• Minecraft has sold over 300 million copies.  (The Verge)
  
  That's a lot.  That's a lot of a lot.
  
  Also, with Henya pushing the crabs and Pina Pengin naturally enough backing the penguins, the Minecraft userbase voted for the armadillo to be the next animal added to the game.
  
  Seriously, what are they going to do?  There aren't any 18 wheelers for them to run under.
  
  
  

Tech News

• With Microsoft now the owner of Activision (as well as Minecraft) (although the US government is still fighting that despite the deal having gone through) (Activision, not Minecraft) what is going to happen to the old Infocom games?  (Zarf)
  
  Yes, Activision has been around that long.
  
  
  
• Why is the frontend stack so complicated.  (Matt Rickard)
  
  By "frontend stack" he means the user side of web development, and the reason it's so complicated is that JavaScript is kind of bad and server-side JavaScript is cancer, and yet it's used everywhere.
  
  There is no solution except fire.
  
  
  
• The Asus Expertcenter PN64-E1 is perfectly adequate.  (Serve the Home)
  
  No stand-out qualities.  No notable weaknesses.
  
  Oh, it's a NUC.  A desktop mini-PC.  Intel.
  
  
  
• Plant-based cheese.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I like my plant-based cheese just like my plant-based steak: Thoroughly cowed.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 16 2023 06:41 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Monday, October 16 2023 07:10 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 17 2023 12:12 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Brendan at Tuesday, October 17 2023 05:28 AM (V8yYW)

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• Canon (the Japanese printer company) has announced a new chipmaking process, where the chip pattern, call a mask, is stamped physically into the chip rather than being used as a filter for a high-energy beam of ultraviolet light.  (Canon)
  
  Stamped gently like an ink stamp, rather than jammed into the surface like a metalworking stamp, because the lines in the pattern are only 15nm wide and it would disintegrate instantly.
  
  15nm lines are small enough to fabricate 5nm chips, because the numbers are pure marketing spin and have been for a couple of decades now.

• There's a slim model of the PlayStation 5 arriving next month, called the PlayStation 5 Slim.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  Seems reasonable.
  
  
  
• Forget that, just buy the current model.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  Seems reasonable.
  
  
  
• The thief who stole $470 million in stolen funds from failed Ponzi scheme FTX is busy trying to launder his gains while chief thief Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial.  (BBC)
  
  Signs point to Russia.

• NASA has just launched its Psyche mission, an aptly named probe to explore the asteroid Psyche.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Sent into space atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy - and in fairness, it's much better for NASA to build just the spacecraft and leave the launches to private industry - the mission is expected to total $1.4 billion between the craft, the launch vehicle, and eight years of operations.
  
  The estimated value of the minerals on Psyche itself is in the range of $10 quintillion.  That's 400,000 years of the US GDP, or about 7 trillion times the cost of this mission.
  
  Say what you will about government waste; this one would appear to be justified.

• Twitter has started to flag explicit pornography as explicit pornography.  Here's why that's a bad thing.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Talk to the hand.
  
  
  
• Clinical trials at the Sheep Hilton show that Vitamin C is a safe and effective treatment for sepsis in humans.  (Florey)
  
  Researchers at Australia's Florey Institute - the aforementioned Sheep Hilton - have shown that sodium ascorbate - Vitamin C - is effective at treating clinical cases of sepsis.
  
  You just need to inject it directly into your veins.
  
  Better than the alternative, and it gives your blood a refreshing citrusy tang.
  
  
  
• Untergruppenfuhrer Thierry "Klaus" Breton has turned his fiery gaze from Twitter to YouTube.  (The Verge)
  
  Probably because Twitter ignored him.
  
  By the way, Klaus, antibiotics will clear that right up.
  
  
  
• Can open source be saved from the EU's Cyber Resilience Act?  (The Register)
  
  Sure.  Easy peasy.  Null-route the entire useless continent.
  
  Maybe offer exceptions for Poland and Hungary.

Not Even Remotely Tech News

Update: Oof.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, October 15 2023 12:00 AM (r9O5h)

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• In which The Verge tries to explain a joke.  (The Verge)
  
  So Rick and Morty is back with season seven, though without series co-creator and the voice of both Rick and Morty, Justin Roiland, who got Me Too'd.
  
  Given the way the show was headed in seasons four through six - straight downward - this is less of a loss than it might have been otherwise.
  
  But that's not the point here.  The point is that The Verge spends eight paragraphs discussing an episode called How Poopy Got His Poop Back and makes it sound about as entertaining as a simultaneous barium enema and double root canal.
  
  It's a talent.  Of some sort.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Apple is a cult.  (Tokyo Dev)
  
  If you lose your MacBook, Apple will very helpfully kill it for you.  Even if you get it back, it will still be dead.  And no, they won't fix that - even though that can.  And they won't let you fix it either.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, be prepared for some drama if you want to run Linux on the latest Framework laptops.  (Zach Codes)
  
  It can be done, but it's certainly not as smooth an experience a you'd hope.
  
  On the other hand, it's yours.  You can pop it open and replace anything.  No subscriptions, no cloud, none of that.
  
  
  
• After petulant impotent threats, the EU Office of the Bookburner General has opened a petulant impotent investigation into "disinformation" at Twitter.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Unsurprisingly the Ars Technica commentariat sides with the book burners.
  
  Wonder if I'll get banned again.
  
  
  
• Intel's Arc A580 is here, and at $180 it's a decent card for 1080p gaming.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Its key strength is that it keeps a full 256-bit memory bus at a price point where AMD and Nvidia only offer cut-down 128-bit cards.
  
  Its key weakness is that Intel's A750 is a good bit faster and only $10 more.
  
  Intel does seem committed to its graphics efforts, and the early driver issues seem to be mostly resolved, but if you're inclined in that direction it's definitely worth spending the extra ten bucks.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 13 2023 11:57 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 14 2023 02:01 AM (LADmw)

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• CRISPR skimmed chicken: Genetically engineering chickens to not get sick and die by the millions any time a sparrow sneezes in Mongolia.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  There are three specific proteins that the H5N1 virus hijacks in chickens to reproduce itself, and the scientists adjusted each one slightly so that it couldn't do that.
  
  Result: Chickens that don't catch colds.
  
  Or almost.  They've grown healthy chickens with any one of those genes altered, which are highly resistant to the flu, but not yet with all three genes updated; that's only been tested in cell cultures.
  
  Still great progress, and I'm expecting in five years or so we'll see these on the supermarket shelves, and shortly after that we'll be told that somehow they got pangolin genes in the mix and we all have to be buried alive for our own good.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Chinese government hackers are exploiting a new zero-day exploit in Atlassian.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Do not run Atlassian products on the public internet.  This is not complicated, people.
  
  
  
• AVX10/128 is dumb and should be thrown into a volcano before it angers the gods.  (Chips and Cheese)
  
  AVX10 is a dumbed-down version of AVX512 because Intel couldn't get AVX512 to work.  (Though AMD did just fine.)
  
  AVX10/128 is the entry-level version, minimally compatible with AVX1 and 2, but it manages to be simultaneously more complicated and less compatible than AMD's AVX implementation in its Bulldozer family of CPUs...  In 2011.
  
  
  
• Russia plans to mass-produce 28nm chips by 2027.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's rather unlikely; Russia was, last I checked, stuck at either 65nm or 90nm.  They can get their hands on 28nm equipment, but getting full-size fabs set up is a different matter.
  
  Still, 28nm is a decent process; the Bulldozer chips I mentioned above were mostly produced on 28nm.
  
  
  
• Everyone involved in this story is an idiot and I feel dumber for having read it.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Do not dumb here.
  Not dumb area here.
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, October 12 2023 09:54 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 12 2023 11:31 PM (LADmw)

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• If you save a post with the Twitter X in it on mee.nu, the post will vanish without a trace, and without an error.
  
  Don't ask me how I discovered this.
  
  
  
• EU fires urgent warning at Elon Musk’s X over illegal content and disinformation following Hamas attacks.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That tangled and breathless headline is the original, not mine.
  
  What happened is that Europe's Bookburner General, Thierry Breton, whined impotently on Twitter today that people were saying unapproved things.
  
   Elon Musk responded to ask what unapproved things?
  
  Breton's response did not in fact contain a list of unapproved speech, but rather more impotent threats.
  
  Quelle fucking surprise.
  
  In other surprises, Tech Crunch, a card-carrying member of Journalists for Censorship, is harshly critical of Musk and Glenn Greenwald's (obviously correct) position that the EU is in no place to determine what is and is not "disinformation".
  
  
  

Tech News

• A tale of two websites:
  
  Sam Bankman-Fried was a terrible boyfriend.  (The Verge)

  I’ve got some shitty ex-boyfriends, but none of them made me the CEO of their sin-eater hedge fund while refusing to give me equity and bragging about how there was a 5 percent chance they’d become the President of the United States, you know? Absolutely counting my blessings after Caroline Ellison’s first day on the stand. I wonder how many of the nine women on the jury are doing the same.

  That's how the Teen Vogue of the tech world sees the story.
  
  The fraud was in the code.  (Molly White)

  Much of the conversation revolved around the allow_negative flag that was introduced to the FTX codebase on August 1, 2019. Wang testified that Sam Bankman-Fried had asked him and Nishad Singh (former FTX engineering director, who has also pleaded guilty) to add the flag. Github screenshots show Singh making a code change to add the column in the database, and adding logic to exempt accounts with the flag from checks that would otherwise determine if they had sufficient funds to withdraw.

  Same story, except actually covering the story and showing the precise code that allowed Caroline Ellison to withdraw infinite amounts of money from customer funds.
  
  Less of the former, more of the latter, s'il vous plait.
  
  
  
• An 18th century Unicode.  (Public Domain Review)
  
  Pantographia, published the same year the Rosetta Stone was discovered, was an attempt to collect all the world's written languages - 164 alphabets in all.
  
  And since that was more than two hundred years ago, there's a link on that page to download it as a PDF.
  
  Very, very slowly for some reason, but there is a link.
  
  
  
• A multifault earthquake threat for the Seattle metropolitan region revealed by mass tree mortality.  (Science)

  Here, we use dendrochronological dating and a cosmogenic radiation pulse to constrain the death dates of earthquake-killed trees along two adjacent fault zones near Seattle, Washington to within a 6-month period between the 923 and 924 CE growing seasons. Our narrow constraints conclusively show linked rupturing that occurred either as a single composite earthquake of estimated magnitude 7.8 or as a closely spaced double earthquake sequence with estimated magnitudes of 7.5 and 7.3.

  Pretty neat.  The article discusses how they cross-linked tree cores in the Seattle area with precisely dated samples from other regions to narrow down a catastrophic event a thousand years ago to within six months.
  
  And rather less neatly notes that Seattle is simply not built to withstand an earthquake of magnitude 7.8, and if one hit today the city would basically cease to exist.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 11 2023 11:39 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, October 11 2023 11:57 PM (2ByFe)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, October 12 2023 12:13 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, October 12 2023 12:02 PM (BzEjn)

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• John Riccitiello is now the former CEO of Unity.  (The Verge)
  
  Whether the company will survive its self-inflicted injuries remains to be seen, but unlike Hasbro it at least has had the sense to go look in the bathroom cabinet for Dettol and Band Aids.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Acer is also offering a new 8.7" Android tablet with a crappy screen.  (Liliputing)
  
  Gee, thanks guys.
  
  
  
• Why USB was originally designed with 540-degree rotational symmetry.  (PC Gamer)
  
  It saved several cents.
  
  
  
• I wrote some C++ code this morning using funky pointer arithmetic and type casting.
  
  It worked first time.
  
  Not sure what to make of that.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 10 2023 09:46 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 10 2023 11:22 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: DougO at Wednesday, October 11 2023 01:56 AM (IPP/W)

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• JavaScript has no place on the server part one: The barrel file debacle.  (Marvin H)
  
  After all these years, it's still a toxic hellbrew of bad decisions.  Not so much JavaScript in itself, which is merely eh, as the choice to use it in server applications where it is obviously completely unsuitable, to do so via an event loop, which is obviously completely unsuitable, and then to add the worst package manager ever devised, a software version of the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus.*
  
  * Which doesn't exist, but should.
  
  
  
• JavaScript has no place on the server part two: The hidden performance cost of Node.js.  (Software at Scale)
  
  Here the problem is trying to implement GraphQL naively in an event loop architecture, which creates a cascade of asynchronous requests - called promises - which totally gum up the works.
  
  This problem was solved all the way back in 1961, before the geniuses behind Node.js decided to inflict it on a whole new generation.

• Fine tuning Mistral-7B on Python code with a single GPU.  (Weights & Biases)
  
  Large Language Models have a lot of problems, stemming from the facts that they don't know anything except what words go together, they're promoted by frauds, and they are actively hamstrung from doing anything but reciting woke bullshit.
  
  But Mistral-7B is completely open-source and you can download it and do anything you like.  And if what you like is programming, well, it turns out you can get a long way in programming just by knowing what words go together.
  
  It helps because you can automatically check if the AI got the basics right - does the code it generated even compile, for example?
  
  I'm still more interested in using AI for testing than for generating code, but having a generally good LLM that is free to everyone and small enough to run on commodity hardware is a win either way.
  
  

Unrelated

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 10 2023 12:19 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 10 2023 12:42 AM (obo9H)

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• Samsung's new small Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab A9, is here, and it's shit.  (Liliputing)
  
  The 8.7" screen has a resolution of 1340x800, barely better than Google's original Nexus 7 model from 2012.  The 2013 model immediately fixed that with a much improved 1920x1200 screen.
  
  To still be offering such low resolutions in 2023 is laughable.  Every other spec is good - it's like offering a high performance sports car with 9" wheels.
  
  There's a Tab 9+ model with a 1920x1200 screen - but that's 11", and there are literally dozens of models like that.

• Berry is a scripting language for microcontrollers.  (Berry)
  
  Without the compiler it needs just 40k of ROM and 4k of RAM, so it will fit easily in a Raspberry Pi Pico, which has 2M of ROM and 264k of RAM.
  
  The whole thing, compiled, is under 300k.
  
  The language itself is very clean and simple.  If you know Python all you need to do is remember to put in end statements and stop with the : at the beginning of blocks.  If you know Ruby you'll just need to adapt to Python-style classes and exceptions.
  
  Is it fast...  Uh, no, not particularly.  Faster than Python in trivial benchmarks.  More than 20 times slower than LuaJIT - though that is rather less suitable for use on microcontrollers.
  
  
  
• Senators Marco Rubio and Mark Warner want to block China from building RISC-V processors...  Which are open source.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I wondered if there was more to this than there seemed at first glance, so I also read the Reuters article linked by Tom's Hardware.
  
  Nope.  It's just stupid.  It's like trying to forbid China from learning algebra.  It's already out there, you idiots.
  
  
  
• Gibson Research, maker for many many years of hard drive repair tool SpinRite, has released a free utility to check USB drives.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's been a flood of implausibly cheap drives recently with implausibly large capacities from implausibly-named vendors like...  Huh.  Amazon seems to have been cleaning up a bit.  Though there are still a whole lot of 2TB micro SD cards from "Lenovo" that you shouldn't touch with a burnt stick.
  
  Anyway, they put a 4GB microSD card inside a USB thumb drive and reprogram it to pretend to be 2TB.  Plug it in, write files to it, it all works fine.  Until you use 4GB of space whereupon it simply starts overwriting earlier data.
  
  
  
• Asus has a new PCIe card that can take four PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs, for a combined 60GBps of bandwidth.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That sounds like it should be horribly expensive, but it's just $80.  That's because all the logic needed to run it is built into your CPU...  If you have an AMD chip.
  
  If you're on Intel you may find that only two of the four slots work.
  
  And you can only put it in the primary PCIe slot in your system - where the graphics card would normally go.
  
  Good for building small servers though, where you don't need a graphics card at all.
  
  
  
• Should you buy a $3 SSD made by a brand you've never heard of from AliExpress?  (Storage Review)
  
  No, but they're better than Storage Review's performance graphs, which somehow go backwards.
  
  
  
• Smart programmers write STUPID code.  (Medium)
  
  Please tell me that's not an acronym.

  The S stands for Simple

  Closes browser.
  Shuts down laptop.
  Sets laptop on fire.
  Flings burning laptop from window.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare's support for "Encrypted Client Hello" breaks ISP-level site blocking.  (Torrentfreak)
  
  Europe is very fond of this.  Australia does it too.  America mostly just shoots the site operators.
  
  Anyway, with this technology the ISP can no longer tell what website you are looking at, so they can't block you.  And they can't block Cloudflare because that's about 16% of the entire internet, including a lot of major sites.
  
  
  
• Brave has laid off 9% of its workforce.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I hope they weather the Recession We Must Not Name, because their browser is pretty good and they haven't piled up millions of dollars and set it on fire like so many other tech startups.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 09 2023 02:12 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 09 2023 02:19 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: bob in houston at Tuesday, October 10 2023 12:07 AM (YBLgY)

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