• Elon Musk really broke Twitter this time.  (The Atlantic)

  The social network has never seen chaos quite like this.

  They literally know nothing, not even their own magazine.  Say the words fail whale and they'll just blink stupidly at you like a myopic dugong.
  
  
  
• You might think that if The Atlantic is reporting on a tech story, it must already be obsolete or irrelevant and you'd be 100% correct.  (The Verge)
  
  The requirement to log in to read tweets?  Gone.
  
  Daily limits on reading, posting, replying, liking?  As far as I can tell, gone.
  
  Oh, and there's this:

  Twitter’s move comes a day before Meta launches its own text-based app called Threads.  Interestingly, Threads also briefly allowed users to view posts on the web without logging in before pulling the links. It is likely that people will be able to see Threads posts without an account when the app officially launches.

  So the news is that Twitter briefly disabled reading content without an account, and Threads briefly enabled it.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Marmot is a distributed, eventually-consistent version of SQLite.  (GitHub)
  
  What happens when there's a race condition, you ask?
  
  They have a very clever solution for that: They lose your data.
  
  They do lose your data deterministically, but they still lose your data.
  
  
  
• Reddit's subreddit r/programming is back.
  
  It's garbage.
  
  
  
• We have left the cloud.  (Hey)
  
  They spent half a million dollars on hardware to save one and a half million per year on cloud services.
  
  
  
• Bruce Power is planning to expand an existing site in Ontario into the world's largest nuclear reactor complex.  (Financial Post)
  
  Swampies hardest hit.
  
  
  
• French president Emmanuel Macron has been accused of authoritarianism after threatening to cut off social networks if mobs continue to burn, loot, and murder their way across the country.  (The Guardian)
  
  Destroy the city and your TikTok privileges are revoked.
  
  I think there's a generation that needs a lesson in the meaning of authoritarianism.
  
  
  
• Promises of the imminent arrival of AGI - artificial general intelligence, or real AI - are bullshit.  (The Register)

  Enter Yale School of Management economics professor Jason Abaluck, who in May took to Twitter to proclaim: "If you don't agree that AGI is coming soon, you need to explain why your views are more informed than expert AI researchers."

  That would be, Jase, because the "expert AI researchers" are crack-addled retards:

  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last month declared to an audience in India: "I grew up implicitly thinking that intelligence was this, like, really special human thing and kind of somewhat magical. And I now think that it's sort of a fundamental property of matter..."

  Yes, you can tell that by all the rocks that have won the Nobel Prize.

  Caswell Barry, professor of UCL's Cell and Developmental Biology department, works on uncovering the neural basis of memory. He says OpenAI made a big bet on an approach to AI that many in the field did not think would be fruitful.
  
  While OpenAI might have surprised the industry and academia with the success of its approach, sooner or later it could run out of road without necessarily getting closer to AGI, he argued.
  
  "OpenAI literally sucked in a large proportion of the readily accessible digital texts on the internet, you can't just like get 10 times more, because you've got to get it from somewhere. There are ways of finessing and getting smarter about how you use it, but actually, fundamentally, it's still missing some abilities. There're no solid indications that it can generate abstract concepts and manipulate them."

  He's being very diplomatic there.  We know that it can't generate abstract concepts.
  
  
  
• A chronological list of Star Wars movies and TV shows.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Why am I linking to a dumb list that isn't even chronological (neither in order of release or internal chronology)?
  
  Because it was generated by an AI, because it is indistinguishable from the usual drivel on these sites except that (a) it is spelled correctly and (b) it doesn't accuse you of racism, and because the idiots who regularly write said drivel don't want anyone to click on it because then they'll all get fired and end up living in a dumpster fighting with the rats over the daily supply of Starbucks' coffee grounds.
  
  Which is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 07 2023 12:15 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 07 2023 12:19 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 07 2023 04:20 AM (zx18t)

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• Ace already hit on this one but the top tech story of the day is undeniably a federal judge's injunction against fascists doing fascist stuff, specifically, censoring the speech of non-fascists. (Washington Post)
  
  (Don't worry, that link goes to an archive site, not to the Post itself.)
  
  The argument in favour of fascism is extraordinary.

  The Trump-appointed judge’s move could upend years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies.

  Yes, that's the point. That's illegal.

  A federal judge on Tuesday blocked key Biden administration agencies and officials from meeting and communicating with social media companies about "protected speech," in an extraordinary preliminary injunction in an ongoing case that could have profound effects on the First Amendment.

  Note that they have protected speech in scare quotes, and describe a straightforward enforcement of First Amendment protections as "extraordinary".
  
  And yes, it could have profound effects on the First Amendment. It upholds it, when Journalists for Censorship has expended so much effort into tearing it down.

  The Donald Trump-appointed judge’s move could undo years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies. For more than a decade, the federal government has attempted to work with social media companies to address criminal activity, including child sexual abuse images and terrorism.
  
  Over the past five years, coordination and communication between government officials and the companies increased as the federal government responded to rising election interference and voter suppression efforts after revelations that Russian actors had sowed disinformation on U.S. social sites during the 2016 election. Public health officials also frequently communicated with the companies during the coronavirus pandemic, as falsehoods about the virus and vaccines spread on social networks including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

  Note the desperate attempt to conflate crimes by other people - child porn and terrorism - with crimes by the government - the systemic censorship of protected speech.

  "The injunction is strikingly broad and clearly intended to chill any kind of contact between government actors and social media platforms," said Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School.

  Yes. That's the point.

  For years, Republicans have argued that social media companies’ policies to address disinformation related to elections and public health have resulted in the unfair censorship of their political views. Meanwhile, Democrats have argued that the companies have not gone far enough in policing their services to ensure they do not undermine democratic institutions.

  The Democrat position being that it's not happening and we need more of it.

  "Deep state" refers the unsubstantiated idea, frequently invoked by Trump, that a group of bureaucrats is working to undermine elected officials to shape government policy.

  Oh, not entirely. Those bureaucrats are entirely happy with the current circus who barely need prompting to do their bidding.

• Amazon's DMS is shit.
  
  
  
• The two things I want and haven't been able to get are an 8" tablet with a high-resolution screen - 2560x1600 would be good, and a small laptop with a Zen 4 CPU and at least 32GB of RAM.
  
  So here's an 8" tablet with a 2560x1600 screen, a Zen 4 CPU, and 32GB of RAM. (Notebook Check)
  
  Not quite what I ordered, but... Maybe? (Checks price.) No.
  
  
  
• The UK is planning to scuttle its 15 billion pound "climate" funding promise. (The Guardian)
  
  "Yeah, about that," said PM Rishi Sunak. "We were drunk at the time. Deal's off."
  
  
  
• India plans to start construction of a chip assembly and test facility next month, with first production scheduled by the end of next year. (Financial Times)
  
  At first glance I thought this was talking about a fab, where they make the actual silicon, in which case there is no way it could happen that quickly.
  
  But this is talking about the factory that takes the tiny slivers of silicon and packages them in plastic with little leads or pins or metal balls, that can then be attached to circuit boards. Less dramatic but still necessary and something that is quicker and simpler to build.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, July 05 2023 08:33 PM (rglbH)

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• It's the end of the social media era and we're all going to die.  (The Verge)
  
  More than anything else, social networks are being killed by the end of low interest rates.  They survived every kind of privacy scandal, they survived being run by outright communists.  But they can't make money when interest rates are at historically pretty normal levels.
  
  Which is why Reddit is murdering third-party application and Twitter is planning to become a shopping platform.
  
  
  
• Twitter has resurrected Tweetdeck.  (The Verge)
  
  Because you have to keep the platform alive long enough to transform it to something profitable.
  
  A necessity Reddit forgot.
  
  
  
• Instagram is launching its Twitter competitor, Threads, this week.  (The Verge)
  
  Because sometimes it's cheaper to kill your competitors than to buy them.
  
  
  
• Twitter's competitors soar after yet another bad Musk move.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Twitter competitor Spill (who?) has now gained 0.01% of Twitter's audience, including high-profile celebrities like Keke Palmer (who?) and Ava DeVernay (who?)  This weekend, the iconic musician from The Roots (who?), Questlove (who?), tweeted - that is, posted on Twitter, a link promoting his Spill profile. Lizzo (the fat chick) even took to Instagram (which is not Spill) and Twitter (also not Spill) to see if she could score a Spill invite.
  
  

• TSMC's CEO made 276 times as much money as an average worker in 2022.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And worth every penny.
  
  The average salary for TSMC employees was also four times the average income in Taiwan, so it's not like he's stiffing the help.
  
  
  
• West Taiwan meanwhile is planning to restrict exports of gallium and germanium.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Neither of which are all that rare, so all this will do is hand the market to other countries.
  
  
  
• AMD's next-gen Epyc chips will offer up to 128 Zen 5 or 192 Zen 5c cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  So one of the new chips will be as fast as two of AMD's fastest chips from a month ago.
  
  
  
• Apple plans to appeal to the US Supreme Court to undo a 9th Circuit ruling that punctured the company's lucrative protection racket.  (Reuters)
  
  You can't put an application on an iPhone without Apple's blessing.
  
  You can't get Apple's blessing without handing them 30% of your gross revenue.
  
  And you can't - or couldn't - mention alternate payment methods that bypassed Apple's sticky fingers.
  
  The 9th Circuit in the Epic v. Apple case ruled that Apple couldn't legally require that, which kills one of Apple's largest revenue streams.
  
  I'm hoping the Supremes shut them down, hard, but I don't know enough about the relevant law to make a prediction.

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, July 05 2023 05:34 PM (BzEjn)

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• Kotaku and Gizmodo writers are furious - though when are they not - after finding out that new corporate owners F/U Media - which also controls Jersey Belle, Leekspin, and Quarts - plans to replace them all with the new Ai-enabled office coffee machine.  (Futurism)
  
  "Frankly it produces better copy as well as better coffee," said F/U Media editorial director Brant Bronson.  
  
  Staff writers complained that coffee-based trials "had already led to a flood of error-prone, plagiarised, and poorly-written content due to badly implemented - and, some would argue, inherently unsuited AI models - that still have a strong tendency to make up facts."
  
  When questioned on this issue, Bronson agreed, but noted that in blind tests nobody was able to tell the difference.  "Except for the coffee.  Those guys made shit coffee."

• The dirty secret of why the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico declined to publish a blockbuster story of US government UFO secrets.  (Vanity Fair)
  
  It was garbage.
  
  Yes, even by their standards.
  
  
  
• Why do 50% of Americans have subtitles enabled on their TVs?  (Indie Wire)
  
  Yes, actors mumble, sound mixes are muddy, and televisions have speakers pointed down or even backwards rather than towards the audience, but that doesn't explain why this is twice as common among Gen Z as it is in Baby Boomers.  In fact, there is a strong inverse correlation with age through all generations.
  
  
  
• The first medicine for regrowing teeth is moving towards clinical trials in Japan.  (Mainichi)
  
  It's not for those who are missing a tooth here or there, though; it's for those who never grew a full set of adult teeth due to congenital conditions.  Humans actually have the ability to regrow teeth in rare circumstances but when it happens it usually doesn't work well and the resulting teeth need to be extracted anyway.  This work apparently triggers the same function but in a more controlled way.
  
  
  
• Building a toy programming language in 137 lines of Python.  (Miguel Grinberg)
  
  A good place to start if you are interested in that sort of thing.
  
  
  
• Building a simple Python-like programming language in a couple of thousand lines of Python.  (GitHub)
  
  Yes, it's a lot more code, but it's clean and readable and the result is not a toy.
  
  
  
• Writing a Ruby compiler in Ruby.  (Hokstad)
  
  If you want the real deal, a bottom-up (rather than top-down) implementation of a programming language that can compile itself, here it is.
  
  All the related source code is available on GitHub.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 03 2023 11:55 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Tuesday, July 04 2023 01:07 AM (jGwUX)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 04 2023 04:20 AM (obo9H)

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• So Twitter is having a partly self-inflicted hissy fit this weekend.  (The Verge)
  
  Allegedly because of site-scraping by the current plague of AI startups - which in my experience is entirely plausible - Twitter temporarily requires you to have an account to read the site, and has even put in place limits on how much you can read, post, reply, and like.  Which I've run into even though I have a paid account.
  
  The site scraping thing is a plague.  It is much cheaper and easier to grab content from a site than it is to deliver it: For one thing, if you are using a service like AWS or Google Cloud, inbound traffic is free while outbound traffic is very expensive.
  
  Multiple times I've been in a situation where 100 servers were all queueing up to steal content from a single server I've been running.  (In one case, it was over 2000 servers.)  I blocked them, but it takes time and there's often a site outage before I can do that.
  
  That said, the temporary rate limits have not been well thought out and if you use Twitter a lot today would be a good day to clean your house.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Apropos of nothing, I just went on to Amazon and bought the cheapest robot vacuum cleaner that had at least a four star rating. Which turned out to be an "Advwin" model - the usual Chinese no-name jumble of letters - for A$185. Call it $120.
  
  It's too dumb and cheap to spy on you - it navigates by bumping into things - but if you plop it down on an expanse of carpet it will reportedly vacuum it pretty well, and if you plop it down on an expanse of tile it will have a go at mopping that.  And it can find its way back to the charging station most of the time.
  
  Seems worth a try given that the fancy models cost anything up to A$2500.  I mean, sure, those can not only mop your floor, but empty the dirty water into the base station and then rinse out the mop, but I could just buy a dozen of these things and throw them out when they get too mucky.
  
  
  
• After the Netherlands announced it would stop selling even second-tier chipmaking tools to China, the Chinese embassy sent them a frowny face emoji.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There is only one company in the world - Dutch company ASML - that makes the most advanced equipment for producing silicon chips, and they're also a key supplier even for less-advanced devices.  So this not only prevents China from making chips on advanced processes of 7nm and below, it will over time cripple the country's ability to produce chips at 14nm.  It already has machines for that, since they were not previously restricted, but now it can no longer buy more, or procure replacement parts.
  
  That pushes them back to 28nm (the 20nm node sucked except for Intel's proprietary version) and 28nm when TSMC is ramping up 3nm is just not going to get you anywhere.
  
  The restrictions also hit flash memory and DRAM production as well as logic chips like microprocessors.
  
  Can China build its own chipmaking tools?  Sure.  In a decade or two.  Even if they steal the designs, which they probably already have, they don't currently have the factories to make the parts to make the machines to make these machines.
  
  
  
• Asus has shown off a variant of Nvidia's 4060 Ti graphics card with two M.2 slots.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This actually makes some sense because the 4060 Ti is a PCIe 4 x8 device, so it will leave half the lanes of your standard x16 motherboard slot unused.  So long as your CPU can handle the bifurcation (the term used for this) it doesn't require any extra logic, just running out the traces on the board to a pair of M.2 connectors.
  
  If your motherboard has a second slot and automatically splits the bandwidth into x8 for each, though, those M.2 slots will not work at all.
  
  
  
• When 2 is less than 1: AMD's Phoenix 2 mobile CPU is a smaller, cheaper, slower version of the Phoenix / 7840 chip shipping now.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's about 25% smaller than the existing 8 core chip, and has two Zen 4 cores and four smaller Zen 4C cores.
  
  This is similar to Intel's P (performance) and E (efficiency) cores, except where Intel's E cores are half the speed of the P cores, AMD's Zen 4C is about 80% as fast as Zen 4 - or about as fast as Zen 3.
  
  And Zen 3 is not slow.
  
  This chip is probably aimed at devices like the Steam Deck, but there's a good chance we'll see it in budget laptops as well.  It should do just fine.
  
  
  
• Taking a break from messing up Twitter, Elon Musk personally launched the ESA's Euclid space telescope on its way to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point a million miles away.  (CNN)
  
  Dude has more launch capacity than most continents.
  
  
  
• The Liberty Phone from Purism is a fairly decent $199 budget model running stock Linux rather than Google's increasingly locked-down Android.  (Liliputing)
  
  Only problem is it costs $2199.
  
  Exactly who they expect to buy this I do not know.  I can see people concerned with security and open standards spending $399 on a device like this - twice what an equivalent Android model would cost but worth it to some people because they can control exactly what their phone is doing.
  
  At this price though, it's toast.
  
  
  
• OLED panels can last more than 100 years - so long as you have blue-yellow colour blindness.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Blue is a bastard.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 03 2023 02:25 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 03 2023 09:10 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 03 2023 11:00 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 03 2023 06:07 PM (PiXy!)

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• A new Canadian law requires Google and Facebook - and apparently no-one else - to pay news organisations - almost all of which receive government funds - for the right to link to news articles without which the news organisations would have even fewer readers than they already do.
  
  Google and Facebook responded - and I quote - Canada who?  (Ars Technica)
  
  And have pulled all their links to Canadian news, which is almost all crap anyway because of the whole government funds issue.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Seagate's 8TB Barracuda sells for $100.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Compared to a Team MP34 or a Crucial P3, that's half the price, twice the capacity, and at best twenty times slower.
  
  It's getting to the point that hard drives are just backup devices, what tape drives used to be.  Not quite, but if SSD prices keep going down at this rate it won't be long.
  
  
  
• The LILYGO T-Deck is a sort-of Blackberry for $50.  (Liliputing)
  
  Except that it's about as fast as the original Blackberry from 1999, has neither a case nor a battery, and can't make phone calls (though neither could the original Blackberry models).
  
  It's an interesting little device for hobbyists though.
  
  
  
• Urtopia has announced a smart e-bike with ChatGPT integration.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Now even your bike can accuse you of racism.
  
  
  
• You now need a Twitter account to read Twitter.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Once upon a time the entire Twitter feed was public for everyone.
  
  What I think this is about is API access.  Twitter has locked down the API behind insane fees, but you could get around that by just reading the website.
  
  And the reason for locking down the API is probably AI training data.  Same deal with Reddit.
  
  The fundamental problem with this is that it's not Twitter's data - or Reddit's - and never was.  They understood this once, but have long since forgotten.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 01 2023 09:47 PM (obo9H)

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• Oh, yeah.  Nvidia's RTX 4060 is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Buy a 6700XT while they're still available.  Or wait for the 7700 and hope it's priced appropriately.
  
  The only good cards in the current generation are Nvidia's 4090 - if you're spending someone else's money - and AMD's 7600 which is now available for around $250 and is worth just about that.
  
  Everything in between is either overpriced, underperforms, or has stupid limitations that ruin a card that might otherwise be adequate.
  
  

• Dell's 6K professional monitor is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's good, but it costs as much as six good 4K monitors, and I'd rather have six good 4K monitors.
  
  
  
• There's no such thing as bad publicity, until the woke mob arrives.  (New York Times)
  
  A new author - who appears to be an idiot, but she's being interviewed by the New York Times so that is pretty much required - found her book getting review-bombed on Goodreads because, so far as I can tell from the rather turgid article, the plot summary she posted to Twitter is insensitive to Marxist retards:

  The story centers on a young Black woman working at Goldman Sachs who falls in love with a conservative white co-worker with bigoted views.

  Note also that "Black" is capitalised because it is an identity, where "white" is not because it is merely an admission of guilt.
  
  
  
• Rocky Linux, which took up the mantle from CentOS after that distribution was murdered by IBM, says it has found a way forward after RedHat stopped distributing source code releases.  (The Register)
  
  IBM only cares about large enterprise customers - if you have fewer than 16 servers they will just give you RHEL licenses for free - but they don't want to let those large enterprise customers slip away, so they are making it as difficult as possible for independent Linux distributions to retain 100% compatibility with RHEL, without actually violating the open source licenses that all the code depends on.
  
  Expect a slow-moving and frankly rather boring war of attrition here, as IBM comes up with annoying new tricks and the smaller distros work around them,
  
  Meanwhile I'm using Ubuntu.
  
  
  
• Brave browser will soon prevent web pages from scanning your local network.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If you thought your home devices were safe without passwords because they're not exposed to the internet, well, wrong.  Your browser is on your local network so any web page you load can scan your devices.
  
  And a surprising number of legitimate websites do that for no good reason.  The article mentions eBay, Chick-fil-A, Best Buy, Kroger, and Macy's, and there are lots more.
  
  Brave will show a popup for websites that try this and you will be able to grant one-time or permanent access, or tell the site to buzz off.  It will be interesting to see what breaks.
  
  
  
• If you want a small Android phone, the Asus Zenfone 10 is apparently what passes for that these days.  (The Verge)
  
  It has a 5.9" screen, but some of the larger models are getting close to 7", so it  is at least relatively small.
  
  It's not cheap either, but the specs are decent.  Not that The Verge tells you what they are, but here's a proper review  (Tom's Guide) and here are the full specs.  (GSM Arena)
  
  It has a headphone jack but no microSD slot, but is at least available with up to 512GB of storage.  Still, if you're using it to hold important data, make sure it's all backed up, because if the phone fails for any reason everything on it is going to be toast.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte's new Ryzen 7030U Brix (their NUC lineup) is up to 140% faster than previous Intel models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Where by "previous" they mean three years previously, but then the 7030U is itself a two year old design so that's not actually unfair.
  
  Don't expect remarkable performance, but it should be decent for anything short of serious gaming.  The eight core 7030U is a slightly improved 5800U, and my new laptop is a six core 5600U, and I'm pretty happy with it.  With the CPU anyway; the shortcomings relate to the screen and the battery life, neither of which applies to a desktop mini-PC.
  
  
  
• Hyte has done it again: The new Y40 Calliope Mori edition is available for pre-order.  (Hyte)
  
  If you plan to fill your house with Hololive-themed PCs they also offer custom Y60 versions styled on Bae and Kronii, and a Hololive EN TKL keyboard.  Which I can't buy because that for some reason is US/Canada only even though it's called the "Connect the World" bundle.

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 30 2023 09:27 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mrs. Peel at Friday, June 30 2023 10:02 PM (jrY13)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 01 2023 07:36 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mrs. Peel at Saturday, July 01 2023 08:49 PM (vlz3c)

Posted by: SMM HEART at Tuesday, January 23 2024 04:45 PM (/QKaT)

Posted by: Kroger Store survey at Wednesday, March 12 2025 02:53 AM (5LxU8)

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• At Reddit, the beatings will continue until morale improves.  (The Verge)
  
  Many of the major subreddits, each with millions of users, remain dark, and Reddit's approach has moved from threatening the moderators to, well, still threatening the moderators.  They don't really seem to have any other ideas.
  
  Now, the moderators of many of the subreddits are little better than a horde of mini-Hitlers, but so are the people actually running the company.  The problem is that despite all the hitlering there is a lot of worthwhile content stuck behind the blackout curtains.
  
  And the only thing Reddit cares about is monetising that content; it doesn't matter how that affects the moderators or the users.
  
  They've really taken a page out of the Big Hasbro Book on Customer Relations.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Western Digital's new SN580 SSD delivers a DRAMless TLC drive for 5 cents per GB.  (AnandTech)
  
  There are other drives priced like that at retail, but this is the official price.
  
  It's a PCIe 4 drive too, but speeds are only a little above 4GB per second.  Which is very, very fast, but not full PCIe 4 speed.
  
  $50 for 1TB is a great price and it should work fine for most users.
  
  
  
• The only problem is their own high-end SN850X model is selling for $59 for 1TB.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a great drive and runs at full PCIe 4 speeds, and has a DRAM cache to help with writes and random I/O.  Definitely worth the extra $9.
  
  
  
• Maza is a financial startup targeting the lucrative illegal immigrant market.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What?
  
  
  
• Stop giving them ideas: The Password Game will make you want to break your keyboard.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yes, it's exactly what you think it is.

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, June 29 2023 07:30 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 30 2023 12:47 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 30 2023 09:27 AM (D0DmO)

Posted by: SMM HEART at Friday, January 19 2024 04:07 PM (/QKaT)

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• Who is the new Mac Pro for?  Apparently, nobody.  (The Verge)
  
  The previous Mac Pro was a serious computer for serious people - except that it was a Mac, anyway.  It supported multiple video cards and up to 1.5TB of RAM.
  
  The new Mac Pro is limited to 192GB of RAM, the same amount you can add to a $100 Intel 13100F.  And it supports no graphics cards.  It has slots for graphics cards, but if you install one, it won't work.
  
  If you ask professional Mac users if they want a Mac Pro, the answer is no.  For almost all of them the 96GB available on the MacBook Pro is enough, and for the few remaining there's the 192GB on a maxed-out Mac Studio.  The Mac Studio doesn't have any PCIe slots, but you can't use the PCIe slots in the Mac Pro anyway.

• After it stopped providing source code distributions for its Linux releases in order to kill its free competitors, RedHat explained that it didn't stop providing source code distributions for its Linux releases in order to killed its free competitors, it stopped providing source code distributions for its Linux releases and the painful lingering deaths of its free competitors are purely a coincidence.  (Phoronix)
  
  RedHat still provides source code - it is legally obligated to do so, because it doesn't own most of the software in its version of Linux.  It just provides it as individual updates in thousands of different places, making it painfully difficult to precisely reproduce RedHat Linux.
  
  This comes after IBM - owner of RedHat - bought its best known free competitor, CentOS, and murdered it.  I mean, had it coincidentally die of natural causes at the bottom of a staircase with a knife in its back at IBM's country estate at midnight.
  
  
  
• Seagate's Firecuda 540 SSDs are 50% faster than their 530 model at twice the price.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which means that you could simply buy two 530s, run them in RAID-0, and have twice as much storage that is 33% faster.
  
  There really isn't much use for PCIe 5 SSDs until they get a lot cheaper.
  
  
  
• Samsung is planning to ship 2nm chips in 2025, and 1.4nm in 2027.  (AnandTech)
  
  Intel is planning to ship earlier, but Intel got stuck on 14nm for seventeen years (approximately) so we'll see what happens.
  
  
  
• GitHub's CEO says AI and software development are now inextricably linked, like peanut butter and typhoid.  (Tech Crunch)

  In an interview after his talk, Dohmke expanded on this a bit when I asked him if he believes every developer will be using AI in the near future. "I think the obvious answer to that one is that the FOMO in companies is already so big that they are looking at the competition and asking themselves if their competitor has already adapted [GitHub] Copilot — and that means that that competitor has — and doesn’t really matter if it’s 20%, 30% or 40% — that competitor has an advantage."

  All your competitors are jumping off our bridge!  It doesn't really matter if it's a 20 foot, 30 foot, or 40 foot drop, that competitor is going to go splat before you do!

  On top of that, he believes there is really no disadvantage for developers to use a tool like GitHub Copilot. "It's just so natural.  There's really no reason to not use new improved GitHub Copilot, now with activated charcoal" he said.  "I think new improved GitHub Copilot now with activated charcoal is becoming part of the standard toolset that every developer will be using.  Ultimately, developers not using it will exist, the same way Cobalt developers still exist."

  Yes, the article says Cobalt.
  
  These people literally know nothing.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 28 2023 11:22 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 28 2023 11:54 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, June 29 2023 01:18 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 29 2023 10:18 AM (obo9H)

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• There's a donut chain in Melbourne that sells several gluten-free varieties, and I really wanted to try them out while I was down there.  This turned out to be very easy because there was one in the shopping mall next to my hotel, and another at the airport.  
  
  I got an assortment of six: One plain, one jam filled, one Nutella-filled, and three glazed.
  
  They're terrible.
  
  
  
• Social network IRL, just recently hailed as a "unicorn" for quickly attracting 20 million active users, is shutting down after it turned out that 19 million of them don't exist.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Having bots on your social network is not intrinsically bad, so long as you can still get a count of human users somehow.  If you can't, and your depending on investor or advertising money, you're bound for serious trouble seriously quickly.

• If 64GB isn't enough for your laptop Mushkin's new 96GB DDR5 SODIMM kit is available now.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This should work in both Intel and AMD laptops, but you should probably check compatibility first; there have been BIOS issues with some desktop motherboards and it's likely the same will be true for laptops.
  
  I just switched to a new laptop with 64GB of RAM, and the difference from 16GB is night and day.  Frankly 32GB would have been fine, but going all the way up to 64GB was only another $100 - Australian, so $3.50 in real money.  If I only had the one laptop for all my work the 96GB kit would be worth it, but I have one or two or three others.
  
  
  
• The Flipper Zero is on its way to selling $80 million worth of, uh, professional security testing tools.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It is actually very useful for security testing; the problem is more that it's a little too good at what it does.  If you're building a garage door system, for example, and want to make sure that it's secure, the device that does that can also open any garage doors that aren't secure.
  
  It can also emulate security cards, key fobs, arbitrary Bluetooth and infrared devices, and IoT and smart home systems which are notoriously unreliable anyway.  Which again is great for developers who need to test those things, not so good if the kid next door keeps locking you out of your own home.
  
  
  
• Google's Pixel Fold is a great $500 device with the slight drawback that it actually costs $1800.  (The Verge)
  
  And the secondary drawback that if you get a tiny bit of grit on the screen and then fold it closed it could die after just four days.  (Ars Technica)
  
  $450 a day seems like rather a lot for a mobile phone.
  
  
  
• If you want one of those little five port 2.5GbE routers only with eight ports you can now get that too.  (Liliputing)
  
  Available with up to a Core i7-10510U, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage, which is more than you could possibly need for a simple router, so it can double as a small Linux server.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 27 2023 11:25 PM (BMUHC)

2 Here's the error:
File "/home/minx/test/Form.py", line 647, in form_comment print('Akismet check %s in %0.3fs on %s %s %s "%s"' % ('error' if aki_err else 'accept' if aki_ok else 'reject', time.time()-taki, tags.get('form.name',''), tags.get('form.web',''), tags.get('form.mail',''), text)) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019' in position 65: ordinal not in range(12

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 27 2023 11:25 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 28 2023 07:27 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, June 28 2023 02:38 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, June 28 2023 02:41 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 28 2023 05:25 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 28 2023 05:28 PM (PiXy!)

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