• YouTube will now demonetise your video if you swear in the first fifteen seconds.  Oh, and that's retroactive and applies automatically to every video you've ever uploaded.  (The Verge)
  
  You can manually edit each of your videos, reupload them, and file an appeal, and maybe they'll undo their mass monetisation murder spree for you.  Or maybe they won't.
  
  Or as Linus Tech Tips reports, maybe they'll hit a lot more of your videos because you dared complain about their very selective puritanism
  
  Advice: Learn Tagalog, or Bahasa.  Lots of creative swearing that YouTube probably won't pick up.
  
  Also, move to Rumble.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Twitter files, categorically proving the collusion of social media and the government to illegally stifle dissent?  Nothingburger.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The point being so far as I could read through this propagandist swill without throwing up (which I'd prefer not to do again this week) is that of course they are corrupt lying hacks looking to deplatform anyone who dares deviate from the designated Party line: They're communists.  And so are we.  Quit whining and go to the end of the queue.  Today's ration is one whole potato and if you miss out that's it until August.
  
  
  
• Slightly less dead today.  Two medical and one domestic problem that have been plaguing me the last couple of weeks have been mostly cleared up through the judicious application of explosives modern chemistry.  And heavy drinking.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel's 6GHz Core i9-1300KS is here.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's 25% more expensive and uses 20% more power (officially) than the regular 13900K, and it's 2% faster.
  
  Avoid.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in a less insane sector of the desktop CPU space the first PassMark score of AMD's Ryzen 9 7900 is up.  (PassMark)
  
  This puts it at 6% slower in single-threaded and 8% slower multi-threaded than the full 7900X, which is not bad at all given that the 7900 is 20% cheaper (at least at MSRP, since the 7900X is currently discounted everywhere) and runs at 65W vs. 170W for the full version.
  
  The 12 core 65W 7900 is also faster than the previous generation's 16 core 105W 5950X (which is what I have in the new servers I'm preparing right now).  Though not by a lot.
  
  If you need a reasonably high end but not absolutely maxed out desktop, this is a good choice.  The GPU market is currently a mess though.  The cheapest current-gen graphics cards cost twice as much as this CPU.
  
  
  
• Grad students hardest hit: ChatGPT - with a lot of editing - can turn out reams of stultifying drivel to justify your research grant.  (Arxiv.org)  (PDF)
  
  The paper was written using ChatGPT, one section at a time, then manually edited.  It's barely distinguishable from traditional human-generated academic excrement: Wordy, boring, and ultimately pointless.
  
  
  
• Live by the woke, die by the woke.  (The Register)
  
  Nobody uses Apache anymore anyway.  (Checks servers.)  Uh.
  
  
  

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Saturday, January 14 2023 03:22 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Yulha at Tuesday, January 17 2023 07:58 PM (Db2k/)

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• There's a lot of uranium and thorium around.  If we used those elements for all our energy production (ignoring that hydro is also entirely viable in some locations), and we built efficient breeder reactors to reuse fuel, how long would the known reserves last?
  
  4.3 billion years. (What is Nuclear)
  
  About 700 million years after that, the Sun will expand to the point that everything on Earth dies in a blaze of, well, just a blaze really, and energy needs will become a moot point.
  
  That's the highest estimate I've seen and a lot longer than my own quick calculation which was "only" 5 million years.  I'll check the math at some point when I'm not rolling around on the floor.
  
  
  
• The bankruptcy team now running collapsed crypto Ponzi scheme and left-wing campaign contribution laundering machine FTX has recovered about $5 billion worth of, well, things.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not including the bullshit self-created cryptocurrencies that were used to keep the whole scheme inflated at a valuation of $32 billion.  That's about half the total customer funds that disappeared when the bubble popped.
  
  Customers and creditors are likely to see a decent amount of their money returned.  Unsecured shareholders are just screwed though.

• Want a 480 core Linux server?  Got a few hundred grand to spend?  Inspur has you covered.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's a 6U rack-mount system so it's not small by modern standards, but we're not at a point yet where any 480 core server is exactly small.   You can pack 480 cores into 2U if you don't mind them being divided across four modular servers, but they you can do the same with AMD and get 768 cores.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 7000X3D will be released on February 14.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'll definitely wait that long before building a new system; it will probably be March or April.
  
  Meanwhile the non-X parts are at retail and slightly cheaper than the X parts.  In the case of the 7700, the price at my formerly local retailer is exactly the same as the 7700X.
  
  Since you can overclock the 7700 and get exactly the same performance as the 7700X, and you can reduce the power consumption of the 7700X and make it behave exactly like the 7700, it's not a surprise that the retail prices aren't hugely different.
  
  No Passmark scores up yet for these models.  I'll keep an eye out for that one as it has historically tracked closely with the performance I measure with my own workloads.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is piloting a professional version of ChatGPT.  (TechCrunch)
  
  "Professional" here means you pay for it and it doesn't just randomly stop working.  Which, really, is what professional means in other contexts as well.
  
  
  

• Intel's much-delayed Sapphire Rapids range of server CPUs is finally here.  (Serve the Home)
  
  At launch there are 52 models to choose from at prices ranging up to $17,000.  There's no clear winner because there is no model that has all the features on offer.
  
  In benchmarks it's kind of meh as you'd expect, because it goes up to 60 cores per CPU and is competing with AMD chips that go to 96 cores.  Plus, unless you are running Intel-created code that leverages a specific Intel-only hardware acceleration function, two 60 core Sapphire Rapids chips can be slower than one 64 core AMD Epyc Genoa.
  
  Also AMD will be launching 128 core chips soon.

• The matching range of workstation chips will launch on February 15.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The pricing on the server models gives us some guidance of how much the workstation models will cost, which is to say, a lot.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is looking at investing $10 billion into OpenAI, creator of lie bot ChatGPT.  (Semafor)
  
  I guess it's less annoying than Sam Bankman-Fried, if no more likely to provide a return on that investment.
  
  And Microsoft has a hedge here: ChatGPT runs on the Azure cloud - which is owned by Microsoft.  So that $10 billion will mostly flow straight back into their pockets.
  
  
  
• More than a million people fled the terror of free speech at Twitter for the familiar Marxist authoritarianism of Mastodon.  Then they decided it's too hard and left again.  (The Guardian)
  
  I'm not sure who loses here.  Why would Mastodon want a million new psychotic cretins?  They've got their fair share alread.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 12 2023 01:18 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, January 12 2023 03:20 PM (BzEjn)

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• Some of AMD's new CPUs are here.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not the high-performance X3D models, but the the low-cost and as it turns out also high-performance non-X models.
  
  These use 40% of the power of the regular version while delivering 96% of the performance in most benchmarks.
  
  And they're cheaper.  And come with pretty good CPU coolers in the box so you don't need to buy one separately.
  
  They'd be dramatic wins if the existing X models weren't already selling under MSRP - the 7900 is $429 vs. $549 for the 7900X, but you can find the 7900X for around $460 now anyway.
  
  
  
• They perform very well under Linux too.  (Phoronix)
  
  It's Phoronix, so that link takes you straight to page 16 of a review filled with benchmarks of every description.  The 7900 is only beaten by the 7900X and 7950X and Intel's top of the line 13900K - a chip that uses three times as much power.  It's comfortably faster than the previous generation's top dogs, AMD's own 5950X and Intel's 12900K.
  
  And you can still overclock it if you want to, though you'd want to add a high-end cooler for that.
  
  I think I'll go for this when I build my new main workstation in the next few months.  It's very reasonably priced given the performance offered, and it uses half the power (and produces half the heat) of anything comparable from either AMD or Intel.
  
  
  
• Also, these - and a 16 core version as well - will be coming to laptops very soon.

• Need a 30TB 2.5" drive with a transfer rate of 7GBps for both reads and writes?  Micron has you covered.  (AnandTech)
  
  I've used some previous models of Micron drives in servers at work and they've been great except for that one time one of them dropped dead a week after we installed it.  I've seen drives from every manufacturer die over the years so I won't hold one incident against them.
  
  
  
• The new Mac Pro - if it ever arrives - will have the RAM soldered in place.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And a lot less of it than the Intel models supported.  And generally be a terrible idea.
  
  Apple only have one CPU chip - or two, really.  The M2 and the upcoming M2 Pro.  Like AMD they glue multiple chips together to get faster models.
  
  Unlike AMD they only make APU chips with integrated graphics, and no pure CPU chips.  And to make their integrated graphics work well they have to solder in laptop RAM, even when they're building a high-end workstation that every customer is going to install a graphics card anyway.
  
  
  
• Speaking of high-end workstations, Intel is getting back into the game this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They abandoned the market to AMD five years ago, but now they might have some decent offerings: The lower-cost W-2400 range with up to 24 cores and four memory channels, and the high-performance W-3400 range with up to 56 cores and eight memory channels.
  
  Clock speeds peak at 4.8GHz so these aren't ideal for gaming but still very capable if you want to play (insert name of current game here) after a long day of computational fluid dynamics.
  
  Prices aren't mentioned at all, so we'll see if Intel manages to kill the entire lineup before it even gets out the door.
  
  (Also, this is WCCFTech, so Rule One of the Internet - Don't read the comments - applies twice as much as usual.)
  
  
  
• Old man yells at cloud.  (Jon and Nic)
  
  Technology is - in many ways - getting worse.  This article discusses the trend, though it doesn't analyse the causes or suggest solutions.  Sometimes you just need to rant.
  
  
  
• Seattle schools sue social networks over youth mental health crisis.  (Engadget)
  
  Methinks they doth protest too fucking much.
  
  
  
• Researchers were able to track the GPS location of every digital license plate in California.  (Vice)
  
  If someone is collecting your data, they will lose control of it.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 11 2023 12:15 AM (k3/O4)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, January 11 2023 01:19 AM (LADmw)

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• PCIe 5 SSDs and the heatsinks that love them.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel stole a march on AMD in 2021 with the introduction of PCIe 5, a full year before AMD had it in their own timeline.  That gave Intel users a big advantage when it came to using the new wave of PCIe 5 SSDs and graphics cards...
  
  Neither of which exist.
  
  PCIe 5 SSDs will be out before too long - some sites have already benchmarked them - but PCIe 5 graphics cards are likely still a couple of years away.  All the new models announced recently by Nvidia and AMD (and Intel too) are still PCIe 4.
  
  I noted that my Bae case - a customised Hyte Y60 - uses a riser card and only supports PCIe 4 graphics cards.  With a PCIe 5 motherboard you need to manually adjust the slot configuration in the BIOS.  That's turning to be even less of a concern than I had thought.
  
  
  
• Still ow.  This is getting seriously annoying.
  
  
  

Tech News

• When is a PC not a PC?  The PC-98.  (Scali's OpenBlog)
  
  NEC's PC-9800 was an early MS-DOS system - it came out in 1982 - with much better graphics due to the requirements of Japanese text.  It wasn't fully IBM-compatible, or even particularly IBM compatible, but it ruled the Japanese market until VGA became common many years later.
  
  And it's supported by DOSBox-X.
  
  
  

• If you've never had kidney stones and a migraine at the same time, well, it's certainly an experience.
  
  
  
• There seems to be little point in that Razer Edge Android gaming tablet I mentioned before unless you play some specific graphics-intensive Android-only game very heavily.  If you want a general gaming device a Nintendo Switch seems like a better bet, and if you want a large small Android device when there's a dearth of good small tablets, the Motorola Edge 20 Fusion is nearly as large (6.7" vs. 6.8"), still has a FHD+ OLED display, is significantly cheaper, has a 108MP camera, and at the end of the day is also a phone.
  
  
  
• Asus showed off some WiFi 7 routers at CES and they're not obviously garbage.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There are a lot of high-end wireless routers that promise 5Gbps of bandwidth but only offer 1Gb Ethernet, so you can't ever make full use of it.
  
  These two models have theoretical total wireless bandwidth over 20Gbps, but have two and three 10Gb Ethernet ports respectively, so they could in theory actually deliver what they promise.
  
  Price not stated but as usual with new standards is unlikely to be cheap for the first year or two.

• The founder of Creative Labs - the company behind the Sound Blaster card - has passed away aged 67.  (The Verge)
  
  That's pretty young but it was apparently natural causes.
  
  
  
• Running Twitter on one server.  (Tristan Hume)
  
  This is mostly a thought experiment on how you could deliver some sort of feed at Twitter scales (data volumes and active users) with just one server.
  
  It does have the usual bootstrapping problem in that it would only work even in theory once all the core data was in memory so you could never, ever reboot that server.
  
  But it does highlight just how fast modern hardware is, if software is suitably optimised.
  
  
  
• And Asus has just the server.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Two Epyc Genoa CPUs for up to 192 cores, 24 NVMe drive bays, and 9 PCIe 5.0 expansion slots.  Only 24 DIMM slots though so you're limited to 3TB of RAM.
  
  
  
• GPT-4 will be here soon and won't change the world.  (Nostalgebraist)
  
  The author gives a number of reasons for believing this, but it boils down to what I said yesterday: It's a language model, not a world model.  It does stuff with language.  It knows nothing other than language.
  
  Would you hire a genius writer for your corporate communications if they provably could not tell fact from fiction?  Even if you did, you'd have to hire a second person to babysit them.
  
  That's where we are.
  
  
  
• A big roundup of product announcements at CES.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  OLED monitors, PCIe 5 SSDs, weird laptops, and weirder PC cases.
  
  Nothing really compelling, though I'll look into the new range of monitors when they ship to customers.  There's a good range of ultra-wide and ultra-high resolution displays coming this year in both OLED and LCD, but it remains to be seen whether they're worthwhile when you can get two good 4K monitors for $400.

• High-end CPUs like AMD's Ryzen 7950X and Intel's Core i9-13900K are power hungry beasts, but you can tell them not to be.  And here's what happens if you do that.  (AnandTech)
  
  Reducing the 13900K to 125W cuts performance by 20%.  The same thing happens with the 7950X if you reduce the power all the way down to 65W.
  
  On the other hand, if you reduce the power of the AMD chips down to 65W, they use more than 65W.  So do the Intel chips actually, but the AMD chips exceed the setting by more than the Intel ones except at full power where the AMD chip behaves itself but the Intel chip blows out to over 300W.
  
  Anyway, cut the Intel chip to 125W, or the AMD chip to 65W, you'll lose 20% performance when running all cores simultaneously (single threaded performance isn't affected at all) but your system will run much cooler and hence much quieter.
  
  Also a good measure of how the new high-end notebooks will run, because they will use desktop chips running at reduce power envelopes just like this.  And the answer is they'll be faster than the fastest desktop chips from the previous generation.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• If pressing a button will destroy the building, you should do more than just add a sign saying "please do not press this button again".  (The Register)
  
  Maybe, I don't know, don't put the button there?
  
  
  
• It's just[url fifteen years to 1901.[/url]  (Epochalypse)
  
  Time to start stocking up on canned goods.
  
  
  
• What happened to housing startup Pippin?  (Spencer Burleigh)
  
  It was a dumb idea, executed by idiots, in California.  Take it from there.
  
  
  
• If you're waiting for Nvidia's new low-end GPUs - the 4050, 4060, and 4070 - whether in a laptop or desktop get ready to be disappointed.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Benchmarks of the laptop versions have leaked and they are very slightly faster than the previous generation, except for the 4050 which is actually a worthwhile improvement.  (Though the laptop 3050 was honestly not very good.)
  
  Also, AMD's 7600M XT and 7700S are the exact same chip with the exact same settings.  I don't know why.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT is a language model, not a world model.  (New York Times)
  
  This makes it useless for anything beyond language.
  
  Some users have shown that it can translate simple JavaScript code to Python.  That's plausible, since that's something a good language model should be able to do.
  
  But others have noted that similar AI models for assisted programming produce code with a significantly higher than normal rate of critical security bugs.  And people have noted that ChatGPT will simply "lie" when it doesn't have access to facts that will support whatever you have told it to write.
  
  It doesn't know that it's lying because it doesn't have a model of the world, it only has a model of descriptions of the world.
  
  This works well enough for AI art, because good art is hard to create but bad art is easy to detect.  If the hands are on the wrong end of the arms, you click the retry button.
  
  If there's a critical security flaw in the code your AI just wrote, on the other hand, you are screwed.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, January 07 2023 10:34 PM (DB9Lx)

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• Missed one item in the big CES news dump yesterday: AMD officially announced the new non-X Ryzen 7000 range, available Tuesday.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are low-power, lower-cost versions of the existing models.  Most notably, the twelve core 7900 is a 65W version of the 170W 7900X, costs $429 vs. $549 MSRP, and includes a pretty good CPU cooler in the box (the Wraith Prism) where the X models require you to buy your own.
  
  It will definitely be slower than the 7900X, but should still perform very well.
  
  
  
• Ordered my Kronii case - another Hololive themed custom Hyte Y60.  I haven't built anything in the Bae case yet, but that will happen in the next couple of months.
  
  I'm still trying to figure out the optimal build for these cases.  They only offer a single full-height PCIe slot - though you can fit a triple-width card in there - so anything else has to be half height.  I want 10Gb Ethernet and S/PDIF for audio, and there seems to be exactly one Ryzen 7000 motherboard that has both and it ain't cheap.  (As in, it costs more than a 7950X.)
  
  None of the cheap Intel motherboards have both of those either.  Though if I go for a cheaper Intel build I don't need to worry about it right now, because unlike Socket AM5 which will support future Zen 5 and Zen 6 chips, Intel's Socket 1700 will never see an upgrade.
  
  Also I don't actually know if the wiring in the house will support 10GbE or if I'll need to get an electrician out to rewire everything.

• The Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED includes a 2880x1800 90Hz display, a Core i7-13700H CPU, Nvidia's new RTX 4050 mobile graphics, the Four Essential Keys...  And 16GB of RAM.  (Liliputing)
  
  Dammit.
  
  
  
• The Razer Edge Android gaming tablet launches on January 26 at $399.  (Liliputing)
  
  I might get one, because while it's not ideal for me - it's 6.8" and I want something in the 8" range - there are currently zero high-resolution 8" Android tablets that don't have crippling issues - like e-ink displays that run at 1 fps, or not being sold at all outside China.
  
  
  
• Plugable's new Thunderbolt 4 hub allows you to connect up to four 4K displays to your Thunderbolt or USB-C laptop, maybe.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's complicated.
  
  If you have a Thunderbolt 4 PC and you close the lid so the internal display shuts down, you should be able to connect four 4K monitors.
  
  If you have an Apple M1 Pro or M1 Max system, you can only have two external displays, and you have to use the correct ports for this (though this is not restrictive since there are plenty of ports).
  
  If you have a regular Apple M1 or M2, you can only have one external display.
  
  If you have a Thunderbolt 3 or USB 4 PC, you can only have two external displays with the same restriction as the M1 Pro/Max models.
  
  And if you have regular USB-C you can probably connect one display.
  
  You can't connect Thunderbolt or USB-C displays, though, and you can't connect 5K, 6K, or 8K displays, though all of those would work without the dock in the middle.
  
  And that's just how it should work if everything goes smoothly.  Heaven help you if you run into a problem.
  
  
  
• Razer has new laptops with 16:10 screens.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They still lack the Four Essential Keys though.
  
  
  
• If you want a CPU with integrated graphics that's a little more powerful than AMD's new Phoenix chips the Radeon Instinct MI300 is exactly that but also not at all what you're looking for.  (AnandTech)
  
  It has 24 Zen 4 cores, an indeterminate number of graphics cores but presumably a lot because it has 146 billion transistors, and 128GB of RAM built right on to the package.
  
  Don't expect change back from twenty grand for this one.

Burn It All Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 07 2023 06:40 AM (obo9H)

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