Twelve years, and four psychiatrists!
Four?
I kept biting them!
Why?
They said you weren't real.
Saturday, February 26
Go Fuck Yourself Russian Warship Edition
Top Story
- Weekends are Question and Answer time, when I'm not working because the blockchain has blown up again, or stuck on a mobile link with a two second ping time, or tied up moving house, or whatever is scheduled for next week that I don't want to think about.
Drop your questions in the comments today and if I don't get crushed by a meteorite I will endeavour to answer them tomorrow.
- Internet is back on.
It was the cable between the modem and the wall socket.
How exactly that got fried by the lightning strike when nothing else was affected I do not know. Maybe they have optoisolators at both ends to protect against this sort of thing.
First thing I watched was a Minecraft stream with Pina Pengin of Prism Project, possibly the single nicest vtuber in the world, which got gatecrashed by Pipkin Pippa of Phase Connect who has a standing invitation to join Nick Rekieta's livestream if that gives you any indication.
- Wait, HoloEN is having an unarchived off-collab?! Amelia, Ina, Mumei, Fauna, and Kronii are all in the same room. You can tell by the acoustics - they're terrible. Right now they're singing the guitar solo from Bohemian Rhapsody, as you are required to by law in any karaoke session involving more than three people.
- The US and allies including Taiwan have announced broad export restrictions of technology to Russia. (Ars Technica)
Does that mean video card prices will finally come down?
- China's supreme court has ruled that fundraising via crypto tokens is a crime punishable by ten years in prison. (The Star)
Does that mean video card prices will finally come down?
- Nvidia is investigating an attack that took down parts of its internal network for two days. (Bleeping Computer)
Well, fuck.
Nvidia says that its "business and commercial activities continue uninterrupted" - which means that the attack was aimed at its R&D.
Tech News
- Russian hacking group Conti basically announced that it's an arm of the FSB. (Bleeping Computer)
There might be some independent criminal hacking groups operating in Russia, but for the most part it's government controlled to a greater or lesser degree.
Also in that article: The FSB got hacked.
- The poor you will have with you always because poverty is relative. (Jeff Kaufman)
Shoots down a Twitter meme about how modern minimum wage earners make less than Bob Cratchit, because minimum wage earners throughout history by definition earn minimum wage. The meme ignores purchasing power, which has gone through the roof.
- The claimed effect size is about a zillion times higher than is plausible. (Statistical Modeling and Stuff)
Good article about how you can immediately disregard certain scientific papers as garbage if they claim unreasonably large effect sizes.
So if an article says that babies whose mothers regularly sang to them average 2 weeks earlier on learning goals than the control group, that's just normally dubious stuff. But it they claim six months earlier, it's trash, throw it out right away.
- How to use an iPad Pro to power your home office. (ZDNet)
Step One: Don't have a real job.
Step Two (optional): Get offended when people point this out.
- The USPS has told the EPA to go fuck itself and is proceeding with the purchase of 150,000 new trucks with internal combustion engines. (Washington Post)
"If you give us more money, we'll think about also buying some electric ones," they added.
- The world's largest bacterium has a sort of proto-nucleus. (Science)
Bacteria normally have their DNA just scattered about like toys in a kid's bedroom after a playdate, but this one has it all neatly stored away like that one kid who you just know is going to have a Wikipedia page before they turn 21.
Also of note is the size: It's 9mm long, on average, with specimens up to twice that. Bacteria are not supposed to do that either.
- How to achieve a completely secure link between two devices that are not themselves secure. (Quanta)
Quantum.
The difference in this article is that they actually did it - it's not just theory anymore.
- Status pages at large internet companies are garbage. (The Register)
There was an outage at AWS last week, but you wouldn't know it from their status page or their official announcements - because those are the same thing. Changing a single indicator from green to yellow on the AWS status page is a management decision, not an automated process. Without approval, that light stays green even if the entire datacenter just got eaten by Nyarlathotep.
That's where Status Page Status Page comes in. (Status Page Status Page)
It checks what the status pages for AWS, GitHub, and Slack are saying, compared with what is actually happening in the real world, and goes red if they don't match up.
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Friday, February 25
Property Blues Edition
Top Story
- Found a house I like. Well, I say like, but that's not quite the right word. Listed at around the market value of my current place, but (a) the lounge/dining area alone is roughly the size of my entire home, (b) the land area is larger than the land footprint of this entire townhouse complex, and (c) it has gigabit internet available (rare in Australia).
Catch is it's a bit of a commute. Like about ten hours.
On the third hand we don't have an office in Sydney anymore, so I don't have a commute.
- Samsung shipped a hundred million phones with broken encryption. (ThreatPost)
They were quietly notified last year and slipped a couple of patches into the regular updates, so if you've updated your phone since last September you should be good.
Samsung chose a robust encryption method but got the implementation details wrong, leaving it leaky and prone to attack by unprivileged apps on the phone.
Tech News
- The Zion Pro is a 15.6" 4K AMOLED portable touchscreen. (Tom's Hardware)
You probably don't need a 15.6" 4K AMOLED portable touchscreen, but if you do, this certainly is one. Even I don't need a 15.6" 4K AMOLED portable touchscreen, but now I want one.
- Smaller, lower resolution, possibly more practical, and still OLED is the Asus Vivobook 13 Slate. (Hot Hardware)
A Windows tablet with a detachable keyboard starting at $599 - don't buy that one, it only has 4GB of RAM - with a 13" 1080p screen and a Pentium Silver N6000 CPU.
That CPU is... Oh. I looked it up. It sucks. Forget I mentioned this.
- Nvidia's next-generation RTX 4000 range will be much faster than the 3000 series but not much more power-efficient. (WCCFTech)
Which means power consumption will go through the roof - allegedly as high as 850W.
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I mentioned that I ordered an HP Aero 13, specifically with Windows 10 because it was 30% off, where the newer model with Windows 11 was only 20% off, and also because I don't want Windows 11, for several reasons not least of which is Windows 11 Home forces you to sign in with a Microsoft account and not just a local password.
So naturally while they charged me for the cheaper Windows 10 model, what they actually shipped me runs Windows 11.
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Thursday, February 24
A Farewell To PixyLab Edition
Top Story
- Today has been a shitty day for the world in general. Also I have to move out of my home for the past decade since I'm renting and the owner is putting it on the market.
Might be looking to buy this time. Move to a less expensive area with worse transport, as long as it has good internet access.
Didn't think I could necessarily swing the deposit but I had completely forgotten about certain financial reserves that have just been sitting there while I've been working 48 hours a day. So... I can swing the deposit on a reasonable place.
(You forgot you had how much money? Yeah, I've been busy. Also it's not exactly liquid.)
Update: Or move out of Sydney entirely and save about a million bucks plus interest. That seems... Inviting.
- Russia may attempt using cryptocurrency to evade the worst of the incoming sanctions. (New York Times)
I can see the headline now: Ruble falls to new low of 40 trillion to the dollar as Russia's crypto reserves drained by bot network Weed_Slut_420.
Tech News
- Intel is working on a new chip aimed at beating Apple's M1 in all respects. (9to5Mac)
9to5Mac being Tame Apple Press calls this "too late" but the only way to get an M1 is to buy completely into Apple's ecosystem, and the company, frankly, sucks ass.
The new Arrow Lake mobile chips won't have more CPU cores but will have a much faster integrated GPU. (WCCFTech)
Still 14 cores on the low-to-midrange laptop parts, but 320 (and possibly 384) graphics cores, up from a current maximum of 96.
It will be built on Intel's 20A process node - a nominal 2nm, but as always that's just marketing.
- Meanwhile Intel has also officially announced their 12 generation mobile parts, due next Month. (Tom's Hardware)
Up to 14 CPU cores (6 performance and 8 low-power) and up to 96 graphics cores at a base power of 28W. That provides a significant upgrade over the 11th generation chips which maxed out at 4 cores in that power range.
Arrow Lake desktop parts meanwhile will have 8 performance cores and as many as 32 low-power cores. Since the low-power cores are about half the speed of the performance ones, that's effectively 24 full cores on a mainstream desktop processor. If the low-power cores also get a design and/or clock upgrade as they surely will, that will be a powerhouse.
- TPG aims for 4G and 5G wireless internet out outgrow wired broadband. (ZDNet)
Yeah, about that. I'm with TPG (not willingly, they bought iiNet) and right now my ping times to 8.8.8.8 are on the order of TWO SECONDS.
Around 8 milliseconds on my late lamented fiber link.
- And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane. (Bleeping Computer)
If only someone had warned us.
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Disclaimer: About the other shitty news today - yeah, I know.
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Wednesday, February 23
5G Or Not 5G Edition
Top Story
- Internet is still out. Playing telephone tag with the idiots at my ISP - how the hell can you run an internet business when your only support is by phone?
Meanwhile I have a 5G phone, a 5G SIM card, and a 5G plan. What I do not have is a 5G signal, because that would make life too easy. If I go upstairs and stand by the window I can just about get a second bar on the 4G signal sometimes.
At least I have a much better mobile plan. The bandwidth fees I was paying would have quickly added up to the cost of the new phone.
- I was wrong, we need crypto. (Hey.com)
A heartfelt and un-woke post from the guy behind Ruby on Rails, a long-time crypto-skeptic (justifiably) now shocked into being a true believer:This is crazy. Absolutely bonkers. Terrifying.
I work mostly with Python, though I do like Ruby. Might be worth taking a look at Rails even though - yep - it does have a Code of Cancer.
I still can't believe that this is the protest that would prove every Bitcoin crank a prophet. And for me to have to slice a piece of humble pie, and admit that I was wrong on crypto's fundamental necessity in Western democracies.
And that it was the Canadians who brought this on? You might as well have told me that it was really the Care Bears who ran Abu Ghraib.
- In a cashless society, freezing someone's bank account is a prison sentence. (The Hub)
The fact that weaponizing the financial system against nonviolent protestors and their distant supporters was the government’s tool of first resort should worry anyone who understands the role of civil disobedience in democracy. I would like to think Minister Steven Guilbeault, who was once arrested for scaling the CN Tower to hang a Greenpeace banner, lost a little sleep when he considered that disrupting critical infrastructure is still a common tactic of his environmentalist comrades. But somehow I doubt it. If there is one thing we haven’t seen much of in Ottawa recently, it’s principled consistency.
Very true.
Tech News
- This tweet is by the author of that Hey.com article:
Lots of agreement in the quote tweets. Lots of disagreement from the pronoun-in-bio crowd, who claim to be against government oppression.
That was always a lie. They just want to be the oppressors.
- Also, fuck you Samsung. (Samsung)
Adoptable storage is not available on Samsung devices. Using a microSD card for adoptable storage will reduce the overall performance of your phone or tablet, and is meant for devices with very low internal memory sizes. MicroSD cards used for adoptable storage are encrypted and cannot be removed from your device without factory resetting your phone or tablet, and formatting the SD card.
It's not your phone, assholes. I bought it. It's mine.
- The AeroCool Cipher case has room for eleven 3.5" and four 2.5" drives in a fairly average-size ATX tower. (Tom's Hardware)
Specifically targeted at Chia mining.
Gonna be expensive-
$75.
I'll take two.
Though I already have a 5-bay and an 8-bay external 3.5" drive arrays and two 2-bay 2.5" boxes, so I'm actually ahead of this. Did cost rather more than $75 though.
- What is this shit? (Krebs on Security)
IRS delenda est.
- Woolworths online sales increased 48% in the second half of 2021. (ZDNet)
I don't know how because they routinely lose half my order.
- Peloton sold rusty bikes that don't move to idiots for $2495. (Ars Technica)
Why are there so many rich idiots in the world? Though I guess I could afford to buy a $2495 exercise bike myself; I just wouldn't.
- Truth Social is at the top of Apple's App Store charts. (CNBC)
I can't speak to the quality of the service because right now it's Apple-only and I won't buy Apple products, and US-only and I can't be bothered fussing with my VPN.
- Salesforce employees are up in arms over the company's NFT plans. (Some weird Reuters site)
Live by the woke idiot, die by the woke idiot.
Party Like It's 1980-is Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Dirty creature come my way, from the bottom of a crypto lake. Selling off all my apes, think I've made a big mistake.
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Tuesday, February 22
Party Like It's 1999.99 Edition
Top Story
- Crypto engineers would welcome a prolonged "crypto winter" says Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin. (Business Insider)
"In Russian winter, only strong survive. Weak are thrown from troika to be devoured by wolves." said Buterin. "The wolves are the financial regulators in this analogy," he added, "and the troika is Ethereum and the ecosystem of Layer 2 blockchains and DAOs. The snow-swept tundra is of course conventional financial systems."
At night the ice weasels come.
Tech News
- The Netherlands has fined Apple $5 million again. (Reuters)
This is over Apple locking developers into their own payment processing system and with its 30% transaction fees. The Netherlands is fining Apple $5 million per week until it fixes it.
- Atlassian cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes wants to wreck Australia's electricity supply. (Wall Street Journal)
He's offered $3.5 billion for energy company AGL, and wants it to shut down its coal-burning power stations. Australia doesn't have any nuclear power for some weird reason - we have one reactor for research and production of radioisotopes for medicine and industry - so this would mean leave hydroelectric as the only reliable baseload capacity, in a country noted for routinely suffering years-long droughts.
- Full specs on Lenovo's Legion Y700 8" gaming tablet. (Liliputing)
Interestingly it uses the Core A77-based Snapdragon 870 compared to the 778G in my new Samsung A52s, which has A78 cores. So if I manage to find this tablet it would still only be my second fastest Android device.
- Is Firefox okay? (Ars Technica)
No. The company is run by communists.
- Intel's 13th generation Raptor Lake chips could be up to 40% faster than Alder Lake on multi-threaded workloads. (WCCFTech)
Which is not that big of a deal. They're going from an 8+8 core layout to 8+16, which given the relative performance of the cores should improve performance by 33% with no other changes.
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Monday, February 21
I Wish You A Stasi Christmas Edition
Top Story
- Hackers took advantage of the confusion around an update to OpenSea's smart contracts to launch a phishing attack and steal NFTs worth between $0 and $200 million. (The Verge)
Apparently they managed to make $1.7 million in real crypto before being caught at it and locked out. The NFTs can easily be rendered untradeable and worthless, but once sold the cryptocurrency is harder to block.
So the ALV (Average Laundering Value) of the NFTs - the imaginary hyper-inflated prices they were listed for - was around $200 million, the thieves actually made off with $1.7 million in ETH, and the remaining stolen NFTs are now worth absolutely nothing.
- Here's how it went down, translated into non-crypto terms:
1. The Open Seas Zoo was planning on transferring $200 million worth of extremely rare monkeys to a new secure location in a U-Haul with security features and GPS tracking.
2. The thieves stole an identical truck and added removable U-Haul decals to make it look exactly like the real thing.
3. On the night of the transfer, they parked their U-Haul right behind the Zoo one and overpowered the driver.
4. They then directed the monkey wranglers to fill their truck with monkeys.
5. The original U-Haul was ostentatiously driven off, breaking the speed limit and getting caught on camera before being abandoned in an open field where it would be quickly tracked and found.
6. Meanwhile the decals were stripped off the fake U-Haul and it was driven sedately from the crime scene and parked under a disused railway bridge where it wouldn't be found.
7. The thieves now laid low for a few weeks while the police traced the real U-Haul but found no sign of the monkeys.
8. A month later after the fuss had settled down the thieves could return to the stashed truck at their leisure.
9. This is all your fault, Brian.
10. You can have your monkeys back, guys.
- These crypto enthusiasts are idiots. (CNBC)
Tech News
- I have two lights now on my fiber internet box. Yesterday it had one; it's supposed to have three. Progress, I guess.
- I also have the new phone, a new SIM card on a 120GB plan instead of a 2GB plan, and probably a 400GB microSD card. I say probably because I accidentally bought it from a third-party vendor when ordering from Amazon, something you should never ever do for SD cards and USB drives. It's probably real though. If it's fake, it's a very good fake. I've bought a dozen or so SanDisk cards and it looks 100% legit.
The Samsung A52s is very close in specs to the Oppo A91 I already have - same 2400x1080 AMOLED screen, just 0.1" bigger, same camera layout, same 128GB storage - but has an A78 core instead of A73. It's about 140% faster according to benchmarks, and by far the fastest Android device I own. Will be interesting to play with it.
- San Francisco mayor London Breed also wants to flush workers who have fled their offices back into the city. (SF Chronicle)
In her case it is rather more literally a shithole.
- AMD's new Radeon 660M RDNA2 integrated graphics outperforms Intel's fastest Iris Xe offering in most benchmarks. (Tom's Hardware)
On the one hand, it's not a lot faster than Intel's best integrated graphics.
On the other hand, this is the cut-down version with 6 graphics cores. The full version has 12 cores and isn't too far behind dedicated GTX 1060 and 1650 desktop cards. (WCCFTech)
- Yet another thunderstorm rolling in this evening, but at least this one isn't directly on top of me.
- Was going to share the worst take in the history of takes, but he got ratioed out of existence.
- At least in software I can just sigh and deploy to older, crappier, but still working hardware.
- Speaking of older crappier but still working hardware, 2.82TB of backups transferred so far. I could reduce that way down with some cleanup effort, but never have the time.
Compression and dedup on the new backup server reduce the actual storage used to 1.67TB.
Also, hard drives are really slow when you have 100 million files.
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Sunday, February 20
What the fucking fuck is this fucking shit?
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Pack Your Bags Kids We're Going To Disneyland Edition
Top Story
- I noticed this too. Apart from the usual propaganda outlets like the CBC and the mainstream Canadian press, there's a huge amount of bot activity supporting police brutality against peaceful protestors.
They're not even very good bots. This really needs an investigation because if what I'm seeing is real, it's a massive scandal.
Tech News
- This exchange was real - though the best part is now deleted.
Bots tend not to actively embarrass themselves like that.
- Google is making updates to Android to improve user privacy, sort of. (Washington Post / MSN)
Similar to steps taken by Apple with iOS in recent years, the changes would prevent third parties from tracking Android user activity across the internet. While doing absolutely nothing to protect users from Google.
This is not about what's best for the customer. It's entirely about control.
- Clearview AI aims to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year. (Washington Post / MSN)
Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
(And no, they're not talking about porn. Though it might be better if they were.)
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Saturday, February 19
Curse You GOG Galaxy Edition
Top Story
- New phone has arrived and joined the dozens of other boxes waiting to be opened. Yay. I'll do that on Monday when the SIM arrives as well.
- New backup server has been deployed and data is trucking over from the old one with the failed drive. The old server is RAID-Z1 so it can't survive losing another drive; the new one is RAID-Z3 so it takes four drive failures to put it out of action.
Also enabled compression and dedup on the new server, which slows things down a bit but is probably going to be fine.
- Now that people - both workers and business owners - have discovered they mostly don't need to come in to the office anymore, don't need to fight traffic on the one hand and pay obscene rents on the other hand - cities such as New York are basically fucked. (New York Post)
New York's new mayor, who, against all probability, seems to be even dumber than the previous one, is telling people that it's time to leave their comfortable, functional home offices and venture once more into his foetid crime-ridden shithole of a city before his budget completely implodes.
If you don't go into the office, your company will reduce or cancel its lease entirely, and the small businesses around it that depend on passing trade will go broke.
Elections have consequences, and elections that put idiots into office doubly so.
- Update: This is the way.
Tech News
- Thanks GOG Galaxy. Your unscheduled update just ate my entire mobile data cap.
Fortunately I'll be moving to a much higher data cap on Monday. I would have just upgraded the existing plan except I can't because my once-competent service provider was acquired by idiots.
- Leaks suggest Motorola (Lenovo these days) is planning to launch a camera this year. (Liliputing)
The camera will have a 194MP primary sensor, 50MP wide angle, 12MP telephoto, and 60MP selfie. Oh, and there's a phone attached to that as well.
You might be saying that a small phone camera cannot possibly have a useful 194MP sensor, because the pixels would be smaller than the wavelength of light, and you'd be correct. Motorola's engineers have worked around this by the clever trick of making the sensor freaking enormous - by phone standards anyway.
You'd probably use it downsampled to 50MP, but that is still super-detailed. If you want a decent take-anywhere camera this might be one to watch. It won't rival a proper DSLR because of the limitations of its physical size, but you're not going to have a DSLR in your pocket everywhere you go.
- A detailed look at AMD's new Ryzen 6000 mobile CPU. (Tom's Hardware)
This is not a huge design change; it's based on existing Zen 3 cores and RDNA 2 graphics. But this is the first time those have been put together on the same chip, and the chip itself is using TSMC's update 6nm node so it runs faster and cooler than the previous generation.
If you want to play games on integrated graphics, it is a huge upgrade though, easily twice as fast as 5000-series chips. It requires DDR5 (or LPDDR5) RAM because DDR4 doesn't have the bandwidth for that level of graphics performance, so that might push prices up a bit.
It also has built-in support for USB4 at 40Gbps, essentially a store-brand Thunderbolt port.
- Intel is preparing to launch its new line of Alder Lake NUCs, starting at - oh. Starting at $1500. (Tom's Hardware)
Nice try, Intel.
- Google Drive is flagging MacOS .DS_Store metadata files for copyright violation. (Bleeping Computer)
Google is the world leader in practical applications of artificial intelligence, so this could not possibly be a mistake, they will patiently explain after they delete all your files and terminate your account.
- Samsung's Galaxy S22 lineup is here. (ZDNet)
I could get the S22 Ultra for only, let's see, four times the price of my newly acquired Galaxy A52s. Given the panic that apparently arose after my abrupt disappearance from the Zoom meeting when I got hit by lightning, I could probably tell work I needed it and they'd pay for it - except that it won't be released for two weeks yet.
And also I don't need it. There's that too.
- (Some) Apple Store workers are planning to unionise. (9to5Mac)
Good.
Party Like It's 1959-ish Video of the Day
Thomas Bender commented on this two days ago when my internet was dead. My internet is still dead, but now I've had a chance to look it up, and it's, well, there it is, listen for yourselves.
Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day
Disclaimer: It's definitely the voices in my head.
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