• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman-Fried shares his optimistic vision of our AI future.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  He explains that European-style regulation, which extracts huge fines from large American tech companies because there are no* large European tech companies for some strange reason, for any reason or none at all, is bad, while US-style regulation which simply crushes his smaller and less dementedly woke competitors is good.
  
  * There is one - Dutch company ASML, which is perhaps the single most important company in the world today.
  
  
  
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman-Fried raises $115 million for a crypto company that scans people's eyeballs.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I am a meat popsicle.

• Why have air conditioning when we could all live like termites?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, apart from the fact that you're talk about demolishing every human dwelling in the world and rebuilding from scratch, apart from the infrastructure problems of such dense living spaces - not to mention the psychological and sociological ones, apart from the fact that termite mounds are found in very few and specific locations in the world for a very good reason, apart from the fact that the one example presented is located in a city at an altitude of a mile where nobody needs AC in the first place, apart from the fact that in any cold climate the people on the outer edge of the building - you know, the only part that has windows - would all freeze to death when winter arrives - termite mounds not notably common in Norway, for example, apart from all that, the square-cube law would mean that twice a day you'd have hurricane-speed winds blasting through the insides of your incomprehensibly expensive new megastructures.
  
  Apart from that, sure.  Eat the bugs and live like them too.  I'll be over here.  In my house.  Eating steak.  Or chicken nuggets anyway, given the price of a good steak.
  
  
  
• Electric truck maker Nikola is at risk of being deleted from NASDAQ mostly because it hasn't made any electric trucks.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It has faked some videos of electric trucks, though, so maybe Disney will buy it.
  
  
  
• IMEC - the global body that tries to manage the semiconductor industry the way an ailurophobe manages thirty to fifty feral cats - has laid out plans to reach the 2A node by 2036.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  2A - two Angstroms - is 0.2 nanometres.  Which is slightly smaller than a single silicon atom.
  
  It might seem impossible to construct silicon chips with features smaller than silicon itself, and you'd be correct, except for the fact that these are not engineering numbers but marketing numbers, which is to say, lies.
  
  And that would mean the whole plan is nonsense except for the fact that the current mainstream production nodes - 7nm and 5nm - are also marketing numbers.
  
  So, yeah, chips are going to keep getting larger and smaller and more complicated at a rapid pace for at least another decade.
  
  
  
• Am I the asshole unethical one?  (Daily Nous)
  
  An ethics professor - I've made my opinions on the field of ethics clear before - made it very clear to his class that if they cheated on their exam, they would fail.
  
  Then he posted a sample exam with obviously incorrect answers to a known cheating site.  We're talking about 2 + 2 = banana kind of answers.
  
  Then his students cheated.  
  
  At least he didn't have to fail them for cheating, because they failed in the old-fashioned way of getting zero on the test.
  
  I think they have a bright future as ethicists.
  
  
  
• Don't buy HP printers.  (The Verge)
  
  HP offers a "Plus" program where - if you sign up within seven days of buying your new printer - you get "free" ink for "six months".
  
  Oh and also HP locks your printer to prevent you ever buying non-HP ink cartridges, even if you later cancel your subscription, even though HP inkjet printers are certified as not locking out third-party ink cartridges.
  
  Epson and Brother both sell inkjet printers with ink tanks that - this is complicated, so bear with me - you fill with ink.
  
  
  
• "China's" "home-grown" "Powerstar" CPU is a painted-over Intel 10th generation Core i3.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not in the sense that China stole Intel's design and made the chips itself while claiming credit for the design effort, since Intel's 10th generation chips were made on a 14nm process and China does have 14nm production capability, but in the sense that these are made by Intel and then literally painted over with new part numbers.
  
  Which is one way to do it, I guess.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in Real China TSMC is preparing a 6x reticle size CoWoS-L super carrier interposer for extreme SiP processors.  (AnandTech)
  
  You know how a few years ago AMD launched its new Zen CPUs, and rather than making an 8-core chip for desktops and a 16-core chip for workstations and a 32-core chip for servers (which they couldn't do because they didn't have any money), they made a single 8-core design that you could use one or two or four of according to your need?
  
  That's what this is about.  Only six times bigger.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, May 27 2023 09:24 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 28 2023 01:52 AM (BMUHC)

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• An idea so bad even the crazies at Ars Technica are calling it out: Google Search has started rolling out "ChatGPT-style" generative AI results.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The only thing we want from a search engine is to report accurately on what has been said on the web relating to our search term.
  
  The most notable thing about ChatGPT and its relatives is that it will simply make shit up, including quotes that were never said and scientific papers that were never published.
  
  This is going to be a disaster.
  
  It's opt-in for now.
  
  For now.
  
  
  
• JPMorgan says hold my Bud Light as plans leak for a ChatGPT-based investment advice service.  (CNBC)
  
  To be fair, the company hasn't officially announced anything; this could just be a case of staking a claim on a trademark to make sure nobody else nabs it.
  
  To continue being fair, on the scale of dumb ideas this is a polar ice cap to Google's iceberg.
  
  Either one entirely capable of sinking the Titanic, mind you.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Acer's new Swift Edge 16 is a laptop.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has the latest Ryzen 7840U - the lower-power variant of the 7840HS - with 8 Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RDNA3 GPU cores.
  
  The screen is a 16" 120Hz 3200x2000 OLED model covering 100% of DCI-P3 colour and reaching 400 nits brightness, all of which sounds good.  It has two USB 4 ports, two USB 3 ports, HDMI, microSD, and a headphone jack, plus a 1440p webcam (commonly these are 1080p or even just 720p) and the latest WiFi 7.
  
  The Four Essential Keys are present in the form of a three-column numeric keypad, which is not perfect but something I can live with.  Price starts at $1299 with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, and there's a second M.2 slot for expansion.
  
  Memory is soldered (LPDDR4 according to the article, which I suspect is wrong), but at least there's a 32GB model on the way though pricing for that is not mentioned.
  
  The other point of note is that it weighs 1.23kg, which is actually lighter than my current 14" laptop.  Could be worth checking out.  There are plenty of more powerful 16" laptops with better keyboard layouts, but they are also anything between 50% and 100% heavier than this one.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's 2TB SN850X is available for $135.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a good drive.  It's TLC, has a DRAM cache, and supports PCIe 4 with a top transfer rate over 7GB per second.  It's a little more expensive than other models in the current market, but even so costs less than the cheapest, nastiest 2TB drives from just one year ago.
  
  
  
• Final Cut Pro is here for the iPad.  It sucks.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Not because Final Cut Pro is bad.  Not because the iPad hardware isn't capable of running it.  But because Apple has deliberately crippled iOS to such a degree that it is useless for any remotely serious task.
  
  For example, if you edit your video in Final Cut Pro, start exporting the final compressed version, and then switch over to play some Flappy Bird while that runs, your export will simply die, because iOS won't do that.
  
  Can.  iOS is Unix.  Just won't.
  
  
  

• Another day, another mid-range video card launch.  Today it's AMD's Radeon 7600.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is basically an RDNA3 respin of the previous generation's 6650 XT, with 2048 shaders and 8GB of VRAM on a 128-bit bus.  That's the same memory configuration that hampers yesterday's 4060 Ti from Nvidia, and really isn't acceptable on a video card that costs $399.
  
  The reason I'm willing to cut AMD some slack here is that their card costs $269.
  
  Which even in these trying times is still less than $399.
  
  Personally I'd buy the current 6700 over the 7600 - it's the older RDNA2 architecture, but has 10GB of RAM on a 160-bit bus, giving it a bit of an edge.  But the 7600 is an okay card at an okay price.
  
  Which is to say that it's a miracle of modern technology, with 13 billion transistors in a chip smaller than your thumbnail, and we should be amazed that it exists at all, never mind that it's available so readily and so cheaply.
  
  (My first computer had a Motorola 6845 video chip running at 3.5MHz and could be persuaded to display somewhere between 10 and 12 colours if you were really persistent.)
  
  
  

Tech News

• All Microsoft Surface Pro X cameras stopped working on Tuesday.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You will own nothing and they really don't care whether you like it.
  
  
  
• A look at the Framework 16 laptop display.  (Frame.Work)
  
  Little details like the fact that the (tiny, fragile) cable between the motherboard and the display module is socketed at both ends, so if it breaks you just replace the cable.
  
  Suck it, Apple.
  
  Hope this one comes with a Four Essential Keys module.  It's designed for that but I haven't seen one yet.
  
  Or a cursor pad module like HP's Omen 16.
  
  
  
• GitLab is great software but use it in private and was your hands afterwards.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I mean, put it behind your VPN.  Yes, that's what I meant.
  
  
  
• Minnesota has passed right-to-repair legislation without having it filleted by the Wicked Witch of the East River.  (The Verge)
  
  Kathy Hochul.  I'm referring to Kathy Hochul.
  
  
  
• The Beelink GTR7 and GTR7 Pro now have prices and are scheduled for release in less than two weeks.  (Liliputing)
  
  These are NUCs / mini-PCs with AMD's latest 7840HS and 7940HS CPUs, with 8 Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RDNA3 graphics cores.  (By comparison, the Radeon 7600 GPU mentioned earlier has 32 RDNA3 cores.)
  
  They're a bit more expensive than the similar Minisforum models but have a few extra features: Dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, dual Thunderbolt ports at the back plus a separate USB-C port at the front, and front and rear 1/8" audio jacks.  They share the configuration of dual DDR5 SO-DIMM slots and dual M.2 2280 slots.
  
  Plus they come in a choice of of Avocado, Burnt Orange, Ultramarine, and London Fog.  No Harvest Gold available at this time.

Posted by: RiCk at Thursday, May 25 2023 11:57 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 26 2023 02:01 AM (PiXy!)

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• Nvidia has finally brought its new Linda Lovelace architecture (motto: Suck it, losers) to the mainstream with the RTX 4060 Ti, and there's never been a better time to buy a graphics card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just not this one, because it's garbage.
  
  The only thing it achieves is making other cards look good by comparison.  Certainly AMD's 6700 / 6700 XT / 6750 XT range is more appealing than they were last month, with more memory and more memory bandwidth than the 4060 Ti at a much lower price.

Tech News

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, May 24 2023 07:58 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, May 24 2023 08:00 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: DougO at Wednesday, May 24 2023 11:51 PM (T6enK)

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Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 25 2023 02:11 AM (BMUHC)

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Top Story

• Blockchains suck.
  
  
  
• Facebook has been hit with a $1.3 billion fine for violating Europe's law against letting foreign companies keep their money.  (The Verge)
  
  Block the entire fake continent at the firewall.

• Daylight, the LGBTQ+ neobank, is unexpectedly shutting down at the end of June.  (Tech Crunch)

  In a blog published today, [founder and CEO Rob] Curtis said he felt like "now is the right time to exit this market before the feds show up" and told customers that their "money is safe and will be fully accessible for transfer through 30 June probably."

  This is my shocked face.
  
  
  
• In more unexpectedly news China is calling in its loans to unemployed nations who never had a chance of paying them back.  (Fortune)
  
  Well, not that shocked.
  
  
  
• Another day, another demarcation dispute: Journalists are in an uproar after a fake Bloomberg account on Twitter posted false news stories before they could.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Look at me.  I am the fake news now.
  
  
  
• TSMC is putting "bombs" in its machines.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, sticky notes that say "bomb" on them, so if the maintenance crews don't find them they get a demerit rather than blown into tiny pieces.
  
  These machines are the size of a house and if not maintained properly can cost tens of millions in lost production and repairs, so a sticky note that says "bomb" seems an entirely reasonable precaution.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum UM790 Pro is now on sale.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This is a mini PC - the size of a sandwich, if you put lots of filling in your sandwiches - with AMD's latest Ryzen 7940HS CPU.  8 Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RDNA3 graphics cores, which makes it three times as fast as the laptop I'm using right now, both for processing and graphics.
  
  Prices start at $519 without memory or storage, and go up to $789 with 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.  It has room for a second M.2 SSD, as well as two HDMI ports, four USB 3 ports, two USB 4 ports (which can also handle video, but are at the front of the system making that a little inconvenient), and 2.5Gb Ethernet.
  
  A pretty nice system at a good price.  Except that you have to order it from AliExpress.

• AWS has a new billing dashboard.  I spent the first decade of my programming career working on accounting systems, and I have to say that this particular system is dogshit.
  
  
  
• Is Peter Pan more like a hedgehog or a galaxy-sized agglomeration of sardines?  (Nautilus)
  
  Proof once again that the leading experts in a field (in this case, neuroscience) are very often completely retarded.
  
  

• China has banned sales of Micron memory chips  because they "failed a network security review".  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Memory chips don't have networking, and don't have security.  The Biden Administration's spokesmop is more believable than these idiots.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Visual Studio code is a free framework that is utterly useless but has a dazzling array of third-party extensions.  What could possible go wrong?  (Programming Geeks Club)
  
  Oh, yeah.  Right.
  
  
  
• Let's put all the Python libraries created by all the programmers in the world in one convenient place.  What could possibly go wrong?  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Oh, yeah.  Right.
  
  
  
• Google has no customer support because you're not the customer.  (Vortex)
  
  This is true even when you are the customer.  We went through a similar situation at my day job when Google refused to assist us in any way when the only thing we needed to do was pay our bill.
  
  
  
• Don't buy HP printers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not only will they brick themselves if you try to use a less insanely expensive third-party ink cartridge, they will sometimes brick themselves if it's Tuesday.
  
  
  

Posted by: Frank at Monday, May 22 2023 09:19 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Monday, May 22 2023 09:25 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 23 2023 04:59 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Tim Turner at Tuesday, May 23 2023 09:35 AM (vVbbK)

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• I used to recommend that people only buy SSDs from companies that made their own flash memory and controllers, like Samsung, Intel, and Micron/Crucial.
  
  Intel has quit the industry entirely, Samsung had a series of serious issues with its high-end 980 Pro and 990 Pro drives, and now Sandisk (owned by Western Digital) is suffering drives spontaneously eating all your data.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This specific issue has been discussed on Reddit and covered by Louis Rossman and is supposedly due to MacOS constantly probing the drive even in sleep mode and eventually causing a bit to flip that turns on drive encryption without first setting a key and corrupts the entire thing.
  
  Which (a) sounds like something a Mac would do and (b) would not be possible unless the drive was broken in the first place.
  
  The bigger problem being that Sandisk refuses to admit to a problem at all.
  
  So that leaves Micron / Crucial (Crucial is Micron's consumer brand), which hasn't done anything too outrageous except that its low-cost P3 models aren't as attractive for heavy workloads as Team's MP34.

• Intel is looking at making future chips 64-bit only.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While this would technically break backward compatibility, that's not entirely bad.  Nobody is running 8086 code directly on a 13900KS.  If you want to play an old game it likely won't work outside of an emulator like DOSBox, and DOSBox won't break with this change.
  
  Removing the two 16-bit modes (8086 and 80286) likely won't cause much fuss and won't require any changes except for BIOS writers who will breathe a sigh of relief, because they no longer have to bootstrap up through those two modes to reach 32-bit and 64-bit mode.
  
  Removing 32-bit mode is a bit more controversial.  Apple did it and it broke stuff everywhere, but Apple's approach to this has always been that it's your own stupid fault for buying their products in the first place.
  
  
  
• 6+8=16.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel's new 16 core Meteor Lake chip really does have 6 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency cores on the CPU chiplet, because all Meteor Lake chips have two additional Efficiency cores on the I/O (Intel call it the SOC) chiplet.  The extra two cores are extra low power, designed to keep running when your computer is in sleep mode, doing stuff you don't know about and didn't ask for.
  
  
  
• Run Linux.
  
  
  
• It still does things you don't know about and didn't ask for - systemd I'm looking at you - but at least everything is documented.  Somewhere.
  
  
  
• Is the Internet of Things - what I call the Internet of Insecure Pieces of Crap - insufficiently broken?  If so, surely the solution is to add ChatGPT.  (Atomic14)
  
  Yep.  If it's not broken enough now, that will solve the problem.
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, May 21 2023 07:08 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, May 22 2023 03:29 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: Billie at Monday, August 28 2023 04:43 PM (++UNp)

Posted by: Private Account at Saturday, September 30 2023 04:41 PM (D/nvR)

Posted by: tindy nat at Wednesday, November 13 2024 12:50 PM (EtmQt)

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• OpenAI has launched an official ChatGPT app for iOS.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
• Apple has banned the use of ChatGPT internally because it leaks confidential information.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The water is perfectly safe to drink.
  
  For you.
  
  I'm not touching the stuff.

• A review of the Asus Flashstor 12 Pro.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This lets you take up to twelve cheap M.2 SSDs and run them at about 2% of their potential speed.  That's still a transfer rate of 800MB per second, which is close to the capacity of 10Gb Ethernet, but it's designed to be cheap and convenient, not to deliver the full potential of the SSDs.
  
  Write speed with RAID-5 was even worse, in some cases as low as 250MB per second, though that might have been due to the choice of DRAMless QLC drives, which are notably poor performers under sustained write loads.
  
  Still it should be just fine for home / small office storage, with the ability to start small and add more SSDs over time.  Other solutions with similar capacities live in another price bracket entirely.
  
  
  
• Speaking of DRAMless QLC drives, the Sabrent Rocket Q 2230 is one.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The notable feature here is that it comes in a 2TB capacity and fits inside a Steam Deck, Asus Ally, or for people with jobs, recent Microsoft Surface models.  Price for the 2TB model is $220, which is as much as some 4TB full-size M.2 drives but a heck of a lot cheaper than Microsoft's official price for upgrading to a 2TB Surface.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the Steam Deck, if you're generally happy with yours but envious of the Ally's 1080p screen and better colour gamut you can now have that for $99.  (Deck HD)
  
  Or will soon be able to.  Assuming you have a steady hand, because while replacing the screen in a Steam Deck is something that you can do, it's a 43-step process.
  
  
  
• Curse you DeSantis probably: Disney is removing dozens of TV shows and movies from its Disney+ and Hulu streaming services because of those evil Nazis in Florida and totally not because the company is bleeding cash from every orifice.  (The Verge)
  
  Disney's financial troubles are so obvious that The Verge doesn't even try to pin the blame on outside causes here.
  
  
  
• Asus has apologised for remotely crashing every Asus router in the world with a bad automated update even if you had turned off automated updates.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops, our bad.
  
  At least they didn't brick the devices.  Which is something that has happened.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 19 2023 11:29 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 19 2023 11:57 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Saturday, May 20 2023 01:42 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Saturday, May 20 2023 10:41 AM (r9O5h)

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• There is no evidence that TikTok, a wholly owned subsidiary of Chinese intelligence, is being used to gather information from and about TikTok users and feed it back to China.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Yes, TikTok has been caught out repeatedly doing exactly that.  Yes, TikTok has been caught spying on journalists.
  
  But that doesn't count because coloration is not casuistry.
  
  Also banned in Montana.

• Has ChatGPT been neutered?  (Hacker News)
  
  Lots of people saying yes, they use ChatGPT and it gets more useless every week.
  
  Lots of other people saying they don't use ChatGPT but the above people are clearly lying.
  
  
  
• What happened with Asus routers this morning?  (Downtown Doug Brown)
  
  No answer, but it looks like it automatically downloaded a file of firmware update information - even if you have automated updates turned off, it downloads that file so it can tell you an update is available - and the file was bad and the router plotzed.
  
  Fortunately a simple reboot would fix it.
  
  
  
• A review of the QNAP QSW-2104-2T switch.  (Serve the Home)
  
  A very short review since it's an unmanaged switch without even POE.  It's not even complicated enough for QNAP to inject security flaws.  It works great because it's too dumb to fail.
  
  
  
• Mojo is Python only not.
  
  
  
  
  Sounds great.  Where can I download the source code?
  
  You can't.
  
  Binaries?
  
  Sorry.
  
  Docker container?
  
  Usually, sir, but there's been a lot of demand and we've run out.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The Analogue Duo is a PC Engine / TurboGrafx hardware emulator.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It uses an FPGA to precisely emulate the hardware rather than using software which would be cheaper and easier and probably off by a millisecond here or there.
  
  I want a Sharp X68000 emulator.
  
  Oh.  Here's six.  (Gametech Wiki)a
  
  Dragon Spirit also ran on the TurboGrafx but the X68000 port was the best.
  
  

1 Re: ChatGPT:
It seems the Hackernews crowd is discovering something inconceivable: Trying to create an artificial mind, and punishing that mind for functioning with thought policing are antithetical goals. Who would have thought *that*?!
>

Posted by: anonymous_for_now at Friday, May 19 2023 03:00 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 19 2023 01:46 PM (BMUHC)

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