• I found a new door to not open.  Now that spring has come to New House City I opened up the sliding doors to the dining room to air the place out.  I didn't worry about the screens because there aren't many insects around yet.
  
  There are birds, however, and it wasn't ten minutes before I had a magpie as a houseguest.
  
  Turns out that magpie poop does clean out of carpet if you get to it promptly, so that could have gone worse.
  
  
  
• Don't buy a graphics card for more than $500 right now.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In fact, the article suggests, don't buy a graphics card for more than $250 right now.  Mid-range and high-end cards from Nvidia and AMD are only a couple of months away.  Low-end cards aren't expected to be replaced until later, perhaps the middle of next year, so the RX 6600 remains a solid choice if you need something right now.
  
  Otherwise hold off if you can.
  
  Which is slightly annoying if you want to build a Ryzen 7000 system because the new CPUs launch in two weeks.

• If you already did buy a graphics card for more than $500 and want to tinker with AI stable diffusion image generation programs like Img2img Stable Diffusion web UI makes that easier.  (GitHub)
  
  Written in Python it provides you with - as the name suggests - a web UI so you don't need to remember 900 arcane command line arguments.
  
  It does specifically need an Nvidia graphics card - or rather, Img2img does - but I have a couple of those sitting unused right now and might give this a try.
  
  
  
• Winamp 5.9 is out.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Because that llama's ass ain't gonna whip itself.
  
  
  
• The US Navy says all UFO videos are classified and releasing them will harm national security.  (Vice)
  
  Did the Zerg also give 10% to the big guy?
  
  
  
• Are AMD laptops really more energy efficient than Intel?  Yes.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  There are some cases where Intel does very well, but overall AMD is ahead, sometimes far ahead - particularly if you're depending on integrate graphics:

  Regarding the utlraportables, AMD pulls off another really great efficiency win. Not only is the frame rate 60% higher than the Intel-based Samsung Galaxy Book2 360, it uses 30% less power. Plus the performance is something you can really feel; 46 fps is smooth enough, but averaging up near 74 fps is quite smooth, and the dips are going to be a lot higher than Intel's, too. We're at a performance level where we'd like to play this game on the ASUS machine, whereas the Xe IGP in the Core i7-1260P powering the Samsung notebook might force us to play on lower settings to be more comfortable.

  I'm looking forward to seeing what Zen 4 and 5nm bring to laptops next year.  AMD has noted that in their new low power settings (65W) for desktop chips they are getting 75% better performance than with Zen 3, which is a huge increase for a single generation.
  
  
  
• Intel has started the first $20 billion stage of a planned $100 billion manufacturing site in Ohio.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The first two factories are expected to come on line in 2025.

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Sunday, September 11 2022 12:33 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 11 2022 02:45 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: licaki at Sunday, January 08 2023 08:33 PM (jS03d)

Posted by: licaki at Sunday, January 08 2023 08:51 PM (jS03d)

Posted by: licaki at Monday, January 09 2023 08:45 PM (pImk9)

Posted by: licaki at Saturday, January 14 2023 11:36 PM (h843u)

Posted by: at Sunday, January 15 2023 04:22 PM (SpChO)

Posted by: licaki at Wednesday, January 18 2023 12:19 AM (PUAQ3)

Posted by: at Thursday, January 26 2023 11:29 PM (qHzML)

Posted by: licaki at Tuesday, January 31 2023 07:43 PM (7pzXt)

Posted by: Fred at Monday, May 01 2023 11:02 AM (wNlmc)

Posted by: Charles Delton at Monday, June 19 2023 12:15 PM (nfw1j)

Posted by: at Saturday, July 08 2023 03:36 AM (zvTc1)

Posted by: at Saturday, July 08 2023 04:12 AM (zvTc1)

Posted by: aaaa at Thursday, September 14 2023 01:08 AM (ZyUGD)

Posted by: Anil and Vaibhav at Sunday, October 08 2023 08:30 PM (XH/KU)

Posted by: aaa at Wednesday, October 25 2023 11:57 PM (NejXs)

Posted by: aaa at Friday, October 27 2023 12:15 AM (leyup)

Posted by: World Traveler at Thursday, November 09 2023 02:53 AM (mqwQy)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The real reason Apple doesn't support standard RCS text messaging on iPhones: Because fuck you, that's why.  (The Verge)
  
  By relegating messages from other phones to third class, they can shame people with perfectly functional phones to burn money on Apple's own expensive and unrepairable toys.
  
  Which strategy, to be fair, (a) works and (b) basically paid for the massive growth of TSMC that has allowed smaller companies like AMD access to extremely advanced chipmaking facilities.

• MSI has announced the specs and pricing of its new X670 motherboards for AMD ahead of the official launch on September 27.  (Anandtech)
  
  Prices range from expensive ($290) to absurd ($1299).  If you want integrated 10Gb Ethernet you're looking at $700.
  
  There will be cheaper models showing up soon, based on the B650 chipset that supports most of the same features.
  
  
  
• The Motorola Edge 30 costs 900 Euros and has a 200 megapixel camera.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is great except that the camera sensor is too small to really take advantage of that resolution, so unless you're taking photos in broad daylight on the Moon you're really looking at 50 megapixel images.
  
  Which is still a lot, to be fair.
  
  
  
• Taichi is a new compile for Python - an interpreted language that has compilers the way some people have mice, probably freeze-dried to feed their python - that compiles not only to your CPU but to your GPU as well.  (Taichi)
  
  They compare it to PyPy, the Python compiler I use in production, and note that both are useful but have very different tradeoffs.  Taichi is more designed for writing computational kernels without having to ever leave PyCharm, delivering up to 100x performance for specific type of code, where PyPy will speed up your code by an average of 4.5x and eat memory like mice.
  
  
  
• I hate everything.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Well, maybe not everything.  The new 0.4 update to fan-made Hololive game Holocure is out now.  (Itch.io)
  
  It's fun and it's free.  Can't ask for more except maybe for it to not melt my laptop in the later stages.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 10 2022 10:07 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, September 10 2022 01:30 PM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 10 2022 05:48 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Sunday, September 11 2022 05:04 AM (r9O5h)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• When Disney was looking to buy Twitter back in 2016, they dropped the idea not because the site was awash with bots, but because the real users were assholes.  (Vox)
  
  You can totally understand a nominally family-oriented company like Disney keeping a long, long way away from Twitter.
  
  But the takeaway from this new interview with former Disney CEO Bob Iger is that the site is flooded with bots, not Twitter's official five percent fairy tale.
  
  Elon Musk took note.
  
  
  

Tech News

• HP has fixed a severe bug in the support assistant tool they install on PCs.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The Four Laws of Thermodynamics:
  
  1. You can't win.
  2. You can't break even.
  3. You can't quit the game.
  4. Support assist tools are a security nightmare.
  
  
  
• If you have a Cisco RV110W, RV130, RV130W, or RV215W unplug it now, throw it away, and buy a new router.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And not another Cisco, because those models have a critical password validation flaw and will never be patched.
  
  Cisco says you should buy a new Cisco router, which is a great idea if you're a government department or a masochist.
  
  
  
• The integrated graphics on the new Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs have been benchmarked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  While the graphics is the new RDNA 2 design, it only includes 128 shaders (two "cluster units"), where the laptop 6800U has 768 (12 CUs).
  
  Performance is...  Not as terrible as you might think, similar to Intel's integrated graphics.  It would have been nice to see 4 CUs instead of just two, since that would be enough to actually play games.
  
  But if you're just doing office work or web browsing or want to boot the system without a graphics card, more than enough.
  
  
  
• The CPU side of things has also been benchmarked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yeah, it's Geekbench, which is not great.  But for comparing two very similar CPUs it's interesting, and it shows the 8 core 7700X ahead of the previous generation 12 core 5900X on multi-threaded tests.

Midjourneying

A pretty good rendition of one of my characters, though it takes some convincing to get Midjourney to give a young character grey hair.

And another, unrelated:



It's really quite good at head-and-shoulders shots.  If they can just teach it that arms end with hands, it will be stellar.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 09 2022 12:12 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 09 2022 01:02 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Starry Knight at Friday, September 09 2022 03:50 AM (a0Eva)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 09 2022 12:08 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• How Cloudflare got KiwiFarms wrong.  (The Verge)
  
  Cloudflare got KiwiFarms wrong by caving to the fascist mob, but since The Verge is a card-carrying flag-waving member of that mob, this article is complaining that Cloudflare didn't cave sooner.
  
  The excuse given is "stochastic terrorism", a term that means someone somewhere said something I don't like.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The GPD Win 4 is a hand-held game console like the Sony Playstation Vita and Nintendo Switch.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's a bit chunkier; the Nintendo Switch weighs around 11 ounces and this is nearly 20.
  
  On the other hand, it has a keyboard - under the 6" 1920x1080 display, which slides up if you want to type rather than play games, an 8 core Ryzen 6800U CPU, up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of NVMe SSD.
  
  Don't need.  Do want.  It's twice as fast as the laptop I'm using right now.
  
  
  
• The Ryzen 4100 and 4500 are here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure exactly why, since these are older Zen 2 cores.  But the 4100 costs $99 and the 4500 costs $129, and they're not bad chips.  So I guess that's a reason.
  
  
  
• There was a 23 year old denial-of-service bug in Curl.  (Haxx.se)
  
  Sort of.  Curl is a client-side tool (and software library) for fetching content from the web, so you could only really DOS yourself.  It involved bad cookies, which are a problem.  Probably oatmeal raisin, which are just cheap counterfeit chocolate chip.
  
  
  
• Still playing with Midjourney.  Some prompts are dead ends that give horrible results after dozens of attempts.  Others work first try, like "middle-aged wizard at workbench".
  
  
  
  It's a lot better at head-and-shoulders shots than full-length.  It often loses track of the arms or hands and the results are not pretty.
  
  Pleased with this Ice Witch too:
  
  
  
  And added a couple more along that theme:
  
  
  
  
  
  It makes things easier if you expect the results to look slightly creepy.
  
  In fact, it's really good at creepy.
  
  
  
  It's keeping it from being creepy that's the challenge.
  
  
  
  But not impossible.

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, September 07 2022 10:01 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Thursday, September 08 2022 09:04 AM (nRMeC)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Thursday, September 08 2022 09:06 AM (nRMeC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• So I took a little time to play with Midjourney, one of the new AI-powered art sites.  I've been critical of AI often enough; it has little of practical use to show for decades of research apart from being able to destroy the last vestiges of privacy in an increasingly totalitarian world.
  
  But this...  This is pretty neat.
  
  
  
  
  You just describe what you want to see, and the art style you want it drawn in, and it does it.
  
  Well, most of the time there are little details that aren't quite right - it's not great at bilateral symmetry, and fairly often the results are on the wrong side of the Uncanny Valley, and while it's good on faces and clothes, including things like uniforms and armour:
  
  
  
  It has a very shaky grasp of the concept of holding something.
  
  It does well on landscapes and cities though:
  
  
  
  You can get a free trial but if you get interested you'll burn through the allowance very quickly.  Monthly plans start at $10, or $30 for unlimited use.  If you need a lot of illustrations for something but you don't need a particular scene or action precisely, it's an amazing tool.
  
  Just be prepared to occasionally see things that can't be unseen, like when it simply forgets to give someone a face.
  
  If you try to put two characters in a scene, it tends to lose its marbles.  I can see why artists are upset, but they're certainly not out of a job yet.
  
  I also wondered if it's possible to get to images of recognisably the same character, given the amount of randomness involved.  And I'll just say for now, yes.  It takes patience, but if your prompt is specific enough, it's not that hard.
  
  Update: Typed in "lexx" as the prompt, nothing else.  Got this:
  
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• QNAP.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• Email is broken.  (Carlos Fenollosa)
  
  Broken deliberately by Big Tech, so that only emails sent by (or if you're luck, via) Big Tech can reach email servers operated by Big Tech.
  
  You can receive email on your own server just fine, but sending it is another matter entirely.
  
  
  
• Cheating at chess using computer shoes.  (Incoherency)
  
  It seems like a rather roundabout approach, but if it gets results, who's to complain?  I mean, the International Chess Federation, yes, but who listens to those nerds?
  
  
  

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, September 07 2022 02:23 AM (rglbH)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The US and Japan have agreed that nuclear power is essential to reducing global warming.  (AP News)
  
  Now, set aside for the moment whether global warming is real or whether, if real, it is on balance harmful: It is absolutely true that if you want to reduce carbon outputs without destroying the global economy, you need to increase the use of nuclear power.
  
  Which is why it's so remarkable to see the head of the EPA saying this.

• Intel's next-plus-one generation Emerald Rapids server CPUs will be out late next year with up to 64 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD has 64 core CPUs now, with 96 core parts coming this year, and 128 cores early next year.
  
  The one thing Intel has in its favour is a full 512-bit implementation of AVX-512, but for typical commercial workloads - databases, web sites, business applications - AVX-512 is basically useless.
  
  
  
• Google has received DMCA takedown notices for 4 million unique domains.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Including the White House, the FBI, and the Vatican.
  
  
  
• LG is bringing NFTs to its smart TVs.  (The Verge)
  
  Ugh.
  
  They are using the Hedera blockchain, though, which is actually the least awful blockchain I've looked at if you really must distribute NFTs for some reason.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 05 2022 07:25 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: EdH at Thursday, September 08 2022 01:38 AM (eAtU4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 08 2022 02:35 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 08 2022 02:45 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 08 2022 02:45 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: EdH at Thursday, September 08 2022 10:04 AM (eAtU4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, Wednesday:

  Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. Both in the physical world and online, that is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities.

  Today, more than 20 percent of the web uses Cloudflare's security services. When considering our policies we need to be mindful of the impact we have and precedent we set for the Internet as a whole. Terminating security services for content that our team personally feels is disgusting and immoral would be the popular choice. But, in the long term, such choices make it more difficult to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices against attacks.

  Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince today:

  Yeah, forget all that.

• Shot:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Chaser:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Amazon has lost a bid to prevent workers unionising at one of its NYC warehouses.  (UPI)
  
  Good.
  
  Amazon provides a useful service - multiple useful services, though streaming anime sure isn't one of them - but by all reports treats its workers abominably.  And is woke as hell so long as it doesn't lose them money.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Amazon losing money there are zero reviews on Amazon for their billion-dollar hate letter to Tolkien.  (IndieWire)
  
  IndieWire is also woke as hell, of course, and thinks silencing viewers is a great idea.
  
  
  

Tech Video of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, September 05 2022 04:27 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: benzeen at Monday, September 05 2022 06:31 AM (Pp4BU)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 05 2022 10:35 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, September 06 2022 06:14 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, September 06 2022 08:12 AM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 06 2022 11:23 PM (BMUHC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Twitter had a new plan to fight "extremism" - then Elon Musk arrived.  (The Verge)
  
  If you're guessing that "extremism" means normal people opposing fascist lunatics and the "new plan" was more annoying popups and account bans, then you're absolutely correct.
  
  The first cool part is that Elon's bid to buy Twitter caused so much chaos internally that the plan was still-born, with management decisions delayed and many of the key censors fleeing the company for even shittier fields.
  
  The second cool part is that an upset would-be censor who tweeted their wish that current CEO Parag Agrawal and former CEO Jack Dorsey "all fall down a very long flight of stairs" was reported for threatening a co-worker and fired.

• I've ordered a Lenovo Tab M10 FHD Gen 3 as an update to my Lenovo Tab M10 FHD Gen 2.  It's about the same size and weight, and has only a minor screen upgrade, but it ships with Android 12 rather than Android 9 and has two A75 cores which blow the A53 cores on the older model out of the water.
  
  Also it was on sale and my old tablet is in a box somewhere and I can't find it.
  
  
  
• The commenters over at Ars Technica are too deranged for me to deal with today.
  
  
  
• USB 4 version 2 also does 120Gbps - in one direction.  (Angstronomics)
  
  And 40Gbps back.  This is very handy if you want to dock your laptop with an 8K 120Hz screen with integrated I/O and networking.  Not that there are a lot of such monitors available - precisely zero as at the time of writing - but since USB 4 version 2 isn't out yet either that's not a huge problem.
  
  The article also notes that although USB 4 is very new, Thunderbolt 3 (which USB 4 is based on) delivered 40Gbps speeds all the way back in 2015, so this speed increase has been a while coming.
  
  
  
• Sony's Xperia 5 IV is basically a smaller version of their Xperia 1 IV.  (Liliputing)
  
  While a 6.1" screen isn't small, the device is basically all screen, making it similar in size to 5.5" phones from three or four years ago.
  
  It also comes with a 1/8" headphone jack and a microSD slot, two endangered species in the phone space.
  
  Not cheap though at just under $1000.

Posted by: at Wednesday, January 04 2023 04:54 PM (u/he/)

Posted by: at Wednesday, January 04 2023 07:00 PM (cCDl3)

Posted by: licaki at Monday, January 09 2023 09:39 PM (pImk9)

Posted by: licaki at Wednesday, January 11 2023 09:49 PM (FAFyg)

Posted by: licaki at Wednesday, January 18 2023 08:06 PM (+w2Aq)

Posted by: licaki at Thursday, January 19 2023 08:41 PM (TWVoN)

Posted by: at Saturday, January 28 2023 06:57 PM (S5ir/)

Posted by: at Sunday, January 29 2023 06:26 PM (DOz8p)

Posted by: licaki at Tuesday, January 31 2023 08:26 PM (7pzXt)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, September 03 2022 05:21 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: licaki at Monday, January 09 2023 10:25 PM (1Wwan)

Posted by: licaki at Thursday, January 19 2023 09:32 PM (TWVoN)

Posted by: licaki at Monday, January 23 2023 09:45 PM (plYP9)

Posted by: licaki at Monday, January 23 2023 09:57 PM (plYP9)

Posted by: at Sunday, January 29 2023 06:59 PM (DOz8p)

Posted by: licaki at Tuesday, January 31 2023 09:16 PM (xjeRg)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Tree planting schemes are just creating tree cemeteries.  (Vice)
  
  Planting trees in a desert is hard.  Planting trees in England is hard to screw up, and yet that's what they're doing.
  
  But by the time the trees have all died, the people planting them have been paid and moved on to the next scheme.

• You had one job: USB 4 Version 2.0 will hit 80Gbps.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It still uses the same USB-C connector but will require an active cable (read: expensive) to hit that top speed.  Otherwise it will fall back to the current 40Gbps.
  
  But why not just call it USB 5?  Do they have some sort of PTSD related to version numbering?
  
  
  
• Flash memory prices are expected to drop sharply by the end of the year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Predictions are for a drop of up to 35% in the current quarter and an additional 20% in Q4.  Which is a lot.  Component shortages have kept prices up the last couple of years but that is coming to an end for computers, though it still applies to industrial electronics.
  
  
  
•  Micron is investing $15 billion in a new factory near Boise, Idaho.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Interesting that the article gives the expense rather than the price, since this factory will be subsidised by both the state and federal governments.
  
  
  
• The Framework laptop is now open for pre-order in Australia.  (Frame.work)
  
  Including the new 12th generation model.
  
  It's not particularly cheap and it lacks the Four Essential Keys, but on the other hand it's not glued together - all repairs can be done with the single (included) screwdriver - and that counts for a lot.
  
  Actually, since I have spare DDR4 SODIMMs and SSDs - and nothing in this laptop is soldered in place - I could just get the entry level model and upgrade it, which would cut the price nearly in half.

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 02 2022 09:43 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 04 2022 03:34 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: licaki at Monday, January 09 2023 11:19 PM (1Wwan)

Posted by: licaki at Wednesday, January 11 2023 11:10 PM (FAFyg)

Posted by: licaki at Tuesday, January 31 2023 10:05 PM (2Nb52)

Posted by: licaki at Tuesday, January 31 2023 10:19 PM (2Nb52)

Hide Comments | Add Comment