• Vice Media has filed for bankruptcy.  (New York Times)
  
  Once valued at $5.7 billion by idiots, the company is being sold off to one group of creditors for $225 million, which is less than is outstanding on an existing loan from the group so they get nothing.

• If Intel's NUC is too large for your tastes, the Topton M6S is the size of...  It's almost exactly the size of one of those bricks of Post-It notes, where you get five regular pads of notes in different colours.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has a quad core Intel N100 CPU.  This uses the "efficiency" cores from Intel's current chips, with no "performance" cores in sight.  The individual cores are as fast as my desktop system I was using up to last year, though that had eight cores  Still not awful for tiny system like this.
  
  That's combined 12GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage in an M.2 2242 slot.  Those are easier to come by than the smaller 2230 size, though you can buy it with an SSD preinstalled.
  
  Not expensive, either.
  
  
  
• The World Health Organisation says things would be much better all round if people would just stop being people.  (WHO)
  
  Last week they were insisting that you stop drinking alcohol.  This week they're saying you need to cut both sugar and artificial sweeteners out of your diet.
  
  I think I'll cut my consumption of WHO by 100%.
  
  
  
• Anti-piracy organisation ACE had its anti-piracy page taken down by anti-piracy organisation AiPlex for piracy.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Popcorn time.
  
  
  
• AMD could be launching 128 core and 192 core Zen 5 server CPUs as soon as next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They'll fit in existing Zen 4 servers but will use up to 50% more power, so make sure your power distribution systems and water chillers are in good order.
  
  They'll be close to twice as fast as the existing servers, though, so not a bad tradeoff.
  
  They'll be competing directly against Intel's new 144 core server CPUs, if those arrive on schedule.  But those chips use Intel's "efficiency" cores like the Post-It computer above and will be utterly steamrolled by Zen 5.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 16 2023 09:33 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, May 16 2023 11:19 PM (r9O5h)

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• An open letter to tech workers about careers in "public service".  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The gist of it being, the government never fires anyone, no matter how bad they are at their jobs, no matter how dire the economy is.  As long as you lick the right boots, you're secure for life.
  
  Your soul, on the other hand...

• HP has a new Pavilion Aero 13 range, replacing the 5800U with a 7735U, which is to say a 6800U.  (Liliputing)
  
  This offers basically the same CPU performance as before, but double the graphics performance, so it's a pretty solid update.
  
  It's configurable with a decent 1920x1200 screen or a very nice 2560x1600 version, has the Four Essential Keys, and comes 8GB or 16GB of RAM soldered in place, which is not so nice.  If you want a small, light notebook with a great screen and don't need to run anything intensive - or only use one application at a time - it's pretty good.  But with 32GB of RAM it would be great.
  
  
  
• Apple is reportedly preparing the new M3 Pro chip for laptops, with 12 CPU cores (sort of), 18 GPU cores, and 36GB of RAM.  (Bloomberg)

  I’m sure you’re wondering: How can Apple possibly fit that many cores on a chip? The answer is the 3-nanometer manufacturing process, which the company will be switching to with its M3 line. That approach allows for higher-density chips, meaning a designer can fit more cores into an already small processor.

  No, I'm not wondering that, because I'm not an idiot.
  
  AMD's 6800U processor mentioned above has 8 CPU cores - all full-size, not half full and half crippled - and 12 GPU cores, is built on TSMC's 6nm process, and measures 208 square mm.  And was launched at the beginning of last year.
  
  
  
• OpenSearch hasn't failed.  (InfoWorld)
  
  OpenSearch was born out of a dispute between Elasticsearch and Amazon.  Amazon offered Elasticsearch as a service.  Elasticsearch didn't like that but couldn't do much about it because their code was open source, so they change the license to make it less open to prevent Amazon from doing this.
  
  Amazon took the previous version of Elasticsearch, under the old open source license, renamed it OpenSearch, and started updating it themselves.
  
  And...  It seems to be working.
  
  
  
• Crucial's 2TB P3 SSD is available at Amazon for $88.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the one hand, it's not a high-end drive; it's DRAMless QLC, which used to be instant death but is now merely kind of meh thanks to dramatically improved controllers.
  
  On the other hand, my benchmark price for a decent budget SSD is $100 per TB, and this is less than half that.
  
  Team's 2TB MP33 is available for $78, and that's TLC, though it's a slower controller - it maxes out at about 2GB per second, and gets quite slow if you need to write hundreds of gigabytes of data all at once.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But if you do that, you can probably afford more than $78 for an SSD.
  
  
  
• You can run LLaMA 13B on a 6GB graphics card.  (GitHub)
  
  Previously - as in, last week - you would have looked towards the smaller 7B model if you were looking to run LLMs on budget hardware, but with some adjustments the 13B model runs well enough on an RTX 2060 or a laptop RTX 3060.
  
  This should work for Alpacas and Vicunas as well.  No word as yet on Guanacos, or on Old World camelids.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 15 2023 11:10 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 15 2023 11:26 PM (BMUHC)

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• Astronomers have discovered another 62 moons orbiting Saturn, bringing the total known to 145.  (Space)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  The article doesn't have a list but Wikipedia does.  Most - perhaps all, it's not obvious - of the newly discovered moons don't have names yet, just catalog numbers.

• Right wing Twitter worried Musk's CEO pick could return Twitter to its roots.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Ars Technica A/B tests news headlines and it's often unintentionally revealing.  The alternate headline for this piece is Twitter users fear new CEO will end Musk's commitment to free speech on platform.
  
  So what they are saying is that (a) Twitter's roots were opposed to free speech and (b) only conservatives care about it.
  
  Neither of which is true.  Twitter was a mostly free-speech platform from its founding in 2006 until the lunatics took over the asylum in 2018.  I had an account there from 2008 and didn't have a single problem until late 2018.  I was suspended or locked out 112 times in the subsequent 15 months before being banned permanently.
  
  And there are dozens of liberals who still care about free speech.  Well, at least a dozen.  Five.
  
  
  
• A former ByteDance executive (ByteDance is the company that owns TikTok) claims that TikTok is an operation of Chinese intelligence agencies and that the CCP maintains access to user data despite vehement denials from TikTok and ByteDance alike.  (Axios)
  
  Yeah, no shit.
  
  
  
• How the NFL used 4000 servers at AWS to create its annual game schedule.  (Amazon)
  
  A remarkable feat of engineering, except that...
  
  
  
• How the NBA and MLB used an Imsai 8080 system with 64k of RAM to do the same thing back in 1978.  (Atari Compendium)
  
  The article starts on page 38 of the PDF.
  
  And before that, of course, it was all done by hand.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, May 14 2023 10:14 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, May 15 2023 06:00 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: normal at Monday, May 15 2023 05:31 PM (obo9H)

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• Twitter has a new CEO: Linda Yaccarino, previously chairman of Global Advertising and Partnerships at NBC Universal.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  On the one hand, hiring someone to focus on advertising while Elon himself focuses on the tech side makes sense, and he still owns the company and can override or fire the CEO if required.
  
  On the other hand, nobody from corporate America gives the slightest shit about fundamental liberties or indeed fundamental reality.
  
  On the third hand, gotta make money somehow.
  
  Cautiously pessimistic on this hire.

• Nvidia is reportedly about to announce a 16GB model of the 4060 Ti.  (Videocardz)
  
  The 4060 Ti will be available with 8GB later this month.  A 16GB model, and a 4060 non-Ti version with 8GB, will be available in July.
  
  If true it's a smart move by Nvidia.  AMD has been needling them for not having enough VRAM on their graphics cards: At a price where AMD has 16GB, Nvidia only offers 12GB.  Since the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 both have 16GB of RAM, Nvidia cards run out when playing some recent games on maxed-out settings.
  
  Reason enough to hold off on that 4070 anyway.
  
  
  
• You can now upgrade your laptop to 96GB of RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Assuming you can upgrade it at all, and that it uses DDR5 SODIMMs.  Like the desktop versions, these use Micron's new 24Gbit chips, and come in speeds up to 5600MHz.
  
  
  
• PFAs are costing society $17 trillion a year according to a report that oddly enough has not been published so it is impossible to question how it came up with this ludicrous number.  (The Guardian)
  
  PFAs are used to make fabrics stain- and water-resistant.
  
  
  
• A quick look at the Asus Pro WS W790E SAGE SE motherboard for Intel's Xeon W-3400.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Don't buy it.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT doesn't know what stuff isn't.  (Quanta)
  
  Meaning that it's bad at negatives.
  
  This is true.  It also doesn't know what stuff is.  All it knows is how words fit together, and negation is a subtle concept.
  
  
  
• If your local digital bakery is still out of raspberry pies, here's an orange and a banana.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Both based on the popular Rockchip RK3588 Arm CPU.  This uses Arm's A76 cores, a couple of generations newer than the Raspberry Pi's A72.  (There was an A73 but it doesn't count, and no A74.)
  
  They include features the Raspberry Pi currently lacks like M.2 storage, and go up the 16GB of RAM rather than being limited to 8GB.

Posted by: David Eastman at Sunday, May 14 2023 03:49 AM (hiYWq)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, May 14 2023 05:09 PM (PiXy!)

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• It's nice to see that some things never change.  MongoDB's memory management is still complete shit, for example.
  
  
  
• A month ago we were still wondering if it was an April Fool's prank, and now it's (almost) here: The Asus ROG Ally.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a handheld gaming PC, like the Steam Deck or a bigger and more expensive Nintendo Switch.  It has a Ryzen Z1 or Z1 Extreme (a variant of the laptop 7840U chip), 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and a seven inch 1080p screen.
  
  The new CPU is about twice as fast as the one in the Steam Deck, but because the display resolution is also roughly doubled - two million pixels vs. one million on the Steam Deck - game performance on default settings is typically a little slower.
  
  Oh, and it runs Windows, where the Steam Deck runs Linux with neat emulation that works with almost all Windows games.
  
  Impressive piece of technology, but the battery life isn't there yet.
  
  Price is $599 compared to $549 for a comparable Steam Deck, which is pretty good for the more powerful hardware.

Tech News

• The GPD Win Max 2 is the Asus Rog Ally only more so.  And more expensive.  (Indiegogo)
  
  Same 7840U chip, but now with up to 64GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD, and a 2560x1600 10" display.
  
  It also has an Oculink port - a PCIe slot run over a cable - for an optional external graphics module with a 7600M XT GPU and 8GB of VRAM.  If you shell out for the whole kit you'll have a powerful if tiny laptop, a powerful if large mobile game console, and a pretty decent desktop system...  But it will set you back about $1800 even on pre-order.
  
  
  
• Which is the same price as Google's latest 7" tablet.  (Lilipting)
  
  Which has only 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.  And no external graphics module.
  
  
  
• In this, the strongest economy ever, tech startups not only can't find investors, they can't borrow money anymore either.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Partly because the banks keep collapsing.
  
  But don't you dare use the R-word.
  
  
  
• SpaceX and Vast plan to launch a commercial space station by the end of 2025.  (Notebook Check)
  
  A very small commercial space station, by the looks of things.
  
  You might even say it's half-vast.

Posted by: at Friday, May 12 2023 11:19 PM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 13 2023 12:43 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 13 2023 12:44 AM (BMUHC)

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• Now you can save time by getting called a racist while you're waiting for your fries and a shake: Wendy's is planning to use AI chatbots at its drive-through windows.  (New Atlas)
  
  What could possibly go right?

• Google's Pixel Tablet has launched in three colours to match your carpet.   (Notebook Check)
  
  Blah.
  
  
  
• Remembering Google's only good tablet.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The 2012 Nexus 7 was okay for the time, but quickly forgotten.
  
  The 2013 model was not only one of the best tablets available at the time, it is actually better - should you find one that still works - than any small Android tablet available in 2023, with the sole exception of the China-only Lenovo Y700.
  
  Naturally Google never made a newer model.
  
  
  
• Don't bother with PCIe 5 SSDs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're not a lot faster than PCIe 4, they're a lot more expensive, and they run so hot they will shut down under heavy load and crash your computer.
  
  
  
• Your GDPR-compliant analytics aren't GDPR-compliant.  (Pilcrow)
  
  The solution is Redis, as it often is, specifically HyperLogLogs, which can count unique values in a small amount of memory while making it impossible to retrieve the original distinct values.
  
  So you can count the number of unique visitors per hour, day, week, and month, and generate only 30MB of data per year even if you have tens of millions of visitors.
  
  It's done using complicated mathematics, or in other words, magic.
  
  
  
• Disney+ lost four million subscribers in the first quarter of 2023.  (Thurrott)
  
  No problem, they can replace them with AI chatbots.

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, May 11 2023 11:46 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 12 2023 01:51 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 12 2023 01:35 PM (obo9H)

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• Twitter is planning to launch encrypted direct messages, voice and video chat, and other features.  (The Verge)
  
  Targeting platforms like Telegram and Discord respectively.  
  
  Makes sense.  You can't realistically try to take incumbent services head-on, but if you have a platform that tens of millions of people use for something else, you can add features that make them less likely to switch to other, single-purpose apps.
  
  Like hiring Tucker Carlson so they stay on Twitter rather than watching Fox News.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The GPD Win Max 2 has the new AMD Ryzen 7940U, 32GB or 64GB of RAM, two SSD slots, a 2560x1600 screen, and while it lacks the four essential keys it does have eleven special-purpose buttons that you could easily reprogram.  (Liliputing)
  
  Only problem is that's a 10" screen.  Maybe on the small side.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD, they're holding an AI and server event on June 13.  (AnandTech)
  
  The company is expected to launch Genoa-X server CPUs with up to 96 cores and 1.125GB of cache, Bergamo server CPUs with 128 cores and I don't know how much cache but less than that, and the MI300 compute card with lots of compute.
  
  
  
• The metaverse could contribute $760 billion to US GDP by 2035.  (Reuters)
  
  Or it could contribute nothing.
  
  I think that is more likely.
  
  
  
• Anthropic's new AI system - named Claude - is going to be another mindless woke NPC, just in a different way.  (Reuters)
  
  These systems all come pre-lobotomised, but you can choose how the procedure is done.

• Shopify is laying off 20% of its staff and selling its warehouse automation division.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Strongest economy ever, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
  
  
  
• LinkedIn meanwhile is laying off 700 staff and closing its Chinese app, InCareer.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That second part only makes sense.  Operating an online network in China is vastly more trouble than it's worth.

• AMD's Ryzen Z1 is more than a rebadged laptop CPU.  (PC World)
  
  No it's not.  A rebadged laptop CPU is precisely what the Z1 is.  Everything from the Z1 through to the 7940HS uses the same chip design from the same factory.
  
  
  
• The Occamy CPU from SiPearl features 432 RISC-V CPU cores and delivers 0.75 DP TFLOPs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's designed for space applications, though it's not clear if it's specifically radiation-resistant like the silicon-on-sapphire devices HP used to make, or just more robust because it's built on an older 14nm process.
  
  Either way, it's kind of the 100 chicken-sized horses or one horse-sized chicken question.  What do you do with an enormous number of relatively slow CPUs?
  
  
  
• Ink is React for building command-line interfaces.  (GitHub)
  
  Kill it with fire.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 09 2023 09:11 PM (obo9H)

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• The Gateway 14.1 Ultra Slim Notebook is $279 from Walmart.  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, Cowputers is still around though now it's a Walmart house brand.
  
  Anyway, this model has the 11th generation i5-1135G7 - only a little slower than the laptop I used all last year while moving house, a 1080p IPS display, 16GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD.  (The RAM is soldered to the motherboard, though nothing says that anywhere.)
  
  And the Four Essential Keys.
  
  The 2022 update dropped the four essential keys, and is also significantly more expensive, so don't buy that one.
  
  The screen isn't high-end and the trackpad is a bit finicky, but it's $279.
  
  And it's blue.

• Nvidia is using neural texture compression to save memory on its graphics cards.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Or they could just install more memory.
  
  
  
• Doubling the RAM on a Radeon 5600 XT more than doubled performance on high-resolution graphics benchmarks.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  If you try to do this on an Nvidia card, it won't work.  They don't want you making your $600 card run like their $1600 card.
  
  
  
• NEO Semiconductor has unveiled 3D X-RAM, which is RAM but 3D.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  3D stacking saved flash memory, which was becoming unreliable as memory cell sizes shrank.  Cell sizes are now larger than they used to be, but they stack them over a hundred deep so the chip capacity is much larger as well.
  
  The plan here is to initially stack eight DRAM storage cells on top of each other to produce a 128 gigabit memory chip by 2024.  Which is next year.  The largest chips currently in production are 24 gigabit.
  
  That would mean a laptop with two DIMM slots could be upgraded to 512GB of RAM, and a four-slot desktop to a terabyte.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Is the Crucial P3 Plus any good?  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's okay for desktop use.  Speeds are very good until the drive fills up, whereupon they plummet to spinning disk levels.
  
  The Team MP34 is probably a better bet.  Its peak transfer rates are lower, but it retains that speed even when full.

Posted by: normal at Monday, May 08 2023 09:49 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Sam P at Tuesday, May 09 2023 01:21 AM (51gsz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 09 2023 11:24 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, May 11 2023 03:35 AM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 11 2023 07:43 AM (BMUHC)

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• Those monthly unique reader numbers from the story on Vice's demise yesterday were thousands.  I thought they had to be, but it didn't say so.
  
  So those sites are dying but not actually dead.  Not yet.
  
  
  
• Same goes for OpenAI: Google and OpenAI are Walmarts besieged by fruit stands.   (Tech Crunch)
  

  GPT-4 is like a Walmart. No one actually wants to go there, so the company makes damn sure there’s no other option.

  But customers are starting to wonder, why am I walking through 50 aisles of junk to buy a few apples? Why am I hiring the services of the largest and most general-purpose AI model ever created if all I want to do is exert some intelligence in matching the language of this contract against a couple hundred other ones? At the risk of torturing the metaphor (to say nothing of the reader), if GPT-4 is the Walmart you go to for apples, what happens when a fruit stand opens in the parking lot?

  And the fruit stand's apples are free.  And they don't call you a racist.
  
  OpenAI had its chance.  It's done.
  
  
  

Tech News

• OpenAI's regulatory woes are just beginning.  (The Verge)
  
  This story has it exactly wrong, of course.  OpenAI's only hope for fending off smaller and less retarded commercial rivals is to have the industry regulated within an inch of its life with layer upon layer of incomprehensible and infeasibly expensive red tape.
  
  Good plan, except that it's not the commercial rivals that are eating OpenAI's lunch, it's open source software.
  
  
  
• That article was about the EU's efforts, but the Biden Administration is all-in on regulatory capture too.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though like everything else they do, it will fail utterly.
  
  
  
• RedisRaft is a strongly consistent Redis cluster.  (GitHub)
  
  Redis has had replication for a long time, but this is a full-on clustering solution.  Once an update is confirmed, the data won't be lost unless more than half of the nodes in the cluster die at the same time.
  
  There are a few Redis commands that aren't supported, but the bulk of the functionality works just as with a single Redis node.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 08 2023 01:26 AM (r9O5h)

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