• Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs so poorly.  (Paavo)
  
  Culling and level of detail.  Or rather, the lack of same.  Or precisely, horrible defects in Unity that mean that in complex games the automatic handling of these issues simply breaks.
  
  And what that means is that if a complex structure would be drawn with 60,000 polygons when it's in the foreground, in Cities: Skylines 2 it is drawn with 60,000 polygons when it is in the background, and indeed drawn with 60,000 polygons when it is behind another object and not visible to the player at all.
  
  Which means that it will be fixed, with some improvements arriving already and a lot more in coming weeks.  But that's because the game developer has taken over fixing things the game engine should handle for them.
  
  Most likely - this is speculation, but it makes sense - Unity has been promising fixes for these problems for months, and the fixes simply didn't arrive in time.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Went to cancel my Adobe Creative Cloud account since I don't really have time to use it, and I have plenty of other software to take its place (mostly from Humble Bundle, which is a great place to save 90% by buying last year's version).
  
  They gave me a 50% discount.
  
  Which...  Okay.
  
  
  
• A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time.  (Salon)
  
  It was lupus.
  
  An Oliver Sacks tale except in this case the patient recovered and was able to tell it herself.
  
  
  
• Drunk grizzlies keep getting killed by trains in Montana.  (Cowboy State Daily)
  
  Which has to be the Montana-est headline ever.
  
  
  
• Across the US, in red states and blue, in rich districts and poor, home-schooling is the fastest growing form of education.  (WV News)

  Home schooling's surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.

  This worries the usual suspects:

  "Policymakers should think, 'Wow - this is a lot of kids,'" said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate. "We should worry about whether they're learning anything."

  You might want to look closer to home, Erzsebet.

Posted by: normal at Monday, November 06 2023 09:54 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 07 2023 01:06 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: bob in houston at Tuesday, November 07 2023 01:12 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 07 2023 04:38 AM (r9O5h)

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• Microsoft is "making a mess of the news" by replacing journalists with AI which is stupid and delusional but not deliberately lying to you.  (CNN)
  
  The top of CNN's list of examples:

  False claims that President Joe Biden fell asleep during a moment of silence for victim sof the Maui wildfire.

  As Snopes and a thousand other sites pointed out in coincidentally identical wording, this is a vicious lie.  If you watch the video he is clearly dead.
  
  
  

Tech News

• I switched from my flaky HP Pavilion laptop to my Pavilion Plus, which I haven't really used much yet.
  
  It's great.
  
  But it commits the eighth cardinal sin of applumbo: Soldered RAM.
  
  While Apple murders your wallet if you want to put a useful amount of RAM in their laptops, charging 100% markups and forcing you to upgrade the CPU along with the RAM, at least you can do it, with the 14" MacBook Pro being available with as much as 128GB.
  
  The Pavilion Plus 14 is locked forever at 16GB.
  
  
  
• Speaking of MacBooks they can now detect moisture in their Thunderbolt ports and automatically void your warranty.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not joking.  They will still short out and die - Apple's power circuitry is infamously terrible - you just won't get warranty support.
  
  
  
• China claims to have produced an AI chip thousands of times more powerful than Nvidia's industry leading A100 accelerator.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And they have, sort of.  Problem is it's an analogue photonic chip, a kind of design that is incredibly powerful but ludicrously finicky.
  
  You might as well just use people.  And we know what they're like.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fried might not be the last crypto criminal.  (The Verge)
  
  No, really?

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 06 2023 01:49 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 06 2023 01:51 AM (BMUHC)

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• The tape-out of Apple's M3 CPU, announced this past week, cost the company $1 billion.  (ExtremeTech)
  
  That's not the cost of the design.  That's not the cost of production.
  
  That's the step in between, taking the design they had and getting it ready for production on TSMC's latest 3nm node.
  
  That used to be a lot of money, but Apple sells a lot of stuff at 1000% markups, so the company can certainly afford it.

• Nvidia's China-only A800 AI card can now be purchased in the US.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And not in China anymore, because the US government changed the rules again.
  
  
  
• Want a small (3" square) router appliance with four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports and support for two monitors?  Available on Amazon starting at $212.  (Liliputing)
  
  Also available with two network ports and an extra HDMI port.
  
  
  
• Want a passively-cooled rack-mount 128 core Arm server with IP65 dust and water resistance?  You can get one of those too.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Not the sort of thing most people need, but if you're doing oil and mineral exploration, for example, extremely handy.
  
  
  
• MicroLua is Lua for the RP2040, the chip found in the Raspberry Pi Pico.  (GitHub)
  
  Literally Lua; it's a complete implementation of Lua 5.4.6.  A stripped-down implementation might be more practical, but having the full language is useful too.
  
  
  
• Tech layoffs are a thing of the past, part 2171:Faire, which wants to be a co-op competitor to Amazon, has laid off 20% of its staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  At least they have a plan, unlike so many other startups.  Amazon is not an easy competitor to tackle though.

• Sam Bankman-Fried has been found guilty on charges of fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, money laundering, and fraud.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  He faces up to 115 years in prison.
  
  Guess he bribed the wrong people.

• Cloudflare blew itself up again.  (ZDNet)
  
  Cloudflare handles roughly 115% of the world's internet traffic so any time it sneezes, the world needs to be rebooted.  This time it was a power failure at one of their key datacenters.  The last major outage - three days ago - was a database failure.
  
  At least this one didn't get me woken up at night by a panicking operations team.
  
  
  
• AMD has announced its Ryzen 7040U series of laptop CPUs, replacing the...  Uh.  Replacing the Ryzen 7040U series of laptop CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  The chips are fine, but the model numbers are awful.  The 7545U will replace the faster 7540U, while the 7440U will supplant the - again, faster - 7440U.
  
  Yes, two different chips with the exact same model number.
  
  
  
• I'm not saying it's aliens but: Cases of fetuses with their organs reversed left-to-right have quadrupled in China.  (Ars Technica)
  
  China blames COVID, which they blame on (throws dart) dirty capitalist swine.

Sun of a Beach Video of the Day

Posted by: BNI4D at Friday, November 03 2023 05:40 PM (qZi3q)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 04 2023 12:05 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 04 2023 12:06 AM (BMUHC)

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• The much-anticipated Cities: Skylines 2 is out, and I was hoping to finally build my new PC, with a configuration that could run the game comfortably at 4K.
  
  Looks like I won't be doing that any time soon, first because my money may be headed to something else entirely, and second because there is no such configuration.  (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
  
  An RTX 3070 - a decent card from the previous generation - at the 1080p High setting, gets 13fps.  The 4070 Ti, which is the fastest Nvidia card at anything resembling a sane price, gets 22fps.
  
  And that's at 1080p, not 4K.
  
  I'll leave it for six months.  I might buy it - I'm definitely going to play it at some point - but it looks like it needs some more time in the oven.

• Millions of fruit flies are to be dropped on Los Angeles.  (The Hill)
  
  Not sure what the flies did to deserve this, but such is life for a fly.
  
  
  
• Russia is cracking down on VPNs and email services as the country tries to implement its own version of China's Great Firewall.  (Torrent Freak)
  
  On of the concerns I have about the Australian internet is that the fiber network here was built by the government, and the have at least a potential chokepoint to implement this kind of thing.  Though at least now there's Starlink and other nascent satellite services.
  
  The US internet is a chaotic mess, but the fact that nobody planned it also means that nobody controls it.
  
  
  
• The People Who Ruined the Internet.  (The Verge)
  
  Ugh, it's The Verge.  Who are they blaming today?

  As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful anymore, what happens to the cottage industry of search engine optimization experts who struck content oil and smeared it all over the web?

  Oh.  Yes.  Right then, carry on.
  
  
  
• Atlassian has sent a message to its customers saying please, for the love of God, stop running our software.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Keep paying for it, mind you.  Just don't run it.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 02 2023 11:14 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 02 2023 11:21 PM (BMUHC)

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• Seems to be a loose connection inside my laptop.  That's why the problem is intermittent.
  
  It can probably be fixed, I think I'll just turn it into a Linux server and stick it on a shelf, and take the other laptop (better screen and CPU but 16GB of soldered RAM) and use that as my Windows system.
  
  
  
• The Day of the 4TB SSDs: Call of Duty Modern Warfare III requires 213GB of disk space.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I have - I think I still have it - a Sun Ultra 5 workstation with two 14GB disk drives.
  
  That used to be a lot.  Today that much storage would cost about a dollar.
  
  
  

• An AI-powered smoothie shop opened in San Francisco in September.  Why is it closed already.  (The Guardian)
  
  Well, one, San Francisco, and two, as even the Guardian noticed, their customers seem to be AI-powered as well.
  
  
  
• If Black 2.0 and Black 3.0 just weren't Black enough for you, Black 4.0 is now available.  (Culture Hustle)
  
  These are real things.
  
  Vantablack was invented in 2014 as a new pigment that absorbs approximately 99.965% of visible light (and ultraviolet and infrared as well).  It's very striking, because light basically just disappears.  It's not like the usual glossy or even matte black surface, it looks like someone cut a hole in the Universe.
  
  And then the inventors sold the exclusive rights to use it in artworks to Anish Kapoor.
  
  So another company came along and created even blacker blacks - 2.0, 3.0, and now 4.0 - which are available for sale to everybody in the world - except Anish Kapoor.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk's plans to make X the "everything app".  (The Verge)
  
  It's an interesting read and provides some justification for the exorbitant price he paid for Twitter, though it's not clear how much of this he had in mind at the time and how much is post-facto rationalisation.
  
  Some of the things mentioned, like end-to-end encryption, are great ideas that need to be more widely adopted (and will piss off the UK government no end).
  
  Other things, like using Twitter to make payments, I'm a lot less keen on.
  
  I do not want an "everything" app.  I want a bunch of entirely independent, competing apps that each do one thing well, and that I can replace easily if they stop doing that thing well.
  
  
  
• WeWork looks set to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I keep forgetting that WeWork isn't already bankrupt.  It's share price is down approximately 99.965% from its peak five years ago, with the company's valuation falling from $47 billion to $121 million.
  
  A lot of that was bad timing, launching a huge office management company just before the Wuhan Bat Flu Death Plague locked everyone in their homes for three years, though a lot of it was that the company was run by idiots.
  
  I'm sure somebody will miss them.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fraud didn't ask where the $8 billion went.  (The Verge)
  
  Maybe it's just me, but that would seem to be an important question, somewhere between "where are my pants" and "why has my heart stopped beating".

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 02 2023 01:04 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 02 2023 06:45 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, November 02 2023 11:54 AM (sZ6tC)

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• Apple's M3 MacBook Pro is here.  Or will be in a week.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's about 15% faster than the M2 model.
  
  A 14" MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD costs $4900.
  
  My 14" HP Pavilion with 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD cost me around $900.
  
  So...  Yeah.
  
  
  
• The new M3 iMac has also been announced.  (Ars Technica)
  
  As well as the speed boost, the maximum memory has been increased from 16GB to 24GB.
  
  That extra 8GB of RAM will cost you $200.
  
  It retails for $20.
  
  So...  Yeah.

• Why does my code run slower on a 5950X running Linux than a 5625U laptop running Windows 11 and WSL?
  
  Probably cache latency.
  
  The 5950X has two CPU chiplets that share cache over a high-speed interconnect, while the 5625U is a single chip.  The chiplet design makes large CPUs cheaper to build but can do weird things to cache latency.
  
  This is a real question that is happening with some code I wrote recently; it's 50% slower on what should be a much faster CPU.
  
  Guess when I (eventually) build my new system I might want to go for the 7800X3D rather than the 7900.
  
  
  
• So, how do those Qualcomm benchmarks for their upcoming Snapdragon X Elite hold up under independent testing?
  
  Just fine, actually.  (AnandTech)
  
  Ryan Smith at AnandTech got to try out two pre-production laptops under both Windows and Linux, and the benchmark scores he got matched Qualcomm's numbers and are genuinely faster than equivalent Apple M2 laptops.
  
  Of course, Apple just announced the M3 which if everyone's claims are accurate will give them back the performance lead in Arm laptops...  By 2.5%.
  
  Looking very good for Qualcomm at this point, except for the six month wait for these systems to arrive.
  
  
  
• Most of the claims in an artist lawsuit against AI art companies have been dismissed for being, well, crap.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  The Reuters article doesn't really give you the facts of the case, the claims of the plaintiffs, the arguments of the defendants, or the relevant laws.
  
  This Twitter thread does a much better job and is well worth reading if you're interested in this kind of thing.
  
  Essentially, while generative AI is new, to claim that it is infringing on your copyrighted works - under current law - would require that the work it produces to be substantively the same, not merely influenced by your own work.
  
  And that's simply not what generative AI does.
  
  
  
• The Biden Administration has issued its executive order governing the development and use of AI systems.  (WhiteHouse.gov)
  
  As you would expect, it's a mix of useless bullshit, impractical bullshit, unconstitutional bullshit, and just, well, bullshit.
  
  
  
• Speeding up Python by 17,000,000%.  (Sidsite)
  
  The article takes a real-world problem with analysing correlations in survey results (people who answered A in question 5 were most likely to answer D in question 15) and then tightens up the code until it squeaks.
  
  While the end result is pretty hairy (though much less so than some of the code I have to maintain) the first two optimisations are straightforward and make it run 50x faster.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 01 2023 12:48 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 01 2023 02:48 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 01 2023 02:57 AM (LADmw)

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• Small Hadron Collider: Scientists have for the first time fired up the world's tiniest particle accelerator.  (Space)
  
  While early accelerators were much much smaller than today's giants like the Large Hadron Collider - which is an underground ring five miles across - this new device, called a nanophotonic electron accelerator, or NEA, reverses the trend entirely.
  
  It's the size of a dime.
  
  The electrons it produces have a millionth of the energy of the particles in the LHC, and there are far fewer of them, so the overall beam energy is tiny.
  
  What it does allow you to do though is produce a small and perfectly focused beam of radiation exactly where you want it.  Targeting cancer?  The beam is sharper than any scalpel.
  
  While it has been proven to work, practical uses - like performing surgery without having to cut the patient open - are likely still years off.

• Apple's M3 CPU is expected to be announced today.  (WCCFtech)
  
  It probably won't be a lot faster than the M2, but if it at least supports more memory it will be a big improvement.
  
  With all variants of Apple's CPUs the memory is soldered onto the CPU module.  You can't upgrade it, ever.  So if you don't configure enough RAM in your new Mac you've just bought some very expensive e-waste.  And with current the M1 iMac you can't configure enough RAM.  16GB is all you can have.
  
  (I have 64GB in my budget HP laptop.)
  
  
  
• Lenovo is set to release YAPALAT - yet another perfectly adequate large Android tablet.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The Tab M11 has a definitely mid-tier but not awful CPU with two A75 and six A55 cores, a roughly 1920x1200 screen, and up to 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.
  
  Make that screen anywhere from 7" to 9" rather than 11" - keeping the same resolution - and I'll buy three of them.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, I kind of had the impression that the block of land my house is on had no two sides parallel.
  
  Looking at the subdivision plan again after eighteen months I was reminded that this is not true at all.  The land is rectangular, but the house is at an angle.
  
  This may or may not become relevant in the near future.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, October 30 2023 10:05 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 31 2023 12:47 AM (BMUHC)

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• The Hugo Awards are here again and the Best Novel apparently did not go to a woke trash diversity pick.  (Gizmodo)
  
  I haven't read T. Kingfisher's (not her real name) Nettle & Bone, which won this year, but I have read her Paladin series and Clocktaur books, and they're fine.  Not the sort of genre-changing works we expect to see winning Hugos, but enjoyable reads.
  
  Which, sadly, might count as genre-changing these days.

• The Lexar NM790 is a low end (though not lowest-end) PCIe 4 SSD.  But what does low-end mean in late 2023?  (Serve the Home)
  
  It means that under sustained heavy write loads - the weak point for DRAMless budget drives - it slows down to as little as 1GBps.
  
  Which is...  Fine.  For most tasks, that's plenty.
  
  Sequential reads are over 7GBps, which is as fast as PCIe 4 will go.
  
  I wouldn't recommend it for a server, but for a desktop, particularly as a second disk, it seems like it would be great.
  
  The 4TB model sells for $189.
  
  
  
• The new RTX 4060 Ti model from Asus takes the unused eight PCIe lanes and adds an M.2 slot with them.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A prototype had two M.2 slots - after all, they use four lanes each, and eight are available.  The problem is, Intel desktop CPUs can't split the lanes up like that.
  
  So rather than make a card that would only work fully in AMD systems, they took that second slot out.
  
  
  
• Supposed specs of the upcoming Nvidia 40x0 Super cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 4080 Super would be a cut-down 4090, the 4070 Ti super a cut-down 4080, and the 4070 Super would be an irrelevant overpriced piece of junk.
  
  
  
• Should you buy a second-hand Nvidia 170HX from a bankrupt Mongolian crypto mining farm?  Probably not.  (niconiconi)
  
  These cost $5000 new two years ago, and are now on the market second hand for around $500.  The 170HX is a variant of Nvidia's A100, the top of the line, which cost over $10,000.
  
  The problem is, Nvidia lobotomised it to stop it cannibalising sales of the more expensive card.  It was good for mining Ethereum, but nobody mines Ethereum anymore.  Literally nobody, since there no longer is such a thing as Ethereum mining.
  
  On other tasks it's all over the map, performing anywhere from 3060 levels to the equivalent of the 3080.  Unless you know exactly what you want to use it for and have benchmarks to hand, best to avoid.

Posted by: BRI4D at Wednesday, November 01 2023 07:42 PM (xhXsh)

Posted by: SIRKUS4D at Thursday, November 02 2023 12:08 PM (7ulN+)

Posted by: BVBSNRTP at Friday, December 01 2023 05:54 PM (jzMpj)

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• Tech layoffs are back with a vengeance. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not just in the "big tech" firms that are 90% diversity hires at this point, but real companies building real products like Nokia, SiFive, and Solidigm (the name of Intel's SSD unit now that it's owned by SK Hynix).
  
  Wait, you say, didn't Tech Crunch tell us tech layoffs were a thing of the past?
  
  They did indeed, last month. And this article actually calls out their own previous reporting rather than hiding it under the rug:

  Last month, Alex wrote that tech layoffs were pretty much a thing of the past. Shouldn’t have said that, buddy, you jinxed it.

  Blame Alex.
  
  
  
• My notebook unpooped itself. Not entirely sure what happened there, but I did get a new notebook set up last night just in case. (One I bought last year but haven't used much yet.)

• Asus has a big new Threadripper motherboard. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Five PCIe slots (three of them PCIe 5), four ECC Registered memory slots, three M.2 slots, optional IPMI for remote management, and... Stuff. They don't have the full tech specs up yet since release isn't until next month.
  
  Only having four memory slots is a bit meh; in practical terms that means you can have 256GB of RAM where you can easily get 192GB on a regular motherboard. There are probably larger modules out there but they're not easy to find.
  
  Price TBA. Chance of me getting one: Slim.
  
  
  
• The Threadripper Pro is getting benchmarked and is impressive. (WCCFTech)
  
  The 64 core and 96 core models now hold the top two positions on Passmark, 60% faster than Intel's fastest chip.
  
  And the 24 core 7965WX outruns the 64 core 3995WX, which is... Well, probably a quirk of the benchmark, because the individual cores are not twice as fast.
  
  
  
• Intel's new 7529 pin CPU socket doubles as a waffle iron. (Serve the Home)
  
  You'll want to put it into low-power mode though or you risk burning your waffles.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fraud says he didn't steal customer funds. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Rather, Alameda (which he controlled) borrowed the funds from FTX (which he controlled) without authorisation by the customers and with no plan to pay them back.
  
  Totally different!
  
  
  
• Almost what I want: The Pimoroni Picovision has two RP2040s: One as the CPU and one as the video chip. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The RP2040 is the chip used in the Raspberry Pi Pico. It has no dedicated video hardware, but the chip is so well-designed that not only can it generate video without external hardware, it can generate an encoded HDMI stream without external hardware. And the chip costs a dollar.
  
  This device is a main board with an RP2040 and an HDMI slot, plus a connector for a regular Pi Pico, plus 16MB of external RAM because if you're doing video the Pico's internal 256k fills up pretty fast.
  
  I'd like to see a single board with the two RP2040s and all the necessary connectors, but in the meantime this will do fine.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 29 2023 08:43 AM (obo9H)

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