• Plants may be absorbing 20% more CO2 than scientists thought.  (New Atlas)
  
  And will continue to do so through to the end of the century.
  
  After that they'll get smashed at the 2099 New Years celebrations and we'll all suffocate the next day, but until then we should be fine.

• Let's learn how modern JavaScript frameworks work by building one.  (Nolan Lawson)
  
  Next week: Let's learn how diphtheria spreads by starting an epidemic.
  
  
  
• The Fediverse is the perfect tool to take stuffy old "learned societies" mired in the Victorian era and extinguish them entirely.  (LSE)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Physicists have found a hard limit on the performance of quantum computers.  (Science Alert)
  
  But when they were measuring how fast it was going they lost track of where it was.
  
  
  

Posted by: bob in houston at Tuesday, December 05 2023 12:38 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, December 05 2023 01:36 AM (r9O5h)

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• Rule One of Online Publishing: A hate click is still a click.
  
  How are things going for the boys and girls over at Tech Crunch?
  
  Not great, it seems.  The article - by the managing editor - on Tesla shipping the Cybertruck to customers is titled The end of Elon.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The comments at Tech Crunch are heavily censored, but even so 95% are asking if the writer needs a bottle and a nap.
  
  
  
• How are things going for the boys and girls over at Kotaku?
  
  Never mind, it's Kotaku.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  After a solid decade of autistic screeching over breast physics in computer games (life tip: breasts do move if you are jumping around) the site is absolutely giddy over, uh, dick physics.

• How are things going for the boys and girls over at The Verge?
  
  The Ember Tumbler is overpriced, over-teched garbage that nobody should buy.  (The Verge)
  
  Oh.  Good.
  
  It's a $199 electrically heated cup that keeps your coffee at the perfect temperature - but does a worse job at it than a $30 brand name insulated mug.
  
  And The Verge actually tested that, measuring temperatures over the course of an entire day, both before and after the Ember's battery ran out.
  
  
  
• Google is escalating its war on ad blockers.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The coming "Manifest V3" update to Chrome is already planned to cripple adblock extensions.
  
  What Google has done now is to change the rules further so that updates to adblock filter rules have to go through the Chrome Web Store - and be approved by Google every time - instead of downloading directly from the adblock developer or a public repository.
  
  I recommend Brave and Vivaldi. 
  
  
  
• A former Wall Street banker paid $2 million for an old coal mine with the hope of reopening it.  Then he conducted a study of the mine's potential with the Department of Energy and discovered an estimated $37 billion worth of rare earth elements.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  The trick here is that rare earth elements aren't actually rare.  They're just expensive and messy to extract, so we allowed China to take on that job.
  
  With increasing use of electrical vehicles we need a source that isn't asshole, the same thing that is driving lithium mining in Australia.
  
  This mine - the Brook Mine in Wyoming - originally operated from 1914 to 1940.  Apparently it still contains a billion tons of coal as well as the rare earths.  (These details aren't in the article, but it's amazing what you can find on the internet.)
  
  Mining operations for both coal and rare earths are planned to commence in Q4 of 2023.  (Mining Technology)
  
  Which is now.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT is successful at convincing people it is human 14% of the time.  (Ars Technica)
  
  ELIZA, a chat bot written in 1964, is successful 27% of the time.
  
  Humans meanwhile are successful 63% of the time.  Don't knock it, it's a passing grade.
  
  
  
• Amazon's new AI platform, Q, has severe "hallucinations" - that is, it lies constantly - and also leaks confidential data.  (Platformer)
  
  That's a pretty solid combination.
  
  Great subhed to the article:

  Some hallucinations could "potentially induce cardiac incidents in Legal," according to internal documents

  Amazon, of course, denies everything.
  
  
  
• Google has released the Android studio hedgehog.  (Thurrott)
  
  I hope it can survive in the wild with winter coming - wait, that's a version name?
  
  Never mind.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT isn't coming for your coding job, because it's shit.  (Wired)
  
  ChatGPT - LLMs in general - are very good at form but absolutely terrible at function.  That's because they are supercharged autocorrect engines; they know only what words fit where, statistically.
  
  They can make a legal filing that looks correct, but it will reference laws and decisions that don't even exist.
  
  They perform slightly better at coding - because it's easy to run the generated code to see if it at least compiles - but not much.
  
  Where they genuinely are transformative is in visual art, because there form largely is function.  In a remarkably short time AI image generation has progressed from putting too many fingers on hands - or attaching hands at the elbow - to putting the hinges on the wrong side of the door.  (As in, adjacent to the doorknob.)
  
  I haven't had time to play with AI art much lately but I'd like to get back into it.  Last time I tested it it fell apart when you tried to put more than one character in a scene, and I'm hoping for some progress there.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 04 2023 02:24 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Monday, December 04 2023 04:13 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Monday, December 04 2023 04:16 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 04 2023 05:17 AM (bg2DR)

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• Did you buy any Discovery Channel content on the PlayStation Network?  Because it turns out you didn't.  (Kotaku)
  
  You just rented it.  At full purchase price.
  
  And now it's gone.
  
  Surprise!
  
  

Tech News

• This is a real photo taken with a real iPhone.  (Apple Insider)
  
  This is an artifact of Apple's computational photography, where the camera takes multiple photos and stitches them together.  Or maybe it's a side-effect of a rolling shutter, something that affects other models of digital camera.  Or maybe it's a fake.
  
  Or maybe mirrors are portals to another dimension.
  
  
  
• Tech startup Prophetic has announced the Halo, a $2000 device that triggers lucid dreams through focused beams of ultrasound.  (Fortune)  (archive site)
  
  The company says that this will allow programmers to write code in their sleep.
  
  Which is the least implausible part of this story, because getting developers to work 24/7 is the dream of the entire tech industry.
  
  Frankly, anyone who buys one of these paperweights deserves to lose their money.
  
  
  
• After a surge in sales when everyone was locked in their homes during the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, followed by a slump when nothing much happened, PC sales are growing again except they're not, this is a forecast, and it's shit.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Canalys says that the two drivers of growth will be AI and Arm, with AI powered PCs making up 19% of the market in 2024, and Arm taking 30% of the market in 2026.
  
  Coughbullshitcough.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 02 2023 10:53 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 03 2023 04:17 PM (PiXy!)

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• The web browser that was banned from the Google Play store because it can browse the web is back up.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Google may be both evil and stupid, but apparently they still have limits.

• How come tech founders don't give a crap about sustainability.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Because nobody does.  It's almost entirely a grift.  And if the secondary grift interferes with the primary grift, out it goes.
  
  
  
• The weirdest bug I've seen yet.  (Gusto)
  
  Not me, but the person writing the blog.
  
  Tracking down why the company's internal customer support application would crash Chrome...  Sometimes.
  
  
  
• ASRock has a new mini-ITX Ryzen server motherboard.  (Serve the Home)
  
  With four memory slots, dual 10Gb Ethernet ports, and remote management.
  
  Awesome.  Sounds perfect for my little NAS cases.  How many SATA ports does it have?
  
  Oh.
  
  Zero.
  
  
  
• Yes, Virginia, you can have too many cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ampere's new Arm-based server CPUs have 192 cores.  And you can put two of them on a motherboard.
  
  Only problem is the Linux Arm kernel supports a maximum of 256 cores, so with two of these chips it just won't boot.
  
  In fact, the smallest model of these chips has 136 cores, so any two-socket server will refuse to boot under Linux.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 01 2023 11:54 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Davd at Saturday, December 02 2023 02:30 AM (R7Z4D)

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• Elon Musk today addressed advertisers who are boycotting Twitter in an attempt to reintroduce censorship.  (WCCFTech)
  
  He told them to go fuck themselves.
  
  He used those words.
  
  This is precisely why the left is so upset about Musk owning Twitter: He's the richest man in the world.  He can tell advertisers to go fuck themselves when they attempt to enforce the far-left agenda.  If Twitter goes broke, well, whatever.

• BBC Basic is back in a big way.  (Hackaday)
  
  The new version runs on Windows, Mac, Linux (including Raspberry Pi), Android, and iOS.  It supports up to 256MB of memory, which isn't that much these days but I don't even want to think about a Basic program that would need more than that.
  
  You can download it...  Well, you can't.  Site's down.
  
  
  
• Dollar Tree was affected by a data breach and information including social security numbers for two million people was stolen.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  You might ask why Dollar Tree was keeping social security numbers of two million people, and the answer turns out to be, it wasn't.
  
  The service provider handling Dollar Tree's payroll got hacked, and Dollar Tree's staff were among the two million people affected.
  
  
  
• Inside of you there are two sciences.  (Nature)
  
  One is being destroyed from within by socialism and incompetence.
  
  The other has already been destroyed by socialism and incompetence.
  
  You might want to consider an enema.
  
  
  

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, December 01 2023 12:07 AM (K8DwR)

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• The Google Play Store keeps banning a third-party web browser.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Not because Google hates third-party web browsers, but because this web browser keeps getting hit by nonsensical DMCA takedown notices.
  
  Like it containing "Properties of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc." when you load the Warner Bros. web site.  Which is kind of what a web browser does.
  
  I have a sneaking suspicion why this particular browser is getting hit: It integrates a file explorer, and is called Downloader.

• Just after fixing a security flaw with a severity rating of 9.8, ownCloud has a shiny new security flaw with a severity of 10.  (Ars Technica)
  
  ownCloud is a personal cloud server for individual users.  This is not the new Ubuntu system for businesses that want to run their own cloud solutions - that's called MicroCloud.
  
  
  
• The United Arab Emirates is playing host to the latest round of global climate talks this week.  It is using those talks as a springboard for new oil and gas deals.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  I'm so proud.
  
  
  
• On Black Friday, Shopify averaged a million requests per second, delivering nearly 30 petabytes of data.  (Twitter)
  
  Using Ruby and MySQL.
  
  A lot of Ruby and MySQL, but still.

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, November 29 2023 11:18 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 30 2023 12:18 AM (BMUHC)

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• A land grab is under way in Australia for lithium mining rights.  (Financial Times)
  
  For the most part it's major Australian companies blocking foreign takeovers of lithium mining startups.
  
  Despite a collapse in lithium prices, sales by Australia quadrupled in the first half of this year compared with 2022.  All by itself that generated a 1% annual growth in Australia's GDP.

• The latest NAS from AOOSTAR has 6 3.5" drive bays and 6 M.2 slots, powered by a Ryzen 5800U.  (Liliputing)
  
  When I saw the logo in the picture I thought it was ADDSTAR which is a not entirely terrible brand name, but no.
  
  It has two 2.5Gb and two 10Gb Ethernet ports (though the latter will probably turn out to be SFP+), HDMI and DisplayPort, and four USB ports.
  
  Price TBA.
  
  
  
• If you want something a bit smaller there's the FriendlyELEC CM3588.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has a Rockchip CM3588 Arm CPU, four M.2 slots (with only one PCIe 3 lane each, but that's still 1GBps), 2.5Gb Ethernet, two HDMI outputs, and an HDMI input for...  Reasons.
  
  Starts at $130 with 4GB RAM and goes up to $160 with 16GB.
  
  
  
• If you have a collection of old game consoles or home computers, but don't have a collection of old televisions or monitors, the RetroTINK-4K could be the device you need.  (RetroTINK)
  
  It accepts composite, S-Video, component, analog RGB, and HDMI inputs at resolutions up to 1920x1080, plus analog and digital audio, can decode NTSC, PAL, and SECAM signals, and can capture, upscale, and resample pretty much any resolution and refresh rate up to 1080p and produce a clean 4K 60p HDMI output.  If it can't automatically lock on the the weird signal coming out of your 1987 Czechoslovakian Sinclair Spectrum knock-off, it has a micro-SD slot where you can install custom profiles.
  
  There's just one tiny problem: It costs $750.
  
  
  
• The DevTernity conference has collapsed in disarray after it was discovered that the loudly promoted female speakers were fake AI personas.  (404 Media)
  
  Well, duh.  There are no women in tech.

• While Americans are slowly waking up from their food comas, those crafty Chinese are preparing to start manufacturing 5nm chips...  Sort of.  (WCCFTech)
  
  China has been banned from buying the machines to make chips below the 14nm node.  They can make 12nm chips because 12nm is really just a tweaked version of 14nm.  And they can make 7nm via a technique called double-patterning, which was used before EUV technology (extreme ultra-violet) made direct 7nm and smaller nodes possible.
  
  Double-patterning is expensive and fussy and wrecks your yield - the percentage of good chips you get from a wafer - but it does work.
  
  To get 5nm they would need to go to quad patterning, which is also a proven technology but even more expensive and a whole lot fussier, and the resulting yields would be in the toilet.
  
  China can build its own machines, but to do so it will first need to build the machines for that, and currently it lacks the machines to build those machines.  It's very complicated and requires incredible precision, and there really isn't any way to rush it.

• Beej's Gude to Interprocess Communication.  (Beej.us)
  
  It's amazing how little this stuff has change since I was a baby programmer logging on to my first Unix system.
  
  
  
• So Cyber Monday is here, and with it lots of amazing computer deals like...
  
  Nothing, really.  I mean, the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro can be found for $250, but that was already true.
  
  I got some cutlery and a fancy slow cooker.  I bought a cheap Kmart slow cooker when I moved to a colder climate last year, and I use it all the time.  This new one is bigger and has a timer and a temperature probe, and can allegedly roast an entire chicken.
  
  I'll give that a try because it's not something I bother with very often because I hate cleaning the oven.  With a slow cooker you can just put the cooking pot and the lid in the dishwasher and forget about it.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 28 2023 03:34 AM (oJgNG)

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• The immediate trigger behind the recent turmoil at OpenAI was a research paper into the risks of AI led by one of the board members.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The paper is idiotic drivel.

• The Dunning-Kruger Effect is autocorrelation.  (Economics from the Top Down)
  
  That doesn't mean it's not real, it just means that all it's showing is that idiots are idiots, which we already knew.
  
  
  
• No it isn't.  (andersource)
  
  Well, that clears that up.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Threadripper 7980X is faster than any Xeon or Epyc server CPU.  (Notebook Check)
  
  On the Passmark benchmark, anyway.  The single-core Passmark score correlates well with the software I run, so I keep an eye on it.  The multi-core score doesn't seem to scale very well though.  The 64-core 7980X is 70% faster than the 128-core Epyc 9754, and it really shouldn't be.