• So I took a little time to play with Midjourney, one of the new AI-powered art sites.  I've been critical of AI often enough; it has little of practical use to show for decades of research apart from being able to destroy the last vestiges of privacy in an increasingly totalitarian world.
  
  But this...  This is pretty neat.
  
  
  
  
  You just describe what you want to see, and the art style you want it drawn in, and it does it.
  
  Well, most of the time there are little details that aren't quite right - it's not great at bilateral symmetry, and fairly often the results are on the wrong side of the Uncanny Valley, and while it's good on faces and clothes, including things like uniforms and armour:
  
  
  
  It has a very shaky grasp of the concept of holding something.
  
  It does well on landscapes and cities though:
  
  
  
  You can get a free trial but if you get interested you'll burn through the allowance very quickly.  Monthly plans start at $10, or $30 for unlimited use.  If you need a lot of illustrations for something but you don't need a particular scene or action precisely, it's an amazing tool.
  
  Just be prepared to occasionally see things that can't be unseen, like when it simply forgets to give someone a face.
  
  If you try to put two characters in a scene, it tends to lose its marbles.  I can see why artists are upset, but they're certainly not out of a job yet.
  
  I also wondered if it's possible to get to images of recognisably the same character, given the amount of randomness involved.  And I'll just say for now, yes.  It takes patience, but if your prompt is specific enough, it's not that hard.
  
  Update: Typed in "lexx" as the prompt, nothing else.  Got this:
  
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• QNAP.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• Email is broken.  (Carlos Fenollosa)
  
  Broken deliberately by Big Tech, so that only emails sent by (or if you're luck, via) Big Tech can reach email servers operated by Big Tech.
  
  You can receive email on your own server just fine, but sending it is another matter entirely.
  
  
  
• Cheating at chess using computer shoes.  (Incoherency)
  
  It seems like a rather roundabout approach, but if it gets results, who's to complain?  I mean, the International Chess Federation, yes, but who listens to those nerds?
  
  
  

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, September 07 2022 02:23 AM (rglbH)

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• The US and Japan have agreed that nuclear power is essential to reducing global warming.  (AP News)
  
  Now, set aside for the moment whether global warming is real or whether, if real, it is on balance harmful: It is absolutely true that if you want to reduce carbon outputs without destroying the global economy, you need to increase the use of nuclear power.
  
  Which is why it's so remarkable to see the head of the EPA saying this.

• Intel's next-plus-one generation Emerald Rapids server CPUs will be out late next year with up to 64 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD has 64 core CPUs now, with 96 core parts coming this year, and 128 cores early next year.
  
  The one thing Intel has in its favour is a full 512-bit implementation of AVX-512, but for typical commercial workloads - databases, web sites, business applications - AVX-512 is basically useless.
  
  
  
• Google has received DMCA takedown notices for 4 million unique domains.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Including the White House, the FBI, and the Vatican.
  
  
  
• LG is bringing NFTs to its smart TVs.  (The Verge)
  
  Ugh.
  
  They are using the Hedera blockchain, though, which is actually the least awful blockchain I've looked at if you really must distribute NFTs for some reason.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 05 2022 07:25 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: EdH at Thursday, September 08 2022 01:38 AM (eAtU4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 08 2022 02:35 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 08 2022 02:45 AM (BMUHC)

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• Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, Wednesday:

  Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. Both in the physical world and online, that is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities.

  Today, more than 20 percent of the web uses Cloudflare's security services. When considering our policies we need to be mindful of the impact we have and precedent we set for the Internet as a whole. Terminating security services for content that our team personally feels is disgusting and immoral would be the popular choice. But, in the long term, such choices make it more difficult to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices against attacks.

  Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince today:

  Yeah, forget all that.

• Shot:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Chaser:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Amazon has lost a bid to prevent workers unionising at one of its NYC warehouses.  (UPI)
  
  Good.
  
  Amazon provides a useful service - multiple useful services, though streaming anime sure isn't one of them - but by all reports treats its workers abominably.  And is woke as hell so long as it doesn't lose them money.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Amazon losing money there are zero reviews on Amazon for their billion-dollar hate letter to Tolkien.  (IndieWire)
  
  IndieWire is also woke as hell, of course, and thinks silencing viewers is a great idea.
  
  
  

Tech Video of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, September 05 2022 04:27 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: benzeen at Monday, September 05 2022 06:31 AM (Pp4BU)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 05 2022 10:35 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, September 06 2022 06:14 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, September 06 2022 08:12 AM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 06 2022 11:23 PM (BMUHC)

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• Twitter had a new plan to fight "extremism" - then Elon Musk arrived.  (The Verge)
  
  If you're guessing that "extremism" means normal people opposing fascist lunatics and the "new plan" was more annoying popups and account bans, then you're absolutely correct.
  
  The first cool part is that Elon's bid to buy Twitter caused so much chaos internally that the plan was still-born, with management decisions delayed and many of the key censors fleeing the company for even shittier fields.
  
  The second cool part is that an upset would-be censor who tweeted their wish that current CEO Parag Agrawal and former CEO Jack Dorsey "all fall down a very long flight of stairs" was reported for threatening a co-worker and fired.

• I've ordered a Lenovo Tab M10 FHD Gen 3 as an update to my Lenovo Tab M10 FHD Gen 2.  It's about the same size and weight, and has only a minor screen upgrade, but it ships with Android 12 rather than Android 9 and has two A75 cores which blow the A53 cores on the older model out of the water.
  
  Also it was on sale and my old tablet is in a box somewhere and I can't find it.
  
  
  
• The commenters over at Ars Technica are too deranged for me to deal with today.
  
  
  
• USB 4 version 2 also does 120Gbps - in one direction.  (Angstronomics)
  
  And 40Gbps back.  This is very handy if you want to dock your laptop with an 8K 120Hz screen with integrated I/O and networking.  Not that there are a lot of such monitors available - precisely zero as at the time of writing - but since USB 4 version 2 isn't out yet either that's not a huge problem.
  
  The article also notes that although USB 4 is very new, Thunderbolt 3 (which USB 4 is based on) delivered 40Gbps speeds all the way back in 2015, so this speed increase has been a while coming.
  
  
  
• Sony's Xperia 5 IV is basically a smaller version of their Xperia 1 IV.  (Liliputing)
  
  While a 6.1" screen isn't small, the device is basically all screen, making it similar in size to 5.5" phones from three or four years ago.
  
  It also comes with a 1/8" headphone jack and a microSD slot, two endangered species in the phone space.
  
  Not cheap though at just under $1000.

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• Tree planting schemes are just creating tree cemeteries.  (Vice)
  
  Planting trees in a desert is hard.  Planting trees in England is hard to screw up, and yet that's what they're doing.
  
  But by the time the trees have all died, the people planting them have been paid and moved on to the next scheme.

• You had one job: USB 4 Version 2.0 will hit 80Gbps.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It still uses the same USB-C connector but will require an active cable (read: expensive) to hit that top speed.  Otherwise it will fall back to the current 40Gbps.
  
  But why not just call it USB 5?  Do they have some sort of PTSD related to version numbering?
  
  
  
• Flash memory prices are expected to drop sharply by the end of the year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Predictions are for a drop of up to 35% in the current quarter and an additional 20% in Q4.  Which is a lot.  Component shortages have kept prices up the last couple of years but that is coming to an end for computers, though it still applies to industrial electronics.
  
  
  
•  Micron is investing $15 billion in a new factory near Boise, Idaho.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Interesting that the article gives the expense rather than the price, since this factory will be subsidised by both the state and federal governments.
  
  
  
• The Framework laptop is now open for pre-order in Australia.  (Frame.work)
  
  Including the new 12th generation model.
  
  It's not particularly cheap and it lacks the Four Essential Keys, but on the other hand it's not glued together - all repairs can be done with the single (included) screwdriver - and that counts for a lot.
  
  Actually, since I have spare DDR4 SODIMMs and SSDs - and nothing in this laptop is soldered in place - I could just get the entry level model and upgrade it, which would cut the price nearly in half.

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 02 2022 09:43 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 04 2022 03:34 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: licaki at Monday, January 09 2023 11:19 PM (1Wwan)

Posted by: licaki at Wednesday, January 11 2023 11:10 PM (FAFyg)

Posted by: licaki at Tuesday, January 31 2023 10:05 PM (2Nb52)

Posted by: licaki at Tuesday, January 31 2023 10:19 PM (2Nb52)

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• As we head into spring the weather here in New House City is trending towards what would be a chilly midwinter week in Sydney.  But since it never gets particularly cold in Sydney, and this house is built for cold weather, it's actually quite pleasant.
  
  My daily heating bill is coming down too; yesterday it was about half what it was during the coldest days of July.  Which is good because while Australia hasn't had Europe levels of energy crisis - we export LNG rather than import it - it sure hasn't gotten any cheaper.
  
  And the garden is starting to bloom.  At some point I'll have to find out what these plants are.
  
  
  
• The CEO of Turkish crypto exchange Thodex, who looted his customers of $2 billion in crypto assets and fled to Albania, has been caught and extradited and now faces 40,000 years in prison.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Pour encourager les autres.

• Arm is suing Qualcomm and its newly acquired subsidiary Nuvia because although Qualcomm has an Arm architecture license and Nuvia has an Arm architecture license, Qualcomm is not permitted to use Arm architecture developed by Nuvia.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This seems shortsighted by Arm, because it eradicates the whole chip design startup model - build a better CPU and get acquired by one of the big players.
  
  
  
• The Asus Zenbook 17 Fold is a 17" laptop that folds to become a 12.5" laptop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is one of those things that might be great someday when the technology crosses over a some threshold but right now is an expensive gimmick.
  
  
  
• The first leaked independent benchmark of the Ryzen 7950X looks promising.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Integer performance is 23% faster single-threaded and 45% faster multi-threaded; floating point is 22% and 38% respectively.  
  
  Cryptography is 70% faster single-threaded, which is a huge boost likely attributable to support for AVX-512 - new instructions that can process 512 bits of data per cycle instead of the usual 256.
  
  A couple of interesting things about AVX-512: First, AMD supports the instruction set but didn't bother to increase the hardware to 512 bits - which makes the chip larger, more power hungry, and more expensive.  Instead they use the existing 256 bit floating point unit twice.  The new instructions are still better suited to certain tasks so even with this cheap and cheerful approach they get between 30% and 150% better performance.
  
  Second, AVX-512 is an Intel instruction set, but no Intel consumer CPUs support it.  It's in Alder Lake chips, making those chips larger, more power hungry, and more expensive...  But they've deliberately disabled it.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD it looks like the full lineup of Zen 4 server CPUs has leaked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Up to 128 cores, 1152MB of L3 cache, 4GHz clock speeds, and 400W TDP, though not all at once.
  
  The lineup is divided into single and dual socket Genoa chips with up to 96 cores and optional 3D cache, and dual socket Bergamo chips with 112 or 128 cores at lower clock speeds.
  
  Genoa is built on 5nm; Bergamo will come along a bit later on TSMC's 4nm process.
  
  
  

Posted by: licaki at Monday, January 09 2023 07:43 PM (pImk9)

Posted by: licaki at Monday, January 09 2023 11:56 PM (1Wwan)

Posted by: licaki at Thursday, January 12 2023 10:54 PM (+uWjd)

Posted by: licaki at Tuesday, January 31 2023 10:53 PM (2Nb52)

Posted by: gubukan prasmanan at Saturday, February 11 2023 01:40 PM (u8O45)

Posted by: catering terdekat at Tuesday, February 14 2023 11:13 PM (u8O45)

Posted by: catering terdekat at Tuesday, February 14 2023 11:17 PM (u8O45)

Posted by: JeffD at Thursday, August 17 2023 04:50 PM (oOu87)

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• The world's leading maker of chip making equipment, ASML, can't get the chips it needs to make its equipment to make the chips it needs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm not sure quite how things got this screwed up, but we've long known that a 100% efficient system can fracture under any minor stress that comes along.
  
  Think of a bridge, for example, that is designed to withstand exactly its predicted traffic load and not one ounce more.  Smaller, cheaper, easier to build than a more conservatively engineered bridge - and also a disaster waiting to happen, and not waiting very long.
  
  One of the things that complicated moving house for me was cupboards full of stuff I was keeping against the chance of eventually needing it, from tinned food to computer cables.  I threw out - maybe literally - a ton of stuff rather than packing it all up and moving it to the new house.
  
  But if I had suddenly needed a charge and sync dock for a Palm Pilot, or a classic 50 pin SCSI cable with matching terminators, or three cans of borlotti beans for a new stew recipe, I had them.  I didn't have to wait six months for the manufacturer to run another batch.
  
  Not an efficient way to manage things at all, right up until the moment that it saves your trillion dollar industry.
  
  I mean, I probably didn't need three cans of borlotti beans, and I doubt ASML does either.  But somewhere in between there is a better balance than the current situation.

• Nvidia's GPU sales were down 26% in the most recent quarter.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And AMD was down around 8%.  One of the major problems - particularly for Nvidia - is that blockchain miners have not only stopped buying cards, but are selling of the cards they already had.  Or attempting to; reportedly they have not adjusted their expectations to match the current realities of the second hand market and there's a huge glut of cards sitting unsold in China.
  
  
  
• AMD could be launching their Zen 4 3D cache CPUs at CES in January.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They have said there will be 3D cache versions of Zen 4 / Ryzen 7000, and hinted that there will be more than one model.  With Zen 3 we only got the eight core Ryzen 5800X3D; this time there looks to be 12 and 16 core versions as well.
  
  
  
• The Solana-based OptiFi decentralised finance protocol lost $661k by, uh, accidentally deleting itself.  CoinDesk)
  
  On the one hand, oops.  On the other hand, the amount is tiny compared to other losses and the company will reimburse its users.
  
  On the third hand, where does the money go in this situation?  Nothing of real value has been destroyed, it's just bits on a computer somewhere that no longer do what they are intended to do.
  
  If the amount were large enough you could fork the blockchain just prior to the accident and you'd get the money back.  Ethereum did just that back in 2016, which is why there is also something called "Ethereum Classic".

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 31 2022 09:42 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 31 2022 11:37 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Thursday, September 01 2022 06:57 AM (r9O5h)

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• AMD had its Ryzen 7000 launch event today.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Top of the line is the 7950X, with 16 cores running at up to 5.7GHz, 80MB total cache, a 170W TDP, and a $699 price tag.
  
  That price tag is actually $100 less than the 5950X at launch, recognising that after a few years of AMD having it their own way, Intel is catching up again.  But the 5950X is currently available for around $550, so building a system will be more expensive.
  
  Against that it offers average single-threaded performance increases of 29%, and a multi-threaded increase of 44%.  Most of that comes from the clock speed increase - from 4.9GHz to 5.7GHz is a big jump for one generation - and the TDP increase from 105W to 170W.
  
  But if you want to reduce power consumption you can adjust that in your BIOS, and AMD says that performance at 65W is 75% better than the previous generation.  That bodes well for upcoming Zen 4 laptop chips as well.
  
  It looks like a good launch if parts are actually available.  AMD made the right move in reducing prices of the high-end parts, and I'll be looking forward to the third-party benchmarks.  
  
  No discussion of the performance of the integrated graphics on these chips, which I'd expect to be pretty bad.  They reportedly have 2 graphics cores where AMDs latest mobile chips have 12, so don't expect too much there.

• Reported for Facecrime: California's new age verification law is a privacy disaster.  (TechDirt)
  
  The proposal here is to prove your age whenever you visit any website by recording a video of yourself repeating a random phrase, and using AI analysis to estimate how old your are based on your facial characteristics.  Seriously, that's what they're suggesting.
  
  Just block California at the firewall and be done.
  
  
  
• An animated map of the Berlin subway.  (Ubahnchen)
  
  Not useful, perhaps, but cool.  You can set the speed to 100x and watch all the little trains scurry about.
  
  
  
• Austria decided to block a bunch of servers belonging to Cloudflare.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Cloudflare delivers some absurd percentage of global web traffic, so the results were as hilarious as they were predictable.
  
  
  
• OpenSea - the world's leading NFT marketplace - has seen its transaction volume drop 99% since May.  (Fortune)
  
  Good.  I work with NFTs, but with low-cost NFTs that are designed to be of practical use, not with Ugly Monkey JPEGs that trade for the price of a sports car.  That nonsense caused real problems with the work I do.

Posted by: licaki at Thursday, January 12 2023 11:30 PM (+uWjd)

Posted by: licaki at Saturday, January 14 2023 10:39 PM (h843u)

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• The scariest words in the English language are We'll just take a quick snapshot of the database and then bring it back up with replication enabled.
  
  
  
• Ten years after Fukushima killed nobody despite being hit by an earthquake and a tidal wave the enemies of humanity have decided that freezing in the dark is not such a great option if it's going to apply to them.  (MSN)
  
  They weren't supposed to freeze in the dark.  That's for those awful poors.

  Natural gas in Europe is 10 times more expensive than it was a year ago, and the continent is now competing with Japan and other global buyers for supplies of liquified natural gas, driving up prices even more.

  Despite being proven catastrophically wrong on every front, some of the self-anointed elites retain a stranglehold on their idiocy:

  "There’s no connection between building nuclear power plants and dealing with the price spike caused by the loss of Russian gas," since they take at least a decade to construct, said Tom Burke, the chairman of E3G, a London-based climate think tank.  "Our policies have led us to utter disaster, so I see no reason to change now."

  
  

Tech News

• AMD's Ryzen 7000 launch event is today.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Well, tomorrow for me.  Today in the US.  I don't know if I'll bother to watch it live.
  
  
  
• One last leak for old time's sake: The Ryzen 7950X could peak at 5.85GHz.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's 20% faster than the 5950X, plus a 10% performance boost from improvements to the CPU design.  If accurate this should be quite a capable chip.
  
  
  
• A new remote execution vulnerability has been found - for the GameBoy Colour.  (TheXcellerator)
  
  You do need the Mobile Adaptor GB - which wasn't sold outside of Japan - to be vulnerable, so you're probably safe from having your pokemons stolen while you sleep.
  
  
  
• Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered two different notes?  (Ethan Hein)
  
  Because they are two different notes - or were, before pianos ruined everything.

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