• Emulating a Macintosh on a Raspberry Pi...  Pico.  (axio.ms)
  
  A rather neat little project.
  
  The original Mac had 128k of RAM, and the Pi Pico has 256k of main memory, so in theory this should be possible.  All you need to do is squeeze a Motorola 68000 emulator and the Mac ROMs and hardware emulation into that remaining 128k.
  
  Oh, and that hardware emulation includes the video, and the Pi Pico has no video hardware.
  
  No problem, not with the help of some street cables and a bit of inspired cheating.

• Asus has promised to stop doing what it promised to stop doing a year ago and didn't.  (Gamers Nexus)
  
  A year ago the news sites gave them the benefit of doubt.  This time, not so much.
  
  
  
• The future is bright for electric vehicles, say analysts as they switch their personal investments into oil and gas.  (Yahoo)

  A global survey conducted by consulting firm McKinsey, also released Wednesday, included this shocker: 29% of EV owners told McKinsey they plan to replace the EV they bought with a gasoline or diesel car, a figure that jumps to 38% for U.S. EV owners.

  This is why California is planning to outright ban all non-E Vs.  Can't have the peasants choosing what works for them.
  
  
  
• Cases of flesh-eating bacteria are skyrocketing in Japan.  (MSN)
  
  More cases have been reported so far this year than in all of 2023, and the mortality rate is 30%.
  
  It's just streptococcus, but streptococcus caused a whole host of nasty diseases before readily-available antiseptics and antibiotics, many of them fatal.
  
  
  
• Minisforum has a couple of new midi-PCs.  (Liliputing)
  
  These are eight inches square and two inches tall - much bigger than NUCs which are around four inches square, but not big.  The Mac Mini is about this size.
  
  The AMD model takes a low-power desktop CPU, up to 96GB of RAM, and four M.2 SSDs, and has two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, USB 4, OCuLink, HDMI, DisplayPort, and the usual swarm of USB 3 ports.
  
  The Intel model includes a choice of 12th and 13th generation laptop chips, and supports 64GB of RAM, two M.2 slots, a half-height PCIe slot, two USB 4 ports, two 10Gb SFP+ Ethernet ports, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, plus HDMI and the usual USB 3 and USB 2 ports.
  
  If you want something small but with more flexibility than a NUC, these might suit.
  
  
  
• Apple has joined the race to find an AI icon.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And they mean that in the technical sense, a little graphical symbol that says "You are stupid and racist, now give me your credit card."
  
  I suggest a mugger wearing an N95 mask.
  
  
  
• How can we convert OpenAI's pricing page into a news article?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oh how we will laugh when you are all replaced by the very systems you pretend to report on.

Posted by: normal at Monday, June 17 2024 07:53 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 18 2024 12:31 AM (BMUHC)

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• Voyager 1 is communicating again.  (The Register)
  
  The probe launched in 1977 and completed its primary mission - flybys of Jupiter and Saturn - in 1980, and since then it has been travelling deeper into space just chilling (literally) and enjoying the view.
  
  Only four of the original eleven instruments on board are still operational, but that's enough for it to return interesting data for a little longer.
  
  Both Voyager probes are powered by short-lived radioisotope generators, and within the next decade the power output will have been reduced to a point where none of the instruments will work.  Shortly after that they will pass beyond the range of the Deep Space Network and we will lose contact until 2270.

• Tuxedo Computers has shown off a prototype of its new laptop based on the Qualcomm X Elite chip that powers Microsoft's new Copilot Plus laptops.  (Beta News)
  
  Tuxedo's version comes without Copilot Plus, though, because it runs Linux by default rather than Windows.
  
  It includes 32GB of RAM, a 2560x1600 14" display covering 100% sRGB colour, USB4, and one M.2 slot.
  
  And also the Four Essential Keys, which I didn't see on any of the Copilot Plus laptops being launched.
  
  I'm not sure of the exact state of Linux on this chip, but it is officially supported by Qualcomm so this might be a good option if you don't absolutely require Windows.
  
  
  
• The integrated graphics on AMD's latest laptop chips are about as fast as an RTX 2050.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I have little idea how fast an RTX 2050 is, so I looked it up.
  
  It's only a little slower than the RX 580 I was running up until a couple of years ago, and about eight times faster than the Radeon 4850 I used to play Dragon Age and Mass Effect back when computer games were still good.
  
  For integrated graphics that's pretty impressive.
  
  This is from AMD's Strix Point chips.  They have another model called Strix Point Halo on the way, with twice the memory bandwidth and two and a half times the graphics hardware, which should put it roughly in line with a current-generation RTX 4060.
  
  
  
• Western Digital has announced its 2 terabit flash memory chips, the world's first chips at that capacity.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These stack the memory cells 218 layers deep.  We take this for granted now, but not so long ago flash memory was facing disaster: Manufacturers couldn't make memory cells any smaller without making them too unreliable for use.
  
  The solution was to build higher rather than smaller, and flash memory cells now are actually larger (and hence more reliable) than they were at that turning point.
  
  
  
• Asus has announced its new line of compact Nvidia GPUs for small form factor PCs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Someone's been editing the dictionary again because these are full-height full-length cards that take up two and a half slots.  They are small compared to, say, NASA's Vertical Assembly Building, but many things are.
  
  
  
• The iPad should fold in half.  (The Verge)
  
  It does.  You just need to make the effort.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 17 2024 01:11 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 17 2024 01:12 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Monday, June 17 2024 02:33 PM (bg2DR)

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• In its ongoing drive to earn public trust OpenAI has appointed the former director of the NSA to its board.  (CNBC)  (archive site)
  
  Yep, that's gonna work.
  
  
  
• In a recent AI study, 270 humans failed the Meta-Turing test.  (Live Science)
  
  The reason: They judged ChatGPT to be human.

• Newton's thunder bird finally has a face.  (Natural History Museum)
  
  The Australian bird - seven feet tall and weighing over five hundred pounds - was first discovered as partial fossil remains in 1896, with a complete skull found in 1913.  But that skull was so distorted that it was hard to identify precisely what kind of bird it was.
  
  Now much better-preserved examples have been found.
  
  It's a goose.
  
  
  
• Meta has scrubbed plans to train AI on data from European users.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  In response to questions, Meta shrugged and simply said "Europe".
  
  
  
• A single modern AI GPU can use 3.7MWh of power per year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  420W.  That's about 420W continuously.
  
  So...  Yes.  I bet it can.
  
  
  
• ASRock's new AMD Siena server motherboard supports 32 SATA drives.  (Serve the Home)
  
  And only comes with 1Gb Ethernet.  They're just doing this to annoy me, aren't they?
  
  
  
• India's Twitter alternative Koo, billed as a Twitter alternative for India, is kind of dead.  (Rest of World)
  
  Has that trick ever worked?  I mean, without spending trillions of dollars on a nightmare surveillance state so that you can ban the original?

• Microsoft will be launching its new range of Copilot Plus laptops minus a key feature: Spyware.  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, Recall, widely considered to be one of the classic blunders right alongside never get involved in a land war in Asia and never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line is miraculously delayed.
  
  
  
• The first retail benchmarks of the new Copilot Plus laptops - based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip - are disappointing.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is probably a nothingburger though, because the scores are exactly what you would expect if the CPU was stuck at the 2.5GHz base clock and not boosting up to 4GHz.

• Everything you ever wanted to know about the Snapdragon X Elite microarchitecture.  (AnandTech)
  
  8-wide decode feeding into 6 ALU, 4 FPU, and 4 load-store pipelines.
  
  By comparison AMD's Zen 4 is a 4-wide decode.
  
  
  
• Designing a website without 404s.  (Pillser)
  
  The software figures out what the closest live URL is to what you are requesting, and redirects you.
  
  Which is a great idea right up until it isn't.  An incorrect URL could change content completely at any moment when an unrelated page with a slightly closer URL is created.
  
  And never mind what happens when you get scraped by a poorly-behaved web spider that finds that every nonsensical random URL is giving it useful data...
  
  
  
• If you want better graphics in your next NUC and don't care how ugly it is - seriously, what the hell - The Asus ROG NUC might be just the thing.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's a standard laptop CPU but adds a laptop RTX 4070.
  
  
  
• French courts have ordered Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to poison their wells.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Or more precisely, the public DNS entries for certain scofflaw websites.
  
  VPNs, baby, I'm telling you.
  
  
  
• The generative AI version of Alexa isn't ready for release.  (The Verge)
  
  The problem?  People expect it to work, and generative AI eats flaming hot Cheetos out of a sewer dumpster out of a sewer dumpster out of a sewer dumpster.

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 14 2024 08:07 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 14 2024 08:40 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Kristophr at Sunday, June 16 2024 06:55 AM (iYdVP)

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• Has Elon Musk finally lost Tesla shareholders?  (New York Magazine)
  
  In the balance: Shareholder votes on whether to restore Musk's $50 billion compensation package, and to tell the state of Delaware to go fuck itself and reincorporate in Texas.
  
  
  
• No.  (Yahoo News)
  
  Both votes at the Tesla AGM have reportedly passed by substantial margins.
  
  Ars Technica commentariat hardest hit.

• Stable Diffusion 3 is here and it is comically bad.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Did you miss those nine-digited hand-feet that you got with the earliest iterations of AI image generators?
  
  Well, they're back, now in glorious 4K photorealism.
  
  Some commenters suspect that in their efforts to stamp out porn, Stable AI stamped out human anatomy entirely.  It's plausible because almost everything else in the sample images is convincing.
  
  
  
• Smaller than big, bigger than small: ASRock's Deskmate X600 can fit a desktop Rzyen CPU, four memory modules, and two SSDs.  (Liliputing)
  
  Four DIMM slots is rare in small form factor systems - this one is a little larger than mini-ITX - so that is welcome, though less necessary now that you can get 48GB modules.
  
  
  
• Demented communists are suing SpaceX for creating a workplace hostile to demented communists.  (The Verge)
  
  These people display warning signs like a broken arrow frog.  Never, ever hire them.
  
  
  
• Intel is trucking a 916,000 pound refrigeration unit across Ohio at an average speed of a little under one mile per hour.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you live nearby you might want to schedule a day off while traffic clears.
  
  
  
• Why Swift is not.  (Daniel Chase Hooper)
  
  Broken type inferencing:

  swiftc spends 42 seconds on these 12 lines on an M1 Pro2, only to spit out the notorious error: the compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time; try breaking up the expression into distinct sub-expressions. In the same amount of time, clang can perform a clean build of my 59,000 line C project 38 times.

  They tried to get clever, and failed miserably, ending up with a compiler that can be a thousand times slower in 2024 than Turbo Pascal was in 1984.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 13 2024 10:25 PM (KP/Jr)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, June 14 2024 12:56 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: David Eastman at Friday, June 14 2024 01:26 AM (rmrII)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 14 2024 07:59 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 14 2024 03:49 PM (PiXy!)

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• Twitter is about to hide likes.  (The Verge)
  
  Which is to say, the like button will still be there, and the like count will still be there, and you'll be able to see which posts you liked and who liked your posts.
  
  But you won't be able to see who liked someone else's posts.  Just the count.
  
  And the psychopathy rampant in The Verge's comment section shows that Elon Musk is entirely correct in pushing for this change.

• MSI has two Epyc 4004 motherboards.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These are fairly boring low-end Ryzen 7000 motherboards, except that they have remote management and depending on the model either dual 10GbaseT or dual 25Gb SFP28 Ethernet ports.
  
  
  
• Brazil's government is turning to OpenAI to combat skyrocketing court costs.  (Reuters)
  
  What could possibly go wrong?
  
  
  
• News site BNN Breaking turns out to be utterly fraudulent, and, worse, not paying journalists to generate its fake news.  (The New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  You can understand how the Times would be upset.  Getting upstaged is one thing.  Getting upstaged by fifty lines of BASIC is another.
  
  
  
• Silicon Valley salaries are shrinking as the recession deepens.  (Mercury News)  (archive site)
  
  How about that.
  
  
  
• Zen 5 is slightly slower than the Zen 4 X3D chips for gaming.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Flow claims its chip can make any CPU twice as fast, and in some cases, one hundred times as fast.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  As far as I can tell, this is just a binary-incompatible parallel CPU.  It won't work at all without updated software, and it won't do anything at all for sequential tasks.
  
  It may well be useful, but it's certainly not novel.

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, June 13 2024 08:45 AM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 13 2024 11:10 AM (OZ8mS)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 13 2024 11:11 AM (OZ8mS)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 13 2024 11:14 AM (OZ8mS)

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• Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference is on now.  Here are the biggest announcements.  (The Verge)
  
  * AI bullshit
  * A password app
  * Bringing the UI up to parity with Android 4 from 2011

• Perl 5.40.0 is out.  (Perldoc)
  
  Yay.
  
  
  
• The New York Times' source code was stolen using an exposed GitHub token.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Yay.
  
  
  
• The word "bot" is increasingly used as an insult by deranged leftists on social media.  (New Scientist)  (archive site)
  
  I've never been sure whether it's just being adopted as a slur or if the people using it are so stupid that they think a Perl script just argued them into the ground.
  
  
  
• Department of Rent Seeking: ISPs are asking the FCC to tax Big Tech - no, the other Big Tech, not them - and give the money to ISPs to fund their private islands in the Caribbean.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This is so blatant you almost have to admire the artistry.
  
  
  

Anime

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, June 11 2024 10:46 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 11 2024 11:10 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 11 2024 11:12 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Wednesday, June 12 2024 10:17 AM (dnuTg)

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• How a single ChatGPT mistake cost us $10,000.  (Asim)
  
  The error is actually fairly subtle, but it's another one of those cases where multiple individual bad ideas* combine to create a disaster.
  
  In this case, the account ID for new users was not assigned when the user was created, but in each worker thread when the server was started up.
  
  Nobody saw this during testing because they were restarting the server all the time, and each restart generated a new pool of available user IDs.
  
  But the moment things were working...  They stopped working.
  
  * Interpreted, weakly dynamically typed languages, database definitions in generic code, and using fucking ChatGPT, for starters.

• Designing a Lego orrery.  (Marian)
  
  Just the Earth-Moon-Sun system, though there's a preliminary idea at the end of doing a simpler version for the entire solar system - just doing planetary orbits and leaving out orbital inclinations, axial tilts, and moons.
  
  Putting all of those features in, building it out of Lego, and keeping it accurate would make it extremely complicated.
  
  Also, quite large.
  
  
  
• Over a thousand malicious extension to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code have been discovered with hundreds of millions of total installations worldwide.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The idea behind Visual Studio Code is that it's a useless piece of garbage but is easy for people to extend.
  
  Which is like selling homes that are just a frame of 2x4s vaguely nailed together, covered with tarps and some exposed drains and wiring.
  
  Cheap.  Easy to upgrade.  Hilariously unsafe.
  
  
  
• HP shipped a bad BIOS update that bricked many of its ProBook laptops.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And of course it was an automatic update, so you'd just wake up one morning, running late for work because your alarm didn't go off, and find that your computer had committed suicide during the night.
  
  Or, worse - since these are business laptops - you work in corporate IT, and you have a hundred dead laptops to deal with all at once, and all that HP is offering is a motherboard replacement that costs nearly as much as a new laptop.
  
  Oh, and the BIOS file HP installed?  Wasn't even a BIOS file.  But the automated update tried to install it anyway.

Scale Model Solar Systems R Us Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 10 2024 11:33 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, June 11 2024 01:59 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 11 2024 04:56 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 11 2024 04:58 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, June 13 2024 08:50 AM (nk1Z+)

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• With a successful suborbital test flight of Starship under his belt, Elon Musk is turning his attention to the Starfactory.  (Space)
  
  Starfactory, already under construction, is planned to be able to build a Starship - the largest and most powerful rocket ever launched - every day.
  
  And keep in mind that both Starship and the Super Heavy booster with its 33 engines are fully reusable.  So that's multiple launches per day.
  
  He's the main character in an old-school Heinlein novel.

• A court-appointed administrator for failed fintech startup Synapse has found $85 million of customer funds aren't.  (CNBC)  (archive site)
  
  Aren't what?
  
  Just aren't.  Aren't funds.  Aren't there.  Aren't accounted for.
  
  Since Synapse was a middle-man between banks and other startups that needed financial services, its failure means that customers - both companies contracting Synapse and their customers in turn - currently have no access to funds even though the banks are solvent and the accounts are FDIC insured.
  
  But the fact that a third of the money simply seems to be gone makes things even more complicated.
  
  
  
• The DOJ has indicted the developers of a tool that let people spend Bitcoin without the government monitoring them.  (Reason)
  
  You know, like you can still do - for now - with cash.
  
  The government hates that.
  
  
  
• For 13 years, Siri has sucked.  Now with the AI bubble in maximum inflation mode, Apple is set to make it worse.  (The Verge)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• What Snowflake isn't saying about its massive data breach.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What Snowflake is saying is that this is entirely the fault of its customers.
  
  For being silly enough to trust their data with Snowflake.
  
  
  
• Six people have been hospitalised after eating Diamon Shruumz brand chocolate bars.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Which contain - as you might have guessed - psychedelic mushrooms.

  The chocolate bars are still available for sale online but the FDA said that consumers should not eat, sell, or serve them, you idiots.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 10 2024 12:52 AM (BMUHC)

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• Just in time for the weekend, there's a new critical security vulnerability in PHP.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Sysadmins worldwide panic.
  
  On Windows.
  
  Sysadmins worldwide go back to sleep.
  
  If you have Chinese or Japanese language packs installed and run PHP on Windows, Windows itself will helpfully slip unsafe characters past the normal security mechanisms and into database queries where they will wreak havoc.
  
  There are several fatal design flaws working together to make this a problem, and none of them are unique to PHP.
  
  Though PHP is still awful and nobody should use it for anything, ever.

• The twelve core Zen 5 Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (yes, unfortunately that is its name) is only a little slower than the sixteen core Zen 4 Ryzen 7945HX3D.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And that's with the Zen 5 chip running in the lowest power "silent mode".  In previous generations there were high and low power versions of laptop chips; with Zen 5 you can run the chip at anything from 15W to 54W - and even at the lowest setting it is very capable.
  
  This was tested in an Asus laptop; my own Asus also has silent mode and it really works.
  
  
  
• Civilization 7 is due out next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I clocked up a fair bit of time back in the day with Civilization II.  I got so good at it that even at higher difficulty settings I'd have nuclear weapons in the Middle Ages and launch my rocket to Alpha Centauri while my rivals were still messing about with sailing ships.
  
  
  
• Hackers breached a Disney Confluence server and stole confidential documents relating to the design and implementation of...  Club Penguin.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Keep being weird, guys.
  
  
  
• Adobe isn't stealing your content, says Adobe.  (Adobe)
  
  Adobe did change its license terms to grant itself permission to steal your content, but Adobe says Adobe would never do that except in certain very specific circumstances, such as if it really wanted to.

  To be clear, Adobe requires a limited license to access content solely for the purpose of operating or improving the services and software and to enforce our terms and comply with law, such as to protect against abusive content.

  Which terms are so broad you could launch a Boeing 737-800 from them without any risk of running out of runway.
  
  
  
• The Affinity suite (design, photo editing, and publishing) is half price right now.  (Affinity)
  
  Under $100 for the three applications on Windows, Mac, and iOS.  No subscription fees, free upgrades.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is planning to encrypt the Recall database.  (The Verge)
  
  Problem: Microsoft claimed in the product announcement that the data was encrypted.  They lied.
  
  They also plan to make it opt-in, just like Windows 11 upgrades, or ads on your desktop.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, June 08 2024 07:24 PM (HXB50)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 08 2024 10:02 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 08 2024 11:00 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 09 2024 12:41 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Kristophr at Sunday, June 09 2024 06:46 AM (iYdVP)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, June 11 2024 11:40 AM (ZLF73)

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