• 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)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 25 2023 02:07 AM (BMUHC)

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

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 25 2023 06:11 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 25 2023 11:06 PM (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)

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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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• High-temperature superconductors are proving to be as elusive as cold fusion.  After a paper was published in nominally reputable scientific journal Nature announcing the creation of room-temperature superconductors (though not STP), other researchers went to work to replicate the results.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Spoiler: The results failed to replicate.

• Why are Gigabyte's Aorus models so much cheaper than their Aero models?
  
  
  
• The Framework Laptop 13 is good.  (The Verge)
  
  The 2023 Intel model is shipping and it delivers better performance and better battery life than the 2022 model.  I'm still waiting for the AMD version which should deliver better performance, better battery life, and better graphics.
  
  
  
• The .zip domain is kind of shit.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Here's the problem:
  
  1. Someone sends you an email telling you to download payroll.zip from the company website and open it.
  2. Gmail sees that as a URL and automatically turns it into a link.
  3. You click on the link and it downloads a zip file.
  4. You open the zip file and your computer melts, because it actually got it from the malicious payroll.zip website.
  
  Two innocuous ideas put together equals one disaster.
  
  
  
• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, appeared before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to ask the government to regulate his competitors out of existence.  (Axios)

  Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called it "historic" that a company was coming to Congress pleading for regulation.

  Oh, do get fucked, Senator.  It's been happening at least as long as there was a Senate, back to ancient Rome.
  
  
  
• Australia isn't a real country anyway: The Australian government has asked Twitter how it plans to stifle free speech when the Stifling Team has all been fired.  (The Register)
  
  Twitter allegedly said, Australia who?
  
  
  
• Zoom plans to implement Anthropic's chatbot, Claude, to make meetings even more insufferable.  (The Verge)
  
  Could we not?

Posted by: madrocketsci at Friday, May 19 2023 05:16 AM (hRoyQ)

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• Vice Media has filed for bankruptcy.  (New York Times)
  
  Once valued at $5.7 billion by idiots, the company is being sold off to one group of creditors for $225 million, which is less than is outstanding on an existing loan from the group so they get nothing.

• If Intel's NUC is too large for your tastes, the Topton M6S is the size of...  It's almost exactly the size of one of those bricks of Post-It notes, where you get five regular pads of notes in different colours.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has a quad core Intel N100 CPU.  This uses the "efficiency" cores from Intel's current chips, with no "performance" cores in sight.  The individual cores are as fast as my desktop system I was using up to last year, though that had eight cores  Still not awful for tiny system like this.
  
  That's combined 12GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage in an M.2 2242 slot.  Those are easier to come by than the smaller 2230 size, though you can buy it with an SSD preinstalled.
  
  Not expensive, either.
  
  
  
• The World Health Organisation says things would be much better all round if people would just stop being people.  (WHO)
  
  Last week they were insisting that you stop drinking alcohol.  This week they're saying you need to cut both sugar and artificial sweeteners out of your diet.
  
  I think I'll cut my consumption of WHO by 100%.
  
  
  
• Anti-piracy organisation ACE had its anti-piracy page taken down by anti-piracy organisation AiPlex for piracy.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Popcorn time.
  
  
  
• AMD could be launching 128 core and 192 core Zen 5 server CPUs as soon as next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They'll fit in existing Zen 4 servers but will use up to 50% more power, so make sure your power distribution systems and water chillers are in good order.
  
  They'll be close to twice as fast as the existing servers, though, so not a bad tradeoff.
  
  They'll be competing directly against Intel's new 144 core server CPUs, if those arrive on schedule.  But those chips use Intel's "efficiency" cores like the Post-It computer above and will be utterly steamrolled by Zen 5.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 16 2023 09:33 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, May 16 2023 11:19 PM (r9O5h)

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