• ASML has cancelled DUV shipments to China following pressure from the US.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Although the DUV scanners being sold are limited to the 14nm node, by use of multi-patterning they can produce (slowly and at significant cost) chips more-or-less equivalent to 7nm.  Which is itself two generations behind the leading edge of mass production in the US, Taiwan, and South Korea.
  
  But the US government still isn't happy and wants to put a stop to that, which will of course force China to develop its own semiconductor tools industry, at which point the US will have no leverage at all.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AI is bad.  Fortunately, it doesn't need to be good to replace journalists.  (The New Republic)
  
  That's not the point the author intended to make.  It is, however, the point he did make in this barely coherent blancmange of an article.
  
  
  
• The good thing about 2TB M.2 2230 drives is that they exist.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The bad thing is everything else.
  
  If you have a device that only takes drives in this postage-stamp size - a Steam Deck, for example, or a Microsoft Surface Pro - you can now get 2TB of storage.
  
  If you can fit a larger drive, though, do so.  You'll get better performance and save as much as 50%.

• After migrating a huge application spread across a hundred servers from one cloud to another, my key takeaway was containerisation.
  
  Not using Docker, which is great if you're deploying simple applications created by some other group that has a build team.  Well, not great, but adequate.  Actually Docker pretty much sucks even then, but there are worse things.  Like Node.js.
  
  My preferred containerisation platform is LXD.
  
  So they blew that up.  (Linux Containers)
  
  To make a stupid story short, LXD is Canonical's - the people behind Ubuntu Linux - build of the Linux Containers system.  It works well.  It's still supported.  
  
  But they've moved it from the Apache license, which lets you do pretty much anything you want, to AGPL, which forces you to release your updates if you build a complex service based on it.  And that license makes corporate lawyers itchy.
  
  
  
• And they've added a contributor license agreement to control the terms under which open-source developers can contribute to the project.  (Stephane Graber)
  
  This is not usually a good sign.
  
  
  
• And Canonical has stopped contributing to the upkeep of the public container image server.  So if you're running LXD 5.20 or later - the version where these license changes took effect - and you want to install an image from that image server you should have done it yesterday.  (Linux Containers)
  
  Access to system images is being phased out for LXD users in steps, starting today, with all access being cut off for all LXD users by May 1st.
  
  You can still install Ubuntu under LXD on Ubuntu, which is in fact what I do 97% of the time.  The other 3% may become a problem.
  
  When you find a solution that works, it's only a matter of time before somebody takes it away.
  
  
  

Tech News

• How bad are search results?  Bad.  (Dan Luu)
  
  In running six tests on each of five search engines plus ChatGPT - thirty-six tests in all - eight results earned scores in the range of OK to Great.
  
  The other twenty-eight results ranked anywhere from Bad to Terrible.
  
  In fact, Google, which built its entire business on providing a better search engine than anyone else, rated Bad or worse on every test.
  
  Bing was even worse on average, but was acceptable on one test, and better than acceptable on another.
  
  
  
• California is entering a death spiral of malice and incompetence.  This might be a bad thing.  (SF Gate)
  
  Do tell.
  
  
  
• The president of the Navajo Nation has asked NASA to delay a Moon launch over the possible presence of human remains.  (KNAU)
  
  This confused me for a moment, but it's not quite as stupid as it seems, though it's still plenty stupid.
  
  The possible human remains aren't on the Moon - at least, not yet.  They're on the rocket, thanks to a commercial service that delivers a few crumbs of your loved ones' ashes into space.
  
  The Navajo Nation objects to this - and here comes the stupid part - because they claim the Moon as a sacred site.
  
  The simple and obvious response to this, which NASA will not make because they were already full of woke bullshit the last time this came up in 1998, is Have you been there?  No?  Then fuck off.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, January 03 2024 09:56 AM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 04 2024 12:27 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 04 2024 12:29 AM (LADmw)

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