Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.

Monday, October 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 October 2021

Beep All Of The Beeps Edition

Top Story

  • DiGi, the industry association formed by all the big tech companies we love to hate and something called Redbubble to manage the new and stupid proposed Australian rules on misinformation before our stupid government turns them into stupid laws has created a new subcommittee to police the voluntary code for policing misinformation.  (ZDNet)

    Which is a good way to guarantee that nothing ever gets done.

    Meanwhile Australian Communications and Media Authority Oberstleutnant Nerida O'Loughlin said she was still concerned about the voluntary and opt-in nature of the code.  "Everything mandatory is forbidden.  Everything forbidden is mandatory."


  • Public hearings* in a major corruption investigation of the Victoria state government are under way.  It turns out that people who will pepper-spray children, violently assault the elderly, send in air support over the report of two people in hi-vis jackets in a local park, and kick down doors over a Facebook post might have other nasty habits.




    If you know of the old-school Democratic vote-buying schemes, that's pretty much what's going on here.  And there's a lot of it, and it's been going on a long time.

    * As you might imagine, given these are the same mob who banned aerial footage of the recent anti-lockdown protests, the moment something juicy threatened to bubble up in the public hearings, the live feed cut out.  Testimony entangled not only the entire government but most of the political party, but when the investigators pressed for names, the public suddenly got static.




Tech News

  • The major change coming with Intel's 12th generation Alder Lake - that's right, isn't it?  Yes, Alder Lake parts, is that they have low-power Atom cores in addition to the high performance Core cores.  (Don't look at me, that's what Intel calls them.)

    Since AMD already has desktop chips with 16 fast cores and Intel will have at most 8 fast and 8 slow cores, a lot is riding on how fast the slow cores are.

    Signs are they'll be at least respectable.  (Serve the Home)

    I checked and there hasn't been an architecture update to Atom since Gemini Lake was announced in 2017.  Those chips, which commonly lurk inside budget laptops, are, well, not terrible.  That's in contrast to early Atom chips that were terrible.

    There are a lot of updates to the design of the new cores, which could potentially lift performance from not terrible to adequate.

    I suspect  the low-end parts with just two fast cores will prove to be a costly mistake, though.


  • NEC is building a half-petabit transatlantic fiber link - for Facebook.  (ZDNet)

    Whatever you are doing that needs half a petabit of bandwidth, please do less of that.


  • Can Bitcoin save an aging, broke, and scandal-ridden nuclear power station?  (Gizmodo)

    Probably not.  But they're sure gonna try.


  • HP leaked some details of its upcoming all-in-one desktop systems including 12th generation Intel and Ryzen 7000 CPUs.  (WCCFTech)

    AMD's Ryzen 7000 range will make great chips for all-in-one desktops with their updated RDNA 2 graphics.  The other specs on these all-in-ones say that they come with 1080p screens, which is pretty sad compared to any iMac from recent years.


  • The new PCIe 5 power connector - the cable, not the slot - can deliver up to 600W.  (Tom's Hardware)

    I believe the slot itself remains at 75W.  The new high-power cable is designed to replace the current trend of multiple six and eight-pin cables with one new 16-pin cable.


  • I just realised I can make an ender chest in Minecraft.

    An ender chest is a portable personal transdimensional storage container, a really handy item that I don't have.  If you put your stuff in one it's safe even if you fall into lava or the void of the End.  If you lose the chest entirely you can just make a new one and all your stuff will be there.

    I was playing on the weekend - the first I've really had off in three months, all the others taken over by scheduled or unscheduled work.  Rather than carrying everything back 2500 blocks from Camp Pandaton - and it would have taken three trips - I built my first Nether Portal with the idea of building a rail line back to base.  (Distances in the Nether are one eighth that in the overworld, so it's a lot faster and needs a lot less rails.)

    I did that, and the portal opened up directly under a lava flow.  Fortunately the portal itself acts as a barrier giving me time to block it off.

    And the moment I left the portal I found a black brick hallway.  On my first try I'd opened the portal on top of a Nether fortress.  And promptly got attacked by wither skeletons and blazes.

    So now I have blaze rods.  I already have at least one ender pearl, and plenty of obsidian, so I have the three components needed for an ender chest.

    And the rail, which got built and cuts the travel time from 15 minutes to about 45 seconds, now serves as access to the fortress.

    Edit: One ender pearl, many blaze rods.  But with blaze rods you can get more ender pearls, so with a bit of villager shuffling I'll have an inexhaustible supply.


Disclaimer: Static filling my attic on Channel Z.

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Sunday, October 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 October 2021

Let's Type The News Stuff Again Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • You can't feed cocoa seeds to parrots.


  • I mentioned that Far Cry 6 requires more video memory at its highest quality settings than most of Nvidia's current generation of cards actually provides.

    This review shows the effects.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Scroll down to the benchmarks of 4K Ultra DXR settings and the scores for the RTX 3060 Ti, 3070, and 3070 Ti are suddenly missing.  The text explains why: Those cards at those settings abruptly drop as low as 10 fps.

    The RTX 3060, which is slower card but has more memory, maintains a reasonably playable 30 fps.

    It's not an insurmountable problem: Drop down to 2560x1440, or switch off DXR, and the three missing cards turn in 50 fps or better.  But it does highlight the fact that Nvidia's most popular cards right now are low on memory relative to both their compute performance and their competition.  Those three cards have 8GB, where both the cheaper RTX 3060 and AMD's competing 6700 XT come with 12GB.


  • Eight problems with Windows 11 and how to fix them.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Step One: Don't install Windows 11.


Workstation Alternatives Video of the Day



The Nvidia A4000 uses the same chip as the 3070 Ti, costs about the same as a 3070 Ti, and comes with 16GB of ECC RAM vs. 8GB on the 3070 Ti.  The catch is that it's a lower power card and clocked much slower, so it performs more like the 3060 Ti than the 3070 Ti.


Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Steam Deck Video of the Day



Louis Rossman takes Steam to task over a how-to video that claims that repairing your Steam Deck yourself could be fatal.  To you, not the Steam Deck.  Well, to both, I guess.



Disclaimer:  Disclaimed by weight, not by volume.  Disclaimer may settling in shipping.

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Saturday, October 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 October 2021

Top Story

  • Where exactly is Tether's $69 billion?  (Bloomberg)

    Tether is a stablecoin, a cryptocurrency pegged at 1:1 against the dollar.  Tether says they can do this because they have a 1:1 ration of liquid dollar assets to the Tether coins issued.

    Tether acts like a bank, but this report suggests it's somewhere between a hedge fund and a Ponzi scheme.


  • Unexpected sanity:
    It’s a sign of Australia’s COVID parochialism that we seem to think allowing 10 people into the homes of the double-vaccinated, instead of five, is a measure of radical risk-taking.
    That's two academics from the left-wing Sydney University writing in the left-wing Sydney Morning Herald to berate the left over their COVID psychosis.

    Being what they are they feel obligated to take a dig at Donald Trump before they get on to criticising the Labor Party here in Australia.
    Perrottet’s political calculation is that we are now ready for take-off. This is one politician who isn’t afraid of freedom. His instincts tell him that the people of NSW increasingly aren’t either.

    For Labor and those on the political left, there is huge political danger in all of this.

    If it works, Labor is sunk.


Tech News

  • Hydrogen's moment is here at last.  (The Economist)

    Not.  None of the problems with storing and transporting hydrogen in bulk have been solved.  It's a lousy fuel.


  • Hydrogen has its faults, but oil isn't necesarily any safer.  (The New Yorker)

    The F.S.O Safer, to be specific, which is a former oil tanker turned fuel store, sitting unpowered and unmaintained just off the coast of Yemen with a million barrels of oil on board.

    This being Yemen, it may also be surrounded by mines, preventing it from being moved to safety by tug boats.

    This being Yemen, the person in charge of laying mines in that area is dead, and there aren't any records.

    The only question is whether it leaks, causing an ecological disaster for the Red Sea, catches fire, causing an ecological disaster for Yemen, or simply explodes and kills everyone in the area. They can't close the port either, because there isn't another port available.


  • How the .NET Foundation kerfuffle became a brouhaha.  (Rob Mensching)

    .NET is Microsoft's development platform, or one of them anyway.  .NET Core has been made open source.  The .NET Foundation manages that open source project.

    Poorly.


  • Apache has released an emergency update for the incomplete fix in the emergency update for the bug they introduced introduced in the recent update.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Someone's having a bad week.


  • Nijisanji EN Wave 3 - named Ethyria - just launched.  (YouTube)

    Pomu is the only one I follow regularly; with Hololive EN Gen 2 so active there's rarely a need to actually look for content.  But I like all the ones I have watched and will at least check in on the new ones.

    There's four in Wave 3, instead of three previously, and wave 4 is likely due before the end of the year.


  • Also, since I finally have a day off - I've been working nights, weekends, and public holidays lately - I've been playing some Minecraft.  Found some glow berries today, and caught my first UPRP.  I've seen one before but I fumbled the capture and couldn't find it again.

    There's a huge mineshaft system under Camp Pandaton and now I have tons of iron, gold, copper, diamonds, and other goodies that I need to get back to base, 2500 blocks away. 

    I'm thinking of finally checking out the Nether at this point, since distance there is 1/8th of the overworld.


Disclaimer: Roboco-san, nooo!!!!

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World

Endorsed


That's exactly what I got banned from Twitter for.

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Friday, October 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 October 2021

Zoom Zoom Beep Beep Edition

Top Story

  • Me: I need to clear my desk for these new monitors so I'll save money and choose three-day shipping, which will leave me time to-
    Courier: Zoom zoom beep beep package for, uh, Pixy Misa?

    Good work by Scorptec.  Haven't ordered from them in a couple of years but likely will as I build out my new development lab.


  • The Ampere Altra Max is the fastest server processor in the world - or kind of meh - depending on your workload.  (AnandTech)

    They've managed to cram 128 cores onto a single piece of silicon, where AMD's 64 core server CPUs are spread across 9 chiplets.

    The downside of this design is that the entire chip is used for cores.  AMD has room for 32MB of L2 cache and 256MB of L3 cache, where the Ampere chip has only 16MB total.

    If your workload fits well in that cache, you get good performance.  If not, it's going to suck.

    With future chips built on a 5nm process, or with stacked memory similar to AMD's new designs, they might  be able to produce a more balanced design that unleashes all those cores.



Tech News


Disclaimer: For A Fistful of Stablecoins.  For a Few Stablecoins More.  The Good, the Bad, and the Cryptocurrency.

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Anime

Daily Hololive Minecraft Stuff 8 October 2021

As two servers merge...



Another one opens.



Prepare for trouble and make it smol.



And Aki Rose is gearing up to solo the Ender Dragon.

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Thursday, October 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 October 2021

110% DCI-P3 Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • Linux now runs on Arm-based Macs.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Well, sort of.  There's no installer, no networking, and video is a dumb frame buffer like this was still 1993, but if you somehow manage to get it on there it will in fact boot.


  • Amazon says don't blame us, it wasn't our game that caused the smoke to come out of your $3000 video card.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Narrator: Yeah, it kind of was.

    A stock 3090 running Amazon's New World can draw 370W just sitting at the menu.


  • The PCIe 6 has reached a final draft.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This is four times as fast as PCIe 4  I'm not sure it's going to arrive in desktop systems any time soon, but I said that about PCI 5 and that will be shipping in about a month.


  • The monitor I wanted - LG's 27UP850-W - came back in stock this morning and I ordered two. It all looks good on paper; 4K panel, 95% of DCI-P3 and 100% of sRGB. It's not calibrated for Adobe RGB but I don't do print work so that doesn't matter nearly as much.

    It has USB-C power delivery so it should be able to power the smaller of my two laptops directly. The laptops each have USB-C and HDMI, so they'll both be connected to both monitors and I can switch as needed.

    The plan is to retire my two current desktops entirely. The larger of my two laptops has a faster CPU and GPU, and more memory and SSD (but no internal hard disk) than either of the desktops. The smaller one is for rare occasions when I'm actually in the office; the rest of the time it's backup because I can't afford to be offline just because my main computer caught fire. And for single-threaded tasks it's also faster (by about 40%) than my current desktop systems.

    Update: It seems they had at least three of them, because I can see that my order has been allocated at the warehouse and is now in dispatch, and the monitor is still in stock.

    Update 2: And they've shipped. I didn't pay extra for 1-day shipping because I need to clear a space for them, but I should still get them Monday.


  • Also just got a shipment of gluten-free snacks from Amazon, stuff that's not readily available from the local supermarkets. And a computer toolkit with about 100 different screwdriver heads. Also a pressure washer. I was looking at one for cleaning the back deck and they were on sale this week, so I threw it in the cart with the snacks.


  • The community is a disgusting toxic cesspool said a 4chan user - referring to Twitch.  (The Record)

    And then leaked a 125GB file containing all of their source code.


  • Now that the JP and EN servers have merged, HoloID is getting their own server as well.  Doing a build relay to launch it starting at, hmm, 9PM tomorrow.  I think they'll be doing the same as the EN branch, finishing the game by themselves and then linking it to the other two.

    Meanwhile Mumei and Kronii from EN Gen 2 spent three hours happily lost on the JP server.




  • Blockchains and deadlines don't mix.


  • Me: Time for bed.
    YouTube: Sora is exploring the HoloEN server.
    Me: Sleep is for the weak.



Disclaimer: Don't you know that I'm a cesspool?

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Wednesday, October 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 October 2021

Everything Mandatory Is Forbidden Edition

Top Story

  • Elizabeth Warren has a brilliant new solution for the growing threat of ransomware: Make it illegal to be a victim.  (Bloomberg)

    That's it.  That's the story.


Tech News


Disclaimer: On fifth thought, I don't want to know.

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Geek

Ruh Roh




This was found by the cPanel team, and though my cPanel server is running the affected release of Apache, the exploit doesn't seem to work there.  Either the httpd config is secured (it only works if you are lacking other protections) or they pushed out their own patch before the vulnerability was announced and fixed upstream.

So I think I can stop panicking and go to bed.  Thankfully that's the only Apache instance I have anywhere...  Wait, there is another one, but it's not affected.

Also, /etc/passwd hasn't included passwords - even hashed ones - since the days of the Byzantine Empire, and /etc/shadow is not world-readable.

Update: Apparently even with the bug it's still secure unless you change the default settings.

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Tuesday, October 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 October 2021

The Fifth One Stayed Up Edition

Top Story

  • Mark Zuckerberg and the terrible, horrible, no good very bad day.  (Bloomberg)

    All Facebook properties went down for six hours due to a BGP misconfiguration.  When everything goes down at once across a giant cloud provider like that, it's usually BGP.  Once you screw it up, you can lose remote access to the networking gear so you can't fix it, so a five minute solution can be stuck waiting for the right engineer to arrive on site with a serial cable.

    The outage caused Facebook apps to go bananas with DNS requests which caused problems for Twitter, Google, Amazon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon...



    The mee.nu server managed to crash all by itself.  Actually, it's possible that it was related since I don't know why it keeps crashing.  Just not probable.


  • Don't trust SMS-based 2FA.  (Motherboard)

    Syniverse, which handles three quarters of a trillion text messages a year for 300 different mobile networks, was hacked.

    Five years ago.

    They discovered the breach in May and just disclosed this a week ago.

    Everything sent from May 2016 to May 2021 was an open buffet for hackers.


  • New South Wales has a new premier after Gladys B, the least worst of a bad lot, resigned due to an ongoing corruption investigation of her boyfriend or something.  I don't know the details, it's petty stuff compared to what's happening elsewhere.

    I was waiting to see how much worse the new guy would be, and...  Well.

    It's not the most elegant formulation of the concept of negative rights I've ever read, but to have a politician - particularly an Australian one right now - saying this is refreshing.


Tech News




Disclaimer: Senpai tax!

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