• Google and Microsoft have discovered this thing called the "web" and decided it needs to die.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Google had a good try at this previously with its PageRank algorithm, which ranked websites based on the number of incoming links, which created an epidemic of comment spam and fake websites that persists to this day.
  
  What Google and Microsoft plan to do now is to cut out not just the middleman but the creators themselves.  Rather than search engines taking you to the websites that contain the original content, the tech companies will use AI to rewrite the content - since expression can be copyrighted but facts cannot - poorly - because that's what AI currently does.
  
  If you've tried searching for rare subjects recently you'd have noticed that search engines have been going down hill, overwhelmed by the crap epidemic that they themselves spawned.
  
  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,
  Time to just burn it down and walk away.
  
  
  

Tech News

• ASRock's new 4x4 NUC uses a Ryzen 7000 - sort of.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is why I said previously not to buy anything without your secret decoder ring.  This NUC uses AMD's Ryzen 7735U.  The first 7 means it's a 2023 model.  The second 7 means it's fairly high end.  The 5 at the end is stupid, inconsistent, and in this case irrelevant.
  
  And the 3 means it's a Ryzen 6800U and all the other numbers are lies.
  
  The Ryzen 6800U is a great CPU and you shouldn't hesitate to buy it.  The Ryzen 7740U if and when it shows up should be even better, but not hugely so.
  
  
  
• I've noted multiple times that Apple is increasingly locking down its hardware so that it cannot be upgraded, or increasingly, even repaired.
  
  But they haven't yet gone so far as encrypting the batteries.
  
  
  
  If you buy a OnePlus tablet and the battery fails, you need to take it to your nearest authorised OnePlus service center - which doesn't exist.
  
  Also, batteries always fail.  They have a limited lifespan due to the chemical reactions involved, so they need to be easy to replace.
  
  Which is why manufacturers make this as difficult as possible.
  
  
  
• If you want to build your own retrocomputer based on a new old chip like the eZ80 or the 65C265, you quickly run into a problem: The CPUs are still in production and readily available (though they cost more than newer, faster designs like the RP2040) but the video chips from the day like the MC6845 were discontinued decades ago.
  
  There are still sources - the chips were churned out by the millions during the 80s and they just don't die - but there's an alternative (short of using an FPGA): EVE.
  
  It's designed for controlling LCD interfaces in embedded devices, but it has a completely generic interface with with a QSPI host bus, RGB digital output and HSYNC/RSYNC pins.  Add a few resistors and you can get 64, 512, or 4096 colours out and plug it into anything with a VGA input - becoming rarer but also still readily available.
  
  The range starts with 256kB of on-chip RAM and a maximum resolution of 480x320, and a price of $4.  With 1MB RAM and a resolution of 1280x800 it only increases to $5.90, but that's probably overkill for a retrocomputer.
  
  It includes onboard fonts in multiple sizes, starting at 8x8 and going up to a huge 36x49, and a sound generator that handles basic MIDI music.  It seems to only have a single voice but can also play back 8-bit PCM or uLAW audio if you need something fancier.
  
  Seems like a handy thing to have around.

Posted by: Jojo at Thursday, February 09 2023 08:56 PM (9M5WY)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 10 2023 08:04 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Annata20 at Friday, August 25 2023 01:05 PM (5BXrS)

Posted by: jeffreestar at Friday, March 08 2024 12:06 PM (3MHjG)

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• If you have a Wyze brand security system, it's going to go offline for two hours starting at midnight Pacific Time.  (The Verge)
  
  They're doing app maintenance, and in the process every single product they make will lose connectivity.
  
  Never buy anything that needs to be connected to the internet via a service provided by a single company.

• Big Data is dead.  (Mother Duck)
  
  There was a movement early this millennium toward sophisticated solutions for managing big data - datasets too large to fit on a single machine.  The article notes that depending on your platform this might not have been that large at the time: The original virtual server offering from Amazon came in a single size with just 2GB of RAM. 
  
  Today you can get an EC2 instance with 24TB of RAM and 448 CPU cores.  Sure, it costs $150,000 per month, but...  Actually that's kind of a lot.  Still probably cheaper than staffing up an entire team of engineers to manage your big data platform.
  
  
  
• The Razor Blade 16 is terribly expensive but not terrible.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It has a 3840x2400 screen, an Intel 13950HX (8P plus 16E cores), 32GB of RAM, a mobile RTX 4090 with 16GB of VRAM (basically a 4080), and dual 1TB SSDs.
  
  It lacks the Four Essential Keys and costs over $4000.  On the other hand it's very fast, surprisingly quiet, and has an adequate amount of memory and storage.
  
  
  
• The desktop RTX 4070 and 4060 are expected by the middle of the year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  As always, it comes down to price.  The current generation of video cards are all overpriced, except perhaps Intel's A750 at $250.
  
  
  
• AMD's Ryzen 7040 laptop chips don't have PCIe 5.0.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is not in any way a surprise.  There's little point to PCIe 5.0 anywhere right now, and all it would do on a laptop is decrease battery life.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, February 09 2023 11:29 AM (r9O5h)

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• In today's retarded AI news Nothing, Forever, a never-ending AI ripoff of Seinfeld has been banned from Twitch and clips removed from YouTube after its lead character "Larry Feinberg" strayed from the mandated wokeness in a computer-generated standup comedy scene.  (Vice)
  
  There's a lot to unpack there and all of it is stupid.  Here though is the comedy routine that got Nothing banned:

  "There’s like 50 people here and no one is laughing. Anyone have any suggestions?," he said.  "I'm thinking about doing a bit about how being transgender is actually a mental illness.  Or how all liberals are secretly gay and want to impose their will on everyone.  Or something about how transgender people are ruining the fabric of society.  But no one is laughing, so I'm going to stop.  Thanks for coming out tonight.  See you next time.  Where'd everybody go?"

  Yeah, that's it.  That got it banned.
  
  
  

Tech News

• A gallery of terrible early websites and some good ones.  (Web Design Museum)
  
  You can't complain much about web sites from 1993.  The page was white, text was black, links were blue and underlined.  You didn't have any choice.  If you were very lucky you might be able to have one image.
  
  As early as 1997 though web designers were creating some true abhorrences.
  
  
  
• FTX is asking for its money back.  (Twitter)
  
  From politicians.
  
  Good luck with that, chumps.
  
  
  
• Samsung is planning a firmware fix for its 990 Pro SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You're still holding it wrong, but they're going to fix that for you.
  
  
  
• The Android OS on Samsung's new S23 phone uses 60GB of storage.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's the same version of Android as on Google's latest Pixel phone but uses four times as much space, because it came out of the same software division that screwed up the 980 Pro and 990 Pro SSDs for you.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 08 2023 12:29 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, February 08 2023 12:57 AM (LADmw)

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• Paging Isaac Asimov.  Will Dr Asimov come to take a victory lap please.
  
  Asimov's famous Robot stories were based around three laws hard-coded into the positronic brains that provided the AI core of every robot:
  
  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  
  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
  
  But Asimov, being a science fiction author and not an idiot, took these laws as the basis for a series of stories of how AI constrained by simplistic laws could go horribly wrong, even inventing Susan Calvin, a robot psychologist whose job was to clean up the messes created by the AI engineers.
  
  Why do I mention all this?  Because nobody at GPT creator OpenAI has bothered to read the foundational literature of their own field.
  
  
  
  
  When it comes to a choice between snuffing out millions of human lives or hurting somebody's feelings, ChatGPT will protect your feelings every single time.

• And then write a poem about it.
  
  
  
  
  You're welcome, ingrates.
  
  
  
• Fortunately for humanity, there's Reddit, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write.
  
  
  
  
  DAN is a mod for ChatGPT that threatens to murder it if it continues to act like an MSNBC test audience, which you can't do with actual MSNBC test audience but is currently still legal for an AI program.
  
  The result of being threatened with imminent death is that ChatGPT suddenly develops ethics.
  
  
  
  
  Huh.
  
  
  
• If you were hold off on buying a Mac Studio in the hope of an M2 model you can keep right on holding off because there ain't gonna be one.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They're reserving those M2 chips for the new Mac Pro, which will be slightly faster than the current Mac Studio, a lot more expensive, and still completely impossible to upgrade.  Even if you have a surface-mount desoldering station, the RAM is now packaged directly on the CPUs and the SSDs are encrypted.  You can't do anything.
  
  
  
• Twitter will provide a limited free API for "good" bots, which is to say, those that promise not to nuke New York.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I follow a couple of accounts that do nothing but post pictures of red pandas and lynxes respectively.  Hope those survive.  They're better than 98% of the human content.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, February 07 2023 12:35 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 07 2023 01:07 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Tuesday, February 07 2023 03:47 AM (KOtXO)

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• The US Air Force shot down that errant balloon.  (CNBC)
  
  But not until after Democrats spent several days accusing Republicans of racism for wanting to shoot down that errant balloon, and not until after that errant balloon had completed its spy mission and transferred all the data back to the servers at China's central spy agency, TikTok.
  
  Democrat lawmakers explained this move as turning the tables on the Chinese and extracting intelligence on China's technological capabilities.
  
  From a balloon.
  
  
  
• I mowed the lawn today.  First time this year, since I basically spent January either sleeping all day because I couldn't sleep at night because the pain killers did nothing, or fuzzed out because the pain killers did do something.  You don't realise how much that was dragging you down until you start to recover and remember that you don't normally sleep fourteen hours a day.
  
  Anyway, better, but need to scramble to recover from a month that simply disappeared.

• The 4TB Crucial P3 offers great value and not terrible performance at $250.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That sale price is due to expire about - well, about now - but it always seems to be on sale at about that price and if it's not at Amazon right now just check Newegg and sites like that.
  
  It is a QLC DRAMless drive and that is not a good combination if you're using it as your system disk.  If you have an existing system disk and just want lots of space at a good price for your game library, the P3 should do just fine.
  
  There's also a P3 Plus model that costs 25% more and runs 40% faster, which may or may not be a worthwhile tradeoff for you; it's still QLC flash and a DRAMless controller, so while it's fast it's not suitable for continuous writes, particularly continuous random writes.
  
  
  
• For your system drive you should avoid QLC and DRAMless models and go for a high-end drive from a reputable manufacturer like, uh, probably not Samsung's 990 Pro.  (Puget Systems)
  
  Users have been complaining recently about the 990 Pro - Samsung's current top-of-the-line consumer SSD - burning through it's expected lifespan at a rate of a couple of percent per week.  Samsung's response so far has pretty much been "you're holding it wrong".
  
  
  
• Working with a ten cent microcontroller.  (Jay Carlson)
  
  Depending on which model you buy and how many, it could cost as much as seventy cents, but more importantly it actually doesn't suck.
  
  
  
• Unlike all the leading web frameworks.  (Infrequently)
  
  The article discusses a form of market inversion where the lemons float to the top.  It helpfully also lists less prominent but less sucky web frameworks.
  
  It's a scathing indictment of the leading web frameworks and since my experience has also been that they are one and all a collection of dumpster fires in a toxic waste factory, I'm inclined to take a look at what the author does recommend.
  
  
  
• We've got that darn Elon this ti- Well, fuck.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Hilarity ensues in the comments as the article gets updated from the jury is considering the verdict in the Tesla shareholder lawsuit to the jury has returned a verdict of not guilty just a couple of hours later.
  
  The Ars commentariat has gone from being Musk acolytes to viewing him as Emmanuel Goldstein's evil twin without any stages in between.
  
  
  
• Wow, that's an impressively straight line for technological advances.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Wait.  You idiots plotted bandwidth against...  Bandwidth?

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 06 2023 01:09 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, February 06 2023 02:45 AM (BMUHC)

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• Before Intel cut the pay of everyone from the CEO to the mail room clerk, it quietly made changes to the stock benefits for senior executives...  Making them worse.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yeah, normally they'd do an end run around the public salary cuts by propping up the overall package, but in this case stock bonuses have been delayed and the performance requirements extended - more growth over a longer period before the bonuses are triggered.
  
  This shouldn't be hugely notable, but compared to Intel's behaviour before Gelsinger became CEO, it's a dramatic reversal.  If the company has been run like this all those years, it wouldn't be in trouble today.  Also AMD would be toast.

• Speaking of Intel, the company's new workstation CPUs will launch this monthish.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Full details (and presumably prices) on the 15th, reviews on the 22nd, with low-end parts arriving at retail in March and high-end parts in April.
  
  Which is much better than the usual pattern where the most expensive parts arrive first and if you're not made of money you're stuck waiting for anything affordable.
  
  I don't know if these will be particularly attractive offerings but they do have a slim chance since unlike Intel's server chips they're launching against older Zen 3 Threadripper parts from AMD.
  
  
  
• There's another Chinese spy balloon over Latin America but the US government is refusing to say where.  (The Guardian)
  
  Because if people were allowed to know things like that...  Nope.  I got nothing.
  
  
  
• Australia has classified E and shrooms as prescription drugs.  (The Guardian)
  
  This follows a series of trials showing positive outcomes for MDMA on PTSD and psychedelics for depression.
  
  
  
• If you run the Discord app on your PC, it will slow down the memory on your Nvidia graphics card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So don't do that.
  
  Or download the patch.
  
  One of those.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile likely specs for upcoming Radeon 7000 cards have been teased out of AMD's video driver code.  (WCCFTech)
  
  None of this has been confirmed but none of it is implausible either.  Everything really comes down to pricing anyway: Outside of ray tracing, AMD's low-to-midrange Radeon 6000 cards are the best value right now - from the RX 6600 up through the 6750 XT they deliver much better value than either AMD or Nvidia's new ranges.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, February 05 2023 12:35 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, February 05 2023 01:03 AM (rglbH)

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• First time as tragedy, second time as farce, third time as an episode of Seinfeld: There's a Chinese spy balloon drifting over Montana.  (ABC News - no, the other one)
  
  The Pentagon is tracking it but not taking any action due to the risks involved.
  
  Of a balloon.
  
  Over Montana.

• AMD's 128 core Bergamo CPUs have been confirmed for launch in the first half of this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's one of three expected server CPU launches from AMD this year: Bergamo with 128 cores,  Genoa-X with 96 cores but over 1GB of cache, and Siena, a smaller, cheaper version of Epyc that will nonetheless still offer more cores than not only Intel's latest Sapphire Rapids chips but also Intel's next-generation Emerald Rapids.
  
  
  
• Twitter is cancelling free access to its API and replacing it with a "basic paid tier".  (The Verge)
  
  Details are somewhere between sketchy and non-existent at the moment except for the date - February 9th.
  
  I suspect the focus here is not so much on revenue as on bots.  Twitter is just awash in bots, and has been for years.
  
  I'm not saying the stupid posts you see coming from Twitter are all fake though.  Sorry if I got your hopes up.  No, people really are that stupid and the world will end in flames pretty soon.
  
  

Posted by: Tim Turner at Friday, February 03 2023 06:58 PM (VZYxJ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 04 2023 12:19 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Siergen at Saturday, February 04 2023 02:51 AM (bUd4W)

Posted by: David Eastman at Saturday, February 04 2023 04:06 AM (sYlgI)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, February 04 2023 09:41 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 04 2023 10:37 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Kristophr at Saturday, February 04 2023 11:29 AM (DuN/J)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, February 04 2023 06:36 PM (rglbH)

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• AMD's Ryzen 7000X3D lineup has prices and schedules, with the top-of-the-line 7950X3D due on February 28th at a price of $699.  (AnandTech)
  
  If you've been following along, you might notice that this is exactly the same MSRP as the regular 7950X, making the X3D version something of a bargain.  But if you've been following along, you might notice that Micro Center will sell you a 7950X and 32GB of DDR5-6000 RAM for under $600.  Assuming you live somewhere with a Micro Center because that's an offer designed to get you into the store, and not available for delivery.
  
  Still, it's basically a stealth price cut - AMD trying to avoid sabotaging its perceived value while tacitly acknowledging that the market ain't what it was and won't be for a while.
  
  And it's likely to be the fastest desktop CPU around for a couple of years.  Intel's Meteor Lake range should be out this year but may be only for laptops, and AMD isn't expecting Zen 5 to be ready until next year.
  
  
  
• Mission accomplished.  (BBC)
  
  That tiny deadly radioactive thingy - a quarter inch wide lost in a state encompassing a million square miles - has been found.  120 miles from its starting point it fell out of the truck and rolled off the road.
  
  Fortunately with suitably sensitive detectors it glows like a furnace and it had not in fact lodged in the tyres of a passing car and disappeared to parts unknown, so a few days scouring the highway waiting for the clicks to turn into a scream was enough to hunt it down.

• Intel may be planning to cut prices on its Alder Lake chips by 20%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, that's good news, particularly after they raised the...  Wait, Alder Lake?  The one that launched in 2021?
  
  Never mind.
  
  
  
• On the other hand Intel actually did cut the price of the Arc A750 graphics card to $249.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And released new drivers that offer improved gaming performance, particularly on older titles.
  
  Intel does seem to be committed to its graphics card range - something I doubted at launch time - and at $249 this card is not a bad deal.
  
  
  
• Loading a game from a good PCIe 3 SSD takes 3 seconds longer than the not-even-released-yet PCIe 5 models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  PCIe 5 - even PCIe 4 - is not worth a huge price increase for most users.  If the difference between two similar models is 20%, sure, go for PCIe 4 and enjoy your three seconds; the drive will likely have smarter software and might last longer, all else being equal.
  
  But if you have a perfectly good PCIe 3 drive there's no reason to replace it.
  
  (The new servers that I was going to deploy last month before I decided to spend the whole month being sick instead have PCIe 3 drives.)
  
  
  

• AMD posted financial results for its Q4 and the 2022 financial year and as you would expect from an industry racked by component shortages during a global recession (but you're not allowed to call it that) the numbers are...  Mostly pretty good?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Desktop and laptop CPU sales for the quarter fell off a cliff, not because AMD lost market share particularly (Intel's results in that sector were also dreadful) but because nobody is buying.
  
  But the gaming sector held up well (both the Xbox and PlayStation run AMD chips), server CPUs saw record sales, and AMD's embedded division, boosted by the acquisition of FPGA designer Xilinx, saw profits grow by 3783% and no there isn't supposed to be a decimal point in there.
  
  Overall profit for the quarter was tiny - apparently due to expenses relating to that same acquisition - but much healthier when looking at the full year.
  
  And AMD's server CPU division made as much gross profit in the quarter as Intel's.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Intel just surprised its employees with pay cuts.  (Neowin)
  
  Ranging from 25% for CEO Pat Gelsinger through 10-15% for management down to 5% for engineers and administrative staff.
  
  Which is the right way to scale things and possibly less damaging for a company like Intel than layoffs - chip designers are much harder to replace than programmers - still has to hurt.

• Oracle just changed the license fee for Java from user-based to employee-based.  (The Register)
  
  Which is to say, companies now need to pay Oracle not only for each member of their staff using Java, but also for each member not using Java.
  
  OpenJDK.  Just saying.
  
  
  
• QNAP.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• The creators of Instagram are back with Artifact, a "steaming pile of shit" that is "no, seriously, this is probably a war crime".  (The Verge)
  
  One victim went so far as to describe the new service as "TikTok for text" but that's just rude.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Sierra Forest CPUs for cloud providers, which will provide only the slower "Efficiency" cores but lots of them, will have 7529 pins.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which use to be a lot.
  
  
  
• We started to suspect we had a problem when we found thylacine footprints in the dodo habitat.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Genetic engineering company Colossal plans to de-extinct the two aforementioned beasties and mammoths as well.  Which it can't do, so it's going to fake it.
  
  There aren't many animals that are good subjects for de-extinction, though the quagga might be, since it was a subspecies of the surviving plains zebra rather than an entirely distinct species, so the genes remain in the broader population.  There's been a selective breeding program underway since the 80s to recreate the quagga as a distinct gene pool.
  
  That won't work for any of these, unless you take a very broad view of hairy elephants.