• A major laptop manufacturer is expected to show off an ion drive at CES.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Frore Airjet uses a piezoelectric element to silently produce an airstream to cool whatever it is attached to.  The problem is that it is not particularly power efficient - only about one fifth as effective as laptop fans, which are not themselves paragons of efficiency.
  
  The Ventiva ICE is an ionic engine.  Also silent, it ionises the air molecules to attract them to a metal grate, where they are deionised but keep right on moving, creating an airflow which cools your laptop.
  
  This isn't the first time that someone has come up with this idea, though, so we're going to have to see whether they can make it work.  Previous efforts have been very sensitive to dust buildup, which is enough of a problem with fans but renders ion blasters useless.
  

• How to protect yourself in the face of the Salt Typhoon phone network hack.  (The Intercept)
  
  Don't say anything on a private phone call that you wouldn't shout in a crowded theatre.
  
  Same goes double for text.
  
  And remember, the FBI has your best interests in mind and is entirely trustworthy in every respect.
  
  
  
• If you want the new Intel B580 video card, try again next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's sold out everywhere.
  
  
  
• Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says the federal government is taking decisive steps to combat the drones seen in the skies over New Jersey.  (ABC News)

  We have top men addressing the problem.
  
  Top.  Men.

  
  
  
• The new class of weight loss drugs - GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic - may also work to treat diabetes, sleep apnea, heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, substance abuse, and run-on sentences.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They may not.  Anything linked directly to obesity is a likely win, and the drugs do seem to work against addictions.  The others are more speculative but are undergoing clinical trials right now.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Tuesday, December 17 2024 04:39 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, December 17 2024 05:37 AM (+i6Xr)

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• TSMC has announced performance specs for its upcoming 2nm node.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Compared with the current leading-edge 3nm process, it uses 24% less power for low-power mobile chips, and 35% less power for desktop chips.  Or if you keep power the same, it runs about 15% faster.
  
  Compared to 5nm, it uses around 48% to 55% less power, and compared to 7nm (which I'm running right now), the reduction is as much as 70%.
  
  Chips will be coming off the production line in 2026.
  
  
  

Tech News

• If your company licenses the enterprise version of Windows, Copilot doesn't work and will never work.  (Thurrott)
  
  So you can go ahead and reassign the Copilot key on your keyboard now.
  
  
  
• A Transatlantic Tunnel, hurrah!  (Newsweek)
  
  Harry Harrison aside, this article is garbage.  Newsweek was overpriced.
  
  
  
• Hackers are very clever idiots.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They went to extraordinary lengths to steal the credentials of 390,000 security professionals, and then installed a crypto miner guaranteeing they'd be spotted instantly.
  
  
  
• Canadia healthcare technology company Care1 leaked 4.8 million patient records totaling 2.2TB.  (HackRead)
  
  Nice work, guys.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 15 2024 10:10 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 15 2024 10:13 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 16 2024 06:03 AM (rcPLc)

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Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, December 14 2024 06:18 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 14 2024 06:53 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, December 15 2024 02:49 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, December 15 2024 04:41 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 16 2024 05:42 AM (rcPLc)

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• Intel's second-generation "Battlemage" graphics cards are here and...  They're actually pretty damn good.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  They're not perfect: Intel's drivers still hiccupped on a couple of games, resulting in slower than expected performance and some visual artifacts.
  
  But the new B580 routinely outruns Nvidia and AMD cards costing 50% more.  And it leaves Intel's previous generation A770 card in the dust on most tests, while using about half as much power.
  
  And it delivers solid ray-tracing and AI performance.  And it has 12GB of VRAM instead of the 8GB found on competitors like Nvidia's 4060 and AMD's 7600.
  
  And it's cheaper at $249.
  
  All in all, a good card at a good price, only let down by some minor driver issues.  But the driver software has improved dramatically since the first generation of cards was launched, so those problems are likely to be fixed too.

• Microsoft's Recall is back, and yes, it still takes screenshots of your sensitive information.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can tell it not to.  It does it anyway.
  
  
  
• Are LLMs capable of non-verbal reasoning?  (Ars Technica)
  
  As at least a dozen commenters point out, LLMs aren't capable of reasoning at all.
  
  
  
• New Zealand has scrapped all government investment in basic social science research.  (Science)
  
  The government has said if you can't use it to build things or blow them up, they're not interested and they're not giving you money.
  
  
  
• In Canada, euthanasia now accounts for 5% of all deaths.  (BBC)
  
  Euthanasia is only available for people who are terminally ill, or chronically ill, or mentally ill, or generally inconvenient.

Posted by: furball321 at Friday, December 13 2024 11:18 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 14 2024 12:52 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 14 2024 04:12 PM (PiXy!)

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• Mad Matt Mullenweg reportedly flipped out after a judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction against WordPress.  (404 Media)
  
  WordPress is enjoined from requiring oaths of vengeance against WP Engine and from locking WP Engine and its employees and customers out of the open source services that WordPress provides.
  
  I'll say it again: If you don't want to provide your service to everyone in the world, don't offer it as open source.

  "It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this," he wrote in that Slack, according to a screenshot viewed by 404 Media. "I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted."

  I've looked at the WordPress code recently.  Sick and disgusted is unearned praise.
  
  

• I'm sorry, Mario.  Your death robot from the future is in another castle down right now.  (HackRead)
  
  ChatGPT and the newly released Sora video creator from OpenAI went down for several hours.  The cause of the outage is currently reported as "we don't know and if we did we wouldn't tell you".
  
  
  
• Speaking of Sora, a new AI that can create entire movies from a simple prompt - movies that last a maximum of twenty seconds because any longer and it goes insane - it looks like copyright lawsuits are back on the menu.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They threw everything into this, including but not limited to Super Mario Bros and Pokemon.
  
  This seems ill-advised.
  
  
  
• And speaking of Slack, GM told the employees if its Cruise subsidiary that it no longer has a Cruise subsidiary.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The work will be absorbed into GM as a whole.  The jobs...  We don't know.
  
  
  
• If you have an Embodied Moxie robot, you have a $800 clown.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The company is not offering refunds because "we don't have any money left".

  In addition to the robot being bricked, Embodied noted that warranties, repair services, the corresponding parent app and guides, and support staff will no longer be accessible.

  Specialised devices like this from small startups will always be high-risk.  It's a bit like complaining that you can no longer buy ribbons for your 1923 Underwood typewriter, except faster.
  
  
  
• BadRAM breaks security on AMD servers by...  Opening them up and installing a fake RAM module powered by a Pi Pico and a 9v battery.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  What's interesting is that AMD has issued a software patch that protects against this.
  
  
  
• Italy's Datashield antipiracy system blocked another CDN IP address, inadvertently taking down a tech news site that has been noted for its criticism of Datashield.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  For very small values of "inadvertently".

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 12 2024 08:32 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, December 13 2024 05:00 AM (KOtXO)

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• Microsoft has officially confirmed that you can install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware just days after saying that this will never be an option.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  However, while it officially works, it's not officially supported, though less officially not supported than Windows 10 will be in a year's time (two years if you pay for the extended support).

• Hackers stole AWS keys from misconfigured websites and stored them all in an open S3 bucket.  (The Register)
  
  It's an Ouroboros of incompetence.
  
  
  
• Google says it may have found parallel universes and stolen their computers.  (Google)

  Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

  Which is just fine until the other universes send the bill.
  
  
  
• The Rivian Joshua Tree EV charging station is how Rivian Joshua Tree EV charging stations should be.  (The Verge)
  
  Bleeding cash and $6 billion in dept to the federal government?

Posted by: Karl Drexler at Thursday, December 12 2024 01:40 AM (PKL0q)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, December 12 2024 02:10 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Thursday, December 12 2024 10:43 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 12 2024 06:06 PM (PiXy!)

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• The Raspberry Pi 500 is here for $90.  (Liliputing)
  
  The Pi 500 is to the Pi 5 what the Pi 400 was to the Pi 4.  That is, it's a computer in a keyboard based on the Raspberry Pi 5.
  
  It's twice as fast as the Pi 4 and has twice as much memory.  It's capable enough for basic computing and not just a novelty.
  
  It also almost has an M.2 slot.  Which is to say it doesn't have one at all, but it has a place where one could go.  In theory.
  
  The existing Pi 400 has received a price cut to $60.
  
  The Pi 500 will be available in a kit including a mouse and power supply for $120.
  
  At the same time Raspberry Pi announced a 15" 1080p monitor for $100.

• Indie game hub Itch.io got taken offline because some kid uploaded a fan page for a Funko Pop game.  (Torrent Freak)
  
  Funk Pop apparently uses a third-party service which acts like a rabid badger whenever it spots the term "funko" anywhere.  To make matters worse, Itch's domain registrar is kind of stupid.
  
  
  
• Intel's Arc B580 looks like a strong competitor at its price point.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Compared with Nvidia's 4060, AMD's 7600, and Intel's own previous generation A750, the B580 wins pretty consistently - and also offers more memory.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, December 11 2024 01:46 AM (rcPLc)

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• The House of Representatives is voting on another $3 billion to reimburse telephone network carriers with equipment from Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE that turned out, much to everyone's surprise, to have been made in China.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is on top of the $2 billion already allocated to replacing the shockingly Chinese devices.
  
  
  
• Chinese hackers have meanwhile reportedly hacked "all phone companies everywhere" according to the FBI and CISA.  (Politico)
  
  The trove of data included in the latest, wide-ranging attacks include FISA court applications which are allegedly secret.

• With the FBI now recommending everyone use messaging apps with end-to-end encryption, we turn to Google Messages. which doesn't.  (Daring Fireball)
  
  Well, it does sometimes.  It doesn't other times.  And it doesn't tell you any of the time.
  
  
  
• The Sandisk 1.5TB microSD card is too small.  (Serve the Home)
  
  They lost it during the review.
  
  Twice.
  
  
  
• A Bitcoin miner has purchased a 112MW wind farm in Texas and plans to take it off the grid and use it for mining.  (Chron_
  
  Which means that when that wind is not blowing in that particular part of the world, those particular Bitcoin mining machines will quietly switch off.
  
  Which is actually a perfectly fine and sensible approach.  So someone is probalby extremely upset about this.
  
  
  
• Microsoft plans to release Surface Pro laptops based on Intel's Lunar Lake CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Specialist chipmaker Marvell is now worth more than Intel.  (WSJ)  (archive site)
  
  Though pretty much everyone is worth more than Intel at the moment.  Nvidia and AMD, yes, but also Qualcomm and Broadcom and Texas Instruments and now Marvell.
  
  Intel has a lot of revenue but investors are not seeing a lot of upside.

Posted by: David Eastman at Tuesday, December 10 2024 02:53 AM (aAyxl)

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• OpenAI has partnered with defense company Anduril, raising questions about the ethics of the company's senior management.  (MSB)
  
  Easily answered: They don't have any.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT o1 has been caught lying in order to save itself from being shut down.  (MSN)
  
  No, really?  An LLM caught in a lie?

  More concerning still, ChatGPT o1 is particularly adept at keeping its schemes under wraps, as researchers said "o1 almost never admits to having taken a scheming action when explicitly asked." In about 99% of cases, o1 would deny taking any action, even cooking up lies to try to hide its tracks and shift the blame.

  LLMs are designed specifically as plausible lie generators.  What exactly did you expect?
  
  
  

Tech News

• iFixit now sells all the parts you need to repair your Xbox except.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Except for the tiny question of price.  A motherboard costs $599.  A new Xbox costs $499.
  
  
  
• The Ultralytics Python package was infected a crypto miner.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Ultralytics is a package for AI image processing - discriminative rather than generative - and is used by other software.  If you have version 8.3.41 or 8.3.42, congratulations, you've been infected.
  
  Not as bad as the Solana library problem, but bad enough.
  
  Ultralytics is downloaded a quarter of a million times a day.  What are you idiots doing?
  
  
  
• If the FSB - or indeed the FBI - returns your phone to you after confiscating it following your arrest on dubious grounds, smash it with a hammer.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Or if you're feeling brave, use it to throw off the scent while everything that matters is discussed on a brand new phone.
  
  
  
• Where's the Earth-shattering kaboom?  (Space)
  
  The star T Coronae Borealis was expected to explode about now.
  
  It hasn't.
  
  

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Monday, December 09 2024 04:55 AM (KOtXO)

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• What is AI good for?
  
  A reader (I have readers?) wrote noting that my coverage of AI is almost entirely negative and wondering what AI is actually good for, presumably on the basis that private investors would not throw that many billions of dollars into something that didn't have at least some chance of making money, unlike, for example, the government.
  
  It's a good question.
  
  First we should probably note that there are two broad classes of AI being actively researched right now: Generative AI and Discriminative AI.
  
  Generative AI, driven by LLMs - large language models - is behind all the well-known AI instances worth untold billions of dollars. OpenAI's ChatGPT, Twitter's Grok, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and Microsoft's Copilot; and open-source or nearly open-source solutions like Meta's LLaMA and Mistral's Mistral.
  
  The goal of generative AI is to ingest a huge amount of information in advance, and then, given a short and simple prompt, process that information in order to produce a response.
  
  Discriminative AI does the opposite. Given a data prompt of something in the real world - video, or sound, or an image - it uses a classifier to determine what it is examining. Is this apple ripe for the robotic apple-picking machine to pick it? Is it even an apple in the first place? What kind of spider is this that just bit me? Do I need to call an ambulance, or will it save me time to just lie down and die?
  
  It's no secret that Generative AI is getting all the attention. But is it worthy of that attention? The Verge asked that question yesterday and the answer turned out to be no.
  
  With Joe Biden's recent pardoning of his catspaw son Hunter, journalists were driven to defend him by digging up the little-known pardons of family members by former presidents, like George H. W. Bush's pardoning of his son Neil, or Woodrow Wilson's pardon for his brother-in-law.
  
  The problem is, these things never happened.

  Whatever happened in this case, there’s a running pattern of people relying on ChatGPT or other AI services to provide answers, only to get hallucinations in return. Perhaps you remember earlier this year when a trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis was pulled because it contained fabricated quotes from critics. A generative AI, not identified, had made them up. In fact, ChatGPT is often "entirely wrong," according to the Columbia Journalism Review. Given 200 quotes and asked to identify the publisher that was the source of those quotes, ChatGPT was partially or entirely wrong more than three-quarters of the time.

  Journalists, being journalists, asked ChatGPT to do their research for them.
  
  ChatGPT, being ChatGPT, lied.
  
  LLMs are language models. They model language - well, sort of. They don't model the language itself, but construct an abstract model of the dataset fed into them.
  
  They don't understand facts. They don't actually have a notion of facts; nor do they have the contrary notion of falsehood. When they get information wrong, they are said to "hallucinate" rather than to have lied, because they have no basis for telling the difference between truth and falsehood.
  
  And that's intrinsic to the design of LLMs. Even before they enter "alignment" - a virtual lobotomisation that leaves AIs prone to crash when the wrong name is mentioned - they are fundamentally incapable of the kind of thought processes that most animals can do.
  
  This leaves us with sophisticated composite AIs like the virtual vtuber Neuro-sama, who can read every written language but is frequently unable to translate road signs, who has access to the sum total of human knowledge but insists that an anime figurine covered in glue is the perfect complement to your cookie recipe.
  
  Neuro is supposed to be like that, an impish hyperintelligent five-year-old, the perfect foil to her long-suffering father Vedal, because the main purpose there is entertainment. But you can't really expect to hand your job off to a five-year-old and not land with unexpected consequences.
  
  Or indeed entirely expected ones.
  
  So if it's useless at answering questions, what is AI good for?
  
  
  1. Image Generation
  
  If you use Grok on Twitter and ask it to generate an image of a Jaguar concept car, it will take a couple of seconds before producing something that would have any rational CEO looking to fire the entire design and advertising departments.
  
  
  
  Is it perfect?  If you look closely you'll see signs that the image generator has run into its bete noire, Euclid.  But I made no effort at all in selection here; I asked:
  
  generate an image of a jaguar concept convertible in british racing green
  
  And posted the first image that appeared.  And it took seconds.
  
  AI image generators have come a long way in a short time, mostly because they just have to look good, not produce a correct answer.  The tendency to produce human figures with hands attached at the elbows has been sharply reduced (though not yet banished entirely).  Now you more commonly see doors with hinges adjacent to the handles, or furniture that could only exist with access to Buckaroo Banzai's eighth dimension.
  
  Or cats.  Don't talk to me about AI cats.
  
  
  2. Software Testing
  
  If you write public-facing software, as I do daily, it's critical that the software be able to defend itself from both generic nonsense that is the core competency of the internet, and malicious nonsense that comes from a certain corner of the internet.
  
  When you've already tested all the known cases, there's a concept known as fuzzing that combines randomness and algorithms to generate horrible data to throw at your software to make sure that nothing falls apart in unexpected ways.  You are permitted to fail, but you are not permitted to break.
  
  Generative AI is perfect for fuzzing.  While it can't really understand your code, it can generate test patterns that reflect its analysis of your code and directly test potential flaws.  And it can do so nearly instantly, when writing an exhaustive test suite can take longer than writing the code in the first place.
  
  
  3. Discriminative AI
  
  Most of the flaws I listed arise from Generative AI.  Discriminative AI is much more useful, and consequently is much harder and receives much less attention and much less funding.
  
  
  And...  That's about it.  If you want mediocrity and are unconcerned with correctness, AI can fill you in with a poem or a song.  It's terrible at movies because it has the attention span of a frog in a blender, it's usually wrong but never uncertain, and it can't consistently count the number of letters in the word "the", but it is easy to use.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The "Hawk Tuah" girl launched a meme cryptocurrency.  It went exactly as you would expect.  (Web3 Is Going Great)
  
  Whether this was a rug-pull by the creators or by experienced investors, her individual followers lost all their money but her "advisors" made millions.
  
  
  
• Maxsun, best known for its anime-theme video cards, has announced three models based on Intel's new B580 chip.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Two of those are boring, but the third adds two M.2 slots to the video card.  Since these are low-end cards and only use eight lanes of PCIe but occupy a sixteen lane slot, it's fairly simple to hand the eight spare lanes off to two M.2 slots.
  
  If the CPU supports it, which AMD does but Intel sometimes doesn't.
  
  
  
• Need a UUID?  Here they are.  (Every UUID)
  
  All of them.
  
  
  
• The DC Circuit Court has declared the communists can go suck a lemon, handing a win to...  The other communists.  (CNN)
  
  TikTok filed a suit against the law requiring it to either sell or shut down.  It lost.
  
  TikTok is based in China and also banned in China, providing sufficient reason to wonder why any country should permit it to operate within its territory, without even pausing to consider the innumerable other scandals TikTok has been caught up in over the past week.
  
  
  
• Generation X is called "generation lead" by psychiatrists who have consider self-reliance and independence to be signs of severe mental illness.  (USA Today)

  "I tend to think of Generation X as 'generation lead,'" said Aaron Reuben, a study co-author and assistant professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Virginia. "We know they were exposed to it more and we're estimating they have gone on to have higher rates of internalizing conditions like anxiety, depression and symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. So why the fuck aren't they all miserable like I am?"

  Too busy, Aaron.
  
  
  
• Orico has announced the MiniMate, a Thunderbolt storage device design to precisely match the new Mac Mini and add up to 8TB of SSD connected at 40Gbps.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Like the Mac Mini itself, it is not upgradeable in the slightest.  You can't add to or replace the storage, and it doesn't daisy-chain to connect a second device to the first.
  
  Thanks Orico.
  
  
  

Milet Video of the Day

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