• Bluesky wants to reinvent Usenet only worse and more expensive and with ads.  (The Verge)
  
  And censorship.  They don't say that, but you can bet on it.

• Heroku did in fact just do that.  (Open Folder)
  
  The developer here has a Heroku setup using their queueing service to make sure emails are send out to users.  Each event place in the queue is guaranteed to be delivered exactly once, so each user gets one email.
  
  So Heroku gave them a second ghost queue, which they can't turn off but which magically duplicates every single email.
  
  
  
• Llamas in pajamas are coming down the stairs.  (Together.xyz)
  
  RedPajama replicates the entire 1.2 trillion token training set of Meta's LLaMA as open source.
  
  LLaMA is a competitor to OpenAI's GPT.
  
  GPT is an artificial radical leftist college sophomore with a meth habit.
  
  
  
• UPC barcodes are going to be completely replaced by QR codes everywhere in the world by 2027 except that obviously isn't going to happen how fucking stupid are you wait it's Axios the answer is all.  You are all the stupid.  (Axios)
  
  Possibly more than all the stupid.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 18 2023 09:35 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, April 18 2023 10:10 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 19 2023 01:02 AM (2Mei2)

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• I noted last week that the RTX 4070 was overpriced in Australia, needing to be under $1000 if it were to have any chance of success.
  
  Today - just days after the launch - some cards have already been reduced to $999.
  
  Still fat and ugly - the nicer two-slot models have not seen price cuts - but at least slightly less horribly expensive.
  
  
  
• The Gigabyte Aero 16 is also overpriced in Australia.
  
  Just saying.

• If you just updated your development server from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 and all your LXC containers lost their IP addresses, it's probably a firewall thing.  (Linux Containers)
  
  And what's more, an easily fixed firewall thing.  Basically LXC can't talk to itself to obtain its own IP addresses.  Dumb but fixable.
  
  
  
• Starlark is Python with all the exciting stuff removed.  (GitHub)
  
  Making it safe to use as an embedded scripting language.
  
  In fact, you can embed it within Python to use Python code to script other Python code.  Only the library to do that doesn't pass callables in either direction - except for the print function - so back to Lupa and LuaJIT I go.
  
  I mean, I could overload the print function to do everything I need, but it's kind of hacky.
  
  
• Leading AI companies are eager for onerous government regulation.  (New York Times)
  
  Because - though the article fails to grasp this obvious point because it is written by an idiot - that will crush smaller competitors.
  
  
  
• Finland just fired up a new nuclear reactor, the first in Europe in 18 years.  (Reuters)
  
  Right as Germany shut theirs down.
  
  One country will be snug and warm next winter.  The other will get to freeze in the dark.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Tab M9 is here, so if you wanted a small (ish) Android tablet with a crappy low-resolution screen, you can now choose from 7, 8, or 9 inches.  (Liliputing)
  
  The 7 inch model is complete garbage though.
  
  Still no replacement for the Tab M8 FHD.  Not from Lenovo, not from anyone.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, April 18 2023 06:13 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 18 2023 01:00 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 18 2023 06:32 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 19 2023 01:06 AM (2Mei2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 19 2023 01:50 PM (PiXy!)

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• Future ChatGPT versions could replace a majority of work people do today says Ben Goertzel, an idiot.  (ZDNet)

  "You don't need to be incredibly creative and innovative or make big leaps to do most people's jobs, as it turns out," said Goertzel.

  Perhaps not, but if you're a pathological liar, people tend to notice.
  
  And that's what ChatGPT is.  It's inherent in the design, because it's a language model, not a fact model.

  "Tools like Grammarly decrease the need for human copy editors," Goertzel said. "They don't entirely eliminate [the job] but they decrease that need. Automatic tools [can be used for] writing journalistic articles. They've been writing ... sports score summaries and weather reports for a long time."

  Seeing some of the crap that passes for journalism, you could replace the whole lot with a short Perl script and get better results.

• Sales of hard drives have dropped by 35% in the past year maybe.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Maybe not, because half the numbers in the chart provided are obviously wrong, but sales do appear to be down.
  
  
  
• Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, says UFOs may be probes sent down by an alien mothership to study mankind and steal our women and/or cows.  (Politico)
  
  Or maybe not, because that is stupid.
  
  
  
• Kotlin 2 is here, with static extensions, collection literals, name-based destructuring, context receivers, and explicit fields.  (Jetbrains)
  
  I have no idea what any of those things are.
  
  
  
• The perfect-ish notebook at an imperfect price: The 2023 Gigabyte Aero 16.  (IT Pro)
  
  Let's take a quick look at the specs:
  
  16" 3840x2400 (16:10) 60Hz OLED screen
  Intel Core i7 13900H (6P + 8E cores)
  Nvidia RTX 4070 with 8GB VRAM
  32GB RAM upgradeable to 64GB
  1TB SSD upgradeable to 16GB (two M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots)
  Two Thunderbolt 4 ports
  One additional USB-C port
  One USB-A port
  HDMI
  micro SD
  Combo audio jack
  Dedicated 240W power connector (it can also charge more slowly via USB-C)
  The Four Essential Keys exactly where they should be
  
  And it weighs in at a svelte 1.9kg.  Or maybe 2.1kg, depending on whether you read Gigabyte's specs or the review.
  
  There's just one small oint in the flyment: That model costs $2299 in the US - not cheap, but not unreasonable for a high-end laptop - but A$4999 down under.

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 17 2023 06:38 AM (obo9H)

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• I did not get woken up at five in the morning by an emergency.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has been granted a five year license to launch Starship, the most important advance in rocketry since the days of Robert Goddard.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
• Once.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Because this is the federal government we're talking about.

• Elon Musk, who co-founded ChatGPT creator OpenAI but parted ways with the company in 2018 and more recently signed on to an open letter calling for a moratorium on AI research has just founded a new AI company.  (The Verge)
  
  It's called X.AI.
  
  And the company that now owns Twitter is called X.
  
  Which might be a hint as to where things are headed.
  
  
  
• Twitter competitor Parler meanwhile just got bought and shut down.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Temporarily - probably - but the fact remains that the site is currently off line.
  
  
  
• If you don't stamp out all dissent you're probably a Nazi.  (Tech Dirt)
  
  Actually, scratch the "probably".  Mike Masnick is insane.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 16 2023 12:29 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, April 16 2023 12:56 AM (r9O5h)

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• The project at work that has been eating all my time lately is winding down now, leaving me only 200% busy instead of 500%.
  
  
  
• The hackers who hit Western Digital got away with 10TB of data.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which is smaller than my Steam library, so it rather depends on what's in there.
  
  They're asking for at least $10 million in ransom not to release it to the public.  I doubt they're going to get a penny.
  
  
  

Tech News

• A suspect has been arrested in the San Francisco murder of Cash App founder Bob Lee.  (Mission Local)
  
  Nima Momeni is apparently another tech executive and knew Lee, and they were seen together on the night of the killing.
  
  Much has been made about this murder and San Francisco's descent into chaos under the policies of communist nutcases, and now that a suspect has been arrested the media are trying to pretend that this means that San Francisco is somehow not descending into chaos.
  
  Hey, we arrested one guy for one crime.  That means that everything is okay.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 4070 is here, and at least in Australia they killed it on pricing.
  
  That is, the pricing killed it.  Between A$1100 and A$1250, when it needed to be under A$1000.
  
  At the high end it's only $100 cheaper than a 4070 Ti, and just $50 cheaper than the currently discounted models of AMD's Radeon 7900 XT, a much more capable card.
  
  The 4070 is a compact and well-designed two-slot card - if you can get the Nvidia Founder's Edition, which we can't here.  Almost all the available cards are much larger cards and hideously ugly.  The hold-out in that trend is Inno3D, not a leading brand, but they've come up with some reasonably nice two-slot designs, and a choice of black/silver and white/silver if you want to match your case.  They have a two-slot 4070 Ti in the same black/silver design as well.
  
  Still undecided which way to go here.  The 20GB 7900 XT is very competitive against anything Nvidia has right now unless you specifically want to play games with ray tracing, or run code that uses the Cuda compute API.   On the other hand, I'd probably be just fine with a 6700 at one third the price.
  
  
  
• The Radeon 6800 and 6800 XT have received price cuts to compete with the 4070 if you can find them which I can't.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Radeon 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT have ceased to exist in Australia.  I can get a not entirely terrible deal on a 6800 if I want to bother importing it from the US which I don't.
  
  Again the 6700 sings its siren song, before that too disappears.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, the dirt-cheap pricing on the 4TB Team MP34 has reached these shores, so I can buy it from a local retailer (that is, within a day's travel of New House City) instead of importing from the US.
  
  I plan on getting at least five of these for my new PCs; it's less than half the price of equivalent drives from only a year ago, and it's a proper TLC model with DRAM cache, not a DRAMless QLC model like the Crucial P3, the only competition it has in its price range.
  
  

Posted by: furball321 at Saturday, April 15 2023 12:40 AM (VZYxJ)

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• Nvidia's RTX 4070 is here and it's not terrible.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's as fast as the previous generation's RTX 3080 while being $100 cheaper and using 40% less power, or to put it another way, 20% more expensive and 30% faster than the RTX 3070.
  
  It has 12GB of VRAM as standard which is enough in most cases, but I wouldn't buy an 8GB card for a system I wanted to use for gaming.  (A cheap 8GB card for light gaming is a different matter.)
  
  It's a regular two-slot card rather than the monstrous three-slot models that Nvidia and its partners have been shipping lately, and though Nvidia recommends a 650W power supply and it includes a 300W-rated 12-pin power connector, it should run in pretty much any system built in recent memory.
  
  Paired with a Ryzen 7900 (65W based power, around 90W peak) it should provide a almost reasonably priced and very capable system for serious work and what was high end gaming just a few months ago while running happily on a 450W power supply.

• Something that isn't reasonably priced is Intel's new Xeon W-2400 CPUs.  The 24 core model - which is the cheapest one in the range that has a chance of being faster than a Ryzen 7950X - costs nearly three times as much as a 7950X; four times as much as a 7900.
  
  Scratch that idea.
  
  
  
• The EU says Broadcom's proposed acquisition of VMWare could restrict competition...  In the Fiber Channel HBA market.  (Reuters)
  
  Dire news for both the people still using Fiber Channel.
  
  
  
• The liquidators sent in to salvage what remained of FTX have apparently actually been doing their jobs.  (Reuters)
  
  So far they've recovered $7.3 billion of about $10 billion that disappeared, which rather justifies the no doubt hefty fees they are receiving.
  
  
  
• The ACCC (Australia's equivalent to the FTC, more or less) wants new powers to crack down on online businesses.  (The Guardian)
  
  Get fu-
  
  That deliberately make it hard to cancel subscriptions.
  
   Understandable.  Have a nice day.
  
  
  
• NPR has become the first "major" "news" organisation to leave Twitter, flouncing off the platform after being accurately labelled as state-affiliated media.  (The Verge)
  
  Lol, as the kids are wont to say.  Lmao.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 13 2023 11:36 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 14 2023 12:26 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 15 2023 12:01 AM (BMUHC)

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• The best new lightweight laptop may be an old lightweight laptop.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If you're looking for a new lightweight Windows laptop and don't want to wait until eventually AMD models show up, you might be better off buying a model from last year while they're clearing out old stock.
  
  Intel's mainstream 13th generation laptop chips are barely better than 12th generation, and there are some good sales going on, particularly with sales down 30% year-on-year.

• Substack's Twitter-killer, Substack Notes, is live and not yet overrun with garbage.  (Substack)
  
  I'll give it a try at least.  Substack does not appear to be a victim of the woke mind plague just yet.
  
  
  
• Is 12GB of VRAM enough?  AMD says no.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because all of AMD's high-end cards from the previous and current generations have at least 16GB, where even the 3080Ti and 4070Ti are 12GB cards.
  
  
  
• Need a laptop with six screens, 192 cores, and 3TB of RAM?  Media Workstations has you covered.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is really for certain specific markets like oil exploration and film production, where you need an entire server that you can pick up and take with you.
  
  It weighs 45 pounds, and I don't think it has a battery at all.
  
  
  

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, April 13 2023 11:09 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 13 2023 05:22 PM (PiXy!)

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• We'll make our own Twitter API!  With blackjack, and hookers!  (PyPI)
  
  Twitter recently cancelled the existing free API plan and replaced it with a free API plan which is useless and a paid API plan which is absurd.
  
  If you know what an API is, you might wonder how the Twitter website works, and the answer is that it uses an API.
  
  A free one.
  
  So now there's software that lets you use that instead of paying $100 per month for 50 API requests, which would last you nearly 11 seconds of active use.

• Hackers have flooded NPM with over 600,000 fake software packages, which is a huge problem because no-one can tell them apart from the 800,00 genuine but terrible software packages that were already on there.  (The Hacker News)
  
  Oh no.
  
  
  
• PC sales dropped nearly 30% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2023, with Apple the odd one out among the major manufacturers with a 40% drop in units shipped.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• How to cluster nine Raspberry Pi Picos into one very slow and basically useless computer.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Two Picos - or better, two of the RP2040 chips the Pico uses - makes sense.  The RP2040 has no built-in graphics but it's clever enough that you can get it to produce an HDMI output just in software.  Only that takes all the memory and half the CPU capacity, so having a second one as the actual CPU makes for a neat embedded / hobby system.
  
  Nine is right out.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 4070 is basically the short-lived 12GB RTX 3080 model without the cost or power consumption, maybe.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's not out yet, but it might finally be a merely expensive and not actually insane card in the current generation.  An announcement is expected this week.
  
  
  
• A previously unknown isotope of uranium, U-241, has been discovered.  (Phys.org)
  
  Where the most common isotope, U-238, has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, U-241 has a half life of 40 minutes.  We probably missed it because we were always at lunch when it showed up at the lab.
  
  
  
• How Starlink lost an entire fleet of satellites.  (Inverse)
  
  Red ionosphere at morning, Elon take warning.
  
  
  
• The FTX has fined supplement maker Nature's Bounty $600,000 for Amazon review hijacking.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is a trick where you take an Amazon page for a product with positive reviews - possibly even legitimate ones - and change all the contents to push your own brand of bullshit while keeping the reviews in place.
  
  Sometimes the remaining reviews are wildly inappropriate for the new product but most people just see 500 reviews with an average rating of 4.8 and click the buy button.
  
  Notably the FTC did this.  Amazon hasn't done squat.
  
  
  
• The Geekom Mini IT12 is basically last year's Intel NUC model only now it's sold by a Taiwanese company you've never heard of.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's not bad, I'm just not sure what the point is.  An AMD-based NUC, sure, but an Intel one when Intel already makes them?
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 11 2023 11:58 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, April 12 2023 05:24 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, April 12 2023 11:11 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 12 2023 11:56 AM (PiXy!)

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• You can't buy a Flipper Zero o Amazon anymore.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is a device for testing short-range communications protocols like RFID, NFC, and Bluetooth, and finding security vulnerabilities.  Which is very important given the number of vulnerabilities out there in the wild needing to be fixed. but a bit of a worry in the hands of the wrong people, like, for example, Apple, Samsung, or Kia.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AMD's 9474F is faster than AMD's 5995WX.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The 5995WX was the world's fastest CPU for some time, with 64 Zen 3 cores and high clock speeds, since it's a workstation CPU and not a thermally-constrained server chip.
  
  The 9474F is a thermally-constrained server chip, and only has 48 cores. and runs at a lower clock speed.  But with Zen 4 cores and 5nm vs. 7nm production, it's just plain more efficient.
  
  The fastest Intel CPUs on Passmark now start at #28 on the chart, with AMD Zen 4, Zen 3, and even Zen 2 chips occupying the top 27 slots.
  
  There are no scores yet for Intel's Sapphire Rapids server or workstation chips, but since anyone can submit a score, that just means there aren't chips around for people to benchmark.  I'm not seeing the new W-2400 desktop chips on sale anywhere, or even being reviewed, and they were due last month.
  
  
  
• Intel's second-generation graphics cards, codenamed Battlemage, are expected next year - and probably won't suck.  (TechSpot)
  
  In fact, following driver updates and price cuts, Intel's first generation cards don't suck.  The A750 for example is pretty comparable to AMD's 6700, and cheaper.
  
  When first released they were bad on older game titles (particularly running DirectX 9) but that has largely been resolved, and early driver bugs are reportedly pretty much resolved.
  
  If Intel remains on track for two more generations - expected in 2024 and 2026 - they may end up with something genuinely good.  And given Nvidia's 4000-series pricing, more competition is very welcome.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 11 2023 08:47 AM (obo9H)

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• So Substack announced it was launching a Twitter killer, and Twitter got snippy with Substack, and Elon Musk tried the good old modified limited hangout, and got community noted.  (The Verge)
  
  
  
  I don't know if he ordered this or even knew about it, since it's the sort of thing Twitter did before he took over, and he's busy electrocuting the world and invading the Moon, but Twitter did block the retweeting of Substack links, at least temporarily.
  
  They're a private company, they can do what they want, yes, but if you want to restore trust this ain't the way.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• AI can crack most common passwords in less than a minute, but so can a potato.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you use a common password and the attacker has your encrypted password from a data leak and a list of common passwords and a cheap video card, they can crack it in less than a minute with or without AI.
  
  
  
• The 32 core Loongson 3D5000 is, optimistically, nearly one sixth the speed of AMD's current server CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Could be worse.  Could be Russian.
  
  
  
• The Acer Predator X32 is a 32" 4k 160Hz HDR1000 monitor that covers 120% of DCI-P3.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which used to be a lot.  
  
  I've thought of DCI-P3 as an upper bound for the colour range of computer monitors, but it's really not; it's just the colour gamut chosen for digital movie projection.  120% of DCI-P3 is possible just as 95% DCI-P3 monitors are around 120% of SRGB.
  
  I wonder what it looks like.  I'm not inclined to pay $1200 to find out, so I'll assume it's similar to an OLED display, something I do have.
  
  
  
• Want a 128 core Arm-based workstation?  Yes?  Why?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Anyway, $5658 with 128GB of RAM.
  
  
  
• GraphQL is bad if you don't need it but implement it anyway using unsuitable tools.  (Better Programming)
  
  That entire website appears to be trash articles written by idiots.
  
  
  
• Something I didn't realise about the Western Digital hack and subsequent cloud services outage: It locked customers out of their own NASes.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Cloud-managed NASes are trash.  Don't.  Just...  Don't.
  
  
  
• So it seems is Apple's Find My iPhone service, which has been directing people to the door of a family in Richmond, Texas, for years.  (ABC13)
  
  Apple is aware of the problem.
  
  
  
• That Chinese spy balloon was spying for China.  (NBC News)
  
  Successfully.
  
  And the Biden Administration declined to shoot it down over Montana for fear of it bonking a bison.
  
  
  
• The DOJ has opened an investigation into a series of leaks of classified defense documents.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  The balloon did it.
  
  Or possibly a bison.
  
  
  
• More on ChatGPT's little libel spree.  (MSN)
  
  A decade ago, Brian Hood blew the whistle on corruption and bribery involving Australia's Reserve Bank.  Not quite as juicy as it sounds, but still illegal, the bribes were kickbacks to secure contracts for printing polymer (plastic) banknotes, since Australia was one of the first countries to produce plastic banknotes that didn't suck.
  
  Anyway, ChatGPT reported that rather than being a whistleblower, Hood was directly involved in paying the bribes, and was charged with conspiracy to bribe foreign officials, pled guilty, and was sent to prison for two years.
  
  ChatGPT was very specific about all this, only...  None of it happened.
  
  So he's suing, and OpenAI - the company behind ChatGPT - isn't speaking to anyone.
  
  Which is the only smart thing they've done.

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, April 09 2023 07:42 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 09 2023 10:00 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 10 2023 04:07 AM (BMUHC)

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