• Europe wants to deploy datacenters into space.  Studies say it's feasible.  (CNBC)

  ASCEND’s space-based data storage facilities would benefit from "infinite energy” captured from the sun and orbit at an altitude of around 1,400 kilometers (869.9 miles).

  Well congratulations, your datacenter is now permanently running away from you at sixteen thousand miles per hour.
  
  Fortunately the writer of this piece spoke to some people who aren't certifiably insane:

  Winterson estimates that even a small 1 megawatt center in low earth orbit would need around 280,000 kilograms of rocket fuel per year at a cost of around $140 million in 2030 - a calculation based on a significant decrease in launch costs, which has yet to take place.

  That's not the launch cost, that's the upkeep.
  
  And that's for a tiny datacenter.  The AI center Tesla is building right now is targeting not 1 megawatt but 500 - which would cost $70 billion per year to maintain given these assumptions.
  
  Back on Earth, Tesla is spending around $4 billion on the entire datacenter.

• After the malicious domain polyfill.io was shut down by the domain registrar, it switched to polyfill.com.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which had much less impact because nobody was using polyfill.com.
  
  The registrar for that domain shut it down as well, and the hackers switched to polyfill.cloud - and a whole list of other domains, including various forms of bootcdn, bootcss, and staticfile.
  
  In an interesting twist, the hackers behind the polyfill.io scheme (the original Polyfill library itself is innocuous and its developer innocent of all this) put their code on GitHub including their API keys and database password.
  
  So if they hadn't already been taken off line they would have been hacked by now.
  
  
  
• Unraveling Factorio's Lua security flaws.  (Memory Corruption)
  
  The game Factorio lets you add scripts written in the programming language Lua, which is intended to be safe - or mostly safe - for such things.
  
  One researcher found that a malicious script could hack every player in a multi-player Factorio game simultaneously.
  
  The article is excruciatingly detailed, which is great for me because I myself have written code that embeds Lua for scripting and I need to know this stuff.
  
  Normal people will likely tune out after page 30.
  
  
  
• A French court ordered global DNS providers like Google and Cloudflare to poison their data in order to block a pirate streaming site.  Rather than comply, OpenDNS blocked France.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Which has the same net effect: If you're in France you can't access the site by using OpenDNS.
  
  Time to run my own DNS server again, maybe.  Not that it's particularly hard; I have two dedicated and two virtual Linux servers running at the new house now.
  
  
  
• The Associated Press is setting up a sister organisation explicitly for pay-to-play propaganda.  (AP News)
  
  The AP itself will continue with its current function of providing propaganda for backroom deals and political favours rather than cash.
  
  
  
• Writing technical books for money.

  Rule 1: Never write a technical book for the money.

  Oh.  Also:

  Authors are those people who consider $500 a lot of money.

  Publishing is pretty miserable for small authors now - which is to say anyone who isn't getting the benefit of a seven-figure money laundering deal - but then it always has been.
  
  
  
• An experiment in Denver doled out varying levels of UBI to three test groups.  (Colorado Sun)
  
  Oh?  What happened.

  The percentage of people who had housing at the 10-month check-in of the Denver Basic Income Project climbed to 45%.

  Well, that sounds great.  What's the catch?

  They were separated into three groups. Group A received $1,000 per month for a year. Group B received $6,500 the first month and $500 for the next 11 months. And group C, the control group, received $50 per month.

  Seems reasonable.
  
  Group A gets a small but steady income.  Group B gets a big advance so they can get out of whatever hole they're in, but a much smaller income.  And Group C gets shafted.  Such is life.

  About 45% of participants in all three groups were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study’s 10-month check-in point, according to the research.

  If the results in the control group are indistinguishable from the results in the trial group, the medicine had no effect.
   

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 01 2024 01:06 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 01 2024 01:08 AM (BMUHC)

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• Forget the debate, the Supreme Court just declared open season on regulators.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  There has been plenty of coverage of what the reversal of the 1984 Chevron decision means - the emasculation of the administrative state - so I'll just examine the tech industry impact of this, via the same liberal fascist wailing that we see everywhere else.
  
  Net neutrality:

  The entire concept of net neutrality is perched atop the FCC’s interpretation of whether broadband data is an "information service" or a "communications service," the terms written in the act empowering that agency.

  Wrong right out of the gate.  Net neutrality is a universal concept.  The FCC is trying to arrogate the power to enforce net neutrality by twisting the definitions in its charter until they squeak, but that is a different question.

  If the FCC is not empowered to settle this ambiguity in a very old law that was written well before today’s broadband and mobile networks

  It is not so empowered and never has been.

  who is?

  Congress.

  Whatever court takes the case brought by the telecommunications industry, which hates net neutrality and would prefer an interpretation where the FCC doesn’t regulate them at all.

  No, Congress.

  And if the industry doesn’t like that court’s interpretation, it gets a few more shots as the case rises towards - oh, the Supreme Court.

  And Congress.

  Why is this so consequential for tech? Because the tech industry has been facing down a wave of regulatory activity led by these agencies, operating in the vacuum of Congressional action. Due to a lack of effective federal laws in tech, agencies have had to step up and offer updated interpretations of the laws on the books.

  Which was never within their authority.
  
  I support net neutrality.  ISPs and cable companies amply demonstrated themselves to be hideously untrustworthy.
  
  It's just that the FCC has no authority to make such a regulation.
  
  AI:

  Let us be optimistic for once and imagine that Congress passes a big law on AI, protecting certain information, requiring certain disclosures, and so on. It’s impossible that such a law would contain no ambiguities or purposeful vagueness to allow for the law to apply to as-yet-unknown situations or applications. Thanks to the Supreme Court, those ambiguities will no longer be resolved by experts.

  The experts can resolve the issues when the laws are enforced.  There is no problem with that.
  
  The only change here is that the courts are not required to defer to experts within the regulatory agencies on their interpretations of the laws.

  (As an example of how this will play out, in the very decision issued today, Justice Gorsuch repeatedly referred to nitrogen oxide, a pollutant at issue, as nitrous oxide, laughing gas. This is the level of expertise we may expect.)

  Face first on a rake.
  
  There are at least a dozen compounds under the generic label "nitrogen oxide", and it is not the proper name for any of them.
  

• The Verge also joins in with a long and detailed article lamenting the demise of regulatory fascism vis-à-vis the tech industry. (The Verge)

  This decision is arguably the largest single deregulatory action that could be taken, and as we have all observed, without regulation, tech - like any other big industry - will consolidate and exploit. The next few years, even under a pro-regulatory Democratic administration, will be a free-for-all. There is no barrier, and probably no downside, to industry lawyers challenging every single regulatory decision in court and arguing for a more favorable interpretation of the law.

  Write better laws.

  Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan has made no secret of her ambitions to use the agency's authority to take bold action to restore competition to digital markets and protect consumers. But with Chevron being overturned amid a broader movement undermining agency authority without clear direction from Congress, Schettenhelm said, "it's about the worst possible time for the FTC to be claiming novel rulemaking power to address unfair competition issues in a way that it never has before."

  As with the previous article, the writers of this piece freely admit that the regulatory agencies are engaged in an unbridled and unconstitutional power grab; they just believe this is a good thing.
  
  The article notes that the FTC's recent ruling against noncompete clauses is likely in trouble because - once again - the FTC never had the authority to make such a ruling in the first place.

  To be clear, none of these are necessarily bad outcomes - and as Lemley notes, most people "have bigger fish to fry." No one is going to think, Well, on the one hand climate change will kill us all, but on the other hand, I have my Apple Watch.

  I'm not sure where they were going there.

  Beyond that, the disempowering of federal agencies means the empowerment of another entity

  Congress.

  and in this case, it is the increasingly conservative judiciary.

  Sounds lovely, but no.
  
  
  
   
• A lawsuit claims that Microsoft tracked sex toy shoppers in real time.  (404 Media)
  
  What a depressingly stupid article.
  
  The websites Good Vibrations and Babeland installed online tracking software called Microsoft Clarity on their websites.
  
  It's like complaining that someone wrote down your name - and then prominently mentioning the name of the ink manufacturer every time you discussed the case.
  
  
  
• NASA wants to stress that the two astronauts who travelled to the ISS on the Boeing Starliner, Butch and Sundance Suni, are not stranded.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The agency just doesn't know when or if they will be able to return home.
  
  
  
• Mustafa Suleyman, a less-successful clone of OpenAI's Sam Altman, has confirmed that Microsoft is taking all your data to train its AI and they don't give a shit what you think about it.  (The Register)

  That's the future Suleyman anticipates. "The economics of information are about to radically change because we can reduce the cost of production of knowledge to zero marginal cost," he said.

  Looks like it's take off and nuke the entire site from orbit o'clock.

• Watched the latest Ghostbusters movie - Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire - last night.  It's not bad.  The 2021 film Ghostbusters: Afterlife was a loving return to the original, introducing a new generation of characters (two new generations in fact) nearly forty years later.  Like Ghostbusters II, though, Frozen Empire runs into the problem that once you've gotten your group of misfits together and saved the world, what do you do next?
  
  Well, you save the world again, of course, but it's never the same the second time around. 
  
  Still pretty good.
  
  We don't mention the 2016 abomination.
  
  
  
• A-chan is leaving Hololive after seven years.  (Dexerto)
  
  She had taken a leave of absence due to an illness in the family, but was unable to return to work as originally planned.
  
  Hololive was originally a tech company selling a new face-tracking phone app for vtubers - originally this required much more complicated and expensive equipment - until two girls fresh out of high school approached them at a trade show and suggested that what the company needed was its own vtuber to show off the software's capabilities.
  
  One of the pair is now Tokino Sora, the first member of Hololive, with nearly 1.2 million YouTube subscribers.  The other is known simply as A-chan, and is one of Hololive's most senior managers.  And even as a manager she has 900,000 subscribers of her own.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 30 2024 12:33 AM (BMUHC)

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Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 30 2024 12:35 AM (BMUHC)

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• OpenAI has a new version of ChatGPT, designed specifically to get into arguments with the previous version of ChatGPT.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Okay.  Sure.  Why not?

• Perplexity is a planned AI search engine that gives you answers rather than results.  (The Verge)
  
  That is, rather than directing you to a site that has the answer, it gives you an answer - quite possibly wrong and without context you won't be able to tell - and the site it scraped the information from gets nothing.
  
  The Verge is upset about this.  The Verge is right to be upset.
  
  
  
• New YouTube Premium plans are coming.  What are they?  We don't know.  (The Verge)
  
  The Verge can die.
  
  
  
• Instagram is running trials of user-created chatbots.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This won't end well, but if they don't try it and show publicly that it won't end well, someone else will.
  
  Which honestly they should be fine with.
  
  
  
• Are you looking for a 7" tablet with 16GB of RAM, up to 512GB of storage, a micro SD slot, HDMI output, five USB ports, and two wired 2.5Gb Ethernet ports?  You are?  Here's one.  (Liliputing)
  
  Interesting option for engineers who need to work on-site and want something cheap that they can throw in a bag, but need more I/O ports than the typical modern laptop.
  
  Or maybe a media PC with a built-in touchscreen.  Is it a touchscreen? Okay, yes.
  
  
  
• The Temu shopping app is dangerous malware and their products are garbage says a lawsuit.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Also, fire is wet and water is hot.
  
  
  
• For all X, X needs tobacco-style warning labels, say experts.  (The Guardian)
  
  I'm sure they do.
  
  
  
• AMD's new X870 motherboards will launch on September 30.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That is two months after Ryzen 9000 CPUs are expected, but the CPUs will run just fine in current motherboards.  (With a BIOS update.)
  
  
  
• Frore has announced a waterproof version of its Airjet cooling device for phones.  (AnandTech)
  
  Airjet is a cooling fan, but it's solid state.  It uses the piezoelectric effect to make components vibrate, and clever design to translate that vibration to airflow.
  
  The design of this particular version allows you to submerge it in water.  When it emerges, it automatically ejects the water and resumes operation.
  
  It can only cool about 4W of heat, which is why these haven't been adopted by laptops.  On the other hand, it's tiny, energy efficient, silent, and robust.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 28 2024 10:49 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Jay at Friday, June 28 2024 10:59 PM (tVkm9)

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• A Russian propaganda network is promoting an AI-manipulated Biden video.  (Wired)  (archive site)

  Experts tell WIRED that Russian disinformation campaigns are using generative AI more and more.

  What would we do without experts?

  In recent weeks, as so-called cheapfake video clips

  Which is to say, live news footage.

  suggesting President Joe Biden is unfit for office have gone viral on social media, a Kremlin-affiliated disinformation network has been promoting a parody music video featuring Biden wearing a diaper and being pushed around in a wheelchair.

  Note that the video is...  A video.  (Twitter)
  
  Wired is too scared to link to the video but it's not hard to find.
  
  It has human actors, in makeup and wigs, and it's edited, and put over a kind of bad song in a a thick Russian accent.

  An analysis by True Media, a nonprofit that was founded to tackle the spread of election-related deepfakes, found with 100% confidence that there was AI-generated audio used in the video. It also assessed with 78% confidence that some AI technology was used to manipulate the faces of the actors.

  There's only one voice in the entire video and it doesn't sound like anyone, so that claim is completely irrelevant.
  
  Is it used for the faces of Biden and Trump in the video?  Eh.  Maybe.
  
  But again, it's a parody video.  Nobody thinks this is real.  The reason Wired didn't link to it is because they want you to think people think it's real.

  Fink says the obvious nature of the deepfake technology on display here suggests that the video was created in a rush, using a small number of iterations of a generative adversarial network in order to create the characters of Biden and Trump.

  It's not a deepfake if it intentionally looks fake.  But pretending it is a deepfake, is a deepfake.
  
  The article then wanders off to foam at the mouth about scary AI a bit more:

  The report details how the campaign, dubbed CopyCop, used the AI tools to scrape content from real news websites, repurpose the content with a right-wing bias, and republish the content on a network of fake websites with names like Red State Report and Patriotic Review that purport to be staffed by over a 1,000 journalists - all of whom are fake and have also been invented by AI.

  Just like CNN.

  The topics pushed by the campaign include errors made by Biden during speeches, Biden's age, poll results that show a lead for Trump, and claims that Trump’s recent criminal conviction and trial was "impactless" and "a total mess."

  My apologies, not like CNN at all.  It's actually reporting facts.
  
  No wonder Wired is upset.

• SpaceX has scored a $843 million NASA contract to blow up the moon.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or to deorbit the ISS sometime after 2030.  One of those.
  
  
  
• If you are using Polyfill.io, STOP THAT RIGHT NOW.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The domain has been sold to a Chinese company which is using it to distribute malware.
  
  You're probably not unless (a) you're a web designer and (b) haven't updated your site in a long time.
  
  The developer of Polyfill warned about this in February. He has no connection with the polyfill.io website but people have been using it as an easy way to run the software, which was very useful to patch up browser incompatibilities years ago but is no longer needed by any modern browser.
  
  Google is notifying website owners where they can, and Cloudflare is offering a free alternative source.
  
  
  
• You're holding it wrong: An Australian bank is measuring how you hold your phone to stop scammers.  (Pymnts)
  
  The article as it is written makes no sense, which may be because the bank is avoiding telling anyone exactly how it works, or may be because it doesn't work.
  
  But the article does make the same observation as the one about the rise of crime in Sweden: If you make payment frictionless, you also make theft frictionless.
  
  
  
• The Rabbit AI pin - which is rubbish but at least much cheaper than the Human AI pin - has been hacked.  (404 Media)
  
  Or at least the API services behind it have been hacked.
  
  Briefly.
  
  Rabbit has apparently rotated the API keys - taking all the Rabbits offline briefly - and now the hack no longer works.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Strix Point laptops ship July 15.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This looks like a pretty good chip.  Four Zen 5 cores, eight Zen 5c cores which are identical but run about 30% slower, and 16 RDNA3.5 graphics cores.
  
  That would make it twice as fast on the CPU side and nearly three times as fast on the graphics side as my new laptop.
  
  And Strix Point Halo, even faster, is still waiting in the wings.
  
  
  
• An AI-designed horse purse is tearing the horse purse community apart.  (The Verge)
  
  You might well ask, is this a purse for AI-designed horses, or a horse purse for AI-designers, or a horse shaped like a purse designed by an AI, or...  I don't know.
  
  In fact, it's a shopping bag.

  Collina Strada spokesperson Lindsey Solomon noted that only two of the prints used AI - others, like the "Sistine Tomato" print are done by "photograph[ing] every element of the print and compos[ing] them together, hand placing each rhinestone and tomato."

  It's a shopping bag with hand-placed rhinestones and tomatoes.

  The AI prints, meanwhile, are based on outputs generated by feeding Midjourney images of Collina Strada's past work, essentially remixing the brand’s own designs. Is it still theft if your inputs are your own work?

  Is it theft if you eat the food you cooked for yourself?

  And what kind of freedom should artists have to experiment with these tools before it’s seen as a moral failing?

  I cannot wait for you idiots to be replaced with ChatGPT.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 27 2024 11:42 PM (BMUHC)

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• Fearless Fund's founder has resigned, and it's a sad reflection on the VC world for Black women.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Is it, though?

  Still, it is being sued by a politically conservative group called the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) over its charitable grants program. AAER is challenging the fund’s right to provide $20,000 in small business grants to Black women, claiming the program violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans the use of race in contracts.

  Oh.

  The case is not going particularly well for Fearless Fund. As TechCrunch recently reported, earlier this month an appeals court ruled against Fearless. It upheld a preliminary injunction that prevents the firm from making grants to Black women business owners. The firm told TechCrunch at that time it is weighing its options on how to proceed.

  Shockingly, it turns out that racism is not only bad, but sometimes illegal.  And while larger funds don't care about quaint notions like right and wrong, they do care about lawsuits potentially involving massive damages:

  Still, as we previously pointed out, the sad fact is that big names in the tech ecosystem have not exactly come out swinging in support. CEO Simone told Inc. earlier this year that the fund had lost nearly all its partnerships aside from two, JPMorgan and Costco. Even Mastercard, who sponsored the now-contested Strivers Grant, has publicly never commented on the lawsuit.

  You hate to see it.  Wait, not hate.  The other one.

• Crucial's 4TB T700 SSD is now $362 at Amazon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There are cheaper SSDs, but this one is PCIe 5.0 and can transfer data at 12GB per second.
  
  And two years ago - maybe two and a half - that was a good price on a basic 4TB PCIe 3.0 drive.  I know because I bought a couple of them at that time.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is adding custom smart widgets to the Start menu.  Again.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Currently only in the preview channel, but you know what to do.  
  
  (Windows 10 and/or Linux Mint.)
  
  
  
• Microsoft is now enabling OneDrive backups by default.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I was irked recently to find that OneDrive was scooping up client work files that are under NDA.  On the other hand, the same overzealous OneDrive settings saved me from having to go back to my old laptop several times to recover little bits of data that hadn't migrated across.
  
  This is actually helpful, just...  Ask, next time.  Okay?
  
  
  
• Five Wordpress plugins - not official plugins but still hosted on Wordpress.org - were hacked and had backdoors inserted into the source code.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The Wordpress model means that security is not even an option; any plugin can do anything.  The core Wordpress code has been relatively stable and free of exploits for a while now, but since very Wordpress blog uses plugins, that's not much of a reassurance.
  
  
  
• Researchers have eliminated matrix multiplication from LLM kernels, making them up to ten times more efficient.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Sort of.  They've translated floating point matrix operations into trinary equivalents, which are much simpler.
  
  The problem is that while the new code is more efficient in principle, existing hardware is designed to be efficient on the existing code, so the difference is meh.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Mustafa Suleyman - formerly the co-founder of AI startup DeepMind which was bought by Google ten years ago - loves Sam Altman, one of the (many) co-founders of OpenAI in 2015.  (Tech Crunch)

  "I'm very good friends with Sam, have huge respect and, trust and faith in what they've done. And that's how it's going to roll for many, many years to come," Suleyman said.  "That is, until I can sneak up behind him and then schklrrrrk."

  Suleyman also dreams of regulatory capture and buddying up with every dystopian nightmare state on the planet.
  
  As for fears about AI, pshaw, says Suleyman.

  When asked his opinion on kids using AI for schoolwork, Suleyman, who said he doesn't have kids, shrugged it off. "I think we have to be slightly careful about fearing the downside of every tool, you know, just as when calculators came in, there was a kind of this gut reaction, oh, no, everyone's gonna be able to sort of solve all the equations instantly. And it's gonna make us dumber because we weren’t able to do mental arithmetic."

  
  
  
• 93% of Baltimore students are failing math.  (USA Today)
  
  Inconceivable.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 26 2024 11:38 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 26 2024 11:39 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 26 2024 11:41 PM (BMUHC)

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• The RIAA and major music labels have filed suit Suno and Udio - the company responsible for "BBL Drizzy" whatever the hell that is* - for copyright infringement because the AI systems learned from copyrighted works just like every musician for the last three hundred years.  (The Verge)
  
  The RIAA claims this case is "straightforward" and presented as evidence a song they produced which sounds suspiciously like Johnny B. Goode - allegedly, because I can't confirm it right now because it won't load.
  
  But AI only produces what you tell it to, and very likely this is similar to the New York Times' suit against OpenAI where they claimed ChatGPT would reproduce NYT articles, which is true only if you essentially feed it the article as a prompt.
  
  I've had enough of these rent-seeking assholes.  A take off and nuke the entire site from orbit on all their houses.
  
  * I found it.  If you imagine a one-hit-wonder 70s funk band that released a second song that never charted, and that song had a B side, and that B side was chosen over the only other song they had which was recorded at 5AM after an all-night marijuana taste-testing session, BBL Drizzy sounds like that rejected song's cousin from the country that was kicked in the head by a chicken when it was young.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, Facebook has started tagging photos as "Made with AI".  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Only problem is they are doing this whether the photos were made with AI or not.
  
  Maybe sic them on the RIAA and let them fight to the death.

• AMD's Zen 5 utterly dominates the competition - in one benchmark.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Well, three benchmarks from the same benchmarking app.  But the 16 core 9950X trades blows in all three tests with the 32 core Threadripper 7975X and is three times faster than Intel's 13900K.
  
  That will definitely not translate to single-threaded performance, and won't reflect in general-purpose multi-threaded tasks, but if AIDA64 does closely model your workload you will definitely want one of these.
  
  
  
• LG's new tandem OLED displays - first seen in the recent Apple iPad Pro - are coming to laptops starting with Dell.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  By stacking two layers of LEDs one on top of the other, these displays manage to be brighter, thinner, and lighter than previous model while also drawing significantly less power.
  
  Unless they don't, because the article does not appear to be well-sourced or even particularly coherent.
  
  
  
• Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with US authorities seeking to extradite him, that will allow him to leave his prison cell in Britain and return to Britain's former prison colony where he will have to fight an echidna in hand-to-hand combat.  (CNN)
  
  Man just keeps winning.
  
  
  
• The EU is suing Apple again.  (The Verge)
  
  Take off and yadda yadda.
  
  
  
• Experts say Telegram's "30 engineers" team is a security red flag.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Yes and no.
  
  By itself, having 30 engineers is not a problem.  Having 30 engineers who know what they are doing, and zero engineers who don't, is an absolute blessing, so long as you don't overwork the team to the point that major mistakes start creeping out to the production environment.
  
  Any sufficiently large team will have at least one member who is dangerously incompetent.

• Meritocracy is bad, say people without merit.  (Tech Crunch)

  "The post is misguided because people who support the meritocracy argument are ignoring the structural reasons some groups are more likely to outperform others," Mutale Nkonde, a founder working in AI policy, told TechCrunch.

  "A founder working in AI policy" is code for oxygen thief.

  "We all want the best people for the job, and there is data to prove that diverse teams are more effective."

  If they are more effective, then by definition, they are at the top of a meritocracy.
  
  The problem is, they're not, and you know they're not, but you are not allowed to admit it.

  Emily Witko, an HR professional at AI startup Hugging Face

  Oxygen thief.

  told TechCrunch that the post was a "dangerous oversimplification," but that it received so much attention on X because it "openly expressed sentiments that are not always expressed publicly and the audience there is hungry to attack DEI." Wang’s MEI thought "makes it so easy to refute or criticize any conversations regarding the importance of acknowledging underrepresentation in tech," she continued.

  Well, yes, because DEI is fraudulent.

Tech News

Time Patrol Bon

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• AI is exhausting the power grid in its tireless search for progressively more refined bullshit.  AI companies are proposing to solve this using unicorn farts.  (MSN)

  A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google, and is, somehow, even less helpful.

  True.  That 900% increase in power consumption is pumped directly into Nvidia's bank account.

  The companies also argue advancing AI now could prove more beneficial to the environment than curbing electricity consumption.

  I'm sure they do.

  "If we work together, we can unlock AI's game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need," Microsoft said in a statement.

  You have to admire the artistry of that statement.  I have never seen so much bullshit condensed into a single sentence in my entire life.

  The tech giants say they buy enough wind, solar or geothermal power every time a big data center comes online to cancel out its emissions. But critics see a shell game with these contracts: The companies are operating off the same power grid as everyone else, while claiming for themselves much of the finite amount of green energy. Utilities are then backfilling those purchases with fossil fuel expansions, regulatory filings show.

  No shit.

  Left unmentioned are the heavily polluting fossil fuel plants that become necessary to stabilize the power grid overall because of these purchases, making sure everyone has enough electricity.

  You could have been building nuclear power for the past thirty years, but no.
  
  There is some good news here, though.  Google is backing geothermal energy, OpenAI and Bill Gates are backing new nuclear reactor designs, and Microsoft is investing in fusion.
  
  Maybe this means our clean energy future will come with ads, but that will annoy the communists twice as much, so I  guess I can live with it.
  
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• I've switched over to the new laptop.  40GB of RAM leaves 16GB for dead for my workload, and AMD's Zen 3 likewise the Intel 12th gen chip I had before.
  
  I'm running it in "whisper mode" which is not quite silent but you in a quiet house have to stop and listen for it, and the CPU is peaking at about 55C under constant load.  My previous laptop ran hotter, louder, and slower.
  
  I'm not sold on the numeric keypad, but I'm hoping to adjust.
  
  
  
• Why going cashless has turned Sweden into a high-crime nation.  (Forbes)
  
  Because, you absolute ninnies, if you can access your money from anywhere at any time, so can everyone else in the world.
  
  With cash, someone has to be there to beat you up and steal your wallet.  With an online scam, they can be in Laos or Lichtenstein or Lesotho.  It doesn't matter and you won't know; your money will just be gone.
  
  
  
• What's in it for us, ask journalists as the new companies they have murdered make desperate deals with AI giants so the executive suite can get one final payday before it all comes tumbling down.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Nothing.  You get nothing.  Which is more than you deserve.
  
  
  
• What is CUDIMM?  (AnandTech)
  
  There are basically two types of memory modules in computers: Unbuffered modules which are used in desktops and laptops - and soldered memory is all unbuffered, and registered memory used in servers.
  
  Unbuffered modules connect the memory chips directly to the CPU.  Registered modules have extra chips between the CPU and the RAM that keep the signals synchronised.
  
  CUDIMMs are clocked unbuffered DIMMs.  That is, the have one extra chip that syncronises the clock signal, but the rest of the wires are left to their own devices.
  
  This makes it easier to run memory at higher clocks, and, most importantly, is invisible to the CPU and motherboard.  These DIMMs should Just Work in current systems.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 25 2024 07:12 AM (2Mei2)

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• NASA has adjusted the scheduled return date of Boeing's Starliner, currently docked with the ISS, from June 26 to don't call us, we'll call you.  (Ars Technica)
  
  In fact, the originally scheduled return was the 14th of June, which is in, uh, a week ago.  NASA planners have repeatedly delayed the return:

  "We are letting the data drive our decision making relative to managing the small helium system leaks and thruster performance we observed during rendezvous and docking and seeing how soon Elon can get a Crew Dragon up there."

  It is better than just saying YOLO and losing another two astronauts.

• The FDA has approved a gene therapy drug to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Good news, right?
  
  Well, the drug failed clinical trials last year, and FDA scientists and statisticians say there is basically no evidence the drug does anything at all.
  
  Derek Lowe, a pharmaceutical researcher who has been blogging about this stuff for about as long as blogs have existed notes that this is the fourth similar drug from this company that has received FDA approval without showing success in clinical trials.  (Science)
  
  
  
• Have you ever seen one of those videos of what happens to a whale when it dies and sinks to the seafloor?  That was the entertainment media and Game of Thrones, for an entire decade.  (The Verge)
  
  They're waiting for the next whalefall, but worried that they might not survive that long.
  
  Oh no.
  
  Anyway.
  
  I read the first book in the series long before the TV show appeared - the series of books is called A Song of Ice and Fire, and the first book is called A Game of Thrones - and while it is is skillfully written the characters are miserable people.  I didn't care about any of them, and I stopped reading.
  
  
  
• Softbank CEO Says AI That's 10,000X Smarter Than Humans Is Inevitable.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  I'm sure he does.
  
  Softbank invested $16 billion in WeWork, an office sharing company now valued at $500 million, so I wouldn't give too much credit to their predictive abilities.
  
  
  
• Systemd 256.1 is out, fixing many many bugs.  (The Register)
  
  It will still delete all your files if you look at it wrong, but it's supposed to do that.
  
  Fuck systemd.
  
  
  
• Is your computer too fast?  Your screen too big?  Your mouse too...  Mouse?  The Pocket 386 cures all that.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's a pocket-sized notebook with an Intel 386SX running at 40MHz, 8MB of RAM - yes, megabytes, and a 7" 800x480 display.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 23 2024 03:12 AM (BMUHC)

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• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again.  (Ludicity)
  
  Man has opinions.  The opinions are mostly correct though.

  I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders.

  Usually both.  Usually both.

  And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.

  Indeed.
  
  
  
• A rant about front-end development.  (Frank M Taylor)
  
  Another man of conviction.

  There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSRonlyin the context of node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air.

  Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shittydivsoup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.

  Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.

  Lua is actually pretty good at this.

  Do you have any idea how frustrating it is that that in order to explain my sadness to my therapist I must first explain like 5 different technologies and by the time I’m finished she’s sad just hearing it, the session’s over, and I didn’t even get to what was making me upset? Technology has made my anger a recursive function.

  You don't need a therapist, Frank.  You need a weekend blowing up abandoned vehicles with a punt gun.

• If you meet a developer over the age of thirty-five, and they're not constantly angry, they are either:
  
  1. Working in a very narrow technical field like x-ray diffraction crystallography that hasn't been poisoned by the latest fads
  2. Heavily medicated, or
  3. Dangerously incompetent
  
  
  
• Western Digital has announced a 4TB model of its Blue SN5000 SSDs.  (AnandTech)
  
  One catch.  Two catches.  Three:
  
  1. It's QLC where the smaller sizes in that range are TLC, so it's potentially slower and has lower endurance per GB.
  2. It's DRAMless, which is not a good combination with QLC flash.
  3. At the MSRP, the SN850X is not much more expensive and much faster.
  
  
  
• A $99 OCuLink GPU dock from laptops and mini-PCs from Minisforum.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You didn't need a power supply, right?  Or a case?
  
  
  
• Writing a video game like it's 1987.  (GitHub)
  
  Not a very sophisticated video game - it's Minesweeper rather than Minecraft - but it's 300k and runs on modern systems.
  
  
  
• The Commerce Department has banned the sale of Kaspersky software in the US, because Russia.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm not saying they're wrong, just that their analysis of the problem is perhaps incomplete.
  
  
  
• With eight speakers, the Lenovo Tab Plus is a tablet with eight speakers.  (Liliputing)
  
  Apart from that, it's large, heavy, and misshapen.
  
  
  
• A statewide 911 outage in Massachusetts was caused by a malfunctioning firewall.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It took two hours to find the one guy who knew how to fix it, and then thirty seconds to fix.
  
  
  

The Only AI Company Actually Worth Anything is Literally a Turtle Music Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 21 2024 11:45 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 21 2024 11:49 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 21 2024 11:52 PM (PiXy!)

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