• Google Assistant - which is apparently a thing - is getting a big reboot using generative AI.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Could we not?
  
  
  
• Facebook plans to use chatbots to boost its user numbers.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I can't wait until social networks are all just chatbots screaming at each other and we can get on with stuff.
  
  
  
• YouTube meanwhile is planning to use AI to summarise YouTube videos.  (The Verge)
  
  If it can make sense of Pippa's stream today - where she returned in spider form after celebrating reaching 250,000 subscribers by eating a tarantula - I'll be impressed.
  
  

• Remember that amazing new room-temperature superconductor announcement?  It might not be rubbish after all.  (In the Pipeline)
  
  Yes, the experimental data is imperfect, but the details provided are sufficient for both empirical testing and theoretical analysis.
  
  There's an unconfirmed report of an independent replication demonstrating the Meissner effect in a small sample of the material, and the video doesn't look like any cooling is involved at all.
  
  Separately, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory took a look at the structural data on the material - called LK-99 - and said:

  I present the calculated spin-polarized electronic structure in Fig. 3. Remarkably, I find an isolated set of flat bands crossing the Fermi level, with a maximum bandwidth of ∼130 meV (see Fig.4) that is separated from the rest of the valence manifold by 160 meV. Such a narrow bandwidth is particularly indicative of strongly correlated bands. . .unlike other correlated-d band superconductors, in this system the Cu-d bands are particularly flat – there is minimal band broadening from neighboring oxygen ions. If previous assumptions about band flatness driving superconductivity are correct, then this result would suggest a much more robust (higher temperature) superconducting phase exists in this system, even compared to well-established high-TC systems.

  Which is saying that on a purely theoretical basis this looks just like what we'd expect from a high-temperature superconductor.
  
  Lowe (the author of In the Pipeline) concludes:

  I am guardedly optimistic at this point. The Shenyang and Lawrence Berkeley calculations are very positive developments, and take this well out of the cold-fusion "we can offer no explanation" territory. ... This is by far the most believable shot at room-temperature-and-pressure superconductivity the world has seen so far, and the coming days and weeks are going to be extremely damned interesting.

  
  
  
• Testing graph databases and reporting the results as seventy pages of text and a handful of illegible microscopic scatter plots.  (Mihai)
  
  Well, that was a waste of time.
  
  
  
• Nim 2.0 is out.  (Nim)
  
  If you want a statically compiled, statically typed Python, this is your best bet.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's new AI image generate fits on a floppy disk and takes 4 minutes to train.  (Decrypt)
  
  And not one of those fancy 1.44MB floppies either, we're talking about an Apple II single-sided single-density jobbie.
  
  
  
• Facebook's ban on Canadian government propaganda - laughingly referred to as "news" - takes effect today.  (Engadget)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Twitter is suing "hate speech researchers" - which is to say fascists - for scaring off advertisers - which is to say mostly also fascists. (Ars Technica)

  Lawsuit comes as Musk and Yaccarino seize control of X's trust and safety team.

  Now? Only now you are doing this?
  
  Day one you should have fired them all. Every single one.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Twitter, they've made changes to the ads to get around AdBlockPlus.
  
  It sucks. And that's with supposedly reduced ads on a paid account.
  
  
  
• Apple asked users why they were turning off the "conversation awareness" feature on their AirPods.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Users: Because it sucks.
  
  
  
• Anker's new USB-C power adapter can fast-charge a 16" MacBook Pro.  (The Verge)
  
  It can put out 140W on one port for a large laptop while still having 100W left over to charge your phone and tablet.
  
  USB-C itself now supports charging at up to 240W - 48V at 5A - though I haven't seen anything using that full power yet.  The Framework Laptop 16 comes with a 180W USB-C charger, which is getting there, and hopefully dedicated chargers will soon disappear even for gaming laptops.
  
  
  
• The Galaxy Z Fold 5 is here, which is odd because it seems the Z Fold 4 only came out a week ago.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  As before, it's expensive and awkward, too narrow when folded up and too wide when unfolded.  You'd be better off in almost every way with a regular phone and a regular small tablet EXCEPT THERE ARE NO GOOD SMALL TABLETS SAMSUNG I'M LOOKING AT YOU.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, August 02 2023 10:04 PM (JqCHh)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 02 2023 11:24 PM (zx18t)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 02 2023 11:25 PM (zx18t)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 02 2023 11:57 PM (BMUHC)

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• An FBI investigation into the US government agency that paid a contractor for an infamous piece of Israeli spyware used in unconstitutional warrantless surveillance has turned up the fact the culprit is the FBI.  (New York Times - archive site)
  
  If you guessed that at the start of the sentence you win some Kewpie mayonnaise.
  
  
  
• Massachusetts legislators are planning a tax of streaming services to fund 200 community access cable channels.  (Boston Globe - archive site)
  
  Nobody tell them about the internet.  They might cry.
  
  
  
• The US and Europe are growing alarmed that, having been denied access to the latest technologies for producing the most advanced chips, China is now using older technologies to produce less advanced chips.  (Time - archive site)
  
  Judging from this story the US and Europe are not very bright.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Dell is all-in on generative AI.  (The Verge)
  
  Oh, they're not planning to use it.  It's crap.
  
  But if you want to deploy your own crap generative AI, they are happy to sell you very expensive servers to run it on.
  
  
  
• Basic computer games has been translated.  (GitHub)
  
  The 1978 classic book Basic Computer Games has been translated into a dozen other languages.  Not French or Spanish, though, but C and Java and Python.
  
  Why?  I don't know why.  But there it is.
  
  
  
• Samsung is losing billions of dollars on DRAM and flash production.  (AnandTech)
  
  The company still managed to eke out a small profit thanks to its other divisions, but while cheap memory is great for consumers, it's not so great for memory companies.  
  
  Of which there are only about three left in the world because the last time this happened the rest of them went bankrupt.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 02 2023 12:05 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 02 2023 05:47 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 02 2023 05:48 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, August 04 2023 02:11 PM (BzEjn)

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• Sam Altman-Fried, CEO of OpenAI (corporate motto: In a world of Saurons, be a Saruman), has run into a snag with his new venture, Worldcoin: It is a transparent totalitarian takeover and existing governments don't appreciate anyone muscling in on their turf. (Tech Crunch)

  Worldcoin, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s bid to sew up the market for verifying humanness by convincing enough mobile meatsacks to have their eyeballs scanned in exchanged for crypto tokens (yes, really), only started its official global rollout this week but it’s already landed on the radar of European data protection authorities.
  
  Why should anyone feel the need to prove their humanness on the Internet? Well one reason is that by unleashing free power tools like ChatGPT Altman’s generative AI company is leading the charge to make it harder to distinguish between bot-generated and human digital activity. But don’t worry, he’s got an eyeball-scanning orb-plus-crypto-token to sell humanity on for that!

  Tech Crunch is sounding almost appropriately cynical here.
  
  The idea behind Worldcoin is they will pay their victims - I mean, their early adopters, a small amount of cryptocurrency to have their retinas scanned and recorded.
  
  A cryptocurrency they just made up.
  
  And of which they have reserved a huge chunk for themselves.
  
  And trust them, they would never permit all that critical biometric data to be misused in any way.
  
  It's basically a credit card fraud ring combined with a massive Ponzi scheme, only with venture capital funding.

Tech News

• The Biden Administration is planning to spend $100 million on products produced from "transformed climate pollution". (Energy.gov)
  
  You know what transforms "climate pollution"?
  
  Trees.
  
  On the plus side, $100 million is peanuts on the scale of things. A lot of peanuts, but still peanuts.
  
  
  
• Why do banks still use IBM mainframes? Because they work. (Ars Technica)
  
  That's it. That's the story.
  
  
  
• After one disastrous quarter, Intel has returned to profitability. (The Register)
  
  Good. They might not be my favourite company, but any company without adequate competition will turn rotten.
  
  
  
• Expect the Radeon 7700 and 7800 to be announced in three weeks. (Notebook Check)
  
  And to be priced at $449 and $549 respectively.
  
  The article gives price ranges of $399 to $449 for the 7700 and $499 to $549 for the 7800. But it also gives a price range of $579 to $649 for the 7900, and that has now been officially announced at $649.
  
  A $399 7700 would kill the 8GB 4060 Ti, and a $499 7800 would kill the 16GB version, so we shouldn't expect to see either.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 01 2023 05:37 AM (zx18t)

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• So, that new room-temperature superconductor announcement?  Maybe not, say other scientists.  (Science)
  
  And one of the tests supposed to illustrate its superconducting properties might just be demonstrating Lenz's law.  Superconductors respond in interesting ways to static magnetic fields, but regular conductors can respond in similar ways to changing magnetic fields, so the actually demonstrate superconductivity you have to keep your field static, which they kind of completely failed to do, at least in one particular video.
  
  It's not fraud or anything, since the paper describes exactly how to create the alleged miracle material, just possible bad research.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Elon Musk is the main reason why Tesla Model 3 owners are switching to other EV brands.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Terrible, terrible headline, because the actual story points out that of the Tesla customers who did sell their Model 3 and buy a different brand, 21.5% said it's because they're mindless Marxists angry that Twitter is no longer their own personal hugbox.
  
  
  
• Speaking of hugboxes Ars Technica managed to cover a Falcon Heavy launch of a 10 ton EchoStar satellite without the comment section turning into the Two Minute Hate in the first page.  (Ars Technica)
  
  There are a couple of such comments on page two but they got downvoted into oblivion.
  
  Good for you, Ars Technica.  Keep it up and we might be able to let play with the other children again.
  
  
  
• The latest Windows 11 update - currently only in the preview channel - breaks third-party apps that fix Windows 11's shitty start menu.  (PC World)
  
  If this makes its way to release I'll go ahead and reinstall this laptop with Windows 10 as planned.  Good litmus test of whether Microsoft cares at all about its paying customers.
  
  Windows 10 at least has the signal virtue that it's been abandoned except for security patches so Microsoft isn't actively trying to break it.
  
  
  
• Intel's 3nm node is on track for next year, says Intel.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  TSMC started first production of 3nm last year, as did Samsung, but their respective 5nm processes are still used for most leading-edge chips.  Apple's next iPhone - later this year - may or may not have a 3nm chip.
  
  Next year we should see lots more 3nm chips from all three manufacturers.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 30 2023 06:27 PM (obo9H)

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• As Threads "soars", Bluesky and Mastodon are adopting algorithmic feeds.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  You will eat the bugs.  You will live in the pod.  You will read what we tell you.  You will own nothing and we don't much care if you are happy.
  
  
  
• Soars straight into the ground: Most of the hundred million people who accidentally clicked over from Instagram to Threads have stopped using it.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The article notes that Threads' count of active users dropped by 75% in two weeks.  It doesn't mention that the amount of time the remaining users spend on the app also dropped by 75%.
  
  Facebook and Instagram executives called this a positive sign and "better than expected".  No, they really did.

• AMD has announced the Ryzen 7945HX3D, their first laptop chip with 3D v-cache.  (AnandTech)
  
  One to look out for if you're after a high-end gaming laptop.  I'd like to see a workstation version with the extra cache on both dies rather than just one.  Since a laptop chip is already power-constrained, adding the cache to both dies is unlikely to cause heat problems.
  
  
  
• Aziyo Biologics has issued a product recall after its bone matrix material was found to be infected with tuberculosis.  Again.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Have you guys ever considered not accidentally killing your customers?
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 30 2023 04:12 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, July 30 2023 05:17 AM (liVFZ)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, July 31 2023 09:01 PM (JqCHh)

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• Conservatives were bombarded with misinformation in the leadup to the 2020 election according to a study by Facebook "researchers" who rank MSNBC as more reliable than the CRC Handbook. (Forbes)
  
  Uh huh.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Facebook has lost $21 billion to date on its virtual reality push because its "researchers" totally have their finger on the public pulse. (CNBC)
  
  In the most recent quarter the company spent $4 billion on virtual reality compared to revenues of $276 million.
  
  What the fuck they are spending all that money on I have no idea because it looks like a tech demo from 1993.

• AMD has announced the Radeon 7900 Golden Rabbit Edition at $649. (WCCFTech)
  
  I ignored this at first because it looked like a China-only release, but it now has official US pricing.
  
  Compared to the 7900 XT this model cuts the core count by 10% and reduces RAM from 20GB to 16GB, but the 7900 XT launched at an MSRP of $899 so it's also a lot cheaper.
  
  AMD is still expected to launch a 16GB 7800 at $549 and a 12GB 7700 at $449 in the coming months.
  
  Ignoring the rabbits (which may not be an entirely safe thing to do) this means you can now build an AMD system with a 7900 CPU and a 7900 GPU.
  
  
  
• Congress is at it again with a bill that purports to protect children online but actually... Huh. (Congress.gov)
  
  I'll need to read the whole thing because a quick skim didn't find the usual privacy horrors we see with this sort of thing.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, the new legislation is upsetting all the right people. (The Verge)

  Digital rights advocates have also suggested that KOSA could prevent LGBTQIA+ teens from finding the resources they may need online without coming out to their parents due to the parental consent requirements of the bill.

  Sounds unexpectedly based.
  
  
  
• The 4TB Western Digitial SN850X has now dropped to $269 on Amazon. (Notebook Check)
  
  This is a solid SSD and that would have been an incredible price a year ago. The 4TB Team MP34 dipped as low as $160 a few weeks ago but that's half the speed of the SN850X.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk said that Twitter - that is, X - will be abandoning light mode and going dark only and The Verge had to run with the story in the five minutes it took for outraged users to swarm and the decision to be reversed. (The Verge)
  
  They do still plan to remove "dim" mode which nobody anywhere has ever used.

Not Tech News

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 29 2023 12:32 AM (zx18t)

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• You can't compete with free.  (The Verge)
  
  Neeva was a search engine startup founded by ex-Google engineers - back when Google still had engineers - to build a better search engine.
  
  The founders noted a fundamental problem with Google.  Being funded by advertising, and having a limited number of ads per page, there was a deep incentive not to push the best search results to the top.
  
  So Neeeva built their own search engine focusing on paying customers - and went broke, because people didn't want to pay for a better solution when the bad solution was free.
  
  How do we get out of this bind?
  
  I see two possible avenues, both generally applicable:
  
  One, an organisation that benefits from good search tools internally and is in competition with Google in other areas open-sources their work because first this gets lots of developers to contribute free work, and second it blows a hole in the competition's revenue stream.  Facebook has done this with its AI research, clearly aiming at wrecking OpenAI and accidentally doing some good in the process.
  
  Two, collaborative effort.  One company can't afford $10 billion to develop a better search engine, but millions of developers pooling their resources?  It's not Facebook's own AI research that has doomed OpenAI to extinction, but hobbyists frantically iterating on incomprehensibly sophisticated algorithms at 3AM so they can produce funny videos.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 28 2023 12:15 AM (zx18t)

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• Conservatives died more than liberals after the COVID vaccine rollout. (Ars Technica)

  The study is just the latest to find a connection between political party affiliation and deaths during the pandemic. But, it takes the connection a step further, going beyond county-level political leanings and looking at how party affiliation linked to deaths at the individual level. The authors—all researchers at Yale University—focused on Ohio and Florida because those were the only two states with readily available public data on voter registration.
  
  The study involved death data on 538,159 people in Ohio and Florida, age 25 and older, and their linked voter registration files. The researchers did not have complete data—the linked data didn't contain a cause of death or vaccination status. But, they could evaluate excess weekly deaths by age, state, county, and party affiliation. They found that the gap in excess deaths was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates, suggesting that lack of vaccination among Republican voters may partly explain the higher death rates.

  So they didn't have the cause of death or vaccination status, and if you read the study to the end (which they desperately hope you won't) they only had voter registration information for 57% of the people in the study.
  
  And they didn't control for any confounding factors at all, because the consumers of fascist fear porn don't give a shit.
  
  
  
• Indeed, all the studies so far trying to prove such a correlation have been complete garbage. (Marginally Compelling)
  
  A good blog about the mathematics of the pandemic (and other things) and how everyone has a vested interest in lying to you.

• The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor? (Arxiv) (PDF)
  
  Maybe. Good discussion on Hacker News.
  
  The researchers appear to have a good track record publishing less exciting papers in this field, and the superconductor as described would certainly be a breakthrough but not actually useful for industrial applications - it fails under high current loads, which is one of the main things you want superconductors for.
  
  But there's a history of superconducting materials being refined to support higher current loads, so if real, given time, this might change the world.
  
  
  
• The EU is planning to pile $47 billion in one place and set it on fire. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is the European Chips Act. Where Japan is making a very specific hedge against China fucking things up, building a leading-edge chip factory specifically for Japanese customers, Europe is engaging in its usual omnixenophobia and paranostalgia:

  "With the Chips Act, Europe will be a frontrunner in the world semiconductors race," said Héctor Gómez Hernández, Spanish Minister for Industry, Trade and Tourism. "We can already see it in action: new production plants, new investments, new research projects. And in the long run, this will also contribute to the renaissance of our industry and the reduction of our foreign dependencies."

  Wanna bet, Hector?
  
  
  
• Newegg's ChatGPT plugin helps you plan a PC build. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Very, very badly.
  
  
  
• OpenAI has shut down its AI detection tool. (Decrypt)
  
  Because just like its AI, it doesn't work.
  
  
  
• The Gulf Stream could collapse by 2005 according to a new study. (The Guardian)
  
  Wait, 2015. I mean, 2025!
  
  
  
• File under nobody cares: Actors out of work due to Hollywood disappearing into a Hellmouth of its own creation will not be permitted to launch podcasts discussing the prior output of the LA sewer system. (The Verge)
  
  Okay. Sure.
  
  
  
• Just like Twitter in the bad old days Threads will regularly switch back from a chronological feed to its shitty algorithm no matter what you do. (The Verge)
  
  You are not the customer. You are not the product. You are sand in the gears.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 26 2023 11:51 PM (zx18t)

2 Grrr.  Third time:
Some "great" comments at Verge:  "[Don't force quit apps, peasants!] When you force quit an app, you're purging its cache so of course it resets your app's last state. How are tech challenged folks working at a tech site?"
This genius has never heard of an ini file.
Also, Akismet still barfs on cool characters like right single quote:
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 182: ordinal not in range(12

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 27 2023 12:09 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 27 2023 12:10 AM (BMUHC)

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• If you're going to be evil, be all the way evil: Google's new Web Integrity API plans to lock you out of your own browser and track your activity everywhere with in-depth fingerprinting and unblockable DRM.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I've switched to Brave.  Finally.
  
  Once Google was a tech company,
  They wrote a lot of code.
  But baby that was years ago,
  Before the advertising motherlode.
  
  For all their flaws Apple and Microsoft still make actual products.  Amazon at least ships products.  With Google, you are not the customer.

• A 2nm fab - chip factory - is under construction in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's major islands.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The venture, called Rapidus, is backed by the Japanese government and a who's who of major Japanese companies from NTT to Toyota, and is in large part a hedge against China fucking everything up.
  
  Worst case if cooler heads prevail and the world doesn't go up in radioactive smoke, they still have a home-grown, leading edge chip production facility.
  
  
  
• Intel's new AVX10 instruction set is AVX-512 without the 512.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AVX-512 has two features: 512-bit operations and a better-designed instruction set than AVX and AVX2.  AMD actually implements it as two 256-bit operations in sequence, mostly using the existing AVX2 logic, and it still works very well.
  
  Intel implemented AVX-512 as a full 512-bit design and has been having problems with it ever since.  On servers it uses too much power and reduces clock speeds; on desktop CPUs it's simply broken.
  
  AVX10 solves these problems by making the hard stuff optional.  AMD's solution is still better, and proven to work, so it's not clear why Intel isn't following suit.
  
  
  
• Sam Altman-Fried's Worldcoin scans your eyeballs and puts them on the blockchain, because who wouldn't want to do that?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This scheme from a third-rate Bond movie has raised $250 million so far.
  
  
  
• The Flipper Zero hacking security testing tool now has its own app store.  (Liliputing)
  
  Now your hacking tool can get hacked.  How convenient!
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Slim Pro 9i Gen 8 14 (a.k.a Yoga Pro 9i Gen 8 14) has a 3072x1920 14.5" display with 100% everything and an eye-searing 1200 nits maximum brightness.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It has soldered RAM, but there are options for 32GB and 64GB as well as the base 16GB, and those options are actually available in Australia.  Though if you choose the 64GB option here you also need to choose the fastest CPU and RTX 4070 graphics.
  
  It actually might be the laptop I was looking for except that (a) I spent all my laptop money already, (b) I'm fairly happy with the much cheaper HP I have now, and (c) there are no good photos of the keyboard I can find anywhere so the Four Essential Keys are stuck in a state of quantum indeterminism.
  
  The Yoga 9i 14 has four non-essential keys in the place of the Four Essential Keys, so PowerToys could turn it into something acceptable.  But judging from the corner of the keyboard in one photo I think the Pro model does away with them.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 26 2023 02:36 AM (zx18t)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 27 2023 02:21 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 27 2023 02:24 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 27 2023 03:26 PM (PiXy!)

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