• Google is threatening to stop providing news links to California after California announced legislation charging companies that provide news links to California.  (The Verge)
  
  It's obvious to everyone that this is what will happen if these stupid laws pass, but they still pass these stupid laws.
  
  
  

Tech News

• After winning its antitrust suit against Google over Play Store restrictions, Epic Games has asked the judge to hand them the keys.  (Thurrott)
  
  Basically.
  
  Epic wants Google to allow developers and users to choose their own payment methods.
  
  Google wants to keep taking its cut of every sale, of course.  It's slightly less avaricious on that regard than Apple, but only slightly.
  
  
  
• If a 4TB SD card isn't enough for you Western Digital has announced a 368TB portable SSD.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Well, kind of portable.  It weighs 28 pounds.
  
  
  
• Asus has announced a new 32" 8K monitor.  ( Notebook Check)
  
  It has not announced a price, but the existing 4K model costs $3000, so this one will not be cheap.
  
  
  

• The Humane AI Pin is the solution to none of technology's problems. (Engadget)
  
  Ouch. Well, what about The Verge, they love pointless shiny toys...
  
  
  
• Humane AI Pin review: Not even close. (The Verge)
  
  Maybe those idiots at Wired?
  
  
  
• Humane AI Pin: 4 out of 10. Too bare bones and not all that useful. (Wired)
  
  There's just no pleasing some people, particularly when your product is garbage.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Western Digital has announced its 4TB SD card. (AnandTech)
  
  Full size, not shipping until next year, and definitely not cheap, but still cool.
  
  That's an entire library in the size of a postage stamp - as a consumer item, not a scientific curiosity.
  
  And when I say library, I mean library.
  
  
  
• Intel's brand new Core Ultra 7 155H laptop chip gets put to the test... And meh. (AnandTech)
  
  I mean, it's not terrible, but it's not particularly good either.
  
  In most cases, the AMD chip they compare it with is faster and uses less power.
  
  
  
• Apple is focusing on AI with its upcoming M4 CPU lineup. (Bloomberg)
  
  You will be made to care.
  
  
  
• A look at SpaceX's financials shows a lot of money spent on moonshot bets. (Tech Crunch)
  
  In other industries that might indicate a gamble. Here it's their core business.

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• The SEC is planning to sue crypto exchange Uniswap because.  (CoinDesk)
  
  Because, basically, the SEC can't decide what to do about cryptocurrencies so it is planning to sue every company that doesn't steal all its customers' money and disappear.
  
  The SEC took no action against FTX until after the meltdown, so now they're making up for lost time by taking action against, basically, everyone.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Kobo has announced two new colour e-readers: The 7" $220 Colour Libra and the 6" $150 Colour Clara.  (The Verge)
  
  These offer a resolution of 300 dpi in black and white and 150 dpi in colour - fairly washed-out colour.  But they're e-ink screens, so they'll last a month or more on a single charge.
  
  The more expensive model also supports the Kobo Stylus, and the combination of colour, long battery life, and note-taking make it an interesting option.
  
  
  
• CrystalRuby lets you embed Crystal in Ruby.  (GitHub)
  
  Those are programming languages.
  
  This is kind of neat.
  
  
  
• A record number of books are targeted for bans in the US.  (Sherwood)
  
  The number has increased from one in 2023 to, well, still one.
  
  I'll try to find the title, but as far as I know there only one edition of one book banned in the US, and that was because it contained classified information.  It somehow made it to print before anyone caught on, and was pulled from the shelves and pulped.
  
  It's hard to find the title because every article you see talking about banned books is lying.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is the QNAP of Elasticsearches.  (Tech Crunch)

  The researchers notified Microsoft of the security lapse on February 6, and Microsoft secured the spilling files on March 5.

  Good work, lads.

• Intel has announced the name of its 6th generation Xeon server processors: Xeon 6.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's it.  That's the story.
  
  Slow news day.

• Peter Higgs, discoverer of the Higgs Boson, has passed away at the age of 94.  (The Guardian)
  
  "My greatest achievement", said Higgs in a recent interview, "was pure happenstance - the particle I found had the same name as me."
  
  
  
• Two Bay Area railway workers have been charged for building secret apartments inside disused train stations.  (The Real Deal)
  
  They built two apartments for a total of $50,000.  They shouldn't be arrested, they should be running the state.
  
  Or both.  That works.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk has expanded on his plans to settle Mars, as SpaceX's Starship approaches reality.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The Ars commentariat is absolutely frothing at the thought of someone who even acknowledges fundamental liberties being the one to establish our first interplanetary colony.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the frothing Ars commentariat 90,000 LG smart TVs are vulnerable to hacking attempts.  (Ars Technica)
  
  By users already on your local network.
  
  So...  You, basically.
  
  Don't do that.
  
  Anyway, three of the four "promoted comments" are people who thing connecting your TV to the internet is a wonderful idea, and they've all been downvoted into negative numbers.
  
  
  
• Got a cheap mini-monitor to go with my Beelink mini-PCs, a 14" 2160x1440 display that should fit on a shelf rather than having to sit on the desk.
  
  As things are going it will probably still be in its box in December so I can wrap it and put it under the tree.

Posted by: Kristophr at Thursday, April 11 2024 06:43 AM (hE8ec)

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• TSMC is to receive $6.6 billion in direct funding and $5 billion in loans under the CHIPS Act.  (AnandTech)
  
  In return, the company will be constructing a leading-edge 2nm fab in Arizona and increasing its total US fab investments to $65 billion.
  
  So...  Eh.  Almost everything the government could do with your money, short of not taking it from you in the first place, would be worse.

• Upcoming AMD and Intel CPUs will have less cache and more cash than originally planned.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Instead of using die space on memory, it's been reallocated to provide much faster AI units.  Which, again, is not the worst thing in the world; you can use that extra compute power to do whatever you want, so long as it's low-precision arithmetic.
  
  
  
• Solidigm's new 60TB SSD...  Basically just works.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Instead of having four 20TB 3.5" hard drives in RAID-5, you can use one 2.5" SSD, and get access times measured in microseconds rather than milliseconds.
  
  At around $6000 it's not exactly cheap, though.
  
  
  
• San Francisco is upgrading its light rail system.  (The Register)
  
  From floppy disks.
  
  Which aren't made anymore.
  
  So probably a good idea.
  
  
  
• The Maiyunda M1 is a mini-PC with a difference.  Two, in fact.  (Liliputing)
  
  At the front it has four quick-access drive bays - for M.2 SSDs.
  
  At the back it has four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports.
  
  And USB and HDMI and DisplayPort.
  
  Apparently there's one more difficult-access M.2 slot and one memory slot. 
  
  It's available with Intel's N100 (four core) and N305 (eight core) Atom CPUs, starting at around $190.

• All AIs are racist, but some are more racist than others.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Microsoft's Copilot gives you racial stereotypes in cartoons, which...  They're cartoons, people.  Though the Jewish boss with the bagel hat is certainly something.
  
  Anyway, it gives you racial stereotypes if you specify a race when you're generating a cartoon, so maybe that's your problem.
  
  Midjourney presents us not so much with racial stereotypes as temporal ones; I don't think it's been outside since 1952.
  
  ChatGPT just says fuck you and rewrites your request with a bunch of WASPs plus a token Asian chick.
  
  Meta AI actually does okay with this.  It pushes too hard on the diversity-at-any-cost side, but it also produced a sample image of a Jewish woman that is 100% believable without a single specific marker.  (The picture actually looks like someone I know.)

• AMD's Zen 5 mobile chips are coming this year maybe.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These will feature a mix of full-size Zen 5 and the smaller Zen 5c cores.
  
  Where Intel's smaller efficiency cores are a completely different design to their performance cores, Zen 5c is functionally identical to Zen 5, but squashed down and running at lower clock speeds.  At a given clock speed they perform identically, but Zen 5c is smaller and uses less power.
  
  Replacing mainstream chips with eight Zen 4 cores we can expect four Zen 5 cores plus eight Zen 5c.  Zen 5c could deliver close to the performance of existing Zen 4, so these should be deliver great performance and good battery life.
  
  
  
• Spotify has demonetised all tracks that have been played less than 1000 times.  (DJ Mag)
  
  Spotify says that affects only 0.5% of tracks on the platform, which seems unlikely because (a) power laws don't work like that and (b) if that were the case they wouldn't bother.
  
  The UMAW puts the number at 86% which seems far more plausible.
  
  
  
• The Opera browser now supports running AI locally on your computer.  (Opera)
  
  I don't know if I would trust Opera in its current incarnation.  It used to be good, but then the company was bought by Chinese interests and the entire development team walked out to set up Vivaldi.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 08 2024 10:42 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 08 2024 11:44 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, April 09 2024 01:58 AM (rcPLc)

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• Ordered by a Brazilian Supreme Court justice to block access to popular accounts that say things inconvenient to the leftist regime, Elon Musk has responded: Fuck you.  (MSN)
  
  A particular post ordered taken down by Australia's radical left wing censor-in-chief - who is an imported American that you guys can take back at any time - remains invisible, but that had the usual Streisand affect and reposted screenshots of it are all over the place, and have not been restricted at all.
  
  Musk is an imperfect defender of our liberties, but I'll give him credit when he gets it right.

Tech News

• To nobody's surprise the FCC has declined to intervene on California's plans to implement net neutrality.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The problem I always had with the FCC's push for net neutrality - which is back on the table for a vote later this month - is that the claim that the FCC even had the power to vote on such a rule is based on assumptions that would grant the agency massive control over all forms of communication in the US.
  
  If an individual state legislature wants to fuck up internet access for their own voters, on the other hand, they can do so, subject to the First Amendment.
  
  I'll have to read up on what California is proposing to do; it's probably bad, but probably legal.

• I've been trying to get the latest Hyte / Hololive limited edition PC cases for months without any luck.  There's only one Hyte distributor in Australia and they can't get them.
  
  I even looked into freight forwarding, but that worked out to cost as much as the cases themselves, and these are expensive cases.
  
  Now Hyte offers freight forwarding itself, and if I order both the cases it only costs 50% of the cost of the cases.  Which is still insane, but so am I.
  
  Then the cases will sit there for months because having spent that much money I won't have much to spare for new parts to fill them with.
  
  I did want to buy the new Lenovo Legion Tab, but Lenovo is assisting me with my budget because that is still not available anywhere.
   
  
  
• NASA has found the exact problem with Voyager 1 and expects to have it fixed...  Eventually.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yeah, I know that feeling, and I'm not even working with 46 year old hardware billions of miles away designed and built by people who have long since retired and aren't returning my emails.
  
  
  
• Do not buy the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It has a very nice 120Hz 2880x1800 OLED display, but it costs $1900, and you can get an Asus Vivobook with an almost identical OLED display for half of that.
  
  And the Asus has upgradeable memory, while the Samsung has 16GB soldered in place.
  
  Which if you're running Windows 11 will be fully used by the time you've booted the system and started a browser.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the Asus Vivobook and it's beautiful OLED display...  Yeah, it's still in its box.
  
  
  
• The Maven is a $2000 e-bike -  (Ars Technica)
  
  Let me stop you there.
  
  First thought: $2000 for a bicycle?  So your only question is not if it gets stolen, but if it gets stolen before you get crushed by an SUV.
  
  Second thought: I mean, if you happened to live in a quiet country town with little traffic and lots of hills, it might be kind of nice.
  
  Third thought: And, it turns out, illegal where I live.  It has a 750W motor and the rules here set the limit at 500W.
  
  
  
• Apple is laying off 700 workers, including the entire team working on the Apple Car, which Apple still denies ever working on.  (9to5Mac)
  
  What exactly do you put on you resume when you worked for a decade on a project that was never officially acknowledged and never produced any real-world results?
  
  
  
• Testing out my modpack under 1.19.2.
  
  That enables several mods I wanted (Creatures and Beasts, Critters and Companions, Zoo Architect, and Oh the Biomes You'll Go) at the cost of a couple of smaller ones (Let's Do Brewery, Dye Depot, and Elytra Trims).
  
  I do also lose the 1.20 updates...  Which were kind of underwhelming.  I'll need find a mod that adds back the cherry tree biome; I've already reinstated camels and the bamboo upgrades.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 06 2024 10:12 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: wheels at Sunday, April 07 2024 01:04 AM (wBT5j)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Sunday, April 07 2024 09:27 AM (Ncog+)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Sunday, April 07 2024 09:27 AM (Ncog+)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Sunday, April 07 2024 09:27 AM (Ncog+)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 07 2024 08:11 PM (PiXy!)

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• Quick one today as it has been a very long week.
  
  
  
• Is Google planning to buy marketing company HubSpot?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Sure.  Why not.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The benchmark numbers being quoted by Qualcomm for its new laptop chips are actually...  Pretty accurate.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Looks like it should comfortably beat Intel and not embarrass itself against Apple and AMD.  That's a huge improvement against earlier attempts which were just about capable of running Notepad.
  
  
  
• How we saved 98% in cloud costs by writing our own database.  (Hivekit)
  
  Turns out you can make databases run much, much faster if you don't care about the data.
  
  In this specific case, Hivekit can lose a second of data and not worry about it too much.  Conventional databases have to assume you want every single record to be saved, which is complicated and (relatively) slow.
  
  It's like...  If you don't care if the eggs arrive intact, you can speed up delivery by a lot.
  
  
  
• The new Razer Blade 18 has everything you could want in a laptop except the Four Essential Keys and an affordable price tag.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Though to be precise you could probably afford to buy the price tag, just not the laptop.
  
  A 24 core Intel 14900HX, an RTX 4090 (laptop version, so basically an RTX 4080), up to 64GB of RAM (probably upgradeable to 96GB), 4TB of storage in two M.2 slots, a 3840x2400 200Hz screen, a Thunderbolt 5 port - the brand new 80Gbps version, four 10Gbps USB ports, HDMI, a full size SD card reader, a headphone jack, and a 2.5Gb Ethernet port.  
  
  Fully configured it's just $4800.
  
  Which is a lot of money, yes, but that's a lot of laptop.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, April 05 2024 09:59 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 06 2024 12:00 AM (BMUHC)

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• I think we've identified the problem.
  
  Microsoft, market cap $3.12 trillion: Hello random open source project, we have a customer-facing problem that we need fixed urgently.
  
  Open source project: We'll take a look, but our project is run by volunteers in their own time.  If it's an urgent issue affecting commercial use might we suggest our friends at Z who offer 24/7 support contracts at very reasonable rates?
  
  Microsoft, market cap $3.12 trillion: No.  (Reddit)
  
  Though it was a Microsoft researcher who found the xz security breach and averted global disaster.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, open-source friendly company Stability AI is apparently fast going broke because it's a little too friendly.  (The Register)
  
  There's always two sides to every story, and in this case the other side is $100 million per year spent on cloud servers.
  
  

• If you comply with the rules, we'll change the rules: The US Commerce Department has banned Nvidia's RTX 4090D from sale in China.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 4090D was designed specifically to comply with the ruling that banned the 4090.
  
  A little too specifically, perhaps.  But maybe Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo should post the rules she wants companies to actually follow rather than expecting them to play some psychotic game of red light green light.
  
  
  
• The LSST camera did not cost $350 billion dollars.  (Gizmodo)

  To do this, the team needed a Rolls Royce of a digital camera. Mind you, the camera actually cost many million times that of an actual Royce Royce, and at 6,200 pounds (2,812 kilograms), it weighs a lot more than a fancy car.

  It's an amazing camera - the largest digital camera ever built, with a resolution of 3.2 gigapixels - but the entire LSST project - the buildings, the telescope assembly, the massive mirrors - the primary mirror is 28 feet across - and this camera is less than 0.2% of that.
  
  (A basic Rolls Royce Ghost costs around $350,000, and weighs 5700 pounds, so they're off on the weight too; just not by three orders of magnitude.)
  
  
  
• Can AMD's 3D Vcache improve game performance for low-end graphics cards?  (Hot Hardware)
  
  I was fully expecting the answer to be no, but if you're doing a budget build with a previous generation AMD chip and a card like AMD's own 7600, Intel's 750, or Nvidia's 3060, it might actually be worth the extra money for a 5000-series X3D chip.
  
  The biggest difference was Cyberpunk 2077 with an Intel Arc 750, where average frame rates jumped 30% from 46 to 60 fps just by upgrading from a 5800X to a 5800X3D.  About half the games tests showed negligible difference though.
  
  Which makes the newer 5700X3D an interesting proposition.  It's 10% slower than the 5800X3D but 25% cheaper, and if you're on a budget might just hit the sweet spot.
  
  
  
• Cannot remove files, disk is full.  Please remove file to free up space and try again.  Lol.  (Six Colors)
  
  Okay, Apple, I can understand that you were trying to make everything user-friendly so that you can un-delete files that were removed by accident, but what you actually achieved was users having to wipe and reinstall the entire system because you ran out of space.
  
  And these are experienced tech journalists we're talking about, who...  Yeah, off by three orders of magnitude.  Never mind.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 24.04 might become Ubuntu 24.05.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The unreleased beta version had the xz unpleasantness, and Ubuntu wants to be super-duper sure that it's been expunged with utmost prejudice.  So the planned release data of April 25 could slip into next month.
  
  I doubt that anyone would be upset about Ubuntu taking that precaution.  Except perhaps for North Korea.
  
  
  

Posted by: madrocketsci at Friday, April 05 2024 12:44 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 05 2024 10:30 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 05 2024 02:10 PM (rcPLc)

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