• Intel has officially announced its plans to fire all the useless freeloaders and force employees to actually show up at the office and do their jobs.  (Tom's Hardware)|
  
  Employees will be required to be in the office four days a week starting in September, a goal likely easier to achieve when the company is also expected to be firing 20% of its workforce.
  
  

• Meanwhile Intel's current-generation and AI-focused chips just aren't selling.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But cheaper, previous generation chips are selling, particularly the 14th-generation parts.
  
  
  
• AMD reportedly has a 12GB cut-down model of the Radeon 9070 ready to go.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This will deliver three quarters of everything on the 9070, and neatly plug the gap between the regular 9070 and the upcoming 9060, which will only have half the performance of the 9070.
  
  
  
• Employee monitoring app WorkComposer leaked 21 million screenshots of monitored employees.  (CyberNews)
  
  How could this happen?
  
  
  
• Why US men think college isn't worth it anymore.  (Bloomberg)  (archive site)
  
  Mostly because it's not.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 25 2025 11:10 PM (1zWbY)

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• TSMC's N3P process is now in full production and N3X is set to follow later this year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  N3P is a slight shrink of N3E which in turn is a small update to N3.  We're only talking about 5% improvements each time, but if you design a chip for N3E you can produced in on N3P and get free performance and power improvements.
  
  
  
• A little further out, TSMC plans to introduce 14A - 1.4nm - production in 2028 and add backside power delivery in 2029.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Many people would benefit from a little backside power delivery.
  
  
  
• Russia is on track to introduce 28nm chips by 2030.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  28nm is actually a very reliable node and a good choice if you're not trying to win Apple as a customer.  Embedded chips are commonly still produced at 40nm.

• Motorola tried to make Perplexity its default AI assistant and Google said no.  (Bloomberg)  (archive site)
  
  Google was just enforcing the terms of its contract with Android phone makers.  But with the recent antitrust decisions on Google's search and advertising divisions, they may no longer be allowed to enforce those terms.
  
  
  
• The EU is fining Apple and Facebook a combined $800 million for not respecting European values.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Which either means they didn't disappear for an entire month in August, or didn't invade Belgium without leaving a tip.
  
  One of those.
  
  
  
• Cluely is an AI app designed to let you cheat on anything.  It's so bad it's actually easier to just tell the truth.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Its terms of service also forbid you from using it for its advertised purpose, which is...  Suspect.  They might be high on their own supply over there.
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, April 24 2025 11:27 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 25 2025 08:16 AM (bg2DR)

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• Open source database for people who are allergic to even the idea of running their own servers Supabase has raised $200 million at a valuation of $2 billion on the back of the "vibe coding" craze.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Vibe coding is the idea that you don't need to know how to program to build an app.  You don't in fact need to know anything at all to build an app.  You get an AI to do the work based on your cool ideas, and you throw it out there and see what sticks.
  
  Which is great if you value your own time at infinity and your customers' time at zero.  Or if you are just playing around to see if an idea is feasible before implementing it properly - except of course that nothing ever gets implemented properly and you'll soon be stuck with a nightmarish mess that routes your authentication requests via Eswatini in plaintext and is written largely in a programming language that is not only no longer supported but never actually existed in the first place.
  
  Supabase isn't directly pushing this, only enabling the trend, so I won't express a desire for them to be hit by a comet and expire.  For them to quietly go bankrupt and disappear would be sufficient.

• Intel is booking capacity on TSMC's new 2nm process for production of its upcoming Nova Lake CPUs next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  AMD and Apple are also planning to build their next CPUs on TSMC's 2nm process.  Intel has its own 1.8nm - 18A - process in the works that should enter production within months, and plans to use both.
  
  
  
• Intel is reportedly also planning to lay off 20% of its staff.  (Bloomberg)  (archive site)
  
  That's...  Less good.
  
  
  
• Bethesda's flower-picking simulator, Oblivion, is back, and it's bigger than ever.  (The Verge)
  
  Much bigger.  The new version takes up 125GB of drive space.
  
  Also none of the existing mods are supported.  Oh, and you can't make new mods either.
  
  Owners of the original version (which used less than 5GB) at least get...  You'll get nothing, and you'll like it.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, April 24 2025 12:17 AM (rcPLc)

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• AMD's 16 core Zen 5c dies have a single shared L3 cache.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are used in the largest Epyc server CPUs, with up to 192 cores in total.
  
  This is not a huge deal for Epyc CPUs because you still have twelve CPU dies each with its own cache.  But it is potentially a big deal for desktop CPUs, because the moment you go off-die - even over AMD's high-speed Infinity Fabric that links these chiplets together - you slow down a lot.
  
  And the fact that AMD is already shipping unified 16 core dies makes rumours that Zen 6 will be a unified 12 core die a lot more believable.

• Lenovo's Legion Tab Gen 4 has a TF slot - functionally the same as microSD.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Of course it does, because I got the shipping notification for my Legion Tab Gen 3 only two hours ago, and the Gen 3 does not have a microSD slot.
  
  But it took close to a year for the Gen 3 to become available in Australia, and it was on sale, and it includes 256GB of storage so I'm not likely to run out quickly.
  
  
  
• Python's new t-strings, arriving in 3.14 late this year, provide a safe (or rather, safer) replacement to f-strings, which provided a brain-damaged replacement to existing string interpolation that everyone knew was a bad idea at the time.  (Dave Peck)
  
  We put Perl in your Python because we hate you.
  
  
  
• It kind of looks like a USB dock but it ain't.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's a NAS with two M.2 drive slots, an Intel N150, 12GB of RAM, two HDMI ports, and sadly only gigabit Ethernet.
  
  
  
• Speaking of only gigabit Ethernet, those super-cheap Wavlink USB docks with HDMI and 2.5Gb Ethernet seem to have gone.  They got down to less than $10 before disappearing entirely.
  
  I did buy five of them, so I'm okay on that front.
  
  
  
• Bluesky is outsourcing account verification to reliable third-parties like...  The New York Times.  (The Verge)
  
  Oh, that's going to work out great.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, April 23 2025 12:05 PM (ZLF73)

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• Discord is deploying age verification systems recently made mandatory in fascist dystopias.  (Soap Central)
  
  Like Britain.  And Australia.
  
  Fortunately they're being a lot more sensible about this than the governments that enforced the rules.  The verification pops up - once - when you want to see adult content.
  
  Which is not something I want from Discord, ever, so I don't see this as a huge problem.  And you can pass the verification check with a face scan by the app and not have to upload government ID.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Looks like there will be a 32GB variant of AMD's Radeon 9070 XT after all...  Sort of.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD denied this a bit too strenuously.  Looks like the 32GB model is for the Radeon Pro range, for workstation users and not gamers.  It is the same card otherwise, though the clock speeds and power consumption will likely be trimmed back a little to make it more acceptable in an office environment.
  
  
  
• It's a four-inch cube and it's blue, but it doesn't say Cobalt on it.  (Liliputing)
  
  The Beelink Me Mini supports six M.2 drives, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, three USB ports, and one HDMI.  And an internal power supply so you don't have an inconvenient brick hanging off it.
  
  Also available in white and gray.  Or will be available.  Price and shipping date TBA.
  
  CPU is an Intel N200 which is a four core Atom CPU and delivers adequate performance for a NAS and only uses 6W of power.
  
  
  
• Resist eggheads!  (Ars Technica)
  
  Ars Technica has noticed that people have finally woken up to the communist takeover of the education system and is desperate to put them to sleep again, by force if necessary.
  
  
  
• Chinese APT IronHusky deploys updated MysterySnail RAT on Russia.  (HackRead)
  
  The Cold War proceeds apace, just now being fought between the Chinese and the Soviets.

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, April 22 2025 09:44 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, April 22 2025 10:07 AM (rcPLc)

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• Vendors have voted to reduce the duration of SSL certificates from one year to 47 days.  (Computerworld)
  
  Fuck vendors.
  
  This is mostly driven by Apple, because...  Because nothing, really.  It's a bad solution to a non-problem.
  
  Apple has been pushing for this for some time.  Previously certificates were valid for up to five years, and then Apple got involved.
  
  And the certificate vendors have just committed suicide, because nobody is going to pay them for a certificate that has to be manually refreshed every few weeks, and if you are deploying an automated solution you might as well go all the way and implement a free automated solution using Let's Encrypt.
  
  So good work, assholes.
  
  
  
• It's true that SSL providers are stupid but you still can't use the certificate without hacking DNS.  (Bugzilla)
  
  And it's true that SSL is intended to be resilient to this sort of attack, but if you care about security you need to care about who is providing your DNS, and if you do then this attack doesn't work anyway.

• Intel says yes, our graphics cards kind of suck when used with older (and slower) CPUs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel's graphics drives are somewhat inefficient.  This doesn't show up on recent CPUs, because they are fast enough to keep up anyway.  But if you pair an Intel graphics card with a CPU from five years ago, the performance bottleneck is now the CPU.
  
  This is a problem because Intel's graphics cards are cheaper than anything current from AMD or Nvidia, making them look like a good option for people with tight budgets...  Who would still be using older CPUs.
  
  
  
• Russia is seeding chatbots with lies.  Any bad actor could do the same, though of course the exercise would be redundant because feeding bullshit into a bullshit factory doesn't really change the output.  (Detroit News)
  
  What it we made it even more stochastic?
  
  
  
• Ordered the Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 3 to replace my dead Tab M8 FHD.  It's more than I wanted to pay, but I need a small tablet with a high-resolution display, and it is the only small Android model available with a resolution better than 1340x800.  Unless I buy from Aliexpress and risk having my Google and Amazon accounts hoovered up in the next OTA update exploit, as happened with Alldocube not long ago.
  
  Compared to the M8 FHD it's three times the price (with the current discount), but has four times the RAM, eight times the storage (no microSD slot, which messes that up, but 256GB is still decent), bumps the resolution up from 1920x1200 to 2560x1600, and is just astronomically faster.  The Cortex X4 is at least nine generations newer than the A53 in the M8 FHD depending on how you count, and on Antutu is ten times faster on multi-threaded tests comparing the two eight-core chips.  (It doesn't have an entry for the P22T, but that had the same cores and clock speed as the P35 which is on the list.)
  
  Which I'd like to say I don't care about but the M8 FHD was kind of a slug.
  
  Hope it's worth it.  Shame I really don't care about graphics performance on this thing, because there it scores 127 times faster than the old model.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 21 2025 07:22 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, April 21 2025 08:12 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: David Eastman at Monday, April 21 2025 12:55 PM (aAyxl)

Posted by: bob in houston at Wednesday, April 23 2025 01:49 AM (YBLgY)

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• TSMC is planning to produce 30% of its 2nm and newer chips in its US fabs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Currently US production is only at 4nm, with 3nm only active in Taiwan and 2nm still ramping up.  The new plans will boost output at the company's Fab21 site in Arizona and bring to it the newer N3, N2, and the 1.6nm A16 lines.
  
  N3 equipment is being installed right now, and construction of new buildings for N2 and A16 is set to begin next year.

• If you're looking forward to the next-generation Nova Lake chips from Intel with their rumoured extraordinary core counts, now is not the time to buy a motherboard.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Because they're changing sockets again.  Arrow Lake will be the only chip running on the current Socket 1851, with new boards with Socket 1954 arriving next year.
  
  Because Intel.
  
  
  
• The hashing algorithms in Python have been replaced with a library that has been verified.  (Jonathan Protzenko)
  
  That is, not merely tested, but mathematically proven to be correct.
  
  And hopefully tested as well.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's latest generation of stochastic garbage generators generate more stochastic garbage than before and the company doesn't know why.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not only will they make up answers that are completely wrong, when asked how they came up with those answers, they will make that up as well.
  
  
  
• A federal judge has ruled that dumping the entire database from a cell tower in order to find a single individual is an unconstitutional search under the Fourth Amendment.  (404 Media)
  
  Well, yes.
  
  
  
• Those damn railroads are putting stage coaches out of work.  (The Register)
  
  Why, back in my day, we walked from London to New York and back again, and you didn't catch us complaining about it.
  
  
  
• Blue Origin's all-girl space stunt is Elon Musk's fault.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Elon Musk has nothing to do with it, has saved the day when things went south, and generally speaking has done nothing wrong at all, but Elizabeth Lopatto has to rant.
  
  
  
• The Gorilla God's Go-to Girl is retro romance anime gold.  (Notebook Check)
  
  What?
  
  I mean, the anime is okay, nothing amazing, but it's also remarkably free of computer hardware.
  
  
  
• So, amid all the to-ing and fro-ing, a certain Speaker of Space collabed with a certain Warden of Time today.  I was thinking, that sounds exactly like, and it sounded exactly like because it was.
  
  (If you don't follow vtubers, you probably just said Wait, what?  If you do follow vtubers, you probably just said, Wait, what?!)
  
  Things go on.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, April 20 2025 05:52 AM (ZLF73)

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• A federal judge has ruled that Google is operating an illegal monopoly - again.  (Associated Press)
  
  Google's search engine was found in violation of antitrust laws last August, and the company's ad division has now joined it on the naughty list.
  
  This doesn't mean that either one is an absolute monopoly, and they're not.  But companies with a dominant market position are restricted from certain business practices that are no in themselves illegal, and that's where Google has run aground.
  
  Now the DOJ will be arguing for specific penalties (most likely forcing Google to spin off a small number of products into separate businesses) and Google will be trying to tie this up in appeals until the Sun goes out.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AGI is still thirty years away, like nuclear fusion.  (Dwarkesh Podcast)
  
  (There's a full transcript; you don't need to listen.)
  
  The host makes the point that we've had rapid advances in AI technology over the past decade; the guests respond that this progress has come at the expense of, well, expense.  The AI supercluster at xAI cost upwards of $2.5 billion to create, and similar installations exist at the other major AI companies.
  
  And we can't replicate that over the next ten years because nobody has $2.5 trillion to build a computer a thousand times more powerful, or 35,000 methane-powered generators to provide the hundreds of gigawatts needed to power the city-sized cluster.
  
  Now things get hard.
  
  
  
• There's a new Framework Laptop 13 in town, with a Ryzen 370 and up to 96GB (and probably 128GB) of SO-DIMM memory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Still no Four Essential Keys though.
  
  
  
• A new GPS alternative from Australia is 10 to 50 times more accurate than existing alternatives.  (Interesting Engineering)
  
  When I first saw this it seemed to be claiming to be 10 to 50 times more accurate than GPS itself, but that's not it.  If GPS is unavailable for any reason - something that happens a lot more often than you might think - this system based on existing maps of the Earth's magnetic field is essentially impossible to jam and doesn't rely on any other systems being active.
  
  It's not as good as GPS, but it's better than other options when you don't have GPS.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 18 2025 08:09 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 19 2025 02:07 AM (1zWbY)

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• Nvidia's RTX 5060 Ti 16GB edition is here and it's eh.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The other two cards announced today, the 5060 Ti 8GB edition and the 5060 non-Ti, are nowhere to be found.
  
  If you're not using ray tracing, it's about 10% slower than my Radeon 7800 XT and costs about 25% more at retail.  Retail prices may settle down eventually, but they haven't been great so far in Nvidia's 5000-series launch.
  
  If you are using ray tracing, it's about 5% faster than my Radeon 7800 XT - but still 25% more expensive.
  
  That retail price places it just 10% cheaper than AMD's new 9070 (non-XT) card, which averages 50% faster at 4k resolution.
  
  It does better at Stable Diffusion (AI image generation) and runs acceptably cool and quiet, but you should definitely wait to see what the Radeon 9060 delivers if you're in the market.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Some Synology consumer NAS models now require Synology-branded drives for full functionality.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This applies to the 2025 Plus series - it was already true for recent enterprise NAS models.
  
  Allow me to take this moment to heartily unrecommend Synology.
  
  
  
• Charles Darwin's children drew vegetable battles on the manuscript of The Origin of Species.  (The Appendix)
  
  Most of the original manuscript is lost, but what remains is...  Colourful.
  
  
  
• CISA didn't end funding for CVE.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I'm sure you will all find that comforting.
  
  
  
• Automattic, owner of blogging software WordPress, has been deploying watermarks on internal websites to catch leakers.  (404 Media)
  
  Which, I mean, sure, Automattic sucks and WordPress sucks and CEO Matt Mullenweg is a lunatic, but if you're leaking internal documents to the press you should expect to get caught.
  
  
  
• China's restrictions on rare earth element exports are a problem.  (The Register)
  
  Of course everyone has known for years that China was going to do this, because they've already done it, but nobody did anything about it.
  
  
  
• Spotify went down.  (The Verge)
  
  But it came back up.
  
  
  
• Zoom went down.  (The Verge)
  
  But it came back up.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude