• The Tuxedo Pulse 14 is a Ryzen 7840HS laptop with a 2880x1800 OLED display.  (Tuxedo Computers)
  
  It has 32GB of RAM - soldered, but at least there's a good amount, room for two M.2 2280 SSDs, four USB ports, HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort, uh, ports.  It comes installed with Linux by default but you can choose Windows instead, or install it yourelf.
  
  There are 29 keyboard layouts to choose from, including the option of a fully custom layout where you edit the design template and upload it when placing your order.  That's about $85 extra but that doesn't seem unreasonable.
  
  So, can you get the Four Essential Keys?
  
  Lol.  No.
  
  
  
• The Fedora Slimbook 14 is a Core i7 12700H laptop with a 2880x1800 OLED display - these displays are showing up everywhere, which is great because they are terrific displays - Thunderbolt and USB-C ports, two regular USB ports, HDMI, a full-size SD card reader, a headphone jack, and a separate power socket.  (Slimbook)
  
  It supports up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM in two SODIMM slots, and a single M.2 SSD.
  
  There are 14 keyboard layouts available with further options for other layouts, though they don't detail exactly how that works.
  
  So, can you get the Four Essential Keys?
  
  Lol.  No.
  
  But.
  
  The Fedora Slimbook 16 weighs just 1.5kg - barely more than my existing 14" laptop, has Nvidia 3050 Ti graphics, and a three-column numeric keypad with a single-height enter key.
  
  Which means, if they support custom keyboard printing, that you can turn it into a 15-key macro pad with any layout you can dream of.  (Actually 18 as there are three half-height keys above the main keypad.)  Four essential keys and another fourteen.

• AMD could be looking to Samsung's 3nm process for some of the chips coming next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This would make sense, from a perspective of not putting all your eggs in one basket hanging directly over a hungry snake, and also from a perspective of not buying all your eggs from one egg shop.
  
  Samsung's 3nm process isn't quite as good as TSMC's, but that's like saying a Ferrari isn't quite as good as a Lamborghini, when the third option is an Edsel.
  
  
  
• Monaspace is a monospace programming font superfamily from GitHub.  (GitHub)
  
  Good monospaced fonts used to be scarce; in the last couple of years there's been a flood of them.  This particular font provides five styles, seven weights, twenty-six widths, and twelve degrees of slant
  
  This has a couple of interesting features, including ten sets of ligatures - where adjacent characters are combined into a more complicated glyph - and what they are calling "texture healing".  If you have the letters imi in that sequence, in a normal monospaced font that looks ugly because the i characters are wide and the m character is squished.  Texture healing keeps everything in the monospaced grid, but lets the m fill the entire width of its cell while each i is moved to to give the m more room.
  
  If your application properly supports TrueType/OpenType fonts, it doesn't need to know anything about this; it uses a trick built into TrueType that us normally used to support variants of Arabic characters - in Arabic, letters can look different depending on where they are located in a word.
  
  You can play with it on the GitHub page and it certainly seems to work.
  
  
  

Posted by: Siergen at Monday, November 13 2023 12:42 AM (WUBpd)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 13 2023 02:01 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 13 2023 02:01 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 13 2023 02:05 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, November 13 2023 02:46 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 13 2023 04:04 AM (BMUHC)

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• Apple says 8GB of RAM on a Mac is equivalent to 16GB on a real computer.  But how does an 8GB Mac perform objectively on simple tasks?  Poorly.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If you leave your browser open with a bunch of tabs while using Lightroom, expect things to take 2.5x longer.  If you're using Final Cut Pro to edit video, up to 4x longer.
  
  There's absolutely no excuse for the existence of a $1600 laptop with only 8GB of RAM.  16GB of RAM is barely adequate for running any serious desktop task these days.

• Childhood vaccine rates are falling right across the US.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Some of the commenters even understand why.  Many of the childhood vaccines really are safe and effective, and we don't want a return of polio.
  
  But whenever the usual suspects try to blame conservatives, they run head-first into the fact that Mississippi has the highest vaccination rates in the US, and Hawaii one of the lowest.
  
  
  
• Microsoft now wants to give you a quiz when you close OneDrive.  (PC World)
  
  There needs to be a write in option for fuck off and stay there.
  
  
  
• Comments might be down for a few minutes between 2AM and 4AM Eastern tomorrow.  I'm setting up database replication on the server in preparation for some upgrades I'll be making to the blog.

• Apple's new M3 Pro - specifically, the 11 core version - has the fastest single-threaded performance of any CPU. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  By 1%, but a win is a win.
  
  Downside is that on multi-threaded tests it ranks 312th, right behind AMD's ultra-low-power Ryzen Z1 Extreme, used in portable gaming devices like the Asus ROG Ally.
  
  So Apple has some work to do there.

• Speaking of portable gaming devices there's now an OLED version of the Steam Deck. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unless you live in Australia, in which case there is no Steam Deck at all.
  
  
  
• Micron has introduced 128GB DDR5-8000 server memory using its new 32Gb DRAM. (AnandTech)
  
  Which is really fast for server memory, which normally runs at more pedestrian speeds like 4800MHz, which is merely absurdly fast rather than insanely fast.
  
  To get 128GB on on module you previously had to stack two memory chips two deep (and before that, four deep), which slowed things down. Server CPUs have been adding more memory channels to get the bandwidth they needed with those slow modules, so an overnight 66% increase is going to shake things up a bit.
  
  Well, when I say overnight, these modules will be available next year.
  
  Expect 64GB desktop and laptop modules as well.
  
  And in 2026, says Micron, 96GB desktop and laptop modules, and 192GB server modules.
  
  
  
• The first planned small nuclear reactor in the US has been cancelled due to spiraling costs. (Ars Technica)
  
  How unusual.
  
  
  
• The Illinois state senate has voted 44-7 to approve the construction of small nuclear reactors. (AP News)
  
  How unusual. But seriously this time.
  
  
  
• Tumblr is reportedly on life support, and is not getting much of that. (Ars Technica)
  
  Tumblr these days is owned by Automattic, which also runs Wordpress.com.
  
  The site is best known for the 2018 Verizon Containment Breach, in which its parent company banned porn and millions of lunatics fled to infect ever other website in the world.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 10 2023 11:46 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 10 2023 11:48 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, November 11 2023 01:21 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, November 11 2023 01:31 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Saturday, November 11 2023 03:10 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 11 2023 03:56 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 11 2023 10:25 AM (PiXy!)

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• The second Starship test build is stacked up, ready for launch as early as next week.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This version should fix the issues that caused ground control to hit the self-destruct button four minutes into the first test flight.  Starship can lift more than a hundred tons into Low Earth Orbit and then land back on the ground - once they get the explosions ironed out - and has been contracted by NASA for future manned Moon missions, so I'm really keen to see this work.
  
  So are the commenters at Ars Technica.  As much as they're hardwired to hate Elon Musk, they are rocketry fanboys and want to see this fly.  The people getting banished from this particular thread are the ones hoping for fireworks.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Space Force has tapped SpaceX to launch its space plane.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The X-37B is a robotic mini-Shuttle that has flown seven times so far - actually a pair of shuttles, just called 1 and 2 - often spending multiple years in orbit doing secret space stuff.  It usually launches on the Atlas V, but this time will go aboard the more powerful Falcon Heavy, which could be sending it into a much higher orbit.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the ESA is run by petty bureaucratic assholes.  (Ars Technica)
  
  All the worst qualities of all the European member states rolled together with no accountability.  What did you expect?

• Apple says that 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is equal to 16GB on other systems.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is not entirely invalid.  Apple is pretty aggressive in tackling memory bloat.  Microsoft just doesn't care.
  
  But if you're running a complicated application, whether that's Adobe Anything, or a JetBrains IDE on a large project, or Chrome, it doesn't matter how much work went into reducing memory usage by the operating system.  If Photoshop wants 20GB of RAM and you don't have that, you're going to have a really miserable time.
  
  
  
• All good things must come to an end: Hollywood actors may have reached a deal to end their strike.  (The Verge)
  
  Well.
  
  
  
• ASRock's Z790 Nova WiFi has six M.2 slots.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is the most I've seen on any regular consumer motherboard.  At $299 it's not exactly cheap though.
  
  
  
• Maine just passed a right-to-repair ballot measure for cars.  (404 Media)
  
  Despite some very expensive lobbying and advertising by carmakers, the measure passed 84.3 to 15.7.
  
  That might serve as a signal that there are votes out there for restoring the right to fix the stuff you own.

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, November 09 2023 07:56 PM (0001W)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 09 2023 10:12 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, November 10 2023 12:47 PM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, November 10 2023 01:17 PM (2tHvf)

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• Optus, Australia's second largest telecommunications provider (I think), went down today.  (ABC)
  
  And I thought I was having a rough time when ARP updates for some of the IP addresses I needed to migrate were taking minutes to propagate rather than seconds.
  
  Anyway, around 4AM the entire Optus network ceased to be.  Mobile phones and internet access simply dropped dead right across the country.  Shops had to remember what cash looked like as point-of-sale terminals became useless bricks.  Melbourne's trains stopped working because, well, Melbourne.  Some remote towns with a single communications link via Optus were cut off entirely.
  
  I'm not sure quite how they managed this, because the national internet backbone itself was completely unaffected.  Probably DNS.  It's usually DNS.
  
  
  

Tech News

• It looks like AMD's Zen 4 laptop chips are headed to the the desktop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is good news, because while the current generation of AMD desktop chips do have integrated graphics, the laptop models have up to six times more graphics and can actually be used to play games.
  
  
  
• If you have a Chamberlain MyQ smart garage door opener - which can do useful things like automatically close the garage door when you lock your front door at night - now you don't.  (The Verge)
  
  That is, you still have the device, but it is now a Chamberlain MyQ stupid garage door opener.  All "unauthorised" API access has been cut off, which means while it can talk to other home automation devices, it won't.
  
  On the other hand, the Chamberlain mobile app now has ads.  So there's that.
  
  
  
• What do do if your shiny new M3 Mac comes preinstalled with a weird outdated version of MacOS that can't be updated.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Get a refund.
  
  Well, or download the update manually.  That works too.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 08 2023 10:12 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 08 2023 10:13 PM (obo9H)

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• WeWork has gone bankrupt.  (Bloomberg)  (archive site)
  
  This will save the labour of at least a dozen neurons that I had assigned to correcting all the other neurons that believed that WeWork went bankrupt a couple of years ago.
  
  The company has $15 billion in assets and $19 billion in debt, which is not fatal except that it is also unprofitable and sees no path to profitability without major changes.
  
  The company has filed for Chapter 11 proceedings in the US, which means it will attempt to reorganise to somehow become a functional company...  Which it never has been.

• Nitrogen-9 is apparently a thing.  (Physics Magazine)
  
  If 7 protons and only 2 neutrons sounds wildly unstable - atoms typically have as many or more neutrons as protons - then you are paying attention.  It very quickly disintegrates into five independent protons and a helium atom.
  
  In fact, nobody has actually observed Nitrogen-9; what they detected was something that had just disintegrated into five protons and a helium atom.  But if you find a flaming pile of junk with four wheels and four doors and a Ford logo, it's not too much of a stretch to guess that it used to be a car.
  
  
  
• Speaking of flaming piles of junk, Washington DC is handing out free Apple AirTags to help track down stolen cars.  (PC Magazine)
  
  Which is the least stupid thing I've heard out of Washington in years.
  
  
  
• If you want a pretty decent Windows laptop, the HP Pavilion Plus 14 is available for $680 with a discount code via HP's store on eBay.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is similar to the model I'm using right now.  Mine has an Intel 12700H, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD; the model on offer has a 13500H - newer, but fewer cores, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD.  Both have a 2880x1800 OLED display, which is really nice, two Thunderbolt ports, two USB-A ports, HDMI, a microSD slot, and a headphone jack.  And the four essential keys.
  
  If it had upgradeable RAM, or even just a build-to-order option for 32GB, it would be pretty much perfect.  But you'd need a professional desoldering station to even attempt such an upgrade.
  
  
  
• Bluesky Social has migrated to SQLite.  (Hacker News)
  
  SQLite is the most popular database in the world - there are an estimated one trillion copies of it in use, because it is so often embedded inside applications.  But it's an unusual choice for a social network.
  
  What Bluesky is doing is giving each user their own database - which means the company is running 1.8 million individual databases.
  
  Which is Dante's 11th circle of Hell.  (The 10th is inhabited by postmodernists.)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 07 2023 10:55 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 08 2023 02:55 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 08 2023 03:20 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Davd at Wednesday, November 08 2023 04:08 AM (R7Z4D)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 08 2023 08:49 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 09 2023 12:05 AM (BMUHC)

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• Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs so poorly.  (Paavo)
  
  Culling and level of detail.  Or rather, the lack of same.  Or precisely, horrible defects in Unity that mean that in complex games the automatic handling of these issues simply breaks.
  
  And what that means is that if a complex structure would be drawn with 60,000 polygons when it's in the foreground, in Cities: Skylines 2 it is drawn with 60,000 polygons when it is in the background, and indeed drawn with 60,000 polygons when it is behind another object and not visible to the player at all.
  
  Which means that it will be fixed, with some improvements arriving already and a lot more in coming weeks.  But that's because the game developer has taken over fixing things the game engine should handle for them.
  
  Most likely - this is speculation, but it makes sense - Unity has been promising fixes for these problems for months, and the fixes simply didn't arrive in time.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Went to cancel my Adobe Creative Cloud account since I don't really have time to use it, and I have plenty of other software to take its place (mostly from Humble Bundle, which is a great place to save 90% by buying last year's version).
  
  They gave me a 50% discount.
  
  Which...  Okay.
  
  
  
• A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time.  (Salon)
  
  It was lupus.
  
  An Oliver Sacks tale except in this case the patient recovered and was able to tell it herself.
  
  
  
• Drunk grizzlies keep getting killed by trains in Montana.  (Cowboy State Daily)
  
  Which has to be the Montana-est headline ever.
  
  
  
• Across the US, in red states and blue, in rich districts and poor, home-schooling is the fastest growing form of education.  (WV News)

  Home schooling's surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.

  This worries the usual suspects:

  "Policymakers should think, 'Wow - this is a lot of kids,'" said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate. "We should worry about whether they're learning anything."

  You might want to look closer to home, Erzsebet.

Posted by: normal at Monday, November 06 2023 09:54 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 07 2023 01:06 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: bob in houston at Tuesday, November 07 2023 01:12 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 07 2023 04:38 AM (r9O5h)

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• Microsoft is "making a mess of the news" by replacing journalists with AI which is stupid and delusional but not deliberately lying to you.  (CNN)
  
  The top of CNN's list of examples:

  False claims that President Joe Biden fell asleep during a moment of silence for victim sof the Maui wildfire.

  As Snopes and a thousand other sites pointed out in coincidentally identical wording, this is a vicious lie.  If you watch the video he is clearly dead.
  
  
  

Tech News

• I switched from my flaky HP Pavilion laptop to my Pavilion Plus, which I haven't really used much yet.
  
  It's great.
  
  But it commits the eighth cardinal sin of applumbo: Soldered RAM.
  
  While Apple murders your wallet if you want to put a useful amount of RAM in their laptops, charging 100% markups and forcing you to upgrade the CPU along with the RAM, at least you can do it, with the 14" MacBook Pro being available with as much as 128GB.
  
  The Pavilion Plus 14 is locked forever at 16GB.
  
  
  
• Speaking of MacBooks they can now detect moisture in their Thunderbolt ports and automatically void your warranty.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not joking.  They will still short out and die - Apple's power circuitry is infamously terrible - you just won't get warranty support.
  
  
  
• China claims to have produced an AI chip thousands of times more powerful than Nvidia's industry leading A100 accelerator.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And they have, sort of.  Problem is it's an analogue photonic chip, a kind of design that is incredibly powerful but ludicrously finicky.
  
  You might as well just use people.  And we know what they're like.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fried might not be the last crypto criminal.  (The Verge)
  
  No, really?

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 06 2023 01:49 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 06 2023 01:51 AM (BMUHC)

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• The tape-out of Apple's M3 CPU, announced this past week, cost the company $1 billion.  (ExtremeTech)
  
  That's not the cost of the design.  That's not the cost of production.
  
  That's the step in between, taking the design they had and getting it ready for production on TSMC's latest 3nm node.
  
  That used to be a lot of money, but Apple sells a lot of stuff at 1000% markups, so the company can certainly afford it.

• Nvidia's China-only A800 AI card can now be purchased in the US.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And not in China anymore, because the US government changed the rules again.
  
  
  
• Want a small (3" square) router appliance with four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports and support for two monitors?  Available on Amazon starting at $212.  (Liliputing)
  
  Also available with two network ports and an extra HDMI port.
  
  
  
• Want a passively-cooled rack-mount 128 core Arm server with IP65 dust and water resistance?  You can get one of those too.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Not the sort of thing most people need, but if you're doing oil and mineral exploration, for example, extremely handy.
  
  
  
• MicroLua is Lua for the RP2040, the chip found in the Raspberry Pi Pico.  (GitHub)
  
  Literally Lua; it's a complete implementation of Lua 5.4.6.  A stripped-down implementation might be more practical, but having the full language is useful too.
  
  
  
• Tech layoffs are a thing of the past, part 2171:Faire, which wants to be a co-op competitor to Amazon, has laid off 20% of its staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  At least they have a plan, unlike so many other startups.  Amazon is not an easy competitor to tackle though.