• Facebook recently announced its new Llama 4 AI platform, with industry-leading scores.  They lied.  (Neowin)
  
  The test results were from an unreleased experimental version.  The actual scores put Llama 4 in 32nd place.

• You can now melt your power cable and destroy your video card cheaper than ever before.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Latest victim was an RTX 5070.
  
  This problem is predictable with the RTX 5090, which draws 575W over a connector rated for a maximum of 600W.  5% out of tolerance and your card is fried.
  
  It shouldn't happen on the 250W 5070 though.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the upcoming 5060 Ti could be better than the 4060 Ti.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 4060 Ti was held back because the relatively powerful chip was being throttle by the 128-bit memory bus.  The 5060 Ti still has a 128-bit bus, but appears to use 28Gbps GDDR7 memory rather than 21Gbps GDDR6.
  
  This should also give it a lead over AMD's upcoming 9060, which still uses GDDR6.
  
  
  
• Bungie's new shooty-game Marathon (no relation to Bungie's old shooty game Marathon) looks set to be Sony's next $400 million write-off.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It looks remarkably unappealing.
  
  
  
• Jack Dorsey is an idiot.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's it.  That's the message.

Posted by: bob in houston at Tuesday, April 15 2025 12:01 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, April 15 2025 03:20 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 15 2025 11:12 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 15 2025 07:05 PM (PiXy!)

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• President Trump has once again scrambled the plans of the Chinese Communist Party and Democrat prophesiers by temporarily waiving the new 125% tariff on selected goods from that country.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The 20% basic tariff remains in effect, but the new tariff will not be applied to electronic components or devices like phones and laptops.
  
  Everything else gets whacked with a 145% impost which has small businesses in China in a panic.  Deliveries already booked and produced are now being refused, and there is simply no substitute market to turn to.
  
  And while it takes time to ramp up a mobile phone production line, products like clothing and homewares are already produced in dozens of countries like India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Indonesia, who will be only too happy to produce more.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Oh, and you know all those attacks China has launched on American infrastructure over the past few years?  Turns out China was behind them.  (WSJ / MSN)
  
  Who knew?
  
  
  
• The Asus X870 Max Gaming Wifi7 motherboard is, well, a motherboard.  (WCCFTech)
  
  An X870 motherboards, meaning AMD.  With four full-length PCIe slots, only one is PCIe 5.0 x16, with the others being 4.0 x4, 4.0 x1, and 3.0 x1.
  
  I don't know where those 3.0 lanes come from, but my motherboard has a PCIe 3.0 x1 slot as well.
  
  It also lacks optical audio output and USB 4.0, but it does seem to have three HDMI ports.
  
  Price TBA but somewhere in the $200-ish range.
  
  
  
• Google's Chrome team is planning to fix a bug that's been around for 23 years.  (The Register)
  
  By feeding your browser a list of links, and then checking what colour each one is, a web site can figure out which other sites you have previously visited.
  
  They're not supposed to be able to do that.
  
  
  
• If you want an Asuka Langley from Evangelion themed mini-laptop, you can now get one starting at $1650.  (Notebook Check)
  
  And also ending at $1650.
  
  That gets you an Intel 255H CPU (6 P-cores, 10 E-cores), 64GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD, and a keyboard.  Screen is a 10.95" 2560x1600 "gaming display", so a reused tablet model.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: furball321 at Monday, April 14 2025 06:53 AM (As8gg)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, April 14 2025 08:59 AM (QE7eq)

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• Never get involved in a land war in Asia: Adobe tried to promote its services to artists on Bluesky.  They promptly deleted their posts after realising that everyone on Bluesky is insane.  (PetaPixel)
  
  I could have told you that, Adobe.
  
  Also, you suck.  Just...  Less than Bluesky.  Like you're diptheria and they're anthrax.

• The Pentagon is cancelling $5.1 billion in IT contracts with the big IT contractors.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  These contracts are almost always vastly overpriced and incredibly unproductive.
  
  
  
• If you're a racist, Marxist, screaming lunatic, South of Midnight might just be the game for you.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The game is doing better than Dustborn, but not a whole lot.  And it looks good and sounds good, it's just written by people who should not be permitted with 500 yards of a keyboard.
  
  And yes, Sweet Baby Inc was deeply involved in this one, with utterly predictable results.
  
  It's also apparently quite short, but I won't knock it for that.  Not every game needs to last 80 hours.  Gris is only a few hours long and it's a masterpiece.
  
  
  
• You don't need websockets if you're not doing anything that needs websockets.  (Hunter Lovell)
  
  Uh, thanks?
  
  Cool Shuba Duck though.
  
  
  
• xAI is not using illegal generators to power its datacenter.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  xAI has 420MW of generator capacity, but only 40% of it has long-term permits.  The rest of it is using a short-term rule that allows a temporary generator to operate for 364 days without that permit.
  
  I think the company will likely be able to get those permits if it needs them later this year, so the article is a nothingburger.
  
  
  
• Ubisoft cancelled online services for its game The Crew.  And removed the game from users' libraries.  And deactivated physical copies.  And issued nothing even slightly resembling refunds.
  
  And now that it's facing lawsuits the company is pointing out that customers don't own what they buy.  (TechSpot)
  
  Ubisoft seems to have violated specific laws in California in all of this.  Of course that's true of everyone on the planet and most people not on the planet, but it doesn't particularly help the company's defense.
  
  
  
• I wasn't particularly planning to spend any more money on my new PC but I accidentally bought a QNAP QM2-4P-384.
  
  The motherboard I have supports up to four M.2 slots, though two share bandwidth with the PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, reducing it to x8, and one shares bandwidth the the PCIe 4.0 x4 slot, reducing it to PCIe 4.0 xnothing.
  
  You can get cheap four-slot M.2 cards but they require a full x16 slot to work, because they are wired up logically as just four four-lane devices and rely on the CPU figuring that out.  If you have a graphics card in your x16 slot, or you have M.2 cards sharing its bandwidth, they're basically useless.
  
  You can also get more expensive four-slot (or even eight-slot) M.2 cards that will work even if you only have a single PCIe lane left over, because they have hardware onboard to split up whatever PCIe you have and divide it among the M.2 slots on the card.  But those are full-height cards and the Hyte Y40 and Y60 cases only have full-height space for the graphics card.
  
  But the QNAP QM2-4P-384 is a half-height card because it's built for smaller NAS devices - though it also works on PCs.  It's PCIe 3.0 x8 which is not something my motherboard has, but with the onboard chip it will still work just fine.
  
  So now I can have 28TB or even 32TB of internal SSD (if I use that fourth motherboard slot).
  
  And then another 16TB of SSD in my external storage array.  Oh, and four SATA SSDs in my PC.  And four 3.5" hard drives (or again SATA SSDs) in the storage array.
  
  So I'll probably run out of money before I run out of space to put drives.

• Google is challenging Anthropic's Cursor AI programming assistant with its new Firebase Studio, pushing "vibe coding" to a whole new level.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  "Vibe coding" is the modern equivalent of giving your credit card to a group of North Korean hackers and telling them to build you an app.
  
  
  
• Firebase Studio is a great example - of why AI can't replace humans.  (The Register)

  "The AI part of the app is basically useless," wrote UK-based developer Oscar Molnar, in a Hacker News post.  "After two hours of 'vibe coding' a chess clock Flutter app, I got basically nothing in the end.  It broke more and more [with] each message.  I tried fixing stuff myself but it would mess it up again.  I would not recommend anyone to use it."

  I've worked with people like that.

• Microsoft's Recall - a.k.a the Telescreen was behind the operating system - is now part of the latest "insider builds".  (The Verge)
  
  Ave atque vale, insiders.  We hardly knew ye, but pretty soon we'll know your credit card numbers and search history.
  
  
  
• The USA can't manufacture phones.  It's a fantasy.  Also, here's how the Liberty Phone is manufactured in the USA.  (404 Media)
  
  It's overpriced because nothing in it is sourced from or assembled in the third world, and pretty much everyone gave up on that idea years ago.  Including China.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which new Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has investments in 600 companies in China including some linked to to the Chinese army.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yeah, good fucking call there Intel.
  
  
  
• The founder and former CEO of shopping app Nate has been indicted on fraud charges over using actual intelligence instead of the artificial kind.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  His app promised to find and buy whatever you wanted using the latest AI services.
  
  It was actually a call center in the Philippines.
  
  
  
• China is retaliating against reciprocal tariffs imposed by the US by - you're not going to believe this - reducing the number of insufferable woke communist Hollywood propaganda films it allows to screen in the country.  (The Guardian)
  
  "Oh no," President Trump is reported to have said.
  
  (Actually he said "I've heard of worse things.")

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 11 2025 06:26 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 12 2025 02:55 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 12 2025 03:02 AM (1zWbY)

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• The cost to query advanced AI APIs has dropped 99.7% in the past 18 months.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's a pretty dramatic shift.  What's causing it seems to simply be competition.
  
  Hardware costs have come down - a bit - and the new hardware is also more energy efficient - a bit.
  
  Training costs for creating new models have soared, on the other hand - DeepSeek's bullshit notwithstanding - but investor money keeps pouring in to cover that.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Nintendo has explained why Switch 2 hardware and software costs so much.  (Ars Technica)
  
  "Because", Nintendo said.
  
  
  
• Whistleblower-as-a-service Sarah Wynn-Williams has accused Facebook of building a Nazi base on the dark side of the Moon.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or something.
  
  
  
• Is Nvidia's priority access program for RTX 5000 cards finished?  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Yes.
  
  
  
• Hackers spied on emails of the Office of Comptroller of the Currency - which is apparently a real thing somehow - for over a year.  (Straits Times)
  
  This is distinct from the hackers who were spying on the emails of the Treasury Department.
  
  
  
• Windows 11 has a new feature that lets Copilot watch while you work with other apps.  (Bleeping Computer)

  When you share your screen with AI, Copilot can then help analyze, offer insights, answer your questions, and speak to you in real time.

  I see you are attempting to uninstall Copilot.  This incident has been reported.
  
  
  
• Google is making some AI employees sign non-compete agreements.  (Business Insider)  (archive site)
  
  Since these have often been ruled unenforceable, Google has tried a new tack: After an employee resigns, their employment continues for another year.  They continue to be paid but they don't need to work, they are just not allowed to work for a competing company.
  
  
  
• Turns out there are still motherboards around with a good number of PCIe slots.  AMD's business-oriented B840 boards mostly have five slots, which is not bad considering that the maximum for a standard ATX system is seven.
  
  They're mostly PCIe 3.0 x1 electrically (x16 physical slots) so not great if you want a 100Gb network card but fine for most other uses.

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, April 11 2025 03:05 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 11 2025 09:46 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 11 2025 03:31 PM (bg2DR)

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• Bluesky has become a home for humourless left-wing scolds, says Wired, which has long been a home for humourless left-wing scolds so they know a thing or two about it.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  Also it's paywalled.  Wired.  Paywalled.  Humourless left-wing scolds who are...  Never mind.

  What Brown experienced is familiar to any former Twitter/X user gathering their bearings on the young and decidedly more earnest social network Bluesky: a distinct humor-detection issue.

  Yes.
  
  Why has Bluesky become such a dumpster-fire of anauralia outpatients?

  Bluesky also got a big boost in users from mainstream television: MSNBC ran multiple segments about the social network, including bumps on Morning Joe, The Weekend, All In With Chris Hayes, and The Rachel Maddow Show.  Regular MSNBC viewers who took the plunge might not be as familiar with the tenor and style of online conversation on the smart-ass social web.

  Oh.  Well, yeah, that'll do it.

• AI mandates are driving developers to the drink.  (LeadDev)
  
  Oh, brink.  Potato, potahto.
  
  AI tools for developers are much the same as AI tools for anyone else: The make easy things easy and hard things impossible.  But when senior management sees an easy thing done easily using AI, they start demanding that hard things be done the same way.
  
  
  
• Sam Altman says that AI won't be used to replace programmers (it will) but instead will make them more productive (it won't).  (Windows Central)
  
  It's Bangalore on demand.
  
  
  
• The CEO of Shopify says that nobody can be hired without the department first proving that the task can't be done by AI.  (CNBC)

  "I've seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn’t even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100X the work done," Lutke wrote.

  WHY AREN'T YOU ALL SELF-SACRIFICING GENIUSES, YOU WORTHLESS SLACKERS?!
  
  
  
• Samsung has a new 32" 2560x1440 colour e-ink display.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's battery-powered and lasts up to 200 days between charges, which is a lot.
  
  Design for in-store displays.
  
  Price not stated, assume expensive.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: bob in houston at Wednesday, April 09 2025 11:29 PM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 10 2025 12:06 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Thursday, April 10 2025 03:18 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 10 2025 09:48 AM (PiXy!)

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Posted by: Mirella at Wednesday, April 09 2025 08:49 PM (3fm/j)

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• We got dire wolves before we got Winds of Winter.  (USA Today)
  
  (Joke stolen from approximately eleventy trillion people because I gave up after the first book.)
  
  Massive Dynamic - the company that recently gave the world woolly mice - has successfully reintroduced fluffy white dire wolf* pups, genetically modifying existing grey wolves with ancient samples of dire wolf DNA.
  
  (Shoves New Scientist back into the locker.)
  
  * Genome may settle in shipping.

• The S in MCP stands for "security".  (Elena Cross)
  
  MCP, which stands for something, is a software bus for connecting multiple LLMs together.
  
  Every single component of it is insecure in multiple different ways.
  
  
  
• NIH scientists say they have a cancer breakthrough but it is being delayed by layoffs.  They are lying.  (MSN)
  
  They have one study that showed some improvement in 25% of patients using personalised immunotherapy on colorectal cancer.
  
  
  
• The Bigme B7 is a 7" colour e-ink tablet with a pretty decent 300 dpi resolution.  (Liliputing)
  
  That's 1264x1680 in this case, which is fine.  But only applies in black-and-white; when you use colour the resolution is cut in half, which kind of sucks.
  
  Pre-order price is $229.
  
  
  
• The "abruptly former" Microsoft employee who went insane and accused Clippy of genocide is now in fact former.  (The Verge)
  
  Clippy is innocent.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, April 09 2025 03:33 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, April 10 2025 02:11 PM (QE7eq)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, April 11 2025 12:57 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, April 11 2025 02:09 PM (QE7eq)

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• Turning your spacecraft off and on again and hoping for the best: The real story of Orion.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Turns out more things failed on that test flight last year than they let on.
  
  At one point they were uncertain whether they could dock with the ISS or return to Earth.  Not which one was safer, but whether either one was possible.

• Could fusion-powered spaceships cut the trip to Mars by half?  Maybe.  (CNN)
  
  We don't have practical fusion power on Earth because it requires a hard vacuum and it leaks.
  
  But a fusion-powered spaceship is traveling through hard vacuum and the engine is supposed to leak.  That's how it would generate thrust.
  
  So all you need to solve is all the other problems.
  
  
  
• On a slightly more stable topic Gizmodo spoke to the Voyager project's mission scientist, who has been on the job for 48 years.  (Gizmodo)

  I started working on Voyager in 1977, it was my first job out of college, and I had a choice between the Viking extended mission or the Voyager mission.  I, of course, hadn’t heard of Voyager.  So I said, where’s Voyager going?  And they said, well, Jupiter and Saturn and onto Uranus and Neptune with Voyager 2 if all goes well.  And I thought, oh my goodness - I remember in third grade, I got a little telescope I used to use to look at the Moon and look at Jupiter and Saturn, and look for little moons around Jupiter and see if I could spot the rings around Saturn.  So the thought of a chance to go visit these worlds that were really only tiny dots in my little telescope, I said, "sign me up."

  It's cool and worth reading.
  
  
  
• The insanity of being a software engineer.  (0x1.pt)
  
  It's like being a bricklayer.  Except the bricks are constantly changing, and you're expected to be an electrician and a plumber should the need arise, and you're just supposed to know what the plans for the building are, and oh the client asked if you could make the bricks invisible.  By tomorrow.
  
  
  
• The Minecraft movie...  Didn't flop, probably.  (Variety)
  
  Despite a pretty bad initial trailer.  It only cost $150 million and made $300 million globally in its first weekend.  So it's not entirely out of the cubical woods yet, but doing a lot better than some recent Hollywood efforts we won't mention.
  
  
  
• The laptop version of Nvidia's RTX 5090 is only slightly faster than the desktop 5070.  (Notebook Check)
  
  I mean, the desktop 5090 draws 575W and is infamous for melting its power connector, so there's no chance of fitting it into a laptop, but still.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, April 08 2025 01:40 AM (rcPLc)

2 Software fun-and-games...company is run by someone too important to know about the weeds.  Hears about software package XYZ and how COOL it is.  Tells company we are switching over to it.  Scramble to get it in place.  Only when it is in production are the customers informed.  Customers say they were coming to us because they FLAMING RED HOT HATED package XYZ.  Now scramble to remove XYZ.   Result is a bad year so programmers don't get a bonus, but Mr. Important gets a big one. Music...Ram Jam showing how it's done

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, April 08 2025 02:27 AM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 08 2025 04:17 AM (DL/kw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 08 2025 04:20 AM (DL/kw)

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• What's truly inside that bright red flame retardant used on bright red flames from the fires caused by California's definitely not bright but certainly Red government?  No-one would say so we drank some to find out.  (LAist)
  
  If you scroll way down in the article you'll find a table with the tiny legend:

  Measurements in micrograms per liter.

  Most of the metals mentioned are benign in the quantities found.  Zinc and manganese you will find in dietary supplements because you need them to live.
  
  But what does 591 micrograms per liter mean for arsenic, a well-known poison?
  
  Well, the LD50 for arsenic in humans is somewhere between 1 and 3 mg per kg of bodyweight for adults.  (It's better known for rats because nobody complains if you try it out on them.)
  
  Which means that if you drink twice your bodyweight in flame retardant, you'd likely die.  So don't do that.
  
  To be fair, LAist interviewed scientists who told them exactly that, and they put it in the article:

  That said, multiple health experts told LAist that the risk to members of the public exposed to the retardant when doing activities like hiking, is likely low, given the concentration of contaminants present in our samples.

  "It should not be a reason for panic, but maybe it's a reason for caution," said Dr. Ana Navas-Acien, professor and chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, who reviewed the results.

  Also, the stuff hangs around afterwards, and residents and cleanup workers should be careful with it.  You can suffer ill effects from doses far short of lethal.
  
  Fortunately, the stuff is, as we noted, bright red.
  
  

• Reminder: Daylight savings has ended here in Oz, so from tomorrow I'll be posting at 4:30 AM, since otherwise I have 15 minutes tops from the end of my work day to the post needing to go up.

Tech News

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 07 2025 01:02 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 07 2025 01:05 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, April 07 2025 01:59 AM (rcPLc)

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