• Where exactly is Tether's $69 billion?  (Bloomberg)
  
  Tether is a stablecoin, a cryptocurrency pegged at 1:1 against the dollar.  Tether says they can do this because they have a 1:1 ration of liquid dollar assets to the Tether coins issued.
  
  Tether acts like a bank, but this report suggests it's somewhere between a hedge fund and a Ponzi scheme.
  
  
  
• Unexpected sanity:

  It’s a sign of Australia’s COVID parochialism that we seem to think allowing 10 people into the homes of the double-vaccinated, instead of five, is a measure of radical risk-taking.

  That's two academics from the left-wing Sydney University writing in the left-wing Sydney Morning Herald to berate the left over their COVID psychosis.
  
  Being what they are they feel obligated to take a dig at Donald Trump before they get on to criticising the Labor Party here in Australia.

  Perrottet’s political calculation is that we are now ready for take-off. This is one politician who isn’t afraid of freedom. His instincts tell him that the people of NSW increasingly aren’t either.

  For Labor and those on the political left, there is huge political danger in all of this.

  If it works, Labor is sunk.

• Hydrogen's moment is here at last.  (The Economist)
  
  Not.  None of the problems with storing and transporting hydrogen in bulk have been solved.  It's a lousy fuel.
  
  
  
• Hydrogen has its faults, but oil isn't necesarily any safer.  (The New Yorker)
  
  The F.S.O Safer, to be specific, which is a former oil tanker turned fuel store, sitting unpowered and unmaintained just off the coast of Yemen with a million barrels of oil on board.
  
  This being Yemen, it may also be surrounded by mines, preventing it from being moved to safety by tug boats.
  
  This being Yemen, the person in charge of laying mines in that area is dead, and there aren't any records.
  
  The only question is whether it leaks, causing an ecological disaster for the Red Sea, catches fire, causing an ecological disaster for Yemen, or simply explodes and kills everyone in the area. They can't close the port either, because there isn't another port available.
  
  
  
• How the .NET Foundation kerfuffle became a brouhaha.  (Rob Mensching)
  
  .NET is Microsoft's development platform, or one of them anyway.  .NET Core has been made open source.  The .NET Foundation manages that open source project.
  
  Poorly.
  
  
  
• Apache has released an emergency update for the incomplete fix in the emergency update for the bug they introduced introduced in the recent update.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Someone's having a bad week.
  
  
  
• Nijisanji EN Wave 3 - named Ethyria - just launched.  (YouTube)
  
  Pomu is the only one I follow regularly; with Hololive EN Gen 2 so active there's rarely a need to actually look for content.  But I like all the ones I have watched and will at least check in on the new ones.
  
  There's four in Wave 3, instead of three previously, and wave 4 is likely due before the end of the year.
  
  
  
• Also, since I finally have a day off - I've been working nights, weekends, and public holidays lately - I've been playing some Minecraft.  Found some glow berries today, and caught my first UPRP.  I've seen one before but I fumbled the capture and couldn't find it again.
  
  There's a huge mineshaft system under Camp Pandaton and now I have tons of iron, gold, copper, diamonds, and other goodies that I need to get back to base, 2500 blocks away. 
  
  I'm thinking of finally checking out the Nether at this point, since distance there is 1/8th of the overworld.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 10 2021 05:00 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Will at Monday, October 11 2021 12:51 PM (8548M)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 11 2021 01:08 PM (r9O5h)

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• Me: I need to clear my desk for these new monitors so I'll save money and choose three-day shipping, which will leave me time to-
  Courier: Zoom zoom beep beep package for, uh, Pixy Misa?
  
  Good work by Scorptec.  Haven't ordered from them in a couple of years but likely will as I build out my new development lab.
  
  
  
• The Ampere Altra Max is the fastest server processor in the world - or kind of meh - depending on your workload.  (AnandTech)
  
  They've managed to cram 128 cores onto a single piece of silicon, where AMD's 64 core server CPUs are spread across 9 chiplets.
  
  The downside of this design is that the entire chip is used for cores.  AMD has room for 32MB of L2 cache and 256MB of L3 cache, where the Ampere chip has only 16MB total.
  
  If your workload fits well in that cache, you get good performance.  If not, it's going to suck.
  
  With future chips built on a 5nm process, or with stacked memory similar to AMD's new designs, they might  be able to produce a more balanced design that unleashes all those cores.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Samsung expects to be in production on their 2nm process node in 2025.  (AnandTech)
  
  3nm will be in production by the end of next year.
  
  The company also announced a 17nm node.
  
  This is the old reliable 28nm node updated with FinFET.  That keeps a lot of the advantages (robust, cheap) while making chips smaller and reducing power.
  
  It's not for leading-edge chips like CPUs and GPUs, but for microcontrollers, which are also in short supply.
  
  
  
• TSMC to USG: Bite me.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The US government demanded details of the types of products TSMC produces for each of its customers, inventories, lead times, and more.  
  
  TSMC told them to fuck off.
  
  The list of questions the Commerce Department is asking is absurd, but typical of government overreach in all areas these days.
  
  
  
• Far Cry 6 requires 11GB of VRAM for its high resolution textures.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Nvidia's 3060 Ti, 3070, 3070 Ti, and 3080 all have less than 11GB of VRAM.
  
  AMD's 6700 XT and up all have at least 12GB.
  
  
  
• Google and Apple are both being investigated by Japan over anti-competitive bullshit.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You know, the usual.
  
  
  
• Everything new is old again: Intel's new low power laptop CPUs will go back to two cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They'll call then 10 core parts, but that's eight slow cores and just two fast cores.  AMD at the same power envelope has 8 fast cores
  
  It comes down to pricing and how fast the slow cores are.
  
  
  
• CDNs don't contribute to copyright infringement just by the act of distributing your content.  (Ars Technica)
  
  A judge ruled in favour of Cloudflare in a case accusing them of contributory infringement.
  
  
  
• WSL for Windows 11 runs Linux GUI apps out of the box.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Although not Gnome, which will install, but dies on startup.
  
  If I wanted to run Linux GUI apps this would present a reason to upgrade.
  
  
  
• Intel is no longer seeking a fab site in the UK after Brexit.  (BBC)
  
  Because continental Europe offers bigger bribes.  CEO Pat Gelsinger was quite explicit on that point.
  
  
  
• Google is going all-in on censorship.  Latest target is anyone not following the party line on global warming.  (The Verge)
  
  Anything mandatory is forbidden.  Anything forbidden is mandatory.
  
  
  
• Stable coins should maybe, you know, actually be stable.  (Bloomberg)
  
  If you want to pin your cryptocurrency to real dollars, you goddam better have real dollars.
  
  
  
• Update: I found bamboo.  And pandas.  There's probably cocoa beans here somewhere.  I've established a base camp and will build a panda sanctuary at some point.
  
  
  
• Update Two: Cocoa bean get.  Operation Bean Farm commence.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 08 2021 09:51 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, October 09 2021 10:03 AM (bHHXR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 09 2021 10:17 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 09 2021 10:39 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 09 2021 10:45 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Andrew Horn at Sunday, October 10 2021 05:18 PM (uEGFG)

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• The difference between the Nazis and the Democrats is the Nazis only needed one Reichstag Fire.
  
  
  The Facebook "whistleblower" is nothing of the sort.  She's a paid lobbyist for government control of social media.
  
  
  
• Windows 11 is all about new hardware.  (ZDNet)
  
  Not about supporting new hardware.  About getting you to buy new hardware.
  
  Old system getting the job done just fine?  Not anymore.
  
  
  
• And if you were planning to upgrade to Windows 11 on your shiny 16 core Ryzen system, you might want to hold off on that.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's as much as 15% slower on Ryzen systems, particularly ones with lots of cores.  There's a patch coming.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Linux now runs on Arm-based Macs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, sort of.  There's no installer, no networking, and video is a dumb frame buffer like this was still 1993, but if you somehow manage to get it on there it will in fact boot.
  
  
  
• Amazon says don't blame us, it wasn't our game that caused the smoke to come out of your $3000 video card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Narrator: Yeah, it kind of was.
  
  A stock 3090 running Amazon's New World can draw 370W just sitting at the menu.
  
  
  
• The PCIe 6 has reached a final draft.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is four times as fast as PCIe 4  I'm not sure it's going to arrive in desktop systems any time soon, but I said that about PCI 5 and that will be shipping in about a month.
  
  
  
• The monitor I wanted - LG's 27UP850-W - came back in stock this morning and I ordered two. It all looks good on paper; 4K panel, 95% of DCI-P3 and 100% of sRGB. It's not calibrated for Adobe RGB but I don't do print work so that doesn't matter nearly as much.
  
  It has USB-C power delivery so it should be able to power the smaller of my two laptops directly. The laptops each have USB-C and HDMI, so they'll both be connected to both monitors and I can switch as needed.
  
  The plan is to retire my two current desktops entirely. The larger of my two laptops has a faster CPU and GPU, and more memory and SSD (but no internal hard disk) than either of the desktops. The smaller one is for rare occasions when I'm actually in the office; the rest of the time it's backup because I can't afford to be offline just because my main computer caught fire. And for single-threaded tasks it's also faster (by about 40%) than my current desktop systems.
  
  Update: It seems they had at least three of them, because I can see that my order has been allocated at the warehouse and is now in dispatch, and the monitor is still in stock.
  
  Update 2: And they've shipped. I didn't pay extra for 1-day shipping because I need to clear a space for them, but I should still get them Monday.
  
  
  
• Also just got a shipment of gluten-free snacks from Amazon, stuff that's not readily available from the local supermarkets. And a computer toolkit with about 100 different screwdriver heads. Also a pressure washer. I was looking at one for cleaning the back deck and they were on sale this week, so I threw it in the cart with the snacks.
  
  
  
• The community is a disgusting toxic cesspool said a 4chan user - referring to Twitch.  (The Record)
  
  And then leaked a 125GB file containing all of their source code.
  
  
  
• Now that the JP and EN servers have merged, HoloID is getting their own server as well.  Doing a build relay to launch it starting at, hmm, 9PM tomorrow.  I think they'll be doing the same as the EN branch, finishing the game by themselves and then linking it to the other two.
  
  Meanwhile Mumei and Kronii from EN Gen 2 spent three hours happily lost on the JP server.
  
  
  
  
  
• Blockchains and deadlines don't mix.
  
  
  
• Me: Time for bed.
  YouTube: Sora is exploring the HoloEN server.
  Me: Sleep is for the weak.

• Elizabeth Warren has a brilliant new solution for the growing threat of ransomware: Make it illegal to be a victim.  (Bloomberg)
  
  That's it.  That's the story.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Do the new security features in Windows 11 slow game performance?  Yes.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But only by around 5%.  And that seems to apply equally to average frame rates and to frame consistency (99% frame rates), so it's not a serious impact.
  
  
  
• The Surface Pro 8 is better than the Surface Pro 7.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Also it has upgradable storage, so if you already have a laptop that comes with a 1TB M.2 2230 SSD like say the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus you can swap that into a low-end model instead of paying Microsoft $1000 for a $200 SSD.
  
  
  
• Intel is back, says Intel.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel added that its products that aren't shipping yet will close the gap with AMD's chips from last year, not that there ever was a gap, because there wasn't, but if there had been there wouldn't be.
  
  
  
• The simplest sorting algorithm ever.  (Arxiv.org - PDF)
  
  On the one hand, it's O(n2).  On the other hand, it's just four lines of code in any reasonable programming language.  On the third hand, it looks obviously incorrect.  On the fourth hand it has been mathematically proven to work.
  
  So it's the perfect answer for annoying tech job interviews.
  
  
  
• How IBM lost the cloud.  (Protocol)
  
  We use IBM Cloud at my day job.  (And other cloud services too.)
  
  The article is...  Not wrong.
  
  
  
• If you are doing 50,000 Docker pulls per day and you're not Facebook or Netflix you are doing something wrong.  Stop that.  (Earthly)
  
  WHAT ARE YOU IDIOTS DOING?
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, October 07 2021 03:43 AM (r9O5h)

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• Mark Zuckerberg and the terrible, horrible, no good very bad day.  (Bloomberg)
  
  All Facebook properties went down for six hours due to a BGP misconfiguration.  When everything goes down at once across a giant cloud provider like that, it's usually BGP.  Once you screw it up, you can lose remote access to the networking gear so you can't fix it, so a five minute solution can be stuck waiting for the right engineer to arrive on site with a serial cable.
  
  The outage caused Facebook apps to go bananas with DNS requests which caused problems for Twitter, Google, Amazon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon...
  
  
  
  
  The mee.nu server managed to crash all by itself.  Actually, it's possible that it was related since I don't know why it keeps crashing.  Just not probable.
  
  
  
• Don't trust SMS-based 2FA.  (Motherboard)
  
  Syniverse, which handles three quarters of a trillion text messages a year for 300 different mobile networks, was hacked.
  
  Five years ago.
  
  They discovered the breach in May and just disclosed this a week ago.
  
  Everything sent from May 2016 to May 2021 was an open buffet for hackers.
  
  
  
• New South Wales has a new premier after Gladys B, the least worst of a bad lot, resigned due to an ongoing corruption investigation of her boyfriend or something.  I don't know the details, it's petty stuff compared to what's happening elsewhere.
  
  I was waiting to see how much worse the new guy would be, and...  Well.
  
  
  It's not the most elegant formulation of the concept of negative rights I've ever read, but to have a politician - particularly an Australian one right now - saying this is refreshing.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL.  (Cloudflare)
  
  An explanation of just how Facebook shot itself in both feet and locked its keys in the car at the same time.
  
  
  
• What to expect with Windows 11.  (AnandTech)
  
  The big day is here, and it's kind of meh.
  
  
  
• I mean, it's not actively terrible.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just, y'know, kind of meh.
  
  
  
• Android 12 is out too.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  6 was the last version that mattered since it brought us adoptable storage - that is, you can take a 32GB device, add a 128GB microSD card, and it works as a single pool of 160GB of storage.
  
  Of course, the major device manufacturers and carriers hated this and immediately broke support.
  
  
  
• What happens when Google decides to break the web.  (The Register)
  
  What happens is the web gets broken.
  
  
  
• RaidForums - a site where people buy and sell the personal data that is increasingly less aptly named -  or not, as we'll get to in a moment - went abruptly if briefly offline after its domain name was yanked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's back up for now on another domain.
  
  
  
• When I said or not, this is what to which I referred.
  
  
  Hey!  This illegal data you sold me is fake!  I want a refund!

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 06 2021 01:51 AM (Z0GF0)

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• New research suggest that the Wuhan Bat Flu may have come from the Wuhan Bat Market and not from the Wuhan Bat Virus Factory across the road according to a paper published by the Wuhan Bat Virus Factory.  (LA Times / Yahoo News)
  
  A second paper from France that - the article kind of slides past this - has not actually been published anywhere concurs.
  
  The article is 90% just the LA Times sniping at CNN, but that has a certain charm in itself.
  
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• M1X Arm-based MacBook Pros may be arriving later this month.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The rumoured specs are inviting.  Shame about the operating system, the price, the fact that it's all glued together into an unmaintainable brick, and that the company behind it basically just plain sucks.
  
  
  
• The chip shortage will continue until morale improves.  (ZDNet)
  
  If you're waiting for prices to come down then congratulations, you can keep right on doing that.
  
  
  
• Why carmakers can't just update to newer chips.  (Jalopnik)
  
  In short: Because cars are expected to work.
  
  
  
• Ransomware gangs are getting ripped off by rival gangs that are undercutting their prices.  (ZDNet)
  
  The free market at work.
  
  
  
• JMS is working on a reboot of Babylon 5.  (Variety)
  
  Look, it's his baby, and the original production was, shall we say, not untroubled.  If he wants to try making it again, and he has funding, let's see how it comes out.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 12:06 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 12:10 AM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 05 2021 04:01 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, October 05 2021 11:36 AM (MuaLM)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 05 2021 01:28 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 02:10 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 02:16 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 05 2021 02:17 PM (Z0GF0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 05 2021 04:51 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Wednesday, October 06 2021 02:56 AM (uii8N)

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