• It's the weekend again and that means something, I don't remember what. Beer, maybe.  Do I like beer?
  
  
  
• The FBI searched the data of millions of Americans without warrants. (Bloomberg)
  
  I am shocked, shocked, to find that the FBI is the largest organised criminal gang in the country.
  
  Even the ACLU is against it. Probably because they got searched, but whatever.

• Huawei's new Mate Xs 2 has a neat flexible screen that wraps around three sides of the phone. (Liliputing)
  
  Only problem is (1) it costs $1500, (2) you can't get one, (3) because Huawei is a spy agency.
  
  
  
• Guess 16 states just aren't going to get any mail then. (Ars Technica)
  
  So long, suckers.  Rarely a good idea to sue the people who provide you with essential services.
  
  
  
• There's not just a shortage of good employees - companies are actively hiring the wrong people. (ZDNet)
  
  Communists. They mean communists.
  
  
  
• Arm has re-established control of its rogue Chinese joint venture, maybe. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The former CEO of Arm China was fired for using the company as his personal plaything... And simply refused to leave. He had a lot of loyal staff because they were making out like bandits looting the company.
  
  The moral of the story is fuck China.
  
  
  
• Which is also the moral of my day. Woke up to an abuse ticket on one of my servers. Someone had sent a spam report because they got a bounce message because a Chinese spammer had sent, well, spam to my server with a fake sender address and it got rejected, a trick referred to as a Joe job.
  
  At least it didn't take me long to figure out and the hosting company accepted the explanation.
  
  Oh yeah. The spam came from China, which is not a country I would trust with food products of any kind.

Did Elon Musk Disparage Twitter?  No, You're All Idiots Video of the Day

Sort of Anime Music Video of the Day

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, April 30 2022 09:59 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 30 2022 10:18 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 30 2022 10:19 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: SMM HEART at Monday, January 22 2024 03:37 PM (/QKaT)

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• The US and 60 other countries today announced A Declaration for the Future of the Internet and it is bilge. (Access Now)
  
  You can read the full document here (PDF) though it's a waste of your time.
  
  The First Amendment is just 45 words, was written 230 years ago, and covers much more than this useless Declaration.
  
  
  
• Of course, the US government just ignores the First Amendment when it is inconvenient. (Law Enforcement Today)
  
  The new Disinformation Governance Board - part of the DHS, which has absolutely no authority to do this - is intended to address the number one threat facing the world today: Reality.

• Synology. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not QNAP for once.
  
  
  
• The EU set up a Mastodon node. (PC Magazine)
  
  Congratulations Europe! There's no limit to what 450 million idiots can do if they put their minds to it.
  
  Maybe next year you could start a blog.
  
  
  
• Weibo is going to attach your location to the comments you post. (Asia Financial)
  
  You can expect the people behind the Declaration and the Disinformation Board to jump on this right away.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm is promising to release new Arm-based laptop chips that don't suck - next year. (Ars Technica)
  
  These are intended to compete with Apple's M1 chips from 2020.
  
  
  
• Amazon's latest quarterly results are in and they made a loss of $3.8 billion. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Probably on the free shipping on all the boxes they've been sending me.
  
  
  
• Samsung's 3nm process is scheduled to start mass production in Q2. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Judging from the specs it is not a much denser process than TSMC's 5nm, but should be faster and use less power.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 30 2022 07:39 AM (obo9H)

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• Quick one today because I worked until 1:30 AM because we have two major customers launching at the same time and then got woken up at 3:00 AM because I made an error in change management because a normally non-critical function is critical today only. Yay.
  
  
  
• Well, someone's enjoying himself.
  
  

Tech News

• The quicker picker upper.  The quicker putter downer too, if you drank the whole thing.
  
  
  
  
  
• Google has launched its new Media CDN. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is a regular CDN only with built-in AI, machine learning, and ad insertion, all very sound reasons to avoid it like the plague.
  
  
  
• Dell's latest XP3 13 Plus has everything but the 4 Essential Keys and decent I/O. (Liliputing)
  
  3840x2400 OLED display, 14 core (6P + 8E) i7-1280P CPU, 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 2TB of SSD. I/O is just two Thunderbolt 4 ports - not even a headphone jack or microSD slot.
  
  The 1280P is welcome - it's a slightly lower power form of the 12700H which absolutely demolishes Intel's previous generation chips for thin-and-light laptops and competes well with AMD's 5000-series and 6000-series chips except in graphics.
  
  
  
• All the chemical bases in DNA and RNA have now been found within meteorites. (ScienceNews)
  
  Which is a hint that if we find life elsewhere in the galaxy it will be edible.
  
  
  
• QNAP. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Again.
  
  
  

• "Fear" is not the word I'd use here: Under Musk, some fear Twitter's moderation progress could unravel.  (NBC News)
  
  Twitter's moderation stance was generally sound through to 2016, mostly tolerable from then until 2018, and on an oscillation cycle between Orwell and Kafka since then.
  
  And the star of this article is none other than Brianna Wu:

  Brianna Wu knows firsthand how bad the harassment on Twitter can get. A software engineer and game developer, Wu was targeted with death and rape threats during GamerGate, an online harassment campaign against women in the gaming industry that started in 2014.

  Everything in this opening paragraph is not only wrong but a direct lie.

  Wu, who has more than 100,000 Twitter followers and has used the platform throughout her career, said she consulted with the company’s trust and safety team in an unofficial, unpaid capacity from 2014 to late 2021.

  Apparently this is true though - Wu has been working as an informant for Twitter's corporate mutawa.
  
  
  
  
  Follow US law, ban the spambots, and give users the tools to block the trolls and lunatics.
  
  Oh, and Elon?  Close any offices Twitter has in Europe.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Yes.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• History didn't repeat for once: The Erie Railroad War of 1869 has eerie parallels with the Twitter board's poison pill.  (ThoughtCo)
  
  That time, Cornelius Vanderbilt - the richest man in America - failed in his takeover bid and the board looted the company, which went bankrupt in 1878.  And 1893.  And 1938.  And today is part of the Norfolk Southern Railway, railroads having some intrinsic utility unlike social networks.
  
  
  
• Lucid group has an order for 50,000 electric vehicles from...  Saudi Arabia?  (WCCFTech)
  
  The company is not a major player in the field so far, but just announced a new 1050hp model with a 0-60 time of 2.6 seconds.  This deal follows on the back of a February agreement to build a manufacturing facility in Saudi Arabia.  That's not something the country is known for, but the oil isn't going to last forever.
  
  
  
• You wouldn't download a Mac, would you?  Not when you can run it right in your browser.  (MacOS8.app)
  
  It has Civilization installed, and SimCity, and Photoshop alongside Kai's Power Tools, and Claris Works and Microsoft Word.  It's actually pretty functional.
  
  
  
• Sorry, I can't come in to work on the pyramid today.  A scorpion bit me while I was brewing beer.  (Open Culture)
  
  Which is probably a good excuse if you live in Texas today.  And are working on a pyramid.
  
  
  
• The Ugly Monkey JPEG Instagram group got hacked, and $0 worth of ugly monkey JPEGS were stolen.  (ZDNet)
  
  The article claims $3 million, but journalists will say anything for clicks.
  
  
  
• With memory prices steady SK Hynix has doubled its profits against the same quarter a year ago.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is good news for memory manufacturers - and for the rest of us too, because there aren't many of them left.  Memory prices are cyclic, and a lot of the companies exited the business one way or another in the last two bust cycles, leaving just Korean SK Hynix and Samsung, and US-based Micron.
  
  
  
• Who is Risa Hoshino, Instagram MD?  (Sarah Burwick)
  
  Unusually it turns out she genuinely is a medical doctor.  The rest of it is a mishmash of half-truths and apparent fabrications - mostly relating to COVID, which an offense that would get your account terminated if you weren't pushing falsehoods in the service of the "consensus" viewpoint.
  
  
  
• Why not just sell NFTs?  (BuzzFeed)
  
  That way at least everyone knows you're lying.

  Some doctors tried to refrain from giving out medical advice in the Ask a Doc channel. In April, one user posted: "Sometimes I'll wake up with my kidney area in bad pain from sleeping on my side, is this normal?” A lead MetaDocs doctor identifying as Dr. Fayez Ajib, a "Part-time doctor, full-time gamer,” according to their Discord bio — advised the user to see their physician.

  Huh.  Even NFT doctors are more ethical than Risa.
  
  
  
• The Dell XPS Desktop 8950: Not complete trash.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  They weren't testing it as a high-end gaming machine, and noted that the included water cooling solution is designed for quiet and not maximum performance.  But given Dell's reputation of unnecessarily loud air cooling, that in itself is an advance.
  
  With a 12600K and a 3060 Ti it's not a terrible power hog: 469W in their torture test but a more reasonable 300W with a normal gaming load - and idle power levels are excellent at just 43W.  The included power supply is 750W so it could easily cope with an upgrade to a faster graphics card later.
  
  Single-threaded performance is great, multi-threaded is decent, and gaming is solidly mid-range - about the same as a previous generation RTX 2080.
  
  I'd like to see Gamers Nexus' take on it, but from this review it seems like a decent prebuilt.  It does use a non-standard motherboard - all of Dell's desktop systems do - so keep that in mind.
  
  
  
• On iOS, all browsers are really just Safari in varying degrees of fancy dress.  Apple forbids any other browser on their platform.  The EU's new Digital Markets Act appears to make that illegal.  (The Register)
  
  Explicitly so.  While not calling out Apple by name, it does call out the imposition of specific browser engines on a software platform.
  
  Given that Safari causes more swearing from our UI team than all other browsers combined, forcing Apple to compete on a level playing field seems like a good thing, even if it comes via massively overbearing regulation from a grossly engorged Pan-European superstate, like a gargantuan blood-sucking tick that coughs up the occasional bit of ambergris.

• Elon Musk bought Twitter.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  For a lefty rag, a not entirely terrible article.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk bought Twitter: Here's five things he needs to take care of.  (The Guardian)
  
  1. Fire everyone.
  2. Edut buten.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk bought Twitter: The neurosyphilitic communist canary in the free speech coal mine is having a stroke.  (Mashable)
  
  Aww, they look so sad.  Can I troll them just a little?
  
  
  
• Elon Musk bought Twitter: Free speech experts worried about the prospect of free speech.  (SBS)

  "For him to say he's doing this for free speech is just a fallacy. It's just wrong. This is not about free speech, if it were there would be a completely different approach needed," said Professor Katherine Gelber, Orwell Professor of Political Science at the University of Queensland.

  
  
• Elon Musk bought Twitter: Sadly he will not immediately begin cleaning house with flame and sword.  (Daily Mail)
  
  The deal could take up to six months to finalise - requiring a shareholder vote that won't take place until May 25 at the earliest - and there are no layoffs planned "at this time".
  
  Whatever you think of the Daily Mail, this is one of the most detailed articles I've seen so far - they've rolled all their previous content on the takeover bid into one huge thread.
  
  
  

• The EU has unveiled its plan for the largest ever ban of "dangerous chemicals".  (The Guardian)
  
  Allegedly including PVC plastics and all flame retardants, the ban could hit a quarter of all chemical production in Europe.
  
  Which sounds great until an apartment building burns down and turns two hundred voters into so much illicit bacon.
  
  
  
• The crypto industry - which is awash with money - can't find enough lawyers.  (WSJ)
  
  Call me crazy but I somehow think there's a solution to this problem.
  
  
  
• Social networks will be required to publish and explain their content recommendation algorithms under the EU's new Digital Services Act.  (The Verge)
  
  It's not all good news, but at least it makes life progressively more difficult the larger a social platform is, which correlates closely with those most needing a kick in the teeth:

  The DSA will, like the DMA, distinguish between tech companies of different sizes, placing greater obligations on bigger companies. The largest firms — those with at least 45 million users in the EU, like Meta and Google — will face the most scrutiny. These tech companies have lobbied hard to water down the requirements in the DSA, particularly those concerning targeted advertising and handing over data to outside researchers.

  
  
• Speaking of making life difficult the lockdowns in China are leading to a growing shortage of laptop components.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Fortunately inflation has taken a bite out of discretionary spending and laptop sales are down 10% over last year, so the component shortage hasn't immediately cleared the shelves of stock.
  
  
  
• Just following pre-orders.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 26 2022 11:28 PM (6oqhX)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 26 2022 11:31 PM (6oqhX)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, April 27 2022 03:07 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, April 27 2022 03:28 PM (gVjvf)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 27 2022 11:03 PM (6oqhX)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 28 2022 04:39 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, April 28 2022 02:52 PM (gVjvf)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 28 2022 11:23 PM (6oqhX)

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• Well, that's one solution: If your politics require you to maintain lockdowns but your economic survival requires getting as many people as possible back to work just lock workers in the factories.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Even the Ars Technica commentariat aren't on board with this one.  A few try half-heartedly to blame it on capitalism, but they're getting downvoted to oblivion.  There are mentions of Mao's war on sparrows, and those are getting upvoted.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Ryzen 7000 is probably going to be DDR5 only.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ryzen 6000 - the new laptop chips that just came out - is already DDR5-only (or LPDDR5).  It truly needs that bandwidth to enable its fast integrated graphics, where a pure CPU doesn't really, not unless AMD goes beyond 16 cores with these new chips.
  
  Intel's Alder Lake still supports DDR4 as well as DDR5 - depending on the motherboard - so AMD is betting that DDR5 prices will come down over the course of the year.
  
  
  
• Twitter's board of directors finds itself unexpectedly at the bottom of a hole it just dug.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Nobody else is interested in Twitter at the moment because the first thing any buyer would need to do is fire the board and senior management, so if they succeed in fending off Elon Musk's takeover bid for their propaganda platform the stock price is almost certain to collapse. 
  
  Netflix and Disney actually have content people want and are willing to pay for, even if their new content is crap, and their respective share prices are in the toilet.  Nobody needs what was on Twitter yesterday; the value of the company is entirely on what people expect in its future.
  
  If the board succeeds in resetting that expectation to all Maxism all the time, as they seem to want, they could also reset the share price to zero.
  
  
  

Just Move Disney to Seattle Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 24 2022 11:31 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, April 25 2022 12:55 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 25 2022 01:52 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, April 25 2022 02:12 PM (gVjvf)

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• It's the weekend or something closely approaching that, which means that it's Question and Answer time or...  Something closely approaching that.
  
  Put something resembling a question in the comments below and I'll put something resembling an answer in the post tomorrow.
  
  
  
• Netflix wants to invest in fewer, better originals.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  The company plans to invest $20 billion in original content, and has indicated that they'd like at least one or two shows not to suck.
  
  
  
• Because apparently the original plan of flooding the end zone with liquid shit hasn't been a runaway success.  (Pajiba)
  
  Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in a quarter where they had expected to gain 2.5 million.  Not me, though.  I quit years ago.  All my entertainment spending gets dumped into Hololive.  Uh, and Nijisanji, and Prism, and indies.  I spend a lot more on vtubers than I ever did on streaming services and it's still infinitely better value for money because they don't immediately turn around and use that money to destroy everything I love.

• TSMC's 3nm process is on track, 2nm still a long way off.  (AnandTech)
  
  N3 - the basic 3nm node - is due to start production this year.  The enhanced N3E is due for the first half of 2023.  Keep in mind that advanced chips take about six months from the start of manufacturing to appearing on the shelves in finished products.
  
  TSMC's 3nm brings the same level of advances over 5nm that 5nm has over 7nm: 15% faster, 30% more efficient, and 40% smaller.  My newest computers are built on Intel's 10nm and TSMC's 7nm process, so 3nm would completely blow them out of the water.
  
  TSMC's 2nm N2 node is not expected to enter production until the second half of 2025, where Intel's theoretically equivalent 20A node is scheduled for the first half of 2024.  (AnandTech)
  
  Whether the nodes are in fact equivalent and whether either company will stick to that question I have no idea.  Though Intel is expected to be one of the first customers on TSMC's 2nm node and why they'd do that when their own 2nm node will come a year earlier is a very good question.
  
  All that aside, at this rate we'll be pushing the limits of bulk planar silicon by the end of the decade; further advances will require a change in approach.
  
  Though that means that without the Red Queen's Race of updating fabs every couple of years to remain competitive, chip production will become much, much cheaper.  Compare the cost of a couple of trillion transistors of 3D NAND flash against the same transistor count in logic - sixty RTX 3090 GPU chips from Nvidia.
  
  
  
• Analysts predict the end is near for the global chip shortage.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  We're doomed.
  
  
  
• Not least because with China seemingly determined to self-destruct we could be in for a supply chain meltdown that makes the last two years look like an all-you-can-eat Vegas buffet.  (General Crisis Watch)
  
  Chinese provinces home to hundreds of millions of people have either gone into lockdown or closed their internal borders to prevent escalation of a COVID outbreak that has officially killed 17 people.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, I found the 128GB of RAM I bought to upgrade my laptops.  I was going to do that over Christmas, then the blockchain melted down and I had to pull an 80 hour week during my vacation, which put me behind schedule on my other work, which snowballed until I pulled some more 80 hour weeks to clear the backlog, whereupon I discovered I had to move house by the end of May.
  
  Anyway.  RAM located, upgrades can proceed.  I need to get that done before I move because I won't be able to find anything smaller than a breadbox for six months afterwards.
  
  One of the reasons I was in a hurry to buy so much computer stuff earlier this year is that I was anticipating a possible Chinese interdiction or even invasion of Taiwan.  Which is appallingly cynical of me but all my old computers were dying and not being able to work for a living would be something of an inconvenience.
  
  Now I'm expecting just as much supply chain disruption overall but in different areas.  Might be living in a half-empty house for a while.
  
  
  
• You can now buy the Framework laptop motherboard for your own projects.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Starts at $399 with a Core i5-1135G7.  It supports up to 64GB RAM, one M.2 SSD, and four USB-C ports for everything else.
  
  Now do a Ryzen 6000 model.  And the Four Essential Keys.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, I bought a big bag of salted cashews last weekend that turned out to be contaminated with gluten, so that was fun.
  
  
  
• Softbank is planning an IPO of Arm at a $60 billion valuation - but maintain a controlling stake.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The $40 billion sale to Nvidia foundered on regulatory rocks, but Arm is a technically solid company and is finally making some inroads into the server market.
  
  The woke plague hasn't yet infected semiconductor design the way it has software development, because preparing a new chip for production can cost up to half a billion dollars.  The beancounters still rule with an iron fist.
  
  
  
• I deployed an Ubuntu 22.04 virtual server.  I also noticed that Percona has a release of MongoDB 5.0 out - 5.0.7 in fact - which indicates that it may now be stable enough for use.
  
  Percona's MongoDB 5.0 won't install on Ubuntu 22.04.
  
  Oh well.
  
  
  
• Will Microsoft cut off security updates if I run an unsupported install of Windows 11?  (ZDNet)
  
  ZDNet is also running a weekly Q&A post.  They point out that Microsoft says you won't be entitled to receive updates, not that you won't receive updates.
  
  
  
• Ebook services are bringing "unhinged conspiracy books" into public libraries.  (Motherboard)
  
  Oh no, books.  In libraries.  World ends, film at eleven.
  
  
  
• Twitter has banned ads contradicting the "consensus" opinion on climate change.  (Washington Post)
  
  I'm less concerned about Twitter blocking ads than I am about them banning accounts because I block every account I see with a promoted tweet.
  
  
  
• Tech companies face substantial fines if they fail to meet the EU's new content rules, whatever they are.  (Bloomberg)
  
  The rules forbid targeting ads based on race or religion, targeting ads to children, and using "dark patterns" like making the Decline button smaller or harder to see than Accept.
  
  And fines can be up to 6% of annual gross revenue.  Not profit, revenue.
  
  
  

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, April 24 2022 12:06 PM (DB9Lx)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 24 2022 10:20 PM (PiXy!)

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