• All AIs are racist, but some are more racist than others.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Microsoft's Copilot gives you racial stereotypes in cartoons, which...  They're cartoons, people.  Though the Jewish boss with the bagel hat is certainly something.
  
  Anyway, it gives you racial stereotypes if you specify a race when you're generating a cartoon, so maybe that's your problem.
  
  Midjourney presents us not so much with racial stereotypes as temporal ones; I don't think it's been outside since 1952.
  
  ChatGPT just says fuck you and rewrites your request with a bunch of WASPs plus a token Asian chick.
  
  Meta AI actually does okay with this.  It pushes too hard on the diversity-at-any-cost side, but it also produced a sample image of a Jewish woman that is 100% believable without a single specific marker.  (The picture actually looks like someone I know.)

• AMD's Zen 5 mobile chips are coming this year maybe.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These will feature a mix of full-size Zen 5 and the smaller Zen 5c cores.
  
  Where Intel's smaller efficiency cores are a completely different design to their performance cores, Zen 5c is functionally identical to Zen 5, but squashed down and running at lower clock speeds.  At a given clock speed they perform identically, but Zen 5c is smaller and uses less power.
  
  Replacing mainstream chips with eight Zen 4 cores we can expect four Zen 5 cores plus eight Zen 5c.  Zen 5c could deliver close to the performance of existing Zen 4, so these should be deliver great performance and good battery life.
  
  
  
• Spotify has demonetised all tracks that have been played less than 1000 times.  (DJ Mag)
  
  Spotify says that affects only 0.5% of tracks on the platform, which seems unlikely because (a) power laws don't work like that and (b) if that were the case they wouldn't bother.
  
  The UMAW puts the number at 86% which seems far more plausible.
  
  
  
• The Opera browser now supports running AI locally on your computer.  (Opera)
  
  I don't know if I would trust Opera in its current incarnation.  It used to be good, but then the company was bought by Chinese interests and the entire development team walked out to set up Vivaldi.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 08 2024 10:42 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 08 2024 11:44 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, April 09 2024 01:58 AM (rcPLc)

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• Ordered by a Brazilian Supreme Court justice to block access to popular accounts that say things inconvenient to the leftist regime, Elon Musk has responded: Fuck you.  (MSN)
  
  A particular post ordered taken down by Australia's radical left wing censor-in-chief - who is an imported American that you guys can take back at any time - remains invisible, but that had the usual Streisand affect and reposted screenshots of it are all over the place, and have not been restricted at all.
  
  Musk is an imperfect defender of our liberties, but I'll give him credit when he gets it right.

Tech News

• To nobody's surprise the FCC has declined to intervene on California's plans to implement net neutrality.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The problem I always had with the FCC's push for net neutrality - which is back on the table for a vote later this month - is that the claim that the FCC even had the power to vote on such a rule is based on assumptions that would grant the agency massive control over all forms of communication in the US.
  
  If an individual state legislature wants to fuck up internet access for their own voters, on the other hand, they can do so, subject to the First Amendment.
  
  I'll have to read up on what California is proposing to do; it's probably bad, but probably legal.

• I've been trying to get the latest Hyte / Hololive limited edition PC cases for months without any luck.  There's only one Hyte distributor in Australia and they can't get them.
  
  I even looked into freight forwarding, but that worked out to cost as much as the cases themselves, and these are expensive cases.
  
  Now Hyte offers freight forwarding itself, and if I order both the cases it only costs 50% of the cost of the cases.  Which is still insane, but so am I.
  
  Then the cases will sit there for months because having spent that much money I won't have much to spare for new parts to fill them with.
  
  I did want to buy the new Lenovo Legion Tab, but Lenovo is assisting me with my budget because that is still not available anywhere.
   
  
  
• NASA has found the exact problem with Voyager 1 and expects to have it fixed...  Eventually.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yeah, I know that feeling, and I'm not even working with 46 year old hardware billions of miles away designed and built by people who have long since retired and aren't returning my emails.
  
  
  
• Do not buy the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It has a very nice 120Hz 2880x1800 OLED display, but it costs $1900, and you can get an Asus Vivobook with an almost identical OLED display for half of that.
  
  And the Asus has upgradeable memory, while the Samsung has 16GB soldered in place.
  
  Which if you're running Windows 11 will be fully used by the time you've booted the system and started a browser.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the Asus Vivobook and it's beautiful OLED display...  Yeah, it's still in its box.
  
  
  
• The Maven is a $2000 e-bike -  (Ars Technica)
  
  Let me stop you there.
  
  First thought: $2000 for a bicycle?  So your only question is not if it gets stolen, but if it gets stolen before you get crushed by an SUV.
  
  Second thought: I mean, if you happened to live in a quiet country town with little traffic and lots of hills, it might be kind of nice.
  
  Third thought: And, it turns out, illegal where I live.  It has a 750W motor and the rules here set the limit at 500W.
  
  
  
• Apple is laying off 700 workers, including the entire team working on the Apple Car, which Apple still denies ever working on.  (9to5Mac)
  
  What exactly do you put on you resume when you worked for a decade on a project that was never officially acknowledged and never produced any real-world results?
  
  
  
• Testing out my modpack under 1.19.2.
  
  That enables several mods I wanted (Creatures and Beasts, Critters and Companions, Zoo Architect, and Oh the Biomes You'll Go) at the cost of a couple of smaller ones (Let's Do Brewery, Dye Depot, and Elytra Trims).
  
  I do also lose the 1.20 updates...  Which were kind of underwhelming.  I'll need find a mod that adds back the cherry tree biome; I've already reinstated camels and the bamboo upgrades.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 06 2024 10:12 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: wheels at Sunday, April 07 2024 01:04 AM (wBT5j)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Sunday, April 07 2024 09:27 AM (Ncog+)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Sunday, April 07 2024 09:27 AM (Ncog+)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Sunday, April 07 2024 09:27 AM (Ncog+)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 07 2024 08:11 PM (PiXy!)

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• Quick one today as it has been a very long week.
  
  
  
• Is Google planning to buy marketing company HubSpot?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Sure.  Why not.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The benchmark numbers being quoted by Qualcomm for its new laptop chips are actually...  Pretty accurate.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Looks like it should comfortably beat Intel and not embarrass itself against Apple and AMD.  That's a huge improvement against earlier attempts which were just about capable of running Notepad.
  
  
  
• How we saved 98% in cloud costs by writing our own database.  (Hivekit)
  
  Turns out you can make databases run much, much faster if you don't care about the data.
  
  In this specific case, Hivekit can lose a second of data and not worry about it too much.  Conventional databases have to assume you want every single record to be saved, which is complicated and (relatively) slow.
  
  It's like...  If you don't care if the eggs arrive intact, you can speed up delivery by a lot.
  
  
  
• The new Razer Blade 18 has everything you could want in a laptop except the Four Essential Keys and an affordable price tag.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Though to be precise you could probably afford to buy the price tag, just not the laptop.
  
  A 24 core Intel 14900HX, an RTX 4090 (laptop version, so basically an RTX 4080), up to 64GB of RAM (probably upgradeable to 96GB), 4TB of storage in two M.2 slots, a 3840x2400 200Hz screen, a Thunderbolt 5 port - the brand new 80Gbps version, four 10Gbps USB ports, HDMI, a full size SD card reader, a headphone jack, and a 2.5Gb Ethernet port.  
  
  Fully configured it's just $4800.
  
  Which is a lot of money, yes, but that's a lot of laptop.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, April 05 2024 09:59 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 06 2024 12:00 AM (BMUHC)

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• I think we've identified the problem.
  
  Microsoft, market cap $3.12 trillion: Hello random open source project, we have a customer-facing problem that we need fixed urgently.
  
  Open source project: We'll take a look, but our project is run by volunteers in their own time.  If it's an urgent issue affecting commercial use might we suggest our friends at Z who offer 24/7 support contracts at very reasonable rates?
  
  Microsoft, market cap $3.12 trillion: No.  (Reddit)
  
  Though it was a Microsoft researcher who found the xz security breach and averted global disaster.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, open-source friendly company Stability AI is apparently fast going broke because it's a little too friendly.  (The Register)
  
  There's always two sides to every story, and in this case the other side is $100 million per year spent on cloud servers.
  
  

• If you comply with the rules, we'll change the rules: The US Commerce Department has banned Nvidia's RTX 4090D from sale in China.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 4090D was designed specifically to comply with the ruling that banned the 4090.
  
  A little too specifically, perhaps.  But maybe Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo should post the rules she wants companies to actually follow rather than expecting them to play some psychotic game of red light green light.
  
  
  
• The LSST camera did not cost $350 billion dollars.  (Gizmodo)

  To do this, the team needed a Rolls Royce of a digital camera. Mind you, the camera actually cost many million times that of an actual Royce Royce, and at 6,200 pounds (2,812 kilograms), it weighs a lot more than a fancy car.

  It's an amazing camera - the largest digital camera ever built, with a resolution of 3.2 gigapixels - but the entire LSST project - the buildings, the telescope assembly, the massive mirrors - the primary mirror is 28 feet across - and this camera is less than 0.2% of that.
  
  (A basic Rolls Royce Ghost costs around $350,000, and weighs 5700 pounds, so they're off on the weight too; just not by three orders of magnitude.)
  
  
  
• Can AMD's 3D Vcache improve game performance for low-end graphics cards?  (Hot Hardware)
  
  I was fully expecting the answer to be no, but if you're doing a budget build with a previous generation AMD chip and a card like AMD's own 7600, Intel's 750, or Nvidia's 3060, it might actually be worth the extra money for a 5000-series X3D chip.
  
  The biggest difference was Cyberpunk 2077 with an Intel Arc 750, where average frame rates jumped 30% from 46 to 60 fps just by upgrading from a 5800X to a 5800X3D.  About half the games tests showed negligible difference though.
  
  Which makes the newer 5700X3D an interesting proposition.  It's 10% slower than the 5800X3D but 25% cheaper, and if you're on a budget might just hit the sweet spot.
  
  
  
• Cannot remove files, disk is full.  Please remove file to free up space and try again.  Lol.  (Six Colors)
  
  Okay, Apple, I can understand that you were trying to make everything user-friendly so that you can un-delete files that were removed by accident, but what you actually achieved was users having to wipe and reinstall the entire system because you ran out of space.
  
  And these are experienced tech journalists we're talking about, who...  Yeah, off by three orders of magnitude.  Never mind.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 24.04 might become Ubuntu 24.05.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The unreleased beta version had the xz unpleasantness, and Ubuntu wants to be super-duper sure that it's been expunged with utmost prejudice.  So the planned release data of April 25 could slip into next month.
  
  I doubt that anyone would be upset about Ubuntu taking that precaution.  Except perhaps for North Korea.
  
  
  

Posted by: madrocketsci at Friday, April 05 2024 12:44 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 05 2024 10:30 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 05 2024 02:10 PM (rcPLc)

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• Taiwan has been hit with its strongest earthquake in 25 years, with an estimated magnitude between 7.2 and 7.7.  (MSN)
  
  The death toll currently stands at 7, with more than 700 injured.  Fortunately the epicenter was on the less-populated eastern side of the island; in the densely populated north and west such a strong earthquake could have been devastating.
  
  
  
• Amazon is closing its automated grocery stores that delivered the magical experience of walking in, picking out whatever you needed, and walking out again, and then having an amount possibly even related to what you had taken deducted from your credit card.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Automated.
  
  Well, as to that, all those cameras weren't hooked up to some carefully trained visual AI system, but to a warehouse full of people in India keeping track of your every move.
  
  Not sure if that's better or worse.

• Dell's new Inspiron 14 Plus is HP's Pavilion 14 Plus only worse.  (Liliputing)
  
  The Dell has a 2880x1800 display but it's half as bright as the HP's OLED panel, and the Four Essential Keys are absent as they are on all of Dell's current laptops.  Since it's the same price as the HP I see no reason for anyone to buy it.
  
  
  
• How to hack any AI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Be very annoying.
  
  
  
• Wait, is Qualcomm's new laptop CPU actually good?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Maybe so.  It's only one benchmark, but it beat AMD and Intel chips on both single-threaded scores (narrowly) and multi-threaded scores (by a substantial margin).
  
  Qualcomm's previous efforts in this space have been underwhelming, but all reports on this venture have been positive so far.
  
  
  
• Google Podcasts was an opportunity to do something innovative and genuinely useful.  (The Verge)
  
  But instead Google killed it and put all their efforts into generating racially diverse Nazis.
  
  
  
• The highest-rating vtuber debut of all time is Hololive's Usada Pekora's mother.
  
  Her April 1 stream pulled in more than 180,000 concurrent viewers.
  
  
  
• Frieren, Maomao, and Tanya are all the same person.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, April 03 2024 08:35 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 04 2024 07:13 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 04 2024 05:00 PM (PiXy!)

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Top Story

• How Vice Media fell down a hole and died.  (The Verge)
  
  By taking a formerly interesting news site and infecting it with woke nonsense written by lazy, greedy, stupid illiterates.
  
  Kind of like The Verge.

Tech News

Not Even Remotely Tech News

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 03 2024 12:56 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, April 03 2024 08:30 AM (bg2DR)

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• New York city is installing expensive security scanners to protect passengers on its plague-ridden subway system.  Scanners that may not actually work.  (MSN)
  
  The "AI enabled" (because of course) scanners cost around $3000...  Per month.  Each.
  
  And the company behind them, Evolv, is currently under investigation by the SEC and FTC and being sued by its own shareholders.
  
  The BBC had its own article on Evolv two years ago.

  "Metallic composition, shape, fragmentation - we have tens of thousands of these signatures, for all the weapons that are out there," chief executive Peter George said last year, "all the guns, all the bombs and all the large tactical knives."

  
  "Can we test it?" asked research firm IPVM.
  
  "No way, get fucked, fuck off" came the reply.

  Further:

  Asked why Evolv had been able to edit what was labelled an independent report, NCS4 told BBC News it "did not allow Evolv to directly edit the report".

   

  "The 'track changes' feature was used as a means to collect feedback," an official said.  "And to change inconvenient findings.  Don't print that."

  
  

• How Facebook spied on Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon.  (Observer)
  
  By installing fake root certificates on users' phones to intercept and decrypt traffic to competitors sites.
  
  Somewhere a volcano waits for the people who came up with this little scheme.
  
  
  
• Intel's second-generation "Battlemage" graphics cards are on their way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Since launch the first generation "Alchemist" cards have slowly progressed from an interesting curiosity to an affordable alternative through numerous software updates.  Given the pricing on graphics cards right now any competition is welcome.
  
  
  
• You're gonna need a bigger phone: Only the most expensive model of the Pixel 8 will come with full AI support.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because the 8GB of RAM on the cheaper model isn't enough.
  
  Which is great if you don't want AI on your phone.

• A little more background on that security disaster that almost was.  (Substack)
  
  It looks like it started with "social engineering" - a confidence scam - two years ago, with one person attacking the maintainer of the xz utility and another one offering to help, and then actually helping.  That warped over time into slipping more and more suspect code into the package, until they got caught.
  
  It's a bit of an odd one because it took a lot of care and planning but was guaranteed to get caught and removed if it ever went mainstream.  So it's not a targeted attack on particular groups, and not subtle enough to pass unnoticed long-term.
  
  If you infect one server you're likely to get away with it, but if you infect every server in the world, there are literally hundreds of honeypot servers set up by security researchers specifically to detect weird stuff like this.
  
  Purely speculation but I'm wondering if this was North Korea rather than China or Russia.  It looks like the kind of miscalculation they would make.
  
  

Tech News

• Software needs to be more expensive.  (Glyph)
  
  There's a well-known XKCD cartoon illustrating that the modern world is utterly dependent on some random bit of code maintained by one guy in Nebraska since 2003.
  
  Not specifically true, but true in general; we nearly had a global disaster with a small but useful library called xz because the maintainer wasn't getting paid anything despite the code being used on hundreds of millions of computers.  (If it's included in iOS or Android, which it probably is, billions.)
  
  The solution proposed here is to make it easy to pay these people.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile AT&T is resetting customer passcodes after millions of customers' account details were leaked...  In 2019.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or possibly earlier.  AT&T doesn't know or isn't saying.  But yeah, the data has been out there for five years and they're responding now.
  
  
  
• The world needs more gadgets like this (checks notes) overpriced underwhelming 27" 1080p monitor in a briefcase.  (The Verge)
  
  The world needs fewer websites like The Verge.  If that leaves me with nobody to mock, so be it.
  
  
  
• Banning TikTok could harm blah blah blah.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Don't care, didn't ask.

Not sure what I expected going into this, but this show goes in every direction at once.  It's no Frieren but it's not objectionable either, and it just got a second season so we won't be left hanging for too long.

I really like the quiet competence of the main character.  He's not out to save the world; he's just trying to do his job, no matter how weird things get.

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 01 2024 02:57 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, April 01 2024 03:24 AM (tSpjU)

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I'm a major fan of Prism - and not just because they have a dangerous concentration of Aussies for such a small agency, though that helps - and I'm sorry to see it go.  Thankfully the talents are almost all staying with it; Sony has handed them their designs and all online accounts, so there's just a short break while payment accounts get sorted out and then they'll be back online.

The exceptions are Kou Tsubame from Gen 5 who will be stepping back from streaming, although her channel will stay up and she'll still be in contact with the rest of the talents, and Naki Kamizuki from Gen 4 who will move away from regular vtubing and pursue other creative forms instead.

From now on if you need to find them, Gen 1 is Cosmia, Gen 3 is Requiem, and Gen 4 is Ever After.  They're working on a new name for the whole group since they can't use "Prism" and they are all planning to continue working together.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, March 30 2024 11:48 PM (tSpjU)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 31 2024 06:19 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, April 01 2024 10:22 AM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 01 2024 05:26 PM (PiXy!)

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