Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.

Friday, December 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 December 2022

It's Gone Quantum Edition

Top Story

  • If you always wanted a quantum computer of your own but didn't have the millions of dollars and the endless rivers of liquid helium SpinQ has three portable models designed just for you sort of.  (Tom's Hardware)

    I say sort of because the theoretical capacity of a quantum computer scales exponentially with the number of qubits - each qubit essentially being another orthogonal dimension of parallel universes that the computer can compute in.  IBM just announced a 433 qubit quantum computer, and 2^433 is a very big number.

    This matters because if SpinQ announced a cheap portable quantum computer with a large number of qubits we'd know immediately that it was bullshit.  But the SpinQ qubit count maxes out at... 3.

    So, yeah, I'm prepared to believe that a $57,000, 90lb quantum that is slower than a first generation iPhone might actually exist.

    Probably not a hot item this Christmas though.


  • All my remaining Amazon packages arrived today, including one from Kentucky that took an interesting route to get here.

    So I ordered some more.


  • Guests arrive on the 27th.  Gotta vacuum, or paint, or plant vines, or whatever you're supposed to do when you have guests.

Tech News



Disclaimer: I didn't realise there was any demand for terrible Gizmodo articles.

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Thursday, December 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 December 2022

Recursively Awful Edition

Top Story

  • ChatGPT wrote a terrible Gizmodo article.  (Gizmodo)
    Suffice it to say, multiple attempts brought less than satisfactory results. For one thing, ChatGPT kept including incorrect information in its explainer—sometimes mixing up basic facts about the history of its own technology (factual inaccuracy has been an ongoing problem for the program). In other instances, it skimped on the details in critical areas, writing text that read more like OpenAI ad copy than a thoughtful explainer. In at least one instance, it forgot its own name, repeatedly telling me that it didn’t know anything about a "ChatGPT" and thus couldn’t help with my request. In general, it struggled to find a good balance of factual information, story structure, and accessible, humorous language, when putting its stories together.
    The comments are exactly what you would expect:
    The joke is so obvious, I’m not even going to bother.


  • Looks like all my Amazon packages that I was hoping would arrive by Christmas, will.

    One seems to have taken three days by plane to travel from the US to Australia, which is odd.  But given that the expected delivery date was January 11, the fact that it has already arrived in Sydney and left again for regional NSW is promising.


Tech News

  • Samsung has used PIM to speed up AMD's Instinct MI100 GPUs by 150% while reducing power consumption by 60%.  (Tom's Hardware)

    PIM stands for Processor in Memory - adding compute logic directly into the memory chips.  That means data doesn't have to be read from those chips, processed, and written back; everything happens in one place.

    That does depend on all the data required for a given computation be located on the same chip, so it's not remotely a general-purpose solution.  But in those cases where you can use it (like training chatbots to write terrible articles for terrible tech news sites) it can bring huge benefits.


  • Meanwhile SRAM is dead.  (Wikichip)

    Moving from 7nm to 5nm, logic sizes shrank by close to 50%, but SRAM sizes only shrank by 20%.  Moving from 5nm to 3nm, it looks like SRAM sizes will only shrink by 5%.

    That's not good, because a lot of performance depends on getting data into large on-chip caches.

    AMD has already tackled this with its 5800X3D, which stacks a separate SRAM chip on top of the CPU, with thousands of interconnects, and with the just released Radeon 7000 range, which separates out the cache and memory controllers onto their own chips on a multi-chip module.

    Expect more of that in the future, and in particular more vertical stacking.


  • The iKOOLCORE R1 is another of those weird little Chinese micro-PCs.  (Liliputing)

    This one has four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, aimed at the small router/firewall market.  It also has a single HDMI port, a USB-C port, and two USB-A.  At three inches square and two inches high, it's even smaller than a NUC.

    Prices start at $145 - in China.


Disclaimer: Which is better than in Minecraft, but not much.

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Wednesday, December 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 December 2022

Company Store Edition

Top Story

  • Work 16 years and what do you get?  A glass of champagne and six million net.  (PC Gamer)

    Cult game Dwarf Fortress, which first appeared in 2006 and has been available for free ever since (and is still available for free) finally has a Steam edition with graphics and has sold 300,000 copies in its first week.

    Even after the cuts for Steam and publisher Kitfox, the game's two authors each just retroactively made 16 years worth of six-figure salaries.

    Advice: Hire a really good accountant.


  • I started playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker last night.  Oops.  Haven't played any RPGs in a long while and even though this one isn't some legendary classic I was still playing six hours later.

    Also, Nvidia MX350 laptop graphics?  Basically worthless.

Tech News



Disclaimer: Just mostly.

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Tuesday, December 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 December 2022

And There Was Much Rejoicing Edition

Top Story



Disclaimer: Or don't.

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Monday, December 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 December 2022

Only 378 Shopping Days Until Christmas Edition

Top Story

  • NASA's Orion (not that one) Moon thingy has safely landed back on Earth.  (WCCFTech)

    As part of the Artemis 1 mission it travelled to the Moon, orbited it - sort of - and returned to Earth 25 days later.

    NASA is planning a manned lunar orbit for 2024.

    Which is great and all, but (a) Apollo 8 did that in 1968, (b) private Japanese company ispace with only 200 employees launched an unmanned lunar lander yesterday, and (c) SpaceX plans to land a fully crewed Starship on the Moon in 2024.

    Which date might slip a bit because Starship has not yet had a successful orbital flight - and has not been cleared by the FAA for orbital tests.  On the other hand, SpaceX has six Falcon 9 launches scheduled before the end of the year, so they're not just sitting around trolling idiots on Twitter either.


Tech News



Disclaimer: From the Earth to the Moon, and Around the Moon.  Not science fiction anymore, but a major motion picture and/or tasty snack!

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Sunday, December 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 December 2022

Don't Touch Anything Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • Breaking up with JavaScript front ends, or, how not to communicate anything, painfully.  (Triskweline)

    A PowerPoint presentation in web form that leads to a demo app that doesn't demo anything like what the slides say it does - particularly when the same demo app is linked from two slides supposedly demonstrating entirely different things - rather muddies a fundamentally sound point that JavaScript front ends are dogshit.


  • Twitter Blue is relaunching tomorrow.  (WCCFTech)

    $8 per month via the web.  $11 per month if you're stupid enough to sign up in the iOS app.

    I'll sign up.  Not because I want to be verified (I don't) or want the clout (I don't), but because it's worth it just to annoy all the right people.


  • Fractal Design goes Danish modern.  (Guru3d)

    In black or white, with a choice of mesh or tempered glass side panels, and walnut or oak front panels.

    It actually doesn't look terrible.


  • What's going on in Alzheimer's research.  (Quanta)

    A long article examining the situation as scientists move away from the amyloid plaque model that seems now to have been overstated at best - and outright fraudulent at worst - after frittering away twenty years and two billion dollars.


  • Where - and what - is dark matter?  (Big Think)

    Dark matter is what you get when you map out the visible matter of galaxies and compare it with the total mass based on how fast the galaxies rotate.  We can't see dark matter - it's dark - but we know there's something there because what we can see doesn't add up to enough mass to stop galaxies from flying apart.

    This article examines the possibility that dark matter is truly dark, that it only interacts via gravity.  If this is true, then we have no other way to measure it.

    At least with neutrinos (which only interact via the weak force) we have a convenient local source running 24/7 (that shiny yellow thing you see in the sky now and then) and the little buggers hit our detectors buried at the bottom of salt mines so that we can learn something about them.

    In the "nightmare scenario" considered here (physicists mostly have nightmares about grant applications, but this is one of the exceptions) no particle collision experiment - whether the naturally occurring variety using the Sun as a convenient lab partner or the artificial variety using Switzerland - will ever provide any information about the nature of dark matter.


Pixy Is Watching

Bocchi the Rock.  Imagine K-On! only Yui has crippling social anxiety and...  No, that's about it.  If you liked K-On! there's a good chance you'll like this as well.  Not that it's a direct rip-off, but there's only so many ways "four high school girls form a band" can go.

Well, this is anime, so that's not entirely true.  By episode three they could be fighting alien space bats on the Moon in a parallel dimension using the power of chord progressions, but just this once they're not.



Disclaimer: I think it's missing socks, but my Superconducting Sock Collider proposal has been on hold for over five years waiting for, and I quote, "Joe from accounting to stop laughing".

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Saturday, December 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 December 2022

That Trick Never Works Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • Here's a 1300W PC power supply in case you need the edge over your crazy neighbour with his 1000W power supply.  (AnandTech)

    Not sure exactly what this is for; it's overkill even for a 13900KS and a 4090.


  • 13900KS?  Oh, yeah, there's that as well.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It's just the 13900K with a small clock speed bump, but that bump takes it to 6GHz, so again useful for getting an edge over your crazy neighbour with his 5.8GHz CPU.


  • Sana, Pina, and Pomu (my new server cluster) are all currently running memory tests before being pressed into production.  Zero errors so far.

    This site (no matter which site you are reading this post on) will be moving to the new cluster in early January.  Not to one server in the cluster, but to all of them at once.


Disclaimer: Names changed to protect the bioreactor.

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Friday, December 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 December 2022

84 Is The New 120 Edition

Top Story

  • How much RAM do you need in your Windows PC?  Don't ask a journalist, they only use Notepad.  (ZDNet)

    Get a load of this:
    The time when more than 8GB of RAM becomes useful and starts paying for itself is when you're running several resource-heavy applications simultaneously -- especially high-end image or 4K+ video processing, CAD, or 3D modeling.
    Yeah when you're running Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, and Maya at the same time, 8GB might get a bit limiting.  64GB might also get a bit limiting.  People who run that sort of workload tend to buy systems with 256GB or more.

    I happened to reboot my laptop this morning.  By the time it had finished booting, before I opened a single application, 8GB of RAM was already in use.


  • Two of the three new servers have been deployed, just waiting on the third now.  Those have 128GB of RAM each.  128GB is probably enough.

    I now have an 84TB RAID-Z3 array with gzip compression and block deduplication. I have about 7TB (already gzipped and deduped) to copy onto it, so it should last a good long while.

    Update: Third server has been deployed.  Tentatively named Sana, Pomu, and Pina (from Hololive, Nijisanji, and Prism Project respectively).  They're running memtester right now because the last thing I want is to get everything set up and find out I've got bad RAM.


Tech News

  • Locating the new stealth bomber using the stars in the sky, JPEG metadata, and guesswork.  (Twitter)

    Looking at the photo, my first thought is there's no way that contains enough information to triangulate, even with a timestamp.  And it doesn't.  But the arc of possible matching locations in the United States comes near Edwards AFB, and if you look at all the buildings at Edwards in Google Maps there's a clear match to the photo.
    I'm sure this entire process could be done with just stars and no google maps as well
    Dude, using just stars they were lucky to discover America, which is somewhat larger than one aircraft hangar at Edwards AFB.


  • Part two of the Twitter Files is out.  (Twitter)

    Here we see the usual suspects working to twist the rules to justify silencing inconvenient truths.  And they were dumb enough to write it all down.

    Nothing we didn't already know in general, but with more specifics to throw in the face of anyone insisting it didn't happen.

    Like Jack Dorsey, who was CEO at the time, and testified before Congress that none of this was taking place.



Disclaimer: Are there any news?

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Thursday, December 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 December 2022

Indiana Jones And The Dominoes Of Doom Edition

Top Story

Tech News



Disclaimer: Just restart everything every six hours.  That will fix it.

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Wednesday, December 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 December 2022

Package, Package Number Nine Edition

Top Story

  • ChatGPT is artificial general intelligence for the easily impressed.  (Bleeping Computer)

    According to one person on Twitter, this is all the tech world has been talking about for days.  (They were complaining that the New York Times was only talking about Elon Musk, as if the New York Times could cogently report on a new generation of language inference engine.)

    I'm less impressed by ChatGPT than Stable Diffusion, because while Stable Diffusion does something I'm bad at - it's bad at it too, and has no understanding of what its mistakes are, but it can generate interesting results that I cannot in any reasonable time frame - while Stable Diffusion does something I'm bad at, badly, but frequently better than I can do, ChatGPT does things I'm good at, badly, and cannot learn from its mistakes.

    If you're bad at writing very simple code or bullshit term papers for some mandatory general studies class, ChatGPT might be just what you need.  But for the most part, it's a toy.

    The internet is already awash with awful AI-generated sites that clog up search results.  This will only lead to more of them, though they might be slightly less awful.


  • I say it's a toy for the most part because if there's one thing you'd expect a language inference engine to understand, it's language and if this example is real it sort of does.  (Maximum Effort)

    It makes some mistakes, because at a surface level it's still using probabilistic pattern matching, but when carefully coached the results are something that an imaginative ten-year-old might come up with.

    Which is not a slam because one of the great early demonstrations of AI was about the level of a four-year-old.


  • As mentioned on my blog earlier, I'm getting a new server cluster.  Two 5950X systems with 128GB of RAM and a ZFS storage server with 120TB of disk, all connected with 10Gb Ethernet.

    This is way more than I currently need but the post-Black Friday sale price was too good to pass up.  I'm basically upgrading my three existing servers (one of which is dead) to twice the size for about another $10 a month.

    They'll all be in one place, which is great because I get that super fast private network and can set up some degree of clustering and redundancy.

    So long as that place doesn't catch fire.

    But how likely is that to happen again?


Tech News

Disclaimer: 11,000 miles ain't much distance, but it sure do make a difference....

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