• Why the past ten years of American life have been uniquely stupid.  (The Atlantic)
  
  Commies.

  The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

  Commies.

  Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?

  Commies.

  There is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales.

  Commies.

  Historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States and India, or, for that matter, modern Britain and France?

  Commies.   A universally shared loathing of journalists.

• The average lead time for semiconductors now exceeds six months.  (The Register)
  
  Almost double what it was in 2020.  And it's not the most advanced chips with billions of transistors that fare the worst, but much simpler analog devices.  
  
  I've noticed that some computer models and Thunderbolt docks no longer come with headphone jacks, and that's because they can't get the fifty-cent chip to drive the analog audio output on a $300 device.
  
  
  
• Twitter's edit button will have an audit trail.  (The Verge)
  
  No shit.  With the amount of craziness over there it's the only way it could possible work.
  
  
  
• Russian soldiers appear to have taken home souvenirs from Chernobyl.  (VOA)
  
  Hey, I've seen this one.  It's a classic.
  
  
  
• GitHub is suspending the accounts of developers working for sanction companies.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Reason #8675309 not to trust critical data to Big Tech.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 18 2022 08:13 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, April 18 2022 10:46 PM (r9O5h)

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• Twitter's board unanimously adopted a poison pill measure against the takeover bid that could save the company.  (WCCFTech)
  
  We had to destroy Twitter in order to destroy it.
  
  
  
• Twitter will never be a platform for "Free Speech".  (ZDNet)
  
  I was about to discard this item as trash, but then read a little further, and it is a fairly sound libertarian tirade against centralised social media in general:

  As with all other social media platforms, including Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Tik Tok, the structure of Twitter prohibits free speech.
  
  ...
  
  Like all who participate in social media, Elon Musk participates in the illusion that he has an identity online. For all intents and purposes, "Elon Musk" does not exist any more than any other entity. It is a name attached to a series of text snippets residing in a database constantly sorted and sifted by a platform owner at their sole discretion.
  
  People who have no identity have no "speech" because they are merely fulfilling the will of the platform. Because they have no speech, the notion of "free" speech is irrelevant.

  The error here is the notion that because the war cannot be won, that the battle is not worth fighting.
  
  Why would you turn down $43 billion in cash?
  
  Because it's not about the money.  It's about control.
  
  

• What happened at Atlassian?  Two things, neither one good.  (The Register)
  
  Intending to deactivate a single app, they deactivated the entire cluster.
  And intending merely to deactivate that app, they instead ran a secure erase procedure for regulatory compliance.
  
  And that scrubbed clean large parts of the data for 400 customers.
  
  They have backups, but the backups are designed to restore server nodes, or entire customer databases, not parts of the data into an otherwise operational platform.  So they're restoring the databases onto recovery nodes and then gluing the pieces back into the production nodes manually.
  
  I've done this kind of restore process before.  It's not fun.
  
  
  
• TSMC is expecting 2nm chips to arrive in 2026.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  With manufacturing beginning late 2025 - a year behind Intel's planned rollout of 18A.  Though TSMC has been rather better at sticking to its schedules than Intel this past decade or so.
  
  
  
• Russia plans to be producing chips at 28nm by 2030.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's not quite 20 years behind the rest of the world.
  
  
  
• The latest Linux kernels aren't just an improvement for Intel's Alder Lake.  (Phoronix)
  
  AMD's Milan-X chips - which have 3D cache just like the 5800X3D - can also see performance gains of as much as 30% depending on the benchmark.
  
  
  
• Vtuber Kaneko Lumi announced her "graduation" - retirement - from CyberLive a few weeks ago.  I was sorry to see her go; although there are too many vtubers for me to follow all the ones I find entertaining she seemed smart and talented.
  
  She also kept on streaming.
  
  Took me a while to figure out it wasn't just a delayed graduation; she'd gone independent while retaining the character.  That's unusual.  Coco and Aloe from Hololive both went independent but left their characters behind.  Suisei brought her character to Hololive, but was independent beforehand so she was free to do so.
  
  Now she and former teammate Amaris Yuri have joined Phase Connect, the same agency as Pipkin Pippa.  I hope they do well there, and without knowing the reasons behind this move I have great respect for CyberLive for allowing this to happen.  Until recently it was common not only for the character to remain the property of the original agency, but for all content to be erased upon graduation.
  
  
  
• That new dinner set I ordered arrived today. It's rather more substantial than I had expected for a hundred bucks.
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 17 2022 10:44 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 17 2022 05:05 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, April 18 2022 12:35 AM (ZlYZd)

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• Slept in this morning.  My year started with a blockchain meltdown requiring me to come back from a long-awaited holiday, and that delayed other work so that I've ended up working night and day ever since up to and including having to find a new place to live.
  
  Today I got to sleep a little.  After this things get really busy.
  
  Should return to normal in July.  I might be sleeping on the floor and working at the kitchen counter for a week or three in between.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk has launched a $43 billion all-cash hostile* takeover bid for Twitter.  (Ace of Spades HQ)
  
  Twitter isn't worth that much.  Under current management it's not worth 10% of that.  But under new management that is not completely insane it could be.
  
  * It's not Musk that's hostile here.  The current board and management team view Twitter as their private political playground, and the shareholders - never mind the users - can die in a fire if they don't like it.
  
  
  
• Buying Twitter is not a way to make money, says Elon Musk.  (The Verge)
  
  Yeah, no shit Elon.  Still glad you put the honey badger among the pigeons.
  
  
  
• The corrupt US government is trying to find a way to intervene to preserve its corrupt defender, by which I of course mean Twitter again.  (Ace of Spades HQ)
  
  Fortunately for Elon Musk, both Twitter and the US federal government are as incompetent as they are corrupt.
  
  And of course all this kicked off half an hour after I posted yesterday's update.

• AMD's new Ryzen 7 5800X3D may in fact be the fastest gaming CPU around.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And that's a $449 CPU that drops into existing motherboards, competing with Intel's new factory-overclocked $739 Core i9-12900KS.
  
  Outside of games - which don't use more than 8 cores because that's what consoles have - chips like the 12 core Ryzen 9 5900X (currently as low as $379) and the 8+8 core 12900K soundly beat the 8 core 5800X3D on heavy multi-threaded workloads.
  
  It's a bit of a niche chip but it's not bad at general purpose stuff and it's not overpriced.
  
  
  
• Renesas - which if you're not familiar is a Japanese electronics giant formed after divisions of Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and NEC were spun off and merged -has introduced the first PCIe 6 chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Given how long the industry was stuck at PCIe 3, it's amazing how quickly these new generation shave been adopted.  I don't know if PCIe 6 will actually hit the desktop market any time soon, but I didn't think PCIe 5 would be here already and it is...  Sort of.
  
  
  
• If you want to run the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 on an Alder Lake CPU, you probably want to manually upgrade the kernel.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is a bit of a nuisance, but upgrading from 5.15 to 5.16 brings on average a 14% performance improvement specifically on Alder Lake.
  
  
  
• An ounce of undo is equal to a pound of are you sure.  (HTTPie)
  
  Particularly when all your are you sure prompts look exactly alike, whether you are deleting a single file or an entire disk drive.
  
  
  
• There was an incident with GitHub actions.  (GitHub Status)
  
  Some people were just slightly concerned.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• A free Windows 11 Toolbox script did bad things.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Very bad things.
  
  I thought I might have mentioned this one here, but now I don't think I did.  I did mention a toolbox app for the Kindle Fire, but that's completely different.
  
  
  
• The Asus Zenbbook 14X OLED Space Edition is now available for pre-order.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's close to the perfect small laptop: Core i9 12900H CPU, 32GB LPDDR5, a 1TB SSD, a 14" 2880x1600 90Hz touchscreen OLED display, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, USB-A, headphone jack, and microSD card, a physical privacy shutter over the webcam, and a pressure-sensitive pen.  Oh, and a MIL-STD-810H chassis so you can just hose it out.
  
  All that and the Four Essential Keys.
  
  Around $2000.  Perfection doesn't come cheap.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 15 2022 11:33 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 15 2022 11:36 PM (Z0GF0)

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• Contracts exchanged today.  I also bought a new dinner set that matches the colour scheme of the new house.  (Gibson Elite Casa Gris in case you're wondering.)
  
  I'm going to need to stay up to 3am playing Minecraft until I recover.
  
  
  
• My current ISP doesn't offer adequate business broadband plans.  They offer cheap 100/40 plans, and expensive plans at 250Mb symmetric and up, but not the common 250/100 plan.  So I'm probably going to finally switch providers.
  
  I'm currently on a 100/40 plan - but that's the best I can get here.  At the new house that's almost the starting point.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 3090 Ti is here and it's, well, expensive.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not bad, just expensive.  Not much more expensive than the regular 3090 but that is already very very expensive - close to $2000 if you can even find one.
  
  AMD's own overpriced minor upgrade is also on its way.
  
  The 6950 XT appears to be even worse value for money.  The model they spotted is water-cooled, yes, but it's over A$3000, when a regular 6900 XT can be easily found for A$1700.

• Zero Nines Uptime, or, Atlassian and the terrible horrible no good very bad #TwoWeeks.  (Pragmatic Engineer)
  
  How a major cloud services provider achieved worse uptime than some random guy running 100,000 websites on a broken $50 server.
  
  
  
• The gambler's fallacy is not a fallacy if the events are not independent.  (Stranger Apologies)
  
  There, saved you from reading 90,000 words looking for the part where he bothers to explain why he's not obviously wrong.
  
  
  
• I've described Docker before as the world's least efficient package manager but it doesn't have to be.  (Florin Lipan)
  
  You can create a 186k Docker container that provides a working web server.  It's just that no-one does.
  
  
  
• Intel's 13th generation Raptor Lake parts could hit 5.8GHz.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's on the high-performance P cores, with the low-power E cores hitting 4.5GHz.
  
  Ryzen 7000, also due later this year, is expected to have all-core clocks over 5GHz.
  
  The current models from both companies are already extremely fast, and these improvements should be pretty substantial.  AMD could improve by more than 30%, and while Intel will have a smaller single-core speed boost, they will double the number of E cores from 8 to 16 to provide a significant increase in multi-threaded performance.
  
  
  
• Constant notifications are ruining your produc - hang on, I have to take this - tivity.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's not like I have 164,033 unread emails in my main inbox either.
  
  
  
• The Lenovo Legion Y700 is now available... In China.  (Liliputing)
  
  $499 for an 8GB/128GB model configured with the English language and the Google Play store.  $599 for 12GB/256GB.
  
  This is a high end small Android tablet, with a pretty recent Snapdragon 870 CPU and an 8.8" 2560x1600 screen.  And a headphone jack and a microSD slot.
  
  It's not cheap but there just plain aren't any real alternatives right now, unless you can find stock of Huawei's MediaPad M6 somewhere
  
  .
• One of my nuggies tasted funny at lunch.  Not bad, but as if the coating was a different mix.  Just waiting to see if I accidentally got glutenated, which I have successfully avoided for more than two years.
  
  Update: Didn't get sick.  Was that a nugget-sized chicken tender?  The same company produces gluten free chicken tenders as well and they do have a different coating.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 15 2022 12:31 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 15 2022 01:22 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 15 2022 04:55 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 15 2022 11:39 PM (LADmw)

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• Contract: As is, subject to all wear and dilapidation, blah blah blah.
  
  Reality: We're getting the builders back in to touch up the paintwork for you and make sure everything is perfect.  Oh, and there's spare paint and tiles left in the storeroom should you need them.
  
  Inspection report found a few minor issues - like a partial blockage in that $2000 digital shower head - and they're getting them fixed prior to settlement.  And if the inspection noticed little things like that, I'm pretty comfortable that there aren't any big things.  I would have said This fancy shower head kind of sucks and probably just used the other shower.
  
  Which is very different from when I was looking at the heritage-listed house a couple of weeks ago, where it was more It's 145 years old.  Comes with the territory, kid.  This place even has a warranty.
  
  Also, there's a storeroom?  I know exactly where that would be, but I thought that door was just for access under the house.  We don't really do basements in Australia.
  
  
  
• The Atlassian outage that started a week ago is expected to be over in no more than another couple of weeks.  (The Register)
  
  The outage affects specific customers rather than the entire platform, but hundreds of them.  I'm sure that knowing their project management platform will only be down another two weeks will bring them comfort in these trying times.
  
  Atlassian used to have a "free candy" offering where you could get any of their products for a small team - 3 to 10 users depending on the product - for $10 per year, and run it yourself.  
  
  Now all of that is going away because The Cloud is the Future which means that when the cloud gets screwed up there is Absolutely Nothing You Can Do.
  
  With even a minimally competent IT team, an on-premises install would limit the recovery effort to restoring last night's backup and re-entering the most recent details.  With a cloud service, you have nothing.

  "We know this outage is unacceptable and we are fully committed to resolving this," Atlassian's spokesperson said. "Our global engineering teams are working around the clock to achieve full and safe restoration for our approximately 400 impacted customers and they are continuing to make progress on this incident.  Two weeks."

• DuckDuckGo browser is here - beta version available now for Mac, Windows version coming soon.  (Liliputing)
  
  This isn't another fork of Chromium, or not quite.  HTML is rendered by whatever is native to your operating system: WebKit on MacOS and the Edge library on Windows.  The rest of the browser - the UI and networking code - is new and created by DuckDuckGo.
  
  It's intended to provide a simple browsing experience where privacy settings are always on by default, rather than giving you 20 screens full of options to hang yourself with.  Doesn't appear to be open source though.
  
  
  
• Update your Git, you git.  (GitHub)
  
  There's a security vulnerability not in GitHub or GitLab but in the Git command line client, though you're really only at risk if you're working on a Windows PC you share with untrusted users in which case you are screwed so many ways already that this doesn't much matter.
  
  
  
• You can simply hose out your Honda Element if the interior gets dirty and you're planning to junk the car within a year because this is a really bad idea and will destroy the vehicle so actually yeah don't do that thanks.  (Fifth Element Camping)

  We've all heard it before..."I love the Element, you can hose it out".
  
  While this statement is true, one could also drive it off a cliff. Doing either of these will destroy your Element, one will just do it faster than the other.

  Now with pictures.
  
  
  
• How to add an external GPU to your Steam Deck.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Step One: Be extremely determined and not a little crazy.
  Step Two: Use the M.2 slot with an adaptor cable.
  
  It has an M.2 slot - small but standard - and M.2 is PCIe, so with the right adaptor and cable you can hook it up to a graphics card.
  
  And if it gets dirty you can just hose it out.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, April 13 2022 10:54 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, April 13 2022 11:41 PM (LADmw)

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• There are curtains in the bedrooms.  Not in the media room or the main living / dining area though.  The listing photos didn't show any curtains at all, but they were there by the time of the video walkthrough.  (Brand new house.)
  
  I don't mind installing matching curtains in the other two rooms, even if that accounts for half of all the windows in the house.  I get to see just how they fit in with carpet and paint colours rather than having to guess.
  
  And I was leaning towards curtains rather than blinds anyway because as a modern design there's not a lot of warmth or soft edges and also blinds suck.
  
  
  
• Pinterest plans to block all climate misinformation.  (The Guardian)
  
  Wait, there's information on Pinterest?

  Pinterest is defining misinformation broadly: the company will take down content that denies the existence or effects of climate change or its human causes, as well as content that "misrepresents scientific data” in order to erode trust in climate science and harmful, false or misleading content about natural disasters and extreme weather events.

  Awesome!
  
  So the idiots who blamed the Tongan volcanic eruption on global warming?  Banned.
  
  People who claim to be fighting global warming but also oppose nuclear power?  Banned.
  
  Michael Mann?  Banned.
  
  NPR?  BANNED!
  
  Wait, they're not actually going to enforce their rules?  Well, that sucks.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel has moved up the start of its 18A manufacturing to the second half of 2024.  (AnandTech)
  
  18A is 18 angstroms, or 1.8nm.  Marketing numbers, but supposed to be comparable to TSMC and Samsung's marketing numbers.
  
  It's a pretty tight schedule.  4nm in the second half of 2022, 3nm in the second half of 2023, 2nm in the first half of 2024, and 1.8nm in the second half.
  
  TSMC and Samsung are currently shipping 4nm parts, and with TSMC expecting 3nm in the first half of 2023, and Samsung in the second half.  So if Intel meets this aggressive schedule, the three companies will essentially be at parity on their leading edge tech.
  
  Which is great, because these newer nodes back far more transistors onto a chip and so can produce more chips per wafer.
  
  
  
• Poopocalypse no more: The new Roborock S7 MaxV has 3D poop detection to prevent turning pet accidents into pet catastrophes.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Because by the time the poop is 2D it's a bit too late to do anything about it.
  
  
  
• Apple has started manufacturing iPhones in India.  (Reuters)
  
  Good.
  
  Still not getting one.
  
  
  
• Dell is running trials of a four-day work week in the UK and the Netherlands.  (The Registe)
  
  But what are people going to do with the other four days?
  
  
  
• The Vivo X Fold is an 8" Android tablet that folds in two to become a 6.5" phone.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is another of those devices that would be amazing at $400 but is priced at $1400.

• Contract for the house came through at around 5pm.  Have a call with my lawyer scheduled for noon tomorrow to go over a couple of details.
  
  
  
• Silicon Valley billionaires plan to turn Twitter HQ into a homeless shelter.*  (Bloomberg / MSN)
  
  Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Marc Andreeson are backing the plan, as are 91% of Twitter users.
  
  * You mean it wasn't already?

• Sonic the Hedgehog 2 had a $71 million opening weekend - the best ever for a film adapted from a video gam.  (MSN)
  
  Why should you care?
  
  Because the initial cut of the first movie was a train wreck - and they listened to fans, fixed it, and now have a hit sequel.
  
  Also, it probably took in more at the box office in that one weekend than all the recent Oscar nominees combined.
  
  
  
• Here are all he annoying changes you can avoid this year by remaining on Windows 10.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Neat.
  
  
  
• TVs suck.  (ZDNet)

  "Jump ads give participating programmers and brands the ability to present an interactive overlay at the conclusion of linear TV programs, directing viewers into a supporting app on Vizio's operating system to continue their viewing experience," Vizio said.

  They're one step away from blipverts.
  
  And if you think a premier brand like Samsung might be better you're going to have a really bad time with your new $3000 in-home billboard.
  
  I'm looking at a 48" OLED monitor for the new place.  It has plenty of room for something bigger, but there aren't many monitors larger than that.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Tuesday, April 12 2022 02:56 AM (NoOEO)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Tuesday, April 12 2022 03:47 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: David Eastman at Tuesday, April 12 2022 03:50 AM (qSKtI)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, April 12 2022 03:50 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Tuesday, April 12 2022 04:27 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Tuesday, April 12 2022 04:30 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, April 12 2022 04:55 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 12 2022 05:04 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Tuesday, April 12 2022 05:19 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, April 12 2022 05:22 AM (ZlYZd)

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Posted by: J Greely at Monday, April 11 2022 02:59 PM (ZlYZd)

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• Couple more house notes:
  
  
• 9' ceilings. I'd forgotten to ask, though it was clear from things like the hanging kitchen lights and the amount of wall above doorways that they were more than 8'.
  
  My current place has 8' ceilings, and in the ensuite which is directly under the main bathroom upstairs, only 7'. A little less in fact because the floor is raised by the tiles. I can stand in the shower and place the palm of my hand flat against the ceiling, and I am not particularly tall.
  
  
• What the heck is going on with those power points in these photos? Zoom. Enhance. Aha, USB!
  
  Forgive me if I test those with my oldest and least favourite device first. Wonder if I can get a cheap USB power tester for that matter.
  
  Handy though.
  
  
• Chilled and boiling water on tap in the kitchen. Nice. Oh, and a digital shower temperature thingy in the ensuite. Which I expect will fail after a few years and cost a fortune to replace.
  
  There's a reason this one cost 10% more than the other house the same size: They filled it up with neat toys. And I don't dislike neat toys.
  
  
• Double glazing throughout. Never lived in a place with that before; never needed it before. But in May last year - not even winter - there were already six nights below freezing up in - well, it's not a huge secret; there aren't many towns in Australia above 3000 feet elevation. One of those few.
  
  Come to think of it, double glazing would be great where I am right now - not for thermal insulation but for noise. Why are there toddlers screaming in the driveway at 1am?
  
  
• All electric except for the stovetop, but with a big solar array to cut down on bills. Ducted HVAC and also underfloor heating, which again I've never had before.
  
  
  
• AMD's "Raphael" Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs go into mass production this month. (WCCFTech)
  
  That would put them on track to be in retail in September or October, assuming no hiccups.
  
  New features to look forward to:
  
  
• Zen 4 core - about 25% faster than Zen 3
• DDR5 and PCIe 5 support
• Built-in USB 4 / Thunderbolt 3 with dedicated PCIe lanes
• Integrated graphics included on (all?) CPU parts as well as "APUs"
• Max TDP increased from 105W to 170W
  
  
That last item is important because the 16-core 5950X is clearly thermally limited on heavy multi-threaded workloads. There will still be low-power 65W models; you just won't have to exceed the rated specs to get maximum performance from the high-end models.

• From Lothar of the Hill People:

  Tech question; Hardware RAID Problem. Dell T1700 Workstation Service Tag JT1YB42 with Intel Premium RST Controller and BIOS.
  
  ISSUE: Win 10 64 bit 2021 2H update failed, leading to a very long automatic Windows system rollback / restore. The Intel Driver assistant also installed a different driver and at the same time dis-abled the desktop app used for managing the RAID Array (Raid 1 Mirror with 2 HDD). Worse, the failed update broke one drive in the array. I installed a new drive, and used the Intel boot BIOS to join the new HDD to the array. It joined but never rebuilt and because the Intel Raid Management App was then disabled, and is now not supported by Intel, I can't use any app to tell the RST controller to rebuild the array. I'm running on one HDD.
  I've bought 2 more drives, but cannot proceed until I find a compatible RST hardware driver and an associated Intel app that can be installed on this machine.
  
  My questions are: 1. How can I find the correct recent driver with it's desktop management app for this chipset? Intel has dozens, Dell hasn't helped.

  Well, that's certainly a question. I'd suggest posting on the Dell subreddit.
  
  An alternative that should be possible with Windows 10 - I think - would be to use Storage Spaces to mirror your existing drive. That doesn't care about the RAID controller or drivers or management software; it's all done by Windows itself.
  
  
  
• From Pixy Misa:

  Anyone have experience with Roombas and similar robot vacuum cleaners?
  
  This house is twice the size of my current house, and all on one level except the garage, so it seems like a reasonable thing to get, where it would be entirely useless where I live now.

  Your best bet is to - wait a minute.

• GitHub can now alert you to supply-chain vulnerabilities in the dependencies (third-party libraries) in your code. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Well, that would just be an alarm that goes off all the time, so more relevant is that it can tell you where these issues are and what you can do about them.
  
  
  
• California is looking to regulate AI-based employee hiring systems. (The Register)
  
  At multiple levels, such that both the customers and the vendors could face legal liability if the software is found to unfairly discriminate.
  
  I'm of two minds about this, because on the one hand most of this software is complete crap, and on the other hand California.
  
  
  
• How does a high-end SSD from 2018 fare when reviewed in 2022? Not great. (Serve the Home)
  
  Though to be honest, this is still not a bad drive. If I had one in an working system I would not feel any burning need to replace it.
  
  
  
• I hate Windows 11. Can I downgrade to Windows 10? (ZDNet)
  
  This question came up here recently, and this is a fuller answer than I gave.
  
  You can't roll back from pre-installed Win 11 to Win 10, but the two releases use the same activation keys (at least so far). If Windows 11 works on your PC you can download and install Windows 10. It will still be supported with regular updates through 2025.
  
  
  
• Amazon is fighting its warehouse employees' plans to unionise. (The Washington Post / MSN)
  
  First time as tragedy, second time as farce. This is Microsoft's news site republishing a story by the Amazon-owned* far-left Washington Post about corporate-left Amazon fighting to destroy its working-class left employees.
  
  There is not enough popcorn.
  
  * Yes, Bezos rather than corporate, whatever.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 10 2022 11:39 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 11 2022 01:23 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, April 11 2022 02:35 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Richard Cranium at Monday, April 11 2022 03:02 AM (769ST)

Posted by: David Eastman at Monday, April 11 2022 10:59 AM (qSKtI)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 11 2022 11:12 AM (PiXy!)

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• It's the weekend again, meaning we survived the week, which is good, but also that there's another week coming up, which is less good.  Though I suppose if you tore the page off the calendar and the next page was blank - and it wasn't January first - that would also be reason for concern.
  
  Anyway, Question and Answer time.  You know what to do.
  
  
  
• The owner accepted my offer.  Contract is being prepared, deposit to be paid Monday.
  
  
  
• So now that I've found the house, I took the time to look at some details like a topographic map of the area.  This particular street is not 3000 feet up; it's more like 3400, well above the town center.  That's higher than all but a few of the peaks in the Blue Mountains region west of Sydney.
  
  Unlike random mountain peaks I can get gigabit internet (full 1000Mb up and down) at this address but yikes is that expensive.  I'll probably go for a business-grade 250/100 plan.  Which will be cheaper than the mobile bill I just paid from the time my internet was out and I blew my 4G data cap to smithereens.
  
  
  
• AMD currently makes the best CPUs for high-end workstations.  Shame that you can't get them anywhere.  (The Register)
  
  The new Threadripper Pro 5000 is only available through launch partner Lenovo, who, uh, don't have any.  Well, they say they have them, but they won't sell you one, which is odd.  Availability is expected to improve in Q3 of this year, jus before the new Zen 4 core launches and renders it obsolete.
  
  Meanwhile the older Zen 2 based Threadripper Pro 3000 parts have disappeared from the distribution channel so you can't get those either.
  
  But it's not like AMD is hurting financially - the company is selling everything it can produce.
  
  This is part of why you get such weirdly out-of-touch statements about the economy - rosy pronouncements delivered by the managerial class a working and middle-class population facing the highest inflation rates in - for many - their entire lives.  
  
  Select parts of the economy are overheated, while other parts are limping along.  If half your body is on fire and the other half is submerged in liquid nitrogen, on average you are perfectly comfortable.
  
  I work in the overheated part and I'm doing fine financially - much better than in recent years - but since I actually listen to people I know my experience is anything but universal.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Anyone have experience with Roombas and similar robot vacuum cleaners? This house is twice the size of my current house, and all on one level except the garage, so it seems like a reasonable thing to get, where it would be entirely useless where I live now.
  
  
  
• Do you need 8 full-speed USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports on a single compact PCIe card?  No?  Here's one anyway.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just $400.
  
  The reason it's so expensive is that no-one makes an 8-port USB-C chip.  It has four two-port chips, plus a PCIe bridge chip to divide a x8 slot into four x2 connections on the board.
  
  On the other hand, that no-expense-spared design means that all 8 ports can handle 10Gbps in both directions simultaneously.  Exactly what you'd be doing to drive that much traffic I don't know, but if you're editing 8k video for a feature film, the last thing you need is for your cheap USB controller to get in the way.
  
  
  
• My first thought on seeing this article was, is Twitter planning to use this to censor conservatives, or to protect communists from well-deserved criticism?  Twitter is experimenting with "unmentioning" - the ability to remove yourself from a conversation.  (The Verge)
  
  Given the weird way Twitter handles "conversations" - a feature that doesn't actually exist but is cobbled together from a history of mentions, replies, quote tweets, and retweets - the ability to silence notifications for a conversation where you have been randomly tagged is definitely needed.
  
  But they already have that.  There's a menu option labelled Mute this conversation which does exactly this.
  
  So what is this new "unmentioning" feature?  I'll see if I can find out what they're doing - it's in a limited beta release right now - but it's a safe assumption it's bad.
  
  
  
• If your Snap-on spanner set is connected to the internet, unplug it now.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I don't know that Snap-on actually makes WiFi-enabled spanners, but nothing would surprise me these days.
  
  
  
• It put on some weight during the lockdown, leave it alone.  (Quanta)
  
  Physicists have discovered that the W boson is 0.1% heavier than it should be.  This is not a new result; they've been checking and double-checking the data for ten years because it seemed more likely to be experimental error.  And it's not a one-off; it's based on four million individual observations.
  
  If borne out, that tiny one part in one thousand difference could be the biggest shakeup in particle physics in fifty years.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, April 09 2022 07:42 PM (gVjvf)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 10 2022 05:36 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: furball321 at Sunday, April 10 2022 06:10 AM (n+R81)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 10 2022 10:10 AM (PiXy!)

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