Ambient Irony

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Tuesday, October 05

Daily Epic Takedown Stuff 5 October 2021

PRGuy17 on Twitter is a cut-price Goebbels to Dan Andrews' dime store Hitler. He claims that lockdowns in Victoria saved 120,000 lives, which would require a death rate two to ten times that of the worst-affected US states to be remotely possible, depending on exactly how his fiction is meant to be interpreted.

This thread - it's a long thread - analyses the numbers and figures that the lockdowns in effect killed 52,000 people.

Meanwhile, a quote from the new premier of New South Wales:

New South Wales already had the least worst state government in Australia - not a high bar. Sign that it might actually get better rather than worse with the change of leadership?

Also, yes, the server outage here was due to the same BGP configuration error that took down all Facebook properties and caused issues with DNS servers around the world, and not because I turned off the alarm after it started beeping at 3AM not due to any server issues but because my own internet connection was flaky.

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Monday, October 04

Daily News Stuff 4 October 2021

Bite Me Edition

Top Story

New research suggest that the Wuhan Bat Flu may have come from the Wuhan Bat Market and not from the Wuhan Bat Virus Factory across the road according to a paper published by the Wuhan Bat Virus Factory. (LA Times / Yahoo News)

A second paper from France that - the article kind of slides past this - has not actually been published anywhere concurs.

The article is 90% just the LA Times sniping at CNN, but that has a certain charm in itself.

Tech News

M1X Arm-based MacBook Pros may be arriving later this month. (WCCFTech)

The rumoured specs are inviting. Shame about the operating system, the price, the fact that it's all glued together into an unmaintainable brick, and that the company behind it basically just plain sucks.
The chip shortage will continue until morale improves. (ZDNet)

If you're waiting for prices to come down then congratulations, you can keep right on doing that.
Why carmakers can't just update to newer chips. (Jalopnik)

In short: Because cars are expected to work.
Ransomware gangs are getting ripped off by rival gangs that are undercutting their prices. (ZDNet)

The free market at work.
JMS is working on a reboot of Babylon 5. (Variety)

Look, it's his baby, and the original production was, shall we say, not untroubled. If he wants to try making it again, and he has funding, let's see how it comes out.

Disclaimer: They said it was mad to build a space station in the middle of nowhere, but they did! And it sank into the swamp! (actually, it blew up) So, they took the debris and built Babylon 2 and that sank into the swamp too. SO, they started again and built Babylon 3! It blew up, caught on fire and sank into the swamp. Babylon 4, though â€“ it held! Didnâ€™t blow up, didnâ€™t burn up and it did NOT sink into the swamp. It did, however, disappear without a trace but Babylon 5 â€“ now there was a space station!!!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:35 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 It feels like the author of that Jalopnik article doesn't really believe the automakers, but what I really like is the semi-implied claim that bigger nodes are more expensive, when we've been hearing for the last several years how the new smaller nodes that are starting to need EUV just so they can pattern the chips, cost far, far more than the old ones. They can't *both* be more expensive.

And I do like the nearly-requiring-a-fainting-couch assertion that power window chips (?) are on the decrepit 45- or even 90-nm nodes. Nobody tell them that there are plenty of chips still made on 130nm and larger. I've been looking to see what the most recent generation of Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers use and I haven't found any, but commonly-used ones like STM32F4s and the SAMD21 and '51 used in Arduinos and Adafruit boards and the like seem to be 130nm or even larger. (There's a Wikipedia article that purports to list all the active foundries in the world, and none of the Microchip foundries (that make the SAMDs) are smaller than 130nm, according to that article. (I use the Cortex-Ms as sort of a proxy for things like ECUs based on an article I read a few months ago, that I can't find any more, that gave an approximation of node, transistor counts, and clock speed, that were in the ballpark of those ARM controllers.)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 12:06 AM (Z0GF0)

2 I heard speculation a while back that there's no way Apple will call the next desktop chip "M1X", because that would imply it's just an upgrade to the M1, when it's widely expected to have twice as many CPU cores, and maybe a lot more GPU cores as well, so they're more likely to position it as a generational leap. That seems reasonable to me, but WTFTech does love calling it the M1X as if Tim Cook personally told them that's what it's called.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 12:10 AM (Z0GF0)

3 In fairness to jalopnik, they're part of the same family of vicious retards as jezebel and deadspin, so the author of the piece was probably simply given a subject and tone by someone even stupider than "theyself". "Just try to like literally scare people about this issue, okay? Like make it seem like really important and like really bad at like literally the same time, can you like do that?"

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 05 2021 04:01 AM (LADmw)

4 I am wary of a Babylon 5 reboot, because it might be where JMS' inherent leftism turns into full-blown SJW.

Of course, given the relative lack of success of his foray into writing comics, perhaps this is for the best.

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, October 05 2021 11:36 AM (MuaLM)

5 I /am/ going to watch the original B5 before I even think of touching the reboot.

And, I find myself wanting to rave at the 'update the chips in the cars' folks. Do they get how complicated cars are? Do they understand what that means for design projects? How awful that makes part inventories and logistics at the volumes they work at? Do they understand data on service life, mechanical reliability, or quality control in manufacturing? Do they even understand the significance of the wiring harness, and how terrible they are?

It is the 21st century, and it is fine if we still use analog circuits for some things. It is fine if we still use vacuum tubes for some things. If we have a lot of old equipment, parts are still cheap, and we have a lot of people who can maintain it, we do not necessarily have to upgrade to something 'better'. We do not need for everything to have a network connection all the way to H3ll and back, so that the gremlins can work from the comfort of home.

Okay, that is a bit hypocritical coming from me. I do hang around some people who are into some digital and solid state stuff, and they have a point about it being cool.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 05 2021 01:28 PM (r9O5h)

6 "And, I find myself wanting to rave at the 'update the chips in the cars' folks. Do they get how complicated cars are?"

No. Or, rather, they don't realize the amount of testing and validation necessary to be sure that putative new designs work and are safe and reliable. The article, to its credit, touches on this.

As proof of my claim, I submit the Intel idiot's comment about selling them all the 16nm chips they want. Intel, you will recall, is the company that was stuck at 14 for like 5 years, and it took 3 generations on 10nm--laptop only, and the first generation sucked (and consisted of one single chip, which was only ever sold in cheap laptops in China), and the second wasn't very good--before they are finally, this fall, ready to release (hopefully) good desktop chips at that node. They have no excuse for not realizing how hard it is.

Disclaimer: final.stats

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 02:10 PM (Z0GF0)

7 BTW, here's something funny about the chip shortages: Microchip's atsamd21 line, the Cortex M0+ used in the ARM Arduino lines, as well as Adafruit's Arduinoalikes (and Sparkfun and lots of other people) had...interesting...shortages. The first ones to disappear were the models Adafruit uses. The ones with less flash & RAM were around for a lot longer, as were the ones with a slightly different pinout--I got a small pile of them. Also, QFN is slightly harder to work with for the hobbyist than QFP, and were available by the thousands long after the QFP ones disappeared. (I got a bunch of QFNs by virtue of seeing a handful of videos of people using things like electric skillets to, essentially, wave-solder QFN, which is a lot easier than trying to do it by hand.) Pro tip: if you have approximately normal human dexterity, don't be afraid of QFN, although practice first with QFP. (The difference, to save people having to look it up, is that QFP has pins around the outside, like you're used to seeing, and QFN doesn't; the "pins" are just tiny pads on the underside, so it's hard to get to them with a soldering iron. The trick is to use solder in paste form and then heat it with hot air or something like a skillet.)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 02:16 PM (Z0GF0)

8 Also, Pixy, is the site code supposed to process s fleeb stuff even without the square brackets? Because "final.stats" isn't what I typed.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 02:17 PM (Z0GF0)

9 Serves you right for sfleebing all over the place.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 05 2021 04:51 PM (PiXy!)

10 "Do they understand data on service life, mechanical reliability, or quality control in manufacturing?" Remember, Intel is the company that had a serious hardware based security flaw (Meltdown) that impacted over 25 years worth of product, billions of processors. There were some pretty widespread suspicions that it was intentional to drive up performance metrics to improve sales and make competition look worse.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Wednesday, October 06 2021 02:56 AM (uii8N)

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Sunday, October 03

Cold Peafowl

There are suddenly no live HoloEN Minecraft streams after a veritable avalanche the last couple of weeks. I think it's specifically because they're doing the server update today to link EN and JP, but it's the first time in a while that I've needed to check for content rather than just hitting my Holodex search and playing whatever was live. IRyS alone has streamed 18 hours of Minecraft this week.

I might catch up on the rest of Pekora's antics now.

Meanwhile, here's the past year of HoloEn's Minecraft adventures squooshed down to 3 minutes.

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Daily News Stuff 3 October 2021

Best Of All Possible Worsts Edition

Top Story

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Cisco, SAP, and Atlassian have joined forces to establish Trusted Cloud Principles. (ZDNet)

The principles are:
1. A government may not harm a cloud provider's profits, or through inaction, allow a cloud provider's profits to come to harm.
2. A cloud provider must obey the laws enacted by its government except where such laws would conflict with the First Law.
3. Users get screwed.
The silver lining is that this is self-serving corporate bullshit, which is infinitely less harmful than the self-destructive woke bullshit that is so prevalent these days.

Tech News

Speaking of woke bullshit Ruby has embroiled itself in a code of conduct war. (Bleeping Computer)

"To promote inclusion" they have removed the First Law of their existing code of conduct, which previously read:
Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.
The rule of the day is now intolerance in the name of inclusion.

Also, Square's "Global Neurodiversity Chair" is - unexpectedly - a fuckhead.
HP's Chromebook x2 looks nice. (Thurrott.com)

It's not, of course. It runs Chrome, leaving all your data hostage to the lunatics at Google. But the industrial design is close to that of my deceased Spectre x2, which is very nice indeed.

At $680 including the detachable keyboard and pen it's reasonably priced compared to an iPad or Surface Go, both of which charge a bundle if you want to type or draw anything.

It uses a Snapdragon 7c, which is not a fast chip, but would be fine for ChromeOS or Linux, if you can get it to run your preferred distribution.
Do not buy an Xbox Series S. (Tom's Guide)

Given that you can't buy an Xbox Series X or a PlayStation 5, that means just don't play games.

Except Minecraft, which will run on a potato with a little overvolting.
The PlayStation 4 was doomed to die because of a bug that would trigger when the CMOS battery failed. (Ars Technica)

If the battery fails, the console connects to the PlayStation Network to set the clock. If it can't do so, it refuses to play any games. Doesn't matter that the game disk is in the drive, it won't work.

So they fixed it.
Apple did not fix the phone number field in their AirTag interface, despite being alerted to a security issue. (Ars Technica)

Scanning the tag with your iPhone reads the phone number, but that could contain anything at all, including JavaScript, which your phone will then run.
Everything you never knew you didn't know about JIT compilers and didn't ask because you didn't know you didn't know it. (Carol Chen)

A pretty good look at PyPy and Graal (a Java JIT compiler), with some information on LuaJIT as well.

Corsair Xeneon 32QHD165 Sounds Like A Robot from the Future Video of the Day

They measured the colour gamut at 95% of DCI-P3 and 100% of sRGB and Adobe RGB, for 83% of Rec.2020. Unlike the Razer Raptor monitor which this reviewer thoroughly panned, this monitor is fairly competitive with the best gaming monitors in its price range, thought they give the edge to the Asus Bunchanumbas.

Not the monitor for me, though; I need at least 4K resolution and I'd prefer more.

Disclaimer: Mike Pall is still a robot from the future.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:52 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Yeah, I tend to rant whenever I see the word neurodiversity. Bipolars and autistics are not the same, and what helps one may not help the other. Automatically including people with biological mental illnesses in LGBT, and recommending the behavior prescribed for LGBT, is an abomination.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, October 03 2021 10:48 PM (r9O5h)

2 We had some Mandatory Joy some time ago. Let me try again: we had some Mental Illness Awareness training at work some time ago, and the Big Takeawayâ„¢ was dont call the wacky fuckers derogatory terms like crazy, wacky, freakish, nutso, bonkers, etc. Use the term mentally ill! Because the term mentally ill can never become derogatory!
So I've been working on that, and "neurodiverse" occupies the same namespace, and is just as easily perverted if you put some effort into it. It's an idea so mentally ill, it just might work!

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 03 2021 11:43 PM (obo9H)

3 a) Mentally ill at least has the virtue of truth. There really are genuine pathologies that involve the mind.

b) I'm definitely crazy.

c) neurodiverse and neurodivergent implicitly have the context of an internet joke from decades ago. A very high functioning autistic went 'wait, how am I the dysfunctional one here', and made 'the institute for the study of neurotypical disorder', a website where he described normal social behavior as being pathological. So, both words are trying to conflate a bunch of other things with autism. There are several falsehoods here.

One, the diversity and divergence probably isn't. People who are not ill may in fact be as internally varied as the people who are ill.

Two, the flavors of ill are not all the same, do not need the same remedies, and sure as hell do not need HR, activists, and other such effers speaking on their behalf, and imposing policy on a bunch of people.

Three, rolling mentally ill into LGBT carries the implication that the ill people should be having sex, probably with a bunch of strangers. Having sex with a bunch of strangers won't make fix anything, and very likely will make things worse.

d) I was a weird bookish kid, overly inclined to trust books and other 'authorities'. The environment I was exposed to growing up was already a little bit bad in this way, but not to the degree of today. I've made some estimates of the results had I been gullible enough to take this stuff at face value, and believe it. Not exactly a happy camper here.

e) One of the appeals people make against holding fringe positions is being outside of the consensus, and being thought strange. Back in the day I chose to identify as monster, precisely because the consensus positions on acceptable thought were so obviously morally bankrupt, and promoting evil as being good. (Public school sex ed was not thoughtful or discerning.) There is no situation where I am not strange.

f) Dear HR, By your criteria, I count as disabled. It is your policy to accommodate disabilities. How do you plan to accommodate me by shutting the hell up about speaking on behalf of the disabled? (*cut further discussion of policy*) How do you plan to accommodate me by hanging from a gibbet?

g) Yeah, I wish I had the courage to put that in writing under my own name, and send it. On the bright side, they may be firing me soon, no matter how well I can manage to behave. Down side, I'm wanting them to do so establishing that they are being unreasonable, not simply because of my acting on my increased levels of anger.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 04 2021 02:13 AM (r9O5h)

4 https://erikengdahl.se/autism/isnt/dsn-psy.html
"Psychiatrists often use drugs, imprisonment, and harmful adversives on their victims. The primary area of delusion for in psychiatry centers on being a savior of sorts, who must rescue others from themselves using any means possible."
Strangely (or maybe not so) this is pretty much 100% correct. (I will defend the oxymoronic "pretty much 100%" on the ground that the whole thing is loaded with odd typos, false synonyms, and the weird grammatical errors caused by thinking faster than you can type and refusing to proofread.)

Posted by: normal at Monday, October 04 2021 04:39 AM (obo9H)

5 There are almost certainly more than a few terrible psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. I'm not as skeptical as that person is of psychiatrists, because of closely knowing some folk who probably would not be alive without psychiatric intervention, and who are much more difficult without meds, or if their meds are off. (But the meds have also cost them greatly.) Additionally, I greatly fear psychiatric drugs and some other substances, after some personal personal experiences with being given psychiatric drugs for things that were, in hindsight, not that severe a problem. It's maybe like approving of capital punishment, /and/ not wanting to hand out a vigilante license to every hotblooded young man with a chip on his shoulder. Powerful set of tools, and we would have problems making sure they were not misused even if academic training and credentials were not almost entirely bullshit.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 04 2021 09:50 AM (r9O5h)

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Saturday, October 02

Daily News Stuff 2 October 2021

Only The Mediocre Die Young Edition

Top Story

Gladys Berjerkelian... Bejekele... Brelekj... Gladys, premier of NSW and probably the least horrible state government leader in Australia right now though that's not saying much, has abruptly resigned due to an ongoing corruption investigation.

Expecting things to somehow get worse.

Meanwhile Dictator Dan down south remains firmly entrenched.
USPS! Can we ship it? No we can't. (USPS)

Not to Australia or New Zealand, anyway.
Do not use SMS-based two-factor authentication to protect anything of real value. (The Record)

It's not secure and people will steal your stuff. In this case, Coinbase wallets. It sounds like the people affected here might have reused a password leaked by a different site, and the attackers then bypassed 2FA to break into the accounts.

Tech News

The Acer FA100 looks like a pretty decent lowish-end NVMe SSD. (Tom's Hardware)

It's a DRAMless TLC model; the alternative at this price point is QLC flash with DRAM. The tradeoffs are complex but for the average user TLC is still a better bet.

The drive is rated up to 3.3GBps for reads and 2.7GBps for writes, which used to be a very high-end product and is now available at under $100 in a 1TB drive.

It's also very power-efficient, so a good choice for upgrading a laptop.
The Kingston Datatraveler Max UFD is a USB thumb drive that can hit 1GBps. (AnandTech)

And can sustain that rate for writes for 95 seconds before it runs out of cache and slows down a bit. Though it gets pretty toasty if you do that, with the chip temperature - not the case - spiking as high as 92C.
Backblaze data shows SSDs failing nearly as often as hard drives. (Tom's Hardware)

Showing an annual failure rate for newer devices of 1.05% for SSDs and 1.38% for hard drives. That's quite high and I'd like to dig into the details, but I can certainly report having seen expensive enterprise SSDs simply dropping dead without warning.
ARM server CPUs are cheaper than AMD (and a lot cheaper than Intel). (Tom's Hardware)

Ampere's 80 core Arm server chips can rival AMD's 64 core parts on many benchmarks (though not as I recall for PostgreSQL) at around half the price, and they now offer 128 core models. They're not as easy to get as AMD or Intel parts, but I've been trying without success to acquire some AMD Epyc Milan servers for work, so "easy to get" is all relative.
Crypto trading platform Compound gave $90 million to its users by mistake. (Bleeping Computer)

Not hacked, just dumb.
Dude, where's my privacy? (ZDNet)

Amazon's new devices siphon up your persona data and make you pay for the privilege.
Jeffy B has praised Amazon Games for its first successful release. (WCCFTech)

See below.

This Is The Below Video of the Day

If you have a high-end video card, particularly a 3090 or 3080 Ti, and double particularly an overclocked model, do not play Amazon Games' first successful release, New World. It could end in smoke and sadness and RMA Hell.

Disclaimer: Oh nyo.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:43 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Begun, The Invasion Has Peko

I noticed this live last night but didn't spot the EN tag.* The portal between the Hololive JP and EN servers is opening soon, but Pekora already has an EN holiday home and decided to pay an early visit.

The full invasion starts in a few days, I think. There's been a flurry of activity on the EN side lately, with all eleven girls preparing to greet the JP and ID contingent. Their spawn point which has been a wilderness for the past year has turned into a Japanese resort town in the space of two weeks. IRyS went overnight from living in a dirt house to building fully automated farms that look like the food they produce.

Meanwhile, I found brown sheep. Well, a brown sheep, but it wasn't alone for long.

* Yes, but since it was already live I didn't see that thumbnail.

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Friday, October 01

Daily News Stuff 1 October 2021

Buffalo Not Buffalo Edition

Top Story

Appeal #7 sent off to Twitter. I wonder if anyone ever reads these.
A list of the top new features coming in Windows 11... But not yet. (Thurrott.com)

(It's a premium article, but you can read it with a free registration if you want.)

Android apps? Not yet.
Adobe apps? Not yet.
Streaming services? You guessed it.
Full-screen widgets? Actually, those are ready to - wait. Nope.
Windows 11 is quite good overall, but it canâ€™t be compared in any way to the consistent and modern interface that Apple offers, say, with macOS.
The words of someone who hasn't tried to use MacOS for any serious work recently.

Tech News

Let's Encrypt's root certificate has expired and stuff is breaking all over the place. (ZDNet)

Let's Encrypt replaced their root certificate a long time ago, but if software isn't configured properly - or is simply out of date - it won't be able to access sites using Let's Encrypt anymore. This affects very old Android devices - unless you install Firefox - and also, it turns out, Palo Alto, Bluecoat, Cisco Umbrella, Catchpoint, Guardian Firewall, Monday.com, PFsense, Google Cloud Monitoring, Azure Application Gateway, OVH, Auth0, Shopify, Xero, QuickBooks, Fortinet, Heroku, Rocket League, InstaPage, Ledger, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages. Among others. Oh, and API testing tool Postman, which just stopped working for me.
Intel's new Loihi 2 neural network chip has the capacity of 10 millihamsters, sys the company. (AnandTech)

The chip one million neural circuits, and Wikipedia pegs the Golden hamster at 90 million, so that seems about right. I mean, such comparisons are 90% fluff, but so are hamsters.
Corsair's Xeneon 32QHD165 covers 84% of Rec.2020. (Tom's Hardware)

A recent and confusing theme is the outbreak of new colour gamuts. I know that 100% of sRGB means you get pretty decent colour - not amazing but decent - and 48% of NTSC is crap, but keeping track of all the different gamuts (gami?) and what percentage of each is acceptable is a chore.

It seems at least in this case that 84% of Rec.2020 is equivalent to 116% of DCI-P3.

Or maybe not. While looking for a price ($800) I found a second review that notes that apart from the wide colour gamut it also has better colour accuracy than Apple's $5000 Pro Display XDR. (PC Magazine) But they measure it at 94% of DCI-P3, which is pretty normal for a wide-gamut monitor.

Oh, right. 2560x1440, 165Hz. DisplayPort, USB-C, and 2x HDMI.
How to upgrade to Windows 11 and bypass the TPM requirement. (Tom's Hardware)

It's not quite as insane as it looks; they cover both upgrades and clean installs; if you're upgrading you only need the first five steps.
QNAP has fixed another remote execution vulnerability. (Bleeping Computer)

Do not connect anything to the internet. Ever.

Disclaimer: Everrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

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Tuesday, October 05

Monday, October 04

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Sunday, October 03

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Corsair Xeneon 32QHD165 Sounds Like A Robot from the Future Video of the Day

Saturday, October 02

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This Is The Below Video of the Day

Friday, October 01

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