Ambient Irony

Thursday, February 13

Daily News Stuff 13 February 2025

Protobugs Edition

Top Story

Oracle chairman Larry Ellison says governments should unify all their data into a single feed for training AI. (MSN)
Fragmented sets of data about a population’s health, agriculture, infrastructure, procurement and borders should be unified into a single, secure database that can be accessed by AI models.
This is not unreasonable for already-public broad-scale data. Getting it all into a standard format so that AI - and non-AI computer tools - can analyse it could be valuable. If all of USAID's funding had been out there so that anyone could plug it into a spreadsheet and look for fraud...

Actually, people have been doing that for years and hardly anyone cared.

Anyway. He also wants your DNA. (The Register)

So that's a no.

Tech News

Intel's new Core Ultra 9 285H - the top of the line of the middle-of-the-line Arrow Lake H series - is here. Is it any good? (Hot Hardware)

Actually, yes. Intel's Lunar Lake laptop chips are a bit limiting, since memory is soldered directly onto the CPU and there are just four fast cores and four slow ones. Now you can have memory soldered onto the motherboard and six fast cores and ten slow ones.

Which is better.

And it performs very well in tests, including - on this specific laptop - battery life. A big part of that is the MSI Prestige 16's 99Wh battery, but it lasts just shy of 24 hours playing video constantly, and weighs 3.3lbs which is pretty light for a 16" laptop.
Emojis and other Unicode characters can be hacked to smuggle data invisibly. (Tom's Hardware)

I've said before that Unicode is a semantic Superfund site.

Now I think that ASCII was a mistake and we should all go back to SIXBIT.
Why firing programmers and replacing them with AI is a mistake. (Defrag Zone)

Because AI is shit.

All the points made are obvious, but they are also correct.
AI is shit. (The Register)

At summarising news headlines, but at many other things too.
A neutrino moving with the energy of a ping pong ball has been detected by a deep sea telescope. (Phys.org)

Ping pong balls don't have that much energy by macroscopic standards, but neutrinos are about as far from macroscopic as you can get without ceasing to exist entirely. The single particle was so energetic that it triggered a third of the detectors in the telescope all by itself.

Minecraft Modpack Mischief

All the overlapping recipe issues have been resolved, thanks to the Polymorph mod, which resolves overlapping recipe issues.

I had one crash, which looks to have been memory size related. I increased the cap from the default 4GB to 6GB and haven't had an issue since.

Remaining bugs:

Turkeys lay chicken eggs. This was fixed last year, but since then the developers of the Let's Do series of mods have rearranged things and it seems to have become unfixed.
Pressing B for my backpack when it's in the Curios slot on my back doesn't let me access the inventory. The backpack works, you just have to access it from your main inventory, or put it down and access it that way. Not sure why; I fiddle with my key mappings but got nowhere. (This was with a Traveler's Backpacks backpack; I haven't tried yet with a backpacks from Let's Do Camping.)

Update: If you equip the backpack via the backpack's own UI, the B key works - and leaves the Curios slot on your back free so you can also carry a quiver for your arrows. Not sure why it doesn't work otherwise, but this way is better so I'm not going to worry about it. And it all renders properly, so you are running around wearing exactly the customised backpack you created.

My new worst enemy is marsh blocks from another of the Let's Do mods. For the player, it holds you in place and does slow damage until you dig yourself free, which is easy enough even empty-handed.

If you have a mod that generates swamp villages though, they can become ghost towns very quickly because villagers can't dig.

I also need to go through and adjust the spawning probabilities for Artifacts and Relics. If you're playing on your own server and can just loot every village you come across, it's too easy to find subtly game-changing items at the default settings. (How many inexhaustible food supplies do you need?)