• SpaceX is cheaper and more capable than any other rocket company, and it's not even close.  Here's why that's a bad thing.  (Ars Technica)
  
  NASA estimated that de-orbiting the ISS in 2030 would cost $1.7 billion.
  
  SpaceX gave them a fixed-price quote of $680 million.
  
  The closest competitor, Northrop Grumman, came in around NASA's estimate.
  
  Sure, it would be great if we had a couple of other companies capable of competing with SpaceX.  But the key here is scale, and SpaceX is creating its own scale with Starlink.  It's not at all clear how another company is going to compete.
  
  
  
• Local Hyte distributor expects the Calliope Mori and Amelia Watson Hyte / Hololive limited edition cases in stock in the next few days.  I've been chasing the Calli case for an entire year at this point, and was looking at having to spend hundreds of dollars to ship one by air from the US.
  
  They still won't be cheap, but they'll be a lot cheaper this way.
  
  There's a Dokibird model coming out in November but I think I'll have enough cases after these two.  If it was Sana or perhaps Maid Mint I'd consider it, but while I like Doki I'm not sure I $300 like Doki.
  
  Or Pippa, but I don't need ants.

• Visual effects studio ModelFarm says fuck this we're going AMD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They say 50% of their 13900K and 14900K CPUs have failed, and their new systems will all be based on the Ryzen 9950X.
  
  
  
• The Intel problem - as finally confirmed by Intel, is twofold:
  
  First, the CPUs ask the motherboard for voltage levels high enough to fry their circuits.
  Second, the chips rust from the inside.
  
  
  
  Not a great combination.
  
  Intel is pushing out a microcode update next month to fix the first problem, but if your chip is already affected, this comes much too late.
  
  Intel has also been rejecting warranty returns despite knowing of these problems internally for some time.
  
  My most recent Intel system is a 12th gen laptop, so I escaped this one.
  
  
  
• AMD's new 9900X is slower than the 7800X3D for gaming.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure exactly how relevant this is, because AMD's 12 core chips are not ideal for gaming.  Current generation consoles have 8 cores on a single chip, and AMD's 12 core CPUs have 6 cores on each of two chips, so they have cross-chip latency for games that need 8 cores.
  
  If you're focused on gaming, get the cheaper 9700X, or the 9800X3D when it arrives, or if you run heavy productivity workloads as well as games, go all out and get the 9950X.
  
  
  
• Facebook's new Llama 3.1 405b LLM is billed as the world's largest open-source AI model.  (The Register)
  
  As a 16-bit model it requires 810GB of video RAM to run.
  
  There's also an 8-bit version that brings that down to 405GB.
  
  Which used to be a lot, and still is.
  
  
  
• 1 bit LLMs can be nearly as good though.  (IEEE)
  
  These are typically 1 trit models though - they are trinary, so each element can have a negative, positive, or zero weighting.
  
  This would reduce Llama 3.1 405b down to around 80GB of video RAM.
  
  Which, yes, is still a lot.
  
  
  
• GitHub is starting to feel like legacy software.  (Misty's Internet)
  
  Not entirely accurate.  Legacy software often works very well, because nobody dares touch it in case it blows up.
  
  GitHub feels like legacy software that someone is pasting an ill-considered flashing interface over.  
  
  Because it is.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum V3 tablet - the 32GB / 1TB model - is currently $949 on Amazon.  (Liliputing)
  
  That's a pretty good price, though I don't know if I'd spend that much on a single device from a company in that tier.
  
  Though my Beelink PCs were about $250 each and they work perfectly, so maybe I'm overly cautious.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 24 2024 10:44 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 24 2024 10:48 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 24 2024 10:59 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 25 2024 03:20 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, July 25 2024 04:04 AM (YqWY6)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 25 2024 04:41 AM (LADmw)

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• The US is all-in on nuclear rockets.  For realsies.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The article starts with a review of past US experiments with nuclear rockets:

  The first of those reactors was called Kiwi-A. The test done on July 1, 1959, proved that the concept worked, but there were devils in the details. Vibrations caused by the flow of hydrogen damaged the reactor after just five minutes of operation at a relatively meek 70 megawatts. The temperature reached 2,683 K, which caused hydrogen corrosion in the rods and expelled parts of the core through the nozzle, a problem known as "shedding."

  Shedding, also known as "Fuck this I'm moving to Bouvet Island and you can contact me by albatross".
  
  The primary impetus for this renewed interest despite some issues with past attempts is China's growing space industry.  Nuclear rockets make far more efficient use of the reaction mass than chemical rockets, but are only practical for general use once you pass a certain size - about the size of SpaceX's starship - because you can't make small nuclear reactors.
  
  Not unless you are willing to kill everyone who works on the project, anyway.

• Greece's land registry was hacked and 1.2GB of data stolen.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you think that's not a lot for a national government department, you're right.  The attackers accessed the database but were stopped before they could steal more than 0.0006% of the data.
  
  
  
• An interview with the lead architect of AMD's Zen lineup, discussing Zen 5 which arrives in the next week.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A couple of interesting points:
  
  First, the laptop versions do not have the full 512-bit version of AVX-512.  They have a half-size version, the same as Zen 4.
  
  Second, the compact cores (AMD's equivalent of Intel's efficiency cores) are planned for desktop...  Eventually.  Not yet though.
  
  Third, Zen 5 will be launching on TSMC's 4nm process, but 3nm versions will follow relatively soon.  No mention on which specific models will get the 3nm chips though.
  
  
  
• Wiz has turned down a $23 billion offer from Google.  (Fortune)
  
  I would have taken the money and allowed Google to ruin my work.  Google is Google, but $23 billion is $23 billion.
  
  
  
• Inside a 64-port 800Gb Ethernet switch.  (Serve the Home)
  
  That's a whole lot of bits.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk's X and xAI have fired up their new training system.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This training system has 100,000 of Nvidia's $30,000 H100 AI processors.
  
  That's a lot.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 23 2024 07:14 PM (bg2DR)

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• Southwest Airlines escaped the CrowdStrike debacle because they are still running Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  One small problem with this story: It's complete bullshit.  (Twitter)
  
  It's an internet meme.  But even the guy who created the meme got confused and thought it was real.
  
  Seriously, nobody runs their business on Windows 3.1.  It doesn't even work properly on a computer with more than 512MB of RAM.  Neither does Windows 95.

• Speaking of which: The Apollo DN10000, a four-processor Unix workstation form 1988 with up to 128MB of memory.  (Jim Rees)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Global IT outage shows dangers of cashless society, campaigners say.  (The Guardian)
  
  Yeah, no shit.
  
  
  
• A ransomware attack has shut down the largest trial court in the US, the Superior Court of Los Angeles County.  (AP News)
  
  Shame.  A couple of hours later and all their computers would have been down with the CrowdStrike disaster and safe from hackers.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which more than 1500 flights were cancelled yesterday as technicians continue to turn things off and on again.  (CNN)
  
  Meanwhile interest in retiring and moving to Idaho to take up potato farming is at an all time high.
  
  
  
• A fake hotfix for the CrowdStrike problem is actually a RAT.  (HackRead)
  
  Because of course it is.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk is "gambling with Tesla's future" by endorsing Donald Trump.  (The Verge)
  
  Gotta love how they quote Trump saying But you can’t have 100 percent of your cars electric. as though it's a gotcha moment rather than a simple fact.
  
  
  

Posted by: madrocketsci at Monday, July 22 2024 07:36 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 23 2024 01:38 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, July 23 2024 02:02 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Sam P at Tuesday, July 23 2024 06:41 PM (C5GOk)

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• Microsoft: CrowdStrike mishap impacted less than 1 percent of Windows PCs.  (Thurrott)
  
  CrowdStrike's faulty update crashed 8.5 million Windows devices, says Microsoft.  (The Verge)
  
  It's the same number; there's something like 1.5 billion Windows PCs in use worldwide.
  
  The problem is that the computers running CrowdStrike are the ones used in critical roles by large organisations.  The 99% that went right on working weren't embedded in ATMs or airport terminals or healthcare providers.
  
  
  
• So how do we avoid a repeat of this?
  
  Dunno.

• A look at Western Digital's latest SN5000 4TB SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's another DRAMless QLC model, and...  It doesn't suck.  It's pretty good actually.
  
  MSRP prices it higher than better drives so only buy it if the price is right.
  
  
  
• Intel says its 13th and 14th generation laptop chips are crashing but not for the same reason as its 13th and 14th generation desktop chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oh.  Well, that's alright then.
  
  
  
• Intel has also announced a range of "E" series chips that have no "E" cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That makes sense.
  
  
  
• Large models of what?  (Arxiv.org)
  
  LLMs are bullshit:

  Work within the enactive approach to cognitive science makes clear that, rather than a distinct and complete thing, language is a means or way of acting. Languaging is not the kind of thing that can admit of a complete or comprehensive modelling. From an enactive perspective we identify three key characteristics of enacted language; embodiment, participation, and precariousness, that are absent in LLMs, and likely incompatible in principle with current architectures. We argue that these absences imply that LLMs are not now and cannot in their present form be linguistic agents the way humans are. We illustrate the point in particular through the phenomenon of 'algospeak', a recently described pattern of high stakes human language activity in heavily controlled online environments. On the basis of these points, we conclude that sensational and misleading claims about LLM agency and capabilities emerge from a deep misconception of both what human language is and what LLMs are.

  Verbing weirds language.
  
  
  
• I didn't know I was dead until I saw it on Google.  (The Guardian)
  
  Google is worth $2 trillion and has 90% of the global search market.  And ever since it started trying to answer questions itself rather than point you to the answers elsewhere, it has been going downhill fast.
  
  
  
• The judge in the SEC's lawsuit against SolarWinds regarding their 2020 security debacle has granted the company's motion to dismiss on most points.  (MSN)
  
  It was another massive power grab by a federal agency.  The SEC claimed authority to regulate all aspects of how companies manage computer and network security and the judge smacked them across the nose with a newspaper.
  
  The one claim not dismissed is that executives at the company lied about the adequacy of its security controls in public statement, which the SEC claims amounts to securities fraud, something the SEC does have the authority to police, since that's what the S stands for.
  
  
  
• Just a reminder that all the race-baiting and lies you see in the mainstream media infest the tech press as well: Some black startup founders feel betrayed by Ben Horowitz's support for Trump.  (Tech Crunch)

  "His reputation will definitely take a hit among well-thinking Black people because it shows that he doesn’t actually understand our lived experiences," David Mullings, founder of Blue Mahoe Holdings, told TechCrunch.

  Lived experiences?  David Mullings is a Jamaican multi-millionaire.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 22 2024 12:22 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 22 2024 10:21 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, July 22 2024 09:42 PM (5rlmi)

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• What is CrowdStrike, and what happened?  (The Verge)
  
  We were expecting Skynet, and all we got is this lousy antivirus update.
  
  
  
• Blue Screen of Death photos from around the world.  (The Verge)
  
  Thank you Microsoft and CrowdStrike for bringing us all together in shared loathing.
  
  
  

Tech News

• How to fix a computer affected by the CrowdStrike problem.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The problem is you need direct access to each affected computer, which is a slight problem when there are thousands of them spread through a major airport, or worse, in ATMs across an entire country.
  
  
  
• CrowdStrike's market cap has fallen by $12.5 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  "Oops", said CEO George Kurtz.
  
  
  
• Russia escaped the CrowdStrike debacle unscathed, because it is not allowed to run CrowdStrike.  (Yahoo)
  
  Small mercies.
  
  
  
• Tenstorrent's new Wormhole AI cards can deliver 466 FP8 teraflops at 300W.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's a little over a quarter the performance of Nvidia's H100, but the H100 costs $30,000 and the Wormhole costs $1400.
  
  The big difference is that the Wormhole is built on an older 12nm process, where the H100 is built on a recent 4nm process.  That makes the Wormhole more power hungry but also much cheaper to produce.
  
  
  
• If this is the real pricing for AMD's Ryzen 9000 lineup, it's good.  (WCCFTech)
  
  $499 for the 9950X would make it a very attractive product, and an easy upsell over the $399 9900X.
  
  But none of this is confirmed yet.  And it would price the 9950X below the launch MSRP of the 7900X, which might be too good to be true.
  
  
  

1 Avoiding a repeat?  Based on past IT job experience, it will only happen when management takes quality and testing as required steps.  Said testing needing more than reading the specs and code while on the way to the quality inspection meeting.  Gotta keep meeting those keystroke requirements...  Should I mention meetings that consume time and deliver nothing to coders themselves, but check the boxes for management.  How about hiring practices

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, July 21 2024 06:34 PM (5rlmi)

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• Everything is down. (ABC) (no, the other one)
  
  Supermarkets, airports, petrol stations, universities, law firms, Bunnings, blood donation services, banks, government departments, Microsoft, police computer systems, NSW emergency services, 7-11 and the ABC's own video editing department are offline across Australia because security company Crowdstrike went splat.
  
  Reportedly any computer with Crowdstrike installed is now throwing the Blue Screen of Death after a bad update and the only solution is to boot into safe mode and remove the driver.
  
  Banks, airlines, and emergency services in the US are also affected.  (Twitter)
  
  And Europe.
  
  Fortunately hamsters are naturally immune.
  
  And so apparently is Twitter.

• AMD's latest 12-core laptop chip comes in just slightly behind Apples 16-core M3 Max on multi-threaded workloads.   (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And ahead on single-threaded tasks.
  
  No word on respective power consumption but the M3 Max is not a lightweight in that regard.
  
  It's up to 46% faster than Intel's Core i9 185H as well.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Can't buy it yet, but laptops are expected to be in stores before the end of the month.
  
  
  
• Type in Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut.  (GitHub)
  
  Take that, Bob from the NSA.
  
  
  
• Don't think I mentioned this one: Email addresses for 15 million Trello users have been leaked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  We used this at work for a brief time, some years ago.
  
  It sucks.
  
  
  
• Google has ruined Fitbit.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Google has ruined Google, so that's no surprise.
  
  
  
• The DOJ's assault on Apple will harm consumers, says App...  Rand Paul.  (Reason)
  
  I respectfully disagree.  Or more precisely, respectfully don't give a damn.
  
  
  
• The USPS shared customer postal addresses with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Snapchat.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these asshats from violating your privacy.
  
  
  
• RealPage says it hasn't done anything wrong in building its illegal rental price-fixing scheme.  (Ars Technica)
  
  "Nobody is above the law, except us", explained a spokesman.
  
  
  
• Meta won't release it's new multimodal Llama AI in Europe, because fuck Europe.  (The Verge)
  
  The words they actually used were "the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment" but that translates to "fuck Europe".
  
  
  
• Russia has slammed Google's censorship while at the same time demanding Google remove 5.6 million search results just for mentioning VPNs.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  It's a free country.  Well, it's not, but...  I guess there really isn't a but.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, July 19 2024 09:06 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 19 2024 10:48 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 20 2024 12:22 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 20 2024 12:22 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, July 20 2024 01:39 AM (5rlmi)

Posted by: David Eastman at Saturday, July 20 2024 02:27 AM (rmrII)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 20 2024 04:43 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 21 2024 07:29 PM (bg2DR)

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• The biggest data breaches of 2024.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  So far this year personal details have been stolen for a billion people.
  
  The internet was a mistake.
  
  
  
• After its multiple recent massive data leaks, senator are asking why AT&T is storing sensitive information like customer call logs in an "AI Data Cloud".  (Ars Technica)
  
  Specifically, Snowflake.  And it's a good question.
  
  I worked in telco billing systems for a while.  That data did not go anywhere outside of our in-house datacenter, except as encrypted tapes in a locked box to a secure backup location.
  
  

• A tiny flaw in Cisco's Smart Software Manager allows anyone to alter any user's password.  (Ars Technica)
  
  And by anyone I mean anyone - you don't need to be logged in.
  
  And by any user I mean any user - without logging in you can change the admin password, and then log in.
  
  I don't think the rate of data breaches is going to slow down any time soon.
  
  
  
• More 9950X benchmarks at various power levels.  (WCCFTech)
  
  We already know there's no point running it at 320W, since it offers performance barely better than the default boost power of 230W.
  
  This chart shows that you also don't want to run it at 40W.  Below 60W the performance craters.  You can probably improve on that by adjusting the clock details, but with the automated settings the sixteen core 9950X runs like a six core 5600X.
  
  
  
• Checking out the Crucial P310 - a 2TB M.2 2230 SSD.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These drives are the size of a postage stamp, and fit in portable devices like the Steam Deck and ultra-slim laptops like Microsoft's Surface line.
  
  This one is QLC and DRAMless, a combination I would generally recommend avoiding, but on these benchmarks it holds up very well.  Read speeds up to 7GB per second, and write speeds up to 6GB.
  
  Under sustained heavy write loads it will slow down, but in all other cases it actually looks good.
  
  
  
• You can now run Windows NT on a PowerMac.  (The Register)
  
  I have a couple of PowerMacs in the garage.  I'm not really inclined to try this out though.
  
  
  
• Looking to build a mini-ITX storage server?  This motherboard from (random AliExpress vendors) might be what you need.  (Liliputing)
  
  For $130 it has a four-coure Intel N100, two M.2 slots, six SATA ports, 10Gb Ethernet, dual 2.5Gb Ethernet, HDMI and DisplayPort, and the usual complement of USB ports.
  
  And one memory slot.
  
  There may be an eight-core N305 model on the way if you need a little more power.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 18 2024 06:42 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 19 2024 03:29 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 19 2024 04:55 PM (PiXy!)

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• Microsoft's former DEI leader has blasted the company in an internal email after the entire team was laid off, sort of.  (IGN)
  
  Yes, a Microsoft DEI team leader did indeed blast the company in an internal email after their entire team was laid off.  That is true.
  
  But don't celebrate just yet.  Microsoft has many DEI teams.
  
  The email though is exactly what you would expect from these parasites:

  Unofficially in my opinion, not specific to Microsoft alone, but Project 2025 looms and true systems change work associated with DEI programs everywhere are no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020. Hence the purposeful and strategic 3-5 year shelf life of many company's inclusion commitments post the murder of George Floyd are being reevaluated.

  Fire them all.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of Bay Area venture capitalist firm Andreesen Horowitz, which I am assured is purely a coincidence, have made an announcement with respect to the coming election.  (Tech Crunch)

  "I wish we didn’t have to pick a side," said Horowitz, who also acknowledged that his political choice would upset many of his friends and even his mother. "We literally [believe] the future of our business, the future of technology, and the future of America is at stake."

  The comments are about what you'd expect.  There's less shrieking that you'd find at The Verge, because Tech Crunch focuses on the money side of tech where The Verge focuses on the intersection of tech and politics from an explicitly leftist viewpoint.
  
  
  
• Western Digital has announced an 8TB model of its high-end SN850X SSD.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's more than three times the price of the 4TB model.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare reports almost 7% of internet traffic is malicious.  (ZDNet)
  
  And 92% is garbage.
  
  
  
• Google has resolved the dual crisis of SEO spam and AI spam by, uh, not indexing your site.  (Vicent Schmalbach)
  
  Looking for something on the internet?  Try, well, AltaVista is dead, but MetaCrawler is still around. 
  
  And it seems to be active too; a search on "Pixy Misa" found a page of hits for the anime character, and then yesterday's tech thread from this very blog.  No visual clutter, no spam that I saw, no AI crap, and commendably fast.
  
  
  
• MySQL 9.0 is here, apparently.  (The Register)
  
  It hasn't made much of a splash despite being what Oracle calls an "Innovation Release".  Partly because it doesn't innovate very much, and partly because what little innovation there is, is found only in the paid version.
  
  Go with MariaDB instead if you can.
  
  Or PostgreSQL if you have the time and inclination.
  
  
  
• Personal data for 2.2 million customers has been stolen from Rite Aid.  (The Register)
  
  This only affects purchases from June 2017 to July 2018, so it sounds like a backup copy of a database was left lying around somewhere not properly secured, and then forgotten until this incident.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk is moving the headquarters of Twitter and SpaceX from California to Texas.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  He specifically cited Gavin Newsom as the reason.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 17 2024 07:56 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, July 18 2024 12:20 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, July 18 2024 01:59 PM (nk1Z+)

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• The Sixth Circuit has issued an administrative stay on the FCC's latest Net Neutrality nonsense pending a decision on a permanent stay.  (The Verge)
  
  As I've been saying for at least a decade, the FCC doesn't have and cannot be permitted the authority to enact net neutrality without new legislation.
  
  Fortunately the recent Chevron decision cut the FCC's legs out from under it in this regard, if it didn't amputate them entirely.  Even The Verge admits that the FCC is likely to lose this one.
  
  As usual, the comments over there are full of foaming illiterates, but there are only a few this time.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The FBI has gained access to the would-be assassin's cell phone.  (The Verge)
  
  Unlikely that this will change anything, of course.
  
  Best comment: Reddit is leaking.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's CTO denies the obvious, that AI is facing exponential scaling costs.  (Ars Technica)
  
  He denies this in the face of exponential expenses in AI training.  He's lying, badly.
  
  Best comment: Always listen to the Chief Tulip Officer's advice about investing in tulips.
  
  
  
• A look at AMD's Zen 5 microarchitecture.  (AnandTech)
  
  Zen 1 through Zen 4 had the same basic design, able to issue and retire four instructions per cycle.  Zen 4 also introduced a 256-bit half-width version of Intel's AVX-512 vector processing.  Intel's own consumer CPUs lack AVX-512 in any form.
  
  With Zen 5 the issue width has been increased to eight instructions per cycle, and the AVX-512 unit is now a full 512 bits wide.
  
  If your code is poised perfectly to take advantage of the improved hardware it could run twice as fast on Zen 5 as Zen 4, but that's unlikely.
  
  The performance charts attached to this article show the 12 core 9900X running Handbrake video processing tasks 41% faster than Intel's 24 core 14900K, at half the power consumption.
  
  Of course Intel will have new chips itself later this year, but those are expected to focus on fixing the power issues more than increasing performance.
  
  These chips are due to show up...  Basically now.
  
  
  
• Also on the AMD front, testing the graphics performance of the new Ryzen HX 370 laptop chip.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's basically level with the desktop GTX 1070, laptop GTX 1650 Ti, or the Radeon RX 480.  I used an RX 480 myself from 2017 to 2022, and it's a perfectly competent card.  For integrated graphics performance it's amazing.
  
  AMD has another, much more powerful laptop CPU in the wings, with at least twice the graphics performance.  No word yet on when that one will ship.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 16 2024 10:53 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, July 17 2024 12:51 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 17 2024 11:22 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, July 17 2024 03:08 PM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: asabinn at Tuesday, November 05 2024 07:59 PM (I9eMS)

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• To avoid sea level rise, some researchers want to put barriers around the world's most vulnerable glaciers to slow them down.  (Science)
  
  Uh.
  
  What?
  
  In 2008, the Ilulissat Glacier in Greenland had a calving event in which it shed a single iceberg covering three square miles.  It sheds 35 billion tons of icebergs in the average year.
  
  And moving glaciers don't leave much of anything in their wake, except rubble.
  
  I mean...  Okay, it's not impossible.  If you want to build an anti-glacier barrier, go right ahead.  Yes, I'll make popcorn, but if you succeed I'll gladly give you credit.
  
  Update: Skip the first four paragraphs of the article and go to the fifth, which explains things a lot more clearly.  They don't want to build an anti-glacier barrier, but a barrier for warm ocean currents to shield glaciers at the point they enter the sea.

• The new Asus ExpertBook lacks the Four Essential Keys and its Lunar Lake CPU will get crushed by AMD's new Strix Point (non-Halo) chips when they arrive later this month.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's not actively terrible but I wouldn't bother.
  
  
  
• Once a new security exploit is made public, system administrators around the world have 22 minutes to update all their servers.  (Bleeping Computers)
  
  That's how fast hackers pounce on new exploits.
  
  
  
• Speaking of exploits "superhuman" AI Go players turn out to be so dumb that a child can beat them.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If the child knows the right exploit.  Even after researchers updated the AI to handle this, it only won 22% of the time.

  Improving these kinds of "worst case" scenarios is key to avoiding embarrassing mistakes when rolling an AI system out to the public. But this new research shows that determined "adversaries" can often discover new holes in an AI algorithm's performance much more quickly and easily than that algorithm can evolve to fix those problems.

  As with AI chat bots that are easily tricked into selling $50,000 cars for $5, the companies behind them will just blame you.
  
  
  
• Possibly as part of the ongoing Snowflake debacle, barcodes for around ten million event tickets from Ticketmaster have been leaked.  (HackRead)
  
  In theory the barcodes cannot be refreshed.
  
  In practice, anything can be refreshed if the alternative is a billion dollars going up in smoke.
  
  
  
• Google is reportedly in talks to acquire cloud security company Wiz for $23 billion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I have never heard of Wiz and have no idea what they actually do.  $23 billion should be a lot of money, so presumably they do something.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 15 2024 11:45 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 16 2024 12:08 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 16 2024 12:12 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 16 2024 09:05 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 16 2024 12:02 PM (MItL9)

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