• There's no longer any such thing as a clean Windows install.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Not unless you have access to the Windows 11 Enterprise, anyway, or bought an AMD system and can simply run Windows 10.  (Windows 10 will work on current Intel CPUs, but the scheduler that handles the difference between Performance and Efficiency cores is only found in 11.)
  
  The article goes through the long and growing list of utter garbage that Microsoft has dumped into Windows 11, making the usual vendor-inflicted utter garbage that comes with laptops rather redundant.  Not that they don't still try.
  
  The stark difference between the Windows 11 Enterprise and Windows 11 Fuck You Peasants editions makes me wonder if the Pro and Workstation editions are better on the crapware front as well as restoring features Microsoft saw fit to remove in the update from 10.  Like having a primary username longer than five letters.
  
  It's so bad that even the anarcho-communist nutcases in the Ars commentariat agree.

• Speaking of Ars, they have another couple of hidden insults: If you're banned for telling them politely that they are full of shit, of course you can't comment, but you also can't read the comments, and you can't log out.
  
  Which works as well as Twitter's block function, which prevents you from reading someone's posts unless you open another browser, and prevents you from replying to them unless you paste in the link for their tweet directly...  Which works exactly the same as a quote-tweet because that's exactly what quote-tweets are.
  
  
  
• After Japan, Israel, and Russia, India is the next country up to plough a lander straight into the surface of the Moon.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The Vikram lander follows in the footprint of 2019's successful crash of the Beresheet lander.  It is currently in an elliptical orbit that takes it to within 25km of the lunar surface, with a catastrophic impact scheduled for later this week.
  
  
  
• Tesla has sued two former employees for misappropriation of other employees' private data.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The employees made off with 100GB of data and leaked selected parts to the press.  100GB used to be a lot, but these days you can fit ten times that on a card smaller than your fingernail.
  
  
  
• Don't expect graphics card prices to come down any time soon: Nvidia has sold $5 billion worth of crippled high-end video cards to China for AI training.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Another number that used to be a lot.
  
  The cards are still fast, but to comply with export restrictions have had their memory bandwidth reduced to less than that of a high-end consumer graphics card.
  
  If you want to know what China plans to use all that AI for, consider that Orwell assumed that humans would still need to monitor all those telescreens
  
  Also consider that generative AI has an unfailing habit of simply making shit up, and you can safely predict that China is not going to have a good time the next few years.
  
  
  
• In a win for users of ChatGPT, the New York Times has blocked OpenAI's web crawler.  (The Verge)
  
  While it is true that there are any number of other sewers for OpenAI to crawl through, blocking one of the largest has got to help.
  
  
  
• SFP?  Throw it in the bin.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Don't want to hear about it unless it's at least 100Gb.
  
  
  
• Walking across Luxembourg.  (ioces)
  
  In a long weekend.  It took him four days, but to be fair he didn't choose the shortest or straightest route.  You could walk across the northern part of Luxembourg in a day.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 23 2023 09:35 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, August 23 2023 10:57 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, August 24 2023 11:48 AM (BzEjn)

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• Amazon workers are demanding "data" explaining why they should return to working in the office.  (Seattle Times)  (archive site)

  Workers who have asked the company to share data have been provided anecdotes and a consistent trope that innovation is more likely to happen in person.

  Which is true.

  That has left some workers feeling demoralized, distracted and undervalued as they struggle to stay focused and motivated, according to interviews and internal communications shared with The Times.

  Well, perhaps less true with a useless pack of mopes like this lot.

  An Amazon manager, who is based on the East Coast and asked to speak anonymously to protect their job, said it is "dehumanizing," and feels as if leadership doesn’t trust its employees to understand their reasoning. In Slack messages, employees anonymously posted that Amazon’s decisions were "dystopian" and creating "just a horrible situation."

  I was going to suggest simply firing them all, but after hearing this heartfelt message I would like instead to propose turning them into jam.

• The LG Gram Style is a great laptop except apparently for the touchpad.  (The Verge)
  
  It's light - 2.7 lbs is great for a 16" laptop.  It has a beautiful 3200x2000 120Hz OLED display.  RAM is soldered but at least there's 32GB of it, paired with an Intel 1360P CPU and 1TB of SSD.  The keyboard has the Four Essential Keys albeit in the form of a three-column numpad, which is an acceptable tradeoff.  And it has two USB-C ports, one USB-A, a headphone jack, and a microSD reader.
  
  Oh, and it changes colour depending on the angle.
  
  Around $1400 at Best Buy which, so it's not exactly cheap, but not insanely expensive either.
  
  
  
• Good Omens season 2 is diverse!  (The Verge)
  
  But is it any good?

  The sheer breadth of representation across the second season of Neil Gaiman’s divine comedy is nothing short of miraculous.

  So that's a no.
  
  Not that you need to take The Verge's word for it: I've watched the whole thing.
  
  Season one, adapted from the classic book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, is great.  Not perfect perhaps, but technically excellent, well-acted, and faithful to the book.
  
  Season two, by Neil Gaiman alone, is technically excellent, well-acted, and quite passable up until the final episode which is an unmitigated disaster.
  
  Hopefully the writers' strike will go on forever and we'll never get a season three.
  
  
  
• 1.4 billion people will need to "reskill" over the next three years as AI transforms the workforce.  (IBM)
  
  Skills most likely to be in demand include:
  
  * The patience to coax a coherent response out of an utterly broken AI system
  * Apologising to customers after the company's AI has screwed up their order
  * Fixing AI errors before they send the company bankrupt
  * Switching the AI off entirely without management knowing about it
  
  
  
• Russia's Luna 25 automated lander has "ceased to exist" after colliding with the Moon.  (CNN)
  
  That'll do it.
  
  
  
• After Elon Musk suggested that the block function would be limited to DMs, so many users left Twitter for Jack Dorsey's Bluesky Social that the newer platform buckled under the load.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  How many?
  
  So many!
  
  Like?
  
  Five thousand.
  
  Yes, 0.0015% of Twitter's active monthly users was enough to make Bluesky cave in.
  
  While it's true that Thread's 100 million users didn't stay around for long, nor do much while they were there, at least the platform didn't collapse under them.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, August 21 2023 10:33 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 22 2023 07:48 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 22 2023 09:42 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 22 2023 12:55 PM (BMUHC)

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• What is real and what is not in TikTok's mental illness plague?  (The Verge)
  
  What is the difference between someone pretending to be mentally ill for the social benefits and someone who is actually mentally ill?

  It was TikTok, in Robinson's eyes, that was driving the sudden rise in pediatric DID referrals. "It's possible that social media is revealing new ways for individuals with genuine DID to express themselves," he said in his lecture. But he also issued a warning: "however, it’s also very possible that social media and internet trends are contributing to increased DID claims that are not genuine." That is, people claiming to have DID might be mistaken, confused, or simply faking it.

  As a licensed professional, Dr Robinson is required by law never to give a straight answer.
  
  As a licensed unprofessional, on the other hand, I can tell you this: Everyone on TikTok is faking being crazy for social credit points.
  
  If you want to find people who are legitimately mentally ill, check the bios on Twitter.

  He started with a clip of a rainbow-haired DID system purchasing a personalized cake to celebrate their official DID diagnosis, something Robinson thought was "surprising," as it contrasted with the typically "hidden" nature of the disorder. He shared footage of a system cycling through eight elaborate neon outfits - complete with wigs and cat-like paws - attributed to their different alters, "overt changes" of appearance that Robinson felt were "not characteristic" of the DID patients clinicians see each day.

  Thanks doc, and no shit.  Identity disorders don't come with complimentary wardrobes.  These are adult-sized children who want to live in cartoon world.

• Why do old books smell so good?  (Science Switch)
  
  Bacon.  They're made of bacon.
  
  
  
• AMD is reportedly preparing a $299 RX 6750 GRE model to compete with the 4060 Ti at the price of the 4060.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Good.  The 6700 / 6750 family are still strong options given the lackluster offerings in the latest generation.
  
  
  
• Intel meanwhile keeps improving the drivers for its own graphics cards.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  These are also becoming a viable option.
  
  
  
• A look - literally - at Samsung's 256TB SSD.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's not small.
  
  
  
• Those fancy blue-light blocking glasses are a useless gimmick.  (New Atlas)
  
  Which should be obvious, because if they actually blocked a significant proportion of blue light, everything would turn yellow when you put them on.
  
  
  
• Cellebrite - the phone hacking tool company - tells its customers, which is to say cops, that they have to keep the tools and their use of those tools secret.  (Tech Crunch)

  In a leaked training video for law enforcement customers that was obtained by TechCrunch, a senior Cellebrite employee tells customers that "ultimately, you’ve extracted the data, it's the data that solves the crime, how you got in, let’s try to keep that as hush hush as possible."

  Yeah, that's illegal.

  Cellebrite spokesperson Victor Cooper said in an email to TechCrunch that the company "is committed to support ethical law enforcement. Our tools are designed for lawful use, with the utmost respect for the chain of custody and judicial process."

  Sure, Jan.

  When asked whether Cellebrite would change the content of its training, the spokesperson did not respond.

  I am shocked, shocked, to find a phone hacking company acting shady.
   

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Monday, August 21 2023 11:51 AM (r9O5h)

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Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 19 2023 11:08 PM (obo9H)

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• Fools and money: Purchasers of ugly monkey jpegs - which is to say, distributed database entries which are unique identifiers of digital images of ugly monkeys stored on someone's server somewhere - are suing auction house Sotheby's and ugly monkey jpeg purveyor Yuga Labs alleging that they, which is to say the buyers of said ugly monkey jpegs, are too stupid to be allowed out of the house without a leash.  (Ars Technica)
  
  And while this is undoubtedly true, it might be hard to establish as a point of law that this idiocy is the fault of Sotheby's or of Yuga Labs.

  Sotheby's sold a lot of 101 Bored Ape NFTs for $24.4 million at its "Ape In!" auction in September 2021, well above the pre-auction estimates of $12 million to $18 million. That's an average price of over $241,000, but Bored Ape NFTs now sell for a floor price of about $50,000 worth of ether cryptocrurrency, according to CoinGecko data accessed today.

  Or rather, don't sell at that price.
  
  At least you can eat tulip bulbs.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Is the PCIe 5 Seagate Firecude 540 worth buying?  (Serve the Home)
  
  No.  But it's less not worth buying than ugly monkey jpegs - about a thousand times cheaper, for a start, and you actually own it.
  
  
  
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says AI is a tidal wave as big as the internet.  (Bloomberg)
  
  A tidal wave?  As in, it brings nothing good, you can see it coming a mile off, and you'd best seek high ground right away?
  
  Seems apt.
  
  
  
• The iKoolCore R1 Pro is a four port 2.5Gb Ethernet router that measures 3x3x2 inches and includes a quad core Pentium N6005 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and up to 1TB of SSD.  (Liliputing)
  
  It also has HDMI, USB-C (and a second USB-C for power input), two USB-A ports, and a microSD slot.
  
  This is all identical to the iKoolCore R1 non-Pro edition released a few months ago except that this model has upgraded cooling and doesn't crash all the time.
  
  Which is a plus.
  
  
  
• The Verge continues to descend into Musk-induced insanity.  (The Verge)
  
  Today's report is titled "Elon Musk is killing 'Environmental Twitter'" but instead makes the case that environmental activists are mindless zealots who will brook no opposition, or indeed anything but the most slavish support.
  
  Which is true.
  
  
  

• LK-99: Not a superconductor.  (Nature)
  
  Ace already posted on this a couple of days ago but this article in Nature seems to explain what the Korean researchers were observing.
  
  Pure LK-99 is not a conductor at all, so what the were measuring was LK-99 "doped" with specific impurities.  And the important one looks to have been copper sulfide, which shows a phase transition and change in conductivity right at the point where the researchers thought they were seeing a transition to superconductivity.
  
  But it was just the temperature at which their sample's resistance dropped by a factor of 10, not by a factor of infinity.  Below that temperature the electromagnetic properties of their sample changed drastically, but it was still not actually a superconductor.
  
  So, no flying cars for another twenty years I'm afraid.
  
  
  

Posted by: anonymous at Friday, August 18 2023 10:10 PM (hRoyQ)

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• Instagram's Twitter competitor, Threads, broke all records in the speed at which it reached 100 million users.  How is it doing now, a couple of weeks later?  Usage has plummeted, and Threads now has less than half the active daily users of Twitter.  (The Guardian)
  
  This is technically correct, since half a percent is indeed less than half.
  
  While Twitter averages around 100 million active users each day, Threads is around 576,000.
  
  
  

Tech News

• You don't hate Jira, you hate your manager.  (Hacker News)
  
  Everyone in the comments: No, we hate Jira.
  
  
  
• China's chip production technology is five generations behind the rest of the world.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China's leading-edge production is 14nm, where Taiwan, Korea, and the US are all ramping up production at 3nm.  But most of China's fab capacity is even further behind, at 28nm.  And 28nm kind of sucks.
  
  AMD was stuck at 28nm for years because TSMC and Samsung fumbled the transition to FINFETs - only Intel got that right.  That almost bankrupted the company.
  
  
  
• Need to pack 64TB of M.2 SSDs into a standard U.2 carrier with active cooling but without fans?  Yes?  What the hell are you doing?  (AnandTech)
  
  Anyway, Mac aftermarket stuff maker OWC has teamed up with fanless fan maker Frore to build, well, what I just said.
  
  The interesting part here is the Frore AirJet, a piezoelectric device that uses tiny vibrating crystals to shoot air out one end at about a thousand miles an hour, keeping whatever it is attached to cool without making a lot of noise, or at least without a lot of noise that anyone other than a bat can hear.
  
  
  
• The Verge's coverage of Elon Musk keeps getting creepier.  (The Verge)
  
  These people need an intervention.  Or sedation.  Or both.
  
  
  
• It's time to rethink our relationships with streaming services.  (The Verge)
  
  I don't have a relationship with streaming services.  What is wrong with you people?
  
  
  
• Google Chrome will now use AI to automatically summarise articles for you so you don't need to read them.  (The Verge)
  
  <summary>The Verge is garbage.</summary>
  
  
  
• The tech jobs market is as strong as it ever was.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Now that hundreds of thousands of people have been laid off.
  
  
  
• ISPs are complaining that new FCC rules requiring they tell customers what they are being charged are excessively onerous.  (Ars Technica)
  
  "How will we rip people off if we have to list all the applicable fees?" asked one executive.  "That sounds ominously like work."
  
  Also, Ars Technica has banned me for a month for very politely telling their Creative Director that he's a credulous idiot.  So while I'm sure there's every kind of nonsense going on in the comments over there, I can't tell you exactly what kind.
  
  
  
• Streaming site SportsBay has been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars to DISH Network.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  That's $2500 for a DMCA violation and, uh, over two million violations.
  
  They had to count them all.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 16 2023 09:18 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, August 16 2023 10:37 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 17 2023 12:07 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 17 2023 12:23 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, August 17 2023 12:33 AM (JqCHh)

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• Large Language Models can generate valid JSON 100% of the time.  (Hacker News)
  
  If you install a plugin that smacks the LLM over the head with a ruler any time it tries to emit a character that would make the output invalid.
  
  It's like lining up an infinite number of monkeys and shooting all the ones that aren't typing out Hamlet.  Yes, it works in theory, but what are you going to do with all the dead monkeys?
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Beelink GTR7 Pro: A great small computer with a completely nonstandard power connector.  (Serve the Home)
  
  And unlike Apple with MagSafe, you're not going to find third-party replacements.
  
  
  
• The Delhi High Court has ruled that under Indian trademark law, Google cannot sell ads against trademarked search terms.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Google operates something of a protection racket here: Competitors place ads against your company name to steer traffic away from you, so you not only need to advertise under your own search term, you have to outbid the competition to get top billing.
  
  Not surprising someone would find this questionable.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fried used $100 million in stolen customer funds for political donations.  (Reuters)
  
  Will they give the money back?
  
  No, they're Democrats.
  
  Also, he's going to be held in the same jail where Epstein did not kill himself, so there's no need.
  
  
  

Posted by: bob in houston at Tuesday, August 15 2023 11:44 PM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 16 2023 12:59 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 16 2023 10:59 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 16 2023 11:01 AM (BMUHC)

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• Stack Overflow is introducing its own AI question answering system because somehow getting the answer wrong 77% of the time is appealing to the company's CEO.  (ZDNet)
  
  You jump off bridges when it's bridge-jumping time, and apparently right now it's garbage AI time.
  
  Stack Overflow plans to fix the problem of generative AI giving plausible but unsound answers by, according to the article, waving its hands around.  It wants an expert system, but Large Language Models are the exact opposite of expert systems.
  
  CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar also believes AI will solve the cultural problems at Stack Overflow, to wit, that the platforms top users are a bunch of autistic narcissists who actively attack anyone asking questions, where the entire point of the platform is for people to ask questions.
  
  The New Stack reached out to the moderators at Stack Overflow for comment on being replaced not merely by an AI but by an AI that has already been tested and proven not to work.
  
  The moderators had not responded at time of publication because they are all on strike.
  
  I swear I am not making this up.

• Apple plans to retire 8GB laptop models with its next generation M3 range, replacing them with 12GB.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Adding a whole $5 to the cost of the system to be very slightly less pathetic.  Good work.
  
  
  
• TSMC is discovering that building a chip factory in Arizona was a mistake.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The company is trying to bring in workers from Taiwan because it can't find qualified workers locally, but the local unions are, of course, fighting it.
  
  Plus there's the slight problem that chip factories use a lot of water and Arizona is a desert.
  
  
  
• The world in which IPv6 was a good idea.  (Apenwarr)
  
  That is not this world.
  
  
  
• A tale of two internets.  (Tailscale)
  
  More thoughts on the same subject from the same author three years later.
  
  
  
• What happens when people start reading privacy policies.  (The Markup)
  
  They find out they have no privacy.

Posted by: leotaylors at Friday, October 13 2023 11:09 PM (a1gCr)

Posted by: annehathaway at Thursday, March 28 2024 09:43 PM (PQRbB)

Posted by: Thor Flash at Monday, July 15 2024 06:59 PM (g9QOk)

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