Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 19 2023 11:08 PM (obo9H)

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• Fools and money: Purchasers of ugly monkey jpegs - which is to say, distributed database entries which are unique identifiers of digital images of ugly monkeys stored on someone's server somewhere - are suing auction house Sotheby's and ugly monkey jpeg purveyor Yuga Labs alleging that they, which is to say the buyers of said ugly monkey jpegs, are too stupid to be allowed out of the house without a leash.  (Ars Technica)
  
  And while this is undoubtedly true, it might be hard to establish as a point of law that this idiocy is the fault of Sotheby's or of Yuga Labs.

  Sotheby's sold a lot of 101 Bored Ape NFTs for $24.4 million at its "Ape In!" auction in September 2021, well above the pre-auction estimates of $12 million to $18 million. That's an average price of over $241,000, but Bored Ape NFTs now sell for a floor price of about $50,000 worth of ether cryptocrurrency, according to CoinGecko data accessed today.

  Or rather, don't sell at that price.
  
  At least you can eat tulip bulbs.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Is the PCIe 5 Seagate Firecude 540 worth buying?  (Serve the Home)
  
  No.  But it's less not worth buying than ugly monkey jpegs - about a thousand times cheaper, for a start, and you actually own it.
  
  
  
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says AI is a tidal wave as big as the internet.  (Bloomberg)
  
  A tidal wave?  As in, it brings nothing good, you can see it coming a mile off, and you'd best seek high ground right away?
  
  Seems apt.
  
  
  
• The iKoolCore R1 Pro is a four port 2.5Gb Ethernet router that measures 3x3x2 inches and includes a quad core Pentium N6005 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and up to 1TB of SSD.  (Liliputing)
  
  It also has HDMI, USB-C (and a second USB-C for power input), two USB-A ports, and a microSD slot.
  
  This is all identical to the iKoolCore R1 non-Pro edition released a few months ago except that this model has upgraded cooling and doesn't crash all the time.
  
  Which is a plus.
  
  
  
• The Verge continues to descend into Musk-induced insanity.  (The Verge)
  
  Today's report is titled "Elon Musk is killing 'Environmental Twitter'" but instead makes the case that environmental activists are mindless zealots who will brook no opposition, or indeed anything but the most slavish support.
  
  Which is true.
  
  
  

• LK-99: Not a superconductor.  (Nature)
  
  Ace already posted on this a couple of days ago but this article in Nature seems to explain what the Korean researchers were observing.
  
  Pure LK-99 is not a conductor at all, so what the were measuring was LK-99 "doped" with specific impurities.  And the important one looks to have been copper sulfide, which shows a phase transition and change in conductivity right at the point where the researchers thought they were seeing a transition to superconductivity.
  
  But it was just the temperature at which their sample's resistance dropped by a factor of 10, not by a factor of infinity.  Below that temperature the electromagnetic properties of their sample changed drastically, but it was still not actually a superconductor.
  
  So, no flying cars for another twenty years I'm afraid.
  
  
  

Posted by: anonymous at Friday, August 18 2023 10:10 PM (hRoyQ)

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• Instagram's Twitter competitor, Threads, broke all records in the speed at which it reached 100 million users.  How is it doing now, a couple of weeks later?  Usage has plummeted, and Threads now has less than half the active daily users of Twitter.  (The Guardian)
  
  This is technically correct, since half a percent is indeed less than half.
  
  While Twitter averages around 100 million active users each day, Threads is around 576,000.
  
  
  

Tech News

• You don't hate Jira, you hate your manager.  (Hacker News)
  
  Everyone in the comments: No, we hate Jira.
  
  
  
• China's chip production technology is five generations behind the rest of the world.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China's leading-edge production is 14nm, where Taiwan, Korea, and the US are all ramping up production at 3nm.  But most of China's fab capacity is even further behind, at 28nm.  And 28nm kind of sucks.
  
  AMD was stuck at 28nm for years because TSMC and Samsung fumbled the transition to FINFETs - only Intel got that right.  That almost bankrupted the company.
  
  
  
• Need to pack 64TB of M.2 SSDs into a standard U.2 carrier with active cooling but without fans?  Yes?  What the hell are you doing?  (AnandTech)
  
  Anyway, Mac aftermarket stuff maker OWC has teamed up with fanless fan maker Frore to build, well, what I just said.
  
  The interesting part here is the Frore AirJet, a piezoelectric device that uses tiny vibrating crystals to shoot air out one end at about a thousand miles an hour, keeping whatever it is attached to cool without making a lot of noise, or at least without a lot of noise that anyone other than a bat can hear.
  
  
  
• The Verge's coverage of Elon Musk keeps getting creepier.  (The Verge)
  
  These people need an intervention.  Or sedation.  Or both.
  
  
  
• It's time to rethink our relationships with streaming services.  (The Verge)
  
  I don't have a relationship with streaming services.  What is wrong with you people?
  
  
  
• Google Chrome will now use AI to automatically summarise articles for you so you don't need to read them.  (The Verge)
  
  <summary>The Verge is garbage.</summary>
  
  
  
• The tech jobs market is as strong as it ever was.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Now that hundreds of thousands of people have been laid off.
  
  
  
• ISPs are complaining that new FCC rules requiring they tell customers what they are being charged are excessively onerous.  (Ars Technica)
  
  "How will we rip people off if we have to list all the applicable fees?" asked one executive.  "That sounds ominously like work."
  
  Also, Ars Technica has banned me for a month for very politely telling their Creative Director that he's a credulous idiot.  So while I'm sure there's every kind of nonsense going on in the comments over there, I can't tell you exactly what kind.
  
  
  
• Streaming site SportsBay has been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars to DISH Network.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  That's $2500 for a DMCA violation and, uh, over two million violations.
  
  They had to count them all.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 16 2023 09:18 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, August 16 2023 10:37 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 17 2023 12:07 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 17 2023 12:23 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, August 17 2023 12:33 AM (JqCHh)

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• Large Language Models can generate valid JSON 100% of the time.  (Hacker News)
  
  If you install a plugin that smacks the LLM over the head with a ruler any time it tries to emit a character that would make the output invalid.
  
  It's like lining up an infinite number of monkeys and shooting all the ones that aren't typing out Hamlet.  Yes, it works in theory, but what are you going to do with all the dead monkeys?
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Beelink GTR7 Pro: A great small computer with a completely nonstandard power connector.  (Serve the Home)
  
  And unlike Apple with MagSafe, you're not going to find third-party replacements.
  
  
  
• The Delhi High Court has ruled that under Indian trademark law, Google cannot sell ads against trademarked search terms.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Google operates something of a protection racket here: Competitors place ads against your company name to steer traffic away from you, so you not only need to advertise under your own search term, you have to outbid the competition to get top billing.
  
  Not surprising someone would find this questionable.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fried used $100 million in stolen customer funds for political donations.  (Reuters)
  
  Will they give the money back?
  
  No, they're Democrats.
  
  Also, he's going to be held in the same jail where Epstein did not kill himself, so there's no need.
  
  
  

Posted by: bob in houston at Tuesday, August 15 2023 11:44 PM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 16 2023 12:59 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 16 2023 10:59 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 16 2023 11:01 AM (BMUHC)

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• Stack Overflow is introducing its own AI question answering system because somehow getting the answer wrong 77% of the time is appealing to the company's CEO.  (ZDNet)
  
  You jump off bridges when it's bridge-jumping time, and apparently right now it's garbage AI time.
  
  Stack Overflow plans to fix the problem of generative AI giving plausible but unsound answers by, according to the article, waving its hands around.  It wants an expert system, but Large Language Models are the exact opposite of expert systems.
  
  CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar also believes AI will solve the cultural problems at Stack Overflow, to wit, that the platforms top users are a bunch of autistic narcissists who actively attack anyone asking questions, where the entire point of the platform is for people to ask questions.
  
  The New Stack reached out to the moderators at Stack Overflow for comment on being replaced not merely by an AI but by an AI that has already been tested and proven not to work.
  
  The moderators had not responded at time of publication because they are all on strike.
  
  I swear I am not making this up.

• Apple plans to retire 8GB laptop models with its next generation M3 range, replacing them with 12GB.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Adding a whole $5 to the cost of the system to be very slightly less pathetic.  Good work.
  
  
  
• TSMC is discovering that building a chip factory in Arizona was a mistake.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The company is trying to bring in workers from Taiwan because it can't find qualified workers locally, but the local unions are, of course, fighting it.
  
  Plus there's the slight problem that chip factories use a lot of water and Arizona is a desert.
  
  
  
• The world in which IPv6 was a good idea.  (Apenwarr)
  
  That is not this world.
  
  
  
• A tale of two internets.  (Tailscale)
  
  More thoughts on the same subject from the same author three years later.
  
  
  
• What happens when people start reading privacy policies.  (The Markup)
  
  They find out they have no privacy.

Posted by: leotaylors at Friday, October 13 2023 11:09 PM (a1gCr)

Posted by: annehathaway at Thursday, March 28 2024 09:43 PM (PQRbB)

Posted by: Thor Flash at Monday, July 15 2024 06:59 PM (g9QOk)

Posted by: Akshat at Saturday, June 28 2025 09:55 PM (oIMkp)

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• Some of the Hololive EN streamers have an expression: One guyed.
  
  It's when they're playing a game or trying to solve a technical issue and ask chat for help, and get a prompt and authoritative answer from one guy among the thousands watching that turns out to be completely wrong.
  
  ChatGPT is that one guy.  (The Register)
  
  Taking a look at ChatGPT answers to Stack Overflow questions - a devil's brew of epistemic closure if I ever saw one - researchers found that ChatGPT had no better than a 50% chance of being correct, and for the best and most authoritative answers - the ones that were accepted by the questioner as definitive - ChatGPT was wrong 77% of the time.
  
  I've said before that the entire model of ChatGPT is building an artificial arts student, but really it seems to be building an artificial confidence trickster.

• Intel's 14700K has been benchmarked, and is between 5% and 20% faster than the 13700K.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  5% on single-threaded tasks thanks to a 200MHz speed boost; 20% on multi-threaded tasks thanks to four additional Efficiency cores.
  
  Nothing groundshaking but if they keep the same price it will be a worthwhile improvement.
  
  Big changes may be coming at the entry level, with the 14100 rumoured to have six Performance cores, up from four.  If true, and if the price again remains the same, that will be a great little chip.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile on the great big chip front AMD is preparing to release Epyc Siena for low-end servers and Threadripper 7000 Pro for high-end workstations.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Siena will support up to 64 cores at a 200W TDP, while the new Threadrippers will offer up to 96 cores at a 350W TDP.
  
  The two families of chips will share the same SP6 socket, which is the same physical size but a different pin layout as the previous generation of Epyc CPUs.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix has launched 24GB LPDDR5X-8500 memory...  Things.  (AnandTech)
  
  They're not modules in the sense of DIMMs, but each one contains 8 memory chips in a stack, so they're not chips either.
  
  Anyway, since they're 64 bits wide a laptop would need two of them, giving 48GB of RAM, which is enough even for me.
  
  
  
• Mediatek's Dimensity 9300 meanwhile supports LPDDR5T-9600 memory, which is one louder.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And has four Cortex X4 cores and four A720 cores - four fast cores and four ultra-fast cores - with no slow cores at all.
  
  Sounds like a good chip for a laptop, actually.  Most phone chips only have one of the Cortex X series cores, which is fine for phone use but not so great in more demanding applications.
  
  
  
• LPython is a Python compiler...  Ish.  (LPython)
  
  It seems to be designed primarily for type-annotated Python code, though it can run unannotated code as well, compiling it into C and thence to native code, rather like Cython.
  
  But it can also JIT-compile live code, rather like PyPy - or given that it uses decorators to do this, like PyPy's predecessor Psyco.
  
  And unlike Mojo, you can actually download it and try it out right now.
  
  
  
• A look inside the Linux kernel.  (Seiya)
  
  The Linux kernel as of version 6.5 is 36 million lines long, too much for any one human to comprehend.  So this article doesn't try; it instead looks at Linux 0.01, the first public version, which is only 10,000 lines.
  
  
  
• How the FBI goes after DDOS attackers.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Very, very slowly.
  
  
  
• Dinner tonight was the spécialité de la maison: Satay kangaroo with fried rice.
  
  Not bad.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 14 2023 02:50 AM (BMUHC)

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• Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced head of failed crypto Ponzi scheme FTX, has had his $250 million bail revoked and been sent to jail to await trial, under new charges of witness tampering.  (CNBC)
  
  Because he spoke to the press.
  
  Bankman-Fried is a fool and a phony and I'm almost starting to believe he's innocent of the specific charges.  Not that I would ever let him within a dozen firewalls of my digital funds.

• Google wants content scraping by AI tools to be considered fair use.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Of course they do.
  
  But...  Why shouldn't it be?
  
  I can read whatever I like on the internet, and express my opinions here.  Well, not if Prime Minister Albonazi manages to shove his godforsaken misinformation bill through Parliament but until then we have the tacit assumption of freedom of speech down here, even if it is not specifically protected under our Constitution because nothing else is either.
  
  And not that those specific protections are worth much in the US anymore.
  
  Anyway.
  
  Why shouldn't training AIs on public material be fair use under the First Amendment?  How can we have free speech if we don't have free listening?
  
  
  
• Disabling the Efficiency cores on Intel CPUs nets a 50% performance boost on new game Atlas Fallen.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is apparently not an unauthorised sequel to Shrugged.
  
  I'm not sure who exactly screwed this up, but the article points the finger at the game developer and not Microsoft.
  
  
  
• Use text-to-speech to instantly create your own podcast.  (Hacker News)
  
  No.
  
  
  
• The You Can't Just Say That S25-0801 offers eight 2.5Gb ports and one 10Gb port, but the 10Gb port is SFP so it goes straight onto the trash pile.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Around $100.  Shame about, uh, that.

  The bottom of the switch has two mounting points. It also has a You Can't Just Say That product label. We will just quickly note that the "You Can't Just Say That" name was one of the most frequent points that commenters focused on in the YouTube video.

  You don't say.
  
  Probably because you can't.
  
  
  
• Austria's telecommunications regulator has ruled that courts can order DNS blocks for various nefarious activities, but cannot require ISPs to block IP addresses.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Which is a sport our own authorities in Australia are a little too keen on as well.
  
  The problem in this case is that a single IP address can host, say, 96,530 individual websites.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 13 2023 04:29 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, August 13 2023 08:25 AM (liVFZ)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 13 2023 09:06 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, August 13 2023 02:26 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 13 2023 04:23 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, August 13 2023 09:56 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 14 2023 03:39 PM (PiXy!)

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• LK-99 might not be a superconductor at all - let alone at room temperature - which is odd because one of the things that has been confirmed is that it works as a superconductor at least at liquid nitrogen temperatures.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  What's going on?  It looks like the pure material may not be a superconductor, and its behaviour is very dependent on impurities.  Which lines up with recent theoretical analyses.
  
  The original lab in Korea is now providing samples of their own material to independent researchers, so the story is likely to resolve itself one way or another in the next couple of weeks.

• The Doogee T20mini is an 8.4" Android tablet with a 1920x1200 screen, an adequate CPU (two A75 cores and six A55 cores, all at 1.6GHz), 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a microSD slot, and a headphone jack, running on Android 13.  (Notebook Check)
  
  List price is $265 but it's available for pre-order at $135, shipping next week.
  
  Googles "doogee malware".
  
  Well, fuck.
  
  Do not want.
  
  
  
• Twitter is close to break even.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Before Elon Musk bought the company, it was losing $4 million per day on average.
  
  After he took over, advertisers fled fearing a backlash from leftist lunatics who don't buy their products anyway, and despite massive cost savings from firing its own horde of leftist lunatics, the company was still losing money.
  
  Tech Crunch is skeptical about all this when they post every press release in existence verbatim, because, well, they are also leftist lunatics.
  
  
  
• Samsung has announced 256TB SSDs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not much information about the exact specs, because (a) Samsung doesn't seem to have said and (b) none of the images in the article will load because the SSL certificate for the CDN has expired.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 12 2023 12:34 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 12 2023 12:38 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 12 2023 12:40 AM (BMUHC)

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