• The US House of Representatives has announced a Task Force on AI that blah blah blah zzzzzz.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Sorry, my brain crawled out of my head to escape that nonsense.
  
  
  
• To be fair, this is one area where even the US federal government can't make things any worse.  (Twitter)
  
  Google Gemini is here, and it's so woke it makes a mockery of the very concept of wokeness.

• If you want to build your own mini-ITX storage server, there aren't many great motherboard options.  The Topton N11 is one.  (Liliputing)
  
  If you don't mind buying a $500 motherboard from AliExpress.
  
  It has a built-in Ryzen 7840HS CPU, nine SATA ports, four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, two M.2 2280 slots, two DDR5 SODIMM slots, a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, supports three monitors over HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C, plus three regular USB 3 ports and one audio jack.
  
  If you want something a bit cheaper, the same company offers a $166 version of the board with an Intel N100 CPU.  Two of the USB ports are downgraded to USB 2, the PCIe slot is just x1, and it has six SATA ports rather than nine, but the networking and video configuration is the same.
  
  
  
• If you're tired of seeing good SSDs at five cents per gigabyte, the Crucial T705 costs four times that.  (AnandTech)
  
  It does run at 14.5GB per second, but so do four cheap SSDs in RAID-0.
  
  
  
• Asus' Zenfone was one of the last remaining reasonably-sized phones, though with a 5.9" screen not actually small.  So Asus is making it bigger.  (The Verge)
  
  As the article notes, even Apple can't convince people to buy smaller phones anymore.  I'm just waiting for screens to reach 8" so I can buy a decent tablet once again.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, February 21 2024 11:31 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 22 2024 07:14 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 22 2024 10:11 AM (bg2DR)

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• Global Foundries is set to receive $1.5 billion in government funds under the CHIPS Act, and another $600 million from New York state in one form or another.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Global Foundries was originally the manufacturing arm of AMD, and was then spun off as a separate company, acquired the semiconductor operations of AMD, and was bought by the UAE, not necessarily in that order.
  
  The company is planning to invest $12 billion over the next decade, mostly on specialised production like gallium nitride and expanding bulk processes on 12nm.
  
  Is this money well spent?  Probably not; if it were, Global Foundries wouldn't need the money.  Is it money better spent than almost anything the US federal government does?  Maybe.

• Unraid is going to a subscription model.  (Serve the Home)
  
  So what happens to your data if your subscription expires?
  
  Nothing.
  
  It keeps working, you just stop getting updates.
  
  I'd still go with an open-source solution by choice, but that's not disastrous.  It's basically what JetBrains does with its development tools.
  
  
  
• MariaDB could be taken private at about 6% of its peak valuation.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Ouch.  Again, I use open-source MariaDB - it has some great features that mainstream MySQL lacks - and they don't make a penny from me.  But for obvious reasons I hope they survive.
  
  
  
• Groq allows you to play with the Mixtral 8x7B-32k and Llama 2 70-B 4k chatbots.  (Groq)
  
  I had some odd problems getting Mixtral to answer a simple question, and then it started working perfectly.  That is likely because Mixtral isn't a single AI, but eight variants of the same LLM tuned to handle different types of questions.  If the wrong variant is selected to answer your question you will get a stupid answer, and this interface doesn't let you see all eight possible answers.
  
  Llama 2 70-B worked fine on the same test question.  Let me try it on the woodpecker one...  No.
  
  
  
• Your fingerprints can be recreated from the sounds you make when using a touchscreen.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No they can't.

Top Story

• The text file that runs the internet: Can robots.txt continue to function in an age of unscrupulous AI companies desperate for free content? (The Verge)
  
  Sure. Just rig an AI to provide infinite garbage to AI web crawlers.

Tech News

• The EU is reportedly planning to fine Apple $500 million for illegal competition with third-party music stores and streaming services. (The Verge)
  
  Which Apple unquestionably does, but yeah, this is a shakedown operation by Europe.
  
  
  
• There are two hard problems in computer science: Cache invalidation and naming things. So what if we stopped naming things? (GitHub)
  
  The namingless programming language - it doesn't have a name - has only one data structure, so that doesn't need a name either.

  How does the code in this language look like?
  
  Like this:
  
  i_^_b_H_i_cpp^_)_V_b_v_J_^_E_H_leafL_==^_)_V_H_Z_Z_^_)_V_H_I_^_E_1^_2^_#_G_Z_Z_^_E_1^_2^_#_H_$_L_-^_G_m_G_&_&_
  
  Holy shit!
  
  Yes.
  
  Sorry.

  Understandable, have a nice day.

Wholesome Hot Mic Moments Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 20 2024 09:56 AM (bg2DR)

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• I can fail to do it for just $1 billion.
  
  Chip architect Jim Keller - involved in the creation of AMD's Athlon, Hammer, and Zen CPUs, DEC's Alpha, and Apple's A4 and A5 cores - told Sam Altman that he could achieve OpenAI's chip production dreams for one seventh of their budget.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which to be fair is still $1 trillion, or as much as the entire industry spends on new chip factories in ten years.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Two Q1 PCs were found intact in a box by a cleaning company in England.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Q1 PC is little known, but it was one of the first ever personal computers.
  
  Introduced in 1972 - four years before the Apple I, two years before the S-100 bus - it was powered by an Intel 8008 and 16k of RAM.
  
  
  
• Reddit has reportedly signed a licensing deal to hand its content to an AI company.  (Mashable)
  
  This is the real reason Reddit killed its API.
  
  No details yet on who or how much.
  
  
  
• Representation Engineering Mistral-7B an Acid Trip.  (Vgel is Me)
  
  That might be somewhat hard to parse, but the article discusses, in detail, how to make an LLM (specifically here the open-source Mistral) act as if it were on drugs.
  
  Or merely very depressed.
  
  
  
• On the other end of the scale, a new AI chatbot called Goody-2 follows such strict ethical rules that it refuses to discuss anything at all.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is art.

• Microsoft is retiring Azure IoS Central, its hub service for the Internet of Insecure Pieces of Crap.  (The Register)
  
  This is the problem with specialised cloud services.
  
  Cloud servers are fine, if you're either small enough that they're cheap, or big enough that you can get a deal.  If you run containers on top of them - LXC or Docker, pick your poison - it is possible - not easy, but possible - to move to any other cloud provider, or to leased servers, or to your own hardware.
  
  S3 storage is fine, because everyone supports that, and there are open source solution as well.  Although S3 storage in general is awful if you need to do any sort of file management.
  
  The service will stay running for existing customers until March 31, 2027, but we're likely to see a bunch of devices simply stop working the next day.
  

• Experts are - again - proposing the regulation of AI hardware.  (The Register)
  
  Where would we be without experts?  Probably sipping margaritas by a beach in the Andromeda galaxy.

  In situations where AI systems pose catastrophic risks, it could be beneficial for regulators to verify that a set of AI chips are operated legitimately or to disable their operation (or a subset of it) if they violate rules.

  No.  No it wouldn't.
  
  
  
• Proposed legislation would allow defendants to inspect the algorithms of any code used to produce evidence against them in court.  (The Verge)
  
  This is actually sound in principle, but would inevitably cause drama during its introduction phase.  And for about twenty years following.
  
  
  
• The Epic Games Store is coming to iOS in Europe this year.  (Thurrott)
  
  If you play games, or have kids who do, it's worth installing the Epic Games Store on your PC.  Or a PC, depending on how much you trust them.  They give away a free game every week; every day over Christmas.
  
  
  
• 2600 official Intel SPEC benchmark results have been invalidated because the compiler was using steroids.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's entirely permitted to use optimisations that are designed to improve performance on a certain type of calculation, even if that calculation is rare outside of benchmarks.
  
  It is not permitted to optimise for the known result of a benchmark...  Which is what Intel was caught doing.
  
  Mobile phone vendors get caught doing this all the time.
  
  
  

If You Live There Put a Ring on It - Or Maybe Don’t - Video of the Day

• Apple has publicly confirmed that it has broken support for persistent web apps (PWAs) on purpose.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The company went on to explain that it broke support because its operating system is buggy and insecure, and because it hates its own developers and users.
  
  They didn't mean to explain that, but they did.

• Walking around with $3500 AR goggles strapped to your face is a bad idea.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Thanks, Ars Technica.  We would never have guessed.
  
  
  
• Sitting inside with the blinds closed reading comics, the $3500 Vision Pro is perfectly fine, until you throw up.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which is nothing specific to the Vision Pro, but a common problem with other AR and VR goggles.
  
  
  
• How to unsubscribe from Nextdoor.  (taylor.town)
  
  Spoiler:

  Yes, there are 16 pages of notification settings.

  There are no "disable all” buttons. In order to unsubscribe from everything, nextdoor demands hundreds of clicks.

  It's the La Brea tar pit of briar patches.
  
  
• Fuck you, they explained: Broadcom takes a leaf out of Nijisanji's management handbook with its acquisition of VMWare.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Perpetual licenses are out, as now is the free version of VMWare ESXi, intended for developers and sysadmins to run at home instead of some other company's software.
  
  Gone too is the VMWare Partner Program, which had 28,000 resellers a year ago.
  
  VMWare's explanation of the changes amounted to everyone else is doing it, which is largely true, but the reason VMWare held on to its customer base was precisely because everyone else was doing that, and VMWare was not.
  
  Was not.  Past tense.
  
  
  
• You wouldn't leave $90,000 in cash sitting out on your desk with the window open.  (The Register)
  
  Or maybe you would.  Maybe you own a pack of honey badgers.  Still seems unwise.
  
  
  
• The Nextbox is coming.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I guess Microsoft is big enough - and Xbox itself is big enough - that it doesn't have to worry about the Osborne Effect.   And the company probably does own a pack of honey badgers, come to think of it.
  
  
  
• Google suggests that owners of older Windows laptops should migrate to ChromeOS.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This would be a great idea - ChromeOS will run fine on hardware that Windows 11 would leave dead in a ditch - if it were not for the fact that Google is no more trustworthy than Microsoft and would have far more control over your data.
  
  
  
• Rat.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Don't click.
  
  Tags: rat, reproduction, ai, china, omgwtfbbq
  

Posted by: Frank at Friday, February 16 2024 06:55 PM (cARBX)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, February 17 2024 01:08 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Saturday, February 17 2024 12:59 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, February 18 2024 01:06 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 18 2024 06:54 PM (PiXy!)

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• In a clear sign of the End Times, the UN and the European Court of Human Rights have both affirmed that forcing companies to create encryption back doors to enable governments to spy on their civilian populations is a violation of human rights.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I mean, duh, and I don't expect this will stop anyone for even a minute, but it's still a little surprising to see them state the obvious.

• Early adopters of Apple's Vision Pro AR headset are lining up to return their $3500 toys before the 14 day trial period expires.  (The Verge)
  
  Who the hell has time for that?  I'm lucky if I even get the box out of the front hall in the first 14 days.
  
  
  
• The new Asus Zenbook 14 has 32GB of RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And one of those 2880x1800 OLED displays which are very nice (the HP laptop I'm using right now has the same screen).
  
  This one also has Intel's new Core Ultra 7 155H, which brings Intel more or less up to date with AMD's chips from last year.
  
  No Four Essential Keys though.
  
  
  
• Hezbollah had blue checkmarks on Twitter.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Which means that Hezbollah paid for them.
  
  Ars Technica runs this as though it were Watergate multiplied by the Pentagon Papers, when it doesn't even amount to a nothingburger.
  
  Meanwhile, the former Twitter regime explicitly granted blue checkmarks to pro-genocide terrorist mouthpieces for years, and Ars didn't raise a peep.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 16 2024 06:58 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, February 16 2024 01:40 PM (bg2DR)

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• A judge has dismissed most of the claims in a series lawsuits by several authors against OpenAI.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The authors claimed that every text produced by ChatGPT was an infringement of their work because...  Because, basically, it had read their work.  Though they had no proof even of that.
  
  There is a surviving claim of unfair business practices under California law, by, essentially, reading the author's works without written permission, but that merely hasn't been dismissed out of hand; it still has to withstand trial.

• The original proposal for the World Wide Web was written in Microsoft Word for Mac 4.0.  Can we still read it?  (JGC)
  
  Yes...  Mostly.  Though not in Word itself.  Libre Office works though.
  
  
  
• IBM is 100 years old today-ish.  (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  Happy birthday.  Your cloud services suck.
  
  
  
• Damn Small Linux is back.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though at 700MB it's no longer particularly small.
  
  
  
• The Flipper Zero security testing device has gained a video game attachment, with video output and motion control.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because they could, I guess.
  
  
  
• How does Nvidia's GTX Titan, the fastest video card available in 2013, stack up against modern rivals?  Badly.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In 9 out of 12 games tested - ignoring the ones that wouldn't run at all - it was slower than an entry-level Radeon 6400.

• The leopard did it: Bank of America has announced a data breach after systems at technical services provider Infosys were breached.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They could have just offered the leopard a job in tech support, but no.  (The Register)
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Twitter competitor Spoutible also had a data breach.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Over 200,000 accounts had their "name, email, username, phone, gender, bcrypt password hash, 2FA secret and password reset token" exfiltrated according to the company.  That's probably most of their users; as of June, Spoutible counted 240,000 registered users in total.

  Spoutible CEO Christopher Bouzy confirmed the data breach and vulnerability and the company required users to create new, stronger passwords, after addressing the issue. However, he also referred to the vulnerability’s discovery as "an attack” on his network and alleged that the person who scraped the data was someone who was intent on hurting Spoutible’s reputation.

  Not sure anything could hurt a company's reputation more than having Bouzy as CEO.
  
  Maybe Nijisanji's PR department.
  
  
  
• Unicode 16 is coming with 4000 new hieroglyphs for translating those Goa'uld inscriptions and hundreds of classic game symbols from the 8-bit era.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Just because Unicode is a semantic superfund site doesn't mean it can't sometimes be cool.
  
  
  
• The FCC has ruled that telcos must notify customers when their data gets stolen.  (The Register)
  
  Okay.  Good.
  
  
  
• AMD's patches for the open-source GCC compiler also confirm that the upcoming Zen 5 CPU core will increase ALU pipes from 4 to 6.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  In theory that could make the chips 50% faster.  In practice, expect the square root of that, more or less.  Probably less.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, February 13 2024 06:30 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 13 2024 08:57 PM (bg2DR)

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• How Venus got its Zoozve back.  (Sky and Telescope)
  
  Back in the dim, dusty reaches of two weeks ago, a cute and amusing story appeared on Twitter about how a children's poster of the Solar System came out with a moon of Venus mistakenly labelled Zoozve.
  
  Mistakenly because (a) Venus doesn't have any moons - not exactly, anyway - and because the designation of the asteroid so labelled is actually 2002VE 68.  The creation of Zoozve was an accident of the artist's bad handwriting.
  
  But 2002VE 68 is not just any asteroid, but what is known as a quasi-moon; it doesn't orbit Venus the way the Moon orbits the Earth, but dances a intricate gavotte around both Venus and the Sun that is expected to last several hundred years before the partners part ways.
  
  It was the first such quasi-moon discovered; since 2002 another eight have been found, seven of them around Earth.
  
  And since all it had - until now - was a catalog number, it was eligible to be named if someone could (a) submit a formal proposal and (b) convince enough members of the relevant IAU committee to vote for it.
  
  So they did, and now the poster is retroactively correct.

• The future is hydrogen.  (Inside EEVs)
  
  In five billion years when the Sun expands and swallows the Earth.
  
  In the meantime, not so much.
  
  
  
• Switzerland was not invaded by three million zombie toothbrushes. (Ars Technica)
  
  Darn.
  
  
  
• Zen 5 could have double the floating point performance of Zen 4.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Zen 4 already squashes Zen 3 and Intel chips on any benchmark that can use AVX512 instructions, because while Zen 4 only implements a cut-down version of AVX512 that breaks 512-bit instructions into two 256-bit instructions, Zen 3 and Intel's consumer chips don't support it at all.
  
  Zen 3 because it just doesn't; Intel because the P cores do but the E cores don't, and that created such a headache that it was simpler to just burn the functionality out with a laser before the chips left the factory.
  
  How good it is we don't know yet.  Intel's server chips that implement full AVX512 have to significantly reduce clock speeds when you are using those instructions because it burns power like mad.  But AMD chips are more power-efficient than Intel - currently - so they might not feel as much heat.
  
  
  
• Palworld creator PocketPair is hiring.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You do need to be able to program, though, so that leaves out most of the recent Big Tech castaways.

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 12 2024 10:00 PM (bg2DR)

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