What is that?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
Monday, January 01
Daily News Stuff 32 December 2023
Drunken Revelry Edition
Drunken Revelry Edition
Top Story
- After migrating a huge application spread across a hundred servers from one cloud to another, my key takeaway was containerisation.
Not using Docker, which is great if you're deploying simple applications created by some other group that has a build team. Well, not great, but adequate. Actually Docker pretty much sucks even then, but there are worse things. Like Node.js.
My preferred containerisation platform is LXD.
So they blew that up. (Linux Containers)
To make a stupid story short, LXD is Canonical's - the people behind Ubuntu Linux - build of the Linux Containers system. It works well. It's still supported.
But they've moved it from the Apache license, which lets you do pretty much anything you want, to AGPL, which forces you to release your updates if you build a complex service based on it. And that license makes corporate lawyers itchy.
- And they've added a contributor license agreement to control the terms under which open-source developers can contribute to the project. (Stephane Graber)
This is not usually a good sign.
- And Canonical has stopped contributing to the upkeep of the public container image server. So if you're running LXD 5.20 or later - the version where these license changes took effect - and you want to install an image from that image server you should have done it yesterday. (Linux Containers)
Access to system images is being phased out for LXD users in steps, starting today, with all access being cut off for all LXD users by May 1st.
You can still install Ubuntu under LXD on Ubuntu, which is in fact what I do 97% of the time. The other 3% may become a problem.
When you find a solution that works, it's only a matter of time before somebody takes it away.
Tech News
- How bad are search results? Bad. (Dan Luu)
In running six tests on each of five search engines plus ChatGPT - thirty-six tests in all - eight results earned scores in the range of OK to Great.
The other twenty-eight results ranked anywhere from Bad to Terrible.
In fact, Google, which built its entire business on providing a better search engine than anyone else, rated Bad or worse on every test.
Bing was even worse on average, but was acceptable on one test, and better than acceptable on another.
- California is entering a death spiral of malice and incompetence. This might be a bad thing. (SF Gate)
Do tell.
- The president of the Navajo Nation has asked NASA to delay a Moon launch over the possible presence of human remains. (KNAU)
This confused me for a moment, but it's not quite as stupid as it seems, though it's still plenty stupid.
The possible human remains aren't on the Moon - at least, not yet. They're on the rocket, thanks to a commercial service that delivers a few crumbs of your loved ones' ashes into space.
The Navajo Nation objects to this - and here comes the stupid part - because they claim the Moon as a sacred site.
The simple and obvious response to this, which NASA will not make because they were already full of woke bullshit the last time this came up in 1998, is Have you been there? No? Then fuck off.
Disclaimer: Too soon.
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Sunday, December 31
Daily News Stuff 31 December 2023
Year's End Edition
Year's End Edition
Top Story
- Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cost-cutting and mergers as losses mount in their streaming services. (Ars Technica)
But not, so far as I can tell, giving much thought to making content people want to watch.
Amazon is propped up by the river of money flowing from AWS - and oh boy di I have a rant there - so they won't feel the same pain until Jeff Bezos decides he wants that money for something else. When the axe finally swings there, it will be swift and brutal.
Plus they have a wide selection of old content that you can get access to for a few bucks a month. I think it's A$5 to get MGM's entire back catalogue on Prime Video, which is how I'm watching Stargate. When I'm done, I just cancel that and pick up a channel with something else.
Or just watch Hololive.
Tech News
- How do red flour beetles absorb water through their butts? (Ars Technica)
On second thought, never mind.
- Can we build solar power satellites? (CNN)
Maybe.
It used to be completely infeasible due simply to the cost of launching the required material into space. SpaceX has fixed that, and now it's just a very difficult engineering problem.
It does solve the obvious problems with ground-based solar, at least: Put your satellites in the right orbit and the Sun shines all the time.
- Why I'm skeptical of "low code". (Scialli)
Because it doesn't work. Basically.
Disclaimer: Farewell, 2023. Or rather, get out, and stay out.
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Saturday, December 30
Daily News Stuff 30 December 2023
Bambeezled Edition
Bambeezled Edition
Top Story
- SpaceX has rounded out the year with two orbital launches three hours apart - one carrying one of the X37B space planes, and the other 23 Starlink satellites - and a static test fire of the third Starship test vehicle. (Ars Technica)
That makes 96 commercial launches this year, of which 96 succeeded. And a couple of test flights which, uh, tested things.
Tech News
- Nvidia is going all-out to compete with AMD's Radeon 7800 XT. (Tom's Hardware)
Except on price, which is probably going to render their efforts irrelevant in the gaming market.
- Remember that program that could determine whether any unsigned 32-bit integer was even or odd? Now there's a version that works for 64-bit integers. (GitHub)
This one cheats slightly. Rather than having a separate check for each possible value, the developers pre-computed the result for every possible input and saved the results to a file.
Then they compressed that file.
Recursively.
Reducing it from around two million terabytes to 13 kilobytes.
- Don't ask why, just accept it.
- In a similar vein, here's a fully-automated Christmas checker. (XKCD)
99.73% accurate, which is even better than the prime number checker.
- Should we upgrade to M3 MacBooks? (Incident)
I don't know, let's throw a bunch of poorly-understood numbers into ChatGPT and see what it says.
ChatGPT says yes!
Also that it's an Amazon Affiliate but that in no way coloured its decision.
Disclaimer: Dad! There's another dead clown on the roof!
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Friday, December 29
Daily News Stuff 29 December 2023
Scrubbidi Server Edition
Scrubbidi Server Edition
Top Story
- The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement by ChatGPT and Copilot. (Tom's Hardware)
This suit seems more substantive than some earlier ones, with examples showing that ChatGPT will reproduce large chunks of NYT articles word-for-word.
Where the case falls down is the NYT's attempt to paint itself as, if not a paragon of virtue, at least a public good, when the organisation is the editorial equivalent of pancreatic cancer, if pancreatic cancer were communicable.
It's no real surprise that ChatGPT does this, of course. It's yet another weakness of building a language model rather than a fact model. Facts cannot be copyrighted.
Tech News
- Quariding Shire has resorted to putting up road signs telling drivers not to trust their GPS. (ABC)
Though to be precise, your GPS is not the issue; it's the mapping software connected to your GPS unit that is the problem. It does not distinguish between a dirt road and a sealed one, or in rainy season, a temporary river and a sealed road.
Quariding Shire is only two hours out of Perth so this has thus far merely inconvenienced people and not killed anyone, but further inland things could be worse. Although further inland there aren't any sealed roads, so it's harder to go wrong.
- PCIe 6.0 is coming next year, just not for you. (Tom's Hardware)
Which is absolutely fine, because there are no mainstream PCIe 5.0 cards yet. As in none. Zero. So 6.0 can wait a while.
- Nvidia's newish graphics cards will be here soon. (Tom's Hardware)
Depending on pricing, the 4070 Super and 4070 Ti Super might be interesting. Probably won't, but might be. The 4080 Super is entirely pointless.
- Minisforum's new MS-01 is touted as a mini-workstation or mini-server, but I'm not sure who would want it. (WCCFTech)
It has two 2.5GB Ethernet ports, and two 10Gb Ethernet ports - though those are SFP+; two USB4 ports albeit only up to 20Gbps, five regular USB ports, an HDMI port, and an audio jack. There are three M.2 slots though only one is PCIe 4, and a half-height, half-length, single-width PCIe slot. Oh, and two DDR5 SO-DIMM slots, all powered by an Intel 13900H.
It's okay, but it doesn't do anything particularly well.
- Inside Apples massive push to make the Mac a gaming paradise, after they completely killed off gaming on the Mac and almost killed off the Mac itself. (Inverse)
Yeah, good luck with that, idiots.
- UK retailers will be forced to pay for e-waste recycling from 2026. (The Guardian)
What's that? Prices on all your electronic gadgets just jumped by 20%? And it's only 2024?
Inconceivable.
Disclaimer: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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Thursday, December 28
Daily News Stuff 28 December 2023
I Of The Apple Edition
I Of The Apple Edition
Top Story
- If you were looking to buy the latest Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2, you can. (Tech Crunch)
Or will be able to shortly. And perhaps briefly.
Apple has won a temporary stay on the ITC ban from a federal court, while it files its full appeal. That only applies through to January 10, depending on the outcome of other proceedings.
Tech News
- Bought a new router. And 15 bits. Which came in a box.
- You should use a hair dryer when bending your 12VHPWR cables for your new RTX 4090, says power supply manufacturer Seasonic. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, okay.
- You should absolutely not use a hair dryer when bending your 12VHPWR cables for your new RTX 4090, and we never suggested you should, says power supply manufacturer Seasonic. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, okay.
- Is-Prime is a library - available in 70 languages - to determine whether any given number is prime, in constant time. (GitHub)
It's very compact, easily ported, and 95% reliable.
- If you are intrigued by this allow me to present a library that determines whether any given unsigned 32-bit integer is even or odd. (Blabbin')
Since the C compiler had a limit of 16 million lines of code per file, it's written directly in machine code. 40GB of it.As a side note, the program is amazingly performant. For small numbers the results are instantaneous and for the large number close to the 2^32 limit the result is still returned in around 10 seconds. Considering the computer has to read 40 GB of data from disk, map it to physical memory and then let the CPU has a rip of it without many chances of caching is honestly quite mind blowing. For reference, the computer is a Core i5 12600K with 32 GB memory and the files are residing on a M.2 SSD disk. While calculating, the peak read speed I saw from the SSD was around 800 MB/s (which doesn’t really make sense as that should give execution speeds at 40+ seconds, but computers are magical so who knows what is going on).
Just don't let the smoke out.
Disclaimer: Who let the smoke out?
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Wednesday, December 27
Daily News Stuff 27 December 2023
Apple Of The I Edition
Apple Of The I Edition
Top Story
- If you were looking to buy the latest Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2, you can't. (Tech Crunch)
I can. I don't want to, but I can. But you can't.
It's been banned from sale in the US (though not Australia) over claimed patent infringement involving the light-based pulse oximetry sensor. Apple could just take the pulse oximeter out - I'm not sure how many people care about that - but until they do, or until they make headway in their appeal, they can't sell the device in the US.
Tech News
- If you're looking for news on NASA's Artemis program, the plan to send an appropriately diverse crew to the Moon to do appropriately diverse things, using SpaceX as a launch platform because NASA is too diverse to actually do that part, good luck using a search engine. (TorrentFreak)
Because all the links are getting hit with DMCA takedowns. Because while it's technically perjury to file a false DMCA takedown request, nobody has ever suffered the consequences.
- Intel is spending $25 billion to build a new chip factory in Israel - less a $3.25 billion grant from the Israeli government. (Tom's Hardware)
Intel already operates a 7nm fab in Israel; the new fab will probably produce chips at 1.8nm.
- Windows 11 will soon let you reinstall the operating system without wiping your files. (XDA Developers)
The only problem is that after reinstalling, you'll still have Windows 11.
Disclaimer: Not that there's anything wrong with that. Except for all of the things wrong with that. Which is a lot.
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Tuesday, December 26
Daily News Stuff 26 December 2023
You Can't Compete With Free Edition
You Can't Compete With Free Edition
Top Story
- Today only, The Outer Worlds is free on the Epic Games Store. (WCCFTech)
I was looking forward to this, and was quite irked when Epic snapped it up as an exclusive title, and never got around to buying it.
And now I don't have to.
This edition includes the two DLC packs, so you get everything. For free.
Tech News
- Things to fix when setting up a new Windows PC. (Tom's Hardware)
Step One: Remove fucking McAfee.
- Many prehistoric handprints show a missing finger. What if this was not accidental? (The Guardian)
On the other hand, what if it was? Prehistoric circular saws did not have safety guards.
- The life and death of open source. (Pocoo)
Many 3D printer companied released their software as open source. This may now be changing, because new competitors are taking those open source programs and using them without giving anything back.
Because you can't beat free.
Disclaimer: Except maybe with a stick.
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Monday, December 25
Daily News Stuff 25 December 2023
Meepy Creepmas Edition
Meepy Creepmas Edition
Top Story
- What kind of bubble is AI? (Locus)
Obviously it's a bubble, but is it the kind that leaves some value behind after the fires die down, or is it the kind where you just have to eat your losses and maybe your children?
Image-generation AI suggests the former; textual AI suggests the latter.
Tech News
- Benchmarks have leaked for Intel's lower-end 14th generation desktop CPUs. (WCCFTech)
If these are accurate, the 14100, 14400, and 14600 are quite good performers and worth a look.
There are signs that the scores are not accurate.
- Wow, it is really pissing down out there.
- Ah, yep, hail.
- Speaking of benchmarks, the Cray-1 could reach 27 LINPACK megaFLOPs. (Roy Longbottom)
Which used to be a lot.
The Raspberry Pi 400 - the model I have, where it is built into the keyboard - can reach 1147.
(A core i5 1135G7 - a laptop chip now three generations old - can achieve 9088.)
Disclaimer: Merry Christmas to all, and may replication lag in your MongoDB clusters not unexpectedly trigger flow control and jam up your entire application at one of the busiest times of the year.
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Sunday, December 24
Daily News Stuff 24 December 2023
Night Before Edition
Don't say I never do anything to you.
For you. I mean, for you.
Night Before Edition
Top Story
- After spending a month fighting with Apple to try to keep its Android iMessage application operational, Beeper is throwing in the towel. (Tech Crunch)
Or at least throwing it in Apple's face. The company has open-sourced the application, and Apple's repeated efforts to shut it down have attracted the attention of antitrust regulators.
Tech News
- Intel's Meteor Lake laptop chips now suck 10% less. (Tom's Hardware)
A bug in the pre-release version of the BIOS provided to laptop manufacturers reduced performance by about, well, 10%.
It has now been fixed.
None of the laptops have reached regular consumers so far, but if you do end up buying one make sure to update it.
- Five laptop computers we'll still be talking about in 2024. (Ars Technica)
That's eight days away, guys.
Besides, those all suck.
- Four clowns are suing Clowns.com over inadequate access to custard pies and undersized shoes or something. (404 Media)
The details are a lot less interesting than the headline.
Star Wars as You've Never Seen It Before Video of the Day
Don't say I never do anything to you.
For you. I mean, for you.
Disclaimer: No I don't.
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Saturday, December 23
Daily News Stuff 23 December 2023
On Second Thought Edition
On Second Thought Edition
Top Story
- Sony has decided it will not be removing Discovery Channel content that its customers had "bought" on the PlayStation Network. (Notebook Check)
Of course, if they can remove it, you haven't bought it.
Streaming content licenses are rarely perpetual, which means that content "bought" on secondary platforms can vanish at any time. That's bad enough if the secondary platform offers refunds, but Sony didn't even bother to do that.
This is why the studios want to destroy physical media. Already Disney has stopped shipping Blu-Rays or DVDs to Australia.
Which is no loss for Disney's current offerings, but their back catalog is a different matter.
Tech News
- Font sizes make no sense. Let's make things even worse. (Tonsky)
Or, you know, we could not do that.
- AMD will start clearly listing which of its consumer chips contain Zen 4c cores. (Tom's Hardware)
Zen 4c has all the features of Zen 4, but is designed to be smaller - about half the size - and runs around 20% slower. It's similar to Intel's Efficiency or E cores, which are a quarter the size of full cores and half the speed, except that the E cores also lack some features of the full cores.
Zen 4c was introduced first on server parts - the 128 core Bergamo range - but things are simpler there because chips in the server lineup contains either only full-size Zen 4 or only smaller Zen 4c. Some of the latest laptop chips like the 7540U contain a mixture.
- Banks lend the money you deposit to other people, and if you are a demented anarcho-communist Ars reader, you may not like that, so just convert it into gold and bury it in your back yard or something. (Ars Technica)
Even the comments at Ars point out that this is a stupid article.
- If you want to build your own compact NAS and don't want to worry about the CPU running too hot, SZBox might have the answer. (Liliputing)
It's a mini-ITX motherboard with an Intel N-series CPU - one that only has the aforementioned E cores. You can choose from a 4 core N100 or an 8 core N305, which is not hugely powerful but should be fine for a file / media server.
Apart from that it has two M.2 slot, six SATA ports, four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, HDMI and DisplayPort, four USB ports, and a single memory slot for up to 32GB of RAM. There's also a PCIe x1 slot, but if you use that one of the M.2 slots stops working because honestly Intel's N-series chips kind of suck.
- So does Google. (Search Engine Journal)
This is not news.
Disclaimer: Or rather it is news, but not new.
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