• The CHIPS act - delivering $52 billion in subsidies to the massively profitable semiconductor industry - has passed Congress after being bloated out to $280 billion.  (The Verge)
  
  Your tax dollars at work.
  
  Won't stop Intel raising chip prices.
  
  
  
• You might ask why Intel was pushing so hard for its cut of the mud pie when it's been having one record quarter after another and the answer is the gravy train just fell off a bridge.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The company posted a $500 million quarterly loss on a year-on-year revenue drop of 17% and an accompanying drop in gross margins, which is not a pleasant combination.
  
  
  

Tech News

• A big part of that Intel loss was an inventory write-down as they close their Optane storage business.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Optane is faster and more robust than flash and cheaper and denser than RAM, but at the same time it's more expensive and less dense than flash and slower and less robust than RAM, putting it in an awkward place.
  
  It never got the volume in sales to drive the price down, so now it's gone for good.  It was an attractive option - at least on paper - for enterprise databases, but I'm not sure if it made much difference in reality.
  
  
  
• Back on the CHIPS act recipients will be banned from building new fabs in China.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That provision is probably aimed at companies like Samsung, which is considering a $200 billion investment in US-based fabs.  Samsung already operates fabs in China for older, lower-tech processes - as does TSMC.
  
  
  
• Nirvana Finance - one of those bullshit blockchain "stablecoins" - just got wiped out.  (Coindesk)
  
  Someone borrowed $10 million - unsecured, anonymous, and online - and created a fake transaction to drain funds from Nirvana before paying the loan back and running off with the stolen funds.  Like paying with a cheque and closing your bank account before it can be cashed.
  
  
  
• Instagram says, "Apparently we are not the phone company after all.  Who knew?"  (The Verge)
  
  Oh.
  
  
  
• Twitter is raising prices.  (The Verge)
  
  Even The Verge is skeptical of this one.

• Facebook - well, the parent company, Meta - saw a 1% decline in revenue compared with the same quarter a year ago.  (Engadget)
  
  And more significantly, a 36% decline in profits.
  
  
  
• Facebook's answer to this seems to be to power into the dive.  In response to user complaints about them turning Instagram into a cheap TikTok clone, they said: We don't care.  We don't have to.  We're the phone company.  (The Guardian)
  
  
  

Tech News

• TikTok itself meanwhile says China?  Never heard of it.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Leaked PR documents say:

  Downplay the parent company ByteDance, downplay the China association, downplay AI.

  Accompanied by a set of "proof points" to let you know they're lying.
  
  
  
• Intel's 56-core Sapphire Rapids CPU is 35% faster than the previous high-end Ice Lake chips.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It has 40% more cores, so this is not a huge win.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 29 2022 09:56 AM (obo9H)

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• Sales of Xbox consoles, software, and online services were all down in the quarter ending June 30.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Does that mean I can finally get an Xbox series X?
  
  No, don't be silly.  And don't even bother looking for a PS5.
  
  
  
• Trees don't exist.  (Eukaryote Writes)
  
  Not that there aren't things called trees, but rather phylogenetically it is impossible to draw a line around the things we call trees.  It's hard enough with crabs - king crabs, for example, aren't crabs, and nor are coconut crabs or hermit crabs.  Crabbiness has evolved at least five times independently.
  
  But treeness has evolved independently at least thirty-eight times in the Canary Islands alone.  Herbaceous plants freely evolve into trees and back again, completely destroying any hope of a neat evolutionary tree of trees.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Social networks are dead.  (Axios)
  
  Facebook is TikToking itself and Twitter's staff is 100% committed to the circular firing squad business model.  They won't be missed.
  
  
  
• Micron has announced new 232-layer TLC flash chips with up to 2TB in a single 11.5x13.5mn package.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's dense enough to make a 16TB M.2 drive.  That would be kind of expensive though.
  
  It's a little too large for a 2TB microSD card, but they would use cheaper, denser, slower QLC flash for those anyway.
  
  
  
• Google reported "disappointing" financial results, with profits of just $16 billion on $70 billion in sales for the last quarter.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Someone please disappoint me like that.
  
  
  
• Hololive's Tokino Sora - their first vtuber back in 2017 when they were just a VR technology company called Cover Corp - has reached one million subscribers, becoming the (counts) thirty-first Hololive member to reach that mark.  (Reddit)
  
  Is that a lot?  Because that seems like a lot.

Posted by: Karl at Thursday, July 28 2022 04:35 AM (e8dSa)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 28 2022 08:32 AM (PiXy!)

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• Nvidia's flagship 4000-series graphics card could feature 18,176 cores and 48GB of RAM, and use as much as 800W.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Or not.
  
  That would make it about 75% larger than the 3090 Ti, and it's also expected to clock about 60% higher, for three times the overall performance.
  
  The card should hit about 100TFLOPs.  My Radeon 4850 - this was a while ago, back when Mass Effect and Dragon Age were fresh and I still had time to play computer games - ran at exactly 1TFLOPs.  I played Mass Effect at 720p and I remember the game tended to chug when I got into large battles with the Reapers.
  
  So the 4090 Ultra (or whatever it might be called) should handle 12k resolution with some slowdowns, or 8k gaming at a steady 60Hz.  Very approximately.
  
  AMD meanwhile is also set to announce new cards, and their high end next-gen cards are also expected to be three times as fast as anything available today.
  
  Likely to be three times as expensive as well.
  
  
  

Tech News

• You can't custom build a Lego minifig of yourself for $12.  (Jay's Brick Blog)
  
  Which is to say there's a new online tool to let you do this, and that is in fact the price, but it's almost universally inaccessible.  Certainly in Australia.
  
  I can create semi-custom minifigs here downunder with their previous tool, which is much, much cheaper (three for A$10) but has less variety in hairstyles and clothing.
  
  I actually started making my own set of Lego HoloEN, but there aren't any redheads available, or green hair either.  At least there's blue.
  
  
  
• Instagram desperately wants to be the new TikTok.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  TikTok is of course a screaming, burning sewer, but it's a screaming, burning sewer that makes money, or doesn't make money but at least that gets lots of clicks, or doesn't get lots of clicks but does gather up endless amounts of personal information that is basically useless but which advertisers are willing to pay for...  Or were.
  
  
  
• Intel has picked up Mediatek as its first* significant foundry customer.  (The Register)
  
  * Sort of.  Altera was Intel's first foundry customer, but then Intel bought them shortly after so it turned into just Intel making more Intel chips at Intel fabs for Intel.
  
  
  

• The new seasonal Pepsi flavour here in Australia is lemon.  It gets a thumbs up from me, except that if you want to buy it in bottles instead of the more expensive cans, it seems to be in stock in exactly one store in the entire state.
  
  I have cherry Coke in the fridge - the good stuff made with cane sugar - but I'm drinking the lemon Pepsi instead.
  
  
  
• Is AMD's Epyc Genoa a fast fast CPU after all?  (WCCFTech)
  
  This article says that the top clock speed for the upcoming 96-core Epyc 9664 is 3.8GHz.  That's pretty good for a server CPU - they are clocked far more conservatively than desktop chips.
  
  It doesn't run all 96 cores at once at that speed though, and the actual speeds achieved in production remain to be seen.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Western Digital Black SN770 is a pretty good SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unless you want to do lots of sequential writes in which case it is half the speed of the cheaper Inland Performance drive from Microcenter.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Why?  No idea.  These things are actually very complicated and as well as the usual price/performance/power tradeoffs there are also configuration tradeoffs, where two drives with the same hardware can perform differently in different benchmarks - each walking away with some tests and losing badly in others - due to different optimisation choices.
  
  And then there's Apple, who tune their SSDs to run fast but simply lose recent data if the power goes out.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, Apple fanboys are whining again - still - about not being taken seriously.  (Daring Fireball)
  
  Yeah.  I listened to you idiots.  I bought a Mac.  It cost a small fortune and I barely used it, because Apple deliberately makes getting work done on their computers a living hell.
  
  
  
• Sony is flagging its own websites for copyright infringement.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Good.  More of this.  
  
  According to the article, Disney and Warner Bros. are doing the same thing.
  
  At my day job we routinely get these notices from the IP lawyers of big companies who have paid us to set up websites for them.  It's always a drama because (a) the datacenter's first response is to pull the plug on that server to avoid any contributory liability and (b) it is impossible to find the right person to talk to to get it sorted out.
  
  
  
• Actual note from me to ops team: Please remove server xyz from the cluster.  It is shit.

1 "it isimpossibleto find the right person to talk to to get it sorted out."

Seems to me that the solution here is to adjust the SLA to state "this is a you problem."

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 26 2022 12:04 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 26 2022 12:57 AM (LADmw)

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• Key images in a number of influential papers that have directed 15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars of Alzheimer's research appear to have been algorithmically enhanced.  (Science)
  
  By which I mean they're as fake as a Confederate $3 bill, to the point that the chemical they are supposed to be showing evidence of may not even exist.
  
  There's an effect called publication bias in science, where if you don't find what you're looking for , your paper is considered uninteresting and doesn't get accepted by the major journals, even though the failure to find something that every expects to exist can be as much of a breakthrough as finding something no-one expected.
  
  Still, one research did publish two papers back in 2008 noting that he followed all the required protocols and ended up with precisely nothing.  But those seem to have been largely ignored.
  
  
  

Tech New

• A quasicrystal with two time dimensions could be the answer to creating robust memory circuits for quantum computers.  (Phys.org)
  
  Or, on the other hand, not.
  
  
  
• The Monkeypox outbreak - just classified as a "mega catastrophe" by the WorldWide Freak-Out Organisation - is exactly what you thought it was.  (NBC News)

  [O]f the 699 monkeypox cases for which there was available information, 97% were in gay, bisexual or other men who have sex with men. New York City, the U.S. epicenter, has seen only one woman diagnosed with the virus out of 639 cases confirmed through July 19.

  But you'll likely be banned from Twitter if you point this out.
  
  
  
• More on Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids workstation chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They'll be available with anything from 12 to 56 cores, with the smaller models offering higher clock speeds.  They'll support 8 memory channels and up to 112 lanes of PCIe 5.0.
  
  No information yet as to dates or prices, so if you're waiting to build a high-end workstation system you can go right on waiting.
  
  
  

• Yet another outage with this damn server.  The automated restart almost worked.  It silenced the alarm but didn't actually bring the blogs back to life.
  
  Ugh.
  
  
  
• We're gonna need billions of solar panels to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and combine it with hydrogen extracted from water to turn it into fuel.  (Casey Handmer)
  
  Or trees.  Because that's what trees do.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• SpaceX has broken the launch record it set in 2021.  (Space.com)
  
  With five months left in the year.
  
  
  
• That idiot who thought a Google chat bot was sentient has been fired.  (Big Technology)
  
  For breaching a confidentiality agreement, not for being an idiot.  Unfortunately.  Because we had a teachable moment here.
  
  
  
• Intel's 13700k is basically a 12900k.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is good if you mostly care about getting eight fast CPU cores, not about the slower efficiency cores, because you should get 12900k performance for a lot less money.
  
  Unless Intel suddenly decided to increase CPU prices.  (The Verge)
  
  
  
• Intel's W9-3495 will offer a 56 core workstation CPU running at...  Oh.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Running at 1.8GHz.
  
  Though that might be (a) an engineering sample, (b) the minimum clock speed when running all cores with AVX512, or (c) both.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 24 2022 12:50 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 24 2022 12:51 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 24 2022 10:09 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 24 2022 10:15 AM (obo9H)

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• Yes, Virginia, the FBI is reading Twitter.  (The Verge)
  
  Anything that allows them to bring high-profile cases without leaving the sofa, up to and including making them up, not that they need to in this case.

  So what have we learned here, friends? First of all, don’t do illegal things. Second, don’t do them on a public blockchain where anyone can look. Third, Coinbase definitely reads crypto Twitter. Fourth, so do the feds. Fifth, when one of your employees is indicted for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, the most important time to note that tokens aren’t securities is right after the indictment is unsealed.

  
  
  
• SEC lists nine crypto tokens as securities following Coinbase insider trading charges.  (The Block)
  
  Oh.

• YouTube processed 1.5 billion Content-ID claims in 2021.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Is that a lot?  That sounds like a lot.
  
  
  
• Samsung plans to invest $200 billion in new semiconductor fabs in Texas.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Is that a lot?  That sounds like a lot.
  
  Also, Texas: Get your grid sorted out.  Wind power is not baseload power.
  
  
  
• Need an FPGA developer board?  Only have a laptop?  NiteFury has you covered.  (CrowdSupply)
  
  Or would do if they hadn't run out of them 18 months ago and been unable to make more due to component shortages.
  
  
  
• A look at the Ryzen 6850U under Linux.  (Phoronix)
  
  Not the fastest laptop CPU, though respectable, but easily the fastest integrated graphics.
  
  
  
• Reality doesn't exist until you measure it.  (Science)
  
  From what I've seen, it often doesn't bloody exist after I've measured it either.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 23 2022 03:04 AM (LADmw)

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• My poem is done.  I abandoned the sonnet and went for five stanzas in the common meter - 8-6-8-6 with an abab rhyme scheme.
  
  That solved the problem of finding another rhyme for "baby", but means it can be sung to the tune of the Pokemon theme - which is hilariously (in)appropriate.
  
  
  
• Neopets' database has been hacked and their user and password information is out there.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Worth noting that their password field appears to be VARCHAR(20) - which means if it's stored as a hexadecimal hash, it's just 80 bits, which means that every single password has likely been cracked already.

• Ford is planning to fund it's expansion into electric vehicles by...  Oh.  (Car and Driver)
  
  They're going to fire 8000 people.
  
  
  
• Is the FiiO K9 Pro ESS Desktop DAC / Amplifier a solid product or audiophile nonsense?  (Tech Powerup)
  
  It costs $850 from AliExpress, so I'm not inclined to find out.
  
  
  
• If you're looking to build a fast fast server, the ASRock WRX80D8-2T might be the just the motherboard you need.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's built around the Threadripper Pro rather than Epyc, but it's a server board with remote management and tons of I/O.  
  
  While the upcoming 4th generation "Genoa" Epyc chips will have 96 cores, up from 64, the 96 core models we've seen detailed so far max out at just 2.15GHz.  The Threadripper Pro 5995WX has 64 cores and a top clock speed of 4.5GHz, so depending on the workload it could well be faster.
  
  
  
• Minecraft says blocks and blockchains don't mix.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Mojang (now owned by Microsoft, like most things) said no to integrating NFTs with the game client, the server, or using Minecraft IP with NFTs in any way.
  
  
  
• NASA has scheduled the launch of the Artemis I Moon program mission for August 29.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is an unmanned test run for a program that will ultimately bring us very, very expensive virtue signaling:

  Artemis I is the first of three missions that will culminate with NASA landing the first woman and first person of color on the Moon.

  Astronaut: You picked me because I have the right stuff, yeah?
  NASA Program Director: What?  Oh, yeah, sure.
  
  
  
• Should you not buy the inadequate base model of the M2 MacBook Air?  (9to5Mac)

  Waddya asking me for?  Do I look like a nerd to you?  I'm a journalist.  I don't know shit.

  Think I'm exaggerating?  Here's a literal quote sans Pixy Filter:

  I’ve used the base model M1 MacBook Air for work since it came out in 2020. Now I’m on the base model M2 MacBook Air. This is my short review:

  • SSD: I can’t tell that the base model storage is slower
  • Performance: I can’t tell if the M2 chip throttles
  • Speed: I can’t tell if the M2 chip is faster

  Thanks Zac.  I can see why they pay you the big bucks.
  
  
  

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