• PCI SIG has released the final specification for PCIe 7.0, and is busy working on PCIe 8.0.  (Liliputing)
  
  PCIe 7.0 runs is twice as fast as PCIe 6.0, which is twice as fast as PCIe 5.0, and so on.  Even a single lane of PCIe 7.0 will keep your RTX 4090 happy.
  
  PCIe 6.0 isn't shipping in devices yet, though test rigs are showing up, and PCIe 5.0 graphics cards only appeared six months ago.  So don't expect the new slots soon - although PCIe 5.0 motherboards did reach the market surprisingly quickly.

• Speaking of PCIe 5.0 don't buy an 8GB graphics card.  (YouTube)
  
  Unless it's very cheap.  The Radeon 9060 XT and Geforce 5060 Ti both come in 8GB versions, but this has already become the bottleneck for game performance.  With the 9060 XT you have 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 so it at least tries to keep up, but if you're on a budget you might not have a PCIe 5.0 motherboard in the first place, which would cut that bandwidth in half.
  
  And if you only have x8 available on the main slot because you have something else plugged in, by half again.
  
  Which is bad.
  
  And if you don't care about game performance, buy something cheap like the trusty RX 580.
  
  
  
• If you have enough memory, though, this isn't a problem at all.  (TechPowerUp)
  
  These guys tested the RTX 4090, and PCIe 3.0 x16 or PCIe 4.0 x8 don't bottleneck this card at all.
  
  If you drop all the way back to PCIe 2.0 for some weird reason, you're still losing only 8% of performance even with this high-end card.  The slowdown only become significant when you slow the interface even further.
  
  It's all about the memories.
  
  
  
• Canva now expects you to cheat on your job interview.  (The Register)
  
  Half of its staff cheat on a daily basis, so this is now the baseline requirement.
  
  
  
• Meta is offering $2 million salaries to AI developers and still losing staff to other companies.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Uh.
  
  
  
• The recipients of the CHIPS grants are now mired in state and local approval processes.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Your government at work.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, June 13 2025 01:01 AM (rcPLc)

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• The Bluesky bubble hurts liberals and their causes. Here's why that's a good thing. (Washington Post) (archive site)
  
  Bluesky was an interesting attempt at redesigning the core architecture of Twitter, but had no natural userbase until Trump won the 2024 election, whereupon the craziest people on Twitter departed en masse all at once and created Bluesky accounts.
  
  That gave the site a massive boost in user numbers but at the same time a massive headache, because suddenly its users were overwhelming screamingly insane leftists with all the problems that come with them.

  For roughly a decade, Twitter hosted what is lightheartedly called the "national conversation" on issues of the day, particularly social justice and public health. Twitter never had that many users, compared with Instagram or Facebook. But it had a big group of influential users - politicians, policymakers, journalists and academics, all of whom were engaged in a 24/7 conversation about politics and current events.

  Mostly leftists, often far left, but at least, at the time, paying lip service to civility and rationality. Those days are far behind us.
  
  That's what they're trying to regain, but the more they tighten their grip, the more star systems slip through their fingers.

  That was a boon to progressives, who wielded outsize influence on the platform because they were early adopters who outnumbered the conservatives. They were also better organized and better networked, and had the sympathy of Twitter’s professional-class employees, who proved increasingly susceptible to liberals' demands for tighter moderation policies on things such as using male pronouns to refer to a transgender woman.

  Translation: Stalinists policing speech.

  It’s not surprising that progressives want to return to the good old days. But it’s not working, and I’m skeptical it ever will.

  Those were the days, my friend. Thought they would never end.

  Something similar has happened on Bluesky. The nasty fringe has become even nastier: A Bluesky technical adviser recently felt the need to clarify that "The 'let's tell anyone we don’t like to kill themselves' crowd are not welcome here" because left-wing trolls kept urging people who disagreed with them to commit suicide. And without the leavening influence of their opponents, Bluesky discourse appears even more censorious and doctrinaire than what progressives were saying on old Twitter.

  Jesse Singal, call your office.
  
  Oh yeah, the key point: Bluesky activity is down 50% since November; it's in a death spiral and there's likely no way out.
  

• Nvidia's low-end RTX 5050 will be a laptop 4050 only much faster because it's a desktop chip but still using GDDR6 RAM unless it doesn't do any of that.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nothing announced officially yet.  But it will at least not be significantly hampered by only having 8GB of RAM because it won't be fast enough to need more than that.
  
  
  
• Micron has started shipping HBM4 memory.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This has up to 2TB per second of bandwidth per stack, with each stack providing 36GB of memory.
  
  Both of those numbers are what is currently described as "a lot".  Nvidia's RTX 5090 has 32GB of RAM and 1.8TB per second of bandwidth across sixteen GDDR7 chips, so packing more of each into a single device is quite attractive to high-end hardware designers.
  
  Just...  Expensive.
  
  
  
• News sites are getting crushed by Google's new AI tools.  (WSJ)  (archive site)
  
  I had to block a bunch of these today, not just Google but Amazon and Alibaba as well, incessantly spraying redundant and nonsensical requests at my servers.
  
  Time perhaps to take another look at Nepenthes, which is designed to derail AI web crawlers and fill them with garbage.
  
  
  
• Starbucks is rolling out a Microsoft Azure OpenAI assistant for baristas because their jobs are just so complicated.  (CNBC)
  
  Fuck.

  "It's just another example of how innovation technology is coming into service of our partners and making sure that we’re doing all we can to simplify the operations, make their jobs just a little bit easier, maybe a little bit more fun, so that they can do what they do best," Starbucks Chief Technology Officer Deb Hall Lefevre told CNBC.

  Nuke them all and let God sort them out.
  
  
  
  
• Xlibre, a fork of the X.org server without the discrimination, bigotry, and hatred.  (The Register)
  
  This has upset the Stalinists infesting - well, pretty much everything including these days The Register - because they love discrimination, bigotry, and hatred.
  
  But Xlibre works and the main competitor - Wayland - kind of doesn't.
  
  
  
• Hang on, did the iPad just become a computer?  (The Verge)
  
  Right, that's enough internet for today.

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Friday, June 13 2025 12:59 PM (1eSd9)

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• Ohio University says that all students will be required to learn and be fluent in AI.  (The Guardian)

  "Ohio State has an opportunity and responsibility to prepare students to not just keep up, but lead in this workforce of the future," said the university’s president, Walter "Ted" Carter Jr.
  
  He [Ted] added: "Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we live, work, teach and learn.  In the not-so-distant future, every job, in every industry, is going to be [affected] in some way by AI.  I'm Ted."

  Sigh.
  
  
  
• China shut down public AI chatbots during exam season.  (The Verge)
  
  How will esteemed offspring ever be able to enter the civil service now, short of having his knackers chopped off?
  
  And has Ohio State considered that option?

• People arguing about the tax code change affecting software development.  (Hacker News)
  
  None of whom know what they are talking about.
  
  
  
• YouTube will protect free expression by, uh, protecting free expression.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The guidelines of the level of "misinformation" required for content to be removed have been increased - making it less likely that material that triggers the lunatic left will be censored - and staff have been advised to contact their managers if they are unsure that the content crosses the line.
  
  The lunatic left - here admirably represented by Ars Technica itself - is outraged that differences in opinion are permitted at all.
  
  
  
• Apple - who have not gone all-in on AI, almost uniquely among the big tech companies - says that AI cannot think, and they can prove it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oh, and they're right.  At least as far as LLMs go, which are gobbling up 99% of the investment and research efforts.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, ChatGPT was trounced in a chess match...  Against an Atari 2600 from 1732.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It's expected to line up next month against the Antikythera Mechanism.
  
  
  
• MacOS 26 will be the last version that supports Intel hardware.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Err...  They seem to have skipped a few version numbers there.
  
  
  
• The GPD MicroPC 2 is an upgrade to the GPD MicroPC.  (Liliputing)
  
  Notably with twice the RAM (now 16GB soldered) and a full-size M.2 2280 storage device.
  
  
  
• 3GB GDDR7 modules exist.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which we already know because they're used in Nvidia's 24GB laptop RTX 5090 and the $10,000 96GB RTX Pro 6000.
  
  These could save the RTX 5060 an 8GB RTX 5060 Ti by upgrading them to 12GB - four 3GB modules instead of four 2GB - but at $10 each they cost a lot for that extra 1GB.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 10 2025 08:52 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, June 11 2025 04:02 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, June 11 2025 08:57 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 11 2025 06:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Wednesday, June 11 2025 11:22 PM (Ncog+)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, June 13 2025 04:09 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 13 2025 07:05 AM (1zWbY)

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• I liked the computer so much, I bought the company: Vtuber and classic computer afficionado Perifractic was in talks to acquire a license to distribute old Commodore software.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The current owners of Commodore made a counter-offer.
  
  We don't know yet exactly what was offered or the outcome; the video ended in something of a cliffhanger.

• A copyright suit filed against Google by textbook publishers - the piratest pirates that ever pirated - has been forced to walk the plank.  (TorrenFreak)
  
  The claim was that by selling ad space for copies of the textbooks that were sometimes not entirely legitimate, Google was vicariously infringing.
  
  Google said this was obvious bullshit and filed to dismiss.
  
  The judge agreed.
  
  
  
• Bambu Labs has removed third-party app support for its P and A series printers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Gradually locking all users into its own ecosystem.  It did the same thing to its X series earlier this year.
  
  You can - for now - still set your printer into developer mode and install the apps you want.
  
  
  
• What to do when AI is all artificial and zero intelligence.  (The Atlantic / MSN)
  
  Also, why the Butlerian Jihad was so named.
  
  
  
• Trees good.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  Thanks Washington Post.  Whatever would we do without you.

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, June 10 2025 01:17 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: JQ at Tuesday, June 10 2025 05:01 PM (rdVOm)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 10 2025 06:08 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 10 2025 08:35 PM (bg2DR)

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• While the rest of us are worrying about moving on from Windows 10 and updating out hard drives to SSDs, the government is preparing to move away from Windows 95 and floppy disks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Fortunately it's nothing important and nobody's lives are at risk.
  
  It's just the US Air Traffic Control system.

• Kioxia - formerly a division of Toshiba - is preparing to release new, faster XL Flash SSDs to compete with Intel's Optane.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And since Intel has abandoned Optane, they have the market for high-speed SSDs to themselves.  And there is a market - data bases generally, and AI-oriented databases specifically because those guys have billions of dollars.
  
  XL Flash is SLC - one bit per memory cell, compared to three or four on common consumer drives - and reduces access times from a typical 30 to 50 microseconds down to three to five microseconds.
  
  
  
• Sonoma County has converted its drone program originally proposed to track down illegal cannabis farms into a privacy-busting airborne HOA.  (SFGate)
  
  Is your grass a millimetre too long?  They will find you, and take pictures.
  
  
  
• Can AI companies train their systems strictly on public-domain documents?  No.  (MSN)
  
  Also loading publicly available data onto a computer is not copyright infringement no matter what the rent-seeking communists at Reddit would like you to believe.
  
  
  
• Apple has warned Australia not to follow the EU in opening up the App Store to allow competition, because that would be bad...  For Apple.  (NeoWin)
  
  Europe's Digital Markets Act and recent antitrust lawsuits in the US have finally loosened Apple's death grip on its own platform and its automatic 30% cut on any money that comes anywhere near an iPhone.
  
  
  
• Anthropic's AI is not writing it's own blog.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The company has an entire team of editors revising and fact-checking what eventually makes it onto the nominally AI-generated blog, because even AI companies don't trust AI.
  
  

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, June 09 2025 07:08 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 09 2025 12:50 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, June 09 2025 11:21 PM (rcPLc)

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• Move fast and blow up rockets: SpaceX is already preparing Starship Flight 10 for testing.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No launch date has been set just yet, but just over a week after Flight 9 suffered an attitude control failure, SuperHeavy Booster 16 underwent a static test fire in preparation for flight with the latest Starship module.

• Is the MSI X870E Tomahawk WiFi the high-end AMD motherboard to get?  Probably.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not the one I got, just the one I probably should have got.  It's still not perfect due to the limited number of PCIe lanes available with AMD's chipsets - Intel is better on this - but it has fewer constraints than the Gigabyte board I have.
  
  Specifically on my board if you use M.2 slots 2 and 3 it cuts the main PCIe slot from x16 to x8 - not the end of the world, but inconvenient - and if you use M.2 slot 4 it turns off the secondary PCIe slot entirely.  The MSI doesn't do that, though if you use both M.2 slot 2 and the USB4 ports, both run at PCIe 5.0 x2.
  
  I bought an M.2 RAID card because it adds four slots - effectively three, because it needs to go in the secondary PCIe slot so I can't use M.2 slot four - and it cost half as much as a new motherboard.  But with the added cost of the MSI board over the Gigabyte models is half of that, and worth it if you don't want to worry about things not working.
  
  
  
• The little-known tax code change that led to mass tech industry layoffs unless it had nothing to do with any of that.  (Quartz)
  
  The change - proposed in 2017 during Trump's first term and taking effect in 2022 - made it so that companies could not immediately write off R&D expenses but had to depreciate them over a period of years...  Like most things.
  
  The link between the tech layoffs of recent years and the changes to the tax code seems to be entirely unsupported.
  
  
  
• Vibe Coding ain't shit.  (ShiftMag)
  
  Let's say you have a great idea for a new app.  You pay some guys in Uzbekistan to develop it for you.  You put it up on the AppStore.
  
  It looks great.  Everyone's happy.  And then within a week it gets hacked and all your customers lot only lose their data but the contents of their bank accounts, you're facing a class action lawsuit, the guys in Uzbekistan have disappeared, and you have no idea what happened.
  
  That's Vibe Coding.
  
  Treat it like you're a twelve-year-old girl and the people promoting it are offering candy from the back of a van.
  
  
  
• The SiPeed NanoCluster is a cluster only nano.  (Liliputing)
  
  It supports up to seven compute modules - SiPeed's own or the Raspberry Pi CM4 or CM5 (equivalent to the Raspberry Pi models 4 and 5 respectively, reasonably enough).  The cluster itself only costs $45, and equipped with seven eight-core, 8GB AI-optimised blades it still comes out to under $1200 and uses less than 65W of power.
  
  This is meant more for robotics and automation than to compete with commercial AI racks, which cost a thousand times as much and use a thousand times as much power.
  
  
  
• Solving a mysterious murder from 14th-century England with advanced mapping except not.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The guilty parties were identified and convicted in 1337, so the mapping project just...  Translated the verdict from Latin?
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: normal at Saturday, June 07 2025 06:25 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 07 2025 11:57 PM (1zWbY)

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• AMD's "budget" Radeon 9060 XT graphics card is here.  Is it any good?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yes.  And also no.
  
  The 16GB model is pretty decent if you can find it for under $400.  The MSRP is $349 for basic models, but they sold out pretty quickly in the US.  You should still be able to find slightly faster models for around $389.
  
  (In Australia the MSRP models are still available.)
  
  The 8GB model is $50 cheaper and is readily available at MSRP because it sucks and you shouldn't buy it.
  
  It's consistently faster than Nvidia's RTX 5060 and the same price.  Compared to the 5060 Ti it's cheaper, and faster on non-ray-traced games, though a little slower in ray-traced titles.  (And a lot slower on Black Myth Wukong which significantly favours Nvidia hardware, but that's an outlier.)
  
  If you want a graphics card that is merely a bit expensive but not actually insanely overpriced, this is the one to buy.
  
  (Or go back in time a few months and nab a 7800 XT for $400 like I did.)

• SpaceX is planning to build an advanced chip packaging factory in Texas.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That is, a factory that takes individual silicon dies and puts them together to build a more complicated "chip".  AMD's server CPUs for example can contain up to 17 individual "chiplets".
  
  SpaceX plans to go a bit further, packaging devices up to, uh, two feet square.
  
  
  
• Highpoint has a PCIe 5.0 SSD RAID card that takes four M.2 drives and costs less than $1000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That includes no SSDs.
  
  I did buy a similar PCIe 3.0 RAID card, but that only cost me $200.  It still delivers up to 8GB per second, which is more than enough for me.
  
  
  
• Living without episodic memory.  (AtherMug)
  
  Better than mistaking your wife for a hat, but still a subtly unsettling read.
  
  
  
• Intel wants a 50% gross margin on all new products.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Same.
  
  
  
• Discord's CEO is just as worried about "enshittification" as you are.  (Engadget)
  
  (Looks at Discord.)
  
  No.  No he is not.
  
  
  
• Anthropic cut off direct access to its AI services to coding startup Windsurf because they suspsected the latter company was being targeted for acquisition by OpenAI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They were right.
  
  
  
• Regulate me!  Regulate me!  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  Anthropic is upset that the AI industry is not being targeted with an impenetrable swamp of state-level regulations that only a multi-billion-dollar can afford to navigate, because it is a multi-billion-dollar company and can afford to navigate it.
  
  How can we have regulatory capture without regulations?

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 07 2025 05:04 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 07 2025 02:42 PM (PiXy!)

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• Microsoft's LinkedIn chief is running Office as part of an AI reorg.  (The Verge)
  
  Abort, abort, abort.
  
  WordPerfect is still available if you're allergic to free.

• Sydney cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains.  (Science)
  
  Oddly, I see far fewer cockatoos now that I live out in the country than I did in the suburbs of Sydney.
  
  
  
• If you're tired of gigabit Ethernet, why not try terabit?  (Serve the Home)
  
  1.6 terabit, in fact.
  
  Networking is the one area where if you pay enough money you can get whatever speed you like.
  
  
  
• How much energy does it take to think?  (Quanta)
  
  More than I have right now.  It's been a long day.
  
  
  
• The court handling the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI - which I suspect is baseless though neither party has behaved exactly admirable - has ordered the company to preserve all logs for all users, including data that the user has nominally deleted, creating a privacy nightmare.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Or rather, none of the three parties including the court itself has behaved admirable.
  
  
  
• Reddit has filed suit against Anthropic, alleging that the company has accessed the site 100,000 times in the past year despite a big sign on the tree fort saying "NO GIRLS ALLOWED".  (The Verge)
  
  The one thing keeping Reddit alive right now is charging huge amounts to AI companies for human-generated content.
  
  Reddit itself is increasingly overrun with AI generated content.
  
  Oh no.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT can now ready your Google Drive and Dropbox.  (The Verge)
  
  No it fucking can't.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 06 2025 05:24 AM (zISgv)

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• We can remember your pet for you, wholesale.  (The Atlantic)  (archive site)
  
  Your pet can live forever.  Except when it dies.  But then we can bring it back, better than new, ready to chew on your shoes and piddle on the rug all over again.
  
  Also, race horses.  Because that's where the real money is.
  
  ViaGen just missed one thing: The name.

• Nvidia suggests you turn down the settings on the demo of new game Hell is Us on their cards or it kind of won't work.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The game also requires an RTX 4090 to achieve even 30fps at 4k resolution, so this is not entirely Nvidia's fault.
  
  
  
• Add -noai or ?udm=14 to stop Google's "helpful" AI summaries.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Also includes a guide on how to tell Chrome and similar browsers to do that automatically.
  
  
  
• We are Harvard researchers.  We'd rather discriminate against Jews than save lives.  (The Times)  (archive site)
  
  That's not the worst of it, either.  Of a scientist bewailing the loss of her $60 million research contract thanks to Harvard's illegal bigotry and intransigence, the article says:

  The Harvard researcher Dr Sarah Fortune was only two years away from creating a vaccine that could have saved the 1.25 million people killed each year by tuberculosis.  But last month, she received a letter telling her that the $60 million grant funding her research was being halted by President Trump.

  Your choice, Miss Fortune.
  
  But:

  But now, "all the data and knowledge" her team has gathered "is gone”.
  
  "It’s as if those studies never happened," she said.

  As if.
  
  
  
• Facebook is planning to revive an old nuclear power plant.  (The Verge)
  
  And refurbish is volcano lair.
  
  
  
• Facebook (and Yandex) are spying on you.  (GitHub)
  
  Using the old Zoom trick.
  
  
  
• You can't copyright Eleanor.  (Car and Driver)
  
  A design patent, maybe?
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, June 04 2025 11:17 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, June 04 2025 11:32 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, June 05 2025 08:14 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 05 2025 07:26 PM (PiXy!)

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• A pro-AI subreddit (one of the individual forums on the Reddit site) has started banning crazies who think the AI trees are talking to them.  (404 Media)

  The moderators of a pro-artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been quietly banning "a bunch of schizoposters” who believe "they've made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god,” highlighting a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early May.

  Yep, that sounds like Reddit alright.

  "LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities,” one of the moderators of r/accelerate,wrote in an announcement. "There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.”

  Oh.  Those guys.
  
  They are also crazy.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AMD's new 9060 XT could be 5% slower than Nvidia's 5060 Ti rather than 5% faster, according to leaked third-party benchmarks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the other hand, the 16GB 9060 XT at $349 is cheaper than even the 8GB model of the 5060 Ti at $379, making it the easy and obvious choice given that 8GB cards are terrible for recent games.
  
  On the third hand, these MSRP numbers are all imaginary and we'll have to wait and see what is actually available.
  
  
  
• AMD meanwhile is trying to defend the existence of the 8GB model of the 9060 XT.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Both the current Xbox and PlayStation have 16GB of RAM, so games ported from consoles to PC very often want more than 8GB of video RAM to run smoothly, or sometimes to run at all, sometimes turning into slideshows at even modest settings, or simply crashing entirely.
  
  Intel's B580 is not a fast card, but it does provide 12GB of VRAM at a nominal $249, something that neither Nvidia nor AMD can provide.
  
  
  
• After running 80,000 simulations across all available polling data, researchers have concluded that the Milky Way is less than 50% likely to collide with the Andromeda Galaxy over the next ten million years.  (Science Alert)
  
  They announced that it is more likely to collide with Hillary Clinton.
  
  
  
• The Liberux Nexx is a Linux-based smartphone with more-or-less adequate specs.  (IndieGogo)
  
  It has an Arm Cortex A76 chip, which ranks as "okay, I guess".
  
  And flagship pricing - around $1500 during the pre-order stage and a proposed $2000 if it ever reached retail.
  
  
  
• It's a small world after all: The planet is in the midst of a climate catastrophe and here's Google doing Google things.  (Notebook Check)
  
  I'm not sure what exactly is going on at Notebook Check, but maybe someone should check on them.
  
  Anyway, the reason I bring this nonsense to your attention is this:

  On May 20th 2025, MIT released an article breaking down the energy costs associated with each query run through a range of AI models, including Large Language Models (LLM) and image and video generators (Diffusion).
  
  Even if you exclude the 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity it took to train GPT-4, the smallest text-based model with 8 billion parameters uses 57 joules of energy per response or 114 joules when accounting for cooling.  On a large model with 50 times more parameters, that number climbs to 3,353 joules (6706 with cooling) for each response.
  
  It would be counterintuitive to get into the maths here, as MIT do a far better job, likening each response to travelling 400 feet (122 meters) on an e-bike. Google processes around 158,500 searches every second.  So, by MIT's maths, if we could capture the power associated with running Gemini for 1 second, a person could travel 19,337 kilometres on an e-bike, or roughly one and a quarter times around the planet.

  The Earth is 40,000 kilometres in circumference.
  
  Almost exactly.  It was exact, because that's how the metre was originally defined, but they got it slightly wrong and it was a little too late to change once they got GPS operational and found the real number.
  
  
  
• AirBnB wants to build the "everything app".  (The Verge)
  
  No.
  
  
  
• Salesforce has bought Moonhub, a startup building AI tools for hiring, for an undisclosed sum.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Also no.
  
  
  
• How Digg is building a website for humans.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  A novel concept in this era.
  
  I don't think the new Digg is likely to succeed, but anyone willing to take on the festering groupthink hugbox of Reddit is welcome to try.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 03 2025 08:23 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 03 2025 08:25 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, June 04 2025 01:04 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, June 04 2025 02:16 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 04 2025 03:57 AM (8u94N)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 04 2025 04:00 AM (8u94N)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 04 2025 04:02 AM (8u94N)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 04 2025 04:04 AM (8u94N)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 04 2025 08:01 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 04 2025 09:51 AM (PiXy!)

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