• In an effort to preserve at least some RTX 3060 cards for gamers, Nvidia has deliberately skorked their drivers to cut Ethereum hash rates in half  (AnandTech)
  
  And launched a new range of mining-oriented cards.
  
  Which rely on the exact same supply-constrained chips as the gaming cards.  But are worse at mining.  A lot worse.
  
  No, I don't know what they think they're playing at either.
  
  
  
• Need more screen real estate on your laptop?  Got $20,692 of somebody else's money to spend?  Expanscape got you covered.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Aurora A5 and A7 have up to seven screens - four 4K 17" displays, two 9" 2K displays, and a 7" touchscreen.
  
  They run on a Ryzen 7 4800U.  The A5 comes with 64GB RAM, 2TB of NVMe SSD, and 2TB of SATA SSD.  The A7 boosts that to 128GB RAM and 8TB total SSD.
  
  These are currently prototypes, but if you want one badly enough they will custom build it to your specs and deliver it to you.  The traditional markets for these would be film editing in the field and energy and mineral exploration, but both those industries are kind of in the dumps at the moment.
  
  
  
• Intel just Osborne Effected Rocket Lake.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Well, not deliberately perhaps, this is a leak.  But according to the leak, Alder Lake will be 20% faster than Rocket Lake and ship in December, giving Rocket Lake a mere nine month lifespan, since it won't even launch until next month.
  
  Alder Lake will use a new socket - LGA 1700 - and support DDR5.  If it launches on schedule and delivers as expected, it will give Intel a lead over AMD for the first time in four years, since Zen 4 isn't expected until early 2022.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Office 2021 will be available for purchase later this year.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which seems like a good time for it.
  
  Also, yes, purchase, as in you plunk down your money and then you get to use it.  Office 365 will still be there if you prefer that.
  
  
  
• WhatsApp has explained what data it shares with Facebook and why.  (ZDNet)
  
  The answers are, respectively, everything, and fuck you.
  
  
  
• Photoshop can no longer draw lines.  (Photoshop)
  
  It's been broken for months.
  
  Which just tells me it's time to cancel my subscription entirely because it's that long since I've used it.
  
  

Laptop Repair Video of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 20 2021 02:21 AM (ZlYZd)

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• Facebook has blocked all news into, out of, from, for, by, or about Australia.  (ABC)
  
  Including articles posted by the news organisations themselves, government weather reports, and emergency services.
  
  I'm not exaggerating.  Here's their own blog post.  
  
  If you're pretending to take a principled stand, try not to cut off emergency services during an emergency.
  
  
  
• Google meanwhile has struck a deal with News Corp.  (Protocol)
  
  That's only one of the big Australian news organisations, and though it has global reach its market share within Australia is not particularly large.
  
  
  
• The HP Spectre x360 14 is a flippy convertible laptop with a 3:2 touchscreen.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can choose between a 1920x1280 LCD or 3000x2000 OLED display, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, and either a quad-core 11th generation Intel CPU or...  No, that's the only choice.
  
  It does have the Four Essential Keys though.
  
  
  
• Citibank just blew half a billion dollars due to a bad UI.  (Ars Technica)
  
  In fairness, it's a really bad UI.
  
  In further fairness, the judge is an idiot, arguing in his decision that major banks wouldn't make huge and obvious blunders.
  
  
  
• This interview with Bill Ottman, CEO of Minds, is worth a listen.  (Quillette)
  
  He seems to have his head on straight.  While I don't agree with everything they do, they are neither incompetent, nor crazy, nor openly antagonistic towards freedom of thought, where most of their competitors fall into at least two of those categories.
  
  Also, Quillette being an Australian commentary magazine, they got shut down by Facebook.  Not being incompetent or crazy themselves they have their own site, their own forums, their own podcast, but one third of their traffic was coming from Facebook.
  
  
  
• As Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and Twitter have shown very clearly, if you deal with American Big Tech you have to have a backup plan that doesn't involve American Big Tech, because they not only cannot be trusted to do the right thing, or to abide by their own contracts, they can't even be relied upon to obey the law.
  

Posted by: Dreamlord at Thursday, February 18 2021 11:53 PM (Knf75)

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• With Google Play Music shutting down I requested a backup of all my Google content.
  
  Two weeks ago.
  
  It was scheduled to run on the 5th.
  
  It just started.
  
  
  
• Coco planned a stream to take her over the 1 million subscriber mark.  Due to scheduling differences, she started out at 999,948.  Which was good because the stream immediately got banned.
  
  When she got things working again, the next few minutes were spent measuring YouTube's cache timeout, which is somewhere between five and ten minutes, whereupon the count jumped straight to 1,001,032.
  
  
  
  It's been a busy week for YouTube, what with shadowbanning Hololive streams, banning Hololive streams, demonetising Hololive streams, and terminating Hololive accounts.  But hey, here's a gold-coloured play button to thank you for making us millions of dollars.
  
  Speaking of Google screwups, watching her second, half-hour long celebration stream in Chrome used over 2GB of RAM for that one tab.
  
  
  
• The Lenovo Thinkstation P620 is the perfect computer for the demanding livestreaming drug-dealing shitposting million-subscriber yakuza dragon.  (AnandTech)
  
  Yes, it supports up to 64 cores and 512GB of RAM - they tested it with 1TB of LRDIMMs but it wouldn't boot - but it also measures just 36 dBA at 30cm with the default fan profile, so it actually is suitable for livestreaming.
  
  The base config is not even insanely expensive - currently $2099 with 12 cores, 16GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, and an entry-level Nvidia Quadro video card.  The price includes a 1000W power supply and 10GbE built in.
  
  
  
• Pine64 has a next generation version of their Quartz64 board out.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's more-or-less a Raspberry Pi 4 competitor, but has some extra features like SATA and a PCIe x4 slot.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new HBM2 chips run at 1.2TFLOPs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, they're memory chips.  Yes, they have 1.2TFLOPs of compute built in.
  
  
  
• I hope they're not being made in Texas.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Austin area fabs belonging to Samsung, NXP, and Infineon have been told by their electricity supplier to temporarily shut down because the entire state is frozen solid.
  
  
  
• Adata has changed the flash used on their XPG SX8200 Pro again.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Without mentioning the change or updating the model number.  This is the third time they've done that - to just this one model of SSD.
  
  
  
• Amazon's attempt to avoid getting sued by the New York AG over working conditions does not seem to be going according to plan.  (WHEC News)
  
  I say this only because they have in fact been sued by the New York AG over working conditions.
  
  
  
• Parler came back online for a while, with existing accounts but not all the posts.
  
  Ars Technica wrote the usual bit of techno-fascism, going upstream from them looking for someone they could potentially bully.
  
  The site is still up, but now their DNS isn't resolving so you can't get to it.
  
  
  
• Reading up on the Raspberry Pi Pico, the magic beans are the two I/O controllers, which are sophisticated state machines that automatically sequence cycle-accurate I/O operations without specific, dedicated hardware or heavy CPU load.  Each controller contains four state machines, so you have a lot of flexibility, and that's in addition to the dedicated serial ports (two each UART, SPI, and I2C), USB, and PWM.
  
  This Hackaday article has some more details.
  
  This is how the VGA output works.  It doesn't have a built-in video controller, but the I/O controller is fast enough and flexible enough to handle that for you.
  
  That will certainly endear it to retrocomputer hobbyists, because while classic chips like the Z80, 6502, and 6809 are readily available, suitable video chips are hard to come by.  I wonder if someone will make a version that fits into a standard 40-pin DIP socket.
  
  The Pi Pico is powered by the RP2040 microcontroller.  I don't know if the chip is available to hobbyists yet, but it could be popular; it's a QFN56 package and should be relatively easy to work with.
  
  There are a veritable swarm of third-party board on the way already though.  (Raspberry Pi)
  
  Two such chips, two SPI flash chips, a power supply, and a handful of transistors resistors and you'd have a really nice retrocomputer.  And you can start right away with a regular Pi Pico.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, February 18 2021 03:51 AM (mjO4F)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 18 2021 05:12 AM (2Mei2)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 18 2021 05:21 AM (2Mei2)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, February 18 2021 05:57 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 18 2021 09:18 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, February 19 2021 11:47 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 19 2021 01:53 PM (PiXy!)

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• Those bumblefucks at YouTube banned Sakura Miko this time.  She has her account back, but not her members.
  
  
  
  873,000 subscribers doesn't warrant human review even when you have just done the same thing to other members of the same group.
  
  The company is run by morons.  Three times is enemy action and all that, but they are doing this to themselves.
  
  
  
• My router caught fire.
  
  Apparently it was a short right in the plug, which was unfortunate because my first instinct was to pull the plug, and I grabbed hold of molten plastic.
  
  Ouch.
  
  I have backup networking stuff but it's not configured the way I need so things are even more chaotic than usual.
  
  
  
• A look at the Xbox Series X SOC, or XOX.  (AnandTech)
  
  Compared the the Xbox One X it has twice the GPU performance and three times the CPU; the One X's CPU was the same as the base Xbox One, which was...  Not great.
  
  
  
• Western Digital has launched the new Green SN350 M.2 SSD range.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are QLC NVMe devices, which are fine for the average user, but the only advantage of QLC is price, and the MSRP is exactly the same as the current price of the TLC Blue SN550 on Amazon, and only 20% cheaper than the Black SN750.
  
  Unless that price comes down, they make no sense.
  
  
  
• AMD is releasing 28 and 56 core Epyc CPUs with their third generation Milan range unless they aren't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Along with other models ranging from 8 to 64 cores.
  
  The listed specs indicate the 56 core model would have eight CPU chiplets each with seven cores active.  On Zen 1 and Zen 2 that would have meant unbalanced CCXes and potential scheduler problems, but Zen 3 has a unified eight core design and that particular problem wouldn't arise.
  
  The L2 cache numbers are wrong though, which raises a red flag.
  
  Intel's new Ice Lake Xeon parts are also listed here, and likewise may or may not bear any relation to reality.
  
  
  
• Clubhouse is sending your data to China.  (The Verge)
  
  Maybe.  Apparently Clubhouse is built on Agora, which is a Chinese company, and though they say they don't transmit US-based data back to China, (a) they are probably lying and (b) Chinese users who make it past the Great Firewall are screwed.
  
  
  
• Those idiots at Bloomberg are at it again.
  
  
  This is not a new story.  This is not an update to the original story from 2018.  This is the exact same story as before, with exactly the same evidence, which is to say, none whatsoever.
  
  Here's a thread by someone who is not an idiot breaking down exactly why the idiots at Bloomberg are in fact idiots.
  
  
  
  
  
• Tried baking some breadrolls just with the pancake mix, using a higher temperature and a shorter time to avoid that thick crust.
  
  The best batch yet - the crust is fine and they taste great, though more like scones than dinner rolls - but they also fall apart.  Not sure how to solve that one.
  
  
  
• I'm a big fan of crossing the streams, especially streams you would never expect to cross.
  

Definitely Not Tech News

• Meanwhile in Melbourne, Australia's own little San Francisco, or possibly New York.
  
  
  Victoria had 90% of Australia's total WBSDP deaths despite having 25% of the country's population.  This is because it is run by idiots.

• The RTX 3060 is great value at $329 with 12GB of RAM.  Unfortunately it looks like it will sell for anything from $600 to $850.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is not great value at all.
  
  
  
• Why SELECT * is bad for SQL performance.  (Tanel Poder)
  
  Actually, all the reasons are obvious and most of them don't matter most of the time.  If you do need just one or two fields, and those fields are indexed, and that query is used a lot, it's worth your time to narrow your field selection.  But far more important to get your database design correct.
  
  
  
• The Raspberry Pi Pico can output VGA with just a handful of resistors.
  
  
  With two cores, 2MB of flash, and 264K of RAM, it's pretty close to a real-world implementation of my imaginary home computer.  Well, it does run at 133MHz rather than 3MHz, and it's 32-bit rather than 10/20 bit, but otherwise.
  
  Having 8 bit bytes instead of 10 bits means it effectively has less memory, but on the plus side it is much, much, much faster.
  
  The 264k RAM is broken up into four banks of 64k and two of 4k.  There's a fabric that connects the two cores and the DMA controller to the memory, and the multiple banks let them all read and write to RAM without conflict, if you're careful.
  
  It also has XIP - execute in place - on the flash memory, so you don't need to load code into RAM before running it.  Not sure how dynamic that is; the tradeoff for XIP is that you can't write to it at the same time.  You have to be running code out of RAM, switch XIP mode off, write your data, and then switch it back on.
  
  Working my way through the 637 page datasheet right now.
  
  
  
• Fuck Ethereum.
  
  Matic on the other hand - now part of Polygon - is Ethereum compatible and seems to actually work, while offering transactions two million times cheaper than Ethereum.
  
  The one good thing about the sky-high Ethereum prices (both ETH and gas) is that I was able to scrape together small amounts of ETH from secondary wallets at my day job and convert it to what would cost $430,514,016.07 if we wanted to run the same volume of transactions on Ethereum itself.

• Bubble dwellers rise up against....  Everyone else!  (CJR)
  
  This has to be the most comically unaware piece ever written by a multicellular organism.
  
  
  
• Though this comes close.  (New York Times)
  
  The money quote comes right at the end:

  "That’s not what I would have expected from The Times,” she said. "You have the 1619 Project. You guys do all this amazing reporting on this, and you can say something like that?”

  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 17 2021 01:07 PM (pxvtu)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 17 2021 02:09 PM (PiXy!)

3 It looks like a lot of them have a certain amount of L1, yeah, at least once you get past the $1 or so mark.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 18 2021 04:43 AM (2Mei2)

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• Raspberry Pi Pico too damn large - or just can't get one?  Try the Pimoroni Tiny 2040.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Admittedly it's three times the price and has 16 I/O pins vs. 40 on the Pico, but it is half the size and comes with 8MB of flash storage instead of 2MB.
  
  
  
• Always remember that the person on the other end of the support line is probably a human being.  (ZDNet)
  
  Though possibly a very stupid one.
  
  
  
• 6.7 billion Arm chips shipped in Q4 alone.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's nearly one per person alive.  Come the zombie apocalypse, we're going to be able to rebuild the internet in about three days.
  
  
  
• 1921 Duesenberg, one careful owner.  (The Drive)
  
  Well, technically, one careful family.  But still, complete with the original toolkit.
  
  
  
• Uh-oh.
  

Holoquake Video of the Day

Posted by: THE Brickmuppet at Sunday, February 14 2021 01:29 PM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 14 2021 02:52 PM (PiXy!)

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• Well, the chicken I ordered for my next round of cooking experiments was out of stock - chicken breast pre-cut into nugget-sized pieces because I'm lazy and it's only another 50¢ per kilogram - so I'll just be doing a roast instead.
  
  Today I tried baking a couple of batches of gluten-free soda bread, first just with self-raising flour, then with half-and-half self-raising flour and pancake mix.
  
  The first attempt was, I think the word is, bad.  The second attempt tasted much better but had a thick crunchy crust and didn't rise enough.
  
  Going to order some yeast and experiment some more.  I've tried gluten-free bread mixes a few times in the bread machine without success, so here I'm doing it by hand.
  
  
  
• The RTX 3060 is on its way in a couple of weeks.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is 14/19ths of a 3060 Ti core with 3/4 the bandwidth and 3/2 the RAM for 329/399ths of the price.
  
  Will you be able to buy one?  Shake shake.  Signs point to no.
  
  
  
• Raspberry Pi has already sold one million Picos.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unfortunately they only made 200,000 in the initial production run, so even if you got your order in you could be waiting a while.
  
  A few suppliers still have stock but have strict limits on purchase quantities.
  
  
  
• Rocket Lake desktop parts are on their way.  If you were looking forward to the new Xe graphics core, here's some bad news for you.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The core in the desktop version is drastically reduced from the laptop parts - one third the number of cores.
  
  
  
• Amazon has filed suit in New York to block a suit by the New York Attorney General over unsafe working conditions, claiming that federal occupational safety laws pre-empt state laws.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's an interesting theory.
  
  
  
• I missed the start of Coco's latest Twitch-plays-Pokemon Minecraft stream, so now I'm waiting for the livestream to end so I can go back and watch the beginning.  She's stopped playing Minecraft, but then she read superchats for an hour and launched straight into karaoke, so it might be a while.
  
  The reason I missed it - one of the reasons, because I was also asleep at the time - is that YouTube shadowbanned the stream.  She noticed the shadowban beforehand, and re-created the stream....  And they shadowbanned that too.
  
  The way YouTube shadowbans work is that videos don't show up in your feed, recommendations, or notifications even if you subscribe to that channel.
  
  They also shadowbanned Kiara's last two streams, and Gura's collab with Amelia today.  Kiara posted to her YouTube community page to let people know about the shadowbanned streams, and they shadowbanned her post.
  
  Those three between them have over four million subscribers - and corporate backing - so just imagine what happens to smaller channels.
  
  Regular shadowbans are basically committing fraud on your users, making them think they are posting publicly when only their followers can see them.  YouTube shadowbans are fraud against the followers as well.
  
  I'm keeping a log of things social networks shouldn't do, and this ranks right up there.
  
  Update: I just realised.  She was doing Chat plays Minecraft on the HoloJP server, not single player this time.  I mean, I saw that in the part I caught earlier, it just didn't register.
  
  But the very first question she asked chat was which button to click on the Minecraft loading screen.
  
  Update: Reine pre-emptively titled her latest stream "I love YouTube".
  
  
  
• Yandex caught an employee selling access to private emails.  (ZDNet)
  
  Only three employees in the company had the sysadmin rights to be able do this, so once they found that it was happening, the investigation as to who was responsible was probably quite short.
  
  Good advertising for ProtonMail though.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, I will support end-to-end encrypted messages in Mana (the new platform) but not in V1.  You'll need to download an app, which will basically be a local instance of Mana, bundled up to run on Windows, Mac, or Linux.
  
  Mobile apps are not on the radar at all, but there is already a full API, so anyone who wants to will be able to write one.

• Magnitude 7.1 earthquake off the coast of Fukushima.  (Japan Times)
  
  No tsunami is expected this time but people on the coast nearby were advised to seek high ground.
  
  
  
• Some tweets age better than others.
  
  
  
  
  Yes, talking about exactly who you think we were talking about.

The Show Must Go On, Even If No-One Knows the Words Video of the Day

The rest of Hololive is just as confused about Haachama as her viewers.

Just Make the Anime Already

• Cover Corp has announced auditions for Hololive EN Generation 2.  (Reddit)
  
  This announcement has been met with Hololive fans' usual levels of polite detachment, by which I mean the announcement itself has received over 100 awards and 2500 comments.
  
  It will likely be about five months before the new generation debuts.
  
  
  
• The Biden Administration has announced plans to address chip shortages and electronics supply chain issues.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They haven't announced what those plans are, just that they have them.
  
  
  
• AMD is set to announce Zen 3 XT models clocking at 5GHz and higher unless they're not.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Given how close they are getting to 5GHz already this one seems pretty plausible.
  
  
  
• Australia's Death to Google legislation will be introduced in Parliament next week.  (Reuters)
  
  That means it sill has to pass a vote in both houses, but that's likely to go smoothly since Google has ensured it has no friends in either major party.
  
  This is not, on the whole, well-considered legislation, but fuck Google.
  
  
  
• Booting an Arm-based Mac from an external disk is stochastic. (Eclectic Light)

  The problem occurs at the end of the normal installation phase, when presumably the installer is writing hashes up the Merkle tree, with the installer window claiming that there’s only About a minute remaining.  At that stage, Activity Monitor reports that com.apple.MobileSoftwareUpdate.UpdateBrainService is taking lots of CPU, and there’s sustained and intense disk activity for many minutes. When that finally completes, instead of the Mac restarting from the external disk to complete installation, the installer just quits.  Trying to restart from the external disk then results in an error.

  Sounds wonderful.
  
  How fucking hard is it to format a disk, you idiots?  That was a solved problem in 1964.
  
  
  
• More on that NPM / PyPI / RubyGems private package vulnerability.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The security model for private vs. public packages on all these platforms is fundamentally and obviously broken: A public package takes precedence over a private package of the same name.
  
  All anyone needs to do was find the name of one of your private packages, and you're dead.
  
  And it's not fixed.  There's no fix forthcoming.  This is just how it is.
  
  You can avoid it with due caution, but it's broken by design.
  
  Go, Rust, and Crystal I know handle this properly.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Surface Pro Duo, a very nice $399 productivity device that was unfortunately priced at $1399, is now $999.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Getting there, Microsoft.
  
  
  
• That time Audible censored a book about censorship.  (The Fire)
  
  Audible is owned by Amazon, the company that famously deleted copies of 1984 from user's devices.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 13 2021 12:38 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 13 2021 03:05 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 13 2021 05:40 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 13 2021 07:31 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 13 2021 07:56 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 13 2021 12:35 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 13 2021 01:50 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 13 2021 09:26 PM (PiXy!)

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