I'm in the future. Like hundreds of years in the future. I've been dead for centuries.
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?

Tuesday, November 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 November 2024

Potat Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • I bought myself a Terramaster D8 which is a small, cheap, and fairly dumb hybrid storage box.

    It holds 4 x 3.5" drives and 4 x M.2 NVMe SSDs, attached over 10Gb USB.   So it's much faster than my old Synology boxes, but it only does RAID-0 and RAID-1 and even that only on the first two drives.  You want to configure that on the system it's attached to.

    But it is cheap; I paid about $250 including tax and shipping, and you are not getting an 8-bay 10Gb Synology solution for that.


  • On the other hand, QNAP.  (The Register)

    They issued a timely software update.

    It bricked users' devices.


  • Amazon's new Kindle Colorsoft is kind of good except kind of not.  (The Verge)

    It's a 7" colour e-ink device with a resolution of 300 dpi, which is pretty good, and 4096 colours, which is tragic for an LCD but again pretty good for e-ink.

    But in colour mode the resolution is cut in half taking it from pretty good territory to pretty bad.

    And while Amazon claims a battery life of 8 weeks on a charge, that assumes that you barely use the device; the reviewer estimated it will last for 20 hours of actual reading.  Which again, is not bad, but is a lot less than 8 weeks.

    Also it doesn't seem to be available in Australia.


  • Teamgroup has announced a 16TB external SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It's basically the size of a 2.5" external hard drive, probably because it's a 2.5" SSD in a metal box, only it stores more, runs ten times faster, is a lot more robust, and costs an estimated $2000.


Disclaimer: No, seriously, duck.

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Monday, November 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 November 2024

396 Shopping Days Until Christmas Edition

Top Story

  • RFC 35140: The Do-Not-Stab flag in the HTTP Header.  (5SNB)

    An idea whose time has come.
    Over the last 50 years, advancements in peripherals have allowed websites to stab users. A number of industries have popped up to provide SaaS (Stabbings as a Service). Some users have expressed discomfort when a knife is plunged into their chest, and this header allows those users to express their personal preferences.

    A user preference can, of course, be ignored by bad actors. However, most stabbings are not done by malicious actors, they are simply law-abiding companies which will gladly stop stabbing you if you ask. This standard provides a method for a user to easily opt-out of all stabbings, except those mandated by law, and ones that the company wants to do anyways.

    Seems entirely fair.  Who could possibly object to this?
    Syntax

    The header has only one form, Do-Not-Stab: 1.  This is because the lack of a header indicates a clear preference that the user wants to be stabbed.

    Understandable.
    Defaults

    A user-agent MUST NOT adopt Do-Not-Stab: 1 as the default preference. If a user-agent were to do this, web services SHOULD ignore the preference and stab the user anyways.

    This is of course a parody of...  Well, pretty much everything the big tech companies do these days.

    Or is it?



Tech News

  • This website is hosted on Bluesky.  (Daniel Mangum)

    Well, not this one.  And not the one linked above, either.  But the one linked in the article linked above.

    I mean, sort of.  It requires jumping through several flaming hoops and is entirely pointless, but...  Not sure there is a but.


  • Outlandish recursive query examples with SQLite.   (SQLite)

    Like solving Sudoku with a database query.  Or plotting the Mandelbrot set...  With a database query.


  • Yes, we seem to have run out of tech news.


Disclaimer: As it turns out, I did not accidentally throw out the fruit cake.  I was cleaning the kitchen yesterday and there was some fruit loaf sitting on the counter - or so I thought - and I realised that it had to be stale since I haven't bought fruit loaf for two or three weeks.  So I threw it out.  Then later on I went to get a slice of fruit cake and there wasn't any because I had thrown it out.  Though I couldn't understand how I had done that since they don't look that much alike.  And this was a problem because gluten-free fruit cake is available for about three weeks of the year and the window has already closed, so there wouldn't be any more until October next year.  But then I was in the kitchen today and I found the fruit cake and it turns out that I did in fact throw out stale fruit loaf which is available year-round.  So I had some.

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Sunday, November 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 November 2024

AI Toasted Honey Buns Edition

Top Story

  • Elon Musk is directing harassment towards individual federal workers.  (The Verge)

    Is he indeed, O Verge?

    The example cited - the only example cited - is of Musk suggesting that Director of Climate Diversification at the International Development Finance Corporation was a "fake job".

    Now, "climate diversification" in this sense means recommending alternative crops to grow to make the food supply more robust against short and long term changes in weather.

    Which is a task that could easily by filled by a fairly small book.

    And in this case, it involves making those recommendations to other countries.

    So, never mind "individual workers".

    USAID, its 10,000 employees, and its $50 billion budget: Afuera!


Tech News

  • In a small bit of welcome news in the never-ending shitfest that is Australian federal politics, the government has abandoned one of its attempts to strangle free speech across the entire world.  (ABC)

    The so-called "misinformation bill" would have set up the government as the arbiter of truth, and anything untrue would have become illegal speech.  The bill did not specify how this was supposed to work; it just legislated it into reality.

    And now it's dead for the current session of Parliament, and the left-wing Labor government is likely to be out of power before Parliament votes on any new legislation.

    Still moving forward is the government's Won't Somebody Think of the Children Act, which bans minors under the age of 16 from using social networks, though again it never specifies how this is supposed to be achieved.  This has the support of the nominally conservative Liberal Party and is likely to pass in some form, even though it is obviously completely unworkable.

    That's the same party that previously wanted to ban encryption, claiming that Australia's laws superseded mathematics, so this betrayal of conservative principles comes as no surprise.


  • Lenovo's ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 uses the new CAMM2 memory module in place of SO-DIMMs, but with a twist.  (WCCFTech)

    Not only does it use the new, more compact modules, it uses LPDDR5X memory rather than regular DDR5.

    This reduces power (LP = low power) and also runs faster at 7500MHz.

    This is particularly welcome as AMD's Zen 5 laptop chips don't support regular DDR5, so without these modules, laptops based on those chips would not have any path for memory upgrades.


  • I don't remember if I wrote about this - the story is from six months ago - but yes, LPDDR6 is on its way.  (Hot Hardware)

    LPDDR6 promises initial transfer rates of 10.6GHz and eventually 14.4GHz, which is not dramatically faster than the best LPDDR5X chips available now.

    Except that the bus is also 50% wider, and instead of fetching 8 words at a time it fetches 12.

    Which makes 288 bits, which is not very useful for 64-bit computers, so the extra 32 bits at the end is used for very strong ECC (DECDED guaranteed).

    Which makes 10.6GHz LPDDR6 90% faster than 7500MHz LPDDR5.

    This matters because current integrated graphics solutions from AMD and Intel are bottlenecked not by the chips but by memory speeds.  Apple's higher-end M-series chips have (as far as I can tell) 256-bit or even 384-bit buses, and AMD's upcoming Strix Halo chips will also have a 256-bit bus, but regular laptops only offer 128-bit memory.

    So when LPDDR6 arrives we can expect a big jump in integrated graphics performance.

    (My new laptop has DDR4 memory running at 3200MHz.   So...  Yeah.)


  • Can ChatGPT-o1 complete a junior front-end developer's task?  (Charbel Ghossain)

    Well, yes, if you aren't worried about it working properly.

    The code produced for this example sort of works, in that it doesn't break the page.  But on a scale of 0 to 100, it only does anything at all for the range from 20 to 80.


  • It is shockingly easy to jailbreak LLM-driven robots.  (Hot Hardware)

    This is not shocking.  LLMs are notoriously insecure and unreliable.

    Simple solution: Don't fucking build LLM-driven robots.


  • Who the heck is the M4 iMac aimed at?  (The Verge)

    It's a lovely piece of engineering, but the screen is too small for serious work, the memory cannot ever be upgraded, and the network speed is limited to 1Gbit when even the Mac Mini has a 10Gbit option.  And Apple has long since abandoned monitor mode, where an aging iMac with a perfectly good screen could serve as a monitor for another computer.

    Which would all be forgivable if it were cheap.  

    The 10 core model with 16GB RAM and 512GB of SSD costs $1699.


  • Does GitHub Copilot improve code quality?  (GitHub)

    Yes, says GitHub.

    No, says literally everyone else.


Disclaimer: I accidentally threw out the fruit cake.

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Saturday, November 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 November 2024

The Horror Edition

Top Story

  • Elon Musk's new ideas for improving government efficiency are not in fact new.  (The Verge)

    Do tell, O Verge.
    Though DOGE isn’t a real department - and may in fact just be President-elect Donald Trump’s way of placating Musk by giving him the appearance of a real job - it represents a long-running right-wing attempt to gut the civil service, a plan the incoming administration fully supports.
    So it only appears to be a real job, but the administration fully supports it?
    In any case, Musk and Ramaswamy have proposed cutting "thousands" of federal regulations and determining the "minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions."
    Awesome.
    This time around, it's not clear whether the courts would stop Trump, who, in his first term, nominated more judges to the federal judiciary than any of his predecessors and will inherit an extremely friendly Supreme Court. And as Musk and Ramaswamy noted in their explanation of how DOGE will function, the incoming Trump administration has something new at its disposal: the recent Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the landmark case that overturned Chevron deference.
    Better and better!
    The goal is mass deregulation - a weakening of checks and balances and a major cut to basic government services, all in the name of concentrating power among a small group of plutocrats.
    As opposed to the way things are now, where government regulations are the primary tool for concentrating power among a small group of plutocrats?



Tech News

Disclaimer: Nothing will come of nothing, speak again.

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Friday, November 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 November 2024

Trucked Up Edition

Top Story

  • The problem is clear: Our customers are dumb.  (Intel)

    Intel commissioned a study to find out how much more efficient users were when equipped with a fancy new "AI PC".

    It turned out:
    At the same time, AI PCs offered a potentially transformative impact on people’s lives, saving individuals roughly 240 minutes a week on routine digital tasks. But the study also highlighted that current AI PC owners spend longer on tasks than their counterparts using traditional PCs. Study results show that greater consumer education is needed to bridge the gap between the promise and reality of AI PCs.
    AI PCs make things worse, but the real problem is the users.


  • Meanwhile at Microsoft.  (Business Insider)  (archive site)

    Microsoft Copilot is a little too efficient, it seems...  At sharing confidential information with people who shouldn't have it.



Tech News




Disclaimer: What is that in Scoville units?

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Thursday, November 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 November 2024

Sky Pie Edition

Top Story

  • The DOJ is seeking to break up Google, or rather to chip off a very small part of it.  (AP News)

    They want to break off the Chrome browser, which has multiple competitors, including some like Brave which use the same open-source core and behave virtually identically.

    What this is expected to achieve is unclear.  It would break Google's direct influence over the browser, but so would people switching to Brave or Vivaldi.

    They also want to prevent Google from making Google Search the default search engine in Android, which is something we've been through before with browsers and achieves basically nothing.

    Experts are freaking out, because that is what experts do:
    "It is probably going a little beyond," Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh said of the Chrome breakup. "The remedies should match the harm, it should match the transgression. This does seem a little beyond that pale."
    He should see my proposal, which involves Tasmanian devils.


  • A Google employee union says, isn't there someone you forgot to ask?  (The Verge)

    I don't know what you mean.  The Tasmanian devils are fully on board.


Tech News

  • Ubuntu Linux has a decade-old bug in the needrestart tool that lets local users gain root access.  (Bleeping Computer)

    This is bad, but it doesn't allow remote hackers to do anything directly.  It does give them a way to completely take over your system if they are already logged in, though.

    To fix it, edit the file /etc/needrestart/needrestart.conf

    It will have a line containing

    #$nrconf{interpscan} = 0;

    Find that line, and delete the # to activate it.  This has been the recommended configuration since 2022 but doesn't seem to have been adopted.

    Or just apt upgrade needrestart


  • Microsoft didn't think people would actually want to play Flight Simulator 2024.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The servers that deliver the data stream have been overloaded and crashed entirely at least once.  Since you can't simply download the game once and play it, that makes it more or less unplayable:
    Our editors at Tom's Hardware attempted to install the game yesterday - two of our editors managed to hit around 70% before the installation failed, and one editor managed to install the game but could only access the main menu. So, unfortunately, we'll have to postpone our review of MSFS 2024 until Microsoft's game services are actually working.
    Nice work, Microsoft.


  • Panzer of the lake, what is your wisdom?  (Stack Exchange)

    Tracking down an eighty year old photo of a tank.  In a lake.


  • The OneXGPU 2 is an external GPU for laptops and mini-PCs with Thunderbolt, USB4, or OCuLink.    (Hot Hardware)

    It contains a Radeon 7800M laptop CPU, which is the 7800 XT desktop chip cut down to 12GB of RAM and a 192-bit memory bus (and also cut down from 265W to 180W).

    It also serves as a docking hub, with two USB ports, Ethernet, a micro-SD slot, and an M.2 slot in addition to the upstream USB4 and OCuLink ports and the three video outputs.

    And...  Basically, it works.


  • Reddit is back online.  (Tech Crunch)

    Some people actually noticed that it went down.


Complete Pile of Dog Crap Video of the Day




Disclaimer: Some people.

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Wednesday, November 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 November 2024

Smirking Or Non-Smirking Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Disclaimer: And who wouldn't want that?

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Tuesday, November 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 November 2024

Eleventy Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Disclaimer: Hypocrisy is different when we do it.

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Monday, November 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 November 2024

So That Happened Edition

Top Story

  • The Twitch Adpocalypse is here, with streamers reporting their income has suddenly declined by as much as 95% as the house of cards burns down, falls over, and sinks into the swamp.

    I don't have a link to a good story covering this yet, because the written articles are useless and the video coverage is obnoxious.  Twitch was offering absurdly favourable pay scales to its preferred coterie of lunatics, and the advertisers got fed up with the crap their ads were shown against and left.

    Jeff Bezos has a bad habit of buying companies and leaving them to be destroyed by lunatics.


  • So, yeah, that link yesterday in the item about Bluesky was totally wrong.  Being me, it pointed instead to a Twitter post about Lego mech suits for Hololive fan mascot plushies.  The only thing that could have made it more of a click magnet would be if the mechs were playing classic D&D.


Tech News



Disclaimer: Pebbles form up!  For the Childlike Empress!

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Sunday, November 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 November 2024

I Am Chaos The End Of Ends Edition

Top Story

  • A million people have left Twitter for competitor Bluesky since the election.

    A million of the most annoying people on Twitter.

    Bluesky is getting what it deserves.  (Twitter)

    The tech is fine, but the people running Bluesky are the same ones Elon Musk fired from the Trust and Safety team the day he took charge.  They are all-in on censorship, and so are the people now flocking to the platform.

    And since there are no conservatives to fight, they are fighting each other.

    Content reports have soared by 4000% as they lash out at everyone and everything, and in a truly beautiful turnaround, the most committed lefties are getting permanently banned for claiming the election was stolen.

Tech New



Disclaimer: Well, that didn't happen.

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