• So Twitter is having a partly self-inflicted hissy fit this weekend.  (The Verge)
  
  Allegedly because of site-scraping by the current plague of AI startups - which in my experience is entirely plausible - Twitter temporarily requires you to have an account to read the site, and has even put in place limits on how much you can read, post, reply, and like.  Which I've run into even though I have a paid account.
  
  The site scraping thing is a plague.  It is much cheaper and easier to grab content from a site than it is to deliver it: For one thing, if you are using a service like AWS or Google Cloud, inbound traffic is free while outbound traffic is very expensive.
  
  Multiple times I've been in a situation where 100 servers were all queueing up to steal content from a single server I've been running.  (In one case, it was over 2000 servers.)  I blocked them, but it takes time and there's often a site outage before I can do that.
  
  That said, the temporary rate limits have not been well thought out and if you use Twitter a lot today would be a good day to clean your house.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Apropos of nothing, I just went on to Amazon and bought the cheapest robot vacuum cleaner that had at least a four star rating. Which turned out to be an "Advwin" model - the usual Chinese no-name jumble of letters - for A$185. Call it $120.
  
  It's too dumb and cheap to spy on you - it navigates by bumping into things - but if you plop it down on an expanse of carpet it will reportedly vacuum it pretty well, and if you plop it down on an expanse of tile it will have a go at mopping that.  And it can find its way back to the charging station most of the time.
  
  Seems worth a try given that the fancy models cost anything up to A$2500.  I mean, sure, those can not only mop your floor, but empty the dirty water into the base station and then rinse out the mop, but I could just buy a dozen of these things and throw them out when they get too mucky.
  
  
  
• After the Netherlands announced it would stop selling even second-tier chipmaking tools to China, the Chinese embassy sent them a frowny face emoji.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There is only one company in the world - Dutch company ASML - that makes the most advanced equipment for producing silicon chips, and they're also a key supplier even for less-advanced devices.  So this not only prevents China from making chips on advanced processes of 7nm and below, it will over time cripple the country's ability to produce chips at 14nm.  It already has machines for that, since they were not previously restricted, but now it can no longer buy more, or procure replacement parts.
  
  That pushes them back to 28nm (the 20nm node sucked except for Intel's proprietary version) and 28nm when TSMC is ramping up 3nm is just not going to get you anywhere.
  
  The restrictions also hit flash memory and DRAM production as well as logic chips like microprocessors.
  
  Can China build its own chipmaking tools?  Sure.  In a decade or two.  Even if they steal the designs, which they probably already have, they don't currently have the factories to make the parts to make the machines to make these machines.
  
  
  
• Asus has shown off a variant of Nvidia's 4060 Ti graphics card with two M.2 slots.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This actually makes some sense because the 4060 Ti is a PCIe 4 x8 device, so it will leave half the lanes of your standard x16 motherboard slot unused.  So long as your CPU can handle the bifurcation (the term used for this) it doesn't require any extra logic, just running out the traces on the board to a pair of M.2 connectors.
  
  If your motherboard has a second slot and automatically splits the bandwidth into x8 for each, though, those M.2 slots will not work at all.
  
  
  
• When 2 is less than 1: AMD's Phoenix 2 mobile CPU is a smaller, cheaper, slower version of the Phoenix / 7840 chip shipping now.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's about 25% smaller than the existing 8 core chip, and has two Zen 4 cores and four smaller Zen 4C cores.
  
  This is similar to Intel's P (performance) and E (efficiency) cores, except where Intel's E cores are half the speed of the P cores, AMD's Zen 4C is about 80% as fast as Zen 4 - or about as fast as Zen 3.
  
  And Zen 3 is not slow.
  
  This chip is probably aimed at devices like the Steam Deck, but there's a good chance we'll see it in budget laptops as well.  It should do just fine.
  
  
  
• Taking a break from messing up Twitter, Elon Musk personally launched the ESA's Euclid space telescope on its way to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point a million miles away.  (CNN)
  
  Dude has more launch capacity than most continents.
  
  
  
• The Liberty Phone from Purism is a fairly decent $199 budget model running stock Linux rather than Google's increasingly locked-down Android.  (Liliputing)
  
  Only problem is it costs $2199.
  
  Exactly who they expect to buy this I do not know.  I can see people concerned with security and open standards spending $399 on a device like this - twice what an equivalent Android model would cost but worth it to some people because they can control exactly what their phone is doing.
  
  At this price though, it's toast.
  
  
  
• OLED panels can last more than 100 years - so long as you have blue-yellow colour blindness.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Blue is a bastard.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 03 2023 02:25 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 03 2023 09:10 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 03 2023 11:00 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 03 2023 06:07 PM (PiXy!)

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• A new Canadian law requires Google and Facebook - and apparently no-one else - to pay news organisations - almost all of which receive government funds - for the right to link to news articles without which the news organisations would have even fewer readers than they already do.
  
  Google and Facebook responded - and I quote - Canada who?  (Ars Technica)
  
  And have pulled all their links to Canadian news, which is almost all crap anyway because of the whole government funds issue.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Seagate's 8TB Barracuda sells for $100.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Compared to a Team MP34 or a Crucial P3, that's half the price, twice the capacity, and at best twenty times slower.
  
  It's getting to the point that hard drives are just backup devices, what tape drives used to be.  Not quite, but if SSD prices keep going down at this rate it won't be long.
  
  
  
• The LILYGO T-Deck is a sort-of Blackberry for $50.  (Liliputing)
  
  Except that it's about as fast as the original Blackberry from 1999, has neither a case nor a battery, and can't make phone calls (though neither could the original Blackberry models).
  
  It's an interesting little device for hobbyists though.
  
  
  
• Urtopia has announced a smart e-bike with ChatGPT integration.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Now even your bike can accuse you of racism.
  
  
  
• You now need a Twitter account to read Twitter.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Once upon a time the entire Twitter feed was public for everyone.
  
  What I think this is about is API access.  Twitter has locked down the API behind insane fees, but you could get around that by just reading the website.
  
  And the reason for locking down the API is probably AI training data.  Same deal with Reddit.
  
  The fundamental problem with this is that it's not Twitter's data - or Reddit's - and never was.  They understood this once, but have long since forgotten.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 01 2023 09:47 PM (obo9H)

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• Oh, yeah.  Nvidia's RTX 4060 is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Buy a 6700XT while they're still available.  Or wait for the 7700 and hope it's priced appropriately.
  
  The only good cards in the current generation are Nvidia's 4090 - if you're spending someone else's money - and AMD's 7600 which is now available for around $250 and is worth just about that.
  
  Everything in between is either overpriced, underperforms, or has stupid limitations that ruin a card that might otherwise be adequate.
  
  

• Dell's 6K professional monitor is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's good, but it costs as much as six good 4K monitors, and I'd rather have six good 4K monitors.
  
  
  
• There's no such thing as bad publicity, until the woke mob arrives.  (New York Times)
  
  A new author - who appears to be an idiot, but she's being interviewed by the New York Times so that is pretty much required - found her book getting review-bombed on Goodreads because, so far as I can tell from the rather turgid article, the plot summary she posted to Twitter is insensitive to Marxist retards:

  The story centers on a young Black woman working at Goldman Sachs who falls in love with a conservative white co-worker with bigoted views.

  Note also that "Black" is capitalised because it is an identity, where "white" is not because it is merely an admission of guilt.
  
  
  
• Rocky Linux, which took up the mantle from CentOS after that distribution was murdered by IBM, says it has found a way forward after RedHat stopped distributing source code releases.  (The Register)
  
  IBM only cares about large enterprise customers - if you have fewer than 16 servers they will just give you RHEL licenses for free - but they don't want to let those large enterprise customers slip away, so they are making it as difficult as possible for independent Linux distributions to retain 100% compatibility with RHEL, without actually violating the open source licenses that all the code depends on.
  
  Expect a slow-moving and frankly rather boring war of attrition here, as IBM comes up with annoying new tricks and the smaller distros work around them,
  
  Meanwhile I'm using Ubuntu.
  
  
  
• Brave browser will soon prevent web pages from scanning your local network.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If you thought your home devices were safe without passwords because they're not exposed to the internet, well, wrong.  Your browser is on your local network so any web page you load can scan your devices.
  
  And a surprising number of legitimate websites do that for no good reason.  The article mentions eBay, Chick-fil-A, Best Buy, Kroger, and Macy's, and there are lots more.
  
  Brave will show a popup for websites that try this and you will be able to grant one-time or permanent access, or tell the site to buzz off.  It will be interesting to see what breaks.
  
  
  
• If you want a small Android phone, the Asus Zenfone 10 is apparently what passes for that these days.  (The Verge)
  
  It has a 5.9" screen, but some of the larger models are getting close to 7", so it  is at least relatively small.
  
  It's not cheap either, but the specs are decent.  Not that The Verge tells you what they are, but here's a proper review  (Tom's Guide) and here are the full specs.  (GSM Arena)
  
  It has a headphone jack but no microSD slot, but is at least available with up to 512GB of storage.  Still, if you're using it to hold important data, make sure it's all backed up, because if the phone fails for any reason everything on it is going to be toast.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte's new Ryzen 7030U Brix (their NUC lineup) is up to 140% faster than previous Intel models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Where by "previous" they mean three years previously, but then the 7030U is itself a two year old design so that's not actually unfair.
  
  Don't expect remarkable performance, but it should be decent for anything short of serious gaming.  The eight core 7030U is a slightly improved 5800U, and my new laptop is a six core 5600U, and I'm pretty happy with it.  With the CPU anyway; the shortcomings relate to the screen and the battery life, neither of which applies to a desktop mini-PC.
  
  
  
• Hyte has done it again: The new Y40 Calliope Mori edition is available for pre-order.  (Hyte)
  
  If you plan to fill your house with Hololive-themed PCs they also offer custom Y60 versions styled on Bae and Kronii, and a Hololive EN TKL keyboard.  Which I can't buy because that for some reason is US/Canada only even though it's called the "Connect the World" bundle.

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 30 2023 09:27 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mrs. Peel at Friday, June 30 2023 10:02 PM (jrY13)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 01 2023 07:36 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mrs. Peel at Saturday, July 01 2023 08:49 PM (vlz3c)

Posted by: SMM HEART at Tuesday, January 23 2024 04:45 PM (/QKaT)

Posted by: Kroger Store survey at Wednesday, March 12 2025 02:53 AM (5LxU8)

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• At Reddit, the beatings will continue until morale improves.  (The Verge)
  
  Many of the major subreddits, each with millions of users, remain dark, and Reddit's approach has moved from threatening the moderators to, well, still threatening the moderators.  They don't really seem to have any other ideas.
  
  Now, the moderators of many of the subreddits are little better than a horde of mini-Hitlers, but so are the people actually running the company.  The problem is that despite all the hitlering there is a lot of worthwhile content stuck behind the blackout curtains.
  
  And the only thing Reddit cares about is monetising that content; it doesn't matter how that affects the moderators or the users.
  
  They've really taken a page out of the Big Hasbro Book on Customer Relations.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Western Digital's new SN580 SSD delivers a DRAMless TLC drive for 5 cents per GB.  (AnandTech)
  
  There are other drives priced like that at retail, but this is the official price.
  
  It's a PCIe 4 drive too, but speeds are only a little above 4GB per second.  Which is very, very fast, but not full PCIe 4 speed.
  
  $50 for 1TB is a great price and it should work fine for most users.
  
  
  
• The only problem is their own high-end SN850X model is selling for $59 for 1TB.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a great drive and runs at full PCIe 4 speeds, and has a DRAM cache to help with writes and random I/O.  Definitely worth the extra $9.
  
  
  
• Maza is a financial startup targeting the lucrative illegal immigrant market.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What?
  
  
  
• Stop giving them ideas: The Password Game will make you want to break your keyboard.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yes, it's exactly what you think it is.

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, June 29 2023 07:30 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 30 2023 12:47 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 30 2023 09:27 AM (D0DmO)

Posted by: SMM HEART at Friday, January 19 2024 04:07 PM (/QKaT)

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• Who is the new Mac Pro for?  Apparently, nobody.  (The Verge)
  
  The previous Mac Pro was a serious computer for serious people - except that it was a Mac, anyway.  It supported multiple video cards and up to 1.5TB of RAM.
  
  The new Mac Pro is limited to 192GB of RAM, the same amount you can add to a $100 Intel 13100F.  And it supports no graphics cards.  It has slots for graphics cards, but if you install one, it won't work.
  
  If you ask professional Mac users if they want a Mac Pro, the answer is no.  For almost all of them the 96GB available on the MacBook Pro is enough, and for the few remaining there's the 192GB on a maxed-out Mac Studio.  The Mac Studio doesn't have any PCIe slots, but you can't use the PCIe slots in the Mac Pro anyway.

• After it stopped providing source code distributions for its Linux releases in order to kill its free competitors, RedHat explained that it didn't stop providing source code distributions for its Linux releases in order to killed its free competitors, it stopped providing source code distributions for its Linux releases and the painful lingering deaths of its free competitors are purely a coincidence.  (Phoronix)
  
  RedHat still provides source code - it is legally obligated to do so, because it doesn't own most of the software in its version of Linux.  It just provides it as individual updates in thousands of different places, making it painfully difficult to precisely reproduce RedHat Linux.
  
  This comes after IBM - owner of RedHat - bought its best known free competitor, CentOS, and murdered it.  I mean, had it coincidentally die of natural causes at the bottom of a staircase with a knife in its back at IBM's country estate at midnight.
  
  
  
• Seagate's Firecuda 540 SSDs are 50% faster than their 530 model at twice the price.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which means that you could simply buy two 530s, run them in RAID-0, and have twice as much storage that is 33% faster.
  
  There really isn't much use for PCIe 5 SSDs until they get a lot cheaper.
  
  
  
• Samsung is planning to ship 2nm chips in 2025, and 1.4nm in 2027.  (AnandTech)
  
  Intel is planning to ship earlier, but Intel got stuck on 14nm for seventeen years (approximately) so we'll see what happens.
  
  
  
• GitHub's CEO says AI and software development are now inextricably linked, like peanut butter and typhoid.  (Tech Crunch)

  In an interview after his talk, Dohmke expanded on this a bit when I asked him if he believes every developer will be using AI in the near future. "I think the obvious answer to that one is that the FOMO in companies is already so big that they are looking at the competition and asking themselves if their competitor has already adapted [GitHub] Copilot — and that means that that competitor has — and doesn’t really matter if it’s 20%, 30% or 40% — that competitor has an advantage."

  All your competitors are jumping off our bridge!  It doesn't really matter if it's a 20 foot, 30 foot, or 40 foot drop, that competitor is going to go splat before you do!

  On top of that, he believes there is really no disadvantage for developers to use a tool like GitHub Copilot. "It's just so natural.  There's really no reason to not use new improved GitHub Copilot, now with activated charcoal" he said.  "I think new improved GitHub Copilot now with activated charcoal is becoming part of the standard toolset that every developer will be using.  Ultimately, developers not using it will exist, the same way Cobalt developers still exist."

  Yes, the article says Cobalt.
  
  These people literally know nothing.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 28 2023 11:22 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 28 2023 11:54 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, June 29 2023 01:18 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 29 2023 10:18 AM (obo9H)

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• There's a donut chain in Melbourne that sells several gluten-free varieties, and I really wanted to try them out while I was down there.  This turned out to be very easy because there was one in the shopping mall next to my hotel, and another at the airport.  
  
  I got an assortment of six: One plain, one jam filled, one Nutella-filled, and three glazed.
  
  They're terrible.
  
  
  
• Social network IRL, just recently hailed as a "unicorn" for quickly attracting 20 million active users, is shutting down after it turned out that 19 million of them don't exist.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Having bots on your social network is not intrinsically bad, so long as you can still get a count of human users somehow.  If you can't, and your depending on investor or advertising money, you're bound for serious trouble seriously quickly.

• If 64GB isn't enough for your laptop Mushkin's new 96GB DDR5 SODIMM kit is available now.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This should work in both Intel and AMD laptops, but you should probably check compatibility first; there have been BIOS issues with some desktop motherboards and it's likely the same will be true for laptops.
  
  I just switched to a new laptop with 64GB of RAM, and the difference from 16GB is night and day.  Frankly 32GB would have been fine, but going all the way up to 64GB was only another $100 - Australian, so $3.50 in real money.  If I only had the one laptop for all my work the 96GB kit would be worth it, but I have one or two or three others.
  
  
  
• The Flipper Zero is on its way to selling $80 million worth of, uh, professional security testing tools.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It is actually very useful for security testing; the problem is more that it's a little too good at what it does.  If you're building a garage door system, for example, and want to make sure that it's secure, the device that does that can also open any garage doors that aren't secure.
  
  It can also emulate security cards, key fobs, arbitrary Bluetooth and infrared devices, and IoT and smart home systems which are notoriously unreliable anyway.  Which again is great for developers who need to test those things, not so good if the kid next door keeps locking you out of your own home.
  
  
  
• Google's Pixel Fold is a great $500 device with the slight drawback that it actually costs $1800.  (The Verge)
  
  And the secondary drawback that if you get a tiny bit of grit on the screen and then fold it closed it could die after just four days.  (Ars Technica)
  
  $450 a day seems like rather a lot for a mobile phone.
  
  
  
• If you want one of those little five port 2.5GbE routers only with eight ports you can now get that too.  (Liliputing)
  
  Available with up to a Core i7-10510U, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage, which is more than you could possibly need for a simple router, so it can double as a small Linux server.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 27 2023 11:25 PM (BMUHC)

2 Here's the error:
File "/home/minx/test/Form.py", line 647, in form_comment print('Akismet check %s in %0.3fs on %s %s %s "%s"' % ('error' if aki_err else 'accept' if aki_ok else 'reject', time.time()-taki, tags.get('form.name',''), tags.get('form.web',''), tags.get('form.mail',''), text)) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019' in position 65: ordinal not in range(12

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 27 2023 11:25 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 28 2023 07:27 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, June 28 2023 02:38 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, June 28 2023 02:41 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 28 2023 05:25 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 28 2023 05:28 PM (PiXy!)

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• Behavioural scientists behaving badly: The work of a top researcher at Harvard Business School has come into question after accusations that she is - and I quote* - just making shit up.  (New York Times)
  
  This is particularly striking because her area of expertise - such as it is - is honesty.
  
  Only half of published medial research holds up when other researchers try to reproduce the results, and for psychology the number is closer to one third.  (The Atlantic)
  
  Part of that is a form of selection bias: Research that doesn't find a result often doesn't get published in the first place.
  
  But it can't help if the effect was never real in the first place because the research wasn't real.
  
  * Quotes may settle in shipping.

Tech News

• AI's bigger-is-better approach is running out of road.  (The Economist)
  
  OpenAI's GPT-3 cost nearly $5 million to train in 2020.  GPT-4 just over two years later cost more than $100 million.  Is OpenAI prepared to spend $2 billion on GPT-5?  Even if they are, is there enough high-quality data that they can spend that much with it automatically going to waste?
  
  The article suggests that AI companies will be forced to work smarter, not expensiver.  But even if they do that will mean instead of spending exponentially more money for incrementally better results, they'll need to work exponentially smarter for incrementally better results.
  
  That's an even worse tradeoff.  It's the Technological Nothingularity, where even with AI helping train new generations of AI, progress slows to a crawl indistinguishable from a dead stop, where the technology of tomorrow can be safely predicted by assuming that nothing ever changes.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT can't program in INTERCAL.  (Muppet Labs)
  
  That's okay.  Neither can anyone else.
  
  
  
• Midjourney 5.2 is here and seems to be pretty good.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It may not matter if your progress stalls, so long as you get to good before stalling it.  If you run out of fuel after arriving safely at your destination. meh, you can deal with it later.
  
  It was hard to get good results out of Midjourney 2.  It was vague not only on how many fingers people had and where they should be located, but hands and heads as well.  They latest version appears to produce much more coherent images.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 26 2023 01:33 AM (BMUHC)

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• LexisNexis is providing bulk personal records to ICE without so much as a hint of a warrant, specifically so that ICE can target people who have not actually committed any crimes.  (The Intercept)
  
  Ctrl-F precrime: No results.
  
  Ctrl-F fascism: No results.
  
  The Intercept?  More like the Internept.  Internot?  Something like that.  What good are you?

• Windows 11 is garbage.
  
  When I get back home, Tanya the Evil is getting a Windows 10 upgrade.
  
  
  
• Intel has made it official: There won't be a 14th generation desktop chip based on the Meteor Lake architecture this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There will however be a 14th generation desktop chip based on the Raptor Lake architecture, which is 13th generation, and a 14th generation laptop HX chip based on the Raptor Lake architecture, which is still 13th generation, a 1st generation laptop U/H Ultra chip based on the Meteor Lake architecture, which is 14th generation, and a 1st generation laptop U/H chip based on the Raptor Lake architecture, which as we mentioned earlier is 13th generation.
  
  All clear?
  
  Good.
  
  Don't buy anything.
  
  
  
• The 7840HS in the Beelink GTR7 makes for a potent NUC.  (Serve the Home)
  
  They tested it in light gaming such as League of Legends and logged no real improvement over the previous generation GTR6 with a 6900HX processor.
  
  Then they realised that the new model has been tested on 4k resolution instead of 1080p.
  
  
  
• Since I'm back in a big city for a few days I stopped at an electronics store to see if there exists a phone appreciably larger than my Samsung, um, A52 5G I think it is.  Not that I have 5G back home in West Wyalong* but I did in Sydney before the move.
  
  Well, I didn't; in fact I barely had any Gs at all.  I had five hypothetical Gs, but zero point one actual Gs.
  
  Anyway, no.
  
  No good small tablets either.  The sales guys - there were are group of them standing around chatting - paused when I said there were no good small tablets, and then unpaused when I added except for the iPad Mini which I don't want.
  
  I think I might have to get one, though.  I have my Samsung A7 Lite with me on this trip as well, and it's just a big bundle of meh.
  
  * May not contain any actual West Wyalong.
  
  
  
• Prism Project has announced its seventh generation of vtubers.  (Twitter)
  
  This comes a month after Gen 6, which came a month after Gen 5, which came 18 months after Gen 4, so it seems that someone at Sony finally woke up and remembered that they bought a vtuber agency a couple of years ago.  (The exact terms of the deal weren't made public, but day-to-day operations are handle by Sony now and the talents' music is released under the Sony label).
  
  The three new talents are all well-known indie vtubers, which is something Phase Connect also did with its "Phase Invaders" generations, and it's what Kawa Entertainment is all about.  Give them a home, let them keep their models and fanbases, and skim a little off the top in return for managing things like music and gameplay rights.
  
  
  
• So apart from Windows 11, Mrs Pixy, how's the new laptop?  (The HP Pavilion 14, non-Plus version.)
  
  It's okay.  The screen is definitely meh.  The CPU is significantly faster than my old laptop (six cores vs. four, so it should be), and it has 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD because such things are cheap if you can just find a laptop that is still upgradeable, which is the only reason I got this and not the much nicer but unupgradeable Plus.
  
  Keyboard I'm getting used to, but the screen is not as good as the old laptop even after the old laptop's screen went bad.  Battery life is far from spectacular as well.
  
  I brought along a little 65W GaN charger with three USB ports to keep the laptop, phone, and tablet topped up and chugging alone.  
  
  It can't do that.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 23 2023 11:38 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 23 2023 11:40 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, June 24 2023 12:32 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 24 2023 08:35 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mrs. Peel at Saturday, June 24 2023 08:46 AM (jrY13)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, June 24 2023 12:20 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, June 24 2023 01:33 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Brendan at Saturday, June 24 2023 03:00 PM (V8yYW)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 25 2023 11:39 PM (obo9H)

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• Journalists for Censorship is at it again: Spotify's podcast platform is going off the rails, except for Joe Rogan who is still drawing huge audiences and we can't stand it!!!!!  (The Verge)

  One problem is that none of these people — from former presidents to filmmakers to bestselling authors — were able to deliver sure-fire podcast hits. Even a podcast hosted by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen ended up putting people to sleep.

  This comes as a surprise?

  This cascading series of events says a lot about the unwieldy nature of Spotify’s podcast business, which is still driven mostly by the former host ofFear Factor. Not even a compilation video of Rogan saying the n-word nearly two dozen times got him kicked off the platform. It’s a lot of power for one creator to yield.

  JfC: WHY WON'T YOU CANCEL HIM?!
  Spotify: He actually makes us money.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Elemental's co-writers wanted it to open, honest, and not an actually good film like Zootopia.  (The Verge)
  
  I'm so old I remember when Pixar was a surefire hitmaker.  Now its just another third-rate cartoon studio.
  
  How did that happen?
  
  This is how:

  Honestly, what’s funny is we’re taking a breather from the strike lines to do this and a few other interviews, and we’re going back this afternoon.

  If you're a writer, you can't go on strike.  Writing is what you do.  It's in your blood.
  
  Corollary: If you can go on strike, you're not a writer, you're a janitor with a keyboard.  (No offense to janitors, but if they tried to do their jobs with a keyboard they'd be useless too.)
  
  
  
• Intel has discontinued the Arc A770 limited edition - the model with 16GB of VRAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The A750 with 8GB VRAM is nearly as fast and much cheaper, so unless you specifically wanted 16GB of RAM that's not a dealbreaker.
  
  
  
• Apple's 24-core workstation-class M2 Ultra CPU, found in the new Mac Pro (base price $7000) has shown up on the Passmark benchmark list.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's 1% faster than AMD's 7845HX, a 12-core laptop chip.
  
  The editor at Notebook Check seems to think this is a great achievement for Apple rather than an embarrassment.  I think that benchmark score is probably low, but taken at face value, AMD has six consumer-level chips faster than Apple's flagship CPU, and dozens of workstation and server parts.
  
  
  
• Feel good story of the day: Elon Musk triples down on making Twitter terrible for trans people.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Musk said that if you use the term "cis" as a slur, it will be treated as such, and your account will be suspended.
  
  They also complain about the Babylon Bee pointing out that "Rachel" Levine is a man.  The only thing missing is a reference to GamerGate and I'd have filled my Entitled Whiners bingo card.

Posted by: furball321 at Thursday, June 22 2023 07:31 PM (wHdE5)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 22 2023 09:17 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 23 2023 12:17 AM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 23 2023 04:06 AM (PiXy!)

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• A new LLM (large language model, the same sort of AI as ChatGPT) called phi-, with 1.3 billion tokens, scores over 50% on the HumanEval problem set.  (Twitter)
  
  GPT-4 scores 67% - but uses 1.7 trillion tokens.
  
  How did they achieve this miracle?  They trained phi-1 on textbooks rather than on the internet.
  
  And what does it means?  It means you can produce an AI that is smart enough to perform simple tasks and small enough to run on your laptop - and probably your phone.
  
  What else does it mean?  It means to score 85% on that test using the same approach as GPT-4 you'd need something like 2 quadrillion tokens, which would cost billions of dollars to train even if you could find that much data.  And then years to "align", that is, to get it to stop giving obviously wrong answers because you stuffed it full of nonsense.
  
  Garbage in, garbage out.
  
  phi-1 took four days to train.  (Arxiv)
  
  Also, speaking of garbage, don't use textbooks published after 2010 or so.

• Meanwhile over 100,000 ChatGPT accounts have been leaked to the Dark Web.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Probably by ChatGPT.
  
  
  
• Speaking of ChatGPT, it apparently knows 25 jokes.  (Twitter)
  
  Which admittedly is 23 more than the Babylon Bee.  (The Babylon Bee)
  
  If you ask ChatGPT to tell you a new joke, 90% of the time you will get a slightly mangled version of one of those 25.  And none of them are funny.
  
  
  
• Just days after saying that it would never remove moderators involved in the protest, Reddit has started removing moderators involved in the protest.  (The Verge)
  
  Moderators of r/midlyinteresting marked the subreddit as NSFW - which means children can't access it if they're particularly stupid, and more importantly, Reddit doesn't run ads.
  
  In a carefully-worded statement, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman-Fried said, "God damn you.  God damn you all to Hell."
  
  
  
• You can now 3D-print your own Selectric typeballs.  (GitHub)
  
  Want to type your new novel directly in Sindarin Elvish?  Now you can.
  
  
  
• Razer's new Blade 14 offers a Ryzen 7940HS, RTX 4070 graphics, user-upgradeable memory and storage, and a high-resolution 14" IPS display.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It lacks the Four Essential Keys and costs $2699.  And it weighs only two ounces less than the 16" Gigabyte Aero, which includes those keys and a second M.2 slot.