Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 23 2025 06:38 AM (e0fX0)

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• 40,000 year old symbols found in caves worldwide may be the earliest written language, according to a bunch of idiots.  (Open Culture)

  And what’s more, it may be possible, suggests paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger, that those prehistoric forms of writing, which include the earliest known hashtag marks, consisted of symbols nearly as universal as emoji.

  #coughbullshitcough
  
  Yes, they're directly conflating art with actual writing.  They're obviously directly conflating art with actual writing, and it's all being reported seriously.
  
  Welcome to my TED Talk.  Check under your seats as you leave the venue.

• An online store listed the 24GB Intel Arc B60 Pro for $600.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is basically a B580 with twice the RAM.  The B580 costs $249 - nominally - so in theory you could buy two of those and a have something nice for dinner.
  
  
  
• Microsoft put me on a list.  (Slugcat)
  
  If you are porting a game to a new version of Windows and you're getting bizarre results, check to see if Microsoft has enabled optimisations specific to the name of your executable.
  
  Because in this case, they had.
  
  
  
• The best time to fix software security was fifty years ago.  The second best time was May 26, 2009 before Node.js launched.  (CACM)
  
  After that there was no hope.
  
  
  
• That's no moon.  (CNN)
  
  Astronomers have found another quasi-moon.  Of Earth.  We have several.
  
  This one is about 60 feet wide and technically orbits the Sun but in such a way that it sticks close to us.

• There isn't an AI bubble.  There are three separate and distinct AI bubbles all happening at the same time.  (Fast Company)
  
  As the article explains, there's an asset bubble, an infrastructure bubble, and a hype bubble, and while they all interact and reinforce each other, you need to examine them separately to try to figure out what is really going on.
  
  Yes, generative AI CEOs are all lying to you, but how much does that matter if you're not an investor?
  
  As to how much value will remain when the bubbles burst, I don't know.  If I knew that I'd still be rich from the last bubble.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AMD has relaunched its $40 Ryzen 3000G.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is an AM4 motherboard, a platform that is still readily available new.  It's the slowest AM4 CPU ever made with just two cores and four threads, but then it is $40.
  
  Be careful if you buy it because it's not compatible with every AM4 motherboard.  There are so many different AM4 CPU models that many motherboards ran out of BIOS space and had to drop support for some of those CPUs, and the 3000G has been a prime target for saving space.
  
  
  
• Vibe coding creates brain dead programmers.  (NMN)
  
  Written by a programmer who gave vibe coding a try and felt brain dead afterwards.
  
  
  
• I see you are doing your homework.  Would you like to cheat on that?  (MSN)
  
  Clippy would never.  Google, on the other hand, had to take down the helpful cheat-on-my-homework link in Chrome after teachers complained.
  
  
  
• Interlune has an order for 10,000 liters of Helium-3 per year starting in 2028.  (MSN)
  
  That it plans to collect from the Moon.
  
  
  
• All the packages that were compromised in the latest NPM supply chain attack.  (Koi)
  
  It's a disaster.
  
  Again.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Dan from Pennsylvania at Sunday, September 21 2025 10:38 PM (79m0J)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 22 2025 02:33 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 22 2025 01:46 PM (rcPLc)

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• AMD silently launched the Radeon 7700 non-XT - a missing model in the previous generation of graphics cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The earlier 6700 non-XT slotted in neatly between the 8GB 128-bit 6600 XT and the 12GB 192-bit 6700 XT, with 10GB of RAM and a 160-bit bus.  Since it was price to match, that was just fine.
  
  We don't have a price on the 7700 yet, but we do have specs, and they're...  Odd.
  
  The 7800 XT (which I have) had 60 GPU cores and 16GB of VRAM on a 256-bit bus.  The 7700 XT cut the cores by only 10% to 54, but the memory down to 12GB on a 192-bit bus.
  
  The new, non-XT 7700 model cuts the cores all the way down to 40, but leaves the memory size at 16GB on a 256-bit bus.  A lot of memory and a lot of memory bandwidth for a relatively modest GPU configuration.
  
  AMD hasn't issued a press release yet so right now all of this is supported by just one link and one web page.  Admittedly those are both on AMD's own site, but an actual product launch would be welcome confirmation.
  
  
  
• ASRock has launched the Radeon RX 7700 Challenger.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Compared with the 32 core 7600 XT from the same range, it is clocked 20% lower, so compute performance is almost identical, but it has twice the memory and memory bandwidth.
  
  Might be interesting to see the benchmarks on this - it would highlight which games and applications really need that bandwidth.

• How obsidian reduces the risk of supply-chain attacks.  (Obsidian)
  
  It doesn't.  The plugin API has no security model at all.
  
  
  
• The US government is set to increase the cost of H-1B visas - used for foreign workers in specialty applications, mostly in the tech industry - by $100,000.  (MSN)
  
  Since the visas currently cost $4500, that can be regarded as a significant increase.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which console prices are moving in the wrong direction again.  (The Verge)
  
  Microsoft's Xbox Series X 1TB model moved from $500 to $600 earlier this year, and is now increasing to $650.
  
  The 2TB model increased from $600 at the last year to $730 in May to $800 now.
  
  
  
• The Lenovo Yoga Tab, a smaller, cheaper version of the Lenovo Yoga Tab Plus, is now available at $549.  (Liliputing)
  
  The Yoga Tab Plus is on sale right now for $539.
  
  
  
• I regret building this $3000 Raspberry Pi AI cluster.  (Jeff Geerling)
  
  I'm just reading the blog article and I regret it too.
  
  Even with ten small models running independently, the Pi cluster is slower than a single Framework Desktop costing around $2000.
  
  And if you run a single large model across the whole cluster, things actually get worse; now the $2000 system is at least 5x faster than the $3000 cluster.
  
  Lesson: Don't do this.
  
  
  
• Why is the Gigabyte TRX50 AI Top the most returned Threadripper motherboard?  (YouTube)
  
  Because Threadripper and Threadripper Pro fit in the same socket even though Threadripper Pro has twice the memory channels and PCIe lanes.
  
  You can fit a Threadripper Pro into a regular Threadripper motherboard like this one and it will work fine - just reduced from eight memory channels to four, and with half the PCIe lanes no longer wired up to anything.
  
  Unless the board is exactly this one in which case all eight memory channels are still available and wired to eight slots.
  
  Which means that if you're a regular user with a regular non-Pro Threadripper, there are four memory slots on the motherboard that you simply can't use.
  
  Also, the fourth M.2 slot only works if you have a Threadripper Pro CPU.
  
  RTFM.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 21 2025 02:01 AM (1zWbY)

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• Intel and Nvidia announced that they are working together on Intel CPUs with embedded (ish) Nvidia graphics.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And also on custom Intel CPUs to work with Nvidia products in the datacenter.
  
  And also that Nvidia is investing $5 billion in Intel.
  
  Intel shares jumped to $30.50 on the news, meaning that the federal government made a 50% profit on its stake in the space of a week - on money that was originally allocated as a direct grant to Intel.

• Valve is dropping support for 32-bit operating systems in Steam.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Steam will still download and launch 32-bit games just fine, but you will need to run it on 64-bit hardware.
  
  
  
• The Amiga meanwhile is still 32-bit, so I guess you can't run Steam.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The latest model Apollo A6000, with an FPGA-driven "68080" CPU and 2GB of RAM, is now on sale oh it's sold out.
  
  The next batch will be on sale on October 17, costing around $1100.
  
  
  
• How Cloudflare DDOSed itself.  (The Register)
  
  It failed to protect its sites using Cloudflare.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, September 20 2025 03:59 AM (zx18t)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 20 2025 01:21 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, September 22 2025 07:39 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 23 2025 06:41 AM (e0fX0)

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• Chinese AI DeepSeek not only writes insecure code - of course it does, they all do - it selectively writes more insecure code if it thinks you are associated with one of the Chinese Communist Party's long list of enemies.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  Also if you're trying to write code for industrial control systems.  
  
  But if you're a citizen of Taiwan or Tibet or a member of the Falun Gong, and you tell it you're writing a monitoring system for a nuclear reactor, it's going to have a field day.
  
  (Go away, Bing.  Yes, I did search for an non-paywalled version that WaPo article, but now just go away.)

• Asus gaming laptops have been broken for four years.  (GitHub)
  
  Uh.  I'm typing this on an Asus laptop less than four years old.  Not sure if it's considered a gaming laptop as it has no dedicated GPU.  The same bug does affect ROG, TUF, and Zephyrus models, and symptoms were reported starting in 2021.
  
  Anyway, on a regular schedule, every 30, 45, or 60 seconds depending on model, an interrupt fires off a BIOS ACPI call that in turn includes a sleep() call, something that would get a programmer shot, hung, drawn, and quartered back in the day.  That makes everything stall for 13 milliseconds or so - not a lot of time, but if you're gaming at 80fps that's one frame just gone.
  
  Oh, and sometimes it makes the entire system blue screen.
  
  
  
• Asus did slightly better with its new prosumer 6k 32" monitor, the ProArt PA32QCV.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At no point during testing did the monitor make the entire system blue screen.  I like the warning that's it's not a super-wide gamut monitor, since it "only" covers 100% of DCI-P3.
  
  
  
• The PlayStation 5 digital edition has been upgraded to 825GB of storage from an original 1TB at no extra cost.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No need to thank us.
  
  
  
• The latest NPM attack.  (SafeDep)
  
  Not the other one.  That was so last week.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, September 19 2025 01:53 PM (rcPLc)

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• Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Games, creator of the Borderlands franchise, has responded to criticism of the performance of the latest game in the series...  Badly.  (TechSpot)
  
  Pitchford claimed the title is "a premium game made for premium gamers" and told customers to stop being poor if they couldn't afford the latest top-of-the-line hardware needed to run it acceptably.
  
  He then told customers who were complaining about Borderlands 4's miserable performance compared to, say, Borderlands 3, "code your own engine and show us how it's done".
  
  Meanwhile Silksong will run perfectly well on a GTX 1050 with just 2GB of VRAM.

• AMD has announced four new CPUs that are all cut-down versions of existing models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Two 9000 series chips with the integrated graphics disabled, one 7000 series chip with half the L3 cache disabled - and also a 400MHz lower clock speed than the most directly comparable model, and one 5000 series chip with just the lower clock speed.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Intel has filled in the bottom of its 200-series desktop chips with the Core Ultra 3 205.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  4 P cores and 4 E cores, and reportedly better performance than recent low-midrange chips like the i5 14400.
  
  Remember though that there will be no new CPU generation that uses compatible motherboards; next year's Nova Lake will come with a new socket.
  
  
  
• I like trains.  (Nature)
  
  Well, that's nice for you, Timmy, but who told you that you could use the photocopier in the staff room?
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 18 2025 12:51 AM (D/dqQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 18 2025 12:53 AM (D/dqQ)

Posted by: RickT at Thursday, September 18 2025 08:44 AM (xeXUW)

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• If you want to run Borderlands 4 at higher than 1080p at a reasonable frame rate, you are almost required to own an RTX 5090.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Borderlands 3 meanwhile will run just fine on an RTX 5050.
  
  Nvidia has published an optimisation guide that consists entirely of improving performance by making the game look like a dog had diarrhea all over the texture maps.
  
  With the same hardware Borderlands 3 looks far better while also performing better.  Not a direct comparison, but so does Cyberpunk 2077, even with ray tracing enabled to increase the load on the GPU.

• React won by default.  (Loren Stewart)
  
  If you wonder why this is a bad thing - particularly if you don't know what React is - imagine if 98% of cars sold were the Ford Escort, even in 2025, simply because it was the default car.
  
  
  
• China says Nvidia violated antitrust regulations.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Did it?  Did it, indeed?
  
  Specifically related to its 2020 acquisition of networking company Mellanox.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 17 2025 12:39 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 17 2025 05:47 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 17 2025 06:01 PM (PiXy!)

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• Children are hacking their own schools for fun, warns the UK Information Commissioner's Office.  (BBC)
  
  Translation: The British government is run by and staffed with idiots.

  It says more the majority of so-called "insider" cyber attacks and data breaches in education settings - meaning they have been carried out by someone with access to internal systems - originate with students.

  I think they've confused insider with inmate.  An insider attack would be by the staff, not by the students.

  "What starts out as a dare, a challenge, a bit of fun in a school setting can ultimately lead to children taking part in damaging attacks on organisations or critical infrastructure," said Heather Toomey, Principal Cyber Specialist at the ICO.

  Reefer madness, IT edition.

  Since 2022, the ICO has investigated 215 hacks and breaches originating from inside education settings and says 57% were carried out by children.

  Translation: The British government is run by and staffed with idiots.
   

• Why grandma won't buy Betty Crocker cake mixes any more.  (Cubby)
  
  Shrinkflation and ratios.
  
  Specifically, the boxes have shrunk from 18.25 oz to 15.25 oz and now to 13.25 oz.  So if you follow an older recipe specifying a box of cake mix and specific amounts of wet ingredients, you're going to end up with slop rather than cookies.
  
  You can get away with changes like this in cooking generally, but not in baking.
  
  
  
• I checked the benchmarks of the two tablet CPUs on Nanoreview.  The Idea Tab's A76 (in a Mediatek Dimensity 6300) scores 782 on single-threaded Geekbench.
  
  The Legion Tab's X4 core (in a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3) scores 2193 - nearly three times as fast.
  
  The A715 core used in the Idea Tab Plus lands right in the middle with 1398.
  
  For an idea of how far we've come, an A53 core running at 1.3GHz from the beginning of 2016 scored just 141.  So the A76 is a lot faster than older low-end tablets which mostly ran the A53 core, and it's just a little slow compared to modern high-end hardware.
  
  
  
• A look inside the Beelink ME NAS device.  (Liliputing)
  
  The ME is almost a latter-day Cobalt Qube - you can even buy it in blue.  Two network ports, HDMI, and USB ports accompany an Intel N150 CPU, 12GB of RAM, a 64GB boot device, and six M.2 slots (five PCIe 3.0 x1 and one PCIe 3.0 x2).
  
  One interesting point that I hadn't considered: The N150 has nine PCIe lanes but only supports five independent devices.  The ME has the six SSDs and two 2.5Gb Ethernet controllers, and eight is more than five.
  
  So how did Beelink do that?  Apparently they just did it and it worked.
  
  The review goes into benchmarks but they're pretty much as you'd expect - the CPU is not particularly fast, but is more than fast enough to fill both 2.5Gb Ethernet ports simultaneously.
  
  The also tested with a 5Gb USB Ethernet adaptor, and it worked and filled that with data easily, with a top read speed of around 600MBps.
  
  
  
• Vibe coding has turned senior developers into AI babysitters but they say it's worth it.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  While blinking rapidly in Morse code.
  
  
  
• Indian tech startup Hike took one.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The company abruptly shut down after crowing about how well its US division was doing on Saturday.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 16 2025 12:53 AM (qs+Fu)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, September 16 2025 08:36 AM (rcPLc)

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• China's Great Firewall turns out not to be watertight: It sprang a leak involving 500GB of code and documentation relating to the firewall itself.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's a lot of data to sift through but it spells years of trouble for the maintainers of the firewall, whether in China itself of in it client states Myanmar, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Ethiopia, all of which run versions of the same totalitarian control software.

• Didn't get a lot of time to test the tablets, but they are both set up and working fine.
  
  The two 2560x1600 displays look great.  The "paper-like" screen on the cheaper Idea Tab stands out in particular as a pleasant user experience.  Colours don't pop quite the way they do on my OLED screens, but it's not washed out or muted, just not aggressive about grabbing your attention.  It's listed as covering 72% of the NTSC colourspace, which is the number to look for - it's the equivalent of 100% sRGB.  It doesn't seem to handle DCI-P3, which you'll find on televisions and OLED panels, but it's a perfectly good screen, and considering that it's on a budget tablet it's a very good screen.  And the resolution is as sharp as you could ask for unless you have some very specific needs.
  
  The CPU on the Idea Tab...  Is a budget CPU.
  
  Using the much more expensive Legion Tab (my price A$799), tasks are done before you can start to wait for them.  Using the Idea Tab (my price A$249) it's not slow, exactly, but you can definitely feel the 2018 Arm A76 shouldering the weight of a 2024 version of Android.
  
  Maybe I should have set up the slower model first.
  
  I haven't tested sound extensively but the speakers on both tablets sound just fine at the default settings.
  
  The 11" Idea Tab has a headphone jack and a microSD slot in addition to the USB-C port.  The 8.8" Legion Tab has two USB-C ports, which might be useful, I guess, but I'd much rather they just return the headphone jack and microSD slot.  (Reportedly the coming Legion Tab 4 will restore the microSD slot.)
  
  I also need to test the pen that came with the Idea Tab.  The web site doesn't say this, but according to 9to5Google that pen and only that pen also works with the Legion Tab.  (You can also buy that pen by itself, but general-purpose Android pens aren't supported by the Legion Tab.)
  
  Perfect opportunity to confirm this, or at least the first part.
  
  
  
• Also mowed the lawn.  Last time I did that I noted my cardiovascular health seemed to be shot from the earlier bout of RSV.  It was just two days later that I got my scary blood pressure reading and found new things to worry about.
  
  So: Definitely on the mend, but definitely not fully mended. 
  
  
  
• Are heart attacks contagious?  (TUNI)
  
  I mean, probably not, but nobody believed that stomach ulcers and gastric cancer were largely caused by bacteria until Barry Marshall chugged a beaker of H. pylori in 1984 and landed himself in hospital and in the history books - winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology for an unauthorised experiment on himself.
  
  (He got better.)
  
  
  
• Five years ago KK Park in Myanmar was farmland.  Now it's a bustling town, home to many of the country's 100,000 trafficked slaves working in scam call centers.  (The Guardian)
  
  Null route the entire fucking country.
  
  
  
• We clean up after vibe coding.  Literally.  (404 Media)
  
  Vibe coded your way into disaster?  Know literally nothing and can't find your way out?  Now you can outsource your mess to a Polish tech team which maybe you should have done in the first place.
  
  (I took a moment to look up the location of one of the countries mentioned in the article.  Not the third world.  Potentially a viable solution.)
  
  
  
• "Forever chemicals" have been found in 95% of beer tested in the US.  (Science Daily)
  
  At long last you can buy beer and not just rent it.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, September 15 2025 01:59 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, September 15 2025 06:00 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 16 2025 03:44 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, September 16 2025 11:01 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, September 16 2025 11:05 AM (ZLF73)

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