• Ordered my new laptop at 9:30 this morning.  It shipped at 1:45 this afternoon.
  
  HP has it all over Dell in this department, at least for Australia.  Dell seems to ship out of Singapore.  Takes them days to ship and then a week to arrive.
  
  
  
• The tech startup sector is fucked beyond imagining.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  On an annualised basis, successful exits for VC funds in this sector are down 97% from 2021.
  
  The article is behind a paywall but nobody really cares.

• Rapid - formerly Rapid API - which was recently valued at $1 billion, has laid off half its staff and frozen all hiring.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I took a look at their site.  I can see where they'd need 20 or 30 staff to build that system and deal with customers and payments.  
  
  They had 230.
  
  Now they have half that.
  
  They took $150 million in funding a year ago so the question is, did they correct course in time or have they burned through their case and are about to fold?
  
  
  
• Apple pays a lot of money to TSMC to get first dibs on the latest chip technology and sometimes that doesn't entirely work out.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The next generation iPhone may be in short supply because only 55% of 3nm chips coming off the production line pass testing.  That's not terrible - Samsung started 3nm production earlier and their first production runs apparently yielded something like 20% fully working chips - but throwing out half your product isn't great either.
  
  On the seventh hand, without Apple customers paying too much money for shiny gadgets TSMC wouldn't be able to churn out cheap 4/5/6/7nm chips for AMD and Nvidia.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Nvidia, nobody continues to buy the 4070.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's not that expensive, but the people for whom money is no object (or creative professionals for whom time is money) already bought a 4080 or 4090.  Customers for the 4070 are at least a bit price-sensitive and they seem to have decided to wait a bit and see what happens.
  
  Which frees up some 4nm capacity at TSMC because Nvidia seems to be cutting production rather than prices.
  
  
  
• Nine ways to shoot yourself in the foot with PostgreSQL.  (Phil Booth)
  
  I was an early user of PostgreSQL but then MySQL got good enough (mostly) and PostgreSQL got complicated (very).  I would like to dive into PostgreSQL and learn more of its tricks, and learning the bad tricks is a good start.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's revenues are up 7%.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Or, given inflation, they're stagnant.
  
  
  
• Google's revenues are up 3%.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which means they're down.
  
  
  
• Intel's PC revenues are down 53% for Q1 over the same quarter last year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I hope their server sales are better.  Their server CPUs suck compared to AMDs, but companies buy them anyway.
  
  
  
• Digital Ocean has opened a datacenter in Sydney.  Last November, apparently.
  
  Kind of handy except we already have Vultr and Binary Lane (an Aussie company) and OVH (French) and all the major players.
  
  
  
• Web spiders suck in general, and web spiders that explicitly ignore robots.txt suck twice as hard.  (Motherboard)
  
  Should call them web mosquitoes.
  
  
  
• I noticed that Amazon Australia finally has the Team MP34 4TB model at a reasonable price and I don't need to buy it from Amazon US.
  
  Except they don't.  It's a marketplace listing from Australian computer store Scorptec.  And it's cheaper on their own site.
  
  I'm planning to buy about 20 of these as I fit out all my new computers over the next year or so, so I got one to give a workout in my new laptop.
  
  There are some cheaper 4TB SSDs now but those are QLC and DRAMless which is fine for regular files but much less fine for databases and virtual servers.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme CPUs have been announced.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Z1 Extreme is the 7840U.  Literally the same chip, just marketed at handheld game consoles rather than laptops.  The Z1 is probably the 7640U or 7540U.
  
  AMD and Intel sell a lot more different chips than they actually make.  The Ryzen 7900, 7900X, and 7950X desktop CPUs and the 7945HX laptop CPU all have exactly the same silicon on them, and there are there are half a dozen other models with the same silicon but one fewer chip on board.  It costs a fortune to make a new chip, even based on an existing one, so when it is at all possibly to avoid doing so, they don't.
  
  All that said, the 7840U looks to be great.  I want that in my next laptop.  Which might be a while since I just bought one this morning.
  
  
  
• Oh, and speaking of Apple's overpriced toys, I priced a MacBook Pro with the same configuration as my new HP Pavilion 14.
  
  Almost exactly four times as much.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 27 2023 12:03 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 27 2023 04:18 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 27 2023 11:02 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 27 2023 09:34 PM (obo9H)

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• With SSD pricing in free fall - I just checked on the PNY CS2241 and the 4TB model is down by 45% since January - it is tempting to just buy a dozen of them and build a big RAID-5 array and forget about mechanical drives and their abysmal random I/O performance (one budget SSD can do as many random I/Os as two hundred mechanical drives) and their inevitable hardware failures.
  
  Except - how?  There are some expensive hardware NVMe RAID cards but they won't work in my case - literally - because my Hyte Y60 PC case only accepts one full-height card.  There are cheap half-height cards that take one or two SSDs but depend on channel bifurcation and most consumer motherboards just don't have the PCIe lanes.  And there's the SilverStone CS01-HS which tough luck I just bought the last two on the market.
  
  And then there's the Asus FlashStor 6 and 12 Pro, which are compact desktop boxes (12x8x2 inches) that take 6 and 12 M.2 SSDs respectively.  (AnandTech)
  
  The FlashStor 6 has dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports; the 12 Pro has a single 10Gb port.  Apart from that they share a 6W Intel Celeron N5105 CPU (not fast, but adequate for this kind of thing), 4GB of RAM, four USB ports, HDMI, and an S/PDIF audio output if you want to use one as a media server.
  
  Which is not a terrible idea: There are no noising spinning drives and the cooling fan is nearly silent at 18dB.
  
  These are real NASes too.  They run Btrfs where I'm a ZFS fan, but they support snapshots, SMB, NFS, iSCSI (so you can mount part of the space it as a dedicated rather than a shared disk), rsync, and a swarm of Docker apps if you're into that kind of thing.
  
  4GB of RAM will disappear fast if you're running Docker apps, but the memory is upgradeable using standard DDR4 SO-DIMMs, which I have lying around everywhere.  The specs say it goes to a maximum of 16GB, but I've seen reports that these Celeron chips work fine with 32GB.
  
  $449 for the FlashStor 6, $799 for the 12 Pro.  I'm going to get that one as soon as I can.  Even if I can't get 10Gb Ethernet running for the whole house it's small and quiet enough that it can sit in the main office rather than the computer room.
  
  Oh, and while there are no spinning drives included, either model will support up to two external expansion units with four 3.5" drives each if you need more capacity.

• If you need a tiny high-performance fanless router to complete your home network after CWWK (who?) has you covered.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The i5-1235U is more than three times the speed of the N5105 in the Asus NAS above, so it should be able to keep the packets flying through the six 2.5Gb Ethernet ports and the optional WiFi but you may have to fight with it to get your preferred operating system installed.  It comes with a preconfigured key for Windows 10/11 Pro - just download and install it and it will activate itself - but pfSense, Proxmox VE, and Ubuntu 22.04 all needed workarounds to get running.
  
  And if you hoped to run VMWare ESXi, just give up.  It doesn't work on Intel's big/little CPUs and there are no plans to fix that.
  
  Apart from all the Ethernet ports there are four USB ports and HDMI and DisplayPort, so if you want to run it as a media server....  Why?  Anyway, you can, and it has an M.2 slot and two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots for up to 64GB of RAM in case you have that lying around.
  
  
  
• If you want a 14" laptop with the Four Essential Keys in their proper location - in a column to the right of the main keyboard - reasonable CPU and graphics performance, a 1080p screen covering 100% of sRGB, and the ability to upgrade to 64GB of RAM using those DDR4 SO-DIMMs you have lying around, there is exactly one such model available: HP's Pavilion 14.
  
  Not the Pavilion Plus 14.  That has a better screen (2240x1400 or 2880x1800 options are available) but all Plus 14 models have soldered RAM.
  
  I skipped over this one not realising that it had dual SO-DIMM slots, but after checking and double-checking it really does, and the screen is far superior to options from Acer or Dell.
  
  Plus it's not at all expensive.  I'll be getting one of these.  I'm tempted to buy more than one, but since I'm planning to build some new desktop systems it wouldn't really make sense to do so.
  
  
  
• Stability AI - the people behind the open source Stable Diffusion image generation software - have launched an open source chatbot similar to ChatGPT.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Many - not all, but many - of the problems with ChatGPT are due to the biases of developers OpenAI.  As open source, you can afflict StableLM with your own preferred set of biases.
  
  
  
• Speaking of chatbots ever since Snapchat unveiled their chatbot they've been flooded with 1-star reviews.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oh no.  Anyway-
  
  
  
• Apple has won its antitrust battle with Epic Games...  Pyrrhically.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The court has ruled that Epic didn't prove that Apple was acting as a monopoly, but also that Apple couldn't forbid developers from linking to third-party payment processors to escape Apple's 30% skim.  
  
  Which was the entire reason for this fight.  Apple seems to have won the battle but lost the war, and Epic vice versa.
  
  
  
• Learn a trade.  (New Yorker)
  
  Web designers don't get called out at 4AM, but plumbing problems can't be outsourced to Bangalore.
  
  
  
• Disney is outsourcing 7000 people to /dev/null.  (The Verge)
  
  Also their dragon caught fire.  (CNN / MSN)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 25 2023 11:28 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Wednesday, April 26 2023 11:32 AM (zpcwY)

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• Don't let them eat cake: The mental patients recently stripped of their little blue warning labels contrived a campaign to block every paid subscriber to Twitter.  (Mashable)
  
  The article quotes Dril, a guy famous for once saying something mildly amusing about corncobs.
  
  Seriously, that's the kind of academic wizardry we're dealing with here.  They got one tiny bit of unearned recognition and they'll burn down the planet before they allow anyone else to have what they did.
  
  Since none of them ever says anything worthwhile, all this achieves is making it slightly more involved to mock them the way they deserve.
  
  And there's a very simple solution to all this: Make the Block button a paid feature.  Then everyone will be happy.
  
  Twitter took a slightly different tack: Handing out blue checks to leading proponents of the "Block the Blue" effort.  That works too.

• SSDs in laptops and desktops cost too much.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  SSD prices are in free fall but manufacturers still have inventory or long-term orders for miserable little 256GB devices, so even in the competitive PC market it will take some time for the backlog to clear out.
  
  At least with almost every Windows laptop you can take a backup, swap the SSD yourself, and restore.  With a MacBook you're just fucked.
  
  
  
• And here's a handy...  Well, not handy, exactly, but anyway here's a guide on doing just that.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Particularly if your laptop dates from 2013.
  
  
  
• Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake chips will have an L4 cache.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And faster integrated graphics.  Intel last had an L4 cache with, I think, Broadwell, their 5th generation CPUs.
  
  (Though these generations start after a couple of dozen earlier generations, so they don't mean all that much.)
  
  
  
• Lenovo's new Tab M8 Gen 4 is garbage.  (Liliputing)
  
  As I said yesterday, the small tablet market consists of the iPad Mini and a bunch of suck, and this is the suck.  It's actually worse than their Tab M8 Gen 3.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 has a 17" ultrawide main screen - quite a good one - plus an 8" tablet screen to the right of the main keyboard.  (Thurrott)
  
  This is almost an interesting idea.  It lacks the Four Essential Keys bit that smaller screen is touch and pen-enabled so you can program it with whatever buttons you might need.
  
  Only problem there is it's basically one of Lenovo's small tablets built into a laptop, and Lenovo's small tablets are a bunch of suck.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT can beat Google search, says, uh, an AI ethicist.  (ZDNet)
  
  Rather than training AI to answer questions - which it can't do - why not train it to filter out all the AI-generated shit polluting search results?
  
  I presume the answer is money.  The less time you spend crawling through search results trying to find something that isn't shit, the less ads you see.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 24 2023 11:16 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 24 2023 11:21 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 25 2023 04:58 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 25 2023 05:09 AM (BMUHC)

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• The 7730U isn't a 6800U, but the 7735U is.  AMD's 7000-series numbering is even worse than I thought.
  
  
  
• We all contribute to the municipal sewage system.  Should we get paid?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Actually they're talking about AI, but the same principle applies.  If your output had any value, you would have been paid already.
  
  Sam Altman-Fried, CEO of OpenAI, thinks sewer-contributors should be paid.  This is because his company has an intrinsic value in the millions but a temporary market cap in the billions, and he wants urgently to pull up the ladder behind him before anyone else can climb up and shove him off the ledge.
  
  
  

Tech News

• HP's Omen 17 has the best keyboard layout of any laptop.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It not only has the Four Essential Keys, but a full desktop cursor section (thirteen keys in total) and six programmable macro keys to the left of the main keyboard section.
  
  Other than that there's either a 16-core 13700HX or a 24-core 13900HX CPU - both of them power-hungry beasts, but this is a 17" gaming laptop so that is rather what you'd expect to find, a choice of Nvidia RTX 4060/70/80/90 graphics, up to 64GB of RAM and 16TB of SSD (if you install your own), and a 2560x1440 165Hz or 240Hz screen covering close to 100% of sRGB.  Not perfect for artists or video editors, but just fine for most users.
  
  Large and heavy (2.8kg) but that goes with the territory.
  
  I hadn't noticed before that this has the six macro keys; that's true of last year's model as well, which is currently selling at 30% off with a 3080 Ti.
  
  
  
• But this is probably not the year to spend big on a hot and heavy gaming laptop, because next year everything is going to change.  (WCCFTech)
  
  AMD's Zen 5 chips will be coming out in the latter half of 2024, both desktop and laptop.
  
  Fire Range will replace Dragon Range in high-end laptops, swapping 16 Zen 5 cores for the current 16 Zen 4 cores.  Nothing dramatic but probably about 25% faster.
  
  Strix Point will replace the current Phoenix chips for mid-range laptops, upping the current 8 Zen 4 cores to 12 Zen 5 cores, and 12 RDNA3 graphics cores to 16 RDNA3+ cores.  That will give a nice graphics boost - comparable to a dedicated RTX 3050 - and a huge CPU boost, bringing next year's midrange just behind the fastest laptops available today.
  
  And then there's Strix Point Halo.  This will offer 16 Zen 5 cores, 40 RDNA3+ graphics cores, and a 256-bit memory bus.  That should be able to match not an RTX 3050 but a (laptop) RTX 4070.  The laptop 4070 is basically a desktop 4060 which is comparable to a 3070 Ti, or if that's too complicated for you, it should be faster than an Xbox Series X or Playstation 5.
  
  This chip will use 90W of power, but in a gaming laptop with an Intel CPU and Nivida graphics, both of those chips are using more than 90W of power right now.
  
  It's very unlikely we'll see this in a laptop with upgradeable RAM - they rarely include even one DIMM slot, so four is out of the question - but with the 256-bit bus manufacturers will finally be forced to include at least 32GB.
  
  
  
• Speaking of laptop manufacturers, we hates them.  I'm still looking for a laptop that fits my needs:
  
  - A 13" or 14" QHD+ screen (that is, 2560x1440 or higher)
  - The Four Essential Keys
  - Upgradeable RAM or at least 32GB of fixed RAM
  - Graphics that don't entirely suck - at least equal to AMD's 6800U's integrated graphics
  
  What is actually available?
  
  - HP's new Pavilion Aero, with a 13" 2560x1600 screen, a 6800U processor, exactly the keyboard layout I want, and a maximum of 16GB of RAM
  
  - Also from HP the Pavilion Plus 14, with a 2880x1800 OLED screen, a 12700H processor, exactly the keyboard layout I want, and a maximum of 16GB of RAM
  
  - From Gigabyte the Aero 14 (the industry ran out of names and has to recycle), with a 14" 2880x1800 OLED display, a 13700H processor, Nvidia RTX 4050 graphics, exactly the keyboard layout I want, and a maximum of 16GB of RAM
  
  - From Asus the Rog Zephyrus G14, with a 14" 2560x1600 screen, an AMD 7940HS processor (which already has integrated graphics that are fast enough for me), Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics as well, 16GB of fixed ram but also a free slot for another 16GB or 32GB, four programmable macro keys...  And no sign of the Four Essential Keys.
  
  - Also from Asus the Zenbook 14, with another 14" 2880x1880 OLED screen, an Intel 13900H CPU, Nvidia RTX 3050 graphics, 32GB of fixed RAM...  And neither macro keys nor the Four Essential Keys.
  
  - Also from Asus the Zenbook Pro Duo 14, with yet another of those 14" 2880x1800 OLED screens plus a 2880x864 LCD touchscreen, an Intel 13900H processor, Nvidia RTX 4050 graphics, 32GB of fixed RAM, no Four Essential Keys but with that second touch screen you can configure as many keys as you want...  But not only is it expensive but with that second screen there is no palm rest so it's basically impossible to use unless you're sitting at a desk and if I was sitting at a desk I wouldn't need a laptop.  (Except for a couple of days a year.)
  
  - The Framework Laptop, with a 13" 2256x1504 display, a selection of CPUs with Zen 4 chips on the way, up to 64GB of RAM and whatever SSD you want, configurable I/O ports, and 21 available keyboard layouts not a single one of which includes the Four Essential Keys.
  
  - From Lenovo the ThinkPad L14 G3, with a Ryzen 5875U CPU, up to 64GB of RAM, the Four Essential Keys albeit not quite where I would like them, and a truly mediocre 14" 1080p screen.  (The same colour problems I mentioned with Acer's laptops.)
  
  - Lenovo's ThinkPad E14 Intel edition, with the 4EK and upgradeable RAM, but a mediocre screen and a mediocre CPU, though they do have the option of mediocre dedicated graphics.
  
  - Lenovo's ThinkPad T14s, again with the 4EK but a mediocre screen and 16GB of soldered RAM.
  
  - Lenovo's ThinkPad Z13 which is 30% off right now, with a Ryzen 6850U, up to 32GB of fixed RAM, a 13" 2880x1800 OLED display (there's a lot of that going about), and unlike every other ThinkPad ever made no sign of the Four Essential Keys.
  
  - Lenovo's ThinkPad P14s Gen 3 AMD, with - wait.  That option wasn't there yesterday.  With the Four Essential Keys though not in my preferred layout, a Ryzen 6850U CPU so solid performance and good integrated graphics at low power, up to 32GB of soldered RAM, a good selection of I/O ports including wired Ethernet, and a build-to-order option of a 14" 3840x2400 colour-calibrated display covering 100% of DCI-P3.
  
  Only problem is, it is not 30% off right now, with all the build-to-order options it costs A$4000.
  
  - And finally Lenovo's - yes, again - ThinkPad P14s Gen 3 Intel edition, with a 1240P CPU, Nvidia T550 workstation graphics which are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to workstation graphics but are about as fast as the integrated graphics in the Ryzen 6850U above which means at least passable, 8GB or 16GB of soldered RAM but also a free RAM slot so you can go up to 40GB albeit not in dual-channel mode - and is 30% off right now.
  
  Lenovo alone sells 76 models of 13" and 14" laptops, and even they only come close to getting it right when you go through ever single build-to-order option.
  
  Also, they're the only major manufacturer in Australia that still does build-to-order.
  
  I think the solution is to buy two laptops.  It's actually cheaper to buy two mass-produced 16GB models than one built-to-order 32GB model with the specs I want. 
  
  
  
• The best small tablets you can buy today.  (ZDNet)
  
  Spoiler: It's the iPad Mini and a bunch of suck.

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 24 2023 03:20 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 24 2023 09:50 AM (BMUHC)

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• The 7730U isn't a 6800U, but a 5800U.  We'll get to why that matters in a moment.
  
  
  
• Apple isn't planning to release an M2 update to the Mac Studio over worries that it will compete with the Mac Pro. (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
• Which doesn't exist. (WCCFTech)
  
  And if and when it does show up, will have RAM soldered in place, making it not so much a professional workstation as a highly polished turd.
  
  Soldered RAM is a disaster in laptops when it comes to any kind of professional use. It's inexcusable in a workstation-class desktop.

• The Asus Vivobook 15X is almost a very good laptop.  (Asus)
  
  It has a 15.6" 120Hz 2880x16201 OLED display covering 100% of DCI-P3 colour, the Four Essential Keys in the form of a three-column numeric keypad, an eight core 15W Ryzen 7730U CPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, a 1TB SSD2, a physical webcam privacy shutter (something I appreciate since I work from home and have to join online meetings multiple times a day), one USB-C, three USB-A, HDMI, and a headphone jack (no microSD here either), and a separate power jack if you don't want to charge over USB-C.
  
  There are just a couple of problems with this.
  
  First, the digit 3 in 7730U means it's a Zen 3 chip despite being a 7000-series CPU, and the most recent Zen 3 U-series chip is the 6800U.  But the 6800U doesn't work with DDR4 RAM, so either the specs are wrong, or...  Well, the specs aren't wrong.  The 7730U isn't last year's 6800U, but the previous year's 5800U.
  
  It's not exactly the same; the CPU side of things runs 100MHz faster.  But the performance differences between the CPU sides of the three chips are minimal, and all are very strong performers given their minimal power draw.
  
  On the graphics side though the 7730U is a potato compared to the 6800U.  Not even half as fast.  It's comparable with Intel's Xe graphics at lower power, but that's all.
  
  Oh, and that screen resolution?  It's an "up to".  An up to that doesn't exist.  The 1TB SSD is also an up to, but at least you can upgrade that yourself.
  
  And the RAM is half-upgradeable - 8GB soldered and 8GB in an SO-DIMM.  So in theory you can upgrade to 40GB though that will lose dual-channel mode.  I'm not sure exactly how bad that would be for performance but it couldn't be worse than running out entirely with 16GB of soldered RAM.
  
  It is cheap, and it's light at 1.6kg, and the screen, whole only 1080p, really is OLED and really does cover 100% of DCI-P3.
  
  I keep mentioning that, and I should explain what it means.  DCI-P3 is the colour system used for digital movie projection, so if your screen covers 100% of that, it means it can display every colour visible in an IMAX cinema.
  
  The Acer laptop I mentioned yesterday can't do that.  I couldn't find a review of the exact model that measured the screen colours, but two similar models clocked in at 36% and 38% of DCI-P3, which is, um, bad.  My current laptop covers 100% of the smaller sRGB colour space, or did before the screen went funny, which was quite acceptable if not startlingly vivid.  The Acer screen covers about 54% of sRGB.  That's like looking outside on a cloudy day through a dirty window.
  
  The Vivobook can't go all the way to 64GB of RAM and doesn't have a discrete graphics card.  On the other hand it should run much cooler and has a vastly better screen, though not as vastly better as Asus tried to make me believe.
  
  It's not much more expensive despite the Acer being discounted by 45% right now and the Asus being at list price.
  
  So maybe.
  
  There's a model that fixes all of these shortcomings: 3200x2000 screen, 13980HX, 32GB RAM upgradeable to 64GB, and an RTX 4060.  It does cost A$3399 vs A$1399 though.  Also it's not available.
  
  
  
• There is no AI, only Zuul.  (New Yorker)
  
  The article explains that what is currently being touted as AI is nothing of the sort, just a glorified typeahead tool, and the concerns about its impact are mostly nonsensical.
  
  It then -this is the New Yorker after all - proposes a global totalitarian nightmare state to allay these delusional fears.
  
  Yeah.  No.
  
  
  
• I'm not sure if all AI ethicists are fascists, but the correlation is unmistakable.  (Overcoming Bias)
  
  Build a bridge out of them.
  
  
  
• The Atari 800 XL is back.  (Revive Machines)
  
  Almost.  Well, an FPGA implementation of it.
  
  I only read up on the details of the Atari internals recently.  The custom graphics chip was a clear predecessor to the Amiga hardware and much more sophisticated than I had realised.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT can write code.  The code is terrible.  (The Register)
  
  ChatGPT is aware of this, but won't tell you unless you ask.  Or possibly even then.
  
  
  
• Google's Bard chatbot has also been updated to write code.  (The Verge)
  
  Bard is, if anything, less reliable than ChatGPT.
  
  
  
• Twitter has stopped labeling state-affiliated media as "state-affiliated media" after the state-affiliated media threatened to leave the platform over being labeled as "state-affiliated media".  (The Verge)
  
  The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command.
  

Dear Current Anime Season, What Is Preventing You From Looking Like This Video of the Day

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, April 23 2023 01:30 AM (r9O5h)

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• The Blue Cheka lost their glittering little symbols of false legitimacy today, and there was a great weeping and a gnashing of teeth.  (The Verge)
  
  But I don't have any teeth.
  
  TEETH WILL BE PROVIDED.
  
  
  
• Can ActivityPub save the internet?  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, the same way NNTP did.

• Speaking of a great weeping and a gnashing of teeth Buzzfeed News is shutting down and firing 180 staff.  (Variety)
  
  So, first, Buzzfeed News by itself had 180 staff?
  
  Second, whatever you think of Buzzfeed, they actually published the Steele Dossier when everyone else was hiding it from view.
  
  
  
• Is Intel's slowest CPU any good?  (AnandTech)
  
  Yes, actually.
  
  The 13100F only has four cores and costs around $100 but it is faster than the eight core Ryzen 1700 I was using until last year.
  
  Faster than the laptop I am typing this on, faster than the Xeon E-2136 I use as a development environment, and not much slower than a 1240P laptop.
  
  
  
• Speaking of 1240P laptops, I'm thinking of buying an Acer Aspire 7.
  
  It doesn't have a high-resolution screen, just 1080p.
  
  The Four Essential Keys aren't in my preferred layout.
  
  But it has a decent CPU (last year's i5-1240P, if you hadn't guessed), dedicated graphics (just a GTX 1650, but plenty for playing Minecraft on the go), charges over either a dedicated port or Thunderbolt / USB-C, and has easily replaceable DDR4 RAM which I already have 128GB of sitting around.  Apart from the Thunderbolt port it has three USB-A ports, HDMI, and a headphone jack - and wired Ethernet, which is becoming a rarity these days.  No microSD slot but I can get by without that.
  
  It's a bit on the big and heavy side - it's a 15" model and the same size and weight as the 16" Gigabyte Aero I like -  but it also has the advantage of being around one fifth the price of the Aero.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Oh, right, the reason that came up is because (a) my current laptop has 16GB of RAM and 16GB simply isn't enough.  32GB is a good minimum; 64GB if I want to run Linux VMs locally for testing.
  
  Which I do, because I currently pay ($TOO_MUCH) per month for a dedicated development server in Sydney.  It runs pretty well, and has six cores, 32GB of RAM, and 800GB of SSD, which is all I could ask for.
  
  But it's a virtualised dedicated server and as such can't run VMs itself, only containers.  Since I already have RAM and an SSD for upgrades the laptop could take over and pay for itself in six months, while at the same time being a (mostly) better laptop than my current laptop.
  
  
  
• The RTX 4070 isn't selling so Nvidia is making less of them.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There's more money to be made selling high-end cards at $30,00 a pop to AI nuts.
  
  The GPU market is AMD's to scoop up at this point but they haven't released any new cards since the 7900 XT.
  
  
  
• The Asus Ally handheld game console should squish the Steam Deck in terms of performance.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It has 8 Zen 4 CPU cores vs. 4 Zen 2 cores on the Steam Deck, and 6 RDNA3 graphics cores vs. 4 RDNA2 cores.  (RDNA3 is about 30% faster than RDNA2 for a given core count.)
  
  Price and launch date have yet to be announced.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 21 2023 09:31 PM (obo9H)

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• Substack has been doing well as a not-exactly-a-social-network that lets writers connect directly with their audience - and get paid for it.
  
  The company recently released a new feature called Notes...  Which is a social network.  It's a Twitter clone.
  
  Does this mean Substack is going to turn into a crab?
  
  Maybe, says Tom Knighton, and that would kill Substack.  
  
  Maybe not, says Holly Math Nerd, but it will be a constant battle against all the other crabs in the bucket who demand that you be one of them.
  
  Substack has a revenue model that works for them; they're not dependent on advertising.  They're not the size of Twitter, let alone Facebook, and never will be, but it works for them.  The longer they can hold out against carcinisation the better, but we are all crabs in the end.

• Snapchat now offers a free AI chatbot to all users.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Nobody knows why they did this, but they do.
  
  
  
• Google employees begged the company not to release Bard, its AI chatbot, calling it "worse than useless" and "a pathological liar" and "barely smarter than an AI ethicist pulling down $500k in salary and shares and producing no work of any value to anyone".  (The Verge)
  
  Google took the hint and fired the complainers and released Bard, which to be fair is in fact worse than useless, a pathological, and barely smarter than an AI ethicist, but still has a job.
  
  
  
• The integrated graphics in the new Ryzen 7000 chips are about as fast as a Radeon RX 570.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is a few years old now - my 2017 Dell desktop had a slightly faster RX 580 - but is very, very good for integrated graphics in a laptop.
  
  The upcoming AMD Framework 13 model will have this chip.
  
  (This is different to the high-end 16-core laptop chips from AMD, which are repackaged desktop chips and come with much slower integrated graphics but are usually paired with something fast and expensive.)
  
  
  
• Speaking of fast and expensive Intel is preparing cooling solutions for future 2000W chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Might I suggest winter in Montana?  That should do the trick.
  
  
  
• m=2, n=4  (Medium)
  
  There is one (positive integer) solution for m^n = n^m, and that's it.  The article explains how we know that's the only solution.  
  
  
  
• Major retailers are walking back their plans for the Metaverse after realising what everyone else already knew: It's complete shit.  (Modern Retail)
  
  Facebook's tech demos look like they were produced in the 90s.  It's a very 90s idea, really - skeuomorphism gone mad - and it should have stayed there.
  
  
  
• Why everyone has their wires crossed.  (Quanta)
  
  In human beings, the left side of the body is wired up to the right side of the brain, and vice versa.  This is odd, but it's also true of chimps and orangutans, horses, pigs, cows, sloths, duck-billed platypuses, whales, birds, lizards, fish, lobsters, crabs (those bastards), and many types of worm.
  
  Every animal with bilateral symmetry and something resembling a brain.
  
  Why?
  
  It makes the wiring easier.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, April 20 2023 10:17 PM (qgsyb)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, April 21 2023 01:29 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 21 2023 05:47 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: meh at Saturday, April 22 2023 01:19 PM (B2YdP)

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Top Story

• Carcinisation is the process whereby everything that isn't already a crab, gradually becomes a crab. (Wikipedia)
  
  King crabs are not crabs. Nor are porcelain crabs, or hermit crabs, or coconut crabs, or hairy stone crabs. They are all the result of carcinisation, where various other decapod crustaceans evolved exactly the same outward characteristics as true crabs, to the point that you can't really tell them apart.
  
  This also happens to social networks.
  
  Yes, they turn into crabs.
  
  
  
• Not my analogy either: This article by Ellis Hamburger (really) formerly of Snap - the company behind Snapchat - makes the point that all social networks start out as butterflies and evolve into crabs. (The Verge)
  
  It's well-written and has the insights expected of someone who spent years on the inside of one of these companies watching naive promises gradually wither in the face of commercial reality and the fact that people in large groups basically suck.
  
  The author doesn't have a solution to this and doesn't pretend to offer one:

  Users seem doomed to be unhappy in this overquantified world of "social." And businesses seem doomed to expect more from the social services they create. Perhaps this was just a blip in the journey of tech, born of a time when oversharing was novel and fun. Indeed, I remember the joy of posting hundreds of photos to Facebook the day after a party, excited to relive those memories with friends. At the time, it felt like a new form of connection.

  Now, I just text them.

  A big part of the reason here is that the financial incentives of the social media companies are horribly skewed:

  However, the promise of ads may simply be too good to turn down. Advertisers are simply willing to pay more for the product than its actual users. In Facebook’s case, the company makes something like $200 per year of ad revenue on each American user, but how many of those users would pay $15 / month to use Facebook? According to one study, not many.

  If you're more valuable as a product than as a customer, that's how you can expect to be treated.
  
  The thing is, the ads really aren't worth anything. I've seen one ad in all my years on social media that inspired me to buy something, and I didn't, and now I've forgotten what it was for.

Tech News

• Cory Doctorow, writing about TikTok, called this process "enshittification". (Pluarlistic)
  
  They're editing the likes of Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, and Roald Dahl to avoid offending modern sensibilities - of illiterates - but at least we have a new generation of wordsmiths like Doctorow to fill in the gap.
  
  Bitter sarcasm aside, Doctorow has been observing the tech industry for a long time, and when he is reporting fact rather than his personal opinions he can provide some useful insights.
  
  He's a lefty - worse, a left-libertarian - so his preferred solution to every problem is to leave everything in the hands of private companies but regulate bad outcomes out of existence, which works about as well as holding your breath until you turn blue and requires about the same level of intellectual effort.
  
  He is at least partly right: Twitter has crippled its APIs for exactly the same reason that Amazon murdered its Smile program where you could direct a tiny percentage of the value of your purchases to a charity of your choice: You're already on the platform, and the competition is already dead, so they don't give a fuck anymore. You're just crabs in the bucket with them, and they're the big crab.
  
  
  
• And finally just by way of comparison here's the same argument made by a doctrinaire lefty who is just so stuffed full of love that she'll beat your brains out with a claw hammer if you so much as blink in the middle of her five-and-a-half thousand word temper tantrum. (Substack)
  
  Five and a half thousand words of blaming every bad thing that has ever happened on "the right", from Twitter being taken over by fascists like Vijaya Gadde to her favourite shade of eyeshadow (moonbat grey) being withdrawn because of lethal levels of cadmium compounds.
  
  Even she recognises that all social networks turn to shit.
  
  She just doesn't recognise her own role in that process.
  
  
  
• Minisforum has a cheap Ryzen 7735HS based mini PC wait is that the ASRock industrial SBC I spy? (AnandTech)
  
  Looks like it, with the two HDMI ports on the back and the two USB-C ports at the front. I'll have to do a close check.
  
  
  
• Broader price cuts might be coming to the RTX 4070. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nvidia's 3000 series cards all sold out immediately at launch. The 4000 series cards have never been difficult to find - because people just aren't buying them.
  
  
  
• Nvidia doesn't care much because their growth market isn't $600 cards for gamers, it's $30,000 cards for AI startups. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Elon Musk reportedly just bought thousands of such cards for his new venture, X.AI.
  
  The AI boom is the new blockchain boom, only worse for everyone.
  
  
  
• Twitter meanwhile will no longer suspend your account for the vile crime of (checks notes) correctly identifying someone's name of gender. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The previous regime at Bird Central treated this as worse than murder. The usual suspects are up in arms that the corporate stormtroopers are no longer willing to enforce their delusions.
  
  
  
• Firefly can compile BEAM applications to WASM. (GitHub)
  
  Which sounds like a complete fucking nightmare to me, but it can also compile BEAM applications to native code, which could be great.
  
  BEAM is the runtime environment for Erlang, the language invented by Ericsson to run large-scale telephone switches. The idea behind Erlang is that if a system is large enough, some part of it is guaranteed to be broken at any time. You can't predict failures, but you can predict with certainty that failures will happen.
  
  Erlang is designed to handle this and automatically pick up whichever part of the system has died and get it running again on whichever parts of the system are still working. It's robust and powerful and at least reasonably efficient, but running Erlang applications means first installing a complex and unfamiliar environment. Like Java written by aliens.
  
  Firefly should make it possible to deploy Erlang applications just like you would anything else. And to run them in the browser too, though nobody in their right mind would try that.
  
  
  
• Reddit will begin charging for its API. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Remains to be seen if the plans they offer are as stupid as Twitter's.
  
  
  
• Next-gen Python tooling, written in Rust. (Astral)
  
  The secret to making Python run fast is not to use Python.
  
  I suppose slow corporate suicide is better than fast.
  
  
  
• The FTC is planning to target AI that violates civil rights (what?) or is deceptive. (Reuters)
  
  Not sure how AI could violate civil rights, even in law, let alone in practice.
  
  But given that LLMs like ChatGPT are trained explicitly to lie, the industry is fucked if the FTC actually follows through here.
  
  
  
• An open letter to epic fantasy readers. (Monster Hunter Nation)
  
  Basically a slap in the face to Patrick Rothfuss and George R. R. Martin:

  I’ve written something like 25 novels, 50 short stories, 6 novellas, edited 4 anthologies, and even wrote a non-fiction book about gun rights since George Martin’s last Game of Thrones novel came out

  My italics.
  
  I read the first Game of Thrones book. It was certainly well-written, but all the characters were awful. I never read further, and never watched the TV show.
  
  I read half of the first volume of Patrick Rothfuss' series, whatever it is called. The character introduced at the beginning is interesting. He has a past; he has depth, and damage, and is still standing and trying to do the right thing. So the book immediately ditches him for a literally interminable flashback to his past as a whiny kid who never fails at anything and deserves only to be served up as dragon bait.
  
  It don't know why those two series took up so much mindshare when there's so much else on offer - old and new - but it's probably to do with crabs.

Never Fear Music Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, April 19 2023 06:51 PM (obo9H)

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 20 2023 03:30 AM (PiXy!)

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