Wednesday, October 23
Floppy Edition
Top Story
- The San Francisco MTA is spending $212 million to move its train control system off floppy disks. (GovTech)
The system was installed in 1998, which is rather late to be using floppy disks that were (assuming it uses 3.5" disks) introduced in 1982. But Compact Flash, the only real alternative at the time that is still supported today, was only introduced in 1994 and was likely not readily available when the project started.
And given that it's been working for 26 years so far, we can't really blame the designers for being short-sighted.
Tech News
- De-extinction company Colossal has provided an update on its work to bring back the Tasmanian tiger. (Ars Technica)
The company now has a near-complete genome for the creature, which went extinct in 1936. (Though some people suspect a few specimens might still exist in south-west Tasmania, which is extremely rugged and mostly uninhabited.
The plan is to produce new embryos by engineering eggs from its nearest living relative, the fat-tailed dunnart, which is basically a carnivorous mouse.
Since it is - was - a marsupial, we wouldn't need to bring it to term in a womb; it evolved to latch on to a nipple and feed at a point that would be an embryo in a placental species.
- Flock you: A lawsuit in Virginia argues that networks of license plate cameras constitute unlawful warrantless searches under the Fourth Amendment. (404 Media) (archive site)
It's an interesting question. In Norfolk, the police know the travel habits of pretty much everyone thanks to cameras distributed through the city.
You don't have an implicit right to privacy in public, but the government is explicitly restricted in how it can infringe on your privacy.
- VMWare has fixed critical vulnerabilities in its vCenter management application. (The Register)
Again.
Fixes were pushed out last month, but they didn't fix it.
- The Beelink SER9 is the fastest mini-PC around. (Serve the Home)
And its quiet.
On the other hand, it's expensive at $999 and memory is locked at 32GB. It's soldered in place (the Ryzen 370 laptop chip it uses doesn't support regular DIMMs) and there's no 64GB model.
- The iPad Mini 2024 model is the best iPad Mini yet. (The Verge)
But it's not much better than the old model, and it still suffers from the "jelly scrolling" problem that everyone noted when the old model first appeared.
Apple doesn't seem to care about this product at all. If you want a good small tablet, there's this and the Lenovo Legion Tab which you basically can't buy anywhere.
- My Calliope Mori Hyte Y40 Limited Edition PC case is here.
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Tuesday, October 22
I Am Not Making This Up Edition
Top Story
- The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post are suing AI startup Perplexity over copyright infringement. (Variety)
To be fair, that seems to be Perplexity's entire business model: Index copyrighted content, summarise it, file off the serial numbers, and then provide it to users to answer their questions.News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, in a statement about the lawsuit, said: "Perplexity perpetrates an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp. The perplexing Perplexity has willfully copied copious amounts of copyrighted material without compensation, and shamelessly presents repurposed material as a direct substitute for the original source. Perplexity proudly states that users can 'skip the links' - apparently, Perplexity wants to skip the check."
From my understanding of Perplexity, this is actually pretty accurate.
This bit less so:We applaud principled companies like OpenAI, which understands that integrity and creativity are essential if we are to realize the potential of artificial intelligence
OpenAI is as unprincipled as any company in the industry, but with billions of dollars of investors money to burn, they can pay off at least some of their victims.
Tech News
- The Internet Archive got hacked again - not the main site, but their Zendesk tech support hub. (HackRead)
Oops.
- Arkansas may have vast lithium reserves. (New York Times)
Or at least half vast.
- Daze is MySpace for teenagers. (Tech Crunch)
Or maybe GeoCities.
Only worse.
- Disney will name Bob Iger's replacement in 2026. (CNBC)
I think Tim would be a good name.
- AMD's upcoming 9800X3D - due in stores November 7 - seems to be significantly faster on general-purpose workloads than either the 9700X or 7800X3D. (WCCFTech)
The X3D chips are optimised for games with extra large caches, which make them run at somewhat slower clock speeds, which in turn makes them perform worse fo applications that don't benefit from extra large caches.
The 9800X3D though ups the TDP to 120W vs. 65W for the 9700X, and that makes it a very capable chip all round.
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Monday, October 21
False Lies Edition
Top Story
- Can an AI lie its way past safety checks to release? (Tech Crunch)
Given how much of a dumpster fire chatbots are, what does it matter?
- Dumpster fires are cool now anyway. (The Register)
Thanks Baidu.
- Can you just turn the damn things off? (The New York Times)
Well yes, but actually no.
Tech News
- Chinese military company DJI has sued the US Department of Defense for classifying it as a Chinese military company. (Tech Crunch)
The argument seems to be that the cold light of day is ruining sales.
- Elon Musk is offering people $1 million to vote. (The Verge)
Elon Musk is not offering people $1 million to vote.
But it seems The Verge staff have got into the owner's cocaine stash again.
- Italy's anti-piracy agency blocked Google Drive. (Torrent Freak)
Oops.
- Cuba's power grid has now collapsed four times in two days, making people start to wonder if this communist utopia thing isn't all it's cracked up to be. (Reuters)
Huh.
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Sunday, October 20
Foofenator Edition
Top Story
- Why are Instagram and Facebook searches for "Adam Driver Megalopolis" being blocked for CSAM? (The Verge)
Because (a) "mega drive" is a code word used by very bad people, and (b) Facebook is dumb.
Tech News
- Random House Penguin is adding copyright messages to its books forbidding anyone else from using the contents for AI training. (Tech Crunch)
Anyone else.
This is not to protect the authors.
- Isaac Newton is now a physics professor at MIT, with a verified mit.edu email address, according to Google. (Bleeping Computer)
Thanks Google.
How Is This Hundred Year Old Website So Fast Video of the Day
When ClF3 Is Just Not Dangerous Enough Video of the Day
Musical Interlude Video of the Day
Klangphonics. Love these guys.
They do a sort of organic techno. They use electronic instruments and effects, but they also use anything they can get their hands on that sounds interesting. Sewing machines, empty buckets, alpine horns, cats, wine glasses, lawnmowers...
Doobenated Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Any similarity between Dooby3d and a recently semi-graduated Hololive English Myth member such as the fact that they sound exactly alike is purely a function of your imagination and you probably also lack object permanence so there.
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Saturday, October 19
Monotreme Arc Edition
Top Story
- Show me the man and I'll show you the fine: Terry Britain might be gone, but his replacement is no better and may be worse: The EU is now considering fining other companies Elon Musk is a shareholder of, for supposed crimes of Twitter. (MSN)
And this is why when you are forced to choose between a company run by sociopathic leftists who bleed their customers try but aren't actually killing people, and a government, you side with the company every time.
Lesson learned. No matter how bad a government is, they can always get worse, and you can't just choose not to do business with them.
Tech News
- Case in point: The lights are out in Cuba. (NPR)
The communist dictatorship that has destroyed the once prosperous island promises they will come back on at some point in the future, probably.
- OpenAI's lead over other AI companies has largely evaporated. (Yahoo Finance)
Using the same benchmarks across multiple open source vendors - including the almost-open-source Llama 3.1 405B from Meta , it's much of a muchness: They all suck.
- Sam Altman's other scam, Worldcoin, has rebranded itself to World and announced a new version of its Orb. (Coin Telegraph)
The Orb is a device that devours a victim's soul. It's now clear exactly who this is being marketed to.
- Bluesky is not a good alternative to Twitter. (Twitter)
It's "open" and "federated"... And run by the same censorship maximalist leftist mafia that destroyed Twitter before Elon Musk rescued it.
- Unknown 9 Awakening, the latest big game from Bandai Namco, was released two days ago and oh it's dead. (Forbes)
It had an all-time peak of 285 players and is now down to 86.
And it exhibits the same problems that killed Concord, albeit on a smaller scale and hopefully Bamco spent less than $400 million on this one.
Also in its favour, it's a single-player game so it doesn't cost a million dollars a day to keep it alive. So it can be safely left to bleed out and then decompose.
- WP Engine has filed for an injunction against WordPress.org to regain access to the open source repository. (Tech Crunch)
This is a cut-and-dried breach of license by WordPress, and WP Engine should win easily.
If they don't, WordPress gets forked.
- The Space Force has awarded a $733 million launch contract to SpaceX. (Tech Crunch)
This is for eight missions - probably satellites or X37-B launches - starting in 2026.
- Google has been granted an administrative stay on much of the decision against it under the Epic lawsuit, by the same judge who issued the ruling. (The Verge)
Not stayed is a ruling requiring Google and its partners to allow users to install third-party app stores. Notably Google recently worked with Samsung to introduce new security features that prevented this.
- My Calliope Mori Hyte Y40 Limited Edition PC case has arrived in Sydney. Since this case has never been available for purchase locally, and Hyte's own international ordering system was broken when I tried it (twice), it might be the only one in the country.
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Friday, October 18
Crocodile Rock And Roll Edition
Top Story
- WordPress looks to be entering a doom spiral as Mad King Matt Mullenweg tightens his grip. (404 Media) (archive site)
After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg's recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he's upped the ante with another buyout offer - and a threat that employees speaking to the press should "exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance."
This divides the company neatly into three factions:
1. Those with principles who will quit - and take advantage of the severance package on offer because principles don't pay the rent.
2. Those who see the writing on the wall and get while the going is good.
3. True believers.
True believers can be good if you're tackling a difficult problem under an experienced leader, like catching an office building falling from space.
It can also produce Jonestown.
This is looking more like the latter.
WordPress itself will survive, since it's open source, but the company and foundation behind it won't.
- Sad to say I was today years old when I realised why the company is called Automattic.
One of those things that's cute in a toddler but diagnostic of malignant narcissism in a CEO.
Tech News
- Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite developer kits have been abruptly cancelled and the company will be issuing refunds. (Tom's Hardware)
It sounds like this is due to a manufacturing problem. Qualcomm was very non-specific except that the kits did not meet its quality standards, but a reviewer said that bits fall off.
- 6G mobile networks do not reach a blisteringly quick 938Gbps. (Tom's Hardware)
That speed was achieved - for a single backhaul link from the base station using lasers.
- Cat's are officially liquid. (Cell)
Back off, man, I'm a scientist!
- Virtual machine images built with Proxmox could be wide open due to a default credentials flaw in Kubernetes. (The Register)
Some of that was actually in English.
- A hard-coded login in SolarWinds' Help Desk product is being actively exploited in the wild. (The Register)
Didn't we hang those guys last time?
- Donald Trump says Tim Cook spoke to him to complain about those filthy communists in the EU. (The Verge)
Tim Apple knows which way the wind is blowing, and knows that there's no chance of Kamala Harris standing up to a stiff breeze let alone the European Union.
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Thursday, October 17
Frosty Inugami Edition
Top Story
- Meta (Facebook) is laying people off again. (Tech Crunch)
11,000 were laid off in 2022, and another 10,000 last year. In addition, 5000 open positions were cancelled entirely.
No numbers yet for this round of layoffs but it does appear to be smaller.
- Intel meanwhile is laying off 1300 workers at its Oregon foundry as part of its company-wide reduction of 15,000. (Tom's Hardware)
Like Boeing, Intel worked long and hard to achieve this disaster.
- TSMC meanwhile has recorded a record $10 billion in net profit for the last 3 months. (The Verge)
TSMC is manufacturing Intel's latest Lunar Lake laptop chips.
Tech News
- That's no moon, that's a potato: Intel's low-end Lunar Lake chips might not be. (Tom's Hardware)
The upcoming Core 5 210H laptop chip has multi-threading.
Intel's new Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake chips don't.
So this is a rebranded model from a prior generation.
- In more positive news the upcoming Ultra 9 285K doesn't suck that much. (CPU Benchmark)
A new benchmark score puts the chip much more in line with expectations. A little slower multi-threaded than the 13900K, but significantly faster in single-threaded tests.
- Western Digital's SN850X is the best option for an 8TB M.2 drive. (Tom's Hardware)
Just one remaining problem: It costs three times as much as the 4TB model.
- Western Digital's SN770 is not the best option for running the Windows 24H2 update. (Hot Hardware)
Unless you're a big fan of the Blue Screen of Death.
Microsoft has paused release of the update while it figures this out.
- Sales of Apple's ludicrously expensive Vision Pro headset are down 80%. (MSN)
And they weren't very good to start with.
It's too big and bulky for and AR headset, and basically useless as a VR headset.
And it costs $3499.
- Samsung's next generation GDDR7 memory for video cards will deliver 50% more capacity and up to 90% more speed. (WCCFTech)
24Gb per chip and transfer rates up to 42.5Gbps, vs. 16Gb per chip and 23Gbps currently.
- Mitt Maybelline's psychotic attack on WP Engine continues to pay dividends. (LWN)
If by "pay dividends" we mean "destroy the WordPress community".
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Wednesday, October 16
Unblank Canvas Edition
Top Story
- Again with the Torquemada: The president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve has explained that nobody buys anything with Bitcoin (because the government makes it as difficult as possible) and it's a lousy hedge against inflation, having gained just, um, 1000% against the dollar over the last five years. (WCCFTech)
Of course, Kashkari is on record for stating elsewhere that there is an "infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve."
Right.
Tech News
- SpaceX is working on plans to boost Starlink to gigabit speeds. (Notebook Check)
This will be done using the Gen2 satellites the company started launching last year, that will also provide direct-to-satellite phone service once that is approved by ground-based authorities.
- If you're still annoyed with Apple unilaterally reducing the lifetime of SSL certificate from five years to one, good news: The company plans to reduce it further to just 45 days. (The Register)
This would completely kill manual installation of SSL certificates. Nobody has time for that.
- SSD prices are expected to start declining again as nobody continues to buy the hot new AI PCs. (Tom's Hardware)
Good news. Prices haven't increased that much since manufacturers slowed production anyway, though the very cheapest sale prices have dried up.
- Apple has announced a new iPad mini. (9to5Mac)
The CPU is upgraded from the A15 to the A17 chip. Apart from that, it's the same, with the same 1000% markup on storage prices.
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Tuesday, October 15
Unfazed Invaders Edition
Top Story
- The Internet Archive is back online after the recent DDOS and data breach. (The Verge)
Currently it's read-only - that is, you can look up existing data but you can't request it to save new websites. But all the existing data is intact.
Work continues on restoring full functionality.
Tech News
- A Nobel Prize winner (Geoff Hinton) has called out OpenAI for placing profits (the company is not remotely profitable) ahead of safety (what safety?) (WCCFTech)
I swear, ever prominent figure in AI appears to have performed an auto-lobotomy with a grapefruit spoon.
- Google has signed a deal with nuclear energy developer Kairos Power to run its data centers using, well, nuclear energy. (CNBC)
Specifically using nuclear energy from small modular reactors which in turn use molten salt cooling. There are currently, let's see, zero of these operating in the United States and only three in the world.
The first reactor is planned to be online by 2030 but I suspect Elon Musk will have his Mars colony before that happens.
- I do not know why they did that: The iKOOLCORE R2 Max is a mini-PC with maxi-networking. (Liliputing)
A 4 core Intel N100 or 8 core N305 CPU, up to 32GB (maybe 48GB) of RAM, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, two 10Gb Ethernet ports, HDMI, USB-C with DisplayPort, and two M.2 NVMe slots.
Here's the catch, though: Intel's N-series CPUs don't have a lot of I/O bandwidth, and after all the network ports are catered for, the M.2 slots get just one PCIe lane each... Of PCIe 2.0.
That's 500MB per second, when even a budget drive like Crucial's P3 Plus can deliver 5000MB per second.
The kicker is that the 2.5Gb Ethernet ports have PCIe 3.0 connections, when they max out at 250MB per second and cannot possible use that.
- NASA's Europe Clipper mission is on its way to Europa - pure coincidence - courtesy of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. (The Register)
It is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter in 2030, just like everything else.
- If you are running Windows 10, a year from now Microsoft will finally stop bothering you with pointless updates. (Ars Technica)
I bet they don't though.
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Monday, October 14
Requiem For A Butterfly Edition
Top Story
- SpaceX's Starship test completes with a remarkable "chopstick" booster catch. (The Verge)
The most successful Starship test so far, with both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship itself performing flawlessly.
I'm linking The Verge for this one because the story is reported completely straight - just the facts, ma'am - and the comments are cheerfully ripping apart The Verge's usual two minute hate pieces.
- Meanwhile Elon Musk is planning to sue the Combat Camel Corps over blatant First Amendment violations. (MSN)
The CCC - wait, I'm told that stands for California Coastal Commission - and specifically Gretchen Newsom - were stupid enough to say that they rejected the SpaceX application for additional launch slots at Vandenburg because of what Musk posted on Twitter.
Tech News
- Turns out 23andMe is a genetic robot vacuum cleaner. (SFGate)
If you used the service - or if anyone in your family did - you should probably log in and delete your data.
This won't do anything but it might work in your favour in the resulting class action lawsuits.
CEO Anne Wojcicki says she's open to takeover offers. Or people who want to buy the company. Either one.
- Unidentified drones swarmed Langley Air Force Base, and the Pentagon is "stumped". (MSN)
The drones circled the base for seventeen days.
- The average LLM (AI) jailbreak attempt takes 42 seconds. (SC World)
20% of attacks succeed, and of those, 90% leak confidential information.
- A detailed review of the Terramaster F8 Plus. (Liliputing)
This is an 8 bay M.2 NAS with 10Gb Ethernet and an 8 core CPU. It's only slightly larger than an external 3.5" hard drive, and can store up to 64TB of data and hold up to 32GB of RAM for running applications (it ships with 16GB as standard, but it uses a regular SO-DIMM slot.)
There's also cheaper F8 Nonplus, with a 4 core CPU and shipping with 8GB of RAM. That should be fine if you just need the server functions and don't want to run apps on it.
- Gotta catch 'em all, but I'm out of disk space: A Game Freak leak has dumped company info and a terabyte of Pokemons. (Notebook Check)
Game Freak is the company developing the Pokemon games, though the franchise is owned by the Pokemon Company and Nintendo. Anyway, the Skitty is definitely out of the bag now.
- The Beelink SER9 is the fastest mini-PC you can get right now. (WCCFTech)
It has more than twice the CPU performance and three to four times the graphics performance of my Beelink SER5. But I have three of those and the SER9 costs more than three times as much if you already have memory and SSDs you can reuse.
The Ryzen 370 used in the SER9 only supports LPDDR5X memory, not regular SO-DIMMS, so you can't install your own unless you have a desoldering station and a very steady hand. It does have two M.2 slots though.
But if you don't need three computers and just want something small and quiet that gets the job done, it does.
Bling Bang Bang Videos of the Day
Bae and Ina.
Ina famously sent Bae the music for this at 2AM and Bae never managed to get back to sleep.
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