• Google Chrome is to gain AI features including a writing helper, a theme creator, a tab organiser, a baby shower planner, and that one annoying relative who simply can't take a hint.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Brave and Vivaldi have announced they are not doing this.  Or will.  Probably.

• Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti Super is here and it's...  Well, it's...  Yeah.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not a lot faster than the 4070 Ti except in a few edge cases, but since it's the same price as the original 4070 Ti, has more memory, and is faster, even if not much, the only downside is that it uses more power.
  
  In fact, it uses more power than the original 4080, but since that cost 50% more and is also on the chopping block, it's probably not all that relevant.
  
  Compared with paying $1199 for the 4080 it's a clear win, but $1199 was a ridiculous price for the 4080.
  
  
  
• AFMF is now available in WHQL providing up to a 103% improvement in frame rates in thousands of DX11 and DX12 titles, similar to FSR and DLSS.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It does this by making shit up.
  
  
  
• The OnePlus 12 is a good phone that isn't overrun with AI crap.  (The Verge)
  
  Though it costs $799, so I would hope so.
  
  My old phone (not the Samsung, but the one before that; I keep a second phone just in case) just died of battery bloat, and I replaced it with a Motorola G14, which worked out to about $118 including tax.  Runs fine.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 25 2024 09:43 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 25 2024 09:46 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 25 2024 05:52 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 26 2024 12:58 AM (BMUHC)

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• Don't buy HP printers: They're hopelessly insecure piles of garbage, says...  HP's CEO?  (Ars Technica)
  
  He was trying to argue that if you buy third-party ink cartridges they could contain a virus that could take over your entire network, but you'd have to have delegated your design efforts to middle-schoolers in Myanmar to fuck up that badly.
  
  Or use Node.js.  That would do it too.
  
  He's lying.  Or at least, I really hope he's lying, because I'm using an HP laptop right now and I don't want it turn burn my house down.

• Palworld is a hit, and it's easy to see why.  (The Verge)
  
  In which the article is relatively sane and the comments are a mud-wrestling match of crazy people, none of them weighing less than three hundred pounds.
  
  The argument going on in the article is that one of the 3D models used in the game has very similar proportions to one of the 3D models used in one Pokemon game...  Because they're both fucking wolves.
  
  The argument going on in the comments is that Palworld is nothing but a direct ripoff of another game...  Though nobody can agree which other game.
  
  
  
• Oh, and it's now sold 6 million copies with a peak of 1.5 million simultaneous players.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Apple may have sold 180,000 units of its Vision Pro high-gloss e-waste device.  (Engadget)
  
  Which is and isn't a lot.  At a minimum price of $3499 that's a lot of idiots who just set their money on fire.  On the other hand, with an estimated 1.2 billion users worldwide, just 0.015% of Apple's customers have shown an interest in the Vision Pro.
  
  I don't think VR goggles are pointless, but consumer-grade VR goggles at $3499 a pop definitely are.
  
  
  
• A hacker has cloned a Game Boy Advance game by crashing the console at just the right time.  (Engadget)
  
  So that instead of playing a single sound from the game's ROM cartridge, it played the entire contents of the 16MB ROM cartridge over the speaker.  So all he had to do was record it, spend a couple of days cleaning up the recording, and then more time debugging the issues with the resulting code, and then it booted, albeit with bugs.
  
  Of course, you can also just read the ROM cartridge over a parallel interface in about four seconds, but where's the fun in that.
  
  
  
• Terraform Labs has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  At first I thought this was Terraform the Docker management thing, but that's owned by HashiCorp.  There is no corporation named "Terraform" associated with the product "Terraform".
  
  No, this is the Terraform associated with the Terra "stablecoin", which imploded in 2022 and took the company's market cap from $40 billion to zero inside of a week.
  
  I'm surprised they still exist.  Their former CEO is in jail in Montenegro after fleeing the country, awaiting extradition back to the US.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, January 24 2024 12:06 AM (ijGbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, January 24 2024 03:36 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 24 2024 06:26 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 24 2024 05:34 PM (PiXy!)

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• What the heck is Broadcom doing with VMWare?  (MSN)
  
  After Broadcom - which makes small boring chips in huge volumes - acquired VMWare for $69 billion, it laid off hundreds of staff, cancelled perpetual license in favour of subscriptions, and removed almost all product offerings.
  
  Why?
  
  As the article explains, it's because Broadcom only wants 600 customers for any of their business units.  If you're not in the top 600 for that market, you simply don't exist, and your needs are irrelevant.
  
  The company made $14 billion in profit last year so this approach seems to be working for them.
  
  But if you're the 601st company on their list and reliant on VMWare, you're paying a lot of attention to competitors' products right now.

• The boycott, it does nothing!  (Twitter)
  
  Palworld has sold four million copies in three days.
  
  
  
• NASA has found Ingenuity.  (NPR)
  
  Not the abstract concept, but the helicopter.
  
  It's on Mars.
  
  Which is where they left it.
  
  
  
• An AI chatbot swore at a customer and derided its company as useless...  After the customer asked it to do so.  (Time)
  
  Yep.  That'll happen.
  
  
  
• What is the solution to gridlocked EV charging sites?  (Sacramento Bee)  (archive site)
  
  Nope.  Sorry.  Can't think of anything.  No way at all to solve that problem.  Nope.  Nothing.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 23 2024 09:12 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 23 2024 09:16 AM (BMUHC)

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• The same pathetic losers who tried to organise a boycott against the Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy are at it again with Palworld.  (GGRecon)
  
  With similar results.
  
  Hogwarts Legacy sold 22 million copies last year.
  
  Palworld has sold 3 million copies in two days.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Overclocking your SSD can bring big performance gains.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you have a cheap no-name SSD that is underclocked to start with, and if you don't mind losing all your data.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake desktop chips could be 5% faster than the current Raptor Lake models.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel is in the middle of launching four generations of CPUs in the same month, which is impossible for anyone to keep track of, but it doesn't matter since they all perform the same.
  
  
  
• For truckers driving EVs there is no turning back.  (Yahoo News)
  
  That's because the only truckers driving EVs are the ones on fixed short-to-mid-range routes where charging is readily available and the economics make sense.
  
  
  
• Can an AI become its own CEO after creating a startup?  No.  (INC)
  
  The co-founder of Google's DeepMind division thinks so, but he's an idiot.
  
  
  
• Node.js users download 2.1 billion deprecated packages every week.  (SC Magazine)
  
  If you're using Node.js, you've already made a really bad decision, so why not double down on that?

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 22 2024 02:28 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 22 2024 02:34 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 22 2024 04:31 AM (BMUHC)

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• The same pathetic losers who tried to organise a boycott against the Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy are at it again with Palworld.  (GGRecon)
  
  With similar results.
  
  Hogwarts Legacy sold 22 million copies last year.
  
  Palworld has sold 3 million copies in two days.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Overclocking your SSD can bring big performance gains.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you have a cheap no-name SSD that is underclocked to start with, and if you don't mind losing all your data.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake desktop chips could be 5% faster than the current Raptor Lake models.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel is in the middle of launching four generations of CPUs in the same month, which is impossible for anyone to keep track of, but it doesn't matter since they all perform the same.
  
  
  
• For truckers driving EVs there is no turning back.  (Yahoo News)
  
  That's because the only truckers driving EVs are the ones on fixed short-to-mid-range routes where charging is readily available and the economics make sense.
  
  
  
• Can an AI become its own CEO after creating a startup?  No.  (INC)
  
  The co-founder of Google's DeepMind division thinks so, but he's an idiot.
  
  
  
• Node.js users download 2.1 billion deprecated packages every week.  (SC Magazine)
  
  If you're using Node.js, you've already made a really bad decision, so why not double down on that?

• Palworld, an independent game that can be best described as Pokemon with guns allowed a handful of vtubers a preview the past few days.
  
  Seems to have paid off because they sold a million copies in eight hours and reached half a million concurrent players in the first 24 hours - and it's still in pre-release.  (Kotaku)
  
  In case you're wondering, yes, those sheep have Browning M2s.

• Twitter has just launched support for audio and video calls via the Android app.  (Thurrott)
  
  I don't know that we want this, but having these features available from a platform not controlled by the usual Silicon Valley mafia is welcome.
  
  
  
• The group of crazed billionaires proposing that doomed planned community in Solano County in northern California has released, uh, a map.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Well, that solves everything.
  
  
  
• One of JPMorgan Chase's CEOs - apparently they have several - has claimed that the company repels 45 billion hacking attempts every day.  (The Register)
  
  This is entirely plausible, if you count individual probes by everyone from random script kiddies to Russian and Chinese state hacking teams.  It really is that bad out there.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, Russia hacked Microsoft, looking to find out what Microsoft knew about Russian hackers.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And instead got the source code to Windows 8 and Clippy.  They are now pressing charges of war crimes in the Hague.
  
  
  
• Apple's Vision Pro, the company's absurdly overpriced VR headset, is up for pre-order.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Starting at $3499.
  
  This being Apple, you need an iPhone just to order it.
  
  
  
• Third-party platforms are flocking to the Vision Pro, with native applications available from...  Nobody.  (MacStories)
  
  YouTube, Netflix, Roku, Facebook, and TikTok have all announced a profound lack of interest, though Reddit has announced some kind of support.
  
  You can open your Numbers spreadsheet in glorious 4D though, so there's that.

• Mark Zuckerberg has made it is goal to develop AGI - artificial general intelligence - with Meta now joining OpenAI and Google in the race.  (The Verge)
  
  What a shame then that none of those companies are actually working on AGI.
  
  They're all putting a lot of effort into LLMs, but going from that to making actual working artificial intelligence is like trying to build houses by practicing caber tossing.  With an enormous amount of effort you might eventually produce something vaguely house shaped that somebody could live in, but it's so obviously stupid that nobody would ever try.

• Microsoft has set 16GB as the minimum memory for AI-enabled Windows PCs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I'd recommend 32GB as the minimum for any Windows PC, unless you're fortunate enough to still be running Windows 7, in which case you can comfortably get away with half that.
  
  The laptop I'm typing this on has 16GB.  It's using 40GB.  And it's not doing very much.
  
  
  
• Leaked benchmarks of Nvidia's upcoming 4070 Ti Super show it just 10% behind the 4080.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Considering the 4080 was $1199 and the 4070 Ti Super will be $799, that's a good deal.  Well, it would be a good deal at $499; at $799 it's as good a deal as you will find right now.
  
  
  
• YouTube hasn't made the site worse for adblock users just recently - that is, not in the past week.  Recent reports of worsening problems are due to people running multiple ad blockers at once.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Don't do that unless you know exactly what you are doing.  Like running multiple anti-virus programs, it's likely to cause weird problems and slow your computer down.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 20 2024 12:54 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, January 20 2024 04:58 PM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 21 2024 03:43 AM (r9O5h)

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• Can special lightbulbs end the next pandemic before it starts?  (Vox)
  
  1. It's Vox.
  2. Betteridge's Law.
  3. Uh, maybe?
  
  They're talking about zapping rooms with far-UV light when they're not in use, which basically, uh, works.  Far-UV is not particularly friendly to your skin or eyes, so there certainly safety considerations.  And installing it is not particularly cheap.
  
  But between the disease and the response the US lost about $14 trillion to COVID, so it sounds like it's worth a shot.
  
  Just try to keep it away from idiots.  (MSNBC)
  
  
  
• Or you could go outdoors, where the UV light is free, and you can't sue anyone.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Cable companies have argued to the FTC that customers can't be allowed to quickly and easily cancel their services because then they would.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, yes.
  
  
  
• There's a leopard stalking the Infosys corporate campus.  (The Register)
  
  This may make more sense if you know that Infosys is based in India.
  
  
  
• Google has told its employees that they're all fired, just not yet.  (The Verge)
  
  That's sure to boost morale.
  
  
  
• Even if you physically block the camera, your phone can take pictures of you using the ambient light sensor.  (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  If you sit very still.
  
  It has a time delay and a resolution that makes early daguerreotypes look like wonders of modern technology.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT is particularly useful to these three types of workers, says Sam Altman.  (CNBC)  (archive site)
  
  1. Bad programmers.
  2. Lazy teachers.
  3. Doctors who want to pass off their malpractice lawsuits to OpenAI.
  
  Great marketing, Sam.

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, January 19 2024 10:55 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 19 2024 03:02 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 20 2024 12:52 AM (BMUHC)

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• Apple has unveiled its response to the Epic lawsuit that ended with the company being required to allow developers to use third-party payment providers.  (MacRumors)
  
  Some notable features:
  
  1. Developers are only allowed to use third-party payment providers with the express written permission of Apple.  Requests for permission may be filed by registered mail that must be sent and received on the sixth Sunday of any given month.
  
  2. When a user is redirected from the developer's application to an external website to process a payment, the application is required to warn in 40 point text that the user "will probably be devoured by wolves" upon leaving Apple's walled garden.
  
  3. Apple still insists on a 70% cut of any payment made by any means at any time, from anybody, to anybody.  Bobby didn't forward Apple their cut, and Bobby's store burned down the next day.  While he was in it.  Don't be like Bobby.
  
  I am exaggerating only slightly.

• Nvidia's 4070 Super is in the hands of reviewers and it's not awful.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It would be a great card at $399.
  
  It costs $599.
  
  That's just the way the graphics card market is right now.
  
  Also, groceries.
  
  
  
• I'm not saying Microsoft's latest version of Outlook is spyware, but...  (Proton)
  
  I mean, it says up front that it's going to share your data with Microsoft and 772 other companies.  Would any self-respecting spy tell you that?
  
  And this time, I am not exaggerating.
  
  
  
• Google search really has gotten worse.  (404 Media)
  
  Perverse incentives.  The longer it takes you to find what you want, the more ads you are forced to scroll past.
  
  
  

Now There's a Voice I Haven't Heard in a While Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 18 2024 12:56 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, January 18 2024 12:51 PM (oJgNG)

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• Microsoft is offering a $20 monthly subscription that adds an AI copilot to Office apps including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.  (The Verge)
  
  PowerPoint: Do you want me to just make some shit up?
  You: Yeah, the meeting is 4PM Friday so nobody is going to make it past slide 3 anyway.
  PowerPoint: You got it, boss.
  
  Hang on, that doesn't sound entirely awful.

• There's another critical vulnerability in GitLab.  (The Register)
  
  Three things about GitLab:
  
  1. It's great.
  2. It's free.
  3. Run it on your VPN, far away from the public internet.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 5 CPUs are reportedly already in mass production.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Unless they're not.
  
  If they are, that suggests we might see a Q3 launch rather than Q4.  Given manufacturing schedules, AMD should have time to get the chips back, tst them, package them, and ship them out to retailers before September.
  
  
  
• Should I try to manufacture toasters?  (Hacker News)
  
  Hell no.
  
  I can get a toaster for A$7.50 at Kmart.  You can't come within a factor of ten of that.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wednesday, January 17 2024 04:24 AM (liVFZ)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, January 17 2024 07:29 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, January 17 2024 02:34 PM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, January 17 2024 08:56 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 18 2024 01:01 AM (BMUHC)

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