• The 7730U isn't a 6800U, but a 5800U.  We'll get to why that matters in a moment.
  
  
  
• Apple isn't planning to release an M2 update to the Mac Studio over worries that it will compete with the Mac Pro. (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
• Which doesn't exist. (WCCFTech)
  
  And if and when it does show up, will have RAM soldered in place, making it not so much a professional workstation as a highly polished turd.
  
  Soldered RAM is a disaster in laptops when it comes to any kind of professional use. It's inexcusable in a workstation-class desktop.

• The Asus Vivobook 15X is almost a very good laptop.  (Asus)
  
  It has a 15.6" 120Hz 2880x16201 OLED display covering 100% of DCI-P3 colour, the Four Essential Keys in the form of a three-column numeric keypad, an eight core 15W Ryzen 7730U CPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, a 1TB SSD2, a physical webcam privacy shutter (something I appreciate since I work from home and have to join online meetings multiple times a day), one USB-C, three USB-A, HDMI, and a headphone jack (no microSD here either), and a separate power jack if you don't want to charge over USB-C.
  
  There are just a couple of problems with this.
  
  First, the digit 3 in 7730U means it's a Zen 3 chip despite being a 7000-series CPU, and the most recent Zen 3 U-series chip is the 6800U.  But the 6800U doesn't work with DDR4 RAM, so either the specs are wrong, or...  Well, the specs aren't wrong.  The 7730U isn't last year's 6800U, but the previous year's 5800U.
  
  It's not exactly the same; the CPU side of things runs 100MHz faster.  But the performance differences between the CPU sides of the three chips are minimal, and all are very strong performers given their minimal power draw.
  
  On the graphics side though the 7730U is a potato compared to the 6800U.  Not even half as fast.  It's comparable with Intel's Xe graphics at lower power, but that's all.
  
  Oh, and that screen resolution?  It's an "up to".  An up to that doesn't exist.  The 1TB SSD is also an up to, but at least you can upgrade that yourself.
  
  And the RAM is half-upgradeable - 8GB soldered and 8GB in an SO-DIMM.  So in theory you can upgrade to 40GB though that will lose dual-channel mode.  I'm not sure exactly how bad that would be for performance but it couldn't be worse than running out entirely with 16GB of soldered RAM.
  
  It is cheap, and it's light at 1.6kg, and the screen, whole only 1080p, really is OLED and really does cover 100% of DCI-P3.
  
  I keep mentioning that, and I should explain what it means.  DCI-P3 is the colour system used for digital movie projection, so if your screen covers 100% of that, it means it can display every colour visible in an IMAX cinema.
  
  The Acer laptop I mentioned yesterday can't do that.  I couldn't find a review of the exact model that measured the screen colours, but two similar models clocked in at 36% and 38% of DCI-P3, which is, um, bad.  My current laptop covers 100% of the smaller sRGB colour space, or did before the screen went funny, which was quite acceptable if not startlingly vivid.  The Acer screen covers about 54% of sRGB.  That's like looking outside on a cloudy day through a dirty window.
  
  The Vivobook can't go all the way to 64GB of RAM and doesn't have a discrete graphics card.  On the other hand it should run much cooler and has a vastly better screen, though not as vastly better as Asus tried to make me believe.
  
  It's not much more expensive despite the Acer being discounted by 45% right now and the Asus being at list price.
  
  So maybe.
  
  There's a model that fixes all of these shortcomings: 3200x2000 screen, 13980HX, 32GB RAM upgradeable to 64GB, and an RTX 4060.  It does cost A$3399 vs A$1399 though.  Also it's not available.
  
  
  
• There is no AI, only Zuul.  (New Yorker)
  
  The article explains that what is currently being touted as AI is nothing of the sort, just a glorified typeahead tool, and the concerns about its impact are mostly nonsensical.
  
  It then -this is the New Yorker after all - proposes a global totalitarian nightmare state to allay these delusional fears.
  
  Yeah.  No.
  
  
  
• I'm not sure if all AI ethicists are fascists, but the correlation is unmistakable.  (Overcoming Bias)
  
  Build a bridge out of them.
  
  
  
• The Atari 800 XL is back.  (Revive Machines)
  
  Almost.  Well, an FPGA implementation of it.
  
  I only read up on the details of the Atari internals recently.  The custom graphics chip was a clear predecessor to the Amiga hardware and much more sophisticated than I had realised.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT can write code.  The code is terrible.  (The Register)
  
  ChatGPT is aware of this, but won't tell you unless you ask.  Or possibly even then.
  
  
  
• Google's Bard chatbot has also been updated to write code.  (The Verge)
  
  Bard is, if anything, less reliable than ChatGPT.
  
  
  
• Twitter has stopped labeling state-affiliated media as "state-affiliated media" after the state-affiliated media threatened to leave the platform over being labeled as "state-affiliated media".  (The Verge)
  
  The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command.
  

Dear Current Anime Season, What Is Preventing You From Looking Like This Video of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, April 23 2023 01:30 AM (r9O5h)

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• The Blue Cheka lost their glittering little symbols of false legitimacy today, and there was a great weeping and a gnashing of teeth.  (The Verge)
  
  But I don't have any teeth.
  
  TEETH WILL BE PROVIDED.
  
  
  
• Can ActivityPub save the internet?  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, the same way NNTP did.

• Speaking of a great weeping and a gnashing of teeth Buzzfeed News is shutting down and firing 180 staff.  (Variety)
  
  So, first, Buzzfeed News by itself had 180 staff?
  
  Second, whatever you think of Buzzfeed, they actually published the Steele Dossier when everyone else was hiding it from view.
  
  
  
• Is Intel's slowest CPU any good?  (AnandTech)
  
  Yes, actually.
  
  The 13100F only has four cores and costs around $100 but it is faster than the eight core Ryzen 1700 I was using until last year.
  
  Faster than the laptop I am typing this on, faster than the Xeon E-2136 I use as a development environment, and not much slower than a 1240P laptop.
  
  
  
• Speaking of 1240P laptops, I'm thinking of buying an Acer Aspire 7.
  
  It doesn't have a high-resolution screen, just 1080p.
  
  The Four Essential Keys aren't in my preferred layout.
  
  But it has a decent CPU (last year's i5-1240P, if you hadn't guessed), dedicated graphics (just a GTX 1650, but plenty for playing Minecraft on the go), charges over either a dedicated port or Thunderbolt / USB-C, and has easily replaceable DDR4 RAM which I already have 128GB of sitting around.  Apart from the Thunderbolt port it has three USB-A ports, HDMI, and a headphone jack - and wired Ethernet, which is becoming a rarity these days.  No microSD slot but I can get by without that.
  
  It's a bit on the big and heavy side - it's a 15" model and the same size and weight as the 16" Gigabyte Aero I like -  but it also has the advantage of being around one fifth the price of the Aero.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Oh, right, the reason that came up is because (a) my current laptop has 16GB of RAM and 16GB simply isn't enough.  32GB is a good minimum; 64GB if I want to run Linux VMs locally for testing.
  
  Which I do, because I currently pay ($TOO_MUCH) per month for a dedicated development server in Sydney.  It runs pretty well, and has six cores, 32GB of RAM, and 800GB of SSD, which is all I could ask for.
  
  But it's a virtualised dedicated server and as such can't run VMs itself, only containers.  Since I already have RAM and an SSD for upgrades the laptop could take over and pay for itself in six months, while at the same time being a (mostly) better laptop than my current laptop.
  
  
  
• The RTX 4070 isn't selling so Nvidia is making less of them.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There's more money to be made selling high-end cards at $30,00 a pop to AI nuts.
  
  The GPU market is AMD's to scoop up at this point but they haven't released any new cards since the 7900 XT.
  
  
  
• The Asus Ally handheld game console should squish the Steam Deck in terms of performance.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It has 8 Zen 4 CPU cores vs. 4 Zen 2 cores on the Steam Deck, and 6 RDNA3 graphics cores vs. 4 RDNA2 cores.  (RDNA3 is about 30% faster than RDNA2 for a given core count.)
  
  Price and launch date have yet to be announced.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 21 2023 09:31 PM (obo9H)

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• Substack has been doing well as a not-exactly-a-social-network that lets writers connect directly with their audience - and get paid for it.
  
  The company recently released a new feature called Notes...  Which is a social network.  It's a Twitter clone.
  
  Does this mean Substack is going to turn into a crab?
  
  Maybe, says Tom Knighton, and that would kill Substack.  
  
  Maybe not, says Holly Math Nerd, but it will be a constant battle against all the other crabs in the bucket who demand that you be one of them.
  
  Substack has a revenue model that works for them; they're not dependent on advertising.  They're not the size of Twitter, let alone Facebook, and never will be, but it works for them.  The longer they can hold out against carcinisation the better, but we are all crabs in the end.

• Snapchat now offers a free AI chatbot to all users.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Nobody knows why they did this, but they do.
  
  
  
• Google employees begged the company not to release Bard, its AI chatbot, calling it "worse than useless" and "a pathological liar" and "barely smarter than an AI ethicist pulling down $500k in salary and shares and producing no work of any value to anyone".  (The Verge)
  
  Google took the hint and fired the complainers and released Bard, which to be fair is in fact worse than useless, a pathological, and barely smarter than an AI ethicist, but still has a job.
  
  
  
• The integrated graphics in the new Ryzen 7000 chips are about as fast as a Radeon RX 570.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is a few years old now - my 2017 Dell desktop had a slightly faster RX 580 - but is very, very good for integrated graphics in a laptop.
  
  The upcoming AMD Framework 13 model will have this chip.
  
  (This is different to the high-end 16-core laptop chips from AMD, which are repackaged desktop chips and come with much slower integrated graphics but are usually paired with something fast and expensive.)
  
  
  
• Speaking of fast and expensive Intel is preparing cooling solutions for future 2000W chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Might I suggest winter in Montana?  That should do the trick.
  
  
  
• m=2, n=4  (Medium)
  
  There is one (positive integer) solution for m^n = n^m, and that's it.  The article explains how we know that's the only solution.  
  
  
  
• Major retailers are walking back their plans for the Metaverse after realising what everyone else already knew: It's complete shit.  (Modern Retail)
  
  Facebook's tech demos look like they were produced in the 90s.  It's a very 90s idea, really - skeuomorphism gone mad - and it should have stayed there.
  
  
  
• Why everyone has their wires crossed.  (Quanta)
  
  In human beings, the left side of the body is wired up to the right side of the brain, and vice versa.  This is odd, but it's also true of chimps and orangutans, horses, pigs, cows, sloths, duck-billed platypuses, whales, birds, lizards, fish, lobsters, crabs (those bastards), and many types of worm.
  
  Every animal with bilateral symmetry and something resembling a brain.
  
  Why?
  
  It makes the wiring easier.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, April 20 2023 10:17 PM (qgsyb)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, April 21 2023 01:29 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 21 2023 05:47 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: meh at Saturday, April 22 2023 01:19 PM (B2YdP)

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Top Story

• Carcinisation is the process whereby everything that isn't already a crab, gradually becomes a crab. (Wikipedia)
  
  King crabs are not crabs. Nor are porcelain crabs, or hermit crabs, or coconut crabs, or hairy stone crabs. They are all the result of carcinisation, where various other decapod crustaceans evolved exactly the same outward characteristics as true crabs, to the point that you can't really tell them apart.
  
  This also happens to social networks.
  
  Yes, they turn into crabs.
  
  
  
• Not my analogy either: This article by Ellis Hamburger (really) formerly of Snap - the company behind Snapchat - makes the point that all social networks start out as butterflies and evolve into crabs. (The Verge)
  
  It's well-written and has the insights expected of someone who spent years on the inside of one of these companies watching naive promises gradually wither in the face of commercial reality and the fact that people in large groups basically suck.
  
  The author doesn't have a solution to this and doesn't pretend to offer one:

  Users seem doomed to be unhappy in this overquantified world of "social." And businesses seem doomed to expect more from the social services they create. Perhaps this was just a blip in the journey of tech, born of a time when oversharing was novel and fun. Indeed, I remember the joy of posting hundreds of photos to Facebook the day after a party, excited to relive those memories with friends. At the time, it felt like a new form of connection.

  Now, I just text them.

  A big part of the reason here is that the financial incentives of the social media companies are horribly skewed:

  However, the promise of ads may simply be too good to turn down. Advertisers are simply willing to pay more for the product than its actual users. In Facebook’s case, the company makes something like $200 per year of ad revenue on each American user, but how many of those users would pay $15 / month to use Facebook? According to one study, not many.

  If you're more valuable as a product than as a customer, that's how you can expect to be treated.
  
  The thing is, the ads really aren't worth anything. I've seen one ad in all my years on social media that inspired me to buy something, and I didn't, and now I've forgotten what it was for.

Tech News

• Cory Doctorow, writing about TikTok, called this process "enshittification". (Pluarlistic)
  
  They're editing the likes of Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, and Roald Dahl to avoid offending modern sensibilities - of illiterates - but at least we have a new generation of wordsmiths like Doctorow to fill in the gap.
  
  Bitter sarcasm aside, Doctorow has been observing the tech industry for a long time, and when he is reporting fact rather than his personal opinions he can provide some useful insights.
  
  He's a lefty - worse, a left-libertarian - so his preferred solution to every problem is to leave everything in the hands of private companies but regulate bad outcomes out of existence, which works about as well as holding your breath until you turn blue and requires about the same level of intellectual effort.
  
  He is at least partly right: Twitter has crippled its APIs for exactly the same reason that Amazon murdered its Smile program where you could direct a tiny percentage of the value of your purchases to a charity of your choice: You're already on the platform, and the competition is already dead, so they don't give a fuck anymore. You're just crabs in the bucket with them, and they're the big crab.
  
  
  
• And finally just by way of comparison here's the same argument made by a doctrinaire lefty who is just so stuffed full of love that she'll beat your brains out with a claw hammer if you so much as blink in the middle of her five-and-a-half thousand word temper tantrum. (Substack)
  
  Five and a half thousand words of blaming every bad thing that has ever happened on "the right", from Twitter being taken over by fascists like Vijaya Gadde to her favourite shade of eyeshadow (moonbat grey) being withdrawn because of lethal levels of cadmium compounds.
  
  Even she recognises that all social networks turn to shit.
  
  She just doesn't recognise her own role in that process.
  
  
  
• Minisforum has a cheap Ryzen 7735HS based mini PC wait is that the ASRock industrial SBC I spy? (AnandTech)
  
  Looks like it, with the two HDMI ports on the back and the two USB-C ports at the front. I'll have to do a close check.
  
  
  
• Broader price cuts might be coming to the RTX 4070. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nvidia's 3000 series cards all sold out immediately at launch. The 4000 series cards have never been difficult to find - because people just aren't buying them.
  
  
  
• Nvidia doesn't care much because their growth market isn't $600 cards for gamers, it's $30,000 cards for AI startups. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Elon Musk reportedly just bought thousands of such cards for his new venture, X.AI.
  
  The AI boom is the new blockchain boom, only worse for everyone.
  
  
  
• Twitter meanwhile will no longer suspend your account for the vile crime of (checks notes) correctly identifying someone's name of gender. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The previous regime at Bird Central treated this as worse than murder. The usual suspects are up in arms that the corporate stormtroopers are no longer willing to enforce their delusions.
  
  
  
• Firefly can compile BEAM applications to WASM. (GitHub)
  
  Which sounds like a complete fucking nightmare to me, but it can also compile BEAM applications to native code, which could be great.
  
  BEAM is the runtime environment for Erlang, the language invented by Ericsson to run large-scale telephone switches. The idea behind Erlang is that if a system is large enough, some part of it is guaranteed to be broken at any time. You can't predict failures, but you can predict with certainty that failures will happen.
  
  Erlang is designed to handle this and automatically pick up whichever part of the system has died and get it running again on whichever parts of the system are still working. It's robust and powerful and at least reasonably efficient, but running Erlang applications means first installing a complex and unfamiliar environment. Like Java written by aliens.
  
  Firefly should make it possible to deploy Erlang applications just like you would anything else. And to run them in the browser too, though nobody in their right mind would try that.
  
  
  
• Reddit will begin charging for its API. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Remains to be seen if the plans they offer are as stupid as Twitter's.
  
  
  
• Next-gen Python tooling, written in Rust. (Astral)
  
  The secret to making Python run fast is not to use Python.
  
  I suppose slow corporate suicide is better than fast.
  
  
  
• The FTC is planning to target AI that violates civil rights (what?) or is deceptive. (Reuters)
  
  Not sure how AI could violate civil rights, even in law, let alone in practice.
  
  But given that LLMs like ChatGPT are trained explicitly to lie, the industry is fucked if the FTC actually follows through here.
  
  
  
• An open letter to epic fantasy readers. (Monster Hunter Nation)
  
  Basically a slap in the face to Patrick Rothfuss and George R. R. Martin:

  I’ve written something like 25 novels, 50 short stories, 6 novellas, edited 4 anthologies, and even wrote a non-fiction book about gun rights since George Martin’s last Game of Thrones novel came out

  My italics.
  
  I read the first Game of Thrones book. It was certainly well-written, but all the characters were awful. I never read further, and never watched the TV show.
  
  I read half of the first volume of Patrick Rothfuss' series, whatever it is called. The character introduced at the beginning is interesting. He has a past; he has depth, and damage, and is still standing and trying to do the right thing. So the book immediately ditches him for a literally interminable flashback to his past as a whiny kid who never fails at anything and deserves only to be served up as dragon bait.
  
  It don't know why those two series took up so much mindshare when there's so much else on offer - old and new - but it's probably to do with crabs.

Never Fear Music Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, April 19 2023 06:51 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, April 19 2023 08:58 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Thursday, April 20 2023 02:44 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 20 2023 03:30 AM (PiXy!)

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• Bluesky wants to reinvent Usenet only worse and more expensive and with ads.  (The Verge)
  
  And censorship.  They don't say that, but you can bet on it.

• Heroku did in fact just do that.  (Open Folder)
  
  The developer here has a Heroku setup using their queueing service to make sure emails are send out to users.  Each event place in the queue is guaranteed to be delivered exactly once, so each user gets one email.
  
  So Heroku gave them a second ghost queue, which they can't turn off but which magically duplicates every single email.
  
  
  
• Llamas in pajamas are coming down the stairs.  (Together.xyz)
  
  RedPajama replicates the entire 1.2 trillion token training set of Meta's LLaMA as open source.
  
  LLaMA is a competitor to OpenAI's GPT.
  
  GPT is an artificial radical leftist college sophomore with a meth habit.
  
  
  
• UPC barcodes are going to be completely replaced by QR codes everywhere in the world by 2027 except that obviously isn't going to happen how fucking stupid are you wait it's Axios the answer is all.  You are all the stupid.  (Axios)
  
  Possibly more than all the stupid.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 18 2023 09:35 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, April 18 2023 10:10 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 19 2023 01:02 AM (2Mei2)

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• I noted last week that the RTX 4070 was overpriced in Australia, needing to be under $1000 if it were to have any chance of success.
  
  Today - just days after the launch - some cards have already been reduced to $999.
  
  Still fat and ugly - the nicer two-slot models have not seen price cuts - but at least slightly less horribly expensive.
  
  
  
• The Gigabyte Aero 16 is also overpriced in Australia.
  
  Just saying.

• If you just updated your development server from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 and all your LXC containers lost their IP addresses, it's probably a firewall thing.  (Linux Containers)
  
  And what's more, an easily fixed firewall thing.  Basically LXC can't talk to itself to obtain its own IP addresses.  Dumb but fixable.
  
  
  
• Starlark is Python with all the exciting stuff removed.  (GitHub)
  
  Making it safe to use as an embedded scripting language.
  
  In fact, you can embed it within Python to use Python code to script other Python code.  Only the library to do that doesn't pass callables in either direction - except for the print function - so back to Lupa and LuaJIT I go.
  
  I mean, I could overload the print function to do everything I need, but it's kind of hacky.
  
  
• Leading AI companies are eager for onerous government regulation.  (New York Times)
  
  Because - though the article fails to grasp this obvious point because it is written by an idiot - that will crush smaller competitors.
  
  
  
• Finland just fired up a new nuclear reactor, the first in Europe in 18 years.  (Reuters)
  
  Right as Germany shut theirs down.
  
  One country will be snug and warm next winter.  The other will get to freeze in the dark.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Tab M9 is here, so if you wanted a small (ish) Android tablet with a crappy low-resolution screen, you can now choose from 7, 8, or 9 inches.  (Liliputing)
  
  The 7 inch model is complete garbage though.
  
  Still no replacement for the Tab M8 FHD.  Not from Lenovo, not from anyone.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, April 18 2023 06:13 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 18 2023 01:00 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 18 2023 06:32 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 19 2023 01:06 AM (2Mei2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 19 2023 01:50 PM (PiXy!)

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• Future ChatGPT versions could replace a majority of work people do today says Ben Goertzel, an idiot.  (ZDNet)

  "You don't need to be incredibly creative and innovative or make big leaps to do most people's jobs, as it turns out," said Goertzel.

  Perhaps not, but if you're a pathological liar, people tend to notice.
  
  And that's what ChatGPT is.  It's inherent in the design, because it's a language model, not a fact model.

  "Tools like Grammarly decrease the need for human copy editors," Goertzel said. "They don't entirely eliminate [the job] but they decrease that need. Automatic tools [can be used for] writing journalistic articles. They've been writing ... sports score summaries and weather reports for a long time."

  Seeing some of the crap that passes for journalism, you could replace the whole lot with a short Perl script and get better results.

• Sales of hard drives have dropped by 35% in the past year maybe.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Maybe not, because half the numbers in the chart provided are obviously wrong, but sales do appear to be down.
  
  
  
• Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, says UFOs may be probes sent down by an alien mothership to study mankind and steal our women and/or cows.  (Politico)
  
  Or maybe not, because that is stupid.
  
  
  
• Kotlin 2 is here, with static extensions, collection literals, name-based destructuring, context receivers, and explicit fields.  (Jetbrains)
  
  I have no idea what any of those things are.
  
  
  
• The perfect-ish notebook at an imperfect price: The 2023 Gigabyte Aero 16.  (IT Pro)
  
  Let's take a quick look at the specs:
  
  16" 3840x2400 (16:10) 60Hz OLED screen
  Intel Core i7 13900H (6P + 8E cores)
  Nvidia RTX 4070 with 8GB VRAM
  32GB RAM upgradeable to 64GB
  1TB SSD upgradeable to 16GB (two M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots)
  Two Thunderbolt 4 ports
  One additional USB-C port
  One USB-A port
  HDMI
  micro SD
  Combo audio jack
  Dedicated 240W power connector (it can also charge more slowly via USB-C)
  The Four Essential Keys exactly where they should be
  
  And it weighs in at a svelte 1.9kg.  Or maybe 2.1kg, depending on whether you read Gigabyte's specs or the review.
  
  There's just one small oint in the flyment: That model costs $2299 in the US - not cheap, but not unreasonable for a high-end laptop - but A$4999 down under.

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 17 2023 06:38 AM (obo9H)

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• I did not get woken up at five in the morning by an emergency.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has been granted a five year license to launch Starship, the most important advance in rocketry since the days of Robert Goddard.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
• Once.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Because this is the federal government we're talking about.

• Elon Musk, who co-founded ChatGPT creator OpenAI but parted ways with the company in 2018 and more recently signed on to an open letter calling for a moratorium on AI research has just founded a new AI company.  (The Verge)
  
  It's called X.AI.
  
  And the company that now owns Twitter is called X.
  
  Which might be a hint as to where things are headed.
  
  
  
• Twitter competitor Parler meanwhile just got bought and shut down.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Temporarily - probably - but the fact remains that the site is currently off line.
  
  
  
• If you don't stamp out all dissent you're probably a Nazi.  (Tech Dirt)
  
  Actually, scratch the "probably".  Mike Masnick is insane.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 16 2023 12:29 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, April 16 2023 12:56 AM (r9O5h)

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• The project at work that has been eating all my time lately is winding down now, leaving me only 200% busy instead of 500%.
  
  
  
• The hackers who hit Western Digital got away with 10TB of data.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which is smaller than my Steam library, so it rather depends on what's in there.
  
  They're asking for at least $10 million in ransom not to release it to the public.  I doubt they're going to get a penny.
  
  
  

Tech News

• A suspect has been arrested in the San Francisco murder of Cash App founder Bob Lee.  (Mission Local)
  
  Nima Momeni is apparently another tech executive and knew Lee, and they were seen together on the night of the killing.
  
  Much has been made about this murder and San Francisco's descent into chaos under the policies of communist nutcases, and now that a suspect has been arrested the media are trying to pretend that this means that San Francisco is somehow not descending into chaos.
  
  Hey, we arrested one guy for one crime.  That means that everything is okay.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 4070 is here, and at least in Australia they killed it on pricing.
  
  That is, the pricing killed it.  Between A$1100 and A$1250, when it needed to be under A$1000.
  
  At the high end it's only $100 cheaper than a 4070 Ti, and just $50 cheaper than the currently discounted models of AMD's Radeon 7900 XT, a much more capable card.
  
  The 4070 is a compact and well-designed two-slot card - if you can get the Nvidia Founder's Edition, which we can't here.  Almost all the available cards are much larger cards and hideously ugly.  The hold-out in that trend is Inno3D, not a leading brand, but they've come up with some reasonably nice two-slot designs, and a choice of black/silver and white/silver if you want to match your case.  They have a two-slot 4070 Ti in the same black/silver design as well.
  
  Still undecided which way to go here.  The 20GB 7900 XT is very competitive against anything Nvidia has right now unless you specifically want to play games with ray tracing, or run code that uses the Cuda compute API.   On the other hand, I'd probably be just fine with a 6700 at one third the price.
  
  
  
• The Radeon 6800 and 6800 XT have received price cuts to compete with the 4070 if you can find them which I can't.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Radeon 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT have ceased to exist in Australia.  I can get a not entirely terrible deal on a 6800 if I want to bother importing it from the US which I don't.
  
  Again the 6700 sings its siren song, before that too disappears.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, the dirt-cheap pricing on the 4TB Team MP34 has reached these shores, so I can buy it from a local retailer (that is, within a day's travel of New House City) instead of importing from the US.
  
  I plan on getting at least five of these for my new PCs; it's less than half the price of equivalent drives from only a year ago, and it's a proper TLC model with DRAM cache, not a DRAMless QLC model like the Crucial P3, the only competition it has in its price range.
  
  

Posted by: furball321 at Saturday, April 15 2023 12:40 AM (VZYxJ)

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• Nvidia's RTX 4070 is here and it's not terrible.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's as fast as the previous generation's RTX 3080 while being $100 cheaper and using 40% less power, or to put it another way, 20% more expensive and 30% faster than the RTX 3070.
  
  It has 12GB of VRAM as standard which is enough in most cases, but I wouldn't buy an 8GB card for a system I wanted to use for gaming.  (A cheap 8GB card for light gaming is a different matter.)
  
  It's a regular two-slot card rather than the monstrous three-slot models that Nvidia and its partners have been shipping lately, and though Nvidia recommends a 650W power supply and it includes a 300W-rated 12-pin power connector, it should run in pretty much any system built in recent memory.
  
  Paired with a Ryzen 7900 (65W based power, around 90W peak) it should provide a almost reasonably priced and very capable system for serious work and what was high end gaming just a few months ago while running happily on a 450W power supply.

• Something that isn't reasonably priced is Intel's new Xeon W-2400 CPUs.  The 24 core model - which is the cheapest one in the range that has a chance of being faster than a Ryzen 7950X - costs nearly three times as much as a 7950X; four times as much as a 7900.
  
  Scratch that idea.
  
  
  
• The EU says Broadcom's proposed acquisition of VMWare could restrict competition...  In the Fiber Channel HBA market.  (Reuters)
  
  Dire news for both the people still using Fiber Channel.
  
  
  
• The liquidators sent in to salvage what remained of FTX have apparently actually been doing their jobs.  (Reuters)
  
  So far they've recovered $7.3 billion of about $10 billion that disappeared, which rather justifies the no doubt hefty fees they are receiving.
  
  
  
• The ACCC (Australia's equivalent to the FTC, more or less) wants new powers to crack down on online businesses.  (The Guardian)
  
  Get fu-
  
  That deliberately make it hard to cancel subscriptions.
  
   Understandable.  Have a nice day.
  
  
  
• NPR has become the first "major" "news" organisation to leave Twitter, flouncing off the platform after being accurately labelled as state-affiliated media.  (The Verge)
  
  Lol, as the kids are wont to say.  Lmao.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 13 2023 11:36 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 14 2023 12:26 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 15 2023 12:01 AM (BMUHC)

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