Twelve years, and four psychiatrists!
Four?
I kept biting them!
Why?
They said you weren't real.
Thursday, December 04
Deplatformed and Backported Edition
Top Story
- Memory and storage company Crucial is throwing in the towel after thirty years in the business. Sort of. (Tom's Hardware)
They're not going to stop producing stuff. They're a division of Micron.
They're just going to stop producing stuff that you can buy because they can make more money out of the AI bubble.
Tech News
- It was India. (AppleInsider)
Who rusted first, that is.
India insisted that Apple pre-install its state-sponsored spyware on all new iPhones sold in the country.
Apple said not just no, but fuck no.
India said yeah, okay.
- The CEO of IBM says that spending in the AI boom is obviously unsustainable. (Tom's Hardware)
Current buildout plans would require industry profits of $800 billion per year just to make payment on the interest.
Current industry profits are less than zero. Significantly less.
- An AI tool for lawyers produced by a billion dollar company had no security. (Alex Schapiro)
As in, literally none. Anyone could access any document.
We're all going to die, aren't we?
- Microsoft is lowering its AI sales targets because nobody is buying. (Reuters) (archive site)
It's hard to sell what you can't even give away for free.
- Case in point: Programming language Zig is leaving GitHub because Microsoft's obsession with AI is tanking the site's reliability. (The Register)
Jeremy Howard, co-founder of Answer.AI and Fast.AI, said in a series of social media posts that users' claims about GitHub Actions being in a poor state of repair appear to be justified.
A fix for the bug was proposed by a user."The bug," he wrote, "was implemented in a way that, very obviously to nearly anyone at first glance, uses 100 percent CPU all the time, and will run forever unless the task happens to check the time during the correct second."
The fix was correct.
The fix was ignored, and the comment thread was closed by AI.
-
Windows 11 is barely ahead of Windows 10 in install base, despite Microsoft stabbing Windows 10 in the back, the front, the sides, and from several other directions. (The Register)
It's hard to sell what you can't even give away for free.
Anime Update
Musical Interlude
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So I finally put my Minecraft modpack up on Curseforge.
And I just tracked down the problem.
Vanilla Backport, which conveniently bundles together backports of feature releases since 1.20.1 (in this case, since it's a 1.20.1 mod), uses a library mod called Platform.
Platform, according to the load time profiler mod I'm using, takes almost twelve minutes to load.
All the other 215 mods combined? Six minutes.
That's on my older (Zen 3) laptop running in silent (low power) mode, so a good computer will handle it in half the time, but swapping that one mod out for five separate backport mods reduced the load time from just under twelve minutes to just over six.
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Wednesday, December 03
None Shall Pass Edition
Top Story
- AMD is reportedly planning price hikes to its graphics cards to cover soaring memory costs: An extra $20 for 8GB models and $40 for 16GB models. (Tom's Hardware)
Which is not all that bad.
- AMD has also - reportedly increased prices for its CPUs, which don't contain any DRAM. (Overclock3D)
To add to the mystery, while this increase is supposed to have already happened, nobody seems to know which models are affected or what the increases are. Indeed, the whole thing might just be the end of Black Friday discounts at the distributor level.
Tech News
- The Trump administration is planning to take a $150 million equity stake in startup xLight, which aims to make better EUV lasers to chip production. (WSJ) (archive site)
Current EUV fab equipment uses 13.5nm lasers. xLight is planning to bring that down to just 2nm, which is pretty inarguably an x-ray more than UV light.
This takes money from the 2022 CHIPS Act, which apparently still has $6 billion available to spend on chip fabrication facilities.
- San Francisco is suing ten food companies for producing food. (NBC)
"How very dare you?!", squeaked city attorney David Chiu.
- Bending Spoons is buying Eventbrite for $500 million. (Tech Crunch)
Bending Spoons is assembling quite the collection of has-been companies here, including Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, and AOL, which you may have heard of.
- Apple has said that it won't pre-install India's mandatory spyware on its phones. (Reuters)
I'm game. We'll see who rusts first.
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Tuesday, December 02
Be Careful Edition
Top Story
- Samsung and SK Hynix - two of the three major DRAM manufacturers - issued a big fat "nope" when asked if they were planning to increase production beyond work already in the pipeline. (WCCFTech)
Rather than rapidly expanding facilities, we will pursue a strategy of maintaining long-term profitability. We will minimize the risk of oversupply through a capital expenditure (CAPEX) strategy that balances customer demand and pricing.
Translation: All our competitors tried this and went broke in the last "boom-and-bust" cycle. We don't plan to go broke.
- Shortages are starting to hit close to home, though, with Samsung denying a large memory order from... Samsung. (WCCFTech)
Samsung's phone division ordered more than a year's supply of memory for the new Galaxy models. Samsung's memory division told them no way.
Tech News
- Did Alexander Fleming discover penicillin the way history tells it? Well... Maybe. (Asimov Press)
Attempts to recreate it exactly as Fleming described it - with the Petri dish contaminated with mold after the bacterial samples were placed - fail. But if the contamination happens before or at the same time, the results can come out pretty much as stated, under the right conditions. It's particularly temperature-dependent.
And it turns out that right when Fleming went on his week's vacation leaving his experiment unmonitored, there was a cold spell that put conditions right in the path of a happy accident.
If that is how it worked out, there was even more luck involved than we thought.
- Colleges are preparing to self-lobotomise - again. (The Atlantic) (archive site)
The Atlantic is complaining about the ill-considered use of AI in higher education, which is fair enough. They are not complaining about all the other self-inflicted metaphorical head wounds in academia, which is less fair.
- Santa Monica has told Waymo it can't recharge its self-driving taxis at night. (Inside EVs) (archive site)
It's unclear whether Waymo or its Virginia-based charging operator, Volterra, intends to comply.
Signs point to no.
- You shouldn't shard your database. (PgDog)
If someone says you should, shard them straight out the nearest window.
- Be careful what you wish for: Now I've found the Door Bypassing Summer and Autumn and Heading Straight Back into Winter.
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Monday, December 01
Leptospirosis Party Edition
Top Story
- Would you like to buy a clue... For $1 million? (AP)
There's a sculpture called Kryptos at the CIA offices in McLean, Virginia, which contains four panels of encrypted text. Three have been decrypted by puzzle-solvers, but the fourth has defied all attempts since the installation was created in 1990.
The artist, now aged 80, has auctioned off his notes and clues to the contents of that fourth panel... For close to $1 million.
Tech News
- LLVM-MOS is a fork of the LLVM compiler suite for the 6502. (LLVM-MOS)
It supports everything from the Ohio Scientific Challenger 1, which shipped in 1976, to the Commander X16, which shipped as a developer edition last year and is available for purchase right now.
- Google Antigravity just wiped my D drive. (Reddit)
Not my D drive. It's AI shit and I don't give AI shit access to anything I don't want destroyed.
- Looking at a water-cooled RISC-V AI workstation. (The Register)
It costs $12,000, but it has four AI accelerator cards each with four 800Gb Ethernet ports. So if nothing else it's an astonishingly fast router.
- The Lotus Diplomat is a double-wide Blackberry. (Notebook Check)
It has a 5" 2560x1920 screen - and a 1" secondary screen - and a QWERTY keyboard with a number row at the top and a function/punctuation row at the bottom. It's powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite and equipped with 24GB of RAM and 1.5TB of storage.
Price is not mentioned, and you might be best off not asking.
- AI is transforming spacecraft propulsion - and may lead to nuclear-powered rockets. (Fast Company) (archive site)
No it isn't, and no it won't.
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Sunday, November 30
Page Petronius Edition
Top Story
- Year of Linux on the Desktop? Part One: Does Linux actually account for 11% of desktops even in the US - and a higher number globally? (ZD Net)
Probably, yes. You get that number by adding together desktop Linux, ChromeOS (which is Linux) and "Unknown" numbers.
Globally Linux numbers are about 50% higher, and looking at US government website stats, 25% of requests come from some flavour of Linux (including Android).
- Year of Linux on the Desktop? Part Two: Google's AluminiumOS (yes, they spell it with two eyes) brings Android to the desktop. (Thurrott)
And Google has already been working to merge ChromeOS with Android. So this would bring a thoroughly-tested Linux variant with a huge collection of existing applications to the desktop, though half of those apps are Kairosoft games.
And the new Steam Cube is due to launch soon, bringing SteamOS - again, a flavour of Linux - to the desktop.
With Microsoft working tirelessly to destroy Windows, these consumer-oriented Linux versions may bring welcome relief.
Tech News
- Yes, Virginia, there are still some tech bargains: Seagate's 24TB Barracuda model is selling for just one cent per gigabyte. (Tom's Hardware)
Or $240 for the whole thing.
Well, not in Australia, where it is significantly more expensive and also completely out of stock everywhere.
With SSD prices on the rise this may be a good choice for people looking to build a high-capacity NAS.
- Speaking of SSD prices, an interesting thing is happening there. The shortage is affecting NAND flash generally. All versions, from high-reliability enterprise chips to the cheap stuff targeted at microSD cards.
Meanwhile PCIe 5 controller chips for consumer SSDs are coming down in price, meaning that the price gap between PCIe 4 and PCIe 5 drives is fast disappearing. At the start of the year it cost around 100% more for a PCIe 5 drive; now it's closer to 30%.
- People are more likely to give up their seats to pregnant women on public transport when Batman is present. (Nature)
He's not going to hurt you. He's just going to judge you.
- Why a RAM boycott isn't going to do anything. (WCCFTech)
Because 70% of RAM goes to enterprise customers and if you don't buy it, they will.
So what's the solution?
Linux. It's notably more memory efficient than Windows.
- Why Honda is suddenly launching reusable rockets. (The Verge) (archive site)
Because they don't do much if you don't launch them.
People don't often think of them that way, but Honda is a successful aerospace company.
- Someone tell Petronius the Arbiter that I've found the Door into Summer.
Now I just need to find the Door Back into Pleasant Spring Weather.
- Updated my Minecraft modpack. It's still on 1.20.1 because some key mods aren't available on anything later - Minecraft doesn't care at all about mod compatibility between versions - but I found a single mod (Vanilla Backport) that bundles together backports of all six six out of nine feature releases since then but has a weird compatibility problem with the Modernfix mod.
Dye Depot and Dye the World - which add 16 more colours to vanilla Minecraft and to 19 other mods respectively - have both been updated. And Create: Steam and Rails has a beta version with Create 6.0 compatibility. I took Create out of the modpack entirely because the update to Create 6.0 broke compatibility with a lot of other mods, and if I wanted Steam and Rails and included Create 5.0, that broke still more things. Looks like the great rift is finally healing.
And after a whole bunch of tweaks and changes and updates, it just worked. That never happens.
Tanya Interlude
Nine years after season one and seven years after the movie, anime's sweetheart is back. Tanya the Misunderstood will return for its second season next year. The original cast though not the director are also returning.
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Saturday, November 29
Post-Turkey Syndrome Edition
Top Story
- Don't worry about AI taking your job. I don't worry about AI taking your job, so why should you, asks billionaire CEO Jensen Huang of Nvidia who got rich pushing AI. (Tom's Hardware)
To be fair, he made the right call, making Nvidia the most valuable company in the world, and that is his job. However, he is pushing his staff to use more AI precisely because if it works he won't need them.
I don't believe it will work, but he has to claim to believe it, because that is also his job. So one way or the other, he is lying.
- Ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger says quantum computing will pop the AI bubble. (WCCFTech)
This would spell serious trouble for Nvidia, because if quantum computing is effective, it would erase 90% of their market overnight.
Huang thinks that will take twenty years.
Gelsinger believes it may take as little as two.
Tech News
- The Ayaneo Next 2 is another of those hand-held gaming devices like the Nintendo Switch or PlayStation Portable, only more so. A whole lot more so. (Liliputing)
It has a 9" OLED display with a resolution of 2400x1504 at 165Hz, which is not drastically more than (for example) the Switch 2's 7.9" 1920x1080 120Hz screen.
But it also has an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, the same CPU powering the recent raft of $2000 home AI computers. 16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores, packed into a handheld.
Price not given but I expect it to be a lot.
- M3 MacBook Air’s Front Sharp Edges Were Too Uncomfortable For Its Owner, So He Used A Sandpaper To Smoothen Them Out, Followed By Some Polishing (WCCFTech)
Smoothen?The only drawback to smoothening the sharp edges of the M3 MacBook Air is that the polished area is prone to oxidation, but nothing like a simple wiping job will do the trick.
Smoothen.
- A major AI conference has been flooded with papers "peer-reviewed" by AI. (Nature)
21% of the "peer reviews" were entirely AI-generated, and 50% showed significant AI use.
Of the papers themselves, 1% were entirely AI-generated. 61% were at least mostly human work.
- The latest Soyuz launch to the ISS wrecked the rocket's own launchpad. (Ars Technica)
Crew on the ground failed to secure a 20-ton service platform and it got blasted into the flame trench by the launch and wrecked it.
None of Russia's other launch sites can currently handle the Soyuz craft, which means that SpaceX may have to save the day yet again.
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Friday, November 28
Turkey Resilience Edition
Top Story
- OpenAI has described its forthcoming AI device. (Tech Crunch) (archive site)
Not announced. Not previewed. Described:When people see it, they say, "that's it?… It’s so simple."
Not so much of a description as a fart.
It's expected to be a phone, but without a screen, making it useless to everyone who already has a phone, which is... Everyone.
Also, don't look at the picture.
- Why can't ChatGPT tell the time? (The Verge) (archive site)
Because it doesn't know anything.
Tech News
- AWS is adding "DNS resilience" to its notoriously unstable US-East-1 region. (The Register)
This won't make the datacenter any more reliable, it will just make it easier for customers to switch over to somewhere else the next time it goes down.
- Looking for a larger, faster hard drive for your 2013-era laptop? SSSTC may have what you need. (WCCFTech)
It's an enterprise SSD, but it's just 7mm tall, uses a standard SATA interface, and stores up to 15TB.
Price not mentioned but probably horrifying.
- Unless it doesn't: Intel's Nova Lake lineup next year will include models with dual CPU chiplets and dual cache chiplets after all. (WCCFTech)
With a total of up to 52 cores and 288MB of cache.
Which is kind of a lot.
Nominal power consumption for the high-end model is 150W, but this is Intel so expect it to post significantly higher numbers in the real world.
- Nvidia then: If you want to buy our GPU chips you have to buy the RAM from us too, at our marked-up prices.
Nvidia now: Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown. (Tom's Hardware)
Nvidia previously forced the companies that make its graphics cards to also buy memory through them, even though Nvidia doesn't make memory chips.
Now that memory chips have become expensive and hard to find, the board makers have been cut loose to sink or... Well, just to sink really.
- As the UK tightens its grip on free speech, it has turned its steely idiot cross-eyed gaze on VPNs. (The Verge) (archive site)
Just as everyone predicted.
It won't work. There are too many VPNs, they're too easy to create, and too easy to use. The Great Firewall of China leaks like a sieve, so the UK doesn't stand a chance.
Musical Interlude
Song is Golden from the movie KPop Demon Hunters, which is about a KPop (Korean pop music) group that, uh, hunts demons.
The movie is supposed to be pretty good, though when Hololive EN did a watchalong stream, Kronii rolled her eyes so hard that her motion-tracking sensor picked it up.
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Thursday, November 27
Fireworks-Stuffed Turkey Edition
Top Story
- OpenAI says a dead teenager circumvented ChatGPT safety features before committing suicide. (Tech Crunch)
This comes out of one of the manifold lawsuits for wrongful death levied against OpenAI by the families of, well, crazy people.
And OpenAI actually seems to have a point:OpenAI claims that over roughly nine months of usage, ChatGPT directed Raine to seek help more than 100 times.
Why didn't you tell him to seek help?
(Produces list of dates, times, and messages.)
We did.But according to his parents' lawsuit, Raine was able to circumvent the company's safety features to get ChatGPT to give him "technical specifications for everything from drug overdoses to drowning to carbon monoxide poisoning," helping him to plan what the chatbot called a "beautiful suicide."
Y'know, back in the Paleozoic era there were these things called libraries.
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
- OpenAI needs to raise $207 billion by 2030 so that it can... Continue to lose money. (Financial Times) (archive site)
Someone remind me why we are doing this again?
Tech News
- Public websites in many US states and whatever Canada has instead of states, bailiwicks or voivodeships or something, for potential jury members to access data on their duties had - have - a tiny flaw: You can just look up anyone's details. (Tech Crunch)
Not directly, but like WhatsApp you could simply run through all the possible numbers - even easier in this case because they are sequential - and access every single piece of data. And there was no rate limiting.
- Asus' new Lockerstor Gen2 NASes offer up to six 3.5" drive bays, four M.2 slots for storage or caching, and dual 5Gb Ethernet ports. (Notebook Check)
And a PCIe slot if you need more speed.
Priced starting at $470.
- What's better than a supercomputer? A supercomputer with baked salmon. (The Register)
Norway's newest supercomputer is also being used to provide warm water for local salmon farms, or, if you dial the heat up just a little...
- Reviewing the Framework Desktop. (Serve the Home)
A month ago these AI-oriented systems with 128GB of unified RAM seemed awfully expensive.
Then the prices for regular memory went not merely into orbit, but directly out of the Solar System.
Since prices for these integrated systems have not been adjusted yet, they are suddenly looking much more attractive.
- AI companies are moving beyond the scale-up phase. (ABZ Global)
Ilya Sutskever (co-founder of OpenAI and now running his own company) and Yann Lecun (chief of AI at Meta) point out that the age of just scaling things up and getting better results is already over, and that all the money in the world can't make AI actually useful without much more research.
Lecun goes further and says - as I do - that LLMs are simply not a path to real intelligence. He lays out four key elements needed for intelligence, and notes that LLMs do not feature any of them.
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Wednesday, November 26
Random Thing Edition
Top Story
- TSMC, the world's leading manufacturer of high-end chips, says it can meet one third of the demand from AI buildouts. (Tom's Hardware)
Expect shortages of everything electronic. Except hobby stuff like the Raspberry Pi Pico which is made on equipment from 2008 that the AI guys don't even think about.
- Rapidus - a new Japanese chipmaker funded by a list of the top companies in that country including Toyota and Sony - is set to start construction of a 1.4nm fab in Hokkaido in 2027. (Tom's Hardware)
Due to start production in 2029.
So don't expect relief from the crunch any time soon.
Unless the bubble bursts.
Tech News
- Intel's Nova Lake CPUs - expected next year with up to 52 CPU cores - will also have up to 144MB of last-level cache, similar to AMD's X3D chips. (WCCFTech)
But you can't have the 52 cores and the 144MB of cache. The 52 core version has a second CPU die, and apparently the large cache version needs the space for its cache die. 28 cores max on those models, and only 8 of them full speed.
By comparison, AMD is expected to launch CPUs next year with 24 full speed cores, but no "efficiency" cores.
- What is the role of tech journalism in a world where CEOs no longer feel shame? (Platformer)
Your role is to report the fucking news.
This is about that disastrous interview with Roblox's CEO, but also about reporters who have completely forgotten - if they ever knew - that their job is to report:I'm still reckoning with what it means to do journalism in a world where the truth can barely hold anyone's attention - much less hold a platform accountable, in any real sense of that word. I'm rethinking how to cover tech policy at a time when it is being made by whim. I'm noticing the degree to which platforms wish to be judged only by their stated intentions, and almost never on the outcomes of anyone who uses them.
No sign of intelligent life.
- Campbell's Soup's CISO and vice president Martin Bally has been put on leave after video of him surfaced declaiming that Chicken noodle soup is people! You're eating people! and I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. (The Register)
Although the audio is garbled, in a later section he appears to cry out You maniacs! You blew it up!
- Amazon has launched its Leo satellite internet, offering speeds of up to one gigabit per second. (Amazon)
Can you use it? Not yet. Trials for enterprise customers start next year.
Also, Amazon's satellite cloud falls just a little short of Starlink's: 150 vs. nearly 8000.
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