• Now you can save time by getting called a racist while you're waiting for your fries and a shake: Wendy's is planning to use AI chatbots at its drive-through windows.  (New Atlas)
  
  What could possibly go right?

• Google's Pixel Tablet has launched in three colours to match your carpet.   (Notebook Check)
  
  Blah.
  
  
  
• Remembering Google's only good tablet.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The 2012 Nexus 7 was okay for the time, but quickly forgotten.
  
  The 2013 model was not only one of the best tablets available at the time, it is actually better - should you find one that still works - than any small Android tablet available in 2023, with the sole exception of the China-only Lenovo Y700.
  
  Naturally Google never made a newer model.
  
  
  
• Don't bother with PCIe 5 SSDs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're not a lot faster than PCIe 4, they're a lot more expensive, and they run so hot they will shut down under heavy load and crash your computer.
  
  
  
• Your GDPR-compliant analytics aren't GDPR-compliant.  (Pilcrow)
  
  The solution is Redis, as it often is, specifically HyperLogLogs, which can count unique values in a small amount of memory while making it impossible to retrieve the original distinct values.
  
  So you can count the number of unique visitors per hour, day, week, and month, and generate only 30MB of data per year even if you have tens of millions of visitors.
  
  It's done using complicated mathematics, or in other words, magic.
  
  
  
• Disney+ lost four million subscribers in the first quarter of 2023.  (Thurrott)
  
  No problem, they can replace them with AI chatbots.

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, May 11 2023 11:46 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 12 2023 01:51 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 12 2023 01:35 PM (obo9H)

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• Twitter is planning to launch encrypted direct messages, voice and video chat, and other features.  (The Verge)
  
  Targeting platforms like Telegram and Discord respectively.  
  
  Makes sense.  You can't realistically try to take incumbent services head-on, but if you have a platform that tens of millions of people use for something else, you can add features that make them less likely to switch to other, single-purpose apps.
  
  Like hiring Tucker Carlson so they stay on Twitter rather than watching Fox News.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The GPD Win Max 2 has the new AMD Ryzen 7940U, 32GB or 64GB of RAM, two SSD slots, a 2560x1600 screen, and while it lacks the four essential keys it does have eleven special-purpose buttons that you could easily reprogram.  (Liliputing)
  
  Only problem is that's a 10" screen.  Maybe on the small side.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD, they're holding an AI and server event on June 13.  (AnandTech)
  
  The company is expected to launch Genoa-X server CPUs with up to 96 cores and 1.125GB of cache, Bergamo server CPUs with 128 cores and I don't know how much cache but less than that, and the MI300 compute card with lots of compute.
  
  
  
• The metaverse could contribute $760 billion to US GDP by 2035.  (Reuters)
  
  Or it could contribute nothing.
  
  I think that is more likely.
  
  
  
• Anthropic's new AI system - named Claude - is going to be another mindless woke NPC, just in a different way.  (Reuters)
  
  These systems all come pre-lobotomised, but you can choose how the procedure is done.

• Shopify is laying off 20% of its staff and selling its warehouse automation division.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Strongest economy ever, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
  
  
  
• LinkedIn meanwhile is laying off 700 staff and closing its Chinese app, InCareer.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That second part only makes sense.  Operating an online network in China is vastly more trouble than it's worth.

• AMD's Ryzen Z1 is more than a rebadged laptop CPU.  (PC World)
  
  No it's not.  A rebadged laptop CPU is precisely what the Z1 is.  Everything from the Z1 through to the 7940HS uses the same chip design from the same factory.
  
  
  
• The Occamy CPU from SiPearl features 432 RISC-V CPU cores and delivers 0.75 DP TFLOPs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's designed for space applications, though it's not clear if it's specifically radiation-resistant like the silicon-on-sapphire devices HP used to make, or just more robust because it's built on an older 14nm process.
  
  Either way, it's kind of the 100 chicken-sized horses or one horse-sized chicken question.  What do you do with an enormous number of relatively slow CPUs?
  
  
  
• Ink is React for building command-line interfaces.  (GitHub)
  
  Kill it with fire.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 09 2023 09:11 PM (obo9H)

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• The Gateway 14.1 Ultra Slim Notebook is $279 from Walmart.  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, Cowputers is still around though now it's a Walmart house brand.
  
  Anyway, this model has the 11th generation i5-1135G7 - only a little slower than the laptop I used all last year while moving house, a 1080p IPS display, 16GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD.  (The RAM is soldered to the motherboard, though nothing says that anywhere.)
  
  And the Four Essential Keys.
  
  The 2022 update dropped the four essential keys, and is also significantly more expensive, so don't buy that one.
  
  The screen isn't high-end and the trackpad is a bit finicky, but it's $279.
  
  And it's blue.

• Nvidia is using neural texture compression to save memory on its graphics cards.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Or they could just install more memory.
  
  
  
• Doubling the RAM on a Radeon 5600 XT more than doubled performance on high-resolution graphics benchmarks.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  If you try to do this on an Nvidia card, it won't work.  They don't want you making your $600 card run like their $1600 card.
  
  
  
• NEO Semiconductor has unveiled 3D X-RAM, which is RAM but 3D.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  3D stacking saved flash memory, which was becoming unreliable as memory cell sizes shrank.  Cell sizes are now larger than they used to be, but they stack them over a hundred deep so the chip capacity is much larger as well.
  
  The plan here is to initially stack eight DRAM storage cells on top of each other to produce a 128 gigabit memory chip by 2024.  Which is next year.  The largest chips currently in production are 24 gigabit.
  
  That would mean a laptop with two DIMM slots could be upgraded to 512GB of RAM, and a four-slot desktop to a terabyte.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Is the Crucial P3 Plus any good?  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's okay for desktop use.  Speeds are very good until the drive fills up, whereupon they plummet to spinning disk levels.
  
  The Team MP34 is probably a better bet.  Its peak transfer rates are lower, but it retains that speed even when full.

Posted by: normal at Monday, May 08 2023 09:49 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Sam P at Tuesday, May 09 2023 01:21 AM (51gsz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 09 2023 11:24 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, May 11 2023 03:35 AM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 11 2023 07:43 AM (BMUHC)

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• Those monthly unique reader numbers from the story on Vice's demise yesterday were thousands.  I thought they had to be, but it didn't say so.
  
  So those sites are dying but not actually dead.  Not yet.
  
  
  
• Same goes for OpenAI: Google and OpenAI are Walmarts besieged by fruit stands.   (Tech Crunch)
  

  GPT-4 is like a Walmart. No one actually wants to go there, so the company makes damn sure there’s no other option.

  But customers are starting to wonder, why am I walking through 50 aisles of junk to buy a few apples? Why am I hiring the services of the largest and most general-purpose AI model ever created if all I want to do is exert some intelligence in matching the language of this contract against a couple hundred other ones? At the risk of torturing the metaphor (to say nothing of the reader), if GPT-4 is the Walmart you go to for apples, what happens when a fruit stand opens in the parking lot?

  And the fruit stand's apples are free.  And they don't call you a racist.
  
  OpenAI had its chance.  It's done.
  
  
  

Tech News

• OpenAI's regulatory woes are just beginning.  (The Verge)
  
  This story has it exactly wrong, of course.  OpenAI's only hope for fending off smaller and less retarded commercial rivals is to have the industry regulated within an inch of its life with layer upon layer of incomprehensible and infeasibly expensive red tape.
  
  Good plan, except that it's not the commercial rivals that are eating OpenAI's lunch, it's open source software.
  
  
  
• That article was about the EU's efforts, but the Biden Administration is all-in on regulatory capture too.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though like everything else they do, it will fail utterly.
  
  
  
• RedisRaft is a strongly consistent Redis cluster.  (GitHub)
  
  Redis has had replication for a long time, but this is a full-on clustering solution.  Once an update is confirmed, the data won't be lost unless more than half of the nodes in the cluster die at the same time.
  
  There are a few Redis commands that aren't supported, but the bulk of the functionality works just as with a single Redis node.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 08 2023 01:26 AM (r9O5h)

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• Vice Media is preparing for a fire sale to existing investors including George Soros, at a valuation of $400 million, down 93% from its 2017 high of $5.7 billion.  (Variety)
  
  Expect things to get much, much worse at Vice, very quickly.  I sometimes link to their Motherboard tech news site - formerly separate, now just a subsection of the main site.  I doubt that will survive long, or if it does, that it will have any content worth reading.
  
  I might still link to it, but as a cautionary tale.
  
  There is something very, very interesting in that article though: A chart showing the readership numbers (unique visitors) of a lot of these "new media" companies.
  
  The numbers are miserable.  Every company on that list is fucked.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Crypto mining is racist, says the Biden White House.  (Engadget)
  
  They want to add a federal excise on electricity use for crypto mining, because racism.
  
  
  
• New York Attorney General Letitia James wants to regulate the crypto industry, calling it "a wretched hive of scum and villainy".  (Bloomberg)
  
  She's not wrong, she's just an asshole.
  
  Actual quote:

  "Millions of investors have lost hundreds of billions in the value of their cryptocurrency investments because of rampant fraud, including market manipulation, hacking, and opaque business practices," James said.

  Is she right?  We checked crypto news site Web3 Is Going Great:
  
  WallStreetBets coin tanks 90% after insider dumps holding.
  Former OpenSea exec convicted of fraud and money laundering in NFT insider trading case.
  
  Both dated May 3.  So as I noted above, she's not wrong.  I don't expect the resultant laws to be anything but garbage though, because she is still an asshole.
  
  
  
• When "free forever" means "free for four months".  (Zulip)
  
  Mattermost - a Slack competitor, which is to say, a chat board for businesses - had a free plan for its online service that they promised would be forever and now isn't, thanks to the strongest economy ever.
  
  So you should move to Zulip, which will be free forever.
  
  To be fair, they do explain architectural reasons why they are able to offer services more cheaply.  Also, both platforms are open source and you can run them yourself.  Mattermost is even bundled into GitLab, which is also free to download and run on your own servers.  (But does eat 8GB of RAM these days.)
  
  
  
• Releasing 3B and 7B RedPajama-INCITE family of models including base, instruction-tuned & chat models.  (Together)
  
  What does any of that mean?
  
  RedPajama is one of the flock of open source Large Language Models stemming from Facebook's release of its own LLaMA.  It's very much like ChatGPT, but it doesn't constantly tell you you're racist unless you want it to.
  
  And you don't need to pay for it.  It's free to download, and can run on any PC with a decent graphics card.  Where by "decent" we don't mean a $1600 RTX 4090, but an RTX 2070, which you can find second-hand for under $200.  And will also work to play games.
  
  
  
• Or an RTX 4060 Ti, which is due out soon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though you might be better off with a 3060 Ti, or even a 3060, as Nvidia has taken the opportunity to cut memory bandwidth in half.
  
  
  
• Some clown edited 90,000 Wikipedia articles to replace "comprised of" with "composed of".  (Hacker News)
  
  Surprisingly, he still can't get laid.
  
  
  
• Mojo is a compiled superset of Python.  (The Register)
  
  Or rather, it will be some day.  Right now it lacks a lot of core Python features, and if you try to use it as a faster Python rather than its own language, you will have a bad time.
  
  
  
• An overview of BlueSky's federation architecture.  (BlueSkyWeb)
  
  This is drivel.  The company is fucked.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, May 06 2023 06:30 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, May 07 2023 12:41 AM (obo9H)

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• OpenAI is both irrrelevant and fucked.  (SemiAnalysis)
  
  This is allegedly a leaked document from Google, but whether that's true or not the analysis is accurate.  It explains in detail how OpenAI went in a matter of weeks from a tech darling - a purveyor of complete crap, yes, but that doesn't matter to the investors - to utterly irrelevant.
  
  Free software that you can not only run, but train, on consumer-level hardware is now nearly as capable as ChatGPT and free of the biases OpenAI cripples its own software with.
  
  This is exactly what befell OpenAI's Dall-E image generation AI.  In two years it went from being the market leader to not even being thought about, mostly because of OpenAI's mishandling.

• Google has announced the Pixel Fold.  (The Verge)
  
  It's a $170 7" tablet that costs $1700 because it folds.
  
  
  
• Corsair has announced the PCIe 5 MP700 SSD.  (AnandTech)
  
  Problem is, you can get two PCIe 4 SSDs and put them in RAID-0, and they will be faster, cheaper, and give you twice as much storage.
  
  
  
• A look at the Beelink SER6 Pro, which is the current version of their AMD NUC rather than the new version with the crazy price.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Now that Ryzen 7000 NUCs have been announced, Ryzen 6000 NUCs are actually available.  At least Intel ships on time.  Sort of.
  
  
  
• Check for integer overflows.  (Mayer)
  
  Or someone might steal $20 million worth of imaginary JPEGs.
  
  
  
• Speaking of imaginary JPEGs and AI image generators you'll never guess what Amnesty International has been up to.  (The Guardian)
  
  Or maybe you will.

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 05 2023 09:34 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 06 2023 01:27 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 06 2023 02:10 AM (BMUHC)

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• Amazon's Prime video streaming service managed to cut its server bill by 90%.  (Prime Video Tech)
  
  By moving away from AWS managed services.
  
  Where the A in AWS is Amazon.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AMD has announced its Ryzen 7040U laptop processor range.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The leaks were 100% accurate, so all we learned today is that the base model Z1 used in the Asus ROG Ally is a 7540U.
  
  
  
• Framework announced it's new AMD laptop models.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I mean, the already did, but they couldn't talk about the specifics before because the CPUs hadn't been officially announced.
  
  One drawback compared to the Intel models is that one of the four swappable ports doesn't support video - you can only have three external monitors.
  
  On the Intel models you can have four external monitors but that shuts off the laptop's own screen.
  
  Also, it doesn't have the four essential keys.
  
  
  
• Orange Pi, a company that makes a cheap board to compete with the Raspberry Pi, announced its own competitor to the Steam Deck and the Asus ROG Ally, powered by a Ryzen 7840U.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Can't get a decent sub-10" tablet, but there's a swarm of these things.
  
  
  
• AI can't replace human writers.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I think you'll find that it can.  The one thing ChatGPT and systems like it are good at is writing mediocre fiction.  It doesn't necessarily know that it is doing that, of course, but neither do Hollywood writers.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, May 04 2023 10:19 PM (fxDKh)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 05 2023 12:59 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, May 05 2023 03:50 AM (fxDKh)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, May 05 2023 04:27 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 05 2023 10:57 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 05 2023 11:12 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 05 2023 11:45 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 05 2023 11:55 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 05 2023 05:58 PM (PiXy!)

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• Reader Rick C pointed out that the Liliputing article on the new Beelink Ryzen NUCs has been updated to note that those absurdly high prices are just placeholders on Aliexpress.
  
  Good.
  
  The current generation Beelink SER 6 is available for $520 with 32GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD - and it's not much slower - so a $1299 base price for the new model seems slightly excessive.

Top Story

• AMD's consumer chip sales are down even more than Intel's - by a massive 65%. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unlike Intel, though, AMD's other divisions - servers, gaming, and embedded - saw pretty solid performance, with gaming down slightly and embedded up by 163% thanks mostly to the Xilinx acquisition.
  
  They still lost money for the quarter, but $140 million compared to Intel's $2.8 billion in red ink.
  
  Strongest economy ever.

• Part of the reason was that AMD's new mainstream laptop chips were delayed from March to May, pushing those sales out of the quarter entirely. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These chips are featured in a ton of new products, from the Beelink desktop mentioned above, to the Asus ROG Ally and an infinite number of other Steam Deck clones, to the new AMD model laptop from Framework.
  
  But they didn't have any, so they couldn't sell any.
  
  
  
• There's a bug in AMD's TPM security module which lets hackers compromise your secret keys if (checks notes) they have complete access to the insides of your computer. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is almost the equivalent of having a door lock that is easily picked - but only from the inside.
  
  Not quite, but almost.
  
  
  
• Samsung has banned its staff from using ChatGPT and similar pieces of crap. (CNBC)
  
  Not mentioned in this article is that Samsung caught three leaks of proprietary data in the space of a month, all traceable to use of ChatGPT.
  
  
  
• Twitter hiccupped briefly. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  You might have had to log in again.
  
  
  
• The gang's all here: Linode also has a datacenter in Sydney. Since 2019, apparently. Guess I wasn't paying attention.
  
  So that's Vultr (who were first), Aussie company Binary Lane, DigitalOcean, Linode, and SSDNodes on the bargain side of things. Also AWS competes in the $5 server market with its Lightsail range. For Amazon it's likely a loss leader to pull people into its more expensive offerings.
  
  I'm reconfiguring stuff right now to work better and save me some money. I was starting to do that last year then the whole buying-a-house-and-moving-three-hundred-miles thing happened, and everything else got put on hold.
  
  I also have new servers for the websites - a pair of AMD 5950X systems with 128GB of RAM each - and they'll be going into production in the next few weeks.
  
  
  
• Vice Media, parent of the soon-to-be-defunct Waypoint, is looking pretty defunct itself. (New York Times)
  
  The entire company is looking at bankruptcy after trying and failing to find a buyer.
  
  Lol.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 04 2023 12:22 AM (BMUHC)

2 Vice, another scummy media company, about to go out of business?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 04 2023 12:28 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: furball321 at Thursday, May 04 2023 06:21 AM (vVbbK)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 04 2023 06:37 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 05 2023 04:38 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: furball321 at Friday, May 05 2023 09:42 AM (vVbbK)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 05 2023 10:47 AM (BMUHC)

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• Geoffey Hinton, the quote godfather of AI unquote who previously boasted that his work would eradicate the need for radiologists has quit Google so that he can warn the world about the dangers of, well, Geoffrey Hinton.  (Insane)
  
  What the dangers are, he has not actually specified.  Radiologists are not notably a dying breed.
  
  
  
• What are notably a dying breed are crappy internet news sites like Waypoint.  (Culture)
  
  BuzzFeed News is dead and that actually reported stories on occasion, so it's no surprised that Waypoint, a part of the sprawling Vice clusterfuck founded on the notion that games journalists spend too much time talking about games - and are basically all fascists anyway - is shutting down in a month with all hands reported lost.
  
  And there was much rejoicing.

• What's that, Lassie?  I have two other cloud servers that I forgot about that just renewed for a year?
  
  SSDNodes.  Cheap, not top-tier performance, but actually pretty reliable.  One of them had been up for 632 days until I upgraded it to Ubuntu 22.04 just now.
  
  And when I say cheap, I mean less per year than DigitalOcean charges per month.  Which is why I didn't notice the bill right away.
  
  The one flaw is that you can't do a custom install so getting ZFS and LXD working is a bit of a pain.  Also they seem to run local storage and not redundant network storage so if your host node fails, your server goes down and so do your backups.  Hence ZFS and LXD which make it easy to take snapshot backups and ship them off site.
  
  
  
• IBM is planning to replace 30% of administrative staff with AI over the next five years.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Since at least 30% of administrative staff do absolutely nothing, this plan seems viable.
  
  
  
• If you want to fire 30% of your own administrative staff, MLC LLM, a chatbot based on Vicuna-7B-V1.1, which is in turn based on Meta's (that is, Facebook's) open-source LLaMA, is small enough to run on a phone if that phone is reasonably capable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not hosted on a server and accessed from your phone, but the entire thing running on your phone with no other resources required.
  
  Or you could just find the 30% doing nothing and fire them and call it a day.
  
  
  
• The Asus Zenbook S13 OLED 2023 is available with 32GB of RAM.  (The Verge)
  
  And it has one of those 2880x1800 OLED screens.  They're ubiquitous, but they're actually good.
  
  CPU is an i7-1355U which only has two P cores (and eight E cores), so it's kind of meh but not terrible.  No 4EK but you pays your money and you takes your chances.
  
  
  
• Beelink has two new NUCs with AMD's latest 7840HS and 7940HS CPUs.  (Liliputing)
  
  These will have some of the best CPU and graphics performance of anything this size, but the pricing - they start at $1299 without memory, storage, or an operating system - is ridiculous.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 02 2023 11:43 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 02 2023 11:51 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 03 2023 03:21 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 03 2023 06:46 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: furball321 at Wednesday, May 03 2023 01:52 PM (vVbbK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 03 2023 03:19 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: furball321 at Thursday, May 04 2023 06:16 AM (vVbbK)

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