Ambient Irony

Tuesday, March 18

Daily News Stuff 18 March 2025

Splunge Edition

Top Story

The top broadband official at the Commerce Department has stormed off in a minute and a huff. (Politico)

Evan Feinman resigned and fled the building in the middle of a spittle-flecked rant about the horrors of Elon Musk and the damage cheap, fast, reliable internet will cause to rural communities.

Under the Biden administration, Feinman was the senior official in charge of a $42.5 billion nationwide rural broadband fund that connected - I am not making this up - precisely zero people.

Tech News

Qualcomm has announced a range of new chips to power portable gaming devices. (Tom's Hardware)

The new top of the line G3 Gen 3 - no, that's not redundant, that's actually what it's called - has one Kryo core, five Kryo cores, and two low-power Kryo cores.

That's what Qualcomm calls all its CPU cores to make it impossible for buyers to have any idea of their performance.

There's also the G2 Gen 2 and the G1 Gen 2, which have less stuff in them.

The G1 Gen 2 is featured in the new Retroid Pocket Classic, which looks like a grown-up Game Boy, has a 1240x1080 screen, and starts at $119.
Ayaneo announced the Gaming Pad based on the G3 Gen 3, an 8.3" Android gaming tablet with detachable controllers. (Ayaneo)

Full specs are not available yet, but the 2160x1440 screen is pretty good, and the photos suggest that with the controllers detached it's not the best part of an inch thick like some competing gaming devices.

Which means it might be useful for non-gaming tasks.
After 47 years, OpenVMS now has a package manager. (Raymii)

It's all downhill from here.
Testing the new Acemagic F3A with 128GB of RAM. (Serve the Home)

This is one of the crop of new Ryzen 370 mini-PCs with socketed rather than soldered RAM.

The extra sauce here is that Micron has started producing 64GB DIMMs for desktop and laptop systems just recently. They're not plentiful yet - I ordered the desktop version from Amazon today and left only one in stock - but the exist and they work and they're no more expensive per gigabyte than 32GB or 48GB modules.

And they put them in this mini-PC, which is a lot of memory for a mini-PC.

Anyway, short story shorter is that most people don't need 128GB of RAM in a mini-PC; 32GB is probably enough and a model with soldered RAM will run 10% faster.

But if you do need 128GB of RAM in a mini-PC, you get get it, and it works.

Except for the DisplayPort output during boot on this particular model.
Monoculture is bad: 23,000 GitHub projects were all compromised at once because all of them were using the same third-party GitHub Actions project and that in turn was compromised. (The Register)

Joy.

Minecraft Update

After spending some time playing first my modpack locally and then vanilla 1.21.4 on a shared server, I went back and ripped out another 70 mods.

Anything that changes the game too much, or changes it too little, or was complicated and annoying.

Now just under 200 mods in total (182 mods, 10 datapacks, 5 shader packs). That makes it run with the default memory settings again, which is not a worry for me since I have a 128GB (2 x 64GB) RAM kit on the way, but I want people to be able to run this.

The focus is on simple things that open up the world, like Dye Depot which adds 16 new colours, Countered's Terrain Slabs, which uses slabs to smooth out the landscape a little, and Ambient Sounds, which adds... Ambient sounds.

Plus of course seven new dimensions, seven hundred new creatures, and seven thousand new building blocks.

Also noticed that even with the performance mods it runs half as fast as vanilla Minecraft. It's still playable (with shaders disabled) on a Ryzen 7730U, which has the old Vega 8 graphics, with a 2880x1620 display, so not likely to be a problem for anyone with a real computer.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Hey, my block faces west.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:50 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 691 words, total size 6 kb.

1 'Splunge' indeed; the correct answer to the quesion of how many people have been served by the $42billion rural broadband project is not "exactly zero" it is, in fact, "almost one".

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, March 19 2025 03:38 AM (KOtXO)

Hide Comments | Add Comment