• Streaming platform Twitch is laying off another 500 staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I was thinking that would be perhaps 5% of their staff.
  
  I was wrong.
  
  It's 35%.
  
  Which explains a lot about Twitch.  1400 staff is not a lot of people to run a global video streaming platform with literally millions of channels.  I'm impressed it even works.
  
  Of course, 900 staff is even less.

• Roxi FastStream makes interactive TV possible on broadcast channels.  (The Verge)
  
  This is an impressive technical achievement, or would be if it actually did that.
  
  What it actually does is us an app to play on-demand video to replace the broadcast channel when you want something else. 
  
  Which you could already do without Roxi FastStream.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's new RTX 5880 professional graphics card is not banned in China.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not yet.
  
  
  
• The NUC 14 Pro and NUC 14 Pro+ ranges are now available - from Asus now, rather than Intel.  (Liliputing)
  
  Intel sold off all rights to the NUC product line to Asus last year.
  
  As for the devices, well, they're NUCs.  Not awful.  Not amazing.
  
  There seems to be a sudden complete absence of audio ports though.  So if you want that, think USB.

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, January 11 2024 03:31 PM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, January 11 2024 03:32 PM (nk1Z+)

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• After telling its customers to "eat shit and die" and then correcting itself and explaining that what it really meant was that as long as its customers ate the shit the dying was entirely up to them, Unity has unexpectedly fired 25% of its staff.  (Reuters)
  
  The CEO of Unity is the former head of Electronic Arts.
  
  
  
• The 1800 abruptly unemployed Unity staff have nothing to fear though, because the US added 700 tech jobs last year.  (The Register)
  
  You mean 700 thousand, right?
  
  
  
  700 thousand, right?
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel announced its Raptor Lake Refresh mobile CPU lineup and showed off its upcoming Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  So right now Intel is launching refreshed Raptor Lake and brand new Meteor Lake chips, and later this year will be launching both Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake.
  
  I can't keep them straight and I follow this stuff every day.  Normal humans have no chance at all.
  
  
  
• Intel also announced the cheaper models of the desktop Raptor Lake Refresh 14th generation range, starting at $82.  (AnandTech)
  
  The $82 chips are kind of crap and should be avoided, but for $109 you can get something decent (if you don't need integrated graphics).
  
  
  
• Six months in a leaky Raspberry Pi 5.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Or two weeks using it as a desktop PC, anyway.
  
  It works, pretty much, if you don't demand too much from it.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's "Super" range of refreshed 4000 series graphics cards is here.  (Ars Technica)
  
  In stores this month.
  
  The 4080 Super seemed completely pointless, being only slightly faster than the 4080, but it's also $200 cheaper than the 4080.  Okay then.
  
  Which one should you get?  Well, if you're playing vanilla Minecraft, consider that a Radeon 7600, the cheapest card from the current generation, can average 1000fps at 1080p.
  
  
  

• The FAA has grounded 170 Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft after important bits fell off one of them.  (MSN)
  
  Nobody was killed, but this is what is referred to in the industry as "not a good look".
  
  Maybe we should wait for the Apple iPlane.  (Twitter)
  
  Sure they're shiny overpriced toys, but the thing fell 16,000 feet to the ground and it's not even scratched.

• The East Coast is sinking at a worrying rate, by which they apparently mean, not nearly fast enough.  (Ars Technica)
  
  By 2mm per year.  Where I live, that would have the waves lapping at the bottom of the hill I'm near the top of in just, oh, half a million years, give or take.
  
  I had to hike up that hill today carrying the full set of The Art of Computer Programming, because while the post office is fine with leaving packages sent through the mail, here in the middle of nowhere they also handle the last mile (really, the last 60 to 200 miles) for a lot of the big parcel services.
  
  So if I just order stuff normally, they leave it on my front porch if I can't come to the door.  But if I pay for expedited delivery so it goes via UPS rather than through the mail, they're not permitted to do so.
  
  Meanwhile parts of Jakarta are sinking by up to 10 inches per year.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  I love how they breathlessly segue from Jakarta rapidly sinking into the mud to San Francisco sinking by 0.07 inches a year - 140 times slower, and a little less than the 2mm mentioned above for the Eastern seaboard.
  
  
  
• Acer has shown off a new 7680x2160 57" curved monitor.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's just what I'm looking for.  With two 4K monitors, you have a gap in the middle, and with three it's too wide to see everything.  With this thing you have divide the space into three 2560x2160 sections, have your IDE in front of you, SSH sessions on the left, and the actual application you are developing on the right.
  
  Perfect, except that it costs $2499.  For that price you could easily get eight good 27" 4K monitors - 95% DCI-P3, USB-C, tilt and pivot stands, all of that.  (Which I currently have three of.)
  
  So nice try, but no.
  
  
  
• Samsung has announced the 990 Evo SSD range, with half support for PCIe 5.0.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is interesting and not pointless.  The drive can either run with 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0 or two lanes of PCIe 5.0.  Both deliver a maximum of 8GB per second, and the drive itself runs at 5GB per second.  It's not the fastest SSD in the world but that's perfectly acceptable.
  
  One thing that PCIe 5 offers that hardly any manufacturers have adopted is that instead of giving you the same number of slots at twice the speed, you can effectively have twice as many slots as before at the same speed.  Most of us don't need 15GB per second SSDs, but an extra M.2 or PCIe slot would be welcome in many computers.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is killing Wordpad.  (The Register)
  
  It had no room the shovel in ads or AI, so it had to go.
  
  
  
• I see the problem, Mrs. Cleaver.  It appears little Theodore is a robot you bought at Ikea, and your husband put the head on backwards.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Withings' "BeamO" multiscope is supposedly a digital thermometer (sure), pulse oximeter (maybe), stethoscope (I guess), and "medical-grade" ECG (horseshit).
  
  
  
• Tulsa's tech scene remains resilient despite (checks notes) the state government's moves to stamp out illegal racism in hiring practices.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Huh.

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, January 10 2024 03:45 PM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, January 11 2024 04:42 AM (r9O5h)

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• Computing, you have blood on your hands.  (CACM)
  
  How dare you (checks notes) not act as the global thought police?
  
  
  

Tech News

• Pricing has leaked for the "new" Nvidia graphics cards.  (WCCFTech)
  
  At $799 the 4070 Ti Super should compete pretty well with AMD's 7900 XT.  The AMD card has more memory, but the difference between 16GB and 20GB doesn't matter as much as, say, 8GB vs. 12GB.
  
  AMD's 7800 XT is much better value at $499 though.
  
  
  
• Can AI lead the way to bug-free software?  (UMass Amherst)
  
  No.  What are you, stupid or something?
  
  
  
• That rocket with tiny amounts of human ashes that the Navajo Nation is bitching about will launch on schedule.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Mostly because NASA has no say in the matter.
  
  Unusually the Ars commentariat are firmly on the side of the rocket company and are downvoting anyone supporting the Navajo bullshit to oblivion.

• What to expect at CES 2024.  (The Verge)
  
  1. Overpriced crap.
  2. Overpriced AI-infested crap.
  
  That seems to cover it.

• Include everything.
  
  What do you mean, everything?
  
  EVERYTHING.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  A new Node.js package called everything does just what it says on the tin: It includes every single package on NPM, the Node Package Manager.
  
  More than two million of them.
  
  This has the unfortunate side-effect that since you can't delete a package from NPM if it is in use by another package, nothing can now be deleted from NPM.  Ever.
  
  
  
• Huawei's breakthrough 5nm CPU was not produced by Chinese manufacturer SMIC through multi-patterning in a 14nm fab.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It was produced by TSMC.
  
  In 2020.
  
  SMIC is producing "7nm" chips using 14nm tools and multi-patterning, but not "5nm" just yet.
  
  
  
• Writing GPT in 500 lines of SQL.  (Explain Extended)
  
  Yes, it's terribly slow, and the results are mediocre at best, but that just makes it authentic.
  
  
  
• NASA will be rolling out the new X-59 - a quiet supersonic plane - on January 12.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Not testing it, so far as I can tell.  Not flying it.  Literally rolling it out of the hangar.
  
  
  

Not Really Tech News

• Niklaus Wirth, creator of multiple programming languages including Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon, has passed away.  (Hackaday)
  
  He was 89.
  
  
  
• Pomu Rainpuff, Nijisanji EN's forest fairy, has announced her graduation.  (Dexerto)
  
  She was 9cm tall.  Which is tall for a fairy.
  
  She announced that she was leaving "to pursue other creative avenues" which I am hoping means Hololive, because Nijisanji treats its talents terribly.
  
  Her last stream will be January 20, which if you are observing the Gregorian calendar is 14 days from now.
  
  All her content will remain online.
  
  (Graduation for vtubers means the talent is leaving that company, so the personality that people know will no longer be around.
  
  This might mean they are retiring from the business entirely, like Sana from Hololive Council, who is a successful commercial artist in real life, or a familiar voice might pop up somewhere else the very next day, like Kiryu Coco or Pikamee.)

• Why don't grocery stores sell pawpaws?  (The Atlantic)  (archive site)
  
  Because (a) they're green even when they're ripe, so you can't tell that they are ripe, and (b)  when they are ripe, which you can't tell anyway, they last about three days before turning into inedible mush.

• Never pay for expedited shipping.

• In its ongoing effort to make YouTube look like a company run by competent adults, Twitch, which only last month relaxed rules to permit "artistic nudity" before reversing itself the next day, has now banned pretending to be nude.  (PC Magazine)
  
  Twitch is a terrible platform run by idiots; the only reason I use it at all is that Amazon (owner of Twitch) has copyright agreements allowing streamers to use music and video content that would result in an instant ban on YouTube, so Pippa sometimes streams there.

• Not much tech news right now.  CES is next week so everything will probably land all at once the day before.
  
  
  
• You can actually see the board of this motherboard.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's common for every square millimeter of surface to be crammed full of either components or heatsinks, but this server board from Gigabyte manages to fit in a 64-core CPU, 12 DIMM slots, four x16 PCIe slots, two M.2 slots, and all the other necessities, while leaving enough bare blue PCB to sail a very small yacht.
  
  
  
• How do jellyfish replace lost tentacles in a matter of days?  (Technology Networks)
  
  Amazon Japan.
  
  Speaking of which, my Christmas present to myself just shipped from Amazon US.  I bought the complete box set of The Art of Computer Programming, because while I already have the first three volumes (somewhere), the full set was almost the same price as just buying the two new volumes.
  
  At least I'm pretty sure it will be here by Christmas.

• Once is happenstance.  Twice is coincidence.  Three times is Amelia Watson.
  
  Yes, again, everybody's favourite Bri'ish time-travelling detective, Amelia Watson, is shipping from Amazon Japan when my supposed pre-order from Amazon US is scheduled for May.
  
  Didn't save money this time because the pre-order price was particularly good, but didn't cost any more either.
  
  
  
• The I in LLM stands for Intelligence.  (Haxx)
  
  In which the author makes the very good point that the output of LLMs like ChatGPT can be worse than useless, because the entire model is designed to produce output that is plausible rather true.
  
  Which means that significant effort is required to show that the plausible output is nonsense and should not be adopted, just as is the case with university presidents.
  
  In this case it's the creator of the utility curl, which is used basically everywhere - every Linux system, every Mac and iOS device, every Android phone and Raspberry Pi has curl on it.
  
  And his particular problem is AI-generated bug reports, reporting bugs that simply do not exist.

• Promising benchmarks of AMD's forthcoming desktop APUs continue to leak.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In this case the 8600G, showing graphics performance about 10% faster than its laptop counterpart, about equal with a desktop Nvidia GTX 1060.  Perfectly adequate for light gaming.
  
  The 8700G will be interesting.  It has 50% more graphics hardware, and we'll see whether the bottleneck there is power consumption or memory bandwidth.  If the former it will be an amazing chip; if the latter it will be...  Still pretty good.
  
  
  
• Looking for an old-fashioned tube amplifier with a transparent OLED display?  LG has you covered with the Duke Box.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, they'll be showing it off at CES, anyway.  Whether it ever ships to consumers is another matter, let alone the price.
  
  
  
• The Qotom Q20332G9-S10 network appliance can do anything except compile Linux quickly.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It supports up to 64GB of RAM, two M.2 SSDs, two 2.5" SATA drives, five 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, four 10Gb SFP+ ports, and an SFF-8087 port for attaching an external drive array.  And it's fanless, so as long as you stick with SSDs it's completely silent.
  
  It is also about a quarter the speed of a mid-range laptop CPU like Intel's 1360P.
  
  
  
• A ship carrying 800 tons of lithium-ion batteries ran into a tiny spot of bother when the batteries did what batteries do, which is catch fire.  (The Register)
  
  They put the fire out.
  
  Which is not very exciting but not every story can be a battery-powered train wreck.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 04 2024 12:35 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 04 2024 12:41 AM (LADmw)

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• ASML has cancelled DUV shipments to China following pressure from the US.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Although the DUV scanners being sold are limited to the 14nm node, by use of multi-patterning they can produce (slowly and at significant cost) chips more-or-less equivalent to 7nm.  Which is itself two generations behind the leading edge of mass production in the US, Taiwan, and South Korea.
  
  But the US government still isn't happy and wants to put a stop to that, which will of course force China to develop its own semiconductor tools industry, at which point the US will have no leverage at all.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AI is bad.  Fortunately, it doesn't need to be good to replace journalists.  (The New Republic)
  
  That's not the point the author intended to make.  It is, however, the point he did make in this barely coherent blancmange of an article.
  
  
  
• The good thing about 2TB M.2 2230 drives is that they exist.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The bad thing is everything else.
  
  If you have a device that only takes drives in this postage-stamp size - a Steam Deck, for example, or a Microsoft Surface Pro - you can now get 2TB of storage.
  
  If you can fit a larger drive, though, do so.  You'll get better performance and save as much as 50%.

• After migrating a huge application spread across a hundred servers from one cloud to another, my key takeaway was containerisation.
  
  Not using Docker, which is great if you're deploying simple applications created by some other group that has a build team.  Well, not great, but adequate.  Actually Docker pretty much sucks even then, but there are worse things.  Like Node.js.
  
  My preferred containerisation platform is LXD.
  
  So they blew that up.  (Linux Containers)
  
  To make a stupid story short, LXD is Canonical's - the people behind Ubuntu Linux - build of the Linux Containers system.  It works well.  It's still supported.  
  
  But they've moved it from the Apache license, which lets you do pretty much anything you want, to AGPL, which forces you to release your updates if you build a complex service based on it.  And that license makes corporate lawyers itchy.
  
  
  
• And they've added a contributor license agreement to control the terms under which open-source developers can contribute to the project.  (Stephane Graber)
  
  This is not usually a good sign.
  
  
  
• And Canonical has stopped contributing to the upkeep of the public container image server.  So if you're running LXD 5.20 or later - the version where these license changes took effect - and you want to install an image from that image server you should have done it yesterday.  (Linux Containers)
  
  Access to system images is being phased out for LXD users in steps, starting today, with all access being cut off for all LXD users by May 1st.
  
  You can still install Ubuntu under LXD on Ubuntu, which is in fact what I do 97% of the time.  The other 3% may become a problem.
  
  When you find a solution that works, it's only a matter of time before somebody takes it away.
  
  
  

Tech News

• How bad are search results?  Bad.  (Dan Luu)
  
  In running six tests on each of five search engines plus ChatGPT - thirty-six tests in all - eight results earned scores in the range of OK to Great.
  
  The other twenty-eight results ranked anywhere from Bad to Terrible.
  
  In fact, Google, which built its entire business on providing a better search engine than anyone else, rated Bad or worse on every test.
  
  Bing was even worse on average, but was acceptable on one test, and better than acceptable on another.
  
  
  
• California is entering a death spiral of malice and incompetence.  This might be a bad thing.  (SF Gate)
  
  Do tell.
  
  
  
• The president of the Navajo Nation has asked NASA to delay a Moon launch over the possible presence of human remains.  (KNAU)
  
  This confused me for a moment, but it's not quite as stupid as it seems, though it's still plenty stupid.
  
  The possible human remains aren't on the Moon - at least, not yet.  They're on the rocket, thanks to a commercial service that delivers a few crumbs of your loved ones' ashes into space.
  
  The Navajo Nation objects to this - and here comes the stupid part - because they claim the Moon as a sacred site.
  
  The simple and obvious response to this, which NASA will not make because they were already full of woke bullshit the last time this came up in 1998, is Have you been there?  No?  Then fuck off.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, January 03 2024 09:56 AM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 04 2024 12:27 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 04 2024 12:29 AM (LADmw)

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