• Telescreens: Not just behind the painting anymore.  (Forbes)
  
  What do you get when you deploy vast networks of traffic cameras and feed them all into AI systems to track, well, everything?
  
  One arrest and the eradication of privacy and Fourth Amendment rights.
  
  Welcome to the goldfish bowl.

• Solar panels built over irrigation canals could, like, do things.  (AP)
  
  They would reduce evaporation and generate electricity, so it's a twofer.  But the correction at the end of the article is a doozy:

  This story was first published on July 20, 2023 and was updated on July 21, 2023 to correct the erroneous statement that panels over California’s canals could provide 13 gigawatts of power, enough to supply the city of Los Angeles from January through October. The proper term of measurement would have been gigawatt-hours rather than gigawatts, but additionally, researchers now say the total amount of energy that would be generated has not yet been scientifically estimated.

  So if the corrected number is correct, it could power the city of Los Angeles for an hour each year.
  
  
  
• If you don't sign in to your Ubisoft account regularly, they will protect your privacy by deleting your account, and also your games.  (PC Gamer)
  
  Trying to win that coveted Worst Company in the World title away from EA?
  
  
  
• Testing seven M.2 2230 SSDs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I have two laptops with 2230-size slots (in addition to 2280 slots).  Recent Microsoft Surface tablets have 2230 storage, and so do some portable devices like the Steam Deck.
  
  This review doesn't run the full suite of tests you usually see; just game loading times and basic read benchmarks, but all of the drives manage rates over 1.5GB per second, which is a lot for something the size of a postage stamp.
  
  
  
• AMD's Ryzen 7500F is a new 6 core model without integrated graphics.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At $179 vs. $229 for the 7600 with integrated graphics, and 5.0GHz vs. 5.1GHz, it makes sense for a budget gaming build where you wouldn't use the integrated graphics anyway.
  
  Rumours are that Intel's upcoming 14100 could also be a six-core part (the 13100 has four cores) so that might be an even better budget part, but likely won't show up until January.

"What about Second Kronii?"
"I don't think he knows about Second Kronii, Pippa."

The highly anticipated announcement of Hololive English Generation 3 has just been, uh, announced.  Launch video Wednesday, debuts probably a couple of days later.

With Hololive Council - Generation 2 - they left a longer gap between the launch and the debuts, and YouTube and Twitter took the opportunity to suspend all their accounts, some multiple times.  Hololive hasn't made that mistake again.

And yes, Amelia was just on holiday.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 25 2023 02:11 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, July 25 2023 10:01 AM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 25 2023 11:17 PM (PiXy!)

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Hololive EN Gen 3 reveal in two days.

Posted by: Kuldeep at Monday, July 01 2024 05:28 PM (bn9vT)

Posted by: Kuldeep at Monday, July 01 2024 05:30 PM (bn9vT)

Posted by: John at Thursday, June 19 2025 01:09 AM (IlRtG)

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• Gabe Bankman-Fried, brother of failed Ponzi schemer Sam, tried to buy the nation of Nauru as a prepper camp.  (CNBC)
  
  "Nauru is not for sale", said Nauru, "at least, not at that price."
  
  (Nauru was briefly prosperous in the 70s and 80s thanks to phosphate mining by British and Australian companies, but the island is only eight square miles and the mining did a lot of damage.  At one point Australia offered the much larger Curtis Island as compensation, but the deal would have made them Australian citizens and they declined.)
  
  
  

Tech News

• The 16GB model of Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti is here.  Don't buy it.  (Extreme Tech)
  
  It averages 3% faster than the 8GB model but is 25% more expensive.  Having 16GB of RAM means it will last a lot longer - current generation consoles also have 16GB of RAM so games are written with that in mind, and only having 8GB is already a problem.
  
  But the retail price overlaps that of the much better RTX 4070, which is also overpriced and underpowered but still a clear winner over the 4060 Ti.
  
  
  
• If you want to spend just a little bit of money upgrading a PC, the 1TB Intel 670p is now $36.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a QLC drive but has a DRAM cache on board, so it's fine for typical desktop use.
  
  It cost $154 when it first appeared in 2021.
  
  
  
• Hundreds of drones gracefully landed in Melbourne's Yarra River when a light show for a women's football game didn't go entirely as planned.  (ABC)
  
  And, this being the Yarra River, immediately fossilised.
  
  
  
• Which would win, Apple's M2 CPU as found in the MacBook Air, or AMD's Z1 Extreme, aimed at low-power portable gaming devices.  (Phoronix)
  
  The tests are run under Linux, and Linux is terrible on current Mac hardware, but these are pure CPU tests and it's shouldn't matter that much.
  
  That said, the AMD chip clobbers the Apple hardware.
  
  
  
• Now there are 17 Phase Connect plushies I need to buy.  Pippa is the only one I watch routinely, but she's become one of my favourite vtubers as she's carved out her niche.  Tenma and Panko are fun too, and I've watched Lumi since she was with CyberLive.
  
  Still, kind of expensive, particularly since there are six Hololive plushies out as well, including Sana.
  
  
  

• Instagram's Twitter rival Threads definitely totally isn't dead, yet.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is a response to a Wall Street Journal article reporting that daily user logins are down by 70% and the duration of those logins is also down by 75%, so total user activity is down by more than 90%.
  
  Which is not the trend you want to see on your brand new platform.
  
  I pointed out previously when Threads crossed the 100 million user mark that the platform had fewer than 100 million posts total, so most of those users weren't doing anything at all.  Twitter's userbase averages 2 to 3 posts per day - and that's after 17 years, when the shine of a new platform has definitely worn off.
  
  
  

Tech News

• If you ask the new AI-powered search engines - Bing with ChatGPT and Google with it's home-grown Bard - for buying recommendations for computer hardware, they will point you to products that don't exist, and so does this article.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It mentions AMD's 7950 XTX, which is not something you can buy anywhere.
  
  
  
• AMD's Threadripper Pro 7985WX is also not something you can buy, but someone out there has one because it's showing up in benchmark data.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Zen 4 Threadripper and Threadripper Pro chips are expected to be available this quarter.  There were never any Zen 3 regular Threadrippers, just the more expensive Threadripper Pro models.
  
  
  
• What is Reddit CEO Steve Huffman-Fried doing?  (The Verge)
  
  Making friends and influencing people. 
  
  Just like Hitler.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 23 2023 12:20 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 23 2023 01:34 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 23 2023 01:39 AM (BMUHC)

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• AI generated clickbait will lead to the demise of search and web publishing/  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is so obvious that you have to wonder why anyone does it.
  
  
  
• We tried using OpenAI to generate "marketing strategies" and it worked.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oh.  That's why.

• Alleged pricing for AMD's Radeon 7700 and 7800 has leaked.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The rumour puts the 7700 at $450 and the 7800 at $550, which is probably true because both prices are $50 too high.
  
  At $400 the 7700 would compete directly against Nvidia's 8GB RTX 4060 Ti and crush it, and at $500 the 7800 would face up against the 16GB 4060 Ti model and make mincemeat out of it.
  
  It was AMD's fight to lose and they did.
  
  
  
• Solidigm has announced 60TB QLC SSDs for the datacenter.  (AnandTech)
  
  Prices are not mentioned in the article, but one of the comments has the details: You can expect this to be around $4000.  Which is a lot of money, but only 20% more per TB than the list price of the 4TB Team MP34.
  
  If you need over a petabyte of fast storage in a 2U server, it's now easy.
  
  
  
• At the other end of the scale you can get a 2TB WD SN850X at Best Buy for $99.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a good drive and that's a great price.  If you need 2TB of storage, no reason to wait.  Prices will probably continue to trend downwards, but when it's already under $100 there's only so much further it can go.
  
  
  
• Apple is threatening to remove online services from the UK if planned surveillance legislation passes.  (BBC News)
  
  This isn't even a "maybe they both can lose" situation.  Apple is right; the legislation is awful.
  
  It would make it legal for British police and intelligence agencies to do everything their US equivalents currently do illegally.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 21 2023 09:30 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 21 2023 11:53 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, July 22 2023 02:02 AM (r9O5h)

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• OpenAI has not made GPT-4 dumber, says OpenAI.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  However, GPT-4's ability to figure out whether the number 17077 is prime (it is) has fallen from 97.6% in March to 2.4% in June.
  
  This highlights a couple of problems with the whole notion of GPT-4 and other Large Language Models:
  
  1. They literally know nothing.  It's all word games.  If you understand what a prime number is it might take you a few minutes to run through the possible factors on a calculator and get the right answer, or even better program a computer to do it for you.  GPT-4 is incapable of doing that.
  
  2. They literally learn nothing.  If someone keeps asking you if 17077 is prime (it is) you might want to remember the answer, maybe even write it down.  GPT-4 is incapable of doing that as well.

• Linux now accounts for nearly half the desktop Linux market.  (The Register)
  
  The other half of the desktop Linux market is owned by ChromeOS, which is also Linux but pretends not to be.
  
  
  
• Intel's N50 CPU, with two E cores, is very slow.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's it.  That's the story.
  
  
  
• A balanced article about Robert Oppenheimer.  (Science)
  
  Not quite the Fauci of the day.  He was actually a competent scientist - maybe second-tier, but the first tier was people like Einstein and Dirac and Fermi, so that is no shame.  But he was also a communist who craved the sense of power.
  
  He is not on record as having tortured dogs, which is another plus in his column.
  
  
  
• Genoa-X and Bergamo put to the test.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Genoa is AMD's current mainstream sever CPUs.  Genoa-X is the same design with extra cache dies stapled to the top to deliver up to 1152MB of cache per socket.  And Bergamo is a more compact design running at lower clock speeds but increasing core counts from 96 to 128.
  
  Interesting to see how they each fare on a long list of different tasks.  Bergamo is ideal for cloud providers like AWS, while Genoa-X runs away from the pack but only in certain very specific benchmarks.
  
  (Genoa-X is the server edition of the 7800X3D, currently the fastest gaming CPU available, but actually slower than a regular 7800X for other tasks.)
  
  
  
• Elon Musk is annoying all the right people once again by increasing Tesla's revenues by 50% year-on-year.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Margins are down due to price cuts, but the company actually is making it up on volume, with sales increasing more than enough to compensate.
  
  Tesla stock is down 5% in after-hours trading because no good quarterly report goes unpunished.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the District of Columbia has awarded a $680,000 contract to fit all its electric vehicles with pine-scented prayer beads.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Rather, they awarded the contract for a blatant free energy scam, which has significantly less utility than pine-scented prayer beads.
  
  
  
• The Cyber Trust Mark is a voluntary IoT label coming in 2024. What does it mean? Absolutely nothing.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's a voluntary label with federal government involvement, so possibly less than nothing.

That Time I Was Reincarnated As A Lime Edition

• Framework's new 16" laptop - dubbed reasonably enough the Framework Laptop 16 - is now available for pre-order.  (The Verge)
  
  If you want one you'll be waiting a while because the first five production batches sold out in the first day.
  
  It comes with a Ryzen 7840HS or 7940HS CPU, up to 64GB of DDR5 RAM (and probably 96GB, but that depends on BIOS support), up to 6TB of SSD (10TB if you install your own), and optional Radeon 7700S graphics with 8GB of VRAM.
  
  The screen is a solid all-rounder: 2560x1600, 165Hz, 100% DCI-P3 colour, and 500 nits brightness.  The CPU isn't high-end - it has eight cores while AMD now offers 16 core laptop chips - but should be plenty for most users.
  
  And the optional dedicated GPU is truly optional: It works without it, you can add it later if you want, you can remove it, and you can upgrade it later on.  There's a plan for a storage module with two more M.2 slots to go in that expansion bay if you don't need the advanced graphics.
  
  It also has six little I/O modules, supporting a choice of USB-C, USB-A, DisplayPort, HDMI, microSD, 2.5Gb Ethernet, storage modules up to 1TB, and/or a headphone jack.  Only three of the module bays support external video, so you can't put anything anywhere, but it is very flexible.
  
  The keyboard is also modular.  The default keyboard lacks the Four Essential Keys, but you can add a numeric keypad or a 24 key macropad.  Or you can get both and swap between them on a whim.  The keyboard modules are programmable and each has an embedded RP2040 - the chip in the Raspberry Pi Pico.
  
  And everything is designed to be user-replaceable eith just a screwdriver and some patience.
  
  It's not cheap, but neither is the MacBook Pro, its polar opposite in terms of serviceability.

• Logitech has acquired Loupedeck, maker of fancy control surfaces for audiovisual editing that look great but kind of suck.  (The Verge)
  
  This is probably good, because Loupedeck had great ideas but lacked the money and engineering depth to bring them fully into fruition.
  
  
  
• Intel has stopped making NUCs - now Asus will make them instead.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Asus has bought the existing designs and the rights to manufacture and sell them, plus the rights to the brand and to produce future designs.
  
  Which is good because NUCs were generally decent designs.  Not world-shattering, but not awful.
  
  
  
• The largest lithium mine in North America has been cleared to start operations in Nevada.  (NPR)
  
  This is NPR, so naturally they think this is a bad thing, and they are switching their cars to run on unicorn farts.
  
  
  
• Neopets is relaunching with $4 million in fresh funding.  (BBC)
  
  Nobody tell Pippa, she has enough obsessions already.
  
  In the scheme of things, with how much money has been flushed down the drain on much dumber ideas (Juicero burned through $120 million trying to sell a juicer that created juice from, well, juice) this seems like a 24 carat investment.
  
  
  
• No, the Radeon 7800 isn't just a 16GB Radeon 7700.  (Notebook Check)
  
  My fault, I misread the article in Tom's Hardware yesterday.  The 7800 should be a 20-25% upgrade over the 6800, and the 7700 a 20-25% upgrade over the 6700 XT.  Nothing amazing, but the only amazing cards in this generation are the RTX 4090, which is amazingly fast and amazingly expensive, and the MooreThreads MTT S80, which is amazingly awful.

• You can't run MongoDB 5.0 or later on Linux under VirtualBox on Windows 11.
  
  Which doesn't affect most people at all, but one of the reasons I wanted a laptop with 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD was so I could have a complete test environment with two virtual servers in a cluster running all my code, and we use MongoDB a lot at my day job.
  
  The reason it doesn't work is that Windows 11 is already virtualised - a lot of the new security features depend on virtualisation, and so does WSL2 if you use that.  So when you run VirtualBox you are running a virtual environment inside a virtual environment.
  
  Which with earlier versions of VirtualBox simply didn't work.  Now it works, unless you want to run specific programs - like MongoDB - that use the AVX instruction set.
  
  Why the AVX instruction set is disabled in this case I have no idea.  The VirtualBox window has a little turtle icon to indicate it's running under Microsoft's Hyper-V paravirtualisation system and thus suffering from institutionally-enforced mental retardation, but the only fix is to disable WSL2 and all the new security features.
  
  Or upgrade to Windows 11 Pro.  Or backgrade to Windows 10.
  
  Or Linux.
  
  Laptop hasn't crashed today so yesterday's incident may have been due to my messing around trying to get VirtualBox working.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new 27" 5k monitor is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It costs $1600 where Dell's 32" 6k monitor costs $2400, so while yes, it is cheaper, if you're in the market for a high-end professional monitor I'm not sure that you're going to quibble about the extra $800 for a larger, higher-resolution screen.
  
  Also the Samsung has built-in smart TV features, which many people would pay to avoid.

• Is the Radeon 7800 a 16GB Radeon 7700?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Maybe.  If so it would be no faster than the previous generation 6800, but would leave plenty of room for a faster 7800 XT model.
  
  And if the price is right - no more than $500 - it could kick Nvidia where it hurts.  Well, actually, it won't hurt at all because Nvidia is swimming in an AI startup money pool at the moment, but it would at least make a good graphics card for normal users.
  
  Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti caught a lot of flack for having just 8GB of RAM on a 128 bit bus.  The 7700 will have 12GB of RAM on a 192 bit bus, and the 7800 will have 16GB of RAM on a 256 bit bus.  So unless AMD screw up the pricing - which they probably will - they should have a much more attractive offering in the $400-$500 range.
  
  
  
• JumpCloud, an IT firm serving 200,000 orgs, says it was hacked by nation-state
  "Extremely targeted" attack involved a data injection into JumpCloud's commands framework.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This is legally-mandated security breach disclosure speak for "some idiot clicked on a link in an email".
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 18 2023 09:25 PM (obo9H)

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• New laptop crashed twice today.  Don't know why; I ran the built-in tests and they all came back good.
  
  I loaded two terabytes of stuff onto it over the weekend without a hiccup, and the core temperature seems to be hovering around 54C, which isn't much at all.  Only thing I can think of is I was using my Linux VM more, but I don't see why that would make a difference.
  
  I did uninstall McAfee, but that shouldn't make anything worse.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has now launched 1612 satellites using just two rockets.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Those are the kinds of numbers you need to achieve if you're serious about taking over the global space launch market, and they is.

• Over 50% of young Danes gave streamed or downloaded content illegally.  (Torrentfreak)
  
  The other 50% have learned how to lie.
  
  
  
• The GPT Win 4 (2023) has a 6" 1080p screen, a Ryzen 7840U CPU, and up to 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD.  (Liliputing)
  
  Why can't we get regular laptops like this?  The only thing it doesn't have is a dedicated GPU, which is understandable in a 6" device but they also have a dock with a Radeon 7600M GPU if you need that.
  
  
  
• Christopher Nolan wants Oppenheimer to be a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley.  (The Verge)
  
  Don't nuke Hiroshima, check.
  
  I'll also note that President Truman thought that Oppenheimer was a jackass.
  
  
  
• Has the VIC-II chip in your faithful Commodore 64 finally fried itself after forty years?  Help may be at hand.  (GitHub)
  
  The new version drops straight into the socket previously occupied by your expired chip, but has one or two new tricks, like an 80 column mode, increasing the colours available from 16 to 262,144, supporting VGA, DVI, and HDMI output, an extra 64k of dedicated video RAM, doubling the vertical resolution for modern monitors that can't cope with ancient low-resolution signals, and a blitter.
  
  This is good to see because you can still buy 6502 CPUs.  There's a company called Rochester Electronics that has stockpiled fifteen billion old chips because there's always someone, somewhere, who needs fifty original model Z80A processors to replace failed signal controllers in a subway, because running a new controller through modern safety qualifications would cost millions of dollars and take at least a decade.
  
  But custom chips like the VIC-II were never available for Rochester to stockpile, and before long there won't be any working chips left to replace the failed ones.

Posted by: Frank at Monday, July 17 2023 07:49 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Monday, July 17 2023 11:23 PM (r9O5h)

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• The Ninth Circuit has denied the FTC's appeal after the agency was denied an injunction blocking Microsoft's acquisition of Actilizard.  (The Verge)
  
  Which is good.  I think.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Fifth Circuit has granted a temporary stay on a preliminary injunction blocking one of the Biden Administration's largest censorship and propaganda efforts.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  Not as good.

• Intel is preparing to offer 16nm FINFET production to third-party designers - as a budget node.  (AnandTech)
  
  Simple chips like microcontrollers - the RP2040 in the Raspberry Pi Pico for example - are typically built on much older processes than the latest mainstream CPUs.  While AMD's laptop chips are built on TSMC's 4nm process, the RP2040 is built on 40nm, with planar transistors rather than the more efficient FINFETs.
  
  So for that market 16nm would be a huge step forward if the price is right.
  
  
  
• If you're in Europe and want to use Instagram's Threads because, I don't know, you have multidrug-resistant neurosyphilis or something, you double can't.  (Thurrott)
  
  Threads isn't available in Europe because it breaks every EU law regarding data collection and targeted advertising, and now Facebook has blocked access via VPNs as well.
  
  
  
• Bing is being sued because its miracle AI-powered news summaries accused an Air Force veteran and rocket entrepreneur of treason.  (Reason)
  
  Turns out that Professor Jeffrey Battle of Battle Enterprises, while possibly ill-advised in representing himself in this suit, is not the same person as Jeffrey Leon Battle, who tried to enlist with the Taliban in the wake of 9/11.
  
  If Bing had merely linked to another website where this claim was made, Microsoft would be protected under DMCA Section 230.  But this is their own work.
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Samsung is launching a new range of big, expensive Android tablets.  (Liliputing)
  
  No small cheap ones.  I have the A7 Lite, and it would be perfectly fine if the screen weren't a reject from 2012.  But there is nothing better on the market right now except for Lenovo's Y700, which you can't buy.