• Apple has launched the new M3 Macbook Air, starting at $1099.  (AnandTech)
  
  For that price you get 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD, neither of which can be upgraded.  Apple would pay less than $10 for each of those components.

• Gartner predicts that search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 due to competition from AI agents and the fact that search engines are fast becoming useless.  (Gartner)
  
  I don't really have a solution to that.
  
  
  
• The EU has fined Apple $2 billion over its restrictive app store practices.  (The Verge)
  
  This isn't related to the current mess; this is following a 2020 investigation under rules in place since 2006.
  
  Apple is seriously pissy about this.
  
  
  
• You will own nothing and we don't much care if you like it: if you own a Roku device, well, you don't.  (Cord Cutters)
  
  Roku has announced new mandatory terms of service and if you don't agree to them, your TV will spontaneously turn into a pumpkin.
  
  
  
• AWS has gone nuclear.  (Datacenter Dynamics)
  
  Pretty literally.  AWS has bought a datacenter right next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant.
  
  
  
• A look at QNAP's TBS-h574TX solid-state combined NAS/DAS thingy.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It has 2.5Gb and 10Gb Ethernet and two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and you can use it simultaneously over the network and and with a directly-attached laptop or two.
  
  Being entirely SSD-based it has no trouble filling that 10Gb Ethernet connection, but it also costs $1199 without any drives - just five bays that can take common M.2 drives or E1.S server drives.
  
  Asus' Flashstor 12 Pro has fewer features, but it has 12 M.2 slots and 10Gb Ethernet, and costs $799.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 05 2024 10:19 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, March 06 2024 09:08 AM (nk1Z+)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The CDC has announced that COVID is basically the flu and should be treated as such at least unless and until a Republican gets elected.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Taking the official figures for what they are, COVID is around three times as dangerous as regular flu seasons.  The last big flu pandemic in 1968 killed people faster than COVID despite the world having less than half the population it does now.

• Are datacenters drinking all of Arizona's water?  No.  (MSN)
  
  Takes a lot of scrolling, but one of Microsoft's massive datacenters uses as much water as, uh, 670 families.  Say 2500 people.
  
  Based on that, all the datacenters in the world might use 0.25% of what is used domestically, which in turn is a small fraction of what is used in agriculture and industry, or, in California, flushed straight out to sea because planning is bad.
  
  
  
• Researchers have created the first AI worms.  (Ars Technica)
  
  These use "prompt engineering" to trick LLMs into violating their own rules and generate emails that can, in turn, infect other LLMs.
  
  Everything old is new again.  We went through a whole decade of this with buffer overflows; this is the same thing except a thousand times more expensive.

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 04 2024 08:17 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 04 2024 08:18 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 05 2024 12:22 PM (BMUHC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• There's helium in them there hills: Researchers drilling in northern Minnesota have struck squeaky gold - which is to say, helium.  (MSN)
  
  Possibly a lot of helium.  They're still confirming the size of the find, but as an indicator, a 0.3% concentration of helium is commercially viable.
  
  This well is yielding 12.4%.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Polya's conjecture for the eigenvalues of a disc has been proven.  (Phys.org)
  
  Nope, no idea.  I've heard of Polya's conjecture.  I just don't know what it is.
  
  
  
• A company called Taiko has raised $37 million to build a truly decentralised social network using Web3 - which is to say, blockchains.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Is this actually possible?
  
  Eh.  Maybe.
  
  A simplistic decentralised Twitter would require each node to hold the entirety of Twitter, which is obviously impractical.
  
  But something structured like Reddit, where you can pick just a dozen of the thousands of subreddits to replicate to your node, that might work.
  
  The upside is that nothing you post to such a social network can ever be deleted no matter who takes over the company.
  
  The downside is that nothing other people post to such a social network can ever be deleted either.
  
  
  
• Ish.  You can fork a blockchain, rewind it to repudiate data, and try to convince all the other users that your fork is the one true fork.
  
  This happened with Ethereum in 2016...  Which is why we now have Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
  
  
  
• Adevinta, Beonex, Blockchain.com, Cafeyn, Deezer, Epic Games, iconomy, Mustang, Paddle, Parula, Proton, Schibsted, 37signals, SkyDemon, Spotify, Threema, Uptodown, Vipps MobilePay, Alliance Digitale, Association Européenne des Radios (AER), Classifieds Marketplaces Europe (CME), Digital Content Next (DCN), Digital Music Europe (DME), European DIGITAL SME Alliance, European Games Developer Federation (EGDF), European Fintech Association (EFA), European Magazine Media Association (EMMA), European Newspaper Publishers' Association (ENPA), European Publishers Council (EPC), France Digitale, Internet Economy Foundation (IEF), News Media Europe (NME), Sveriges, Tidskrifter, and Tidningsutgivarna have complained to EU Bookburner General Thierry Breton that Apple is cheating.  (Thurrott)
  
  Can everyone mentioned in that list please just fall in a hole and stay there.
  
  
  
• You should have been ionised then: See the moment YouTube laid off 43 unionised workers.  (MSN)
  
  It turns out that the one thing communists really can't stand is other communists.

• Most of the talents from the soon-to-be defunct Prism Project have confirmed they will be continuing as indie vtubers.
  
  Sara Nagare plans to quit her part time job to focus on it full time, since without corporate backing she'll have to do all her own management - and will also make twice as much money.
  
  Kou Tsubame is the only one so far that will be suspending streaming after the end of March.
  
  
  
• Can I offer you a Banpire in these trying times?  Hololive's Yozora Mel is returning to her personal channel in about an hour.
  
  She was fired earlier this year for an NDA violation; basically she discussed her job with a trusted friend...  Who turned out to be not at all trustworthy.
  
  
  

Why Do They Do It Video of the Day

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, March 03 2024 08:25 PM (cARBX)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 04 2024 06:34 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• A tale of two tales: Elon Musk sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over "betrayal" of nonprofit AI mission.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI was founded specifically as a nonprofit, chartered with a mission to produce AI for the public good.
  
  This was the source of the drama last year when Sam Altman was removed by the board - the board was trying to return OpenAI to something closer to its original mission.  But money talked, and Altman was soon restored as chief bullshitter.
  
  Musk's suit hinges on how much of the nonprofit's charter and statements made at the time can be held as legally binding - since he provided much of the original funding.
  
  
  
• Speaking of chief bullshitters here's The Verge's terrible take on the story.  (The Verge)
  
  That's not reporting, it's propaganda.

• This takes major talent.  (MSN)
  
  Home brand and budget soft drinks (as in soda/pop) and mineral water have disappeared from supermarket shelves in Australia due to - I am not making this up - a shortage of carbon dioxide.
  
  Supplies are expected to resume by the end of the year, maybe.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, I just bought a SodaStream.
  
  
  
• Apple is un-killing persistent web apps in the EU.  (Apple Insider)
  
  "This has nothing to do with the EU investigation," said an Apple spokesman on conditions of anonymity.  "We listened to our users.  Lol.  Don't print that."
  
  
  
• Here's an 8.8" tablet with a 2560x1600 screen, a fast CPU, 16GB of RAM, and upgradeable storage.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Only problem is it's a chunky monkey and runs Windows and costs about three times as much as Lenovo's Android-based Legion Y700.
  
  Only problem with the Y700 is you can't officially buy it outside China.
  
  
  
• JPEG XL and the Pareto Front.  (Cloudinary)
  
  A very, very, very detailed look at recent improvements to the JPEG XL library, showing off performance improvements, resource reductions, and quality advantages over JPEG.
  
  When you over-compress JPEG it gets blocky and ugly, but JPEG XL just gets overly smooth.
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

• Vtuber agency Prism Project is ending.  (Twitter)
  
  I've been watching Prism since 2021; it's been my second favourite agency, though it has never made huge numbers.  Sony Music acquired the company in 2022, and launched three new generations of talents last year, but it looks like it's fallen victim to cost-cutting by the corporate parent.
  
  Update: Prism talents have now said specifically that this is not related to recent layoffs at Sony, though they can't go into a lot of detail.
  
  But in a masterclass of how to do things right, Sony is transferring all rights to the character models, existing content, and online accounts to the individual talents, so they can all continue as independent channels.
  
  It's a stark contrast to Nijisanji, which bullied Selen Tatsuki into a suicide attempt, seized control of her online accounts while she was hospitalised, fired her, defamed her, and deleted three years of content.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, March 02 2024 11:41 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 03 2024 01:42 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 03 2024 02:15 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 03 2024 03:09 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 03 2024 04:17 PM (oJgNG)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• HP has announced that after years of neglect its printers are now overpriced, unreliable, insecure garbage that nobody in their right mind would buy.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They want you to rent them instead.

• Self-service gas pumps failed across New Zealand because, uh, it was February 29.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This has never happened before in the history of last week.
  
  At least we have New Zealand to give engineers in the rest of the world a couple of hours' notice that they've written some really stupid code.
  
  
  
• Intel has rebranded Altera as Altera.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Intel bought FPGA maker Altera in 2015, renamed it the Intel Programmable Solutions Group, and then basically forgot it existed.
  
  Which is what you tend to do when you spend nearly $17 billion on something.
  
  I guess.
  
  
  
• No HDMI 2.1 for you.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD offered an open-source HDMI driver for Linux, supporting all the advanced features of HDMI 2.1, for free.
  
  The HDMI Forum said no.
  
  AMD said, well everyone should just use DisplayPort then.
  
  
  
• Rockstar Games has told workers to return to work.  (Bloomberg)
  
  This is a real article on a real website.
  
  
  
• Socialism is bad.  (The Verge)
  
  I'm not sure The Verge intended to write a 2000-word diatribe against socialism, but it did.
  
  
  
• 112 falsehoods programmers believe about time.  (GitHub)
  
  Some of these are obvious.  Some of them are obvious when you think about it a bit.
  
  And some of them are not at all obvious, and if you look up the details behind them you find some epic tale about the war between King Walter IV of Karelia and the Ruthenian Orthodox Church that led to the calendar being changed five times in four years, or the time zone in Siberia that has no permanent residents but goes in and out of daylight savings time every three and a half weeks.
  
  Handling real-world time is like handling Unicode: It's much easier for everyone if you just pretend it doesn't exist.
  
  
  
• Reddit "should" IPO at a valuation of $5 billion LOL.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I received an invitation to buy shares in Reddit before the IPO, since I've been on every social network in the world basically forever except for Twitter which kept banning my account when it was being held hostage by commies.  (YouTube only banned me once, the day they first turned the ContentID system on.  Thanks very much, Sony Music.)
  
  Anyway: Yeah, nah.

Posted by: stargazera5 at Saturday, March 02 2024 08:14 AM (Kqwxo)

Hide Comments | Add Comment