• After 25 years in development, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched safely and is on its way.  (CBC)
  
  The telescope is designed to work in the near-infrared.  That's not a magical spectrum, it's just hard to work with here on Earth where basically everything around it is radiating in the infrared, and worse, the atmosphere blocks most of the infrared light from space.
  
  The telescope is now heading out to its long term base of operations at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, about a million miles straight out from the Sun past the Earth.  That's a lot further away that the Hubble so there's no easy way to repair this one if it needs glasses.
  
  And yes, they did test it first.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, this being apparently the 21st century or something, work is underway to turn an old superfund site into the world's leading fusion research program.  (Boston Globe / MSN)
  
  The $2 billion project has been funded in part by Bill Gates and Google, and has been criticised by sustainable energy activists for taking attention away from more critical matters, by which they mean, themselves.  Because if fusion can be made to work - or rather, be made to work in a less dramatic fashion than what we have had for the past 70 years - then their grift train is derailed permanently.
  
  
  

• I was wondering why there were no Alder Lake motherboards which could run dual PCIe slots in a x8/x8 configuration, and then I realised that it was likely due to the cost and difficulty of running two sets of PCIe 5 signals - at 32Gbps - to those slots.
  
  Then I poked around a bit and found that there are actually plenty of such boards, but every single one of them uses DDR5 RAM, and you'd have to be daft (or spending someone else's money) to go with DDR5 right now.  Given the pricing of some of those motherboards my surmise that the lack of dual slots was due to cost is probably not wide of the mark, either.
  
  And then I realised that the reason I wanted that second slot was so I could hook up more than four monitors (I want three or four monitors, a drawing tablet that needs its own HDMI, and possibly also a TV) and the motherboard I had selected for the build itself has HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, each capable of 4K/60Hz.
  
  From the integrated graphics, yes, so no good for gaming, but just fine for a drawing tablet or watching movies.
  
  
  
• The Philadelphia 76ers just partnered with a company that "applies tech and AI to the entertainment industry".  (Defector)
  
  They apply this in rather innovative ways: The company's own CEO appears to be an AI program.  Which might be news to NASDAQ where the company's shares are listed.
  
  90% of AI is bullshit, and the other 10% is swearing because the code you've spent years working on just did something embarrassingly stupid.  Again.
  
  
  
• What real AI looks like.  (Louis Bouchard)
  
  Some examples actual research papers from the past year:
  
  - Automatic detection and quantification of floating marine macro-litter in aerial images
  - High-Resolution Photorealistic Image Translation in Real-Time: A Laplacian Pyramid Translation Network
  - The Cocktail Fork Problem: Three-Stem Audio Separation for Real-World Soundtracks
  - Deep nets: What have they ever done for vision?
  
  
  
• A Christmas miracle: It turns out that even the crazies over at Ars Technica think that slave labour camps run by communist dictators are a bad idea.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Intel sent a message to its Chinese suppliers to tell them to stop using slave labour.
  
  A day later the company apologised profusely for suggesting that companies controlled by a totalitarian state that can disappear CEOs on a whim might ever be inclined to do anything immoral.
  
  The left-wing commentariat over at Ars Technica responded - to my surprise - with entirely appropriate levels of scorn, redoubled when a genocide apologist showed up right there in the thread.
  
  
  
• The Scorptec Nuctop has a dumb name.  (Scorptec)
  
  But it also has the Four Essential Keys (since someone asked - PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End - you use those all the time as a developer), an Intel Core i7 11800H, RTX 3070 graphics, a 15.6" 165Hz QHD (2560x1440) IPS display, 32GB of RAM (upgradeable to 64GB), 1TB of NVMe SSD (specifically a Samsung 970 EVO Plus which is a very good choice, and upgradeable to as much as you can jam into two M.2 2280 slots), Thunderbolt 4, HDMI, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (10Gbps), a full size SD card slot, headphone jack, wired 2.5Gb Ethernet, and an optical/mechanical keyboard with per-key backlight control. 
  
  It has a hefty 94WHr battery and weighs a relatively svelte 1.95kg.  And runs Windows 10 Pro, where you are more likely to get landed with 11 Home on a laptop like this.
  
  I don't know who the OEM is - Scorptec is an Australian chain of computer stores (and online store) and did not make this themselves - but the specs are pretty much perfect and the design is a nice restrained magnesium alloy case in basic black.
  
  Might need to investigate this one, since I was planning to order a pile of stuff from Scorptec in the next week anyway.
  
  Update: The OEM is, um, Intel.  This appears to be their NUC X15 Laptop Kit - model LAPKC71F.
  
  I might rail against Intel's idiotic management, but there are worse companies to buy computers from. I think I might get one of these.
  
  
  
• I think I missed this at the time: There are no bandwidth charges between Vultr's cloud servers and Backblaze B2 storage.  (Backblaze)
  
  I mean, it would be nice if Vultr offered object storage in every one of their locations, but for a small company, keeping cloud servers running smoothly in 13 countries on 5 continents is already a pretty big job - particularly for prices starting at $2.50 per month.
  
  
  

July

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 26 2021 11:25 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 27 2021 03:23 AM (r9O5h)

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