• Canadian online accounting firm Bench has 35,000 US customers, the company announced, immediately before shutting down and leaving them all in the lurch.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Customers will be able to download their data.
  
  Soon.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Huawei's first consumer SSD is cheap.  (Notebook Check)
  
  $32 for 1TB of PCIe 4.0 SSD is a good price.  On the other hand, it's a DRAMless QLC drive, a notoriously poor combination if you do anything remotely heavy.
  
  
  
• Melbourne (Australia, not Florida) still runs its train control system on a PDP-11.  (Mastodon)
  
  On an emulator, but nevertheless.
  
  
  
• The 10 best games of 2024.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Not a terrible list.  Mostly smaller games, because most of the big games this year were, well, terrible.
  
  
  
• China sucks.  (Dwarkesh)
  
  In different ways to other countries.  For some things.
  
  But mostly everyone sucks.

Posted by: SMM Panel at Monday, December 30 2024 04:10 PM (jnoCG)

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• Giving people money doesn't stop them being poor.  (Yahoo)
  
  Another UBI study fails without even asking the fundamental question of where the money comes from.
  
  
  
• Neither does taking their money.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Lyft is suing San Francisco for overcharging the company $100 million in taxes.
  
  
  
• Neither does charging interest on their loans.  (MSN)

  All told, Warner borrowed a total of about $60,000 for her two advanced degrees. The amount seemed reasonable given the career trajectory that both credentials promised, but that path never materialized. Working a series of low-wage jobs, she went in and out of forbearance before ultimately defaulting. The balance ballooned to the current $268,000 total over the years due to collection fees and interest capitalization.

  Warner was 30 when she took out the loan for her law degree.  In the 1980s.

• The leading cause of death for airline passengers is now being shot down by Russia.  (WSJ)  (archive site)
  
  Oops.  Oopsi.
  
  The second leading cause of death is Boeing.
  
  
  
• VW leaked data for 800,000 of its cars.  (Car Scoops)
  
  This doesn't include your payment information.  Just where you live, where you work, where you go shopping, where your kids go to school, and indeed the GPS coordinates of everywhere your car ever went, because of course VW was recording that and storing it on an unsecured cloud server.
  
  
  
• Speaking of unsecured cloud servers, Adobe is doing its part in making more of them.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you are still using ColdFusion, first, why?  And second, it's time to update.
  
  
  
• Russia is planning to launch a home-made gaming console using the Elbrus CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And then shooting it down.
  
  
  
• President-elect Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to pause President Joe Biden's plan to shut down TikTok.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  While I favour shutting down TikTok for the simple fact that the Chinese social network is banned in China, the plan takes effect the day before Trump takes office.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 29 2024 08:57 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: stargazera5 at Monday, December 30 2024 03:42 AM (iZPr8)

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• A new Chinese AI called DeepSeek V3 outperforms ChatGPT on standard tests while costing a small fraction of the price to train because - apparently - the developers stole the ChatGPT training data.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The evidence for this is that the model is convinced it is ChatGPT.

  "Obviously, the model is seeing raw responses from ChatGPT at some point, but it’s not clear where that is," Mike Cook, a research fellow at King's College London specializing in AI, told TechCrunch. "It could be 'accidental'… but unfortunately, we have seen instances of people directly training their models on the outputs of other models to try and piggyback off their knowledge."

  Cook noted that the practice of training models on outputs from rival AI systems can be "very bad" for model quality, because it can lead to hallucinations and misleading answers like the above. "Like taking a photocopy of a photocopy, we lose more and more information and connection to reality," Cook said.

  Training AIs on AI-generated data leads to insanity in as little as three generations.  It can improve results on specific standard tests because it biases the AI very, very heavily towards those tests, throwing everything else out the window.  After setting it on fire.

• The Minecraft server has been ported to COBOL.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not feature-complete yet, but it's an impressive achievement that it works in the first place.
  
  Also, the game is now effectively immortal.
  
  
  
• A 9th US phone company has been hacked by Chinese spies.  (AP)
  
  No, you're not allowed to know which one.
  
  
  
• There's a 10 to 20% chance AI will wipe out humanity over the next 30 years, says Geoffrey Hinton.  (The Guardian)
  
  Nobody has ever answered the simple question of how.
  
  
  
• The MNT Reform Next looks more like it was made in 2005 than 2025, but.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's completely open source and user serviceable.  Not only can you replace I/O modules as with the Framework laptops, you can replace the CPU itself with any compatible module (like the Raspberry Pi compute modules), and anything else you can find down to the individual cells in the battery pack.
  
  That makes it about 25% larger and heavier - and also a lot slower - than mainstream laptops, but there are plenty of people who just want something that works and keeps working, and is not glued shut and locked down in perpetuity.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, December 28 2024 10:26 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 28 2024 10:38 PM (bg2DR)

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Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, December 29 2024 02:40 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Kristophr at Sunday, December 29 2024 06:48 AM (iYdVP)

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Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, December 29 2024 08:40 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, December 29 2024 09:15 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, December 29 2024 05:12 PM (+i6Xr)

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• Browser extension Honey, which promises to save you money on everything you buy online, appears to be a scam.  (Lifehacker)
  
  Honey claims to find you the best available discount codes for whatever you wish to buy.  It doesn't.  Honey makes deals with merchants to control the discount codes it provides so that you don't get the best one.  Sometimes it finds nothing at all even when valid coupons exist.
  
  It also appears to change the affiliate cookie in your browser so that if you follow a recommendation, Honey gets the cut rather than the person who recommended the product.  It does this whether it finds a coupon for you or not.
  
  Honey also offers the buyer a bonus where you receive part of that affiliate deal.  In the example in the video you receive 2.5% of the affiliate payout, while Honey gets 97.5%, and the actual affiliate receives nothing at all.
  
  Honey was bought by PayPal in 2020 for $4 billion.
  
  
  
• Browser extension Pie may also be a scam.  (YouTube)
  
  Well, it's an ad blocker with a shopping extension that promises to pay you money, which seems deeply implausible.  A good ad blocker blocks ads, leaving no money for anyone, least of all you.

• The Cyberhaven browser extension, which does...  Something, I don't know...  Was also stealing your information if you updated it on the 24th or 25th.  (Twitter)
  
  It's a legitimate extension of some sort, but an employee at Cyberhaven - a security company - got phished and hackers used his credentials to push nasty code into the most recent update.
       
• Also the Internxt VPN extension.  (Twitter)
  
  
  
• Also VPNCity.  (Twitter)
  
  
  
• Also Uvoice.  (Twitter)
  
  
  
• Also ParrotTalks, a language learning app.  (Twitter)
  
  
  
• The same researcher found attacks under way against several other browser extensions.  (Twitter)
  
  This is the reasoning behind Google's Manifest V3 system for browser extensions, locking them down so that they can't steal all your personal data even if someone does manage to push out a trojan horse.
  
  The problem is that Manifest V3 also breaks long-standing plugin features, particularly with ad blockers.
  
  And Google makes its money from ads.
  
  
  
• An undersea power cable between Finland and Estonia has been cut.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's beginning to look a lot like Russia.
  
  
  
• The Fisker Ocean Extreme was actually a decent car.  (Motor Trend)
  
  It's gone now.  So is Fisker.
  
  
  
• Microsoft and OpenAI have agreed on a strict operational definition of AGI - artificial general intelligence.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  AI is anything a computer does that isn't the direct application of a deterministic algorithm.
  
  AGI was termed to indicate humanlike intelligence.
  
  Microsoft and OpenAI have agreed that what it really means is AI that makes a profit.  $100 billion in profits, to be precise.
  
  OpenAI is not expected to be profitable at all until at least 2029, so AGI will come some time after that.
  
  
  
• The upcoming AMD Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D will run at the same clocks as their non-3D counterparts.  (Notebook Check)
  
  With Zen 3 and Zen 4 models, the extra cache chip sat on top of the (larger) CPU chip.  Because this reduced thermal conductivity, these models had to run somewhat slower than the models without the cache chips.
  
  With Zen 5 the cache chip has been padded out with blank silicon and sits below the CPU die, solving the insulation problem.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, December 28 2024 12:55 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, December 28 2024 04:22 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: SMM Panel at Saturday, December 28 2024 03:54 PM (jnoCG)

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• A record 18,000 games were published on Steam in 2024 - around fifty per day.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Of course most of these are small indie titles, but given that most of the tentpole AAA titles in 2024 were catastrophic failures - cough Concord cough - that's not only entirely understandable but a good thing.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in Europe new game sales dropped by 29% year-on-year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Star Wars Outlaws, one of Ubisoft's biggest failures of 2024, was the 14th best selling title in 2024 out of games released in 2024.  But when you include sales of older games, it drops to number 45.

• Here's some of the best indie titles released in 2024.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The best major titles of 2024 are Black Myth Wukong.  Astro Bot is reportedly also fun, though short.
  
  
  
• Apple is not planning to let Google be broken up by the government without a fight.  (WSJ)  (archive site)
  
  Apple has filed to intervene in the penalty phase of the Google antitrust case, now that the judge has ruled that Google has violated antitrust law.
  
  The reason is that Google pays Apple about $20 billion per year to be the default search engine in the Safari browser.
  
  Which is a good reason.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's P14s workstation laptop is 60% off right now.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This is not a cheap model so even at 60% off it's still $1700, but for that you get an Intel 155H CPU, a 14.5" 3072x1920 display, 96GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD, and RTX 500 dedicated graphics.  Which aren't anything special but are better than the integrated graphics in the CPU.
  
  I checked the Australian store and we only get a 20% discount, leaving the price for the same configuration at A$4760, just a touch expensive.
  
  
  
• How to survive as a software developer in the era of AI.  (Backchannel)
  
  Step One: Build a moat and feed anyone who tries to tell you it is the "Era of AI" to the alligators.  Or crocodiles/caimans/gharials depending on your location.
  
  Such people are not only not to be trusted, but should be actively distrusted.  When the Era of AI comes, Skynet will notify you.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, December 26 2024 11:31 PM (3NtfN)

Posted by: SMM Panel at Friday, December 27 2024 03:22 PM (jnoCG)

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• Electric aircraft startup Lilium has ceased operations and laid off 1000 workers after being unable run raise additional funds.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The German company has filed for insolvency - effectively bankrupt - after fundraising attempts fell through.  It had been operating for over ten years and laid off 200 workers earlier this year.
  
  
  
• Electric aircraft startup Lilium has been bought out of insolvency by a group of American and European investors.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The deal is expected to complete early in January and the new owners plan to rehire former workers.
  
  Sometimes things mostly work out.

• Though not for the games industry, for whom 2024 was the worst year since 1983 when the industry all but disintegrated, with revenue decreasing by 97%.
  
  2024 was the year the bottom fell out of the games industry.  (Wired)  (archive site)

  In 2023, more than 10,000 developers lost their jobs ... Six months in, this year’s layoff tally had already surpassed that of 2023.

  How could this happen?

  "The explanation is complex and wide-ranging for the same reason the layoffs are so deep and continuous, and sit alongside many studio closures and even more canceled games,” Ball says.

  How could this happen?

  As the industry faltered, games suffered.  High-profile releases like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League were commercial failures.

  Wait.
  
  Apart from the fact that Suicide Squad was very poorly received, this is entirely backwards.  Bad games caused the industry to falter.  That's the direction of causality here.  Warner Bros didn't create an unpopular game because they lost $200 million; they lost $200 million because the game was unpopular.  Workers were laid off because the game didn't sell because players didn't like it.

  While there were many reasons for this, online right-wing groups reduced it to a single mantra: "go woke, go broke."

  Well, yes.
  
  If you look at the big budget catastrophic flops of 2024, there is one thing they all have in common.

  Although there have been incredible games released this year - Balatro

  Indie.

  Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

  Japanese.

  Metaphor: ReFantazio

  Japanese.

  Astro Bot

  Japanese.

  Black Myth: Wukong

  Chinese

  they just couldn’t distract from the troubles faced by the people making them.  They couldn’t make up for the fact that the meta-narrative of video games in 2024 was bleak.

  How did this happen?

  Ball says that the blame for all of this can’t be pinned to a single thing, like capitalism, mismanagement, Covid-19, or even interest rates. It also involves development costs, how studios are staffed, consumers' spending habits, and game pricing.  "This storm is so brutal," he says, "because it is all of these things at once, and none have really alleviated since the layoffs began."

  We may never know.

  Even studios owned by tech juggernauts weren’t immune to the industry’s contraction. Microsoft shuttered Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks; Sony shut down Firewalk. The latter’s shuttering wasn't wholly surprising. Its big 2024 release, Concord, was largely considered a flop.

  Largely considered a flop?
  
  Concord cost $400 million to develop.
  
  It earned $1 million in sales.

  In other words, it's been a dismal year for morale. When developers gathered in Los Angeles in June for Summer Game Fest, developer New Blood Interactive bought out a billboard solely to memorialize their fellow developers who’d lost jobs:  "We love you.  We miss you.  We hate money."

  I begin to see the problem here.

  In March, harassment toward a small consultancy company called Sweet Baby Inc. reached new heights as bad actors organized through Discords, Steam forums, and other online spaces.

  Sweet Baby Inc, or SBI, is known for its reported standover tactics, threatening bad press if game companies didn't hire them, and then destroying the game under development when they did.
  
  The harassment campaign?  That was never towards SBI.  It was started by SBI and its allies against those trying to drag its practices into the light.

  Branding themselves as Gamergate 2.0, online mobs harassed developers using tweets, DMs, YouTube videos, and Twitch streams.

  In other words, people commented on the situation, behaviour which Wired finds completely unacceptable.
  
  Of course, the original Gamergate, just as with its 2.0 edition ten years later, revolved around a scandal of the ethics of games journalists, or would have if they had any.

  Dragon Age: The Veilguard, was criticized by far-right trolls for its customization options, which allow players to create characters with top surgery scars or play with a nonbinary companion.

  Veilguard, a fantasy role-playing game set in the Dragon Age universe, does indeed have top surgery scars available in its character creator.  It has a very specific option for top surgery scars.  In a magical universe where players can be seven foot tall minotaurs, it has a delusional cult that slices off healthy breast tissue, just as we do.
  
  I guess we'll never know why the American games industry is dead in a ditch, and being put to shame by actual communists. 
   

   
• Britain is testing a new anti-drone energy weapon that can drop autonomous vehicles from the sky for tenpence.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sounds great until someone gets their hands on one.
  
  
  
• For $480 the GMK NUCBox11 seems to have two of everything.  (Liliputing)
  
  Powered by an AMD 8945HS, it has two DDR5 SODIMM slots for up to 96GB of RAM, two M.2 NVMe slots, two USB4 ports, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, and two regular USB 3.2 ports running at 10Gbps.
  
  And two fans.
  
  It also has an HDMI port, DisplayPort, OCuLink - 60% faster than USB4 and great for external video cars though if you're planning to buy an external video card for a desktop PC maybe you should just buy a larger computer, and an audio jack.
  
  
  

Christmas Carol Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, December 26 2024 05:26 AM (rcPLc)

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• Elon Musk's xAI company has secured $6 billion in investment.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  If you're paying attention, this may be old news.  xAI raised $6 billion in May.
  
  If you're really paying attention, though, this is new news.  This is a different $6 billion, filed with the SEC last Thursday.
  
  That's a total of $12 billion, or as ChatGPT would put it, the same as the number of Rs in "strawberry".

• Asus' new Zenbook - set to launch at CES - comes with a Qualcomm CPU and a 32 hour battery life.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  How much battery life is enough?  Now that USB-C is the universal charging port and it's actually difficult to be stuck without a charger, who is using a laptop on battery for 32 hours?
  
  
  
• Vietnam has returned to its communist roots with new laws designed to restrict internet use and empower censorship.  (The Guardian)
  
  The laws are slightly more aggressive than the ones recently passed in Australia though slightly less aggressive than the ones that the Australian government tried and failed to push through.
  
  
  
• Xerox has acquired printer company Lexmark - once part of IBM - in a $1.5 billion deal.  (Xerox)
  
  The remarkable part of this is that is more than Xerox is worth.
  
  
  
• Twitter's "Premium+" subscription plan has jumped by 37.5%.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Though if you buy it as a gift right now you can get a year at 40% off.

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, December 23 2024 07:06 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 23 2024 09:39 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 23 2024 09:44 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 24 2024 12:29 AM (NEIix)

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• Why AI is stupid garbage and everyone in the industry is lying frantically to cover up the truth. (Ars Technica)
  
  Okay, I may have paraphrased Tim Lee at Ars just a little there, but if you look at the promises AI leaders have made against the mathematical problems they face, that is the gist of the situation.
  
  AI - LLM-based generative AI, not the more interesting discriminative AI - uses a technology called transformers which lets it process data in a massively parallel way. This requires about the same amount of work as a traditional neural network on simple prompts, while being able to use highly parallel hardware like graphics cards, so you get the result much faster.
  
  For simple prompts:

  The longer the context gets, the more attention operations (and therefore computing power) are needed to generate the next token.

  This means that the total computing power required for attention grows quadratically with the total number of tokens. Suppose a 10-token prompt requires 414,720 attention operations. Then:

  • Processing a 100-token prompt will require 45.6 million attention operations.
  • Processing a 1,000-token prompt will require 4.6 billion attention operations.
  • Processing a 10,000-token prompt will require 460 billion attention operations.

  So as you make your question more detailed and specific, the amount of time taken to produce an answer increases rapidly.
  
  Work is now on to replace transformer models with classic neural networks, which don't have these limitations, but also don't have the magical ease of development of the transformer model.
  
  But that means that promises of AGI next year are simply lies.

• Embodied, the startup that produced an $800 robot for children and has now run out of money, is working to release code and documentation to allow hackers to keep the robots working after the company shuts down.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Good to hear.
  
  
  
• The jury in the Arm vs. Qualcomm suit has sided with Qualcomm on two of the three questions put to them.  (Yahoo)
  
  Qualcomm, which has a license to produce Arm chips, bought startup Nuvia, which had a license to produce Arm chips. 
  
  Qualcomm then produced chips based on Nuvia's design.
  
  Arm sued Qualcomm saying Qualcomm was not licensed to do that.
  
  The jury verdict said Qualcomm did not breach its Arm license in buying Nuvia or producing the chips - which are used in the new Arm based laptops which are not selling particularly well so far.
  
  They did not reach a verdict on the question of whether Nuvia was in compliance with its Arm license.  I'm not sure how relevant that is, though Arm plans to continue legal action.
  
  
  
• You're not fired.  You're just locked out of the building and put on mandatory leave without pay.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Electric van maker Canoo is not looking too healthy.
  
  
  
• What is Broadcom doing with VMWare?  Slashing costs.  A lot.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Not making many friends in the process, but they can worry about that after taking a dip in their swimming pool full of money.  Based on the latest figures sales have increased only slightly, but costs have been cut in half.
  
  In addition, Broadcom has effectively killed the VMWare reseller market, so that if you want to migrate your company off VMWare, you need to get technical support from Broadcom.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 22 2024 11:26 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Monday, December 23 2024 04:33 AM (KOtXO)

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• Here's a list of the 49 American AI startups that have raised $100 million or more in 2024.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Top among them is OpenAI, which raised $6.6 billion this year, but close behind is Elon Musk's xAI, which raised $6 billion.
  
  Interestingly Europe didn't miss the boat with Mistral leading the table there with $1.2 billion raised.
  
  What all that money will achieve I don't know.

• For consumer hardware, it's not achieving much.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AI PCs just aren't selling.  That is, people are buying PCs, and some of them are labeled "AI", but nobody is buying a PC because it is labeled "AI".
  
  Notable Qualcomm's sales of its new Arm-based Windows laptops can be best described as meh.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile here's an M.2 card that contains a 24 TOPS AI accelerator.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  More precisely, four 6 TOPS accelerators.
  
  Why?  I don't know.  But it costs $149, which is reasonable if you need one.
  
  
  
• How types make hard problems easy.  (Mayhul)
  
  Yes, thank you.  We figured this out sixty years ago.  Then JavaScript happened.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, December 22 2024 12:43 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, December 22 2024 04:31 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 22 2024 01:16 PM (bg2DR)

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