Ambient Irony

Monday, February 24

Daily News Stuff 24 February 2025

Academic Inflation Edition

Top Story

With AMD's launch party for its new 9000-series video cards just days away, it has held a press briefing and of course benchmark numbers have already leaked. (VideoCardz)

The 9070 XT is 42% faster than the 7900 GRE at 4k resolution, and the 9070 non-XT is 21% faster.

Absolute silence on the price. Earlier leaks put the cards at $750 and $650 respectively, which is about $100 too much. But given that Nvidia cards don't exist at all at the moment, AMD will probably price the cards too high, kill all enthusiasm, and then adjust the price in a month or two when it's already too late.
Speaking of Nvidia cards that don't exist if you somehow got your hands on an RTX 5080 you had best check the number of ROPs onboard. (VideoCardz)

Yes, all the models that have shipped so far - 5090, the 5090D made for the Chinese market, the 5070 Ti, and now confirmed the 5080 - have been hit with the same hardware flaw. It only affects some cards, but it could apply to any model from any manufacturer.
My 7800 XT arrived today, so my interest in all this is purely academic.

Tech News

Richard Dawkins asked ChatGPT if it was conscious. It regurgitated a textbook on the subject and then said no. (Richard Dawkins)

Well, okay then. Stupid question, stupid answer.
The inverse square law suggests this is bullshit. (Yahoo)

Allegedly a surge in power on a high voltage cable in California created a magnetic field which induced a current in a nearby defunct power cable, which in turn caused sparks which ignited one of the recent fires.

I doubt it. Unless the two cables were an inch apart.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: What a coincidence! I also love plastic!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:37 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 307 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Now, ask it if it's couscous!

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 24 2025 08:46 PM (bg2DR)

2 No Jefferson Airplane singing about plastic?

Posted by: Frank at Monday, February 24 2025 10:12 PM (+i6Xr)

3 well, akshully, the decrease in electrical spherical electrical power propagation is the power of two with spherical propagation, cylindrical might be less so with a long enough pair of parallel lines, but I dunno. (Two way loss with point target radar is power of four, but two way loss for distributed target radar is supposed to only be power of two. So, for power transmission antennas and distance would both matter, and I don't have enough of my basics down to know shit off the top of my head.) But, fi someone in california government and or policy space is saying something, and that somethign is not that california government is insane, lying, and owed a great deal of the blame, they are probably lying and/or ignorant. Also, this morning I think I hate electromagnetics. So I need to get my doses of caffeine, and walk it off.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, February 25 2025 01:12 AM (rcPLc)

4 Turns out I am probably just a moron. I think wavelength of 60 hz is something like 500km. If I haven't done the thinking very wrong, that means that the link budgets will rarely be super strong, and that the induced currents will often be pretty weak. Also, many practical situations will be 'pointlike', so probably decreases with distance to the power of two.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, February 25 2025 12:32 PM (rcPLc)

5 Good point though with the long parallel lines. Probably somewhere between linear and squared in this case.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, February 25 2025 06:01 PM (PiXy!)

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