Say Weeeeeee!
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Sunday, January 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 January 2019

Tech News



Social Media News

  • We need a word for that feeling you get when you're reading an article that is really getting stuck in to Facebook for their shady activities and and are just about to post a link to it when you realise the author is a hard left conspiracy nut.

  • New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo was apparently sick the day they covered the Bill of Rights in Clown College. (TechDirt)


Anime Op/Ed of the Day

Let's dig up a few OVA classics today, shall we?



Picture of the Day

[Goes to upload a picture.  Where is my Images folder?  WHERE IS MY IMAGES FOLDER? Oh, it's right there.  WHY CAN'T I UPLOAD TO IT?  Don't look at me, you wrote this thing.  Oh, huh.  If you reduce your site's main page from 10 posts to 5 because of the number of YouTube videos you've added, it has the side-effect of reducing the number of folders shown per page as well.  Which is fine except when it comes to that dropdown list.

I can fix that in the template with a hard-coded limit of 1000 or something.]


http://ai.mee.nu/images/DavDApuVwAAXgMo.jpg?size=720x&q=95


Disclaimer: Doggone it Roy Gene, how many times do I have to 'splain it to you?  When I tell you to put a rock under the wheel, I mean a rock.  Now look at that what you have there is no bigger'n a grapefruit.

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Saturday, January 26

Life

Australia Day Musical Interlude


more...

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 January 2019

Tech News

  • Intel's single functional (mostly) 10nm CPU gets reviewed.  (AnandTech)

    And when I say reviewed I mean it - 14 pages, and some of the individual pages would make Tolstoy blush.

    Quick summary though: Eh.

  • Samsung has a 15.6" 4k OLED laptop display on the way.  (AnandTech)

    100% DCI-P3, 600 nits, HDR10, and a 120,000:1 contrast range are the key points, all areas where OLED has a huge advantage over LCD.  I have three high resolution laptops (one Dell 4k and the two 3000x2000 HP models I picked up at fire sale prices last year) and they're great, but the Dell is neither particularly bright nor possessed of an especially impressive colour gamut.  

    How well Samsung has dealt with the problems specific to OLED we have yet to see.  These should start appearing in laptops around the middle of the year, but it might be wise to hold off for a bit if you're spending your own money.

  • Intel's volumes are down but average selling price is up, suggesting that this is not part of an economic downturn, but rather AMD nibbling away at their low end products.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This holds true across the board - notebooks, desktops, and servers.

  • Samsung is forging ahead with its full-custom Arm chips.  (WCCFTech)

    The new Exynos 9820 will feature two of Samsung's M3 cores, as well as two A75 cores (which were the high-end standard core until recently) and four A55 low-power cores.

    The previous 9810 had some design issues that prevented it from living up to its potential, so it will be interesting to see how Samsung fares this time around.  Neither Arm themselves nor companies like Qualcomm seem to be interested in chasing Apple in the high-performance wide-issue full-custom space, leaving Samsung alone, apart from companies like Fujitsu who are putting Arm into supercomputers and would set your pocket on fire if they got anywhere near the smartphone market.

  • Asus' VivoMini VC65-C1 is a small - bigger than a NUC, but still small - PC that can play 4K Blu Ray disks. (AnandTech)

    Up to 6 cores and 32GB RAM (maybe 64GB or even 128GB depending on stuff), one M.2 slot and two 2.5" drive bays. 8" square and 2" tall. Oh, and no external power brick - it has direct AC in.

    https://ai.mee.nu/images/VivaVivo.jpg?size=640x&q=95

  • Websocketd lets you turn absolutely anything into a websocket server.

    Awk?  Snobol?  Fortran IV?  No problem!

    Mind you so does Caddy so it's probably best just to use that.  The author of Caddy mentioned that he got the idea for that feature from Websocketd.

    Websocketd GitHub.

  • Badger is an LSM database library with built-in versioning.  Versioning is used in transaction management, with stale versions normally getting eliminated once a new transaction is committed, but Badger allows you to keep them around and query them.

    Want to see the last five versions of that post you just accidentally overwrote? [This never happens - Ed.] Badger can dig those out for you.

    Badger GitHub.

  • The Microsoft 365 online service has been renamed to Microsoft 363.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Oops.

  • The full specs for Motorola's upcoming G7 range have been leaked.  By Motorola.  (CNet)  [Warning - autoplay video with sound]

    Oops.

Social Media News

  • Court documents show that it wasn't just a couple of individuals in customer support denying refunds to under-age purchasers of in-game items, it was Facebook corporate policy.  (Reveal)

    They even had a term for it: Friendly fraud.

    This is not going to go well for Facebook.

  • Need to get your blep and blop fix in one convenient place?  Pro tip: You can combined subreddits with a + to create instant custom multireddits.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Blep+blop/


Video of the Day



Anime Op/Ed of the Day



Pictures of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/ServalL.jpg?size=360x480&q=95https://ai.mee.nu/images/Serval2.jpg?size=360x480&q=95

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Friday, January 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 January 2019

Tech News

  • JMAP is a modern email protocol that doesn't suck.

    It works over HTTPS (okay) and uses JSON (yay!)  It's stateless where IMAP and POP are stateful, but that's probably a win on balance.

    There are a couple of Python libraries already, though not yet in the robust state of libraries for protocols that were laid down in 1986.

    JSON lacks support for some data types (dates and times) but it is simple, fast, and robust, where formats like XML or YAML are none of those things.

  • A DNA voltmeter for organelles.

    Just the thing I need.

  • Apple has laid off 200 employees from their automotive division.  (Mashable)

    The whole project never made any sense anyway. 

  • There's a steganographic JavaScript advertising attack in the wild and targeting Mac users.

    It downloads an image that looks like a plain white rectangle and a snippet of JavaScript that decodes the hidden content.  Once decoded, it tries to convince you to download a fake update to Adobe Flash which contains the real payload - the Shlayer trojan.

    All the rigmarole is to hide from real-time virus scanners, and it worked, for a while.

  • Chrome has added new protection against downloads not specifically requested by the user.  (Bleeping Computer)

    The existing protections are already a significant nuisance when trying to get your purchases from Humble Bundle, but given the story immediately above I guess we'll just have to deal with it.

  • A look at modern big iron: The Dell EMC PowerEdge MX.  (Serve the Home)

    It's basically a whole lot of PCs on a very fast backplane.  A single-width compute sled can contain 56 cores and 3TB of RAM, and a double-width sled twice as much.  Eight (or four) such sleds fit in a 7U rack module, which can weigh up to 400 pounds fully populated.

  • NumPy has a remote execution bug.  (Bleeping Computer)

    NumPy is a very widely used Python library for scientific computation.  Turns out it uses Python's Pickle library by default when saving data, which has been known to be unsafe for about a trillion years.  The problem is even documented by NumPy...  Just not actually fixed.

  • Fucking magnets, how do they work?  (Quanta)

    Turns out that is actually a good question.

  • NekoMiko gets a pervert patch to bypass the shutoff valve that was blocking steamy content.  (One Angry Gamer)  [Potentially NSFW]

    Steam has gotten censorious again - nobody seems to know why they keep changing their minds, and Valve aren't talking - and blocked a whole bunch of games (the above site calls this waifu holocaust 2.0).  So the developers are publishing a tame version and then making a patch file publicly available.

    Also, that site was loading while I was typing this in another Chrome window, and it popped up an alert, stole the input focus while I was typing, and disappeared the alert before I had a chance to see what it said.

    What the actual fuck was that, Google?  Never, ever, ever do that.

  • Google has appealed to the Supreme Court to smack down the idiots in the appeals court who overturned the original (and correct) ruling in the original trial of Fuckheads Who Want to Copyright API Definitions v. The Rest of the Universe.  (Thurrott.com)

  • Some researchers working to make the BGP protocol more robust managed instead to crash a number of routers at major internet providers.  (ZDNet)

    Then two weeks later they did it again.

    I mean, point made, but could you maybe not experiment on a live patient?

Social Media News

  • The Huffington Post just laid off their entire opinion section.  (CNN)

    All together now: Isn't that everything they do?

  • BuzzFeed meanwhile is laying off 15% of its employees.  (CNN)

    The truly shocking thing here is that BuzzFeed has 1450 staff.  Doing what?  Posting "10 reasons why your cat may be an alien" and "Donald Trump takes orders from Mars and we have the documents to prove it (in Martian)"?

  • Why is all this happening?  Newspapers have been in decline for forty years and their responses to this decline have been to make themselves more and more isolated, irresponsible, and unreliable, and to blame everyone else for their own failings.  The thread is a fascinating mix of historical fact and wilful ignorance.  But it can be summed up in one picture.

    https://ai.mee.nu/images/OhSitChart.jpg

    Not that newspapers were ever trustworthy, on the whole.  The ghost of William Randolph Hearst is laughing heartily.


Video of the Day


Gawker is gone.  Again.  It lasted six and a half minutes this time.


Bonus Video of the Day

Does it spark HONK?


Wait, Alex is Australian?


Anime Op/Ed of the Day

Some people look at old anime that has been remastered in 1080p and ask why.

Fair enough.

 

I was planning to do Magic Knight Rayearth, but the HD clips of the season one opening have been stomped.

Well, okay.


One more, unrelated.



Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/Duckie.jpg

Quack.


Disclaimer: So, logically--
- If she weighs the same as a duck...
- she's made of wood.
- And therefore?
- A witch!

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Thursday, January 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 January 2019

Tech News


Social Media News


Video of the Day

 

Everything you ever wanted to know about the sea cucumber.


https://ai.mee.nu/images/Pelagothuria_natatrix_Samoa_2.jpg?size=720x&q=95

The terrifying alien being silhouetted by the Aurora Australis above the Antarctic Peninsula.


Anime Op/Ed of the Day


The animation got a lot more fluid as the series progressed.  


Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/CatCat.jpg?size=720x&q=95 


Disclaimer: Darling no baka!!!

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Wednesday, January 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 January 2019

Tech News


Social Media News



Anime Op/Ed of the Day



Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/ThePain.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Nyawm.



Disclaimer: It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

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Tuesday, January 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 January 2019

Tech News


Social Media News


Video of the Day

Speaking of aftermarket upgrades...



Bonus Video of the Day

All good, you get to ride the ant.




Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/Pickles.jpg?size=720x&q=95

On second thought, hold the corned beef.  Art by Richard Parry.


Bonus Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/UnpleasantProcession.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Hoag's Object, an atypical galaxy about 600 million light years away in the constellation Serpens.  Why is it structured like that?  Nobody's entirely sure.




Disclaimer: This post may contain traces of cereals containing gluten, soy, egg, fish, crustacea, peanuts, tree nuts, milk, more egg, ants, those little green things, what are they called, capers, butter, cheese, bread, fish again, a different kind of fish, shrimp, no, wait, those are included under crustacea, so molluscs, aglets, look it up, maple and/or maple-flavoured syrup, other sugars including but not limited to sucrose, glucose, fructose, lactose, galactose, and maltose, very small rocks, and a duck, unless he's got out again.

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Monday, January 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 January 2019

Tech News

  • Ethereum is really annoying.

    Okay, yes, I am trying to analyse the entire blockchain, but nevertheless...

    Update: Well, whatever it was I just did it sure as hell worked.  That's six times faster than before.

  • The PHP extension repository PECL was compromised and has been taken offline.

    Exactly how much damage this has caused is not yet clear; I haven't used PECL directly in years.  But the internet hasn't exploded yet.  Or at least not so that we can tell the difference.

Social Media News

  • Facebook is planning a new offensive on misinformation because the company is run by morons.  (Tech Crunch)

    Facebook added 24,000 content moderators in 2018, and is blocking a million accounts per day.  Including mine, until I dug an old photo out of the company website and uploaded it to satisfy their screechy little bots.

    Just give people the tools they need to manage their own feeds, and be transparent in how the feeds work.  Stop being sociopathic money-grabbing control freaks.

  • Twitter has lost its collective marbles.

Video of the Day


Sorry, out of ratings season so you're stuck with reruns.



Disclaimer: In the beginning the Universe was created.  This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

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Sunday, January 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 January 2019

Tech News

  • Kingston is aiming to bring NVMe SSD prices below SATA. (AnandTech)

    I don't know of any specific reason why this would be impossible.  The flash chips are the same and there's little difference in controllers.

    They're aiming for 1500MB/s writes and 2000MB/s read, which is middle-of-the-pack for NVMe but three to four times faster than SATA.

    Launch date and pricing are yet to be set.

  • Netflix is full of shit. (Gamasutra)

    Netflix VP: We are losing subscribers.  Quick, what do we blame to placate investors?
    Exec 1: The trade war?
    Exec 2: Fortnite?
    Exec 3: All our original content sucks, competition is stronger than ever, and we just increased our pricing?

    [Exec 3 exits via window.]

  • Two is one and one is none.

    Also, if it's Synology, two may be none, because those things seem to simply drop dead without warning.

  • Apple users are very, very slowly coming to the realisation that a hermetically sealed ecosystem might not be great for consumers. (Apple Insider)

    Very, very, very slowly.

  • According to Amazon 50,000 retailers on their platform had more than $500,000 in sales in 2018. (TechSpot)

    200,000 had sales over $100,000.

    That's a lot of small businesses making good money.  I don't entirely like Amazon, but they don't suck the life out of everything they touch the way Facebook and Google do.

  • We had a recent mention of a bug in scp where a hostile server could attack your client.  Usually this sort of problem runs in the other direction.

    Well, there's a similar bug in MySQL, though you're even less likely to actually run into it.  scp is used to connect to remote hosts all the time; it is far less common to connect to a MySQL server outside your control, for dozens of excellent reasons.

Social Media News


Video of the Day



Bonus Video of the Day

Good morning sewer babies!


This... Might actually be good.


Anime Op/Ed of the Day



Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/yang-zhen-5.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Speak softly, carry a 300lb sledgehammer, and wear your enemy as a hat.

Art by Yang Zhen.


Disclaimer: It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets, or where otherwise prohibited by law.

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Saturday, January 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 January 2019

Tech News


Social Media News

  • Nice one, Facebook. Way to go. (TechDirt)

    Refusing to refund charges run up by underage users is a surefire PR coup.

  • There is joy in Mudville - the EU's godawful copyright legislation has unexpectedly struck out!
    Note that it's only mostly dead.  Mostly dead is still partly alive.

  • The GDPR is still in full and hideous effect, though, with Amazon, Apple, and other companies facing potential fines totalling up to €18.8 billion.  (Bleeping Computer)

    This week.  For complaints from one advocacy group.

  • Mike Godwin (yes, that Mike Godwin) reports on the problem of epistemic closure.  (TechDirt)

    The book Network Propaganda demonstrated that the problem with epistemic closure in American news sources lies not with explicitly biased sources like blogs, but with the mainstream media.  But Mike apparently suffered an aneurysm mid-way through the article when he offered this hypothetical for the reader's consideration:
    Consider: if progressives had cocooned themselves in a media ecosystem that had cut itself from the facts—that valued tribal loyalty and shared identity over mere factual accuracy—conservatives and centrists would be justified in pointing out not merely that the left's media were unmoored but also that its insistence on doctrinal purity in the face of factual disproof was positively destructive.
    Mike, you idiot, that's precisely what has happened.

    67% of Democratic voters believe that the Russians changed the vote counts in the 2016 election.  (The Economist/YouGov poll, November 4-6, 2018)

    This is of course completely false, and everyone in the administration is on record as saying it is completely false, but it is the mainstream belief among Democrats.

  • Oh, snap.  (Tech Crunch)

    Sorry.  Had to.

Video of the Day

So where the heck did Navi go anyway?



The first 11 minutes are explaining that leaks are unofficial pre-release information subject to change because people apparently no longer understand "grain of salt".


Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/ThisIsAlsoNotMyCat.jpg?size=720x&q=95


Disclaimer: Offer valid only at participating locations, which in this case means all locations.  Not to be combined with other offers or somehow cleverly duplicated.  Limit one card per visit.  Please present this card to the cashier, but don't be surprised when they keep it.  Cash value 1/100th of one cent, which is pretty much nothing.  This is the fine print, why are you still reading this?  Really, this is getting silly, go eat.

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