Tuesday, September 28
Way Worse Edition
Top Story
- Facebook has abandoned the idea of Instagram for Kids after everyone in the Universe, and many people from nearby universes, told them what a terrible idea it was. (Hot Hardware)
The planned app was to target children under 13. You do have to wonder where these people come from and how small their bubbles are that they even contemplated this.
They say that YouTube and TikTok have versions for children, but YouTube has - always has had - content for children, and TikTok is an internationally designated relativistic black hole targeting zone.
Tech News
- For just $3 you can strangle AMP at its source. (Apple)
This is a Safari extension for iOS that finds Google AMP links and converts them to take you to the original content instead.
- The problem with the blockchain is the blockchain. (The Block Crypto)
Oops. Accidentally spent $22 million in transaction fees to transfer $100k.
- Spider.
- The problem with North Korea is North Korea. (Bleeping Computer)
If you try to travel secretly to North Korea, people will notice and assume you are up to no good - particularly when you are up to no good.
- This is impossible. What mistake are you making? (Quanta)
The discovery of a double charm tetraquark was met with appropriate levels of skepticism, but seems to check out. Unlike those faster-than-light neutrinos that were all down to a faulty cable.
- Sydney is fully exiting lockdown December 1.
No vaccine mandates, no vaccine passports, no intrastate travel restrictions.
The past couple of months have still been appallingly authoritarian and a huge overreaction, but they at least had the sense to back off before it blew up in their faces. Assuming they actually follow through. We'll see.
Melbourne continues to spiral into the abyss.
- The FCC is setting up a $1.9 billion fund to rip Chinese spy equipment out of US communications networks. (ZDNet)
Larger telcos can't access the funds, but smaller carriers, schools, libraries, and other organisations providing internet access are eligible.
This is not the worst way to spend public funds.
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Monday, September 27
Vtubers Channeling Donald Trump Edition
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- Chipmakers to carmakers: Get out of the Stone Age. (Fortune)
Carmakers to chipmakers: Your old chips actually fucking worked. Well, not worked as such, but failed in documented ways. It takes years to validate a new design, and not taking the time to do that validation could get people killed.
- Why is Elizabeth Holmes facing criminal charges when other tech CEOs aren't? It's because she's a wxmxn, isn't it? (NPR)
Because she's a wxmxn who engaged in fraud that could have killed people, yes.
Tech News
- A review of AMD's "new" 4700S CPU. (Tom's Hardware)
This is actually a a broken PlayStation 5 chip with the graphics cores disabled. It has up to 16GB of soldered-in GDDR6 memory - much faster than DDR4 - but the PlayStation was never designed to support a separate GPU so it only has 4 lanes of PCIe 2.0, which is kind of crap.
It's an adequate desktop CPU but useless for gaming. But if the price is right and you're not planning to play games it might work fine.
- AMD hit 16% market share on server CPU sales in the last quarter. (WCCFTech)
Up from basically 0% five years ago.
- Forget machine learning, return to inverse FFT. (Revue)
A simpler approach to eliminating Moiré patterns, and one that actually works.
- A raytraced Minecraft clone running on a budget FPGA. (GitHub)
Pretty basic but kind of neat. It's a 16-bit CPU running at 32MHz, but has hardware designed to run the game's graphics and physics.
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The Age is outraged at @therealrukshan for reporting without a license.
I blocked you you IT genius. But I can still see your stupid shit in apps that don’t get access to the full API you fucking dipshit motion fuckface Fuckwit.
— Peter Wells (@peterwells) September 26, 2021
Or they've just gone completely insane. Hard to tell.Or maybe I’m just using SorosBot you fucking moron racist fuck stain embarrassment to your parents.
— Peter Wells (@peterwells) September 26, 2021
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Sunday, September 26
Pessimalism Anonymous Edition
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- The BBC is bringing back Russell T Davies to revive Doctor Who. (BBC)
Which the BBC themselves killed.
I'm cautiously pessimistic. I don't think it will be good, but I think it might at least return to being watchable.
Tech News
- Germany's attempts to balance free speech with their national pastime of stamping out all independent thought seems to be floundering. (MSN)
They are shocked that politicians are being criticised:The aim of our legislative package is to protect all those who are exposed to threats and insults on the internet
They see being rude to those who richly deserve it as a crime to be punished.
Well, I don't live in Germany, so go fuck yourselves you fascist Furbies.
- Which VPN is best for you? (ZDNet)
They give top marks to NordVPN which got hacked two years ago. (Tech Crunch)
Second on the list is ExpressVPN which their own reporting says no-one should touch with a ten-foot pole.
Number three is Surfshark which... I haven't heard anything bad about. I haven't heard much about them at all, which might be a good sign, because when things go bad in the security world that invariably makes the news. Well, the news I follow.
- Hands on with HP's new Pavilion Aero. (Thurrott.com)
I mentioned this one before; it's a 13" laptop with an AMD CPU, a 16:10 2560x1600 display, and the Four Essential Keys. Potentially the best small laptop available right now with Dell's Inspiron 14 7000 no longer available.
Even South Canada Still Has Some Freedom of Speech Video of the Day
A Wisconsin teen sued after being threatened with jail over an Instagram post - and won.
Though Joseph Conrad is a great name for a sheriff.
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Saturday, September 25
Update And/Or Smash All The Things Edition
Top Story
- Update your Chrome browser. (Bleeping Computer)
Update your Exchange server.
Update your VMWare vCenter.
Update your iOS.
Update your IOS. That's Cisco rather than Apple.
Update your SonicWall security devices. Again.
Update your, uh, European Union. Or not, that one's definitely non-critical.
Tech News
- China has banned cryptocurrencies. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, except for one, controlled by China.
Be interesting to see what happens with video card prices. Hard drive prices are on their way back down after the Chia mining crazes fizzled out, but video cards are in short supply even without the miners.
Anyway, I have an RTX 3060 now - albeit a laptop 3060 - which should do for a while.
- A teenager on TikTok invalidated the garbage research of thousands of garbage scientists. (The Verge)
How it happened is you're lazy and stupid and your research is worthless.
- Your face is not a bar code. (UCLA)
- Your butthole on the other hand... (The Guardian)
- A look at the Asus Zenbook 13. (Hot Hardware)
This one has a Ryzen 5800U, an OLED display covering 100% of DCI-P3, albeit only at 1080p, the four essential keys, two USB-C, one USB-A, HDMI, microSD... No headphone jack and soldered RAM, but oh well.
- Using Nim instead of Python for data processing. (Benjamin D Lee)
Nim is essentially a statically typed and statically compiled Python. I say essentially because the languages are just very similar, not actually compatible.
There is a Python JIT compiler - it's called PyPy and it works very well - and in this case it's already nine times faster than Python, but Nim is three times faster again.
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I mean, not relevant to this particular post, it is relevant o the world at large and the frauds in charge.
This is one of my favorite troll responses. These fake Russia stories were The Biggest Thing On Earth, for years, when the crooks behind them still hoped they'd work. Now they just want to get away clean, and people like you say, "Can't you just let it go?" https://t.co/KFvYTksorG
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) September 23, 2021
Read your own tweet: the Beacon originally funded the "research firm†that created the dossier, not the dossier itself. Timeline: Beacon drops Fusion, Perkins Coie hires Fusion, Fusion hires Steele. No one disputes this. It’s been testified to countless times. https://t.co/xDnRVXTvDgpic.twitter.com/8Z2WvQvPwp
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) September 24, 2021
Every single person who works at the media corporations that spread the CIA lie that the Biden archive was "Russian disinformation" knows they lied to protect Biden.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 24, 2021
But they also know their audience doesn't care if they get caught lying as long as it's for the right Party.
Also, this is literally the objectification of women.
Our new issue is here! On the cover—'Periods on display' and the cultural movement against menstrual shame and #PeriodPoverty.
— The Lancet (@TheLancet) September 24, 2021
Plus, @WHO air quality guidelines, low #BackPain management, community-acquired bacterial #meningitis, and more. Read: https://t.co/eP1Lx7D116pic.twitter.com/DchfiHnYEs
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Yeah, we're back.
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Friday, September 24
Circling The Drain Edition
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- I got to load 1595 web pages last night and manually click a button on each because a certain company's API no longer works.
- Meanwhile not only is Melbourne sending the stormtroopers after anyone in a high-vis jacket, they are sending the brownshirts after Twitch livestreams of said stormtroopers to prevent the government propaganda efforts being punctured.
Time for an intervention, if not a visitation.
- Facebook allegedly volunteered to pay a $5 billion FTC fine as a payoff to keep the agency quiet. (Ars Technica)
A shareholder lawsuit says that the maximum fine was a little over $100 million - which would put a dent in your pocketbook or mine but would be insignificant to Big Tech, and Facebook accepted a much larger fine just to hush it all up.
Seems plausible. They suck.
Tech News
- What is the point of a 200MP camera sensor when the red pixels are smaller than the wavelength of red light? Not much. (AnandTech)
The physics are a bit more complicated than that, and the layout means that you can easily get 50MP or 12.5MP images out of it, but 200MP isn't really going to work even for a sensor that is quite large for a phone camera.
- The EU is pushing the enforce USB-C as a standard phone connector. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, it's better than mini-USB, which was large and clunky, or micro-USB, which was fragile and clunky.
At the high end the list of features a USB-C port might support is incomprehensibly complicated, but if you just want 10W or 20W of power and USB 2.0 data rates you shouldn't have any problems.
- There's another three vulnerabilities in iOS. (Habr)
Data at risk includes:
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medical information (heart rate, count of detected atrial fibrillation and irregular heart rhythm events)
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menstrual cycle length, biological sex and age, whether user is logging sexual activity, cervical mucus quality, etc.
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- Minecraft Dungeons is now on Steam. (Thurrott.com)
Unfortunately it doesn't involve mining or crafting, it's just a blocky version of Diablo.
- Twitter is adding Bitcoin tipping to its authoritarian digital hellscape. (Bloomberg)
There is nothing on Twitter that is worth a Bitcoin transaction fee, much less the tip. Unless they let you bid to have other people's accounts suspended. They could make billions that way.
- California just signed their Fuck you Amazon bill into law. (The Verge)
It targets Amazon's abusive working conditions and obsessive control. Very much a let's you and him fight situation.
- Now that I have a new computer - still in its box, but I have it - the monitor I wanted is out of stock again. The LG 27UP850-W, which is a 27" 4K model with USB-C input for my laptop, DisplayPort, HDMI, a 95% DCI-P3 colour gamut, HDR, speakers, a USB hub, Freesync, and a tilt/pivot/height adjustable stand without being horribly overpriced.
Just can't actually get it.
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Sydney
We're still under lockdown - likely for another three to four weeks - and pubs are closed. But you're allowed to get together in small groups outdoors since there's much less spread.
So the government did something sensible and lifted alcohol bans in a lot of inner-city parks.
Melbourne
Police are scouring a park - including air support - after a report that two people were spotted wearing high-visibility safety vests.
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