• 2 x Ryzen 5950X, 128GB RAM, 3.84TB NVMe
• 1 x Dual Xeon E5-2630, 128GB RAM, 12 x 10TB SAS, 240GB OS SSD

Top Story

• Intel says Moore's Law is alive and well, and plans to produce trillion-transistor chips by 2030. (Hot Hardware)
  
  This must be a source of some amusement to its rivals at TSMC where they manufacture the 2.6 trillion transistor WSE-2 AI chip for Cerebras.
  
  Admittedly that chip is the size of a dinner plate and systems using it start at around $2 million, but on the other hand it already exists.
  
  
  
• Also already existing are the desk legs I ordered and the Kindle Paperwhite I got to replace my unfunctional Tab M8 FHD.
  
  Ikea packs things really well, by the way. Amazon tends to just toss expensive stuff into a lightweight box with maybe a bit of packing paper to keep it company, and then deals with the complaints later.

Tech News

• Moon's haunted: After a successful trip to and around the Moon, NASA's Orion spacecraft* has had some issues with ghost breakers. (WCCFTech)
  
  The computerised circuit breakers are supposed to trip on command or when something goes horribly wrong, but instead half of them tripped for no reason at all. And cut off half the maneuvering thrusters in the process, something that could be inconvenient if it happened at the wrong moment.
  
  The next Orion flight is expected in, uh, two years.
  
  * Not old bang-bang, sadly. See Niven & Pournelle's Footfall if you're not familiar.
  
  
  
• The making of Dune II. (Read Only Memory)
  
  I always wondered why the sequel to the Dune computer game was in a completely different genre - the first an adventure game, the second a real-time strategy title.
  
  This article explains that: It wasn't a sequel, not even in the strictly temporal sense. Once the producers obtained the rights to make Dune computer games, they hired two studios to produce two entirely different games at the same time.
  
  Dune I was unremarkable and is largely forgotten. Dune II on the other hand pulled together all the elements of a real-time strategy game for the first time, and is the direct parent of the entire Command & Conquer series.
  
  
  
• You can't let just anybody look at the sky! (Scientific American)
  
  The US government plans to require public release of all date from publicly-funded science. The article argues that this is bad for science, because other scientists can look at the data and, well:

  I have a friend in Minsk
  Who has a friend in Pinsk
  Whose friend in Omsk
  Has friend in Tomsk
  With friend in Akmolinsk
  His friend in Alexandrovsk
  Has friend in Petropavlovsk
  Whose friend somehow is solving now
  The problem in Dnepropetrovsk
  
  And when his work is done
  Haha! Begins the fun
  From Dnepropetrovsk to Petropavlovsk
  By way of Iliysk and over Novorossiysk
  To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
  To Tomsk to Omsk
  To Pinsk to Minsk
  To me the news will run
  Yes, to me the news will run!
  
  And then I write by morning, night
  And afternoon, and pretty soon
  My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed
  When he finds out I published first!

  I didn't say it was a very good argument.
  
  
  
• How "goblin mode" became Oxford's word of the year. (NPR)
  
  First, that's not a word.
  
  Second, people voted for it. It was an online poll. And it mopped the floor with the competition, because the competition was "metaverse" (which is at least a word) and "#IStandWith".
  
  Third, I wonder if that's in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. I shall take a look, because that just arrived too. (I'd love to get the full 20-volume set, but it's pretty expensive.)
  
  
  
• Twitter turns its back on open-source development. (ZDNet)
  
  Is it true?
  
  No. It's just more wishcasting by another left-wing pro-censorship journalist. (Which is pretty much all of them.)
  
  Interesting tidbit from the article though: Twitter was developing its own custom JVM, which is a really dumb idea. The company isn't nearly big enough - let along profitable enough - to support work like that.
  
  
  
• Setting up container backups on the new server. Much cleaner than the old rsync-and-hope system.
  
  I plan to migrate the old MyISAM tables to either Aria or InnoDB, which will make them crash safe. Not certain that the code will work correctly with InnoDB, because it's properly transactional, but Aria is just a better MyISAM.

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Wednesday, December 07 2022 03:52 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, December 07 2022 04:16 AM (g0n8K)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 07 2022 07:49 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Thursday, December 08 2022 12:34 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, December 08 2022 12:00 PM (2tHvf)

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• So with Elon Musk spending all his time trolling people on Twitter, his other companies are floundering, with Tesla, uh, launching its promised electric semi and blowing away all the competition.  (EV Universe)
  
  There are other electric semis on the market, but the Tesla has the largest battery, the longest range, the fastest recharge time (not even close), and the highest efficiency.
  
  It takes 30 minutes to recharge to 70% capacity, and has a fully charged range of a little over 500 miles.
  
  The article analyses the test trip to dig up details like the effectiveness of the Tesla's regenerative braking and its unloaded weight.
  
  Tesla has around 1000 orders for the Semi already.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Starlink, which already operates more satellites than everyone else in the world put together has FCC approval to triple its deployments.  (Engadget / MSN)
  
  The company will be launching 7500 Gen 2 satellites.  These will enable broader adoption of direct-to-orbit mobile communications.
  

• Why do many developers consider Scrum to be an evil scam?  (Medium)
  
  Because it is.

  Some have called it a project management fad.

  Also true.

  People have even accused me of being a snake oil salesman, willingly pushing a scam to earn money.

  More of a Jim Jones vibe, really.
  
  
  
• If you want to covertly surveil your grad students it might be best not to start with scientists and engineers.  (Vice)
  
  They fairly quickly took the monitoring devices apart, analysed the code, and found the inevitable security flaws.

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, December 06 2022 12:57 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: David Eastman at Tuesday, December 06 2022 06:05 AM (D6Mju)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 06 2022 07:02 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Tuesday, December 06 2022 07:12 AM (tZjYc)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, December 06 2022 10:46 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, December 06 2022 11:51 AM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Wednesday, December 07 2022 02:29 AM (r9O5h)

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• The mee.nu server is alive, with all data up to yesterday transferred to the new system.  There wasn't much data yesterday because the planned maintenance at the datacenter ended up taking 25 hours.
  
  So someone had as bad a weekend as I did.
  
  Also bumped from CentOS 6 to Ubuntu 22.04 and from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.9 with relatively little trouble.
  
  Don't try to upload files just yet, though, right now that's read-only.  I'll fix that shortly.
  
  
  
• Also looking at getting some new servers and replacing all the old ones.  Should work out cheaper in the end.
  
  Two 5950X systems with 128GB RAM and 4TB SSD, and a new ZFS storage server for backups.  With the 7950X out the 5950X is a lot cheaper now, and still twice as fast as anything I currently have.
  
  Overkill right now but if I can avoid weekends like this, totally worth it.
  
  
  
• MSN fired its human journalists and replaced them with an AI that writes stories about mermaids.  (Futurism)
  
  The only problem is this story about collapsing journalism standards in pursuit of a quick buck, is a story of collapsing journalism standards in pursuit of a quick buck.
  
  It's not true.
  
  MSN aggregates a huge range of "news" sources, almost all of them garbage, but it's handy sometimes because it usually punctures the paywalls when it does so.
  
  One of those sources it aggregates is called Exemplore, and it's nearly as much of a trash fire as Futurism.
  
  The New York Times is still in a class by itself when it comes to trash fires though.

• I wonder how ZFS would perform on AWS sc1 EBS volumes.  Probably poorly.
  
  
  
• Intel's Core i5 13500 is over 50% faster than the Core i5 12500.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On Passmark it's almost exactly 50%.  Other tests rate it a little higher.
  
  This is not because the main "performance" cores are a lot faster; they're a little faster but not much.  With this generation Intel has added eight "efficiency" cores to the six "performance" cores, and that gives a big overall boost for multi-threaded work.
  
  I'm not sure I like this, because the E cores run at half the speed of the P cores, and I really want everything to be consistent.  But Windows likes to run a lot of crap in the background, and having eight extra cores to take care of that sure won't hurt.  
  
  If it's priced similarly to the 12500 - around $200 - this will make a fine CPU for most desktop users.
  
  
  
• AMD reportedly plans to launch three new X3D processors at CES in January.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD's X3D models stack an extra chip on the CPU to triple the size of L3 cache.  Depending on what you're running the effect can be huge - the 5800X3D is still up there among the fastest CPUs available for gaming, despite being clocked lower than the regular 5800X.
  
  Leaks suggest that AMD will be releasing 12 and 16 core models this time, as well as the 8 core chip aimed at gaming.  (They also do this on their Epyc server CPUs, for up to 768MB of L3 cache on the chip.)
  
  
  

Posted by: Lump the Chump at Sunday, December 04 2022 04:15 PM (1WyDN)

Posted by: David Eastman at Sunday, December 04 2022 05:49 PM (D6Mju)

Posted by: David Eastman at Sunday, December 04 2022 05:56 PM (D6Mju)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 04 2022 07:33 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 05 2022 01:33 AM (PiXy!)

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• Kanye West is not buying Parler after all.  (Axios)
  
  Bullet dodged.  For both parties, but after today, particularly for Parler.

  Ye has just around 55,000 followers on Parler, compared to 18.5 million on Instagram and zero on Twitter.

  Oops.
  
  
  
• The Ikea desk legs I needed for my main office, that were out of stock for weeks, came back in for days, and then went out of stock again, are back in stock.
  
  I ordered 35.  I think I need 31 - maybe fewer if I use fixed drawers rather than the mobile ones, since you can mount the desktop directly onto the drawer units.  Since the legs are $4 each and they've been blocking my plans for thousands of dollars worth of furniture, I don't exactly mind if I end up with a few spares.
  
  (The longer desks - they come in 120, 140, and 200 cm lengths - recommend an extra leg in the middle, hence the odd number.)

• How much slower does automatic bounds checking make your Rust code?  (ReadySet)
  
  Rust is designed to make it hard to write unsafe code - the sort of code that causes security nightmares for sysadmins around the world because one line in one library from 20 years ago didn't check the size of the input and now everyone is mining Monero on your production servers.
  
  Anyway, the answer is none.  None slower.
  
  
  
• Google has halved the number of memory safety issues with Android since they started using Rust for some of the code.  (9to5Google)
  
  And it's none slower.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare is raising its prices by 25% starting from May.  (The Register)
  
  There's going to be a lot of that about.  Computers have been one of the few things consistently getting cheaper, but there's only so much you can do when real inflation is well into double digits.
  
  (I also switched my Amazon Prime subscription from monthly to annual to lock in the current low price - A$59 for a year, about US$40.  Given the cost of shipping stuff to New House City it's gone from being a nice-to-have to essential.)
  
  
  
• Apple blocked a new feature in the Coinbase wallet that allowed users to transfer NFTs to other wallets.  (MacRumors)
  
  Apple said that the "gas fee" - a small amount of cryptocurrency that you need to pay to perform any transaction - had to be purchased using Apple's own payment platform for the new feature to be approved.
  
  You can't purchase crypto using Apple's payment platform.
  
  
  
• The relaunch of Twitter Blue is delayed because Twitter doesn't want to give Apple 30% of everything it earns.  (WCCFTech)

  Twitter is planning on finding a way to circumvent the 30% fee that Apple charges, but so far, we don't see a way out. I mean, remember what happened to Epic Games and Fortnite when they refused to circumvent the in-app fee?

  Yes.  Epic launched an entire new online games store and now has over two thousand staff and half a billion users.
  
  It doesn't seem like much of a threat, to be honest.
  
  
  
• Stable Diffusion - the AI image generator - now runs on Arm-based Macs.  (9to5Mac)
  
  While this is new, I was under the impression that it only ran on Nvidia graphics cards.  Not true, as it turns out; with a little fiddling it runs on most AMD cards from the last six years as well.
  
  
  
• The Kindle Scribe is absolutely adequate.  (The Verge)
  
  If you want a large (10.2") high resolution (300dpi) e-ink reader with a pen, this is that.  And some clunky software aside, it works exactly as it says.
  
  I'm getting a Kindle Paperwhite while I wait for somebody - anybody - to release a good, small Android tablet that I don't have to order from AliExpress.

Posted by: normal at Friday, December 02 2022 07:39 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 03 2022 02:24 AM (BMUHC)

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• Here's everything that went wrong with FTX. (The Verge)
  
  Yeah, it just "went wrong".  By accident.
  
  
  
• FTX’s Collapse Was a Crime, Not an Accident. (CoinDesk)
  
  That's more like it.

  In the weeks since Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire was revealed to be a house of lies, mainstream news organizations and commentators have often failed to give their readers a straightforward assessment of exactly what happened.  August institutions including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have uncovered many key facts about the scandal, but they have also repeatedly seemed to downplay the facts in ways that soft-pedaled Bankman-Fried’s intent and culpability.

  More October institutions, possibly November, but yes.

  It is now clear that what happened at the FTX crypto exchange and the hedge fund Alameda Research involved a variety of conscious and intentional fraud intended to steal money from both users and investors.  That’s why a recent New York Times interview was widely derided for seeming to frame FTX’s collapse as the result of mismanagement rather than malfeasance.  A Wall Street Journal article bemoaned the loss of charitable donations from FTX, arguably propping up Bankman-Fried’s strategic philanthropic pose.  Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, court chronicler of the neoliberal status quo, seemed to whitewash his own entanglements by crediting Bankman-Fried’s money with helping Democrats in the 2020 elections – sidestepping the likelihood that the money was effectively embezzled.

  This is the straight shit.  If you're interested in the real story behind this latter day love child of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff, read most of the thing.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk met with Tim Cook and announced that the war is cancelled.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Build your own war.

• Samsung's GDDR6W memory doubles capacity and performance by the clever trick of, um, being two chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's literally two chips.  One device to surface-mount, which might make assembly simpler and cheaper, but two slivers of silicon inside it, with twice as many leads and twice the power consumption.
  
  
  
• Laspass says hackers breached its systems and accessed customer data.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Again.
  
  They're probably running Elasticsearch on QNAP.
  
  
  
• The hackers got GoTo too.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  GoTo - formerly LogMeIn - apparently shares the same QNAP device as Lastpass.
  
  
  
• Security researchers at Akamai left a space out of a command line and accidentally murdered a botnet.  (Bleeping Computer)

  "In our controlled environment, we were able to send commands to the bot to test its functionality and attack signatures," Akamai vulnerability researcher Larry Cashdollar - we swear we are not making this up - explained in a new report.
  
  "As part of this analysis, a syntax error caused the bot to stop sending commands, effectively killing the botnet."

  Mission failed successfully.
  
  
  
• Autonomous trucking company Embark has silently evaporated.  (Crunchbase)
  
  The company's market cap has dwindled from $5 billion to $110 million, even though it still has $190 million in cash reserves.
  
  If that's not a show of confidence, I don't know what is.
  
  And they did it without any splashy fraud or missed earnings - they don't have any earnings yet.  Investors just decided, yeah, not so much.
  
  Autonomous vehicles are hard, and with interest rates up sharply investors are looking for returns in this lifetime rather than the next.
  
  
  
• Anker lied about the security of its security cameras.  (The Verge)
  
  There isn't any.

• Apple's App Store is an ad-ridden mockery of its former self.  (Business Insider)
  
  If you're working on a good an useful app, you have to jump through flaming hoops to get it in the App Store.
  
  If you're producing worthless garbage that makes Apple money, no problem at all.
  
  
  
• The same Ikea desk legs that were out of stock before are out of stock again.  Should have ordered them when I had the chance, even if I'm not planning to put those desks in place right away.
  
  That only affects the main office; the desks in at least four of the other five rooms use different legs that are still in stock and which I am going to order right now before those also disappear.
  
  Ordering the legs for ten desks gives me a delivery fee of $29.  One small desktop, $599.  That's why I didn't place an order sooner.
  
  
  
• Speaking of ordering stuff, I bought some books.  I buy books all the time - every time there's a Humble Book Bundle that isn't rubbish I'll throw some money at it, so I average about 100 new books a month.
  
  But those are digital.  I stopped buying paper books a few years ago because (a) I mostly read on my tablet and (b) my old house was completely and utterly out of room.
  
  Now I have room.  Lots of.  Have to buy all the books before they stop printing them.

• If you've been around the Web for a long time this page should give you an attack of nostalgia, and possibly epilepsy.  (NeoCities)
  
  
  
• MineCity 2000 converts SimCity 2000 save files into Minecraft maps.  (GitHub)
  
  That's one way to do it, I guess.  
  
  Where is that video of the Hololive fan Minecraft server?  They did it the hard way.
  
  
  
• Mastodon privacy: Who actually holds your data?  (Privado)
  
  The answer makes sense: The server you log in to holds details like your email address and password, all servers hold your public data, and any server hosting a user you send a private message holds that private message.
  
  Which means the admin of any server hosting a user you send a private message can read that private message.  No end-to-end encryption.
  
  There are reasons for that, and the former staff of Twitter were little better than a random nobody running an anonymous Mastodon node, but it's something to be aware of.
  
  
  
• Apple looks set to fall short by 20 million units on iPhone sales this quarter.  (Reuters)
  
  Due to the global recession that dare not speak its name and the ongoing higher-order fuckery in China.  Not sure how much each element is contributing, but neither is good.
  
  
  
• Snap - as in Snapchat - has told its employees to show up at the office or consider themselves ex.  (CNN)
  
  Four days a week, at least.
  
  And since the company has already announced layoffs of 20% of its staff, I expect that threat of being exed is perceived as real.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fried says he couldn't possibly have been using his technical skills to steal billions of dollars from customers because he doesn't have any.  (Coin Telegraph)
  
  Technical skills, that is.  Well, customers too at this point.
  
  Who the fucking fuck thought it was a good idea to give this sociopathic retard ten billion dollars in the first place?  And why hasn't anyone been arrested yet?
  
  
  
• Distributed crypto exchange Serum, formerly backed by FTX, is toast.  (The Block)
  
  "Here's the code.  Build your own exchange.  We're done with this bullshit." said lead developer - I swear we are not making this up - Mango Max.
  
  
  
• Amazon has announced a "Zero ETL" integration between Aurora and Redshift.  (The Register)
  
  This is what we in the olden days used to call an integration.  ETL stands for extract, transform, load, meaning you dump the data out of one application, painstakingly convert the file format, and load it into the new one.  
  
  Which is not an integration at all.
  
  
  
• Why streaming service subscription rates keep going up.  (The Verge)
  
  Because they spend billions of dollars on crap nobody watches.

Posted by: David Eastman at Thursday, December 01 2022 04:04 AM (D6Mju)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, December 01 2022 09:08 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 01 2022 05:36 PM (PiXy!)

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• In a rare win for sanity and freedom Britain is abandoning legislation that would have banned "legal but harmful" speech online.  (Reuters)
  
  The proposed law was so twisted that it included criminal charges for executives of social platforms for the entirely legal speech of other people.
  
  This unsurprisingly provoked some pushback from said social platforms.
  
  The government - the nominally conservative government - is planning to return with more of the same but with a tasty won't somebody think of the children sauce on top.
  
  
  
• I think everything I want from Ikea is in stock right now.  I could just set fire to my credit card and order a houseful of furniture in one go.
  
  Probably best not to.  Would save on delivery fees but leave my living room filled with flat packs when I've only just got it free of boxes.
  
  Going to end up with 90 feet of desk space.
  
  

• The Merriam-Webster Word of the year is gaslighting.  (Merriam-Webster)
  
  In other news, monkey pox has been renamed piss party pox to remove the stigma associated with fucking monkeys.
  
  
  
  
  
• Mice use calculus.  (Quanta)
  
  Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
  
  
  
• Candian crypto exchange Coinsquare has suffered a breach of customer data.  (CoinDesk)
  
  Customer funds are safe with the encryption keys stored offline.  
  
  They say.
  
  
  
• Epson has ditched laser printers for inkjets, saying inkjets are better for the environment.  (The Register)
  
  While I view such claims with suspicion on general principle, Epson does make the Ecotank line of inkjets, which have ink tanks, that you simply fill up with a bottle of ink when you need to.  It's hard to improve on that unless you can synthesize ink directly from the air.

Posted by: three-humped camel at Wednesday, November 30 2022 01:14 AM (x8H4m)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 30 2022 01:46 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 30 2022 03:10 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Any Mouse at Wednesday, November 30 2022 03:26 PM (FMxtE)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 30 2022 06:51 PM (PiXy!)

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