Is this how time normally passes? Really slowly, in the right order?
Friday, June 04
Daily News Stuff 4 June 2021
Anime of the day is Alice to Zoroku from 2017, the story of... It's hard to explain. It's really hard to explain. It's the story of an odd young girl named Alice and a grumpy old bugger named Zoroku who runs a flower shop.
Possibly the manga series has more time and focus, but the anime isn't quite sure of what it wants to be or who its audience is, and tries to be all things to all people, and yet somehow actually mostly brings it off. In this case it helps that it's only 12 episodes; that would have become impossible in a longer run.
I described it at the time as a cross between Hellsing, Usagi Drop, The Tomorrow People, and a post-graduate lecture on particle physics, and I stand by that.
I haven't posted much Miyazaki material lately, because it goes without saying that you should watch Miyazaki films, but I have a particular fondness for Ponyo. Some critics see this as a lesser film; I think they need their heads read. I'd place it right up there with Kiki and Totoro.
Louis Rossman is scouting Florida as a new home and business location. If you watched any of his New York real estate or COVID videos, you know why. This has been building up for some time.
I don't know how he votes, but he loathes Cuomo and De Blasio, so that's a start.
I haven't read or watched any of Demon Slayer - no, wait, that's not true; I watched a bit of the first episode and it rather touched a nerve by portraying violence against children and I noped out.
Top Story
- The Supreme Court has reined in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (Ars Technica)
The government has been using it to slap additional charges on any crime where computers were involved, and the decision says that if it's going to be used that broadly, it would make felons of the entire country.
Interesting split to the decision: Thomas, Alito, and Roberts were in the dissent, against the Trump appointees and the liberals.
In this particular case a cop was caught taking bribes and charged with accessing a computer system pursuant to said bribes. (ZDNet)
The problem is, he was authorised to access that system, and he wasn't charged with the obvious crime of the bribe itself. So now the charges have been thrown out.
- Something I didn't think of with regards to AMD's recent announcement of die stacking to increase cache sizes. This technique requires a custom CPU chip as well as custom memory chip to stack on top. Only AMD didn't announce a custom CPU chip, just an update to Ryzen 5000 with triple the cache.
Which means...
Possibly the manga series has more time and focus, but the anime isn't quite sure of what it wants to be or who its audience is, and tries to be all things to all people, and yet somehow actually mostly brings it off. In this case it helps that it's only 12 episodes; that would have become impossible in a longer run.
I described it at the time as a cross between Hellsing, Usagi Drop, The Tomorrow People, and a post-graduate lecture on particle physics, and I stand by that.
Tech News
- How to buy an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. (WCCFTech)
1. Check the online stores.
2. They don't have any.
3. Go to a brick-and-mortar store.
4. They don't have any either.
5. Go home.
6. Order pizza.
- Not always Russia: Chinese hackers hacked the network of New York's MTA in April. (Bleeping Computer)
The point of entry? A Pulse Secure VPN appliance.
Firewall your firewalls and VPN your VPNs. It's the new double-bagging.
- The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold is the world's first folding notebook except for every other notebook computer every except that Tandy 1000 and other relics of the 80s from before they invented hinges. (Thurrott.com)
It works well but it's horribly expensive - price for a basic model is around $2500 - so it's not clear quite what the point is. You have to start somewhere, and with another five years of iteration this could be a gem. Or on the other hand, not.
- Amazon to its drivers: Go play in traffic. (Motherboard)
Sure, you'll likely get killed, but it will shave another thirty-seven seconds f your route.
- Copyright holders are suing Cloudflare for failing to shut down infringing sites. (TorrentFreak)
Cloudflare doesn't host the sites; they provide secondary network services - content delivery and DDOS protection. And they forward DMCA notices as required by law.
But the individual sites are many and mostly broke, while Cloudflare is a big fat bag of money.
They're not the worst of Big Tech but I have no particular love for them either.
Counting Stars Anime Music Video of the Day
I haven't posted much Miyazaki material lately, because it goes without saying that you should watch Miyazaki films, but I have a particular fondness for Ponyo. Some critics see this as a lesser film; I think they need their heads read. I'd place it right up there with Kiki and Totoro.
When You're Tired of New York, You're Tired of Overpriced Garbage Video of the Day
Louis Rossman is scouting Florida as a new home and business location. If you watched any of his New York real estate or COVID videos, you know why. This has been building up for some time.
I don't know how he votes, but he loathes Cuomo and De Blasio, so that's a start.
Just One Specific Manga May or May Not Have Outsold the Entire American Comic Industry Video of the Day
I haven't read or watched any of Demon Slayer - no, wait, that's not true; I watched a bit of the first episode and it rather touched a nerve by portraying violence against children and I noped out.
Anyway, it may not, technically, all by itself, have outsold all American comics combined last year.
Still, the top twenty comics by sales volume in America are all Japanese. Get woke, wake up in debtors' prison.
Disclaimer: And your little dog too.
Still, the top twenty comics by sales volume in America are all Japanese. Get woke, wake up in debtors' prison.
Disclaimer: And your little dog too.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:06 PM
| Comments (5)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 802 words, total size 7 kb.
Thursday, June 03
Daily News Stuff 3 June 2021
Trust No-one Edition
Anime of the day is Inari, Konkon, Koi Iroha from 2015, which is just an absolute little gem of a series. It follows the story of Inari, who rescues a dog at a Shinto shrine one day and then discovers that it wasn't a dog, and ends up blessed with divine power that she never sought and would generally rather not have.
The New York Times is squirming like a millipede in pancake batter, and it's glorious.
I have no idea who decided that Nene was a seal, or indeed what any of this means, and I watch something from Hololive pretty much every day.
But I do know where that clip at the beginning came from: Nene accidentally streamed on Kiara's channel (Kiara is the chicken) after an earlier collab. And that stream got cut short and immediately disappeared. But on the internet everything is forever, except for the opening credits of Nuku Nuku.
Probably, but I haven't posted this particular video recently. Most of the insanity herein - from about 1:20 onwards - comes from a single very special episode. It's not all like that, but the joy of LWA is that when it needs go crazy it goes all the way crazy. Smash references to Evangelion, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and Castle of Cagliostro together in a single scene? Sure, why not!
Disclaimer: Look, it's my grandmother's recipe. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.
Trust No-one Edition
Top Story
- Amazon warehouse injury rates are 80% higher than those of their competitors. (BBC)
Amazon was at a loss to explain these numbers.
- Amazon has stopped testing job applicants for marijuana use and is pushing for legalisation. (NPR)
This is, like, totally unrelated.
The only problem I have with it is that they compressed ten volumes of manga down to a ten-episode TV series, skipping a lot of the content entirely. It could have done with a 24 or 26 episode run, and some parts feel a little rushed.
Tech News
- The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is here. (Tom's Hardware)
In short, it's fast, though not much faster than the existing 3080, overpriced, though you probably won't be able to find one anyway, and HOLY CRAP THE 3070 IS EXPENSIVE.
It's currently going for around $2000 here in Australia, where the competing Radeon 6700 XT is around $1150. That's still about a 60% markup over what it's supposed to cost, but the 3070 is marked up about 160%.
- Windows 10+ or whatever it's called is being announced on June 24. (Tom's Hardware)
Can they just fix the various settings panels so that they all work the same way? Some were released with Windows 10, while others haven't changed since NT 3.51.
- Micron is shipping 1α memory. (Tom's Hardware)
This is 40% smaller and uses 15% less power than their existing 1Z chips.
Those numbers - 1α and 1Z - are because they gave up entirely on claiming they were working at a size in nanometres. It's really all somewhere around 20nm with various clever tricks applied on top of that.
- Prosus (who?) is buying Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion. (Wall Street Jorunal)
Stack Overflow used to be just massively popular with programmers; it was the first place you went when you needed help with a coding issue. In recent years it has suffered something of a problem of entrenched opinion; if you ask a question it will instantly be closed and you will be chastised for not looking up an answer provided a decade ago that no longer even compiles.
- There will never be a Python 4. (Tech Republic)
Good, because they seriously fucked up the release of Python 3.
Also, there kind of is a Python 4. It's called Nim.
It's not perfect, but Nim is written entirely in Nim, which shows a certain degree of commitment by its maintainers. And it's a lot faster than Python.
- Will AMD come to the yellow, carp-shaped courtesy phone? (Phoronix)
AMD's recent GPUs have all been codenamed as $colour / $fish - the first one being Sienna Cichlid. I haven't seen any mention of Yellow Carp before - it just showed up in a Linux Kernel update - so it looks like they have yet another part on the way.
- The FBI says that the Russia-based REvil group is behind the hack on steak-and-bacon supplier JBS. (Bleeping Computer)
I don't trust anything the FBI says; if they told me not to eat plutonium-based paint chips I wouldn't even bother to put down the bowl while I googled "plutonium paint chip danger debunked".
But yeah, probably Russian hackers. This one looks like their kind of short-term thinking; China plans things much better.
- Huawei has launched their new operating system for mobile devices, Harmony OS. (Thurrott.com)
This is totally a new and independent system and not just Android hurriedly papered over to look like iOS despite the fact that the preview release still identified itself as Android in dozens of places.
- If you use Alibaba's UC Browser, you might want to not do that. (Forbes)
They're tracking everything you do. They promised explicitly not to do that, and then they did it.
Who do they think they are, Google?
Actually, the tracking outlined in the article is at a level American Big Tech only dreams it could get away with. It's already been yanked from Apple's App Store, and apparently after that article was written, from the Google Play Store as well.
This would be totally unconnected with the recent crackdown on Alibaba by the Chinese government and the almost total disappearance of Jack Ma after he was totally not forced to resign as chairman.
He's fine. He's just been playing golf. Since November.
- Can you play Metro Exodus EE at 8K? (Tweaktown)
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Unless 10 FPS with dips down to 7 is your jam. It does better with DLSS enabled, but DLSS simply means that you're no longer running at 8K; it's rendering at some lower resolution and upscaling.
Further Deponent Sayeth Not Video of the Day
The New York Times is squirming like a millipede in pancake batter, and it's glorious.
How Did He Even Get That Clip Video of the Day
I have no idea who decided that Nene was a seal, or indeed what any of this means, and I watch something from Hololive pretty much every day.
But I do know where that clip at the beginning came from: Nene accidentally streamed on Kiara's channel (Kiara is the chicken) after an earlier collab. And that stream got cut short and immediately disappeared. But on the internet everything is forever, except for the opening credits of Nuku Nuku.
Did I Already Do Little Witch Academia Anime Music Video of the Day
Probably, but I haven't posted this particular video recently. Most of the insanity herein - from about 1:20 onwards - comes from a single very special episode. It's not all like that, but the joy of LWA is that when it needs go crazy it goes all the way crazy. Smash references to Evangelion, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and Castle of Cagliostro together in a single scene? Sure, why not!
Disclaimer: Look, it's my grandmother's recipe. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:45 PM
| Comments (5)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1042 words, total size 9 kb.
Wednesday, June 02
Daily News Stuff 2 June 2021
Working Five To Nine Edition
Anime of the day is Pretty Cure from 2004. And I have to be very specific about this: Pretty Cure from 2004.
This show is a multi-media juggernaut, with 18 TV seasons to date - and we're talking 45 to 50 episodes each, not short runs - 29 films, 17 video games, and about half a billion dollars a year in merchandise.
The problem - and we should all have such problems - is that the show's producers achieved this by maintaining a laser-like focus on their target audience: Girls aged 6 to 12 (or thereabouts).
Except for that very first season.
Not that the first season doesn't have cute mascots and frilly outfits, but those two girls are infinitely more likely than the later cohorts to mix it up directly with the baddies and get punched clear through an office building.
Give it a moment or you might be fooled into just thinking she has a nice voice. She's said that she no longer remembers which voice is "really" hers, though the two regular ones are "Risu" and "Ayunda".
Working Five To Nine Edition
Top Story
- TSMC is firing on all cylinders. (AnandTech)
It's still not enough, but they're also building a bunch of new cylinders.
6nm production - what they term N6 since the nanometres are imaginary - will match 7nm (N7) this year. N5 is producing better yields than N7 already, though it is a more complicated process and more expensive to produce. And N4 will be entering initial production later this year. N4 is only slightly smaller than N5 but is cheaper to produce, which is a good combination.
Meanwhile the company outlined its plans for the 3nm and 2nm nodes. (WCCFTech)
Fabs (silicon factories) for these advanced nodes are planned for both Taiwan and Arizon, and the company expects to expand overall production at a compound rate of 30% annually. Though they didn't specify for how long and no-one asked if paperclips were involved.
Logic circuits are expected to be 70% denser on N3 than on N5. (WCCFTech)
But memory circuits will only improve by around 20%. This is similar to the situation moving from N7 to N5, and it's a major reason why AMD and Intel are both looking at die stacking solutions. Their CPU cores are getting smaller but their caches aren't, so if they don't seek out novel solutions their chips are going to be cores lost in a sea of RAM.
This show is a multi-media juggernaut, with 18 TV seasons to date - and we're talking 45 to 50 episodes each, not short runs - 29 films, 17 video games, and about half a billion dollars a year in merchandise.
The problem - and we should all have such problems - is that the show's producers achieved this by maintaining a laser-like focus on their target audience: Girls aged 6 to 12 (or thereabouts).
Except for that very first season.
Not that the first season doesn't have cute mascots and frilly outfits, but those two girls are infinitely more likely than the later cohorts to mix it up directly with the baddies and get punched clear through an office building.
Tech News
- Gas is one thing, but when you hack a country's supply of steak that's a declaration of war. (Bloomberg)
Russian hackers targeted meat processor JBS SA, closing facilities in America, Canada, and Australia, though some facilities are expected back online soon. The company handles about 25% of the US beef supply and around 20% of its pork. The edible kind, not the other one.
They're also the largest processor in Australia for beef, pork, and lamb, including a huge volume of exports.
I'm dubious that this is ordinary criminal activity. And I'm not alone. (Bleeping Computer)
But I'm equally dubious of the ability of our leaders - who are in general some combination of feckless, fascist, and inconsequential - to do anything about it.
- Europe is at least ostracising aspiring failed state Belarus after its airliner hijacking stunt. (BBC)
Though to be fair, Belarus is also banning travel from Belarus.
- Faced with having to pay fees for 75,000 individual arbitration cases, Amazon is scrambling to drop their forced arbitration clause. (Wall Street Journal)
The article is cut off after five paragraphs but you can get the gist. They forced customers into arbitration rather than potentially costly judicial proceedings, only to discover that not all their customers are idiots, and tens of thousands of separate arbitration cases aren't cheap either.
- Turkey reportedly deployed hunter-killer robots in Libya. (CNet)
The drones are designed to track and kill their targets without human guidance or intervention.
This is probably not a good development.
- The space station got hit by space junk. (Science Alert)
It only dinged the Canadarm, which is mounted outside the hull, so there wasn't a pressure breach, but that's kind of close.
- Don't throw away your optical microscopes just yet. (Nature)
A new technique that I don't quite understand... Don't understand in any way whatsoever improves the resolution of regular optical microscopes by a factor of five, to about one tenth the wavelength of blue light.
This is done using metamaterials, or in other words, magic.
- Stp asking difficult questions, you're scientists, not... Wait. (Nature)
Methinks someone doth protest too much.
It's All Just a Silly Misunderstanding Officer Anime Music Video of the Day
You Will Believe a Squirrel Can Sing Hololive Music Video of the Day
Give it a moment or you might be fooled into just thinking she has a nice voice. She's said that she no longer remembers which voice is "really" hers, though the two regular ones are "Risu" and "Ayunda".
Disclaimer: Squirrels, can't trust them, can't build a bridge out of them.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:08 PM
| Comments (2)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 806 words, total size 7 kb.
Upheld 9-0
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:14 AM
| Comments (2)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 2 words, total size 1 kb.
Tuesday, June 01
Daily News Stuff 1 June 2021
Ghost Hands Edition
Anime of the day is Strange Dawn, animated by Hal Film Maker (who also did Princess Tutu) and distributed by Pioneer in 2000. Mostly.
In fact the English language release by Urban Vision only got as far as episode 8 before the series disappeared without a trace, which is why no-one really remembers it today.
It's something of a cross between the classic isekai story where the heroes are transported to a fantasy world, and Gulliver's Travels. Because the heroes - heroines - are indeed transported to a fantasy world, but the inhabitants are about six inches tall.
Which means that two teenage girls are suddenly vast and terrifying engines of destruction, and everyone is plotting to gain their trust and/or kill them.
I can totally see Haruhi doing this.
Thanks Steve. Great roundup.
Disclaimer: Also, free content.
Ghost Hands Edition
Top Stories
- AMD had their Computex keynote, and announced a few things, some expected, and one not.
- Ryzen 5000 desktop APUs will be coming to the retail market August 5th. (AnandTech)
The 5700G is an 8 core / 16 thread part with a 65W TDP and will cost $359. The existing 8 core CPU, the 5800X, costs $449, so that's not a bad price.
It does run 100MHz slower, and it has half the L3 cache and only PCIe 3.0. On the other hand, it uses less power than the 105W 5800X and has built-in graphics.
- The Radeon 6000M family is also here. (AnandTech)
The 6800M is basically a reduced power 6700XT. The 6700M is a cut down and reduced power 6700XT - 10GB of RAM instead of 12GB, and about 90% of the performance. And the 6600M looks like the leaked specs for the upcoming Radeon 6600.
It looks like the 6800M isn't quite as fast as the mobile RTX 3080, but it's not too far behind.
- And finally, AMD CEO Lisa Su put to rest rumours that they were working on 3D chip stacking technology by announcing that 3D chip stacking technology would be going into production this year. (AnandTech)
Su showed off a version of the Ryzen 5000 with 192MB of L3 cache. The existing high-end parts have 64MB across two CPU chiplets, and the new version stacks another 64MB cache chiplet on top of each of those.
They reported performance gains of up to 25%. Admittedly that's in one specific game, Monster Hunter World, but 25% is huge and MonHun is huge.
It also helps with a limitation of newer process nodes. TSMC's 5nm node is about 35% smaller than 7nm, but only for logic circuits. For memory it's basically the same size as 7nm. With die stacking AMD could produce just the CPU chiplets on 5nm and the cache dies on the older and cheaper 7nm process.
In fact the English language release by Urban Vision only got as far as episode 8 before the series disappeared without a trace, which is why no-one really remembers it today.
It's something of a cross between the classic isekai story where the heroes are transported to a fantasy world, and Gulliver's Travels. Because the heroes - heroines - are indeed transported to a fantasy world, but the inhabitants are about six inches tall.
Which means that two teenage girls are suddenly vast and terrifying engines of destruction, and everyone is plotting to gain their trust and/or kill them.
Tech News
- AMD also unveiled their FidelityFX AI upscaling solution. (AnandTech)
This competes directly with Nvidia's DLSS, except that it's open source and also works on Nvidia hardware. This is exactly what AMD did with Freesync - now an industry standard - to Nvidia's proprietary and expensive G-sync.
- Nvidia's 3080 Ti is a 3090 with half the RAM. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, it also has 256 shaders missing, but that's about 2% of the total. That's so they can salvage dies with one or two defects.
It will cost $1199 - in theory. The regular 3080 costs $699 - in theory. So you're paying 70% more for a 15% performance boost. In theory. I have no idea what the real prices will be.
There's also a 3070 Ti which looks to be 7% faster than the 3070.
- Porn film distributor The Score Group file a DMCA takedown request demanding Google remove links to Wikipedia's own Wikipedia page. (TorrentFreak)
Google said no.
- Microsoft has released WinGet, a package manager like RedHat's Yum or Debian's Apt. (Thurrott.com)
It's available right now on GitHub.
Not Technically Tech News
- Matsuri just became the 17th member of Hololive to hit one million subscribers, during her third anniversary stream. (Reddit)
I was watching live when Gura hit one million and Calli half a million at the same time during a Minecraft collab. Gura was the first Hololive member to hit that mark, but she opened the floodgates. There are another four members over the 900k mark so this isn't going to stop any time soon.
- VOMS meanwhile is holding auditions for two new members. (Reddit)
VOMS is currently home to Pikamee and Tomoshika - famous for that Minecraft clip. The third member, Monoe, left earlier this year.
I like them a lot and hope they do well. Pikamee speaks fluent English and has a big overseas following, and is definitely worth checking out if you ever run short of stuff to watch between Hololive EN and the recently launched Nijisanji EN.
A Ship Shipping Ship Shipping Shipping Ships Anime Music Video of the Day
I can totally see Haruhi doing this.
More On That AMD Announcement Video of the Day
Thanks Steve. Great roundup.
Disclaimer: Also, free content.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:32 PM
| Comments (7)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 825 words, total size 7 kb.
Monday, May 31
Daily News Stuff 31 May 2021
Anime of the day is Trigun, a 26 episode TV series from 1998 that sadly has spawned no sequels shut up the movie doesn't exist.
The series follows the story of two claims adjusters, "Derringer" Meryl Stryfe and "Stungun" Milly Thompson, who are out to stop the depredations of Vash the Stampede before he bankrupts the insurance company they work for. I wonder how they would have dealt with Kei and Yuri.
Tech News
Yeah, I need to clean out my PCs. I got a couple of cans of compressed air but haven't had the time to actually apply them. 110C does seem a little excessive.
Blockchain Imposition Edition
Top Story
- Blockchain mining has made it impossible to buy video cards for video, so what if they instead used hard drives?
Yep, storage market is fucked. (New Scientist)
Drives haven't disappeared, but bargains on large hard drives that were commonplace six months ago are gone, and supply is patchy generally.
I got myself a new 6TB drive (Toshiba Gold) last month to replace a failing unit in my NAS, because I knew this was coming. That drive is still available - but I'd now have to order it in from Amazon UK, because there's zero stock in Australia, even at double the price I paid.
The people behind Chia say that this will be a good thing in the long run as drive makers ramp up production, to which I counter, fuck you you fucking fucks.
The series follows the story of two claims adjusters, "Derringer" Meryl Stryfe and "Stungun" Milly Thompson, who are out to stop the depredations of Vash the Stampede before he bankrupts the insurance company they work for. I wonder how they would have dealt with Kei and Yuri.
Tech News
- Apparently it's Computex or something, and Intel has announced a refresh of their Tiger Lake laptop parts. (AnandTech)
You can tell how far they've come by the fact that these are 15W parts but they quote performance numbers for them running at 28W and they actually use up to 50W: Not very.
- The next version of Windows 10 is on its way, and will bring sweeping UI changes that will probably suck. (Bleeping Computer)
Or you could not do that, Microsoft. Just a thought.
- Despite booking $11 billion in orders, Aerion could not raise funds to complete its supersonic business jet. (Flying)
They will now return to making expensive chairs.
- Apple's next-gen M1X Mac mini will return the features removed from the M1 Mac mini. (9to5Mac)
Not upgradeable RAM, though. Not upgradeable anything, in fact.
Something Worse Than a Four-Year-Old RX 580 Full of Dust Video of the Day
Yeah, I need to clean out my PCs. I got a couple of cans of compressed air but haven't had the time to actually apply them. 110C does seem a little excessive.
Substitute Anime Music Video of the Day
Ah, says Pixy, I'll include that AMV, because while Konosuba might be trash that's a problem with the story and not the artwork, and I can introduce more readers to Saint Motel.
Nope, says YouTube. Age Restricted for Anime Boobs.
Well, instead, here's The World God Only Knows.
And Saint Motel's original video for My Type.
Disclaimer: You've got a pulse and you are breathing, mostly.
Nope, says YouTube. Age Restricted for Anime Boobs.
Well, instead, here's The World God Only Knows.
And Saint Motel's original video for My Type.
Disclaimer: You've got a pulse and you are breathing, mostly.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:04 PM
| Comments (5)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 474 words, total size 5 kb.
HoloEN Is Having A Day
Ina just hit 1 million subscribers a couple of days ago, Gura just hit 2.75 million, Kiara scheduled a 12-hour marathon stream to take her to 1 million - and hit the mark three hours early while she was still asleep.
And then we got this:
Amelia, Gura, and Ina played Mario Party with a side bet that the winner could post anything they wanted on the others' Twitter accounts.
Ina just hit 1 million subscribers a couple of days ago, Gura just hit 2.75 million, Kiara scheduled a 12-hour marathon stream to take her to 1 million - and hit the mark three hours early while she was still asleep.
And then we got this:
Amelia, Gura, and Ina played Mario Party with a side bet that the winner could post anything they wanted on the others' Twitter accounts.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:28 AM
| Comments (2)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 75 words, total size 1 kb.
Sunday, May 30
Daily News Stuff 30 May 2021
10nm Sneak Attack Edition
Anime of the day is Irresponsible Captain Tylor from 1993. There's 26 TV episodes, followed by a 10 episode OVA series that ran from 1994 to 1996 and wait, where did that come from? A 12-episode sequel called Irresponsible Galaxy Tylor from 2017.
Update: No wonder I missed the "sequel"; it sank without trace. It gets a 4 on My Anime List, and tetanus would probably get at least a 5.
Justy Ueki Tylor is either a supernaturally lucky idiot or a tactical genius, or a little of both. He joins the Space Force to work a cushy job in the pension department, but finds himself on the frontline just as a major war breaks out.
This is one I would recommend to fans of Dirty Pair; it leans a little more into the comedy but it features people good at their jobs being allowed to do their jobs, and the anime itself is clearly a labour of love.
Today's entry makes Dell look good. The Dell system was competently engineered and assembled, it's just that everything was designed to reduce cost rather than to make the system run smoothly.
This system from iBUYPOWER was delivered untested and physically broken.
Looks at first glance like cheap knockoff rubbish but it's actually a competently-built product that performs exactly as it should.
10nm Sneak Attack Edition
Top Stories
- Intel has quietly slipped Tiger Lake B into the sales channel - so quietly that I missed the importance of this yesterday. (WCCFTech)
Existing 11th generation Intel desktop CPUs are made on their old 14nm process; until now only laptop chips were produced at 10nm. Tiger Lake B represents Intel's first 10nm desktop parts.
We'll have to wait for reviews to see exactly how this turns out, but the new 11900KB uses 65W at base load, compared to 125W for the 14nm 11900K. It also looks like they've increased the cache from 16MB to 24MB.
On the other hand, base clocks for the 11900B are a little slower than before.
The 11500B on the third hand looks like it could be a gem: The power remains the same at 65W, but base clocks are up from 2.7GHz to 3.3GHz, and maximum boost clock from 4.6GHz to 5.3GHz.
- Intel also has graphics cards on the way. (Tom's Hardware)
This is great given the ongoing shortage and sky-high prices from both Nivida and AMD. The cards are expected to have up to 512 Xe execution units, which gives us a good idea how fast they will be, because Tiger Lake laptop chips have up to 96 Xe units. The dedicated cards will likely run at a faster clock.
On the downside, we won't see these until next year, so in the meantime it's either wait or pay the scalper.
Update: No wonder I missed the "sequel"; it sank without trace. It gets a 4 on My Anime List, and tetanus would probably get at least a 5.
Justy Ueki Tylor is either a supernaturally lucky idiot or a tactical genius, or a little of both. He joins the Space Force to work a cushy job in the pension department, but finds himself on the frontline just as a major war breaks out.
This is one I would recommend to fans of Dirty Pair; it leans a little more into the comedy but it features people good at their jobs being allowed to do their jobs, and the anime itself is clearly a labour of love.
Tech News
- Zen 3 Threadrippers could arrive in August. (WCCFTech)
That's ten months after the launch of Zen 3 for the consumer desktop, though it's only recently that the high-end Zen 3 parts (12 and 16 cores) became readily available.
- Microsoft Edge 91 is here and it's, um, basically crap. (Bleeping Computer)
It pushes a bunch of unwanted features and an even bigger bunch of bugs.
Avoid. Oh, wait, you can't. It updates itself auotomatically.
- Iran has banned Bitcoin mining due to ongoing blackouts. (NBC)
This is not entirely because the country is run by genocidal kleptocrats; they've also been subject to a prolonged drought that has reduced hydroelectric output.
The government blamed the blackouts on a natural gas shortage, which is rather like Australia blaming problems on a mouse shortage. (CNN)
Irresponsible Anime Music Video of the Day
It Fell Off the Back of a Truck Video of the Day
Today's entry makes Dell look good. The Dell system was competently engineered and assembled, it's just that everything was designed to reduce cost rather than to make the system run smoothly.
This system from iBUYPOWER was delivered untested and physically broken.
Bonus Not Actually Junk Video of the Day
Looks at first glance like cheap knockoff rubbish but it's actually a competently-built product that performs exactly as it should.
Disclaimer: We found the missing one - it was in the dust filter! Just like this blog post!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:38 PM
| Comments (5)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 646 words, total size 6 kb.
Saturday, May 29
Daily News Stuff 29 May 2021
Pessimisations Abound Edition
Anime of the day is Ranma ½, Rumiko Takahashi's third and probably still biggest hit series. It ran for 161 episodes from 1989 to 1992 and as usual still didn't cover all the story (which ran to 38 volumes of manga).
The story? Well, that cute redhead in the opening credits? His name's Ranma. He's under a curse that many teenage boys would pay money for, and searching desperately for a cure. As these things usually go, most of the cast of the show also ends up cursed.
It does get a little repetitive after a while. Actually, it gets a lot repetitive after a while. It's worth watching some of it as long as you don't feel obliged to watch all the way to the end because there isn't one.
Update: Swapped out the nice creditless version for one that will play in the US.
This is the theme song for Zettai Karen Children, and those are the girls who sang it. Keen-eyed observers will be wondering if that is, and the answer is yes. It's a very young Suzuka Nakamoto, from even before she became the lead singer for Babymetal.
The connection doesn't stop there; the other two members of Babymetal first caught attention in a talent contest performing a dance routine to the song Over the Future.... Which is the theme song for Zettai Karen Children.
Pessimisations Abound Edition
Top Stories
- When our main datacenter burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp - which is several weeks ago now - I had to bring up other sites on the mee.nu server and I made some hacks to limit performance-crunching features.
I haven't had time to undo those hacks yet because we also had servers at that datacenter for my day job and the following weeks were somewhat.... Fraught.
Anyway, I'll be working to undo those de-featurings this weekend.
- It's time to firewall your firewalls to defend your defenses from attacking attackers.
Just before a report was released about Chinese hackers compromising Pulse Secure VPN appliances, the hacks were quietly removed. (The Record)
FireEye, the company monitoring this, has revised its report from "a group likely connected with Chinese espionage did this" to "China did this".
- The Russia-based hackers who compromised the SolarWinds management software are targeting the governments of 24 countries. (Bleeping Computer)
Again, this is not a rogue criminal organisation operating in Russia. This is the Russian government.
- If you have SonicWall security appliances, patch that shit now. (Bleeping Computer)
It never ends.
If you don't want to sleep for a week, go over to Bleeping Computer and start scrolling.
Anime of the day is Azumanga Daioh.... Wait, no, it's not. I can't find a clean version of the opening credits. There is that version, but no.
Anime of the day is Zettai Karen Children... Wait, no it's not. I can't find a clean version of the opening credits. There is the live version... I'll include that at the bottom of the post, because if nothing else it has some historical significance.
Anime of the day is Nanaka 6/17... Well, crap.
Anime of the day is Zettai Karen Children... Wait, no it's not. I can't find a clean version of the opening credits. There is the live version... I'll include that at the bottom of the post, because if nothing else it has some historical significance.
Anime of the day is Nanaka 6/17... Well, crap.
Uh...
The story? Well, that cute redhead in the opening credits? His name's Ranma. He's under a curse that many teenage boys would pay money for, and searching desperately for a cure. As these things usually go, most of the cast of the show also ends up cursed.
It does get a little repetitive after a while. Actually, it gets a lot repetitive after a while. It's worth watching some of it as long as you don't feel obliged to watch all the way to the end because there isn't one.
Update: Swapped out the nice creditless version for one that will play in the US.
Tech News
- Back in the Paleolithic Era I had a YouTube channel. It will come as a surprise to many of you that it was a curated collection of anime openings and endings. No full episodes, no full songs, just the opening and ending credits.
Then the first version of ContentID got switched on, and I got three strikes instantly because the music in some of those clips matched their database, and it was gone forever.*
That was more than a decade ago, but proving that a trillion dollars in market cap doesn't mean you have the faintest clue about anything Twitch is replicating YouTube's fuckup in every last detail. (The Verge)
Nice Twitch channel you have here. Shame if anything were to happen to it. Like, for example, Twitch happened.
* I still have all the video files and if you search very carefully you might still find them, but the YouTube channel got yeeted to Yeetsville.
- USB power delivery is getting amped up to 240W. (AnandTech)
Well, that's technically the exact opposite of what's happening. Standard USB-C cables can deliver up to 60W - 20V and 3A. Specifically rated cables can deliver 100W - 20V and 5A. The new standard keeps the same current rating but increases the voltage to 48V.
That's only for 5A rated cables and you'll need a new cable anyway, with capacitors rated at 60V+ for safety.
This can replace power bricks for even most high-end laptops - and smaller all-in-one desktops as well - with a single standard port. The power bricks won't necessarily be smaller, but the same power brick will work for any device unless the manufacturers explicitly cripple them so that is almost certainly what will happen.
The new standard also supports stepping the voltage up in 100mV increments, so you can expect chargers that support all of that to cost a bit more than the typical cheap phone charger from Kmart.
- I came looking for weed, and found Ethereum. (Tom's Hardware)
British police took a break from confiscating butter knives to check out a suspected pot farm using an illegal electricity tap. They confirmed the location using an infrared-sensing drone, which is a common way to spot these sites because their grow lamps put out a lot of heat.
But so do 100 specialised mining rigs stuffed full of Nvidia graphics cards, which is what was actually found.
- Sabrent's 2TB Plotripper Pro has a 54PBW rating. (Tom's Hardware)
To unpack that a little, this is a 2TB NVMe SSD, one of those little M.2 drives that plugs into a slot on newer motherboards. It can write a total of 54PB - 54,000TB - over its lifespan.
Assuming a 5 year warranty, that's 30TB per day - 15 times the drive's capacity, which is termed as 15 DWPD (drive writes per day).
That is the highest rating I have ever seen on a general-purpose SSD. Expensive enterprise drives go as high as 10 DWPD.
This is - of course - for crypto mining with Chia.
- Nvidia's RTX 3080 Ti is a 3090 with half the RAM. (WCCFTech)
People complained when the 3090 was launched because the MSRP of $1500 was considered excessive. Compared to what it costs to get one of those cards now, that seems laughably low.
- Twitter has confirmed their paid plan, Twitter Blue.
For $2.99 per month you get absolutely nothing.
There is one feature Twitter could offer that would be worth paying for - it rhymes with edit button - but they absolutely refuse because they know that their users are batshit insane and it would be an unimaginable clusterfuck.
- What's new in Swift 5.5? (Hacking with Swift)
Swift is Apple's programming language to replace Objective C, which absolutely nobody liked. There was a lot of buzz around it early on as a new systems programming language with a clean and thoughtful design, but then people tried using it and the buzz died.
There are third-party compilers and you can write apps in Swift and run them anywhere including Android, but nobody wants to.
- If you have a last-generation iPad Pro with 6GB of RAM, a single app can use at most 4.5GB of that, leaving 25% of the RAM for the operating system and other apps.
If you have a new 16GB iPad Pro your apps can now get 5GB of RAM - a whole extra 512MB. (MacRumors)
iPads are a good device for artists, with their high resolution screens and stylus support. Why plug an expensive drawing tablet into an expensive PC when you can just get an iPad?
Well, this is why. Because Apple hates you.
Karen Girls Music Video of the Day
This is the theme song for Zettai Karen Children, and those are the girls who sang it. Keen-eyed observers will be wondering if that is, and the answer is yes. It's a very young Suzuka Nakamoto, from even before she became the lead singer for Babymetal.
Babymetal Music Video of the Day
The connection doesn't stop there; the other two members of Babymetal first caught attention in a talent contest performing a dance routine to the song Over the Future.... Which is the theme song for Zettai Karen Children.
Disclaimer: See you in the mosh'sh pit.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:18 PM
| Comments (5)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1317 words, total size 11 kb.
Friday, May 28
Daily News Stuff 28 May 2021
Oh Great Edition
Anime of the day is Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi from 2002, which tells the classic story of legendary Heian Era onmyoji Abe no Seimei, only with a very slightly different take to what is found in Japanese high school literature class.
The song is by Megumi Hayashibara, but I don't think she had a character role , certainly not a starring one.
As I said, a slightly different take to what you'd learn in literature class.
It's worth noting that a major character in the story is called Mune-Mune, which translates as, well, boobs - and you can probably spot who that is in this clip. But Mune was in fact a real person who features in the story of the historical Abe no Seimei.
Because Japan.
Oh Great Edition
Top Story
- Intel's next-generation Alder Lake is expected to arrive this year - and probably with a whimper. (Tom's Hardware)
Intel have been talking up its single-core performance, but they need to, because it looks like the low power laptop parts - 15W - will have two cores. Well two large cores - the type of core you normally find on laptops - and also eight small cores, like a smart phone.
AMD can provide eight large cores at a 15W TDP.
So Intel not only needs to deliver a really fast large core, because they'll only have two of them, and a really fast small core, because they'll only have two large cores, they need to deliver the really fast large cores and the really fast small cores working together seamlessly at a low power consumption and that just plain ain't on the cards..
It looks like it could be even more power-hungry than Tiger Lake... It is Tiger Lake, right? When that is exactly the issue these small cores are supposed to address.
I do expect it to deliver on single-threaded workloads. And it will be arriving well before AMD's Zen 4, so it should have time to establish itself before it gets demolished in turn by the competition. Competition of this sort is a fine thing.
- Actually the thing that had me earlier muttering under my breath oh, great - I save my expletives for the written word, mere shrieks of anguish being too ephemeral to be a worthy medium - turned out to be pretty reasonable.
At my day job we're currently suffering from success. It's better than the alternative, but it's going to be hectic for the rest of the year. October in particular is going to be 31 days of crazy. The length and frequency of these posts might get a little glitchy around then.
The song is by Megumi Hayashibara, but I don't think she had a character role , certainly not a starring one.
Tech News
- Marvell has announced the first PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers. (AnandTech)
Intel's Alder Lake is expected to provide PCIe 5.0 - I don't remember if that has been officially announced as yet, or merely leaked - as is AMD's Zen 4 next year. But this controller is aimed at servers, not at desktops, let alone laptops. Power consumption for the controller chip alone is 9W, where an 8-core AMD APU - CPU and graphics combined - uses 15W.
PCIe 4.0 is already pretty power hungry; PCIe 5.0 isn't going to improve that. But it is fast; this controller will deliver up to 14GB per second.
- Speaking of Zen 4, here's Zen 5. (WCCFTech)
I'm not sure this even deserves being called a leak; it consists of a name - Granite Ridge - and a diagram so pixelated it could appear on a true crime show without any additional editing.
- How to get all your work done on an iPad. (ZDNet)
Step 1: Have very, very low expectations.
He lists email, a calendar, a password manager, and a text editor. He could get by with a Tandy Model 100.
- AI's core competence seems to be screwing things up faster and on a larger scale than mere humans can hope for. (Vox)
And we are very, very good at screwing up. The problem is we need to eat and sleep and stuff like that, so I'm told, so we take regular forced breaks from screwing up.
AI can screw things up 24x7.
Magical Shopping Arcade Anime Music Video of the Day
As I said, a slightly different take to what you'd learn in literature class.
It's worth noting that a major character in the story is called Mune-Mune, which translates as, well, boobs - and you can probably spot who that is in this clip. But Mune was in fact a real person who features in the story of the historical Abe no Seimei.
Because Japan.
Disclaimer: Actually, I'll stick with because Japan for now.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:39 PM
| Comments (5)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 716 words, total size 6 kb.
135kb generated in CPU 0.0662, elapsed 0.3505 seconds.
60 queries taking 0.3287 seconds, 420 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
60 queries taking 0.3287 seconds, 420 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
