• Artificial Defamation: How ChatGPT libeled law professor Jonathan Turley.  (Jonathan Turley)
  
  Libeling lawyers is not notably a successful business model.
  
  
  
• Libeling lawyers and then citing imaginary articles from real newspapers is not an improvement.  (Washington Post)
  
  This time not just from ChatGPT but from Microsoft's ChatGPT-infused version of its Bing search engine.
  
  
  
• So naturally Google is all-in on further destroying its own search in the same way.  (WSJ)
  
  Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.

• AMD's new Ryzen 7800X3D not only outperforms Intel's 13900K in gaming, it does so at about one third the power consumption.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  The 7800X3D averages 49W in gaming benchmarks; the 13900K averages 143W.
  
  And the AMD chip is cheaper.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the 7950X3D and 7900X3D have received price cuts.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 7950X3D is now $599, matching the regular 7950X, while the 7900X3D is $549 and at that price dead in the water.
  
  If you care mostly about games, get a 7800X3D.
  
  If you care about heavy productivity tasks, get the 7950X.
  
  If you want a powerful but cool and quiet workstation, get the 7900.
  
  And if you have one computer for work and games, maybe consider the 7950X3D.
  
  The low-end chips - the 7600 and 7700 - are also quite good, now that cheaper motherboards are coming out.
  
  
  
• Jim Keller, who led the original Ryzen design effort for AMD and now heads design of a new RISC chip at startup Tenstorrent, estimates that next year's Zen 5 chips from AMD will be 30% faster than Zen 4.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Single-threaded.
  
  That's a lot for a single generation.
  
  Not clear exactly how much information Keller has access to, but he's one of the leaders in the field so he might have a good idea.
  
  
  
• The Beelink EQ12 is a mini PC - a NUC - with an Intel N100 CPU.  (Liliputing)
  
  The N series chips have only the low-power E cores from Alder Lake.  But that lets us clearly see exactly how fast those E cores are, and the answer is fast enough.  Single-threaded it's as fast as the Ryzen 1700 I was using up until this time last year.
  
  On the other hand it's only available with 16GB of RAM.  On the third hand it has a DIMM slot so you can upgrade that to at least 32GB.  On the fourth hand it costs just $259 including 16GB RAM, a 500GB SSD, and allegedly Windows 11 Pro.
  
  On the fifth hand it's a lot slower than a 13900K.  On the sixth hand, it uses just 6W of power.
  
  
  
• Which used to be a lot, but that was long ago and in another country.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 08 2023 11:16 AM (obo9H)

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• AMD's 7800X3D is here and it's the fastest gaming CPU around. (AnandTech)
  
  Faster - and this is a little awkward, to be honest - than AMD's more expensive 7900X3D and 7950X3D.
  
  Though to be clear, that's just for games.  If you run 3D rendering or video processing or run parallel compiles on large software projects the higher-end CPUs will win, but for games the 7800X3D is the bees knees.
  
  And while it outruns Intel's 13900K, it uses less power than the 13600K, two notches down the product stack, to do so.
  
  I'm still inclined towards the 7900 (non-X) which is the most efficient of the high-end CPUs available, but the 7800X3D is also tempting.
  
  No scores on CPUBenchmark.net as yet, but it's probably very close to the 7700X.

• Bob Lee, creator of Cash App, former CTO of payment platform Square, and SpaceX investor (among other minor startups), was stabbed to death in a fancy neighbourhood in Nancy Pelosi's district of San Francisco. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Following the news, there was an outpouring of grief in the tech community, but they don't seem to have quite figured out that they are the ones destroying the city.
  
  
  
  
  
• Western Digital got hacked. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The company's cloud-based services are offline, but the 32 aging 3TB drives I have in my second-hand Synology boxes keep chugging away. Well, mostly. I've had to replace a few.
  
  
  
• If you have a Nexx internet-enabled garage door opener, well, first, why, and second, unplug that thing now. (Ars Technica)
  
  Anyone, anywhere in the world, can find it and open the door.
  
  
  

• The music mafia has won a court order in Germany to take down the website of Youtube-dl.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Which is Pyrrhic at best, because Youtube-dl is open source software and hosted on GitHub, which got so annoyed at the baseless takedown demands that it created a legal defense fund for open source projects.
  
  They've taken down what the developers described as a business card, rather than the business.

• We all know about QNAP NASes, but what about their switches?  (Serve the Home)
  
  Cheap and good.  In fact, cheaper than anything better and better than anything cheaper.  Which is a good place to be.
  
  
  
• Cyberpunk 2077 has a new graphics mode delivering improved visual effects.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And a frame rate of 16 fps on a $1600 RTX 4090.
  
  
  
• If you've left your secret decoder ring at home, look for the orange sticker.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ryzen 7000 laptop chips are a mix of Zen 4, Zen 3, and Zen 2 cores, which is utter dogshit.  You can tell by the part number - the third digit is the core generation - but you shouldn't have to.
  
  Thankfully AMD is putting orange stickers on the Zen 4 models to replace to older silver / gray stickers.
  
  
  

• Don't use ChatGPT.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Samsung engineers' use of ChatGPT has led to three leaks of confidential information in less than three weeks.
  
  ChatGPT isn't designed for privacy.  It's not designed to give you correct answers.  It's designed to pretend to be helpful while it empties your pockets.
  
  
  
• Don't let your friends use ChatGPT.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Content warning: Naked Furby.
  
  Now that's just horrifying.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Don't announce products on April 1.  (Liliputing)
  
  Or indeed on March 31 or April 2.
  
  Asus' ROG Ally handheld gaming console is apparently real.  It's similar to the Steam Deck but more powerful, with a Zen 4 CPU and RDNA 3 graphics.
  
  Price and availability TBA.
  
  
  
• Don't buy a graphics card before the RTX 4070 comes out.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Looks like this might hit the sweet spot.  Depends on pricing though.
  
  
  
• Don't bother arguing with Europe.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Time to null-route the entire continent.
  
  
  
• Dontge.  (MSN)
  
  Twitter's blue bird thingy has been replaced today with the famous image of Kabosu, the shiba inu who gave rises to a trillion internet memes and the DogeCoin internet currency.
  
  Because, apparently.  Just because.
  
  
  
• Post, a "Twitter alternative" where traditional publishers have complete control and you the user can basically just get fucked has launched a public beta.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Bankruptcy filing in 3... 2...

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 04 2023 09:22 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, April 05 2023 09:24 AM (BzEjn)

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• Don't use ChatGPT.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Samsung engineers using ChatGPT has led to three leaks of confidential information in less than three weeks.
  
  ChatGPT isn't designed for privacy.  It's not designed to give you correct answers.  It's designed to pretend the be helpful while it empties your pockets.
  
  
  
• Don't let your friends use ChatGPT.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Content warning: Naked Furby.
  
  Now that's just horrifying.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Don't announce products on April 1.  (Liliputing)
  
  Or indeed on March 31 or April 2.
  
  Asus' ROG Ally handheld gaming console is apparently real.  It's similar to the Steam Deck but more powerful, with a Zen 4 CPU and RDNA 3 graphics.
  
  Price and availability TBA.
  
  
  
• Don't buy a graphics card before the RTX 4070 comes out.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Looks like this might hit the sweet spot.  Depends on pricing though.
  
  
  
• Don't bother arguing with Europe.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Time to null-route the entire continent.
  
  
  
• Dontge.  (MSN)
  
  Twitter's blue bird thingy has been replaced today with the famous image of Kabosu, the shiba inu who gave rises to a trillion internet memes and the DogeCoin internet currency.
  
  Because, apparently.  Just because.
  
  
  
• Post, a "Twitter alternative" where traditional publishers have complete control and you the user can basically just get fucked has launched a public beta.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Bankruptcy filing in 3... 2...

• Remembering Gordon Moore and the iAPX432 debacle.  (The Chip Letter)
  
  Intel's planned followup to the wildly successful 8080 was not the 8086 or even the Z80-like 8085, but the iAPX432, an object oriented mainframe-on-a-chip (well, mainframe-on-a-board since it was a multiple chip implementation) that actually eventually worked but was so slow that nobody ever used it for anything.
  
  It took a diametrically opposite approach to RISC: Instead of relying on clever compilers to make simple hardware work, it tried to bring the hardware up to the level of advanced programming languages like Ada.  
  
  In 1975.
  
  It was 30 times as complicated as the 8080 but worse by almost every measure, and was completely abandoned.
  
  The only other company I know of that has attempted this is hi-fi maker Linn, whose Rekursiv CPU suffered a similar fate when it turned out that commodity Sun 3 workstations ran the same code cheaper and faster.

• AMD's 7800X3D is the new AMD 5800X3D.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That is, not necessarily the fastest gaming CPU in every single case, but mostly faster than more expensive chips that use much more power.
  
  It's priced the same as the 7900X which is about 50% faster for many non-gaming workloads, so if you only spend part of your time gaming it might not be the best choice.
  
  It does avoid the issue with the 7900X3D and 7950X3D which have two slightly different CPU chiplets, because it only has one CPU chiplet.
  
  
  
• The RTX 4070 might be a good graphics card.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Due this month (probably) for around $600 (we think), it should use the same power as the 3060 (more or less) but deliver the performance of the 3080 (ish).
  
  It will (likely) come with 12GB of VRAM, which is the minimum you should buy these days.  The 3060 Ti, 3070, and 3070 Ti all have 8GB of RAM, and are starting to suffer on some new releases.
  
  The Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 both have 16GB of RAM, most of which can be used for graphics, so titles designed for consoles can play poorly on even some fairly recent graphics cards.
  
  The 3060, curiously enough, has 12GB of RAM and sometimes runs better than more expensive cards with less RAM.
  
  
  
• The Framework laptop is very exciting and I'd love to buy one but I'm sticking with my MacBook Air because I have the intelligence of a potato and am happy paying 16x the market price for storage in laptop that can never be upgraded or repaired.  (The Verge)
  
  Ijits gonna ij.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 04 2023 12:40 AM (LADmw)

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• If you're looking for a big and decently fast SSD with no major flaws for under $200, you're in luck.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  TeamGroup's MP34 is currently on sale at Amazon for $199.  For the 4TB model.
  
  It's not a new drive - this range first appeared in 2019 - and it's not PCIe 5 or even PCIe 4.  It "only" delivers read speeds of 3.5GB per second.
  
  But it's also not QLC - it's TLC, so generally faster and with a longer lifespan - and it's not DRAMless - it has a proper DRAM cache on board.
  
  At launch the 1TB model cost $160 so prices have come down a lot in the past four years.
  
  The Crucial P3 also offers 4TB for $199 right now, but that is QLC and DRAMless, so the only thing it has going for it is the reputation of the manufacturer: Crucial is the consumer brand of Micron, one of the biggest makers of flash and DRAM chips in the world.
  
  As a secondary drive either one should be fine, but the MP34 should also deliver the goods as a primary drive if you don't need bleeding edge performance.
  
  A year ago 4TB drives like these would have set you back at least $400 even on sale.  These are now cheaper than SATA SSDs, and five or six times faster.

• Meanwhile in Flashland Kioxia (formerly Toshiba's flash memory division) and Western Digital have announced 218 layer 3.2GHz 1Tb TLC flash chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  That means that a cheaper 4 channel controller on a PCIe 5 SSD will be able to hit 12.8GBps - or for PCIe 3 you'd only need one channel to basically max up the bus.
  
  This is particularly good for smaller drives.  Apple customers buying recent 256GB laptops have noticed that the performance has been cut in half over the previous year's model.  Of course Apple massively overcharges for storage and you can never, ever upgrade so you'd have to be an idiot to buy a 256GB Apple laptop anyway.
  
  They have other nasty habits that make it questionable buying any of their products at all.  More on that below. 
  
  
  
• Don't buy one of AMD's new budget A620 motherboards if you want to run an X or X3D CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It should at least run, but it will run at 65W economy mode, turning (for example) a 7900X into a 7900, and a 7900X3D into, um, a 7900X3D running at 65W because there isn't a specific model like that.  
  
  This doesn't actually lose you much performance though.  The 65W 7900 is only 6% slower than the 170W 7900X.
  
  Which makes you wonder why they bothered to go to 170W in the first place.
  
  
  
• AMD and JEDEC are working on DDR5-17600 memory for servers.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This uses a trick that basically puts two memory modules into one slot and interleaves the data from the two sets of chips, running at double the native rate.
  
  In the six years since Epyc CPUs first appeared they've jumped from four memory channels to eight to twelve, and there's just no room in servers for them to get much bigger. 
  
  So the solution is to make the memory faster, only that takes too long.
  
  So the solution to that solution is to basically RAID-0 the memory chips.
  
  
  
• SpaceX is preparing for a full test launch of Starship, likely this month.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Despite it being Ars the comments are mostly sane.  One comment praising Elon Musk got downvoted to oblivion, but so did one comment denigrating him.
  
  
  
• And it's going to the Moon.  Not this month, though.  In a couple of years.  (Space News)
  
  Carrying a privately developed lunar rover.
  
  
  
• The scammer who got Instagram "influencers" account's banned and then charged them to help get them reinstated may have been found.  (ProPublica)
  
  Of course this scam was only possible in the first place because Instagram is run by evil shitheads.
  
  Instagram declined to comment.  Evil, not stupid.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 03 2023 01:38 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, April 03 2023 10:40 AM (2tHvf)

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• Twitter open-sourced its recommendation algorithm, as it said it was going to do.  (Twitter)
  
  I believe it was already leaked by a disgruntled former employee - pretty much all Twitter's former employees fit that category because they're communists - so nothing has really change except that it's official now.
  
  Reportedly this uses something on the order of a trillion CPU seconds per day - five billion iterations, each running across multiple CPU cores.  That would require twelve million cores, at a minimum, or 62,500 dual 96-core Epyc Genoa servers.  Call it 1500 racks stuffed full of the latest server equipment.
  
  The results speak for themselves though: Everybody turns it off and goes straight to the chronological feed because it's full of crap.

• ChatGPT has found a useful purpose: Hunting for security vulnerabilities in code libraries.  (The Register)
  
  I've mentioned before that ChatGPT is a pure language model, and doesn't actually understand anything.  But computer programs are pure language - everything about them is defined in terms of language, with no outside knowledge required.  This is exactly what ChatGPT can do, and it turns out that it does it pretty well.
  
  Given the state of public code libraries it's like dynamiting fish in a barrel, but it actually reports on the specific problems rather than marking everything on NPM as SEO spam.
  
  Even though it is.
  
  
  
• Europol is dumb.  (The Register)
  
  I swear I could hear my brain cells ditching work and getting drunk when I tried to read that article.
  
  
  
• Italy too.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Dumb.
  
  
  
• The 2023 Chuwi Corebook X has the Four Essential Keys.  (Liliputing)
  
  And a 12th generation U-series CPU (that's last year's model, but last year's Corebook X had a 2020 CPU, so it's progress), a very nice 14" 2160x1440 screen, and up to 16GB of RAM though it's soldered in place and the 16GB model is out of stock.
  
  I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone actually buying it, but if they can put the Four Essential Keys in place on a small notebook why do the major manufacturers have so much trouble with it?
  
  
  
• AMD's low-end A620 motherboards are here for less horribly expensive systems.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They still require more expensive DDR5 RAM, but that cost is going down - it's about 50% more than DDR4 now, rather than 100% - and it does offer better performance.  Sometimes.
  
  
  
• The toy business is surprisingly complex when your CEO is a moron and your executives actively hate their customers.  (The Verge)
  
  Brain cells getting drunk again.  It's about Hasbro, who have systematically destroyed their two money-makers, Money the Gathering and Dingbats & Deviants.
  
  
  
• AI ethicists - some of the most useless people on the face of the Earth - have fired back at that preposterous open letter demanding a six-month pause on AI research saying that yes, AI will kill us all, probably tomorrow if it can fit that into its busy schedule, but research must continue because otherwise the AI ethicists won't get paid.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Microsoft to its credit recently fired all its AI ethicists.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, April 01 2023 11:29 PM (r9O5h)

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• Twitter has announced its new API plans for developers.  (Twitter)
  
  They're shit.  Just completely useless.
  
  For $100 per month - that's the hobbyist plan - you get 10,000 GET requests per month and 50,000 POSTs.
  
  Which is already terrible, but in fact even that is a lie.  They're counting individual tweets, not requests, and you can fetch 200 tweets with one GET.
  
  So that's 50 requests per month.  For $100.
  
  Elon Musk is somehow recreating the market opportunity that should have closed when he rescued Twitter from the commies.
  
  
  
• Twitter is publishing The Algorithm today.  (Twitter)
  
  Whatever that means.  We'll see.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Also shit is this Epyc Genoa motherboard from ASRock.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I looked at it and was impressed that they had managed to fit a Genoa motherboard into the microATX form factor, even if they had to cut it back to eight memory channels.
  
  It's not the microATX form factor.  It's not the anything form factor.
  
  
  
• Even more shit arrives from Asus in the form of the ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM.  (The Verge)
  
  It's an ugly, bulky, overweight tablet PC with a 48 minute battery life.
  
  Yes, minute.
  
  
  
• Tax Heaven 3000 is an anime dating sim that also does your taxes and empties your bank account.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Probably.
  
  Anyway, shit.
  
  
  
• Half of all new NPM packages are SEO viruses.  (Sandworm)
  
  The other half are other kinds of virus.
  
  NPM is, you guessed it, shit.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 01 2023 12:06 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 01 2023 12:08 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 01 2023 05:58 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, April 01 2023 11:54 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Berto Dalisay at Thursday, May 30 2024 07:55 AM (8MGMD)

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• US government efforts to ban communist spy and propaganda application TikTok have been stalled by...  Senator Rand Paul.  (Reuters)
  
  Senator Paul is just being his usual contrarian self and there is nothing at all to worry about in the comfortingly-named RESTRICT Act.  
  
  Let's see...  First born child, uh huh.  Plagues of blood, okay.  A fire upon the deep, makes sense.  Demons from the Ninth Circle of Hell eating your liver, yep.
  
  Everything is totally above board here and there is nothing to worry about and the government is not trying to shove through an unprecedented and violently unconstitutional infringement of civil rights under the pretext of fighting those filthy commies blinkblinkblink blink-blink-blink blinkblinkblink
  
  
  

Tech News

• A full review of the new Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  With two screens, a 16 core Ryzen CPU, and an Nvidia RTX 4090, this is one of the most powerful and flexible laptops around but.
  
  But it seems that Nvidia couldn't decide who they were making this laptop for and ended up with something that won't please anybody - unless it arrives as an unexpected gift.  It's by no means bad; it's just not focused.
  
  Creators don't need a 240Hz display or an RTX 4090, they'd be better off with a cheaper (quieter, cooler) GPU and a higher-resolution, wider-gamut display.  The 16" LCD panel covers only 85% of DCI-P3 - which used to be very good and again is not bad, it's just decidedly unremarkable for a high-end laptop.
  
  Gamers don't need the second screen or the cramped keyboard and small trackpad caused by its inclusion, and more conventional laptops have better cooling and run faster.
  
  If you work and play on the go and need to pick just one laptop, again, it's not a bad choice.  It's also not remotely cheap - the tested configuration cost $4000.  US, not Australian.  It's A$7000 here.
  
  
  
• Memory prices continue to fall which is great for consumers in the short term but not great for the companies that produce the chips, with Micron losing $2.3 billion for the quarter.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The last collapse of DRAM pricing left only three major producers of memory chips.
  
  
  
• Intel plans to release the successor to the lackluster Sapphire Rapids server (and workstations) CPUs by the end of this year.  (AnandTech)
  
  They should look up Osborne Effect.
  
  They really should, because Emerald Rapids - the replacement for Sapphire Rapids - will be followed by Sierra Forest in the first half of 2024, then Granite Rapids in the second half of 2024, then Clearwater Forest in 2025.
  
  It seems simpler to just buy AMD.
  
  
  
• 1100 virtue-signaling nitwits signed on to an open letter calling for a six month moratorium on AI research, pointing to the existential threat posed by crappy chatbots.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Yeah, right.
  
  
  
• Stable Diffusion will kill all life on Earth by lunchtime Wednesday if we don't act NOW!!!!!  (Time)
  
  Just in case you thought the wankers from the previous article were insufficiently hysterical.
  
  
  

Louis Rossman Ranting About That RESTRICT Act Video of the Day