• Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, says we should be full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes on AI.
  
  Hmm.
  
  
  
• In just the past six months, Nvidia has shot up from the fourth highest revenues in the semiconductor industries to take first place.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Based almost entirely on sales of high-end AI chips, which go for twenty times as much as similar chips for the gaming market.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Researchers have bypassed Windows Hello secure logins.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  All they needed to do was (checks notes) completely disassemble and rewire the laptop.
  
  Windows Hello is designed to be secure even if you do that, but that's a pretty difficult task when your partners building the CPUs, laptops, and fingerprint scanners fail to follow the specs.
  
  
  
• AMD's Ryzen 8000 laptop chips are expected to be announced early next year, likely at CES.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These are a major advance over the already very good Ryzen 7000 chips.  Although they still use Zen 4 cores, and are still limited to 8 cores, and still use RDNA3 graphics, and still only 12 graphics cores, and are still limited to DDR5 memory, and...
  
  Wait, these aren't an advance at all.  These are the same chips with the numbers changed.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, November 26 2023 12:21 PM (bg2DR)

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Top Story

• How it started: Exports of Nvidia's RTX 4090 to China will be banned starting November 17 following existing bans on high-end Nvidia AI cards. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  
• How it's going: Chinese factories are dismantling the RTX 4090s on their production lines and turning them into high-end AI cards. (WCCFTech)
  
  So... You banned these products from being exported to the country that manufactures them?
  
  Smart.
  
  (The chips are made in Taiwan, and manufacturing of the cards will likely move to Taiwan as well, but there were a lot of chips already in China set to be turned into gaming cards and now destined for the AI market.)

Tech News

• Idaho National Laboratory has been hacked by gay furries. (The Register)
  
  That's kind of embarrassing, but the furries have offered them a deal:

  The self-styled furry hackers meanwhile have offered to remove the staff records if the lab performs experiments that at best could be described as highly irregular.
  
  "We're willing to make a deal with INL. If they research creating IRL catgirls we will take down this post," the group said. The creation of real cat-human female hybrids is a frequently posted meme in certain corners of the internet, but it's not the laboratory's specialty.

  You fools. You don't want Idaho for that. You want Omaha.
  
  
  
• If your research data isn't giving you the results you need, try analysing it with ChatGPT. (Nature)
  
  Your P-values hacked or double your money back.
  
  
  
• Anthony Levandowski is rebooting his AI church. (Bloomberg) (archive site)
  
  It's not a cult. They're just devoted followers of CthulhuGPT and OpenDagon.
  
  
  
• That's enough internet for today. (Ars Technica)
  
  Do not read before, during, or after eating. Not Ars Technica's fault this time either.
  
  
  

Posted by: furball321 at Saturday, November 25 2023 04:18 AM (wHdE5)

Posted by: furball321 at Saturday, November 25 2023 04:20 AM (wHdE5)

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• It would appear that everyone at OpenAI is either profoundly autistic or sociopathic.  (Reuters)
  
  But someone decided to give them billions of dollars anyway.
  
  
  
• The sociopath has a name that might rhyme with Pram Praltman.  (Washington Post)  (archive site)
  
  This is not the first time Praltman has been fired from a company he was running.

• The third - or fourth? - generation of Dell's Inspiron 16 Plus is here.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It's a little faster than the original model (which I have) but is pretty meh otherwise.
  
  
  
• It looks like AMD's high-end graphics cards are now banned in shithole countries too.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If you live in Afghanistan, Belarus, Burma, Cambodia, the Central African Republic, China, Congo, Cuba, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Lebanon, Libya, Macau, Russia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe, better give up any dream of playing Cities: Skylines II.
  
  
  
• Google Bard can now watch YouTube videos so you don't have to.  (The Verge)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Twitter is going to add headlines back in to embedded news stories.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Maybe one day they will make Twitter embeds work again.

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 24 2023 03:42 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 24 2023 05:37 PM (PiXy!)

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• The DOJ has apparently succeeded in shaking down Binance for $4 billion.  (Wall Street Journal)  (archive site)
  
  The fines will settle civil liabilities over violating US financial sanctions in allowing people to transfer imaginary money over the internet, and CEO Changpeng Zhao will plead guilty to one criminal charge and - since he's not a Republican - probably get off with probation.

• Sarah Silverman's lawsuit alleging that all generative AI constitutes copyright infringement continues to fall apart.  (Hollywood Reporter)
  
  If only someone could have predicted this.
  
  
  
• Sunbird is a secure messaging app that doesn't store any of your private information on its servers.  (The Verge)
  
  It stores them on someone else's servers.
  
  Unencrypted.
  
  
  
• Striated caracaras perform as well as Goffin's cockatoos with puzzle boxes.  (Phys.org)
  
  Wait, I think that might be the wrong link.
  
  
  
• Rich people have money.  This is bad.  (Phys.org)
  
  The solution is to make sure nobody has any money, and if at all possible, make sure there are no people at all.
  
  
  
• Intel's Meteor Lake laptop chips - the real 14th generation, for small values of real - are almost here, and they're just plain not very good.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Lots of off-the-record quotes from laptop makers who are basically saying they're turning to AMD because Intel is a hot mess right now.
  
  
  
• Former OpenAI employees call Sam Altman a scum-sucking pig and soul vampire.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Well, they didn't use those words.  Or they might have done; I didn't read it all.
  
  But after he joined as CEO the company's attrition rate spiked to 50%.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, November 22 2023 07:52 PM (0001W)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 23 2023 01:39 AM (LADmw)

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• Elon Musk went nuclear on Media Matters.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The article tries do pretend this didn't happen, because as the saying goes You don't hate journalists enough.  You think you do, but you don't.
  
  Media Matters ran a shock exposé showing that Twitter ran ads against extremist content, leading to a flight of major advertisers.
  
  The only problem is, Twitter was watching while they did this.
  
  What they did was create a new account and:
  
  1. Follow every Nazi meme account they could found (which was not many).
  2. Follow the major advertising brands they wanted to scare away from Twitter.
  3. Sit there hitting refresh over and over until they got the screenshot they wanted.
  
  Only problem with that is that Twitter logged everything they did and can show that the only account in the world that saw those ads on those tweets was Media Matters, because they spent an entire day setting things up to get that result.
  
  Does Tech Crunch tell you that?  No.
  
  Does The Register tell you that?  No.
  
  Does Ars Technica tell you that?  No.
  
  They're all-in on censorship.
  
  
  
• Oh, and the Texas Attorney General has announced a criminal investigation into Media Matters conduct.  (MSN)
  
  You don't hate journalists enough - but maybe Ken Paxton does.

• To be fair Ars Technica already filled its weekly quota of one article not hating Elon Musk.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yes, the Starship flight was a good test.  It might be too much to say it was a success, but it achieved the stated goals.  If your kid comes home with a 90 on their math exam, you shouldn't complain that they weren't able to answer the bonus question which was actually a copy-paste of the Goldbach Conjecture.
  
  
  
• How many Jacaranda trees are there in Sydney?  1539.  (Observable)
  
  They specifically mean the central business district, not the metropolitan area, where there are far, far more of these purple fuckers.
  
  
  
• The DOJ is trying to shake down Binance for $4 billion.  (Bloomberg)
  
  What did Binance do?  Apparently it sent customers' money where the customers asked for it to be sent, rather than stealing it the way FTX did.
  
  
  
• Airliners flying over the Middle East are experiencing advanced Denial of Service attacks on GPS guidance systems and nobody knows what to do.  (Vice)
  
  I can think of a couple of things.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Threadripper 7000 range is here.  (AnandTech)
  
  I'd like to get excited about these, but the price is simply too high - a 32-core chips is four times the price of a 16-core desktop chip - and for many task the performance barely improves.
  
  If you do 3d rendering for a living, then one of these systems will dramatically improve your workflow and earn back the cost in no time.  Otherwise make sure to find a benchmark that matches your workflow and decide whether it's worth it for you.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has hired Sam Altman and Greg Brockman after they were fired from OpenAI.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I have ceased to care about any of this nonsense.

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, November 22 2023 11:51 AM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 22 2023 05:21 PM (PiXy!)

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• A day after firing Sam Altman, OpenAI is in talks to bring him back.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
• No they're not.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well, that certainly clears that up.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Twitch founder Emmett Shear will be the new CEO of OpenAI.  (The Verge)
  
  It looks like the researchers and non-profit board wanted a CEO who would run the business, and not try to also run the non-profit side of things.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday.  (Microsoft)
  
  Apparently with a driver update that broke the microphone in my laptop.
  
  
  
• After 33 years of searching, two groups of mathematicians have independently discovered the ninth Dedekind number.  (Quanta)
  
  The first four numbers are 2, 3, 6, and 20.
  
  The ninth number is 286,386,577,668,298,411,128,469,151,667,598,498,812,336.  So it does grow a bit after that start.
  
  
  
• There is no cloud, there is only someone else's computers...  Or your own.  (The Register)
  
  Microcloud from Canonical - the company behind Ubuntu - is designed to make it easy to deploy your own small cloud - where "small" is anything from three Raspberry Pis to fifty 128-core AMD servers.  Which is a pretty large value of small.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 21 2023 12:15 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 21 2023 12:19 AM (LADmw)

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• Starship's second test flight successfully reached space - and then went boom.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Not everything went to plan, but it went a lot better than the first test, with all 33 engines in the booster working, a clean separation of the second stage of the rocket, and reaching a height of nearly 150km before the automated self-destruct system got bored and decided to join in the fun.

• The Silicon Power UD90 is one of the cheapest 4TB SSDs around.  How does it perform?  Poorly.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It is rated for 5000MBps reads and 4500MBps writes, perfectly respectable numbers.
  
  It gets just slightly over that read speed in independent tests...  And slightly over 5% of that write speed.
  
  Avoid.
  
  
  
• You can find the Team MP34 4TB for $151.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Its rated speeds are lower, but it actually delivers what it says.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's investors allegedly want the used car salesman back in charge.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI has an odd corporate structure: It's a non-profit in charge of a for-profit company.  The non-profit board fired the for-profit CEO, but there are investors putting money directly into the for-profit company and they want their snake oil guy back.
  
  Fortunately companies like Mistral and Meta are working hard to make OpenAI irrelevant.
  
  
  
• AMD's previous-generation Radeon 6750 GRE comfortably beats Nvidia's RTX 4060.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't buy one though; it's a China exclusive.  Because reasons.
  
  

• What the fuck is going on at OpenAI? (Tech Crunch)
  
  Snake ail salesman Sam Altman has been dismissed as CEO and removed from the board, and co-founder Greg Brockman, who yesterday was chairman and president, is now neither of those. CTO Mira Murati is interim CEO until a replacement can be found.
  
  Altman is also deeply involved in the thoroughly sleazy Worldcoin project, and the moderately dubious Humane AI pin. It might be something as simple as a conflict of interests, or it could be something... More.
  
  Sam Altman strikes me as a high-functioning version of Sam Bankman-Fried, so these events surprise me not at all.

• An online atrocity database got hacked and leaked the personal details of the victims of said atrocities. (The Intercept)
  
  Who thought this was a good idea?
  
  
  
• A Canadian court has overturned a government ruling that single-use plastic items are toxic, on the basis that they aren't. (Reuters)
  
  The government wants to ban single-use plastic, so rather than pass legislation, it just defined them as toxic so they'd be banned automatically.
  
  The only problem with that is, well, they're not toxic at all.
  
  A little surprising that a Canadian court would take issue with this, but welcome nonetheless.
  
  
  
• What could be toxic, though - as mentioned previously - is eye drops. (Ars Technica)
  
  An inspection of one factory in Mumbai found workers wandering around barefoot - inside an allegedly sterile production area where not only shoes but shoe coverings, gowns, and gloves are required.
  
  They did detect the inevitable contamination. They just... Kept right on going.
  
  
  
• You can save oil by taking your kids to school on an electric moped, and even more when you all get killed in a traffic accident on the first day. (The Conversation)
  
  Take a look at the photos in the article. Sad to say, those people are statistics waiting to be calculated.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile:
  
  

  Getting back to productive matters, Starship flight 2 launches in ~6 hours!!

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2023

  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, November 18 2023 06:07 PM (bg2DR)

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• Running Signal - an encrypted messaging app with hundreds of millions of installs worldwide - costs $40 million a year.  (Wired)
  
  That's not a lot on the scale of major platforms, but the breakdown is interesting.
  
  Nearly half of it goes on salaries and benefits.  Signal has a relatively small engineering team but keeping engineers working in a major US city is expensive.
  
  $1.7 million goes to pay for 20 petabytes of data transfers for voice and video calls.  
  
  And $6 million is spent just on the verification messages sent via SMS when new users sign up - a markup of around 50,000% over the real data costs incurred by mobile carriers.
  
  

• UnitedHealth is using an AI system to decided when to pay out on health insurance claims.  They say they're not, but they would.
  
  The AI is wrong 90% of the time.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Wrong in UnitedHealth's favour, of course.  Otherwise it would have been kicked to the curb long ago.
  
  
  
• A 96 core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX overclocked to 5.2GHz on all cores uses three times the power and runs four times as fast as an Intel 14900K.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which sounds reasonable, except using three times the power of a 14900K means it's pulling about a kilowatt.  Not the whole system, just the CPU.
  
  That's easily enough current to make it glow red hot, so they had a pretty substantial cooling system for this particular benchmark run.
  
  
  

• Is my toddler a stochastic carrot?  (New Yorker)
  
  No.  Your toddler is actually capable of learning.
  
  This piece of art is a better discussion of the risks, benefits, and underlying mechanisms of generative AI than I have seen coming from almost anyone in the industry.

• Microsoft has renamed Bing Chat to Stochastic Carrot.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or if it hasn't, it should.
  
  
  
• Amazon has stopped selling seven brands of eye drops that lacked FDA approval.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  Eye drops might not seem like a big issue.  All you need to do is take a saline solution, boil it so it's sterile, and bottle it.
  
  And yet in the past year in the US, eye drops have caused infections, blindness, and at least four deaths.
  
  Oh, and there's lead in baby food.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Do you people want an overbearing regulatory state?  Because this is how you get an overbearing regulatory state.
  
  
  
• Developers keep putting security keys into public code.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Stochastic carrots.
  
  
  
• Asus has apologised for its "Evengenlion" limited edition motherboards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All purchasers will get an extra year of warranty coverage and a replacement part that correctly spells "Avengelyne".
  
  I'm sure that will make everybody happy.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 17 2023 02:03 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 17 2023 11:22 AM (bg2DR)

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