• Geoffey Hinton, the quote godfather of AI unquote who previously boasted that his work would eradicate the need for radiologists has quit Google so that he can warn the world about the dangers of, well, Geoffrey Hinton.  (Insane)
  
  What the dangers are, he has not actually specified.  Radiologists are not notably a dying breed.
  
  
  
• What are notably a dying breed are crappy internet news sites like Waypoint.  (Culture)
  
  BuzzFeed News is dead and that actually reported stories on occasion, so it's no surprised that Waypoint, a part of the sprawling Vice clusterfuck founded on the notion that games journalists spend too much time talking about games - and are basically all fascists anyway - is shutting down in a month with all hands reported lost.
  
  And there was much rejoicing.

• What's that, Lassie?  I have two other cloud servers that I forgot about that just renewed for a year?
  
  SSDNodes.  Cheap, not top-tier performance, but actually pretty reliable.  One of them had been up for 632 days until I upgraded it to Ubuntu 22.04 just now.
  
  And when I say cheap, I mean less per year than DigitalOcean charges per month.  Which is why I didn't notice the bill right away.
  
  The one flaw is that you can't do a custom install so getting ZFS and LXD working is a bit of a pain.  Also they seem to run local storage and not redundant network storage so if your host node fails, your server goes down and so do your backups.  Hence ZFS and LXD which make it easy to take snapshot backups and ship them off site.
  
  
  
• IBM is planning to replace 30% of administrative staff with AI over the next five years.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Since at least 30% of administrative staff do absolutely nothing, this plan seems viable.
  
  
  
• If you want to fire 30% of your own administrative staff, MLC LLM, a chatbot based on Vicuna-7B-V1.1, which is in turn based on Meta's (that is, Facebook's) open-source LLaMA, is small enough to run on a phone if that phone is reasonably capable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not hosted on a server and accessed from your phone, but the entire thing running on your phone with no other resources required.
  
  Or you could just find the 30% doing nothing and fire them and call it a day.
  
  
  
• The Asus Zenbook S13 OLED 2023 is available with 32GB of RAM.  (The Verge)
  
  And it has one of those 2880x1800 OLED screens.  They're ubiquitous, but they're actually good.
  
  CPU is an i7-1355U which only has two P cores (and eight E cores), so it's kind of meh but not terrible.  No 4EK but you pays your money and you takes your chances.
  
  
  
• Beelink has two new NUCs with AMD's latest 7840HS and 7940HS CPUs.  (Liliputing)
  
  These will have some of the best CPU and graphics performance of anything this size, but the pricing - they start at $1299 without memory, storage, or an operating system - is ridiculous.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 02 2023 11:43 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 02 2023 11:51 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 03 2023 03:21 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 03 2023 06:46 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: furball321 at Wednesday, May 03 2023 01:52 PM (vVbbK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 03 2023 03:19 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: furball321 at Thursday, May 04 2023 06:16 AM (vVbbK)

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• We interviewed the quote engineer unquote Google fired for saying its AI had come to life.  (Futurism)
  
  Blake Lemoine, the "engineer" in question, was fired for violating NDA.
  
  Being a gibbering imbecile is just icing on the cake.
  
  
  
• OpenAI CTO Mira Murati on shepherding her own gibbering imbecile.  (Security Week)
  
  I think the people who really stand to lose their jobs here are the ones who write about AI, who could all be replace by a TRS-80 Model 1 Level 1.

  We’re far from the point of having a safe, reliable, aligned AGI system. Our path to getting there has a couple of important vectors. From a research standpoint, we’re trying to build systems that have a robust understanding of the world similarly to how we do as humans. Systems like GPT-3 initially were trained only on text data, but our world is not only made of text, so we have images as well and then we started introducing other modalities. The other angle has been scaling these systems to increase their generality. With GPT-4, we’re dealing with a much more capable system, specifically from the angle of reasoning about things. This capability is key. If the model is smart enough to understand an ambiguous direction or a high-level direction, then you can figure out how to make it follow this direction. But if it doesn’t even understand that high-level goal or high-level direction, it’s much harder to align it. It’s not enough to build this technology in a vacuum in a lab. We really need this contact with reality, with the real world, to see where are the weaknesses, where are the breakage points, and try to do so in a way that’s controlled and low risk and get as much feedback as possible.

  The vapidity is astonishing.

• A quick look inside the Asus Flashstor 6.  (Serve the Home)
  
  You can install the drives without even a screwdriver, and it looks like the CPU is just fast enough to handle 10Gb Ethernet rates from a RAID-5 array.  This model doesn't have 10GbE so it maxes out at about 50% CPU load.
  
  
  
• A quick look at the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023).  (Notebook Check)
  
  The is a great laptop except of course it lacks the Four Essential Keys.  I was looking at the model with 4060 graphics before settling for a much cheaper HP that had those keys.  The version reviewed here, though, has an RTX 4090 which some might consider overkill for a 14" laptop.
  
  
  
• Maybe you should store passwords in plaintext.  (Qword)
  
  I mean, no, you shouldn't, and if anyone seriously suggests that you should set them on fire, but what this article is actually discussing is the nature of incentives for technology workers, and why all large organisations suck.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Tuesday, May 02 2023 01:51 AM (UiCgU)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 02 2023 04:51 AM (BMUHC)

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• Broadcast TV here I come, right back where I started from: The future of streaming services looks an awful lot like the 1950s, except for one small difference.  (The Verge)
  
  We've seen that promise of a bright future, made it real, and killed it.

• Microsoft has been quietly - very quietly - supporting right-to-repair legislation.  (Grist)
  
  Apple is the Wicked Witch here.  Microsoft has actually made small improvements, like user-replaceable storage in many of its Surface tablets.  Apple meanwhile is at war with its own authorised repair centers, requiring them to sign NDAs forbidding them from even mentioning the existence of the NDA.
  
  
  
• AMD's Radeon 7800 graphics cards will have 16GB of RAM.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There's been a lot of fuss recently over the fact that 8GB of VRAM - as found on the previous generation's 3070 Ti - is no longer enough to run some new games at full resolution.  Performance isn't just a little bit slower; in some cases the 3070 Ti is slower than the much cheaper 3060 because that card has 12GB of VRAM.
  
  So AMD is making a fuss about its high-mid-range cards having 16GB, as much VRAM as Nvidia's 4080 at half the price.
  
  The Radeon 7700 will have 12GB of VRAM like the 6700 - the article doesn't mention this but knowing AMD's RDNA3 cache design, 48MB of cache means 12GB of VRAM.  12GB is probably fine for a low-mid-range card like this.
  
  
  

• The AOKZOE A1 Pro has AMD's latest Ryzen 7840U and up to 64GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD.  (Liliputing)
  
  That should make it close to twice as fast on the CPU side as my new laptop and more than twice as fast on the GPU side.  Memory isn't upgradeable but since the entry model has 32GB and 64GB is available as an option, that's not a problem.
  
  Confusingly, it also has a 1920x1200 8" screen covering 100% of sRGB and the other four essential keys - the A, B, X, and Y buttons from an Xbox controller.
  
  Because it's a handheld gaming device and not a tablet or a laptop.  It's like they've been reading all my complaints and did their best to produce the perfect device but spilled coffee on the plans at some point.
  
  The Asus ROG Ally has similar specs but is limited to 16GB of RAM and uses a smaller 7" 1920x1080 display.  It also nominally uses the AMD Z1 Extreme CPU, but that's just a rebranded 7840U.
  
  Same thing for the Aya Neo Air Plus, Neo 2S, Neo Geek 1S, and the forthcoming Neo Slide.
  
  The Neo Slide being a little different because it actually has a keyboard.  Would have been a very useful thing to have when I travelled more - full laptop power that fits in a coat pocket.

• Lenovo's Yoga 9i Gen 8 has an Intel 1360P, a 14" 3840x2400 OLED screen, and four non-essential keys where the Four Essential Keys should be so you can reprogram them with Power Toys to do the right thing.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  And a maximum of 16GB of soldered RAM because we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• The Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen 8 has an Intel 13700H CPU, a 14" 2880x1800 OLED screen, and two DIMM slots for up to 64GB of RAM.  (Liliputing)
  
  And is missing the Four Essential Keys BWCHNT.
  
  I've lost count of the number of pairs like this where if either one borrowed just one feature from the other it would be perfect, but literally nobody has got it right.
  
  
  
• OpenAI, creator of virtual Berkeley English lit sophomore ChatGPT, has raised $300 million on a valuation of of $27 billion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I look forward to these suckers losing all their money.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 30 2023 12:21 AM (obo9H)

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• The Asus Flashtor (not FlashStor as I had it previously) is in stock right now on Amazon's US and AU sites.  I couldn't find it before because I was spelling it wrong.*
  
  Curiously enough the Australian pricing is almost exactly at MSRP when you account for exchange rates and sales tax, while the US price is 8% higher.  Usually it's very much the other way around - Gigabyte's laptops for example cost 30% more in Australia.
  
  I want one, but I won't be able to afford to fill it with SSDs until maybe September.  I think it supports volume capacity upgrades, though, so I can start with one SSD and then add a couple more at a time.  (One reason to go for Btrfs over ZFS.)
  
  * Wait, no.  I had it right.  The listings on Amazon are wrong - and it's being sold directly by Asus.
  
  
  
• Intel is not having a good day.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sales for Q1 of 2023 were down 36% over 2022 and profits were down 133%, which is, well, bad; the company lost $2.8 billion.  Mind you, that's 30% less than Facebook's Metaverse project lost in the same period.
  
  Server chips usually save Intel when consumer sales are weak, but not this time: Consumer products were down 38%, while datacenter products were down 39%.  Mobileye was the only bright spot with sales up 16%
  
  I have no idea what Mobileye is.

• Need to connect more monitors but only have a low-profile PCIe slot free like maybe you have a Hyte Y60 with a main graphics card or a SilverStone CS01-HS case?  And you're allergic to fan noise?
  
  Matrox - yes, they're still around - has you covered.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These are low-end Intel Arc A310 and A380 cards, so don't plan on playing anything more taxing than Minecraft.  The A310 is equivalent to Intel's Xe integrated graphics with the full 96 cores, while the A380 is one step up from that with 128 cores.
  
  Since the cards have dedicated VRAM they'll likely perform a bit above expectations.  And one of the A310 cards is a 30W passively cooled model.
  
  All will run four 4K or two 8K monitors over DisplayPort.
  
  Price is not mentioned anywhere which means it will be way more expensive than you think.
  
  
  
• Colorado has signed into law a right-to-repair bill for farm equipment.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Louis Rossman has been covering this for years on YouTube.  A right-to-repair bill passed in the New York legislature but was killed by Governor Kathy Hochul, so I think this is the first major piece of such legislation to become law.
  
  
  
• Twitter competitor Bluesky is dead.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's still wriggling around but these people are fucking morons, even dumber than the ones running Twitter before Elon Musk fired them all.
  
  Nearly as dumb as the utter retards of the tech media reporting on them.  (The Verge)
  
  I'm all for competitors to Twitter but these people don't have a single functional brain cell shared among the lot of them.
  
  
  
• Clubhouse, a kind of spoken-word Twitter that was briefly pseudo-popular during the Wuhan Bat Flu Death Plague, has fired half its employees.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The total number of which reportedly never exceeded 100, so it's possible they didn't burn through all their capital and are about to die.  Just slowly fade back into obscurity.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 29 2023 12:52 AM (k3/O4)

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• Laptop is here, memory and SSD on the way.  I already have memory and an SSD, but I want to specifically try out the Team MP34 and see how it performs.
  
  
  
• Forbes "30 Under 30", the magazine's list of the most notable young tech entrepreneurs, has so far been charged (and in some cases convicted) with fraud totaling $18.5 billion dollars.  (New York Post)
  
  To be fair, Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) and Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX) account for 80% of that amount.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Amazon has shut down its Halo health product division and is laying off more staff.  (The Verge)
  
  Another sign of the Biden economic boom.
  
  
  
• Meta's - that is, Facebook's - Reality Labs division, in charge of the company's Metaverse project, lost $4 billion in the first quarter of 2023.  (CNBC)
  
  Can't really blame this one on Biden.  They didn't have a good but expensive product that people liked but are now reluctant to buy in the global recession.  The Metaverse is a bad idea, poorly executed.
  
  The only way they could make it worse is to add lootboxes full of NFTs.
  
  
  
• Don't give them ideas, Pixy.
  
  
  
• An 8" Linux tablet!  (Liliputing)
  
  With an e-ink display, albeit a colour one.  Looks pretty good as a pure reading device though.
  
  
  
• As I mentioned yesterday, between pekora and polka my containers stop starting.  I've run into a limit with the number of LXC containers on one server and don't know what it is.  The documentation is...  Lacking.
  
  I'm going to move all of these onto my laptop once the SSD and memory are installed, and I can run the containers across two Linux virtual machines if need be.  85 containers should be more than I need - but not a lot more.
  
  
  
• LG's 1kg 15" Gram Superslim is available in a 32GB model.  (Liliputing)
  
  Yay!
  
  At a price of $2000.
  
  Boo.
  
  Also it's only 1080p, where most of the other Gram models have 2560x1600 screens.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 28 2023 06:55 AM (obo9H)

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• Ordered my new laptop at 9:30 this morning.  It shipped at 1:45 this afternoon.
  
  HP has it all over Dell in this department, at least for Australia.  Dell seems to ship out of Singapore.  Takes them days to ship and then a week to arrive.
  
  
  
• The tech startup sector is fucked beyond imagining.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  On an annualised basis, successful exits for VC funds in this sector are down 97% from 2021.
  
  The article is behind a paywall but nobody really cares.

• Rapid - formerly Rapid API - which was recently valued at $1 billion, has laid off half its staff and frozen all hiring.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I took a look at their site.  I can see where they'd need 20 or 30 staff to build that system and deal with customers and payments.  
  
  They had 230.
  
  Now they have half that.
  
  They took $150 million in funding a year ago so the question is, did they correct course in time or have they burned through their case and are about to fold?
  
  
  
• Apple pays a lot of money to TSMC to get first dibs on the latest chip technology and sometimes that doesn't entirely work out.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The next generation iPhone may be in short supply because only 55% of 3nm chips coming off the production line pass testing.  That's not terrible - Samsung started 3nm production earlier and their first production runs apparently yielded something like 20% fully working chips - but throwing out half your product isn't great either.
  
  On the seventh hand, without Apple customers paying too much money for shiny gadgets TSMC wouldn't be able to churn out cheap 4/5/6/7nm chips for AMD and Nvidia.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Nvidia, nobody continues to buy the 4070.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's not that expensive, but the people for whom money is no object (or creative professionals for whom time is money) already bought a 4080 or 4090.  Customers for the 4070 are at least a bit price-sensitive and they seem to have decided to wait a bit and see what happens.
  
  Which frees up some 4nm capacity at TSMC because Nvidia seems to be cutting production rather than prices.
  
  
  
• Nine ways to shoot yourself in the foot with PostgreSQL.  (Phil Booth)
  
  I was an early user of PostgreSQL but then MySQL got good enough (mostly) and PostgreSQL got complicated (very).  I would like to dive into PostgreSQL and learn more of its tricks, and learning the bad tricks is a good start.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's revenues are up 7%.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Or, given inflation, they're stagnant.
  
  
  
• Google's revenues are up 3%.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which means they're down.
  
  
  
• Intel's PC revenues are down 53% for Q1 over the same quarter last year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I hope their server sales are better.  Their server CPUs suck compared to AMDs, but companies buy them anyway.
  
  
  
• Digital Ocean has opened a datacenter in Sydney.  Last November, apparently.
  
  Kind of handy except we already have Vultr and Binary Lane (an Aussie company) and OVH (French) and all the major players.
  
  
  
• Web spiders suck in general, and web spiders that explicitly ignore robots.txt suck twice as hard.  (Motherboard)
  
  Should call them web mosquitoes.
  
  
  
• I noticed that Amazon Australia finally has the Team MP34 4TB model at a reasonable price and I don't need to buy it from Amazon US.
  
  Except they don't.  It's a marketplace listing from Australian computer store Scorptec.  And it's cheaper on their own site.
  
  I'm planning to buy about 20 of these as I fit out all my new computers over the next year or so, so I got one to give a workout in my new laptop.
  
  There are some cheaper 4TB SSDs now but those are QLC and DRAMless which is fine for regular files but much less fine for databases and virtual servers.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme CPUs have been announced.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Z1 Extreme is the 7840U.  Literally the same chip, just marketed at handheld game consoles rather than laptops.  The Z1 is probably the 7640U or 7540U.
  
  AMD and Intel sell a lot more different chips than they actually make.  The Ryzen 7900, 7900X, and 7950X desktop CPUs and the 7945HX laptop CPU all have exactly the same silicon on them, and there are there are half a dozen other models with the same silicon but one fewer chip on board.  It costs a fortune to make a new chip, even based on an existing one, so when it is at all possibly to avoid doing so, they don't.
  
  All that said, the 7840U looks to be great.  I want that in my next laptop.  Which might be a while since I just bought one this morning.
  
  
  
• Oh, and speaking of Apple's overpriced toys, I priced a MacBook Pro with the same configuration as my new HP Pavilion 14.
  
  Almost exactly four times as much.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 27 2023 12:03 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 27 2023 04:18 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 27 2023 11:02 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 27 2023 09:34 PM (obo9H)

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• With SSD pricing in free fall - I just checked on the PNY CS2241 and the 4TB model is down by 45% since January - it is tempting to just buy a dozen of them and build a big RAID-5 array and forget about mechanical drives and their abysmal random I/O performance (one budget SSD can do as many random I/Os as two hundred mechanical drives) and their inevitable hardware failures.
  
  Except - how?  There are some expensive hardware NVMe RAID cards but they won't work in my case - literally - because my Hyte Y60 PC case only accepts one full-height card.  There are cheap half-height cards that take one or two SSDs but depend on channel bifurcation and most consumer motherboards just don't have the PCIe lanes.  And there's the SilverStone CS01-HS which tough luck I just bought the last two on the market.
  
  And then there's the Asus FlashStor 6 and 12 Pro, which are compact desktop boxes (12x8x2 inches) that take 6 and 12 M.2 SSDs respectively.  (AnandTech)
  
  The FlashStor 6 has dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports; the 12 Pro has a single 10Gb port.  Apart from that they share a 6W Intel Celeron N5105 CPU (not fast, but adequate for this kind of thing), 4GB of RAM, four USB ports, HDMI, and an S/PDIF audio output if you want to use one as a media server.
  
  Which is not a terrible idea: There are no noising spinning drives and the cooling fan is nearly silent at 18dB.
  
  These are real NASes too.  They run Btrfs where I'm a ZFS fan, but they support snapshots, SMB, NFS, iSCSI (so you can mount part of the space it as a dedicated rather than a shared disk), rsync, and a swarm of Docker apps if you're into that kind of thing.
  
  4GB of RAM will disappear fast if you're running Docker apps, but the memory is upgradeable using standard DDR4 SO-DIMMs, which I have lying around everywhere.  The specs say it goes to a maximum of 16GB, but I've seen reports that these Celeron chips work fine with 32GB.
  
  $449 for the FlashStor 6, $799 for the 12 Pro.  I'm going to get that one as soon as I can.  Even if I can't get 10Gb Ethernet running for the whole house it's small and quiet enough that it can sit in the main office rather than the computer room.
  
  Oh, and while there are no spinning drives included, either model will support up to two external expansion units with four 3.5" drives each if you need more capacity.

• If you need a tiny high-performance fanless router to complete your home network after CWWK (who?) has you covered.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The i5-1235U is more than three times the speed of the N5105 in the Asus NAS above, so it should be able to keep the packets flying through the six 2.5Gb Ethernet ports and the optional WiFi but you may have to fight with it to get your preferred operating system installed.  It comes with a preconfigured key for Windows 10/11 Pro - just download and install it and it will activate itself - but pfSense, Proxmox VE, and Ubuntu 22.04 all needed workarounds to get running.
  
  And if you hoped to run VMWare ESXi, just give up.  It doesn't work on Intel's big/little CPUs and there are no plans to fix that.
  
  Apart from all the Ethernet ports there are four USB ports and HDMI and DisplayPort, so if you want to run it as a media server....  Why?  Anyway, you can, and it has an M.2 slot and two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots for up to 64GB of RAM in case you have that lying around.
  
  
  
• If you want a 14" laptop with the Four Essential Keys in their proper location - in a column to the right of the main keyboard - reasonable CPU and graphics performance, a 1080p screen covering 100% of sRGB, and the ability to upgrade to 64GB of RAM using those DDR4 SO-DIMMs you have lying around, there is exactly one such model available: HP's Pavilion 14.
  
  Not the Pavilion Plus 14.  That has a better screen (2240x1400 or 2880x1800 options are available) but all Plus 14 models have soldered RAM.
  
  I skipped over this one not realising that it had dual SO-DIMM slots, but after checking and double-checking it really does, and the screen is far superior to options from Acer or Dell.
  
  Plus it's not at all expensive.  I'll be getting one of these.  I'm tempted to buy more than one, but since I'm planning to build some new desktop systems it wouldn't really make sense to do so.
  
  
  
• Stability AI - the people behind the open source Stable Diffusion image generation software - have launched an open source chatbot similar to ChatGPT.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Many - not all, but many - of the problems with ChatGPT are due to the biases of developers OpenAI.  As open source, you can afflict StableLM with your own preferred set of biases.
  
  
  
• Speaking of chatbots ever since Snapchat unveiled their chatbot they've been flooded with 1-star reviews.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oh no.  Anyway-
  
  
  
• Apple has won its antitrust battle with Epic Games...  Pyrrhically.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The court has ruled that Epic didn't prove that Apple was acting as a monopoly, but also that Apple couldn't forbid developers from linking to third-party payment processors to escape Apple's 30% skim.  
  
  Which was the entire reason for this fight.  Apple seems to have won the battle but lost the war, and Epic vice versa.
  
  
  
• Learn a trade.  (New Yorker)
  
  Web designers don't get called out at 4AM, but plumbing problems can't be outsourced to Bangalore.
  
  
  
• Disney is outsourcing 7000 people to /dev/null.  (The Verge)
  
  Also their dragon caught fire.  (CNN / MSN)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 25 2023 11:28 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Wednesday, April 26 2023 11:32 AM (zpcwY)

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