This wouldn't have happened with Gainsborough or one of those proper painters.

Wednesday, February 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 February 2025

You Can't Get Here From There Edition

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Tech News

  • Using the time-tested method of hitting things with stuff, physicists have confirmed the existence of a third form of magnetism.  (Science Alert)

    Termed altermagnetism, the individual atoms in the crystal lattice have their quantum spin in opposite directions to their neighbours, but with a novel twist, that they don't explain very well and which I don't understand but can apparently be used to store data somehow.


  • Australia has also banned Chinese spyware DeepSeek from government devices.  (The Register)

    The country also moaned bitterly that nobody takes it seriously when it says the internet can be used to look at naughty pictures.


  • Plugging a handheld gaming device into a dock with an Nvidia RTX 5090.  (The Verge)  (archive site)

    First, it actually worked, and second, it worked pretty well for the most part.  On Horizon Zero Dawn it saw a significant loss of performance compared with a desktop system with a 5090, which may have been the OCuLink connection or may have been the thermal limits of the pocket-sized device.

    The 5090 itself offers a PCIe 5.0 x16 connector, but OCuLink only provides PCIe 4.0 x4 - one eighth as much bandwidth.  Tests have showed that the 5090 keeps chugging right along with PCIe 4.0 or 3.0 x16 slots, but this is half that again.

    So if you really need to play Horizon Zero Dawn on your handheld device plugged into a desktop graphics card that it is not currently possible to buy, you may be limited to just 80fps.


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Can't stand not tea either.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, February 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 February 2025

Heartbreak Hovel Edition

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Tech News

Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: I never want to see gravel again!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:29 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 280 words, total size 3 kb.

Monday, February 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 February 2025

Apopliptic Edition

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  • AI systems with unacceptable risk are now banned in the EU.  (Tech Crunch)

    What risk, we ask.

    The EU actually answers that, sort of.

    "Unacceptable risk" AI is Class 4, and Class 3, which is not banned but regulated, includes AI systems for recommending medical treatment.  Fair enough; medical anything tends to be regulated, and there's no reason not to subject medical AI to standards and tests.

    Under Class 4, banned outright, we see:

    * AI used for social scoring, where the social scores are applied outside the context in which they are calculated - e.g. firing someone because of their Reddit posts
    * Inferring a person's likelihood to commit a crime unless you are the police and already have the criminal banged up because you think they done it
    * Subliminal advertising, which doesn't work anyway
    * Something so broad that it encompasses all advertising, which will be interesting
    * Anything that can infer someone's emotional state
    * Biometric analysis except when the government really wants to

    So yes, commies gonna commie, and the legislation has enough holes to drive the Bagger-288 through.

    Companies - anyone operating however tangentially in Europe - are expected to be in full compliance by, uh, yesterday.


Tech News


Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: Migraine, migraine, go away.  Come again when I'm somewhere else.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:47 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, February 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 February 2025

Combat Wombat Edition

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  • Nvidia's RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti might arrive in March to steal the thunder from AMD's launch of its Radeon 9000 family, but probably won't succeed at doing that.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The problem is twofold.

    The best selling point of the 4060 is its low power consumption, and Nvidia is using the same 4nm TSMC process for the 5000 series, so there are no easy wins there.  They can use GDDR7 memory, but that's more expensive and the chip on the 5060 is unlikely to be fast enough to make good use of it.

    With the 5060 Ti things are more complicated.  The 4060 Ti is 40% faster in theory than the base 4060, but has exactly the same 8GB of GDDR6 RAM on a 128 bit bus, so the performance of the card is meh, and collapses as soon as games demand more than 8GB.  You can get a 16GB model, but it's still constrained by the 128 bit bus.

    With the 5060 Ti, Nvidia can use GDDR7 - around 40% faster - and use 24Gbit chips so that the base model has 12GB of VRAM instead of just 8GB.  That would give the chip a lot more breathing room - but if it works well it will encroach on the 5070 and Nvidia can't have that.

    Also Intel's B580 already exists, has 12GB of VRAM, and costs just $250, constraining both AMD and Nvidia when it comes to lower-end cards.


Tech News



Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: Crazy little thing called Ziz.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:10 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 464 words, total size 4 kb.

Saturday, February 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 February 2025

Drip Under Pressure Edition

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  • The Minimal Phone is a minimal phone.  (Liliputing)

    Well, technically it's a minimal smartphone.  It runs Android 14 and has an 800x600 display and supports 4G - though not 5G.  And it has a camera - optionally two - and USB-C.

    And a physical keyboard and a genuine headphone jack and a microSD slot, all of which are becoming less common.  And the screen is a relatively tiny 4.25".

    Also less common is the use of an e-ink display, which gives much better battery life but is not great for watching videos or checking your photos, since it's black and white.  The video review attached to that article suggests it's not the most responsive device ever created either, likely directly tied to the slow e-ink display.

    Price is $399 despite the lower-end specs, presumably because phones that aren't bloated and annoying don't sell.

Tech News


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Questionable actions negotiable.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:41 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 516 words, total size 5 kb.

Friday, January 31

Geek

Daily News Stuff 31 January 2025

Yes We Have No 5090s Edition

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  • If you were waiting for an RTX 5090 or 5080 - which you weren't if you've been reading the reviews - they're gone.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Micro Center is sold out of both cards at all stores, though they only had 233 5090s in the entire country.  Taiwan, where the chips are made, received an allotment of just 84.

    In Australia, meanwhile, there aren't any.  Not that many people care with a starting price of A$4000 for the cheapest model.

    The 5080 - half the price for a chip half the size with half the memory - is more plentiful in the sense that there were a lot more for sale initially.  It is also completely sold out.

Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: If anyone disagrees with anything I say, I am quite prepared to not only retract it, but also to deny under oath I ever said it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:34 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, January 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 January 2025

Big Steps And Little Ones Edition

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  • Nvidia's RTX 5080 is here and while it is tempting to blame it for the company's $600 billion share price free fall that was probably just a jumpy and irrational stock market and not directly related to the profound ordinariness of this card.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It's slightly faster than last year's 4080 Super, which was slightly faster than the previous year's 4080.

    It does best at 4K resolutions, where it's 9% faster, probably thanks to the much faster GDDR7 memory.  At lower resolutions where memory bandwidth doesn't matter so much, performance gains average just 3%.

    And with average gains that low, yes, it is sometimes slower than the previous model.  I'm not sure how, because by all the numbers it should be at least a little better.

    All the benchmarks seem to pit it against AMD's 7900 XTX, which comes out looking pretty good aside from ray tracing, since it is cheaper, includes 24GB of RAM compared to the 5080's 16GB, and is just as fast for anything except ray tracing.

    This review bizarrely suggests skipping the 5080 for the 5090, which delivers 50% better performance for twice the price.  Yes, if a $1000 video card isn't fast enough to justify the price, you should spend twice as much for something that is even worse value.

    We're going to see a repeat of this next month when the cheaper models - the 5070 Ti and 5070 - arrive.  In March we might see something interesting as AMD's new cards launch.

    But probably not.


Tech News

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Let me explain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:29 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, January 29

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 January 2025

Pink And Blue Edition

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  • A lot of stuff is being written about Chinese AI DeepSeek right now, and most of it is probably wrong.  Somehow The Verge seems to have been skeptical where skepticism was appropriate for once.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
    It took about a month for the finance world to start freaking out about DeepSeek, but when it did, it took more than half a trillion dollars - or one entire Stargate - off Nvidia’s market cap. It wasn’t just Nvidia, either: Tesla, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft tanked.
    This is of course true.  The sky-high valuations were irrational, and the drop was also irrational.
    Even if critics are correct and DeepSeek isn’t being truthful about what GPUs it has on hand (napkin math suggests the optimization techniques used means they are being truthful), it won't take long for the open-source community to find out, according to Hugging Face's head of research, Leandro von Werra. His team started working over the weekend to replicate and open-source the R1 recipe, and once researchers can create their own version of the model, "we’re going to find out pretty quickly if numbers add up."
    DeepSeek claims 100x improvements in training efficiency, but its published papers are full of micro-optimisations, which do not create 100x performance gains.
    There are some people who are skeptical that DeepSeek's achievements were done in the way described. "We question the notion that its feats were done without the use of advanced GPUs to fine tune it and/or build the underlying LLMs the final model is based on," says Citi analyst Atif Malik in a research note. "It seems categorically false that 'China duplicated OpenAI for $5M' and we don’t think it really bears further discussion," says Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon in her own note.
    My take as well.  DeepSeek did some useful work, and they published it.  But there are very good reasons to believe that they didn't do everything they said - such as the fact that on release, DeepSeek was convinced it was ChatGPT.


Tech News


Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: Ring ring!  Banana milk!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:55 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, January 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 January 2025

Forever Now Edition

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  • You can't predict how AI will behave.  (Scientific American)

    You can't predict how people will behave either, except in general terms.  Toddlers are going to do toddler things.  Malignant dirtbags are going to do malignant dirtbag things.

    AIs are going to do AI things.  Stop acting surprised.

Tech News



Musical Interlude


Song is Everything Now by Canadian band Arcade Fire.  Anime is Ano Natsu de Matteru - Waiting in the Summer - which is sort of but not exactly a retelling of the older Onegai Teacher only better.

I like this video more than the original one released by Arcade Fire themselves.  The anime is bittersweet, where the music video looks like Nebraska after the zombie apocalypse burned itself out.


Disclaimer: Zombies are going to do zombie things.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:24 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, January 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 January 2025

Australian't Day Edition

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Tech News


Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: Go fish.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:34 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 210 words, total size 3 kb.

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