• The Kosmos 482 space probe has landed safely - sort of - in the Indian Ocean.  (Space)
  
  Safe for everyone else, anyway.
  
  The probe was supposed to go to Venus, more than 50 years ago, but got slightly lost.
  
  
  

Tech News

• It's 2025.  Why are banks still getting authentication so wrong?  (Jamal Habash)
  
  Because they're banks.  Something that is bad and barely works but has known risks is preferable to something that is good and works well but has unknown risks.
  
  
  
• There's some sort of kerfuffle between Google and Nextcloud over app permissions.  (The Register)
  
  Google has denied the Android Nextcloud app the permission to even ask for permission to access any file on your device to sync with your Nextcloud server.  (Nextcloud lets you run your own little cloud storage service - and other services as well - on your own hardware under your control.)
  
  Google only allows permission to access media files.  But isn't that largely the point of managing files on an Android device?  They're great for accessing content and awful for anything else.
  
  
  
• House Republicans have tried to jam a ban on state-level AI regulations into the budget reconciliation bill.  (404 Media)
  
  Okay.  Works for me.
  
  
  
• The universe is now expected to decay in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
  000,000,000,000,000,000,00,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, much less than was previously calculated.  (Phys.org)
  
  Make sure you have clean underwear.
  
  
  
• Curious variants of Intel's B580 graphics card have been spotted in shipping manifests, including a model with dual GPU chips and 48GB of total VRAM.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  These might be announced soon, but are not expected to actually be available for some time, if at all.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• Listings have started to appear for Nvidia's RTX 5060 graphics card ahead of its official launch at Computex next week.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There is one model priced at the MSRP of $299, which won't be available, with other models mostly priced towards or over $400, a price that should buy you the faster 5060 Ti with 16GB of RAM.  But doesn't.
  
  The base 5060 with 8GB of RAM is not something anyone should buy.  We'll see soon enough what AMD and Intel have to offer in competition.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Nvidia is increasing GPU prices by 10 to 15%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because of course they are.

• TSMC's $100 billion investment in new factories in the US seems to be paying off, with all US production now fully booked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Currently that's just the slightly older 4nm process, but the company is installing 3nm equipment right now and has started construction on additional buildings for new 2nm and 1.6nm production lines.
  
  
  
• The Asus DriverHub software is now the Asus Instant Vulnerability software.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't leave it running until they fix it.
  
  
  
• You wouldn't read a book, so why would you let AI read a book?  (The Register)
  
  Copyright law protects the right to make copies.  That's not what AI does.
  
  
  
• Slate Auto has received 100,000 reservations so far for its any-colour-so-long-as-it's-grey $20,000-after-rebates truck.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  A good start.
  
  
  
• Update: I found it!  (The Audio Guide to Babylon 5)
  
  When I tripped over the Sabaton / Babylon 5 crossover this was what I was looking for - the opening of episode 45 in the podcast.  It's a parody of Jonathan Coulton's Shop Vac song but rather more upbeat.  The singing perhaps isn't all that great but it's fun.

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Wednesday, May 14 2025 12:36 PM (XsuFr)

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• The killer app for generative AI is coding, say people who know nothing about coding.  (Fast Company)
  
  "Our new spreadsheet performs calculations faster than ever before, and only gets half of them wrong."
  
  
  
• Fake NPM packages claiming to support the Cursor AI coding system infected 3200 users before they were taken down.  (The Hacker News)
  
  And it's going to get much, much worse.

• Meanwhile an NPM package that previously did something useful suddenly contained a RAT instead.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  So much worse.
  
  
  
• Sandisk has a new SSD controller designer to support 1PB drives.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  128TB models are planned this year, with 256TB drives coming next year and 512GB in 2027.  1PB drives presumably will follow.
  
  Do not send to know for whom the price tolls.
  
  
  
• The boyfriend of jailed Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes has launched a new company that...  Sounds exactly like Theranos.  (The Daily Beast)
  
  This will end well, I'm sure.
  
  
  
• A team of physicists at the University of Texas has solved a major problem in making nuclear fusion a viable energy source.  (UTexas)
  
  It is now only twenty years away.
  
  
  
• You don't own what you just bought, Nintendo edition.  (Beta News)
  
  If you violate the terms of your license agreement - which Nintendo can change after the fact - the company can brick your Switch 2.
  
  
  
• The Overwatch 2 team just unionised.  (Kotaku)  (archive site)
  
  Aaaand it's dead.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, May 13 2025 04:26 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, May 13 2025 01:35 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 13 2025 06:17 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 14 2025 01:46 AM (yeIbg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 14 2025 10:50 AM (PiXy!)

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• Microsoft is planning an update to Windows 11 with a less terrible version of the start menu.  (Thurrott)
  
  Don't worry, all the other terrible features are still there.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, Teams is basically Skype.
  
  I installed the free app for work.  It's...  Not horrible.

• AMD is changing sockets for its next-generation server CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Two sockets, in fact.  The low-end SP8 supporting up to 96 Zen 6 cores or 128 Zen 6c cores, and the high-end SP7 supporting up to 256 Zen 6c cores.
  
  I don't know why SP7 is bigger than SP8.  It just is.
  
  No specific word on whether the current AM5 desktop socket will support the next generation of desktop CPUs, but probably.  AMD's own history suggests it will only change once DDR6 memory is available, which will be a couple of years yet.
  
  
  
• Google will pay Texas a $1.4 billion settlement over collecting Texans' data without permission.  (AP News)
  
  And they promise not to do it again, pinky swear.
  
  
  
• The Beelink Me Mini NAS is now available starting at $329 including a 2TB SSD.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has an Intel N150 CPU - not fast, but it gets the job done, 12GB of soldered RAM, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, three USB ports, HDMI, and six M.2 slots.
  
  Those slots mostly only support PCIe 3.0 x1, but even that is enough for a single SSD to flood both network ports.
  
  
  
• There's a new stupid TikTok trend that is actually less likely than others to leave children dead or in jail.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The same site that promoted cheque fraud and autoasphyxiation is now just teaching children to short out their school-supplied laptops.
  
  So that's nice.
  
  
  

Chemical Interlude

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, May 11 2025 06:48 PM (QE7eq)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 12 2025 01:32 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Monday, May 12 2025 03:18 PM (bg2DR)

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• A lithium deposit valued at $1.5 trillion has been discovered in Oregon.  (Earth)
  
  Well, that's Portland sorted out.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Mexico has sued Google over naming the Gulf of America the Gulf of America on American maps after the American government voted to name it the Gulf of America.  (The Guardian)
  
  Yes, that's sure to work.
  
  
  
• A Florida state bill requiring backdoors for minors' social media accounts has quietly died...  But not before passing the state Senate.  (Tech Crunch)

  Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation called the bill "dangerous and dumb."  Security professionals have long argued that it is impossible to create a secure backdoor that cannot also be maliciously abused, and encryption backdoors put user data at risk of data breaches.

  State legislatures tend to be dangerous and dumb.  Sometimes their worst instincts are restrained.  Sometimes you get California.
  
  
  
• What's new in Swift 6.2?  (Hacking with Swift)
  
  Things.  I haven't really looked at Swift since I tested it against the PyPy Python compiler and found it about 0% faster.
  
  
  
• AI use damages professional reputation.  (Ars Technica)
  
  As it should.

Posted by: furball at Saturday, May 10 2025 08:44 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: furball at Saturday, May 10 2025 08:45 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: furball at Saturday, May 10 2025 08:52 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 11 2025 12:19 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, May 11 2025 02:54 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: David Eastman at Sunday, May 11 2025 03:23 AM (aAyxl)

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• Who is winning the war between search engines and AI chat bots?  Search engines, and it's not even close.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In fact, if you add up all the search engines and all the AI services, 90% of the activity is Google search and everything else is just noise.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Alibaba has release new AI code that allows AI to act as a search engine without needing a search engine.  (VentureBeat)
  
  Called ZeroSearch, a 7-billion parameter version outperformed Google Search in undefined and indefensibly stupid scenarios.  It's the equivalent of claiming that you managed to condense the Encyclopaedia Britannica down to a bowl of alphabet soup.  I don't know what you actually did, but I know you're not worth talking to until you grow up.

• Zettlab's new NASes look nice but.  (Liliputing)
  
  Supporting up to eight hard drives and two M.2 SSDs, with an Intel 125H CPU, up to 96GB of RAM and two 10Gb Ethernet ports, the hardware specs are solid enough.
  
  Unfortunately it runs a custom AI-focused Linux distribution and must be cleansed from the Earth with fire.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Legion Tab 4 actually looks nice.  (Liliputing)
  
  The CPU has been bumped from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to the new Snapdragon 8 Elite, which has custom CPU cores rather than the regular Arm ones.  And pixel density for the 8.8" screen has been increased by nearly 20% to 3040x1904.  The older model already had a very fast CPU and a great screen, so these were not urgent updates, but are certainly not objectionable.
  
  The missing microSD slot on the Tab 3 also showed up, supporting up to 2TB of extra storage.
  
  Right now only available in China for around $450.
  
  
  
• What does Huawei's new HarmonyOS look like?  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's Android you idiots.
  
  
  
• Bill Gates is mad that CIA cut-out USAID got shut down.  (The Verge)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• China's Squeely is moving to take AV company Blookit private in a credit default swap on the Chicago Commodity Exchange.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Actually none of that is true but you didn't miss any useful information.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 10 2025 08:04 AM (1zWbY)

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• Apple vice president Eddy Cue says you may not need an iPhone ten years from now.  (The Verge)
  
  Not a huge stretch of the imagination, since I don't need an iPhone now and didn't need an iPhone ten years ago.
  
  On the other hand, possibly not the best message to send about a product that represents half your company's revenue.
  
  I did buy an iMac ten years ago.  Great hardware.  Solid operating system.  UI sucked.

• Europe has announced plans to spend $500 million over three years to make the continent a "magnet for scientists".  (The Register)
  
  Scientists are not ferromagnetic.
  
  
  
• The Beeling GTR9 Pro is another AMD Strix Halo mini-PC designed like a Mac Studio.  (Liliputing)
  
  16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, and up to 128GB of RAM on a 256-bit bus.  Mostly designed for running AI tasks locally because it can dedicate up to 96GB of RAM to the GPU, but makes a very nice computer for anything that needs a fast processor and solid graphics.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile if you need a 192-core Arm CPU with 12-channel memory you can now get one.  (Serve the Home)
  
  You probably don't need one, but it's nice that it exists. 
  
  
  
• Stripe has unveiled an "AI foundation model" for payments.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not a model for payments for AI services, but a model for payments using AI services.
  
  Cash or gold only.  No cards.  No cheques.  No credit.
  
  
  
• AI chatbots are juicing engagement instead of being useful, warns...  Instagram?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Isn't that the entire point of Instagram?
  
  
  
• JetBrains CLion is now free for non-commercial use.  (JetBrains)
  
  CLion supports C and C++ (and also Python), and joins WebStorm (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and RustRover (Rust) in its lineup of free IDEs for hobbyists.

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, May 08 2025 06:37 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, May 08 2025 11:58 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Tim Turner at Friday, May 09 2025 09:56 AM (As8gg)

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• Skype is dead.  Here's five alternatives.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  I wish it were dead.  I've received eight messages on it from work today.  The first of those at four minutes past midnight.

• Intel's 265K has been cut in price from $399 to $299.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While overall I would recommend AMD's platform, that does deliver 80% of the performance of Intel's current top-of-the-line chip for 50% of the price.  It's a little faster than AMD's 9900X and now 20% cheaper as well.
  
  If Intel wasn't planning a new socket next year cutting off any possibility of upgrades it might actually be worth recommending.  But they are so it's not.
  
  
  
• Under RDK, "Make America Healthy Again" means junk science like, uh, evolution.  (The Verge)  (archive site)

  "There's a sort of Darwin-esque notion that only the fittest survive," says Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist, virologist, and professor of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

  "Only the fittest survive" is tautological.  In evolution, fitness is defined by survival to reproduction.

  "But these viruses can kill anybody, so that's just wrong."  In the recent deaths, the first from measles in a decade, no underlying medication conditions have been reported.  Both of the Texas children were reportedly healthy before they contracted measles. They could have stayed that way.

  Measles doesn't just "kill anybody" as Offit knows perfectly well.  It was a major killer before the introduction of the vaccine, and we certainly shouldn't abandon that vaccine.
  
  But it kills children.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, May 08 2025 08:05 AM (rcPLc)

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• Microsoft has shut down Skype for good.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  I wish.  It's still bloody working.  I got a call from work fifteen minutes ago.

• Dimension 126 isn't a place.  (Quanta)
  
  Strangely worded headline.  Strangely worded article.
  
  126-dimensional spaces allow for certain strangely twisted shapes, that are possible only in spaces with dimensionality of the form 2n-2 - so 2, 6, 14, 30, 62 - but disproven in 2009 for spaces with 254 or more dimensions.
  
  That left only 126 dimensional space to have this property confirmed or denied, and now it has been proven true.
  
  
  
• Databricks is looking to acquire serverless Postgres company Neon in a deal valued at about $1 billion.  (Upstarts Media)
  
  Neon advertises its blazing speed with queries taking as little as ten milliseconds, which is miserably slow compared to running your own database and completely impossible if you are more than ten milliseconds away from one of their servers.
  
  
  
• Touchscreens are everywhere, but proper tactile interfaces have significant benefits.  But what if your touchscreen could form its own tactile buttons on demand?  (The Verge)
  
  LG is planning to show off exactly that next week, with a new automotive control interface featuring a touchscreen that changes shape instantly to create buttons and dials for physical controls.
  
  The demo is intriguing, though the unit displayed is rather bulky and it's not clear how much of that bulk is necessary.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 07 2025 08:37 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, May 07 2025 10:48 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 08 2025 12:43 AM (cRZ/R)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, May 08 2025 07:56 AM (rcPLc)

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• Intel may have sold off a majority of its Altera acquisition to balance the books, but it hasn't given up in other areas: The B770 GPU could be here as soon as Computex, which is in just (searches frantically) over two weeks.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This will likely be a mid-range 16GB card.  The existing B580 offers 12GB of RAM at $250, which is already a better bet in the current market than 8GB cards, except for the minor problem that there aren't any.
  
  
  
• And Intel's third-generation "Celestial" GPUs could be here by CES.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  That seems a bit ambitious, to be honest.  Expect this to take more like a year to reach retail even if things go well, and eighteen months if they need more than a simple tweak moving from test samples to production.

• Apples are selling twice as fast as any other type of orange: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is selling twice as fast as any other JRPG on Steam.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Expedition 33 is indeed a success, but it's a weird comparison since the J in JRPG means Japanese, and Expedition 33 is a French game created by French developers in France.
  
  
  
• Stalin didn't go far enough in his purges.  (Pluralistic)
  
  Jobs are bad!  Unions are good!  Dark humour is like food, not everyone gets it!
  
  I'm so old I remember when Cory Doctorow could write a coherent sentence.
  
  
  
• People are losing their loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies and mental illness but mostly mental illness.  (Rolling Stone)  (archive site)
  
  I thought mental illness was seen as a positive thing on the left, given how much time and effort they devote to wallowing in it.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  You have to understand, he is not just playing as a bunny in a fantasy world, he is playing as a negro bunny.  His words.
  
  
  
• Yasuke - the pseudohistorical star of Ubisoft's latest commercial catastrophe Assassin's Creed 14: The Assassining, was never a samurai and all the claims to the contrary were cooked up very recently by a single lunatic.  (AP News)
  
  The article doesn't mention that.  The article in fact is completely useless.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 05 2025 11:04 PM (rcPLc)

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