You know when grown-ups tell you everything's going to be fine, and you think they're probably lying to make you feel better?
Yes.
Everything's going to be fine.

Wednesday, June 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 June 2024

Stochastic Scrabble Bag Edition

Top Story

  • Fearless Fund's founder has resigned, and it's a sad reflection on the VC world for Black women.  (Tech Crunch)

    Is it, though?
    Still, it is being sued by a politically conservative group called the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) over its charitable grants program. AAER is challenging the fund’s right to provide $20,000 in small business grants to Black women, claiming the program violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans the use of race in contracts.
    Oh.
    The case is not going particularly well for Fearless Fund. As TechCrunch recently reported, earlier this month an appeals court ruled against Fearless. It upheld a preliminary injunction that prevents the firm from making grants to Black women business owners. The firm told TechCrunch at that time it is weighing its options on how to proceed.
    Shockingly, it turns out that racism is not only bad, but sometimes illegal.  And while larger funds don't care about quaint notions like right and wrong, they do care about lawsuits potentially involving massive damages:
    Still, as we previously pointed out, the sad fact is that big names in the tech ecosystem have not exactly come out swinging in support. CEO Simone told Inc. earlier this year that the fund had lost nearly all its partnerships aside from two, JPMorgan and Costco. Even Mastercard, who sponsored the now-contested Strivers Grant, has publicly never commented on the lawsuit.
    You hate to see it.  Wait, not hate.  The other one.


Tech News



Disclaimer: You fell victim to one of the classic blunders.  The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia.  But only slightly less well-known is never get between a tech weasel and a stack of cash.

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Tuesday, June 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 June 2024

$Drizzy/BBL Edition

Top Story


Tech News


Time Patrol Bon

Today we're at the Battle of Marathon, where one of our heroes thinks its a good idea to shoot Pheidippides.  This causes problems.

A nice touch though is that they work those problems into the discrepancies in real historical accounts of the battle.



Disclaimer: This octopus, let's give him boots, send him to North Korea!

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Monday, June 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 June 2024

Wazzup Edition

Top Story

  • Meritocracy is bad, say people without merit.  (Tech Crunch)
    "The post is misguided because people who support the meritocracy argument are ignoring the structural reasons some groups are more likely to outperform others," Mutale Nkonde, a founder working in AI policy, told TechCrunch.
    "A founder working in AI policy" is code for oxygen thief.
    "We all want the best people for the job, and there is data to prove that diverse teams are more effective."
    If they are more effective, then by definition, they are at the top of a meritocracy.

    The problem is, they're not, and you know they're not, but you are not allowed to admit it.
    Emily Witko, an HR professional at AI startup Hugging Face
    Oxygen thief.
    told TechCrunch that the post was a "dangerous oversimplification," but that it received so much attention on X because it "openly expressed sentiments that are not always expressed publicly and the audience there is hungry to attack DEI." Wang’s MEI thought "makes it so easy to refute or criticize any conversations regarding the importance of acknowledging underrepresentation in tech," she continued.
    Well, yes, because DEI is fraudulent.


Tech News

Time Patrol Bon

Thinking this is not a children's show, based on the period-accurate costumes in Minoan Crete and two lead characters getting gored to death by an angry pot roast.

And now they're at the Battle of Okinawa, which was not a fun time for anybody involved.

Oh.  Yeah, playing Russian Roulette with an automatic is not theme commonly found in kid-friendly entertainment.

The base timeline in the story continues to be weird.  Tokens of the 2020s - this episode, a flat-screen TV - but a woman who would have been in her fifties in the manga had to be rewritten into her nineties.



Disclaimer: I am Chaos, the end of ends, a steel rose trapped in a cage of ice, your best friend, Baelz Hakos of Hololive English.  Witness me!

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Sunday, June 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 June 2024

Live Freeze Or Die Edition

Top Story

  • AI is exhausting the power grid in its tireless search for progressively more refined bullshit.  AI companies are proposing to solve this using unicorn farts.  (MSN)
    A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google, and is, somehow, even less helpful.
    True.  That 900% increase in power consumption is pumped directly into Nvidia's bank account.
    The companies also argue advancing AI now could prove more beneficial to the environment than curbing electricity consumption.
    I'm sure they do.
    "If we work together, we can unlock AI's game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need," Microsoft said in a statement.
    You have to admire the artistry of that statement.  I have never seen so much bullshit condensed into a single sentence in my entire life.
    The tech giants say they buy enough wind, solar or geothermal power every time a big data center comes online to cancel out its emissions. But critics see a shell game with these contracts: The companies are operating off the same power grid as everyone else, while claiming for themselves much of the finite amount of green energy. Utilities are then backfilling those purchases with fossil fuel expansions, regulatory filings show.
    No shit.
    Left unmentioned are the heavily polluting fossil fuel plants that become necessary to stabilize the power grid overall because of these purchases, making sure everyone has enough electricity.
    You could have been building nuclear power for the past thirty years, but no.

    There is some good news here, though.  Google is backing geothermal energy, OpenAI and Bill Gates are backing new nuclear reactor designs, and Microsoft is investing in fusion.

    Maybe this means our clean energy future will come with ads, but that will annoy the communists twice as much, so I  guess I can live with it.


Tech News

  • I've switched over to the new laptop.  40GB of RAM leaves 16GB for dead for my workload, and AMD's Zen 3 likewise the Intel 12th gen chip I had before.

    I'm running it in "whisper mode" which is not quite silent but you in a quiet house have to stop and listen for it, and the CPU is peaking at about 55C under constant load.  My previous laptop ran hotter, louder, and slower.

    I'm not sold on the numeric keypad, but I'm hoping to adjust.


  • Why going cashless has turned Sweden into a high-crime nation.  (Forbes)

    Because, you absolute ninnies, if you can access your money from anywhere at any time, so can everyone else in the world.

    With cash, someone has to be there to beat you up and steal your wallet.  With an online scam, they can be in Laos or Lichtenstein or Lesotho.  It doesn't matter and you won't know; your money will just be gone.


  • What's in it for us, ask journalists as the new companies they have murdered make desperate deals with AI giants so the executive suite can get one final payday before it all comes tumbling down.  (Tech Crunch)

    Nothing.  You get nothing.  Which is more than you deserve.


  • What is CUDIMM?  (AnandTech)

    There are basically two types of memory modules in computers: Unbuffered modules which are used in desktops and laptops - and soldered memory is all unbuffered, and registered memory used in servers.

    Unbuffered modules connect the memory chips directly to the CPU.  Registered modules have extra chips between the CPU and the RAM that keep the signals synchronised.

    CUDIMMs are clocked unbuffered DIMMs.  That is, the have one extra chip that syncronises the clock signal, but the rest of the wires are left to their own devices.

    This makes it easier to run memory at higher clocks, and, most importantly, is invisible to the CPU and motherboard.  These DIMMs should Just Work in current systems.


Disclaimer: Ow, my bees.

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Saturday, June 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 June 2024

Bolivians In Space Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Time Patrol Bon

Is this a children's show?  That witch trial scene is brutal.

And why does exactly one character have a mobile phone?

Wait, another family has a combination cordless phone and fax machine, and definitely not a 1978 model.

Problem with a modern take on an older story that's all about messing up and restoring the flow of history is you can't tell whether apparent anachronisms are plot points or just there to keep a younger audience engaged.



Disclaimer: Unless it doesn't.

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Friday, June 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 June 2024

Also Also With Edition

Top Story

  • I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again.  (Ludicity)

    Man has opinions.  The opinions are mostly correct though.
    I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders.
    Usually both.  Usually both.
    And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at usLook at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.
    Indeed.


  • A rant about front-end development.  (Frank M Taylor)

    Another man of conviction.
    There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSRonlyin the context of node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air.

    Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shittydivsoup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.

    Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.

    Lua is actually pretty good at this.
    Do you have any idea how frustrating it is that that in order to explain my sadness to my therapist I must first explain like 5 different technologies and by the time I’m finished she’s sad just hearing it, the session’s over, and I didn’t even get to what was making me upset? Technology has made my anger a recursive function.
    You don't need a therapist, Frank.  You need a weekend blowing up abandoned vehicles with a punt gun.



Tech News

The Only AI Company Actually Worth Anything is Literally a Turtle Music Video of the Day



Evil Neuro sings the theme song from the second season of the anime Mashle.

Neuro (and her evil twin) are AI vtubers developed by a single programmer who calls himself Vedal, and they show better than anything Google or OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta have produced, how AI can make our lives better: By endlessly roasting their creator.


Time Patrol Bon

Completely missed this because I don't normally check Netflix for new anime, but that's where it is.



One look and you know it's a 70s anime, except for the minor fact that it was produced this year.  Animation is by Bones, and it looks great - it still looks like a 70s anime, but an unreasonably well-animated and high-resolution 70s anime.

The original manga started in 1978, created by Fujiko Fujio, who was not a person but a decades-long collaboration of two artists best known for a little thing called Doraemon.



Disclaimer: For all I know, that might be his real name.

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Thursday, June 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 June 2024

Legs Of Justice Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Disclaimer: I'm at soup.

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Wednesday, June 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 June 2024

Into The Out Of Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • An AI product without so much AI in it: Gigabytes 2TB AI TOP 100E SSD has an endurance rating of 219PB.  (Tom's Hardware)

    I don't know what changes they've made to achieve that, but that is a lot.  A typical drive in this category has an endurance rating around 1PB.  With the Gigabyte drive you can use the entire disk 100,000 times before you have to start worrying about it wearing out.

    Pricing not yet available, but if it's horribly expensive you'll know why.


  • Meta (that is, Facebook) has announced a method to watermark AI-generated speech.  (MIT Technology Review)

    The code - available on GitHub - adds markers to an audio file that are inaudible to humans but easily detected by the same program.

    Which of course means you can simply run the program to delete the markers, but who would do that?


  • If you were hoping for an Arm model of the Framework laptop, sorry, but here's a RISC-V motherboard for it.  (Liliputing)

    With four 1.5GHz CPU cores it's not going to set any records though.  Also, unlike regular Framework laptops, you can't expand the memory or the storage.

    It's really just for people developing software for RISC-V embedded systems.  Not a huge market but I'm sure they'll welcome this.


  • I'd sooner swallow a wasp: An AI app called Butterflies promises to destroy social media forever.  (The Verge)

    When you sign up, you create an AI personality called a Butterfly that can post text and pictures on your behalf, and interact with other Butterflies on the platform, so that you can log out and go for a walk while your account that has all your personal information attached discusses homeschooling with an FBIfly.


Not At All Tech News

Uh-oh, it's another one.


I wasn't expecting HoloEN Gen 4 this year, certainly not before HoloID Gen 4.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

The backstory is that they're a team of investigators dispatched to track down HoloEN Gen 3, whose backstory is that they're escaped supercriminals.

That will last for about 0.3 milliseconds before it devolves into chaos.



Uh, yeah, that's one of our terrifying supercriminals there.


Also, if you're looking for Reiny or Shizukou, two British indie vtubers who retired earlier this year, you might want to check Globie.



Disclaimer: The doggo and the racing giraffe, respectively.

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Tuesday, June 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 June 2024

Cartesian't Edition

Top Story


Tech News


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Monday, June 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 June 2024

Street VGA Edition

Top Story

  • Emulating a Macintosh on a Raspberry Pi...  Pico.  (axio.ms)

    A rather neat little project.

    The original Mac had 128k of RAM, and the Pi Pico has 256k of main memory, so in theory this should be possible.  All you need to do is squeeze a Motorola 68000 emulator and the Mac ROMs and hardware emulation into that remaining 128k.

    Oh, and that hardware emulation includes the video, and the Pi Pico has no video hardware.

    No problem, not with the help of some street cables and a bit of inspired cheating.


Tech News

  • Asus has promised to stop doing what it promised to stop doing a year ago and didn't.  (Gamers Nexus)

    A year ago the news sites gave them the benefit of doubt.  This time, not so much.


  • The future is bright for electric vehicles, say analysts as they switch their personal investments into oil and gas.  (Yahoo)
    A global survey conducted by consulting firm McKinsey, also released Wednesday, included this shocker: 29% of EV owners told McKinsey they plan to replace the EV they bought with a gasoline or diesel car, a figure that jumps to 38% for U.S. EV owners.
    This is why California is planning to outright ban all non-E Vs.  Can't have the peasants choosing what works for them.


  • Cases of flesh-eating bacteria are skyrocketing in Japan.  (MSN)

    More cases have been reported so far this year than in all of 2023, and the mortality rate is 30%.

    It's just streptococcus, but streptococcus caused a whole host of nasty diseases before readily-available antiseptics and antibiotics, many of them fatal.


  • Minisforum has a couple of new midi-PCs.  (Liliputing)

    These are eight inches square and two inches tall - much bigger than NUCs which are around four inches square, but not big.  The Mac Mini is about this size.

    The AMD model takes a low-power desktop CPU, up to 96GB of RAM, and four M.2 SSDs, and has two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, USB 4, OCuLink, HDMI, DisplayPort, and the usual swarm of USB 3 ports.

    The Intel model includes a choice of 12th and 13th generation laptop chips, and supports 64GB of RAM, two M.2 slots, a half-height PCIe slot, two USB 4 ports, two 10Gb SFP+ Ethernet ports, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, plus HDMI and the usual USB 3 and USB 2 ports.

    If you want something small but with more flexibility than a NUC, these might suit.


  • Apple has joined the race to find an AI icon.  (Tech Crunch)

    And they mean that in the technical sense, a little graphical symbol that says "You are stupid and racist, now give me your credit card."

    I suggest a mugger wearing an N95 mask.


  • How can we convert OpenAI's pricing page into a news article?  (Tech Crunch)

    Oh how we will laugh when you are all replaced by the very systems you pretend to report on.


Disclaimer: Ha ha ha.  Like that.  That's how we will laugh.

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