• Congressional testimony from Peiter Zatko says that Twitter is run by idiots and infested with foreign spies.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which former we knew and latter comes as no surprise.
  
  Also that the company executives have been routinely lying to the board, to shareholders, and to the SEC.
  
  Zatko was, until January, Twitter's head of security, before being abruptly fired and then receiving a $7 million settlement.
  
  
  
• It must be purely coincidence then that at least six "research firms" are offering money to besmudge Zatko.  (New Yorker)
  
  Former coworkers at Stripe, Google, and DARPA report being bombarded with aggressive requests for paid interviews about Zatko - with the clear implication that you had better be prepared to dish the dirt.

  The consultant told Provos that its analysts were assessing Zatko’s "personality professionally and socially," his "strengths and weaknesses," "motives for his whistle-blower complaint and any similar past complaints," his "need for attention," and whether he was a "zealot or ideologue," "conspiratorial," or "vengeful." She also said they were interested in Zatko’s "view of Elon Musk and Musk's bid for Twitter."

  And they were prepared to pay $1000 per hour for this, which is a wonderful motivation for discovering a previously latent speech impediment.
  
  How this reads to me is that everything Zatko has said is true and Twitter's management is in serious trouble, but I should beware of wishcasting.

• A long review of Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach with no part IV.  (Less Wrong)
  
  I first read GEB when I was 16 - it was a Christmas gift from my mum.  Which tells you something about both of us.  It's probably heavy going for a 16 year old but the way it is written you can read it once and get the surface of it, skimming over the maths-heavy pages, and then come back to it again a year later an get a lot more out of it.  Maybe more than once.
  
  Also, Hofstadter is right about the nature of consciousness.
  
  
  
• GlobalWafers is starting construction of a $5 billion factory in Texas this November.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Before you can build a silicon chip you need a silicon wafer - a sliver of ultra-pure crystalline silicon the size of an LP record.  There are many chip factories in the US but this will be the first new wafer factory in 20 years.
  
  
  
• A tale of two hardware firewalls.  (Serve the Home)
  
  One good, one less good.  And the only difference being the case - but since these are passively cooled, the case makes a big difference.
  
  
  
• China has formally accused the NSA of spying, which is the function of the NSA.  (Gizmodo)
  
  This may be true, in which case it's dog-bites-man except that the NSA broke Rule One of Spycraft, which is don't get caught.
  
  Or it may be China making shit up to divert attention from getting caught spying on other countries itself, which, well, same as above.
  
  
  
• They said I was daft to build a datacenter in Strasbourg, but I built it all the same.  It burned down.  Then I built another one.  (The Register)
  
  OVH has built a new, hopefully less flammable, datacenter on the site of the one that burned to the ground last year.
  
  Last year was not a good time for datacenters.

• Cockatoos in Sydney have learned how to open rubbish bins.  (Cell)
  
  Not only that, but the knowledge is spreading.

• Intel's upcoming 13700T - a nominal 35W part - is reported to outrun AMD's 105W 5800X in both single and multi-threaded tests.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This could be true.  The 13700K is a 16 core / 24 thread part, while the 5800X is 8 core / 16 threads, so with one core running very fast or all 16 cores running slowly it can outperform the 5800X in the respective benchmarks while using less power.  But also being less useful for many workloads, because games (for example) really don't like it when one thread runs at half the speed of the others.
  
  Also it could be using a lot more than 35W.
  
  
  
• Who cares if it scales?  (Better Programming)
  
  Me, because whenever someone writes something that doesn't scale, fixing it becomes my problem.  Often at 3AM.  On a holiday weekend.
  
  
  
• Quad9 continues to fight those jerks at Sony in court.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Quad9 is one of the public, global DNS servers - the others being Google's 8.8.8.8 and Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1.  Sony wants it to block pirate sites, even though it doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with the pirate sites - it just performs lookups of DNS information from other servers.
  
  It's a pretty important case because at its core is whether you can repeat a piece of information that is (a) public and (b) verifiably true when someone decides they don't like the implications of that information.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 13 2022 08:31 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 14 2022 12:17 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 14 2022 04:50 AM (LADmw)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• How to build a Greek temple.  (Antigone Journal)
  
  In case your plans for the weekend fall through, here's a handy list for a quick DIY project.
  
  
  

Tech News

• And three hundred degrees.
  
  
  
  
  Intel planned to hit 10GHz about 15 years ago, but reality declined to cooperate.  Still, it's good to see some level of progress.  The only 6GHz CPUs that have shipped previously were in expensive IBM servers.
  
  
  
• The flips side of more gigahertz is, of course, more cores.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The article makes the point that if 128 core CPUs are readily available, it makes little sense to run servers with 4 cores that are less than 25% busy most of the time.  Slice a 256 core system (two 128 core CPUs) into 256 virtual servers and you get 256 times as many customers in the same amount of rack space.
  
  Unfortunately that's also part of the entire you'll own nothing and like it mantra.  It makes economic sense, but I'm going to continue running my own servers as long as it's at all feasible.
  
  
  
• A problem with the planned introduction of 2nm chips has been resolved with the help of a microwave oven.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Might have some difficulty banning the sale of those to China.
  
  
  
• Coinbase is funding a lawsuit against the treasury department over sanctions on Tornado Cash.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Tornado Cash is a cryptomixer, and cryptomixers are often used to hide stolen funds.  It's online money laundering.
  
  But Tornado Cash isn't a website or a business; it's open source software.  It can be used for illegal purposes, but it's hard to see how it can itself be illegal under US law.

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 12 2022 11:22 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 13 2022 01:24 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 13 2022 07:50 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 14 2022 12:22 AM (BMUHC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Nobody buys books anymore.  Maybe.
  
  
  
  
  The truth is slightly more complicated, as it usually is.  (Countercraft)
  
  Nobody knows how many books are published each year, how many are sold, how many of each book published are sold, or how to work out answers to any of those questions.  The first comment to that post - one of the rare exceptions to Rule 1 of the Internet - has a lot of statistics that indicate that, within the quantities that can be quantified, 15% of new books sell fewer than 12 copies, sort of.
  
  
  

Tech News

• While AMD just announced welcome price cuts with its new Ryzen 7000 range - sort of - Intel is planning just the opposite.  (WCCFTech)
  
  To unpack that a little, the 7950X, due in about two weeks, is priced at $699, where the 5950X was priced at $799 at launch and was unavailable for months in any case.  But the 5950X is now readily available at around $550, so the new chip is simultaneously $100 cheaper and $150 more expensive than the old one, depending on what numbers you are comparing.
  
  Meanwhile Intel is planning on price increases of up to 20%, particularly in the consumer market sector.  Intel's consumer product earnings are down 25% year-on-year and the easiest way to bring them back up is to increase prices.
  
  AMD doesn't have to fab capacity booked to steal the market from Intel, so it could come down to a choice of waiting until the AMD chip you want comes into stock again, or settling for an overpriced intel chip.  We'll see how that works out.
  
  
  
• WiFi 7 is coming, with transfer rates up to 5Gbps.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure yet if I'm going to cable the three rooms in my house that don't have wired networking.  I'll probably just run the cables on the floor to start with.  Right now I'm using WiFi 6 which according to my router's specs can reach 4.8Gbps.  The same way a Yugo GV can hit 150mph - if you drop it from a sufficient height.
  
  
  
• Get ready to switch browsers by January.  (The Register)
  
  If you haven't already.
  
  Google will be killing Chrome support for fully functional ad blockers - the ones that let you select exactly what you want blocked and where.  This is ostensibly because this requires the ad blocked to be able to inspect the contents of all web pages, and the internet requests they make.
  
  But mostly because Google is an advertising company.
  
  Safari and Edge are expected to do the same.
  
  Brave and Mozilla have specifically said they won't, but Mozilla is run by communists so this does not leave us with many viable choices.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 11 2022 09:50 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 12 2022 02:06 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: at Sunday, January 08 2023 08:44 PM (pr2K8)

Posted by: at Monday, January 09 2023 06:25 PM (pImk9)

Posted by: at Thursday, January 12 2023 10:32 PM (tY4Tt)

Posted by: at Sunday, January 15 2023 10:19 PM (SpChO)

Posted by: at Monday, January 23 2023 11:02 PM (k9PKe)

Posted by: at Saturday, July 08 2023 03:55 AM (zvTc1)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• I found a new door to not open.  Now that spring has come to New House City I opened up the sliding doors to the dining room to air the place out.  I didn't worry about the screens because there aren't many insects around yet.
  
  There are birds, however, and it wasn't ten minutes before I had a magpie as a houseguest.
  
  Turns out that magpie poop does clean out of carpet if you get to it promptly, so that could have gone worse.
  
  
  
• Don't buy a graphics card for more than $500 right now.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In fact, the article suggests, don't buy a graphics card for more than $250 right now.  Mid-range and high-end cards from Nvidia and AMD are only a couple of months away.  Low-end cards aren't expected to be replaced until later, perhaps the middle of next year, so the RX 6600 remains a solid choice if you need something right now.
  
  Otherwise hold off if you can.
  
  Which is slightly annoying if you want to build a Ryzen 7000 system because the new CPUs launch in two weeks.

• If you already did buy a graphics card for more than $500 and want to tinker with AI stable diffusion image generation programs like Img2img Stable Diffusion web UI makes that easier.  (GitHub)
  
  Written in Python it provides you with - as the name suggests - a web UI so you don't need to remember 900 arcane command line arguments.
  
  It does specifically need an Nvidia graphics card - or rather, Img2img does - but I have a couple of those sitting unused right now and might give this a try.
  
  
  
• Winamp 5.9 is out.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Because that llama's ass ain't gonna whip itself.
  
  
  
• The US Navy says all UFO videos are classified and releasing them will harm national security.  (Vice)
  
  Did the Zerg also give 10% to the big guy?
  
  
  
• Are AMD laptops really more energy efficient than Intel?  Yes.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  There are some cases where Intel does very well, but overall AMD is ahead, sometimes far ahead - particularly if you're depending on integrate graphics:

  Regarding the utlraportables, AMD pulls off another really great efficiency win. Not only is the frame rate 60% higher than the Intel-based Samsung Galaxy Book2 360, it uses 30% less power. Plus the performance is something you can really feel; 46 fps is smooth enough, but averaging up near 74 fps is quite smooth, and the dips are going to be a lot higher than Intel's, too. We're at a performance level where we'd like to play this game on the ASUS machine, whereas the Xe IGP in the Core i7-1260P powering the Samsung notebook might force us to play on lower settings to be more comfortable.

  I'm looking forward to seeing what Zen 4 and 5nm bring to laptops next year.  AMD has noted that in their new low power settings (65W) for desktop chips they are getting 75% better performance than with Zen 3, which is a huge increase for a single generation.
  
  
  
• Intel has started the first $20 billion stage of a planned $100 billion manufacturing site in Ohio.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The first two factories are expected to come on line in 2025.

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Sunday, September 11 2022 12:33 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 11 2022 02:45 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: licaki at Sunday, January 08 2023 08:33 PM (jS03d)

Posted by: licaki at Sunday, January 08 2023 08:51 PM (jS03d)

Posted by: licaki at Monday, January 09 2023 08:45 PM (pImk9)

Posted by: licaki at Saturday, January 14 2023 11:36 PM (h843u)

Posted by: at Sunday, January 15 2023 04:22 PM (SpChO)

Posted by: licaki at Wednesday, January 18 2023 12:19 AM (PUAQ3)

Posted by: at Thursday, January 26 2023 11:29 PM (qHzML)

Posted by: licaki at Tuesday, January 31 2023 07:43 PM (7pzXt)

Posted by: Fred at Monday, May 01 2023 11:02 AM (wNlmc)

Posted by: Charles Delton at Monday, June 19 2023 12:15 PM (nfw1j)

Posted by: at Saturday, July 08 2023 03:36 AM (zvTc1)

Posted by: at Saturday, July 08 2023 04:12 AM (zvTc1)

Posted by: aaaa at Thursday, September 14 2023 01:08 AM (ZyUGD)

Posted by: Anil and Vaibhav at Sunday, October 08 2023 08:30 PM (XH/KU)

Posted by: aaa at Wednesday, October 25 2023 11:57 PM (NejXs)

Posted by: aaa at Friday, October 27 2023 12:15 AM (leyup)

Posted by: World Traveler at Thursday, November 09 2023 02:53 AM (mqwQy)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The real reason Apple doesn't support standard RCS text messaging on iPhones: Because fuck you, that's why.  (The Verge)
  
  By relegating messages from other phones to third class, they can shame people with perfectly functional phones to burn money on Apple's own expensive and unrepairable toys.
  
  Which strategy, to be fair, (a) works and (b) basically paid for the massive growth of TSMC that has allowed smaller companies like AMD access to extremely advanced chipmaking facilities.

• MSI has announced the specs and pricing of its new X670 motherboards for AMD ahead of the official launch on September 27.  (Anandtech)
  
  Prices range from expensive ($290) to absurd ($1299).  If you want integrated 10Gb Ethernet you're looking at $700.
  
  There will be cheaper models showing up soon, based on the B650 chipset that supports most of the same features.
  
  
  
• The Motorola Edge 30 costs 900 Euros and has a 200 megapixel camera.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is great except that the camera sensor is too small to really take advantage of that resolution, so unless you're taking photos in broad daylight on the Moon you're really looking at 50 megapixel images.
  
  Which is still a lot, to be fair.
  
  
  
• Taichi is a new compile for Python - an interpreted language that has compilers the way some people have mice, probably freeze-dried to feed their python - that compiles not only to your CPU but to your GPU as well.  (Taichi)
  
  They compare it to PyPy, the Python compiler I use in production, and note that both are useful but have very different tradeoffs.  Taichi is more designed for writing computational kernels without having to ever leave PyCharm, delivering up to 100x performance for specific type of code, where PyPy will speed up your code by an average of 4.5x and eat memory like mice.
  
  
  
• I hate everything.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Well, maybe not everything.  The new 0.4 update to fan-made Hololive game Holocure is out now.  (Itch.io)
  
  It's fun and it's free.  Can't ask for more except maybe for it to not melt my laptop in the later stages.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 10 2022 10:07 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, September 10 2022 01:30 PM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 10 2022 05:48 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Sunday, September 11 2022 05:04 AM (r9O5h)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• When Disney was looking to buy Twitter back in 2016, they dropped the idea not because the site was awash with bots, but because the real users were assholes.  (Vox)
  
  You can totally understand a nominally family-oriented company like Disney keeping a long, long way away from Twitter.
  
  But the takeaway from this new interview with former Disney CEO Bob Iger is that the site is flooded with bots, not Twitter's official five percent fairy tale.
  
  Elon Musk took note.
  
  
  

Tech News

• HP has fixed a severe bug in the support assistant tool they install on PCs.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The Four Laws of Thermodynamics:
  
  1. You can't win.
  2. You can't break even.
  3. You can't quit the game.
  4. Support assist tools are a security nightmare.
  
  
  
• If you have a Cisco RV110W, RV130, RV130W, or RV215W unplug it now, throw it away, and buy a new router.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And not another Cisco, because those models have a critical password validation flaw and will never be patched.
  
  Cisco says you should buy a new Cisco router, which is a great idea if you're a government department or a masochist.
  
  
  
• The integrated graphics on the new Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs have been benchmarked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  While the graphics is the new RDNA 2 design, it only includes 128 shaders (two "cluster units"), where the laptop 6800U has 768 (12 CUs).
  
  Performance is...  Not as terrible as you might think, similar to Intel's integrated graphics.  It would have been nice to see 4 CUs instead of just two, since that would be enough to actually play games.
  
  But if you're just doing office work or web browsing or want to boot the system without a graphics card, more than enough.
  
  
  
• The CPU side of things has also been benchmarked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yeah, it's Geekbench, which is not great.  But for comparing two very similar CPUs it's interesting, and it shows the 8 core 7700X ahead of the previous generation 12 core 5900X on multi-threaded tests.

Midjourneying

A pretty good rendition of one of my characters, though it takes some convincing to get Midjourney to give a young character grey hair.

And another, unrelated:



It's really quite good at head-and-shoulders shots.  If they can just teach it that arms end with hands, it will be stellar.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 09 2022 12:12 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 09 2022 01:02 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Starry Knight at Friday, September 09 2022 03:50 AM (a0Eva)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 09 2022 12:08 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• How Cloudflare got KiwiFarms wrong.  (The Verge)
  
  Cloudflare got KiwiFarms wrong by caving to the fascist mob, but since The Verge is a card-carrying flag-waving member of that mob, this article is complaining that Cloudflare didn't cave sooner.
  
  The excuse given is "stochastic terrorism", a term that means someone somewhere said something I don't like.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The GPD Win 4 is a hand-held game console like the Sony Playstation Vita and Nintendo Switch.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's a bit chunkier; the Nintendo Switch weighs around 11 ounces and this is nearly 20.
  
  On the other hand, it has a keyboard - under the 6" 1920x1080 display, which slides up if you want to type rather than play games, an 8 core Ryzen 6800U CPU, up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of NVMe SSD.
  
  Don't need.  Do want.  It's twice as fast as the laptop I'm using right now.
  
  
  
• The Ryzen 4100 and 4500 are here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure exactly why, since these are older Zen 2 cores.  But the 4100 costs $99 and the 4500 costs $129, and they're not bad chips.  So I guess that's a reason.
  
  
  
• There was a 23 year old denial-of-service bug in Curl.  (Haxx.se)
  
  Sort of.  Curl is a client-side tool (and software library) for fetching content from the web, so you could only really DOS yourself.  It involved bad cookies, which are a problem.  Probably oatmeal raisin, which are just cheap counterfeit chocolate chip.
  
  
  
• Still playing with Midjourney.  Some prompts are dead ends that give horrible results after dozens of attempts.  Others work first try, like "middle-aged wizard at workbench".
  
  
  
  It's a lot better at head-and-shoulders shots than full-length.  It often loses track of the arms or hands and the results are not pretty.
  
  Pleased with this Ice Witch too:
  
  
  
  And added a couple more along that theme:
  
  
  
  
  
  It makes things easier if you expect the results to look slightly creepy.
  
  In fact, it's really good at creepy.
  
  
  
  It's keeping it from being creepy that's the challenge.
  
  
  
  But not impossible.

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, September 07 2022 10:01 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Thursday, September 08 2022 09:04 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Thursday, September 08 2022 09:06 AM (nRMeC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• So I took a little time to play with Midjourney, one of the new AI-powered art sites.  I've been critical of AI often enough; it has little of practical use to show for decades of research apart from being able to destroy the last vestiges of privacy in an increasingly totalitarian world.
  
  But this...  This is pretty neat.
  
  
  
  
  You just describe what you want to see, and the art style you want it drawn in, and it does it.
  
  Well, most of the time there are little details that aren't quite right - it's not great at bilateral symmetry, and fairly often the results are on the wrong side of the Uncanny Valley, and while it's good on faces and clothes, including things like uniforms and armour:
  
  
  
  It has a very shaky grasp of the concept of holding something.
  
  It does well on landscapes and cities though:
  
  
  
  You can get a free trial but if you get interested you'll burn through the allowance very quickly.  Monthly plans start at $10, or $30 for unlimited use.  If you need a lot of illustrations for something but you don't need a particular scene or action precisely, it's an amazing tool.
  
  Just be prepared to occasionally see things that can't be unseen, like when it simply forgets to give someone a face.
  
  If you try to put two characters in a scene, it tends to lose its marbles.  I can see why artists are upset, but they're certainly not out of a job yet.
  
  I also wondered if it's possible to get to images of recognisably the same character, given the amount of randomness involved.  And I'll just say for now, yes.  It takes patience, but if your prompt is specific enough, it's not that hard.
  
  Update: Typed in "lexx" as the prompt, nothing else.  Got this:
  
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• QNAP.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• Email is broken.  (Carlos Fenollosa)
  
  Broken deliberately by Big Tech, so that only emails sent by (or if you're luck, via) Big Tech can reach email servers operated by Big Tech.
  
  You can receive email on your own server just fine, but sending it is another matter entirely.
  
  
  
• Cheating at chess using computer shoes.  (Incoherency)
  
  It seems like a rather roundabout approach, but if it gets results, who's to complain?  I mean, the International Chess Federation, yes, but who listens to those nerds?
  
  
  

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, September 07 2022 02:23 AM (rglbH)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The US and Japan have agreed that nuclear power is essential to reducing global warming.  (AP News)
  
  Now, set aside for the moment whether global warming is real or whether, if real, it is on balance harmful: It is absolutely true that if you want to reduce carbon outputs without destroying the global economy, you need to increase the use of nuclear power.
  
  Which is why it's so remarkable to see the head of the EPA saying this.

• Intel's next-plus-one generation Emerald Rapids server CPUs will be out late next year with up to 64 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD has 64 core CPUs now, with 96 core parts coming this year, and 128 cores early next year.
  
  The one thing Intel has in its favour is a full 512-bit implementation of AVX-512, but for typical commercial workloads - databases, web sites, business applications - AVX-512 is basically useless.
  
  
  
• Google has received DMCA takedown notices for 4 million unique domains.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Including the White House, the FBI, and the Vatican.
  
  
  
• LG is bringing NFTs to its smart TVs.  (The Verge)
  
  Ugh.
  
  They are using the Hedera blockchain, though, which is actually the least awful blockchain I've looked at if you really must distribute NFTs for some reason.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 05 2022 07:25 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: EdH at Thursday, September 08 2022 01:38 AM (eAtU4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 08 2022 02:35 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 08 2022 02:45 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 08 2022 02:45 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: EdH at Thursday, September 08 2022 10:04 AM (eAtU4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment