happen.
  
  Their next big title, Assassin's Creed Shadows, is looking to be an even bigger failure. The company's shareholders are rioting.
  
  
  
• Google has won a lawsuit against scammers who filed false DMCA takedown requests to remove their competitors from the search index. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Filing a false DMCA request is perjury, which is a felony, but I'm not aware of anyone ever being charged with that crime in such a case.
  
  Here Google was awarded a default judgement because the scammers never responded.
  
  
  
• Epic Games is suing Google, again, and also Samsung. (The Verge)
  
  Epic Games got a court order forcing Google to allow third-party app stores on Android devices.
  
  So Google and Samsung collaborated to introduce new security features that effectively prevent users from installing unauthorised applications, while not providing any means for applications to become authorised.
  
  Again, I don't like Epic, but Google and Samsung need to be smacked down hard here.
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

Posted by: madrocketsci at Wednesday, October 02 2024 12:04 AM (hRoyQ)

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• California governor Gavin Newsome has vetoed SB 1047, the "AI safety" bill that did nothing for AI or safety.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well, good, I guess.
  
  
  
• He has however signed into law 18 other bills involving AI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  These range from common sense regulations on the use of AI when interacting with customers, to blatant violations of the First Amendment.
  
  Mostly the latter.

• MSI has confirmed that CUDIMMs work with AMD as well as Intel processors.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are memory modules with clock regenerator chips onboard, allowing them to run stably at higher speeds - up to 9.6GHz currently, with even faster speeds promised.
  
  The problem is that they are otherwise still standard DDR5 modules, so to hit those speeds they have to run at much higher than normal voltages.
  
  
  
• Kia's online dealer portal could be used to steal with the click of a button.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This has reportedly been fixed but who the hell thought that was a good idea?
  
  
  
• Are software developers gaining from the miracle of generative AI?  No.  (CIO)
  
  Productivity has not improved, bugs have not been reduced, and developer burnout is as bad as ever.
  
  If anything, unfamiliar AI-generated code is making the situation worse.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's 2024 Legion Y700 tablet is here.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is the only good small Android tablet on the market.  And when I say "on the market" I mean not on the market, because it is almost impossible to buy outside of China.
  
  Why?  I have no idea.
  
  Anyway, this model appears to remove the microSD card.  The previous update removed the headphone jack.
  
  Why?  Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• After Unity committed suicide with its overbearing and larcenous new licensing terms, open-source competitor Godot had its moment in the sun.
  
  It just committed suicide in a very messy and public way.
  
  Godot's community manager went psychotically woke on Twitter, not just affirming LGBTQIA+ bullshit over everything else, but blocking users and hiding replies from anyone who dared to question this in even the most polite terms.
  
  Hundreds of people.  It just keeps going.
  
  And the CEO of Godot has gone into hiding.

Posted by: madrocketsci at Monday, September 30 2024 09:44 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 01 2024 12:03 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Tuesday, October 01 2024 03:35 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 01 2024 06:00 AM (rcPLc)

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• In the ongoing legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games over Apple's theft of 30% of everything, Apple was ordered to produce a million documents relating to changes to the App Store.
  
  Apple asked for an extension to that deadline, following its habit of dragging out unfavourable cases forever.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The judge was not having it.

  As Epic constantly points out, this document production is all downside for Apple because it relates to Apple’s alleged lack of compliance with the Court’s injunction. It is not in Apple’s interest to do any of this quickly. This is a classic moral hazard, and the way Apple announced out of the blue four days before the substantial completion deadline that it would not make that deadline because of a document count that it had surely been aware of for weeks hardly creates the impression that Apple is behaving responsibly.
  
  Apple’s request for an extension of time is DENIED. The deadline for the substantial completion of document production is Monday, September 30. It’s up to Apple to figure out how to meet that deadline, but Monday is indeed the deadline.

  Good to see.  I have no particular love for Epic Games, but Apple acts like a classic monopolist, constantly skirting the edge of open illegality.

• SpaceX's rescue mission for the stranded Boeing Starliner astronauts is on its way to the ISS.  (AP)
  
  This is SpaceX's 15th crewed mission.
  
  
  
• A bug in Nvidia's Container Toolkit leaves AI cloud servers exposed to hackers.  (The Register)
  
  This doesn't affect desktop users at all, or people running their own server hardware.  Only cloud users and operators with Nvidia cards.
  
  
  
• The CWWK X86-P5 is a mini-PC with up to an 8 core N305 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and four M.2 SSDs.  (Liliputing)
  
  The N305 (and the other option, the four core N100) don't have a lot of PCIe lanes so those four SSDs all run at PCIe 3.0 x1 - a maximum speed of 1GB per second each.
  
  But this is designed to run as a simple NAS, and the two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports combine to about 0.5GB per second, so that bandwidth is unlikely to be the limiting factor.
  
  Apart from that there are two HDMI ports and two USB ports.  A pretty spartan selection but just fine for a mini-NAS.
  
  
  
• Can addressing gut issues treat long COVID in children?  (Ars Technica)
  
  At least as well as it does for Morgellons disease.
  
  
  
• How does Discord store trillions of messages?  ScyllaDB.  (Discord)
  
  They previously used Cassandra, which is written in Java, and which I have used myself.  ScyllaDB is compatible but written in C++, and they have found it to be far more robust on this scale than Cassandra.
  
  They've also cut the number of database servers needed in half, now having 72 servers each with 9TB of storage.  Which is a lot of servers, but not a lot of disk; you could easily fit that much storage in a single 2U rackmount system.  And it would only cost about $100k - a lot for you or me, but nothing for even a modestly successful company.
  
  So if you are stuck with a Cassandra database and it is causing you pain, ScyllaDB might be the way out.

Pixy Was Watching

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 29 2024 06:39 PM (bg2DR)

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• What is going on in the WordPress war, from a former WP Engine employee.  (Josh Collinsworth)
  
  Matt Mullenweg is a co-founder of WordPress, and now heads up both WordPress.org, the open-source foundation that creates the WordPress application, and WordPress.com, the company that commercialises blog hosting.
  
  WP Engine is a competitor that also offers blog hosting, and has done for nearly fifteen years.  This is entirely legal because WordPress is open source.
  
  So Matt, fed up with a competitor existing at all, has used his position as head of the open-source project to benefit his position has head of the commercial operation by carpet-bombing that competitor:

  Matt had a problem with the landlords, so he carpet bombed the neighborhood.  He didn’t like Alderaan’s leaders, and so he fired the Death Star.  And now it doesn’t really matter what his original point was; he’s made himself the bad guy.

  And I do mean carpet-bombing:

  That post, crucially, went up on WordPress.org, which on its own seems questionable. WordPress.org is ostensibly the website for the nonprofit foundation; it’s supposed to exist topreventany one for-profit company from having too much power over the WordPress ecosystem. It’s supposed to be agnostic.

  Not only was that boundary ignored, but since the post was published as WordPress news, it was then syndicated to each and every WordPress admin dashboard in the world.

  Now, the WordPress software is garbage - not as much as it used to be, but still terrible - but until recently they weren't notably a garbage organisation.
  
  Now they've fixed that, and there are growing calls for Mullenweg to be tossed overboard before he sinks the ship.

• Speaking of garbage companies, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tried to raise $7 trillion to build new chip fabs and datacenters.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's trillion, with a TR.
  
  This calls to mind nothing more than this Sagan quote:

  But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

  
  
  
• There's a bug in some X670E motherboards where if you do something and something, something bad happens.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The end result is that PCIe 5.0 SSDs can end up running as PCIe 1.0 - one sixteenth the speed.
  
  Curiously this does not affect PCIe 4.0 SSDs at all; they work just fine at PCIe 4.0 speed.
  
  
  
• Meta stored 600 million Facebook and Instagram passwords in plain text.  (Apple Insider)
  
  This is not good.
  
  But it should be clarified that this is not the password database.  It's a logging database used by Facebook engineers that should not have been receiving passwords at all.
  
  
  
• Nvidia could release a 24GB version of the upcoming RTX 5080.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Common memory chips used in graphics cards are 2GB each, but new chips are coming out that are 3GB, so that any graphics card vendor can release versions of cards with 50% more memory.
  
  
  
• Why I won't be buying a Lunar Lake laptop.  (CPU Benchmark)
  
  My current Asus laptop isn't perfect.  The screen is amazing, it has one DIMM slot so I could upgrade it to 40GB, and it basically keeps trucking along.  But when I'm doing a big code build it really starts to grind.
  
  It was cheap and gets the job done, but I wouldn't mind something even better.
  
  Luna Lake is not that.
  
  It has a maximum of 32GB of RAM - soldered directly to the CPU, with no possibility of upgrades.
  
  But worse, it is not really any faster or more efficient than my existing laptop, which uses an AMD Ryzen 7730U, which in turn is a renamed Ryzen 5800U, which came out nearly four years ago.
  
  Intel is only really competing with itself here.
  
  
  
• In case you missed it, Ace has a great writeup on the slow-motion multi-track woke train wreck spilling hazardous flaming toxic waste all over the video game industry.  (Ace of Spades)
  
  He highlights Ubisoft's failed Star Wars Outlaws and upcoming failure Assassin's Creed Shadows, Rocksteady's disastrous Suicide Squad game, Bioware's godawful Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and Sony's future wreck Ghost of Yotei, a spinoff of the universally acclaimed Ghost of Tsushima, and mentions in passing Sony's now deceased $400 million money pit, Concord.
  
  The only one really missing there is Fairgame$, Sony's contribution as a multi-billion-dollar corporation to the anarcho-communist "eat the rich" genre.
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, September 28 2024 11:40 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 29 2024 01:06 AM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, September 29 2024 12:16 PM (nk1Z+)

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• The Chief Technology Officer, Chief Research Officer, and VP of Research have all left OpenAI this week as Doc Sam "Snake Oil" Altman tightens his grip on the company.  (Ars Technica)
  
   The core issue is the change of OpenAI's status from a public benefit company to slush fund for the select few to loot.  Altman himself is looking at a $10 billion payday at current valuation.
  
  This is likely a disaster for the company and its shareholders.
  
  
  
• As for the researchers fleeing the oncoming catastrophe they are likely to do just fine.
  
  Google is paying $2.7 billion to rehire an early employee who built an AI chatbot years before ChatGPT.  (MSN)
  
  Specifically, he left Google and founded his own company, and Google has paid $2.7 billion to license that company's technology with the proviso that he return to work at Google.
  
  The amounts of money being flushed down the drain on this are insane.

• Wordpress has declared war on Wordpress hosting company WP Engine.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Wordpress itself is open source and anyone can download it and use it, or offer it as a commercial service to their customers.
  
  Apparently the entire fuss is over the use of the letters W and P.  Wordpress chief Matt Mullenweg is accusing WP Engine of everything short of serial genocide over those two letters.
  
  
  
• HP is adding AI to its printers.  (Ars Technica)
  
  We're already not buying your printers, guys.  You can stop making them worse.
  
  
  
• Speaking of HP the HP EliteBook X G1a actually looks good.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It has a Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 375 CPU, a 2880x1800 14" OLED display, and almost the four essential keys (Home shares a key with F12).
  
  No pricing yet.
  
  
  
• Why Volvo changed its "EV or bust" strategy.  (The Verge)
  
  Because the customers said "okay, bust it is".
  
  
  
• There's a five alarm fire vulnerability in every version of Linux unless there isn't.  (HackRead)
  
  If you're a sysadmin you might want to drink heavily in preparation for actual useful details on October 6.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 27 2024 09:07 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 27 2024 10:54 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 27 2024 11:04 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, September 28 2024 09:26 AM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 29 2024 12:59 AM (pnaK4)

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• Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman-Fried's right-hand woman in the FTX kerfuffle, has been sentenced to two years in prison for her part in the fuffling and ordered to pay $11 billion in restitution.  (Ars Technica)
  
  That restitution order confused me, because that's the entire amount under management by FTX at the time it collapsed, and (thanks to the continuing rise in  Bitcoin prices) all the customers have already been made whole, with interest.
  
  Ellison certainly doesn't have $11 billion, and there is little prospect of her ever having $11 billion.
  
  What it means, rather, is that if Ellison has squirreled away a few million from the collapse, the court has already laid claim to it.
  
  
  

Tech News 

• Facebooks current smart glasses have everything you might want in a pair of smart glasses, except a display.  The company's new glasses codenamed Orion, do.  (The Verge)
  
  They're rather chunkier than the current model, but they're still at the prototype stage, and they look like you're wearing ugly glasses rather your head being eaten by a robot crab.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new 990 Evo Plus SSDs are 45% faster than the existing 990 Evo models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because the existing models were slow.  "Only" 5GB per second.
  
  
  
• Intel's Lunar Lake is here and it's not terrible.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Battery life is solid, and performance is not terrible.  It is just an eight-core chip though, and on heavy workloads like video editing and 3d rendering AMD's current twelve-core chips leave it in the dust, completing tasks around 60% faster.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD the company's 9900X3D desktop chip is expected next month.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's a pretty fast follow-up to the launch of the mainstream versions of Zen 5, but sales of those have been slow.  They're not bad chips, but AMD is competing with itself as well as Intel.
  
  An eight core 9700X is the same price as the previous generation's twelve core 7900X, while being significantly slower.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 26 2024 10:04 PM (pnaK4)

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• Intel has launched its Xeon 6 server processors, boasting up to 128 cores (full-size, not "efficiency" cores) and using up to 500W of power, to compete with AMD.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Intel has been far behind AMD in this space since the first Epyc processors launched in 2017.  Intel hopes to start taking back market share with these new chips, priced starting at...
  
  Well, you can't actually buy them, but when you can they'll be great.  Really.
  
  
  

Tech News

• California Governor Gavin Noisome has vetoed a bill that would have required browsers to allow users to tell websites not to sell their fucking personal data to every criminal organisation in the world.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Even the Ars Technica commentariat didn't like that.
  
  
  
• Booting Linux on an Intel 4004.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 4004 is running an emulator because it lacks most of the hardware (not to mention the address space) to run Linux directly, but it's real Linux on a real 4004 chip from 1971.
  
  It takes almost five days to boot, and sixteen hours to list the contents of a directory.
  
  
  
• The DOJ is suing Visa for "profound and persistent weaselry".  (The Verge)
  
  Sounds about right.
  
  
  
• The world's largest banks are lining up to support nuclear power, with plans to triple the world's nuclear capacity by 2050.  (Business Insider)
  
  That should drive the degrowthers into a tizzy.
  
  Also mentioned in the article is that Microsoft has tapped a well-known nuclear power plant to run its AI datacenters - namely Three Mile Island.
  
  
  
• US air traffic control systems are fucked.  (The Register)
  
  That's it.  That's the story.
  
  
  

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Thursday, September 26 2024 03:18 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 26 2024 07:47 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 26 2024 07:50 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, September 26 2024 01:25 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 26 2024 02:30 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, September 27 2024 09:46 AM (rcPLc)

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Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 25 2024 01:22 PM (bg2DR)

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• AI superintelligence will be here in 20 years says Sam Altman who would never ever lie about such a thing.  (Ars Technica)

  "It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there," he wrote.

  Wanna bet, Sam?

  It's easy to criticize Altman's vagueness here; no one can truly predict the future, but Altman, as CEO of OpenAI, is likely privy to AI research techniques coming down the pipeline that aren't broadly known to the public.

  No.  He's not.

  So even when couched with a broad time frame, the claim comes from a noteworthy source in the AI field-albeit one who is heavily invested in making sure that AI progress does not stall.

  No.  It doesn't.

  Elsewhere in the essay, Altman frames our present era as the dawn of "The Intelligence Age," the next transformative technology era in human history, following the Stone Age, Agricultural Age, and Industrial Age. He credits the success of deep learning algorithms as the catalyst for this new era, stating simply: "How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity? In three words: deep learning worked."

  The problem with that is that "deep learning" hasn't worked, and can't.  There's no point making ever larger and more expensive models - if there ever was - because we've run out of data to feed them.

  Not everyone shares Altman's optimism and enthusiasm. Computer scientist and frequent AI critic Grady Booch quoted Altman's "few thousand days" prediction and wrote on X, "I am so freaking tired of all the AI hype: it has no basis in reality and serves only to inflate valuations, inflame the public, garnet [sic] headlines, and distract from the real work going on in computing."

  Yes.

• Redis users are considering jumping ship.  (The Register)
  
  Redis used to be open source.  Now it isn't.
  
  Which is a problem for Redis.
  
  
  
• Because now Valkey exists.  (Valkey)
  
  It only exists because Redis used to be open source, but Redis did use to be open source.
  
  Meaning that Valkey could take the last open source version of Redis, and create its own version.
  
  And then add features that Redis never had (like multi-threading) and then ship it as open source.
  
  The only thing Valkey can't do is stop being open source, which is a feature rather than a bug.
  
  
  
• The Arc browser: Why you need a better browser than Chrome.  (The Verge)
  
  Chrome used to be the best.  Now it's...  Meh.
  
  Arc is designed to be an operating system for web applications.  Should you try it?

  So, the origin of The Browser Company is I was a political appointee in the Obama White House and after the 2016 election, I was personally devastated by the result. I felt like technology and the technology industry had an impact on the things I didn’t like, and I was very motivated to try to do something about it.

  No.
  
  
  
• Intel's Razer Lake CPUs will follow after Nova Lake now that the Arrow Lake Refresh has been cancelled.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Look, I follow this stuff every single day, and if you told me that Veronica Lake was now set to follow Swan Lake because Rose Madder Lake had been cancelled I would have no idea whether that was real or not.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 25 2024 01:24 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 26 2024 02:32 PM (pnaK4)

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• EU Bookburner General Terry Britain is gone, stabbed in the back by his political masters and dumped in an alley like a diseased dog even the Haitians won't touch, but the EU is still a giant socialist hagfish looking for its next meal, so what do America's big tech companies have to look forward to from his replacement?  (Ars Technica)
  
  We don't know.  This is a Wired article, so it is 100% content-free.
  
  Britain is being replaced by a Finnish center-right politician, Henna Virkkunen.  But she's been in the European Parliament for ten years now, plenty of time for the Helsinki to rub off and the Brussels to soak in.

• The entire human genome on a poker chip.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ew.
  
  Etched by laser.
  
  Never mind.
  
  The storage device, using glass or quartz discs up to the size of a CD, can store up to 360TB and last more or less forever unless you hit them with a hammer.
  
  The problem is that you need a high power laser to write the data in the first place; you can't stamp them out in bulk.
  
  
  
• Keeping Firewire alive on Linux.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Recent versions of Windows and MacOS have abandoned Firewire entirely, so if you need to maintain support for some unusual hardware device, Linux is really your only option.
  
  Or stick with Windows 10.
  
  
  
• Running C code natively from JavaScript.  (The New Stack)
  
  You seem to be attempting to summon Cthulhu.  Would you like me to help with that?
  
  
  
• Are Facebook's Ray Ban smart glasses actually not terrible?  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, they're marketed as AI, but what's more important is that they contain a microphone, a camera, and speakers, all of which work - and reportedly work pretty well - without any AI bullshit.
  
  And they're glasses; they don't cover most of your face and make your neck hurt.  If you already wear glasses you can get them with your prescription.
  
  And they cost $299, not $3499.
  
  What they don't have in their current iteration is a display.  There are other smart glasses like this that do have displays - not full VR but little HUDs, which can be very useful.
  
  If these features can come together maybe the Apple Vision Pro can quietly die and be forgotten.

Something Important Was Forgotten Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 23 2024 09:08 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 26 2024 02:35 PM (pnaK4)

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