• Xiaomi has another of those little nuclets, like the Chuwi Larkbox.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This one is named the - seriously - the Xioami Ningmei Rubik's Cube Mini.
  
  It's powered by a quad core Celeron J4125 which delivers acceptable performance for simple tasks, two USB-A ports, one USB-C port, HDMI, headphone jack, and microSD, and measures a tiny 62 x 62 x 42 mm.
  
  6GB/128GB model is $149, 8GB/256GB model is $186.
  
  
  
• Social Media Nightmare Misinformation Scenario would be a good name for a rock band.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's Tech Crunch, so...  You know what to expect.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 5000 goes on sale today and it's already gone.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If you want a 5900X or 5950X you'll need to be fast and/or lucky.  5600X and 5800X are apparently in better supply.
  
  Also if you want to watch the first review - it was up on YouTube but now it's disappeared.  Apparently it was set to go public the minute the clocked ticker over to release day when the embargo actually had several hours to run.
  
  Update: Listed now on my preferred Australian supplier.  The 5900X is A$40 more than the 3900X, which is less than the US price increase.  On the other hand, they don't have any.
  
  Reviews are back up now.
  
  
  
  
  
• Florida is releasing 750 million mutant mosquitoes.  (BBC)
  
  They finished counting early so they got to work on their hobby project.
  
  
  
• An online community for marijuana growers suffered a data breach.  (ZDNet)
  
  The breach involved Kibana, which is part of the Elasticsearch stack, which long ago adopted the philosophy that information wants to be free, particularly your information.
  
  The data included hashed passwords, but they were only hashed using MD5, which is pretty easy to crack these days.
  
  
  
• Massachusetts voters passed a right-to-repair initiative by a 3:1 margin.  (Vice)
  
  It only applies to vehicles, but it's a start.
  
  
  
• The New York Times, tired of being merely corrupt, incompetent, divisive, immoral, greedy, and dishonest, has now gone batshit insane.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 06 2020 03:15 AM (eqaFC)

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• California's Proposition 22 - limiting the scope of the anti gig-worker AB5 legislation - looks set to pass.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And Proposition 16, which would have enshrined racial discrimination into California law, looks set to fail.
  
  
  
• For some reason the number of visas granted to Chinese students looking to study in the US has dropped by 99%.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Guess we'll never know why.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 875 appears to have a HUGE.big.LITTLE layout.  (WCCFTech)
  
  One X1 core, three A78 cores, and four A55 cores.  The X1 is Arm's new performance core, related I think to the V1 and N2 server cores.
  
  
  
• Australia's STEM workforce should reach gender parity by 2091.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's good to have a hobby.
  
  
  
• The $34B IPO of Ant - the company behind Alipay - has been spiked by the Chinese government.  (New York Times)
  
  Apparently for insufficient reverence.  Okay, sure, it's a translation, but that's the word used in the translation.
  
  
  
• Twitch suspended guitarist Herman Li for playing his own music.  (Happy Mag)
  
  Good work there, guys.  It does look like he got his channel restored though.
  
  

Oh No It's Real Picture of the Day

Memetic Background Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 05 2020 12:34 AM (eqaFC)

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Tech News

• Apple has an event on the 10th where they will be inviting everyone to their new combination Arm-based Mac / Walled Garden / Roach Motel.  (AnandTech)
  
  Unless Apple surprises us, this is the end of the line for Mac as anything resembling an open platform.
  
  
  
• What social networks have learned since the 2016 election.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  1984 is a cookbook, apparently.
  
  
  
• The Ryzen 5600X is slightly slower than the 3700X on Cinebench.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Since that's comparing a 6 core Zen 3 against an 8 core Zen 2, that's a pretty respectable result.
  
  Compared to Intel's 6 core 10600K, it's just embarrassing.  25-40% better performance at half the TDP.
  
  
  
• Second-tier Chinese phone makers could be looking to Samsung for their chipsets.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Huawei is out of the running for now because they've lost access to TSMC's fabs because they're filthy commies.
  
  
  
• How to make your Git repo unpublishable on GitHub.  (Joey)
  
  Of course, someone can still publish your code to GitHub, just not the repo.
  
  
  
• Benchmarking the Samsung 980 Pro.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is their new PCIe 4.0 SSD.  Despite the "pro" moniker, it is TLC flash just like the current "evo" models.
  
  It's fast, but at $150 for 500GB it's unreasonably expensive.  That's more than two 500GB WD Blue SN500 drives which you could RAID-0 for similar speed and double the capacity.
  
  
  
• Tech startups are complaining that Republicans took their slaves away.  (WSJ)
  
  Move out of San Francisco, you idiots.
  
  
  
• Undocumented colours on the Tandy Colour Computer.  (Vintage is the New Old)
  
  I remember finding these, many, many years ago.  The CoCo officially had 9 colours available (not all at once) but unofficially there were several more.  I found dark green and brown (shown in the article) while playing with the 6847 registers.  Which is to say, poking values into addresses and seeing what would happen.
  
  
  
• An overpriced, underpowered desktop motherboard.  (CNX Software)
  
  It's a 1.4GHz quad core, probably a fair bit slower than a Raspberry Pi.  But if you want to develop for Linux on the RISC-V architecture, it's something that exists.
  
  $665.

Take a Ride on the Death Coaster Video of the Day

Areorobonekomimiocracy* Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 04 2020 03:43 AM (LADmw)

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• The Raspberry Pi 400 squooshes a 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 into the Raspberry Pi keyboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  $100 in a kit with mouse, power supply, a pre-loaded microSD card, cables, and other stuff.  You'll need the cables because for some stupid reason it still uses micro HDMI ports.
  
  I was looking at benchmark chart and wondering why it was slower than the regular Pi 4, then my eyes focused and I realised that was a temperature chart.  It actually uses a new version of the Pi 4 SOC and runs 20% faster than the regular model.
  
  
  
• Samsung has entered early production on their 5nm node.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The first devices with 5nm chips are expected to ship in Q4...  Which is now. 
  
  I'm guessing the device will also be made by Samsung.
  
  It's great to have two companies now on a leading edge process node.  Samsung may be a little behind TSMC here, but it's measured in months rather than years, and TSMC's capacity is sold out anyway.
  
  
  
• Leaked benchmarks of the RX 6800 running games with ray tracing suggest it works pretty well.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Ray tracing is a key feature of both the Xbox Series X/S and the PS5, so one would hope AMD had it sorted out.
  
  
  
• San Francisco and New York are screwed.  (NPR)
  
  As many as 23 million Americans are planning to relocate now that they can work from home, and they're not going to be moving to dirty, smelly, dilapidated, socialist shitholes.
  
  
  
• Apple's iCloud is having a few problems.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Fortunately, the outage is limited to just these services:
  
  
  • Find My
  • iCloud Account & Sign In
  • iCloud Backup
  • iCloud Bookmarks & Tabs
  • iCloud Calendar
  • iCloud Contacts
  • iCloud Drive
  • iCloud Keychain
  • iCloud Mail
  • iCloud Storage Upgrades
  • Photos
  • Screen Time
  
  Yeah, basically you're fucked.
  
  
  
• It's not the hardware that's going to be the problem.  (MSN)
  
  NASA's SLS is built by five different companies in traditional pork-barrel style.  The hardware works, kind of.  The big problem is getting five separate software systems to co-ordinate with each other.
  
  I've done that.  It's not a lot of fun, even with hardware that doesn't literally blow up when you have a problem.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 03 2020 05:59 AM (LADmw)

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• Wait, when did those get added to Terraria?
  
  
  
• Paging Big Hero 6.  (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  Swarms of tiny self-assembling robots.  What could possibly go wrong?
  
  
  
• Intel's DG1 GPU card is coming to the desktop.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's currently only for laptops and sold bundled with Intel CPUs, and the card will also be OEM-only.  I'm not sure who exactly would want it, though it should support QuickSync for video transcoding.
  
  
  
• There were zero new local cases of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague in Australia yesterday.  (WuhanBatSoupDeathPlagueData)
  
  People in Melbourne are now able to freely travel...  A maximum of 25km.
  
  A colleague had to co-ordinate with her parents to meet half-way for lunch.
  
  Oh, and the Melbourne Cup is on Tuesday.  This year it will be virtual.  Robot horses or something.
  
  

Picture of the Day

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• Ducked out to pick up some more strawberry frogs (and some other items) before the potential trickle treaters, even though that meant missing the first fifteen minutes of Kiara's KFP construction stream.
  
  Got home just as the thunderstorm rolled in.
  
  I now have a lot of frogs to eat.
  
  
  
• Big Navi gets benchmarked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not by Tom's Hardware, though - by AMD.
  
  The results are good across the board, with one case where even the base 6800 beats the RTX 3090.  But then, AMD picked and ran these benchmarks, so box of salt time.
  
  
  
• eXoDOS is a collection of DOS games.  (eXoDOS)
  
  All of them.  Seven thousand so far, and they are gathering more as fast as they can find original media to copy.  About half a terabyte in total, but thankfully in individual directories and not one enormous bloody zip file looking at you BlueMaxima.
  
  
  
• Mars has declared independence from Earth.  (The Independent)
  
  Good to get that sort of thing settled early.
  
  
  
• Sony is looking to buy Crunchyroll for $1 billion.  (Nikkei)
  
  Um.
  
  
  
• A flock of drones is planting a billion trees across Canada.  (Fast Company)
  
  I mean, sure, why not.
  
  
  
• Okay, that's it.  Time to launch these fuckers into the Sun.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Yes, they are saying that if they suspend your account, then reverse the rule that led to your suspension, you might now permitted to beg for your account to be restored.
  
  
  
• Trump's gonna be president forever.  (Washingtonian)
  
  In the clearest sign yet that he will be re-elected, businesses in Washington DC are busy boarding up their windows this weekend.
  
  
  
  
  

Korone's On First Video of  the Day

Posted by: normal at Sunday, November 01 2020 12:53 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 01 2020 02:01 PM (eqaFC)

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Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, November 02 2020 02:53 PM (4i7w0)

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• The first independent benchmarks of Zen 3 are out.  (SiSoftware)
  
  Money quote:

  Executive Summary: Zen3 is ~25-40% faster than Zen 2 across all kinds of algorithms.  No choice but give it 10/10 overall!

  Looks like the 19% IPC gains that AMD cited were a conservative figure.
  
  They say that basically a 16-core 5950X can match a 32-core Threadripper 2990WX on most workloads.  That's a pretty significant gain for two generations, when even Zen 1 was a very solid architecture.
  
  
  
• Intel has released some details of the upcoming Rocket Lake desktop parts.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are the companion chips to the...  Whateverthefuck Lake 11th generation laptop parts that have just started to appear.  That is, the ones that (a) have the new cores with better IPC and (b) aren't completely broken.
  
  Just one thing you need to know, from one of the slides: PL2=250W.  It's as power hungry as the 10900K.  Just buy AMD.
  
  
  
• The 11900K scores a big win over the 10900K in a leaked benchmark unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The leaked benchmark is UserBenchmark, though, which is complete garbage.
  
  
  
• It's a terrible day in the neighbourhood.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you want to buy a video card.
  
  I fear that the 6800 XT will turn out to be the new people's choice for crypto mining - it looks to be more efficient for that than Nvidia - and will be in short supply through all of next year.  We shall see.
  
  
  
• Grubhub to restaurants: We're adding you to our database.  If you don't like it, sue us.
  
  Restaurants to Grubhub: Your proposal is acceptable.  (Eater)
  
  
  
• Amazon is building more fulfilment centers in Australia.  (ZDNet)
  
  At some point they might cross the line into not being completely fucking useless.
  
  Australia's big retailers have really upped their online game.  I've started shopping online at Kmart recently, and its great.  Dirt cheap prices and free delivery in a couple of days.
  
  Amazon AU?  Still a big ball of meh, and you have to constantly worry about counterfeit crap because they are entirely unwilling to clamp down on it.
  
  
  
• Google One's 2TB plan now includes a free VPN.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yay!
  
  On Android.
  
  Meh.
  
  I recently upgraded to the 2TB plan and will probably drop Dropbox, because their application is garbage and constantly tries to delete all my files.
  
  
  
• Old Spare Laptop stopped charging.  Stopped, in fact, powering itself from the charger at all.
  
  So I swapped it back to the other charger, the one that doesn't work.
  
  It is now charging.
  
  
  
• I was looking for this quote, and couldn't find it, because I thought it was Heinlein.

  If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

  It's certainly Heinleinesque, but it came from a government report, back in the day when people still expected someone to read those, even if it was just reporters looking for pull quotes.
  
  
  

• I'll have to buy more strawberry Freddos.  Or just turn the lights off and pretend I'm not home.
  
  
  
• Radeon RX 6000 is here. (AnandTech)
  
  Three initial high-end models:
  
  
• 6800 with 60 CUs for $579
• 6800 XT with 72 CUs for $649
• 6900 XT with 80 CUs for $999
  

All three models feature 128MB of cache and 16GB of 16GHz GDDR6 RAM on a 256-bit bus.

The 6800 competes evenly with the RTX 3070 (or the 2080 Ti).  It costs $80 more than the 3070 but has twice the RAM.

The 6800 XT competes evenly with the RTX 3080, is $50 cheaper, and has 16GB of RAM vs. 10GB.  It has 20% more shaders and is clocked about 10% higher than the base 6800, for just $70 extra, making it easily the best value here.

The 6900 XT competes with the 3090; it seems from AMD's benchmarks that it's not quite as fast, but on the other hand it's $500 cheaper.

All cards support ray tracing, new anti-aliasing methods, accelerate loading of textures from SSDs (like the Xbox and PS5), and, if you also have a Ryzen 5000 CPU, direct mapping of the entire VRAM address space.

Hoping to build myself a Ryzen 5900X / Radeon 6800 XT system next year. We'll see how things work out.



• Apple's A14 chip shows that 5nm is 50% denser than 7nm.  (SemiAnalysis)
  
  TSMC's earlier announcements indicated that 5nm was nearly 50% smaller than 7nm - that is, 100% denser - but the fine print noted that this only applied for logic transistors.  SRAM does not scale nearly as well to the new node.
  
  And a large part of modern chip designs is SRAM - the Radeon 6000 dedicates six billion transistors to its Infinity Cache.
  
  
  
• I violated a code of conduct.  (Fast.AI)
  
  A speaker at a tech conference took the topic of "This previous talk was wrong and here's why."
  
  He got shipped off to the re-education camp for the crime of... Making two people uncomfortable.
  
  
  
• Asteroid 16 Psyche is worth $10 quintillion.  (Observer)
  
  I think this one may have come up before, but a quick search didn't find it.  The asteroid appears to be one huge chunk of metal.  Imagine West Virginia only made entirely out of nickel.
  
  NASA is launching a mission in 2022 to claim it for the fatherland.  (JPL)  Uh, Terran Empire.  Something.
  
  
  
• Nice doggo attacks evil AI.  (Embrace the Red)
  
  If you know the image scaling algorithm used by an object detection AI, you can steganographically embed one image in another, so that after rescaling only the hidden image is visible and the AI makes comical mistakes like nuking your entire city.
  
  
  
• Old Spare Laptop has decided to start charging again.  I have no idea why.
  
  
  
• This seems significant.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The Scottish National Party wants to criminalise "offensive" speech in private homes.
  
  Sargon has a few words.
  
  
  
  
  
• Removing §230 will remove speech from the internet.
  
  
  
  
  Really, Jack?  Fucking really?
  
  Was it removing Section 230 that locked the Twitter account of the New York Post - which account is still locked?
  
  Was it removing Section 230 that banned Twitter users from linking the Post article - which ban is still in effect contrary to your sworn testimony before Congress?
  
  Repeal Section 230.  Let the internet burn.  I don't fucking care anymore.

Haachama Will Rock You Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 29 2020 11:32 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 30 2020 07:46 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 30 2020 07:52 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, October 30 2020 02:06 PM (ZlYZd)

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• It's Radeon day.  No new leaks that I can see, and I'm not staying up for another pre-recorded launch.
  
  The interesting thing is that according to the leaks, these cards have less memory bandwidth than even the Xbox Series X, but are much faster.  No-one seems to know exactly how they manage that.
  
  
  
• AMD recorded record revenue and profit for Q3.  (AnandTech)
  
  Against either Q2 or Q3 last year, revenues are up around 50% and margins are steady.  It looks like this quarter includes chips for the new Xbox and Playstation, but that should be continuing revenue and not just a one-time bump.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 3070 is here and it's pretty good.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Great at 1080p, solid at 1440p, decent at 4k.
  
  Can you actually buy one anywhere?  No.
  
  
  
• Starlink is now in open beta.  (Ars Technica)
  
  US and Canada only to begin with, but the plan has always been a global rollout.  The satellites don't stay put, after all.
  
  
  
• GitHub's CEO is working directly with developers to get the YouTube-dl repo reinstated.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Probably without some circumvention code, but that can be a downloadable patch from some other source.  While not perfect, this is better than we see from most companies, and evidence that GtiHub knows which side of its bread is buttered.
  
  
  
• Don't buy an Oculus Rift.  (Polygon)
  
  If you ever delete your Facebook account - or, of course, they do that for you - all your purchased content disappears.
  
  Fuck Facebook generally.
  
  
  
• Any sufficiently oversimplified security warning is indistinguishable from your operating system just plain being broken.  (Mr Macintosh)
  
  There's a certificate issue with some HP printer drivers for MacOS.  This can manifest itself in any of thirteen different error messages, all saying that the driver "will damage your computer".
  
  
  

I Wonder If You Can Tame Polar Bears Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 29 2020 12:14 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 29 2020 12:54 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 29 2020 02:02 AM (eqaFC)

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• AMD is buying Xilinx in an all-stock deal worth $35 billion.  (AnandTech)
  
  Once again the rumours were spot on.
  
  I think this is probably a good fit.  An AMD APU with integrated FPGA could be a killer app in certain niche markets, and those markets are used to paying a lot for the hardware.
  
  
  
• Zoom is censoring Zoom censorship.  (Buzzfeed)
  
  Who do they think they are, Twitter?
  
  
  
• About 3% of Starlink satellites have failed so far.  (Phys.org)
  
  Failed dead, that is, not responding to commands and unable to manoeuvre.  That's a fairly normal attrition rate for new satellites, and is only a problem due to the pace of the launches.  I suspect that the Starlink satellites are planned so they will passively de-orbit in this situation; the article also suspects this but doesn't confirm.
  
  
  
• Who the hell designed that piece of shit?
  
  
  
  
  
  
• There's water on the Moon.  (NPR)
  
  So carry your harpoon.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 27 2020 11:34 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 28 2020 09:22 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 28 2020 02:28 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 28 2020 02:29 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, October 28 2020 02:30 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 29 2020 12:13 AM (eqaFC)

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