• But wait, it gets worse: We spend $20 to attempt RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi.  (Watchtowr)
  
  A story of how one thing led to another and now we seem to have conquered Southeast Asia.

• This bubble has holes in it.  (The Register)
  
  AI in general is not all nonsense.  But generative AI, which has sucked all the oxygen out of the AI room, is actually useful for very few of the purposes to which it is being put.
  
  
  
• Mistral has released Pixtral 12B, it's first multimodal generative AI model.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Multimodal generative models work by having a collection of smaller models each trained for a certain task, rather than trying to pack them all into one unwieldy mess.
  
  It's still not useful for much but on the upside, it's free.
  
  
  
• Human drivers keep running into Waymo autonomous vehicles.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This list includes two cases of criminals who ran into a Waymo vehicle while fleeing the police, and another of where the human-controlled vehicle hit the Waymo car, backed away, and then hit it again before fleeing the scene.
  
  
  
• And while generative AI may be largely worthless, it is at least taking jobs away from journalists.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  Be thankful for small mercies.

• Sony's PlayStation 5 Pro is here, priced at $699.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or A$1200.
  
  Not including a Blu-Ray drive or a stand.
  
  Or any games worth playing, let alone games that would run better than on the regular PS5.

• Starship has been ready to fly again since the beginning of August, but the government is keeping it grounded until at least November.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• Why I won't buy an Intel Lunar Lake laptop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Soldered RAM, limited to 32GB.
  
  
  
• Malaysia's unworkable plan to block public DNS servers has been quietly cancelled.  (The Register)
  
  Good for them.  Most governments would be tripling down and calling you racist at this point.
  
  
  
• The Huawei Mate XT has a tri-fold display.  (Liliputing)
  
  I'm not sure how practical this is, or how robust, but it looks interesting.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 11 2024 10:33 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: David Eastman at Thursday, September 12 2024 01:14 AM (rmrII)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, September 12 2024 04:13 AM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 14 2024 01:47 AM (rcPLc)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 12 2024 12:56 AM (pnaK4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Idiots who tried TikTok's viral "free money glitch" at ATMs are getting reported for fraud.  (Gizmodo)
  
  The "glitch" involved depositing a cheque that you wrote on your own account into your own account at an ATM, and then withdrawing the funds immediately before the cheque bounced.
  
  There is a term for this.
  
  Though doing it from and to your own bank account is an artistic touch of idiocy I had never considered.

  It's not entirely clear how many people may have tried this scheme, but the Journal describes it as "thousands." The viral meme got so popular that tens of millions of people have watched TikTok videos about the "glitch" at this point, according to the Journal.

  People haven't gotten dumber, it's just that technology allows them to do more dumb things faster.
  
  
  
• Though considering that many of these people posted video of themselves committing grand larceny in a manner where the bank also has video of them, maybe they really are getting dumber.
  
  
  
• Though again, considering that criminal mastermind Frank Abnagale, the subject of the movie Catch Me If You Can, only managed to make off with $1448.60 in his own cheque fraud scheme before being caught and sent to prison, maybe not.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Elon Musk has said that no, Tesla is not licensing AI from xAI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Considering that the two AI platforms serve completely different purposes, this report only serves to highlight that the mainstream and tech media alike don't know what they are talking about.
  
  
  
• AMD's Radeon 8000 series will target the mainstream first, not the high end.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The usual pattern is to put out the fastest, most expensive cards in a new generation first, and then trickle out more affordable options.  AMD plans to reverse that with the new generation - expected to launch at CES in January - because its high-end cards don't sell all that well anyway.
  
  This is a much better plan to compete with Nvidia because Nvidia will be launching its own high end cards around the same time, with its mainstream cards coming months afterwards.
  
  
  
• Speaking of launches, SpaceX is hoping to start launching unmanned Starship missions to Mars late in 2026.  (Next Big Future)
  
  If all goes to plan, manned missions will follow in 2028 or 2030.
  
  
  
• China meanwhile is planning a return flight to Mars in 2028.  (Space News)
  
  "Merely an unmanned mission to return small samples.  To Mars.  Well, from Earth, to Mars, and back to Earth.  Round trip.  Steerage class.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 09 2024 11:53 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 10 2024 07:38 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 10 2024 09:59 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 10 2024 10:32 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 10 2024 11:22 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 10 2024 12:05 PM (bg2DR)

7 I did not.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 10 2024 06:15 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 11 2024 10:35 PM (pnaK4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• For the sake of security, we have to stop answering the phone.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Way ahead of you there, chief.

• I don't want unlimited clean energy.  I want communism.  (Ars Technica)
  
  These people are idiots.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition has great battery life thanks to its Lunar Lake CPU.  (WCCFTech)
  
  But how does it perform?
  
  
  
• Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus has solid performance.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  But how is the battery life?
  
  
  
• Fraudulent scientific papers generated by ChatGPT are filling Google Scholar with irrelevant garbage.  (Misinformation Review)
  
  So no change to the status quo then.
  
  
  
• Larry Ellison of Oracle now owns a controlling interest in Paramount Global.  (The Register)
  
  Good?  Bad?  I'm the guy with the money.

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 09 2024 11:31 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 09 2024 02:27 PM (rcPLc)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• College grades have become a charade.  It's time to abolish them.  (MSN)
  
  The colleges?  Sounds good to me.

  If everyone outside hard-core engineering, math or pre-med courses can easily get an A, the whole system loses meaning. It fails to make distinctions between different levels of achievement or to motivate students to work hard on their academic pursuits. All the while, it allows students to pretend—to themselves and to others—that they are performing exceptionally well. Worse, this system creates perverse incentives. To name but one, it actively punishes those who take risks by enrolling in truly challenging courses.

  All true, if somewhat less daring than I had hoped.
  
  The proposal is that every course be reduced to pass/fail.  Which is better than the current situation, but doesn't actually fix the problem.
  
  I like my plan better.

• Threads is full of exactly the sort of tiresome idiots you mute on Twitter.  (Werd)
  
  Full of them.
  
  Thank you for your service, Facebook.  You truly took one for the team.
  
  
  
• Cisco has warned that there is a backdoor admin account in its own license managing tool.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The tool Cisco provides to manage your software licenses for the hardware you bought from Cisco also allows anyone nearby to break into your network.  If you're dumb enough to leave the license manager open to the internet, you're toast.
  
  (And there are lots of people who are exactly that dumb.  They post on Threads.)
  
  
  
• Godot - an open source library for game developers - desperately hoped that Unity wouldn't commit suicide.  (Game Developer)
  
  As we covered at the time, Unity did indeed commit suicide, implementing a new payment structure that could easily cost more than 100% of a game's revenue.
  
  Godot is one of Unity's main competitors, but it is a less polished library built by a smaller team, so taking on all those developers fleeing Unity was going to be a struggle, and they knew it.
  
  Makes me like the Godot team all the more.
  
  (Also, it's officially pronounced however you want.)
  
  
  
• Lenovo's latest Thinkpad Carbon X1 (Gen 13) is almost a good laptop.  (Liliputing)
  
  Well, it is a good laptop (though not a cheap one).  Intel's latest Lunar Lake CPU, up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a 14" 2880x1800 OLED display.  Those screens are great.
  
  And it has the Four Essential Keys.  Not in my preferred arrangement, but they are all there.
  
  And it weighs less than 1kg.
  
  What's not to like?
  
  Two things: First, pricing starts at $1999.  This is not in the same ZIP code as cheap.
  
  Second, Lunar Lake.  Apart from the fact that you cannot upgrade the RAM, ever, it is not all that fast.  We haven't seen the numbers yet, but with just four P cores and four E cores, and no hyper-threading, even if its single-core performance is extraordinary it is unlikely to outperform a four year old Ryzen 5800U for multi-threaded tasks.
  
  And I already have a four year old Ryzen 5800U.  Well, the very slightly updated 7730U, but it's the same silicon.
  
  
  
• Google is now facing another antitrust case, this time in the online advertising market.  (The Verge)
  
  This is the gold standard of "let's you and him fight".
  
  
  
• An AI company's misconfigured server exposed 5TB of patient mental health records.  (HackRead)
  
  This includes full patient identification - names, addresses, drivers licenses, insurance information; medical records including health conditions, family histories, and traumatic experiences; test results and prescription medications; and audio and video recordings of therapy sessions.
  
  All sitting on a server connected directly to the internet without a password.
  
  This is the worst security fuckup I have ever seen.  Whether the data was stolen is unknown - it was discovered by a security researcher - and will not be known unless or until the data starts circulating on the Dark Web.
  
  
  
• Sony's $100 million woke flop Concord is now deceased, having failed to reach 1000 players in the entire world in the ten days since release.
  
  Meanwhile Valve's competing game Deadlock, which you cannot buy, has had zero advertising, and has not even been announced yet, has over 170,000 players.  (Tweaktown)
  
  All you need to do is not actively hate your customers.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 07 2024 08:45 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, September 07 2024 08:55 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 08 2024 09:01 AM (bg2DR)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The US, UK, and EU have signed a "legally binding" AI treaty.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  Has it been ratified by the Senate?  Yeah, that's what I thought.
  
  The treaty itself is relatively short at just twelve pages.  (PDF)
  
  Unfortunately it is utter garbage since the definition of "artificial intelligence" it provides applies to every computer ever built, back to the Hollerith tabulating machines used in the 1890 US census.
  
  On the plus side, it has deeply upset the communists by focusing almost entirely on government use of AI rather than corporate or individual use.

• The Windows 11 23H2 Ryzen patch is here.  Does it deliver performance as promised by the preview?  Yes.  Maybe.  Sometimes.  (YouTube)
  
  Interestingly this video tests Windows 10 alongside Windows 11 2023 and 2024 versions with and without the patch, and Windows 10 often runs faster than unpatched Windows 11.
  
  The problem is that there is a 10% variance in performance between two installs of the same patch version of Windows 11 on the same computer.
  
  That's the kind of thing that leads to bald hardware reviewers.
  
  
  
• There's a live action Minecraft movie coming.  (YouTube)
  
  If you know of the fuss about the original design of Sonic for the Sonic the Hedgehog movie, this looks worse.
  
  If you don't know of that fuss, simply put, this movie is going to bomb.  Hard.  With a 350 million crazed Minecraft fans in the world, there is no way this is going to break even.
  
  There's already a gold standard in this kind of thing, in the form of the Lego Movie.
  
  Everything the Lego Movie did right (which is a lot), this does wrong.
  
  
  
• China's 7nm chips are close in performance and size to Taiwan's 5nm chips.  (Nikkei Asia)
  
  Only problem is that Taiwan is now ramping up 2nm production.  And it will take China a decade to get there.
  
  China's 7nm chips are produced using 14nm equipment with multi-patterning, carefully writing over the chip repeatedly using optical effects to produce a smaller feature size than can be achieved directly.
  
  The problem is that this is rather like saving on painting a car by buying half-price paint...  That requires twelve coats to provide an acceptable finish.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Russia has been dodging sanctions and buying up spare parts for its own chipmaking facilities.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which operate on the 90nm node.  Some of them.  Others are all the way back at 200nm, which is the same process used for Stonehenge.
  
  
  
• My most downvoted StackOverflow answer.  (GitHub)
  
  If you're not interested in the fine details of C vs. C++ arrays, at least scroll down the the quoted Reddit post at the end.  It is a thing of beauty.
  
  
  
• It is truly an exciting time to be buying a new PC.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel's upcoming desktop Core 7 265K is 2% faster than the current 14700K.
  
  But at least it probably won't commit suicide.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, September 07 2024 03:29 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 07 2024 03:03 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, September 08 2024 10:35 AM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 08 2024 05:55 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist at OpenAI, has raised $1 billion for his new company, Safe Superintelligence.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  What is the company planning?

  "It's important for us to be surrounded by investors who understand, respect and support our mission, which is to make a straight shot to safe superintelligence and in particular to spend a couple of years doing R&D on our product before bringing it to market," [CEO Daniel] Gross said in an interview.

  Okay, but what is the company planning?

  Sutskever said his new venture made sense because he "identified a mountain that's a bit different from what I was working on."

  Okay, but what-

  Gross said they spend hours vetting if candidates have "good character", and are looking for people with extraordinary capabilities rather than overemphasizing credentials and experience in the field.

  What-

  "One thing that excites us is when you find people that are interested in the work, that are not interested in the scene, in the hype," he added.

  Yes, but-

  Sutskever was an early advocate of scaling, a hypothesis that AI models would improve in performance given vast amounts of computing power. The idea and its execution kicked off a wave of AI investment in chips, data centers and energy, laying the groundwork for generative AI advances like ChatGPT.

  Okay, but-

  Sutskever said he will approach scaling in a different way than his former employer, without sharing details.

  Great.

  "Everyone just says scaling hypothesis. Everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling?" he said.

  WHAT ARE YOU SCALING?

  "Some people can work really long hours and they'll just go down the same path faster. It's not so much our style. But if you do something different, then it becomes possible for you to do something special."

  Scaling investors' money into your pockets, apparently.
   
   

• Elon Musk says he's a free speech absolutist, but he obeys the law.  (The Verge)
  
  What a villain.
  
  
  
• In a remarkably stupid decision, NaNoWriMo - the National Novel Writing Month, where participants try to complete a novel in a month as an exercise to get into the habit of writing - has embraced generative AI.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's like practicing sewing by buying clothes at Walmart.
  
  
  
• Intel has scrapped its 20A (2nm) process for Arrow Lake.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel has just announced Lunar Lake, manufactured at TSMC.  But that's a single design with 8 cores (4P/4E) and only suitable for thin-and-light laptops.
  
  Arrow Lake will be the matching desktop lineup, and high-end and low-end laptop chips as well.  The desktop chips are likely still on track - those were planned to make made at TSMC - but the laptop chips are probably derailed into next year.
  
  
  

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, September 06 2024 03:21 AM (KOtXO)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Concord is a flop.  (Mashable, 28 August)
  
  
  
• Concord is dead.  (Mashable, 3 September)
  
  Yes, Concord, Sony's $200 million (ish) tentpole hero shooter Overwatch clone (depending on your generation, digital laser tag/cops and robbers/cowboys and indians/Mycenaeans and Sea People) has officially been unalived less than two weeks after release.
  
  Despite desperate attempts by the entire tech and gaming press - apart from Mashable, as it turns out - to drag its flyblown corpse across the finish line, Sony read the hemlock leaves and decided that there was no way to fix this mess without setting even more money on fire.
  
  Everyone who bought a copy - estimated at less than 25,000 - will receive a refund.  The Steam page is already gone, and the servers will go offline this Friday, probably for good.
  
  At time of writing, the game has 43 players.  In the entire world.  So even among the unfortunates that bought the game, fewer than one in 500 are playing it.
  
  
  
• Dustborn currently has 9 players.
  
  
  
• Soulash 2 has 110.  Which is still not a lot, but it's a paid early access game written by one guy living in Poland.
  
  
  
• Core Keeper, another indie game very broadly in the same genre as Soulash, has 20,680 players right now.
  
  
  
• If your doctor has advised you to increase dietary schadenfreude I present The Verge and Kotaku.  Kotaku is in the seventh stage of grief, which like the first six stages consists of blaming gamers.

• Intel has launched its Lunar Lake mobile CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel promises much better battery life than its recent offerings.  That may well be true, because these chips max out at 8 cores (4 Performance and 4 Efficiency), lack hyperthreading, and are built on TSMC's 3nm process rather than by Intel itself.
  
  They also come with memory soldered onto the chip itself.  16GB or 32GB.  No other options, no possibility of upgrade, ever.
  
  These are targeted at the thin-and-light market exclusively, and may actually be good for that market.  We don't know yet, because this is paper launch.  There are no laptops available yet, much less reviews.
  
  Those should come before the end of the month.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile AMD Ryzen AI 300 laptops will receive a free Microsoft Copilot update in November.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Whether you want it or not.
  
  
  
• Remembering the days when disk drives were lethal.  (GitHub)
  
  We're talking an original IBM RAMAC here, which contained fifty 24-inch platters and weighed over a ton.

  The thing that kept us from getting killed was a shield that Don Johnson invented to put around the whole RAMAC disk assembly.  It slowed down the shrapnel.  Leonard and I were the only ones in the room.  We started it up.  It didn't even get up to full speed before it started to fly apart.

  Yes, those were the days.
  
  
  
• Canva has increased the price of its Teams product - in some cases by more than 300%.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I wouldn't care except that Canva recently bought Affinity and the Affinity suite is good software at a very reasonable price, with free updates and no subscriptions.
  
  I hope they don't mess that up.
  
  

• Andreesen Horowitz partner Joshua Lu says the future of gaming is AI, and Discord.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What would he know?

  Andreessen Horowitz’s partner Joshua Lu knows that, in the video game industry, you can never get too comfortable. When he was head of product at Zynga, he experienced the height of mobile games, working on hits like Words with Friends; then as a vice president at Blizzard Entertainment, he helped produce tentpole hits like Diablo Immortal.

  Wait.  Diablo Immortal?  I've heard of that.
  
  Oh, yeah.
  
  Diablo Immortal slammed on Metacritic, now holds lowest user score ever.  (Kotaku)
  
  It scored 0.2.  Out of 10.
  
  After some updates the score increased slightly.  It now stands at 0.3.
  
  Of course, that's on PC.  On iOS they're more tolerant of pay-to-win mobile slop.  It scored 0.5 there.
  
  This was the game where it infamously cost $110,000 to fully equip a single character.  (GameRant)
  
  The future of gaming smells like a sewer.
  
  

• The Rust for Linux maintainer has stepped down because other Linux developers just refused to see the light he was shining upon them.  (The Register)

  "Almost four years into this, I expected we would be past tantrums from respected members of the Linux kernel community. I just ran out of steam to deal with them, as I said in my email."

  Why, yes, he does work for Microsoft.  How did you know?
  
  
  
• What's inside a 128TB SSD?  (Serve the Home)
  
  Flash memory chips.  What a surprise.
  
  
  
• Ugh.  5Gb Ethernet.  (WCCFTech)
  
  2.5Gb Ethernet switches are readily available and getting cheaper.  10Gb Ethernet switches are readily available and getting cheaper - very slowly.
  
  5Gb Ethernet switches do not exist.  You need to find a 10Gb switch with multi-gig support for 2.5Gb and 5Gb speeds.
  
  
  
• I was wrong.
  
  Yesterday I said that Intel's upcoming Panther Lake CPUs will have more bits.
  
  They actually have less bits.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While they will have up to 16 cores, that's made up of four low-power Efficiency cores, eight regular Efficiency cores, and only four Performance cores.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has announced that the ability to easily uninstall the Recall Metavirus is a bug and will be fixed.  (The Verge)
  
  The Recall Metavirus itself is not a bug.  It is intentional.
  
  The ability to remove it will be removed.
  
  
  
• A federal judge has granted a partial injunction on the Texas online child protection (SCOPE) act.  (The Verge)
  
  At issue are arguments that in trying to protect children the law would unconstitutionally infringe upon the free speech of adults.
  
  Which it probably would.  Laws like this are hard to draft without running into First Amendment issues.
  
  
  

Posted by: madrocketsci at Tuesday, September 03 2024 09:47 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:14 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:42 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:44 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:46 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:49 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 04 2024 01:03 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: John Donigan at Wednesday, September 04 2024 03:16 AM (VAiJm)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 04 2024 04:52 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, September 05 2024 08:48 AM (nk1Z+)

Hide Comments | Add Comment