• Apple has reinstated Epic Games' developer account as abruptly and with as little discussion as they terminated it in the first place.  (Epic Games)
  
  Guess multi-billion-dollar fines have that effect.

• Dating app Bumble lost a third of its Texas workforce after - operative word, after - Texas passed abortion restrictions.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I wonder if there could have been any other contributing factors.
  
  
  
• Dating app Bumble laid off a third of its staff amid mounting losses.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Huh.
  
  
  
• Need a reasonably priced switch with 20 2.5Gb ports, four 10Gb ports, and two 40Gb ports?  MikroTik's catchily named CRS326-4C+20G+2Q+RM might fit the bill.  (Serve the Home)
  
  With the 40Gb ports that's a pretty good deal for an MSRP of $999.
  
  It also has console and management ports, and can even act as a router, though its processor is relatively slow and the routing throughput is sub-gigabit.
  
  
  
• TSMC is set to receive $5 billion in "incentives" from the CHIPS act for its planned fab expansion in Arizona.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's against a total cost for this project of $40 billion, so your tax dollars are probably not being completely flushed down the drain.
  
  
  
• Fine tune a 70B AI model at home.  (Answer.AI)
  
  All you need is two RTX 4090s.
  
  
  
• It's not just you: Even Google can't make WiFi work.  (Reuters)
  
  Staff and Google's newest 600,000 square foot office space have been advised to work from the cage next door if they need network access.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, March 09 2024 10:16 PM (bg2DR)

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• The worst person in the world just made a good point: EU Bookburner General Thierry Breton has confirmed his agency is investigating Apple over its decision to cancel Epic Games' developer account.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Apple did this specifically to prevent Epic Games opening its own app store as is permitted under the new EU regulations.
  
  Breton pointed out that the regulations that force Google and Apple to open up their platforms also forbid those companies from using pretexts to keep their platforms effectively closed.
  
  As we've seen, the EU isn't shy about fining American companies billions of dollars, because for them it's free money.
  
  And it's reached a point where I don't blame them.  Watching one group of communist bleed another group of communists dry is better entertainment than you can find almost anywhere.
  
  
  

Tech News

• JEDEC has published the specifications for next-generation graphics memory, GDDR7.  (AnandTech)
  
  GDDR7 is 50% faster than GDDR6 - because it uses trinary.
  
  Thunderbolt 5 (and the horribly named USB4 Version 2.0) also use trinary.
  
  With GDDR7 the data inside the chip is still ones and zeroes, but the interface uses 1, 0, and -1.
  
  The spec also supports chip sizes up to 64Gb - including intermediate sizes at 24Gb and 48Gb - though only 16Gb is expected initially.
  
  
  
• The House Commerce Committee has voted 50-0 to force Bytedance to divest TikTok to some other owner not directly under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party.  (Ars Technica)
  
  TikTok got its insane userbase to contact their congressmen - or just any random congressmen - and threaten to unalive themselves if the app was banned, but this had shockingly little effect.  (Engadget)
  
  (Not that TikTok's userbase is that much different to any other social platform.  People are dumb.)
  
  Worth noting that TikTok is banned in China.
  
  
  

All Tech Companies Suck Rant of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 09 2024 03:27 AM (BMUHC)

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• With Europe's new DMA laws requiring both smartphone companies to open up their marketplaces, Google is taking a lead out of Apple's book and imposing a 27% fee on all purchases made through third-party marketplaces running on Android.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Because they can.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile with Epic Games planning to open an app store on iOS in Europe Apple has simply terminated their account.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The EU is probably rubbing their hands with glee at this, because it gives them grounds to fine Apple more billions of dollars.

• There's a bunch of new security vulnerabilities in VMWare, including three related to the virtual USB controller.  (Ars Technica)
  
  VMWare suggests disabling USB support.  That will make your keyboard stop working, but whatever.
  
  
  
• If you want a seriously fast desktop PC - and you're spending someone else's money - Dell's Precision 7875 might suit.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The 96 core Threadripper 7995WX CPU is paired with two 48GB Nvidia RTX 6000 graphics cards.  The model tested "only" had 128GB of RAM, but you can upgrade that to 1TB.
  
  One small problem: As tested, $31,065.
  
  
  
• OpenAI has clarified what the "open" in "OpenAI" means in the face of Elon Musk's lawsuit alleging that the company is not actually open.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Apparently the "open" in "OpenAI" means not open.
  
  I'm not sure how they view this as a rebuttal, but it is what they said.
  
  
  
• Microsoft also has its idiots.  (Thurrott)
  
  Not as prevalent perhaps, or at least better under control than at Google, but one of the companies AI engineers reported the company to the FTC because, as an AI engineer, he could work around the filters deployed by other AI engineers to create content he considered, as an idiot, to be problematic.
  
  
  
• Warner Brothers has announced that it will shift its gaming focus from shitty expensive games to shitty cheap games.  (GameSpot)
  
  Not under consideration: Making good games.

• Did they fall or were they pushed?  Facebook, Instagram, and Threads all fell over.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Which is not a huge surprise because they are all the same thing.
  
  Most likely DNS.  It usually is.

• Microsoft is killing off Windows Subsystem for Android.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This, as the name would suggest, was a subsystem that ran Android apps on Windows.
  
  It is no longer available as of, uh, yesterday.  Thanks for the warning, Microsoft.
  
  It was only a developer preview anyway, and apparently not a popular one.
  
  
  
• That's one way to do it:  Samsung has renamed its second generation 3nm process to 2nm.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If it worked for Intel, why not?
  
  
  
• The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2024 has a 2880x1800 14" OLED display, 32GB of RAM, an AMD CPU, Nvidia graphics, and no Four Essential Keys.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It does have an extra four macro keys above the usual function key row, but that's a bit of an awkward location.
  
  
  
• The HP Omen Transcend 14 has a 2880x1800 OLED display, 16GB of RAM, an Intel CPU, Nvidia graphics, and no Four Essential Keys.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Give this one a miss.
  
  
  
• The Asus Zenbook Duo OLED 2024 has a 2880x1800 OLED display, and a 2880x1800 OLED display.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It has an Intel 185H CPU (the latest generation), up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, pen support on both screens as far as I can tell, and a keyboard that can clip on to the lower screen or be used separately.
  
  Interesting device, except (a) no Four Essential Keys and (b) $4000.
  
  
  

• Apple has launched the new M3 Macbook Air, starting at $1099.  (AnandTech)
  
  For that price you get 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD, neither of which can be upgraded.  Apple would pay less than $10 for each of those components.

• Gartner predicts that search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 due to competition from AI agents and the fact that search engines are fast becoming useless.  (Gartner)
  
  I don't really have a solution to that.
  
  
  
• The EU has fined Apple $2 billion over its restrictive app store practices.  (The Verge)
  
  This isn't related to the current mess; this is following a 2020 investigation under rules in place since 2006.
  
  Apple is seriously pissy about this.
  
  
  
• You will own nothing and we don't much care if you like it: if you own a Roku device, well, you don't.  (Cord Cutters)
  
  Roku has announced new mandatory terms of service and if you don't agree to them, your TV will spontaneously turn into a pumpkin.
  
  
  
• AWS has gone nuclear.  (Datacenter Dynamics)
  
  Pretty literally.  AWS has bought a datacenter right next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant.
  
  
  
• A look at QNAP's TBS-h574TX solid-state combined NAS/DAS thingy.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It has 2.5Gb and 10Gb Ethernet and two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and you can use it simultaneously over the network and and with a directly-attached laptop or two.
  
  Being entirely SSD-based it has no trouble filling that 10Gb Ethernet connection, but it also costs $1199 without any drives - just five bays that can take common M.2 drives or E1.S server drives.
  
  Asus' Flashstor 12 Pro has fewer features, but it has 12 M.2 slots and 10Gb Ethernet, and costs $799.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 05 2024 10:19 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, March 06 2024 09:08 AM (nk1Z+)

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• The CDC has announced that COVID is basically the flu and should be treated as such at least unless and until a Republican gets elected.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Taking the official figures for what they are, COVID is around three times as dangerous as regular flu seasons.  The last big flu pandemic in 1968 killed people faster than COVID despite the world having less than half the population it does now.

• Are datacenters drinking all of Arizona's water?  No.  (MSN)
  
  Takes a lot of scrolling, but one of Microsoft's massive datacenters uses as much water as, uh, 670 families.  Say 2500 people.
  
  Based on that, all the datacenters in the world might use 0.25% of what is used domestically, which in turn is a small fraction of what is used in agriculture and industry, or, in California, flushed straight out to sea because planning is bad.
  
  
  
• Researchers have created the first AI worms.  (Ars Technica)
  
  These use "prompt engineering" to trick LLMs into violating their own rules and generate emails that can, in turn, infect other LLMs.
  
  Everything old is new again.  We went through a whole decade of this with buffer overflows; this is the same thing except a thousand times more expensive.

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 04 2024 08:17 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 04 2024 08:18 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 05 2024 12:22 PM (BMUHC)

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• There's helium in them there hills: Researchers drilling in northern Minnesota have struck squeaky gold - which is to say, helium.  (MSN)
  
  Possibly a lot of helium.  They're still confirming the size of the find, but as an indicator, a 0.3% concentration of helium is commercially viable.
  
  This well is yielding 12.4%.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Polya's conjecture for the eigenvalues of a disc has been proven.  (Phys.org)
  
  Nope, no idea.  I've heard of Polya's conjecture.  I just don't know what it is.
  
  
  
• A company called Taiko has raised $37 million to build a truly decentralised social network using Web3 - which is to say, blockchains.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Is this actually possible?
  
  Eh.  Maybe.
  
  A simplistic decentralised Twitter would require each node to hold the entirety of Twitter, which is obviously impractical.
  
  But something structured like Reddit, where you can pick just a dozen of the thousands of subreddits to replicate to your node, that might work.
  
  The upside is that nothing you post to such a social network can ever be deleted no matter who takes over the company.
  
  The downside is that nothing other people post to such a social network can ever be deleted either.
  
  
  
• Ish.  You can fork a blockchain, rewind it to repudiate data, and try to convince all the other users that your fork is the one true fork.
  
  This happened with Ethereum in 2016...  Which is why we now have Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
  
  
  
• Adevinta, Beonex, Blockchain.com, Cafeyn, Deezer, Epic Games, iconomy, Mustang, Paddle, Parula, Proton, Schibsted, 37signals, SkyDemon, Spotify, Threema, Uptodown, Vipps MobilePay, Alliance Digitale, Association Européenne des Radios (AER), Classifieds Marketplaces Europe (CME), Digital Content Next (DCN), Digital Music Europe (DME), European DIGITAL SME Alliance, European Games Developer Federation (EGDF), European Fintech Association (EFA), European Magazine Media Association (EMMA), European Newspaper Publishers' Association (ENPA), European Publishers Council (EPC), France Digitale, Internet Economy Foundation (IEF), News Media Europe (NME), Sveriges, Tidskrifter, and Tidningsutgivarna have complained to EU Bookburner General Thierry Breton that Apple is cheating.  (Thurrott)
  
  Can everyone mentioned in that list please just fall in a hole and stay there.
  
  
  
• You should have been ionised then: See the moment YouTube laid off 43 unionised workers.  (MSN)
  
  It turns out that the one thing communists really can't stand is other communists.

• Most of the talents from the soon-to-be defunct Prism Project have confirmed they will be continuing as indie vtubers.
  
  Sara Nagare plans to quit her part time job to focus on it full time, since without corporate backing she'll have to do all her own management - and will also make twice as much money.
  
  Kou Tsubame is the only one so far that will be suspending streaming after the end of March.
  
  
  
• Can I offer you a Banpire in these trying times?  Hololive's Yozora Mel is returning to her personal channel in about an hour.
  
  She was fired earlier this year for an NDA violation; basically she discussed her job with a trusted friend...  Who turned out to be not at all trustworthy.
  
  
  

Why Do They Do It Video of the Day

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, March 03 2024 08:25 PM (cARBX)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 04 2024 06:34 PM (PiXy!)

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• A tale of two tales: Elon Musk sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over "betrayal" of nonprofit AI mission.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI was founded specifically as a nonprofit, chartered with a mission to produce AI for the public good.
  
  This was the source of the drama last year when Sam Altman was removed by the board - the board was trying to return OpenAI to something closer to its original mission.  But money talked, and Altman was soon restored as chief bullshitter.
  
  Musk's suit hinges on how much of the nonprofit's charter and statements made at the time can be held as legally binding - since he provided much of the original funding.
  
  
  
• Speaking of chief bullshitters here's The Verge's terrible take on the story.  (The Verge)
  
  That's not reporting, it's propaganda.

• This takes major talent.  (MSN)
  
  Home brand and budget soft drinks (as in soda/pop) and mineral water have disappeared from supermarket shelves in Australia due to - I am not making this up - a shortage of carbon dioxide.
  
  Supplies are expected to resume by the end of the year, maybe.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, I just bought a SodaStream.
  
  
  
• Apple is un-killing persistent web apps in the EU.  (Apple Insider)
  
  "This has nothing to do with the EU investigation," said an Apple spokesman on conditions of anonymity.  "We listened to our users.  Lol.  Don't print that."
  
  
  
• Here's an 8.8" tablet with a 2560x1600 screen, a fast CPU, 16GB of RAM, and upgradeable storage.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Only problem is it's a chunky monkey and runs Windows and costs about three times as much as Lenovo's Android-based Legion Y700.
  
  Only problem with the Y700 is you can't officially buy it outside China.
  
  
  
• JPEG XL and the Pareto Front.  (Cloudinary)
  
  A very, very, very detailed look at recent improvements to the JPEG XL library, showing off performance improvements, resource reductions, and quality advantages over JPEG.
  
  When you over-compress JPEG it gets blocky and ugly, but JPEG XL just gets overly smooth.
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

• Vtuber agency Prism Project is ending.  (Twitter)
  
  I've been watching Prism since 2021; it's been my second favourite agency, though it has never made huge numbers.  Sony Music acquired the company in 2022, and launched three new generations of talents last year, but it looks like it's fallen victim to cost-cutting by the corporate parent.
  
  Update: Prism talents have now said specifically that this is not related to recent layoffs at Sony, though they can't go into a lot of detail.
  
  But in a masterclass of how to do things right, Sony is transferring all rights to the character models, existing content, and online accounts to the individual talents, so they can all continue as independent channels.
  
  It's a stark contrast to Nijisanji, which bullied Selen Tatsuki into a suicide attempt, seized control of her online accounts while she was hospitalised, fired her, defamed her, and deleted three years of content.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, March 02 2024 11:41 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 03 2024 01:42 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 03 2024 02:15 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 03 2024 03:09 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 03 2024 04:17 PM (oJgNG)

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• HP has announced that after years of neglect its printers are now overpriced, unreliable, insecure garbage that nobody in their right mind would buy.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They want you to rent them instead.

• Self-service gas pumps failed across New Zealand because, uh, it was February 29.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This has never happened before in the history of last week.
  
  At least we have New Zealand to give engineers in the rest of the world a couple of hours' notice that they've written some really stupid code.
  
  
  
• Intel has rebranded Altera as Altera.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Intel bought FPGA maker Altera in 2015, renamed it the Intel Programmable Solutions Group, and then basically forgot it existed.
  
  Which is what you tend to do when you spend nearly $17 billion on something.
  
  I guess.
  
  
  
• No HDMI 2.1 for you.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD offered an open-source HDMI driver for Linux, supporting all the advanced features of HDMI 2.1, for free.
  
  The HDMI Forum said no.
  
  AMD said, well everyone should just use DisplayPort then.
  
  
  
• Rockstar Games has told workers to return to work.  (Bloomberg)
  
  This is a real article on a real website.
  
  
  
• Socialism is bad.  (The Verge)
  
  I'm not sure The Verge intended to write a 2000-word diatribe against socialism, but it did.
  
  
  
• 112 falsehoods programmers believe about time.  (GitHub)
  
  Some of these are obvious.  Some of them are obvious when you think about it a bit.
  
  And some of them are not at all obvious, and if you look up the details behind them you find some epic tale about the war between King Walter IV of Karelia and the Ruthenian Orthodox Church that led to the calendar being changed five times in four years, or the time zone in Siberia that has no permanent residents but goes in and out of daylight savings time every three and a half weeks.
  
  Handling real-world time is like handling Unicode: It's much easier for everyone if you just pretend it doesn't exist.
  
  
  
• Reddit "should" IPO at a valuation of $5 billion LOL.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I received an invitation to buy shares in Reddit before the IPO, since I've been on every social network in the world basically forever except for Twitter which kept banning my account when it was being held hostage by commies.  (YouTube only banned me once, the day they first turned the ContentID system on.  Thanks very much, Sony Music.)
  
  Anyway: Yeah, nah.

Posted by: stargazera5 at Saturday, March 02 2024 08:14 AM (Kqwxo)

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Top Story

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai has responded to the Gemini Catastrophe.  (The Verge)
  
  "Gemini accurately represented our views here at Google", said Pichai, "and users don't like that.  This is completely unacceptable, and we are working around the clock to replace our users with better ones."
  
  
  

• The Biden Administration is urging programmers to stop using unsafe languages like C and C++ and switch to more modern and robust alternatives like...  JavaScript.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Uh huh.
  
  
  
• The Biden Administration is also asking whether American companies should be permitted to sell of customers' private information to Russia and China.  (CNN)
  
  Or rather, asking where their cut is.
  
  

• After Micron announced its 24GB 9GHz HBM3E memory, Samsung has responded with 36GB 9.8GHz HBM3E.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's 12 24Gb chips stacked up.  A lot of memory - relatively - and a ton of bandwidth in a very small space.
  
  It would be amazing except that it's also very expensive.
  
  
  
• The European Parliament has banned Amazon from its premises.  (Euractiv)
  
  No delivery for you!
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 01 2024 12:01 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Friday, March 01 2024 06:51 AM (K4jh7)

Posted by: Tersf at Friday, July 26 2024 04:33 AM (BF7eL)

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