• Remembering Gordon Moore and the iAPX432 debacle.  (The Chip Letter)
  
  Intel's planned followup to the wildly successful 8080 was not the 8086 or even the Z80-like 8085, but the iAPX432, an object oriented mainframe-on-a-chip (well, mainframe-on-a-board since it was a multiple chip implementation) that actually eventually worked but was so slow that nobody ever used it for anything.
  
  It took a diametrically opposite approach to RISC: Instead of relying on clever compilers to make simple hardware work, it tried to bring the hardware up to the level of advanced programming languages like Ada.  
  
  In 1975.
  
  It was 30 times as complicated as the 8080 but worse by almost every measure, and was completely abandoned.
  
  The only other company I know of that has attempted this is hi-fi maker Linn, whose Rekursiv CPU suffered a similar fate when it turned out that commodity Sun 3 workstations ran the same code cheaper and faster.

• AMD's 7800X3D is the new AMD 5800X3D.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That is, not necessarily the fastest gaming CPU in every single case, but mostly faster than more expensive chips that use much more power.
  
  It's priced the same as the 7900X which is about 50% faster for many non-gaming workloads, so if you only spend part of your time gaming it might not be the best choice.
  
  It does avoid the issue with the 7900X3D and 7950X3D which have two slightly different CPU chiplets, because it only has one CPU chiplet.
  
  
  
• The RTX 4070 might be a good graphics card.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Due this month (probably) for around $600 (we think), it should use the same power as the 3060 (more or less) but deliver the performance of the 3080 (ish).
  
  It will (likely) come with 12GB of VRAM, which is the minimum you should buy these days.  The 3060 Ti, 3070, and 3070 Ti all have 8GB of RAM, and are starting to suffer on some new releases.
  
  The Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 both have 16GB of RAM, most of which can be used for graphics, so titles designed for consoles can play poorly on even some fairly recent graphics cards.
  
  The 3060, curiously enough, has 12GB of RAM and sometimes runs better than more expensive cards with less RAM.
  
  
  
• The Framework laptop is very exciting and I'd love to buy one but I'm sticking with my MacBook Air because I have the intelligence of a potato and am happy paying 16x the market price for storage in laptop that can never be upgraded or repaired.  (The Verge)
  
  Ijits gonna ij.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 04 2023 12:40 AM (LADmw)

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• If you're looking for a big and decently fast SSD with no major flaws for under $200, you're in luck.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  TeamGroup's MP34 is currently on sale at Amazon for $199.  For the 4TB model.
  
  It's not a new drive - this range first appeared in 2019 - and it's not PCIe 5 or even PCIe 4.  It "only" delivers read speeds of 3.5GB per second.
  
  But it's also not QLC - it's TLC, so generally faster and with a longer lifespan - and it's not DRAMless - it has a proper DRAM cache on board.
  
  At launch the 1TB model cost $160 so prices have come down a lot in the past four years.
  
  The Crucial P3 also offers 4TB for $199 right now, but that is QLC and DRAMless, so the only thing it has going for it is the reputation of the manufacturer: Crucial is the consumer brand of Micron, one of the biggest makers of flash and DRAM chips in the world.
  
  As a secondary drive either one should be fine, but the MP34 should also deliver the goods as a primary drive if you don't need bleeding edge performance.
  
  A year ago 4TB drives like these would have set you back at least $400 even on sale.  These are now cheaper than SATA SSDs, and five or six times faster.

• Meanwhile in Flashland Kioxia (formerly Toshiba's flash memory division) and Western Digital have announced 218 layer 3.2GHz 1Tb TLC flash chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  That means that a cheaper 4 channel controller on a PCIe 5 SSD will be able to hit 12.8GBps - or for PCIe 3 you'd only need one channel to basically max up the bus.
  
  This is particularly good for smaller drives.  Apple customers buying recent 256GB laptops have noticed that the performance has been cut in half over the previous year's model.  Of course Apple massively overcharges for storage and you can never, ever upgrade so you'd have to be an idiot to buy a 256GB Apple laptop anyway.
  
  They have other nasty habits that make it questionable buying any of their products at all.  More on that below. 
  
  
  
• Don't buy one of AMD's new budget A620 motherboards if you want to run an X or X3D CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It should at least run, but it will run at 65W economy mode, turning (for example) a 7900X into a 7900, and a 7900X3D into, um, a 7900X3D running at 65W because there isn't a specific model like that.  
  
  This doesn't actually lose you much performance though.  The 65W 7900 is only 6% slower than the 170W 7900X.
  
  Which makes you wonder why they bothered to go to 170W in the first place.
  
  
  
• AMD and JEDEC are working on DDR5-17600 memory for servers.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This uses a trick that basically puts two memory modules into one slot and interleaves the data from the two sets of chips, running at double the native rate.
  
  In the six years since Epyc CPUs first appeared they've jumped from four memory channels to eight to twelve, and there's just no room in servers for them to get much bigger. 
  
  So the solution is to make the memory faster, only that takes too long.
  
  So the solution to that solution is to basically RAID-0 the memory chips.
  
  
  
• SpaceX is preparing for a full test launch of Starship, likely this month.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Despite it being Ars the comments are mostly sane.  One comment praising Elon Musk got downvoted to oblivion, but so did one comment denigrating him.
  
  
  
• And it's going to the Moon.  Not this month, though.  In a couple of years.  (Space News)
  
  Carrying a privately developed lunar rover.
  
  
  
• The scammer who got Instagram "influencers" account's banned and then charged them to help get them reinstated may have been found.  (ProPublica)
  
  Of course this scam was only possible in the first place because Instagram is run by evil shitheads.
  
  Instagram declined to comment.  Evil, not stupid.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 03 2023 01:38 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, April 03 2023 10:40 AM (2tHvf)

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• Twitter open-sourced its recommendation algorithm, as it said it was going to do.  (Twitter)
  
  I believe it was already leaked by a disgruntled former employee - pretty much all Twitter's former employees fit that category because they're communists - so nothing has really change except that it's official now.
  
  Reportedly this uses something on the order of a trillion CPU seconds per day - five billion iterations, each running across multiple CPU cores.  That would require twelve million cores, at a minimum, or 62,500 dual 96-core Epyc Genoa servers.  Call it 1500 racks stuffed full of the latest server equipment.
  
  The results speak for themselves though: Everybody turns it off and goes straight to the chronological feed because it's full of crap.

• ChatGPT has found a useful purpose: Hunting for security vulnerabilities in code libraries.  (The Register)
  
  I've mentioned before that ChatGPT is a pure language model, and doesn't actually understand anything.  But computer programs are pure language - everything about them is defined in terms of language, with no outside knowledge required.  This is exactly what ChatGPT can do, and it turns out that it does it pretty well.
  
  Given the state of public code libraries it's like dynamiting fish in a barrel, but it actually reports on the specific problems rather than marking everything on NPM as SEO spam.
  
  Even though it is.
  
  
  
• Europol is dumb.  (The Register)
  
  I swear I could hear my brain cells ditching work and getting drunk when I tried to read that article.
  
  
  
• Italy too.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Dumb.
  
  
  
• The 2023 Chuwi Corebook X has the Four Essential Keys.  (Liliputing)
  
  And a 12th generation U-series CPU (that's last year's model, but last year's Corebook X had a 2020 CPU, so it's progress), a very nice 14" 2160x1440 screen, and up to 16GB of RAM though it's soldered in place and the 16GB model is out of stock.
  
  I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone actually buying it, but if they can put the Four Essential Keys in place on a small notebook why do the major manufacturers have so much trouble with it?
  
  
  
• AMD's low-end A620 motherboards are here for less horribly expensive systems.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They still require more expensive DDR5 RAM, but that cost is going down - it's about 50% more than DDR4 now, rather than 100% - and it does offer better performance.  Sometimes.
  
  
  
• The toy business is surprisingly complex when your CEO is a moron and your executives actively hate their customers.  (The Verge)
  
  Brain cells getting drunk again.  It's about Hasbro, who have systematically destroyed their two money-makers, Money the Gathering and Dingbats & Deviants.
  
  
  
• AI ethicists - some of the most useless people on the face of the Earth - have fired back at that preposterous open letter demanding a six-month pause on AI research saying that yes, AI will kill us all, probably tomorrow if it can fit that into its busy schedule, but research must continue because otherwise the AI ethicists won't get paid.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Microsoft to its credit recently fired all its AI ethicists.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, April 01 2023 11:29 PM (r9O5h)

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• Twitter has announced its new API plans for developers.  (Twitter)
  
  They're shit.  Just completely useless.
  
  For $100 per month - that's the hobbyist plan - you get 10,000 GET requests per month and 50,000 POSTs.
  
  Which is already terrible, but in fact even that is a lie.  They're counting individual tweets, not requests, and you can fetch 200 tweets with one GET.
  
  So that's 50 requests per month.  For $100.
  
  Elon Musk is somehow recreating the market opportunity that should have closed when he rescued Twitter from the commies.
  
  
  
• Twitter is publishing The Algorithm today.  (Twitter)
  
  Whatever that means.  We'll see.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Also shit is this Epyc Genoa motherboard from ASRock.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I looked at it and was impressed that they had managed to fit a Genoa motherboard into the microATX form factor, even if they had to cut it back to eight memory channels.
  
  It's not the microATX form factor.  It's not the anything form factor.
  
  
  
• Even more shit arrives from Asus in the form of the ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM.  (The Verge)
  
  It's an ugly, bulky, overweight tablet PC with a 48 minute battery life.
  
  Yes, minute.
  
  
  
• Tax Heaven 3000 is an anime dating sim that also does your taxes and empties your bank account.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Probably.
  
  Anyway, shit.
  
  
  
• Half of all new NPM packages are SEO viruses.  (Sandworm)
  
  The other half are other kinds of virus.
  
  NPM is, you guessed it, shit.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 01 2023 12:06 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 01 2023 12:08 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 01 2023 05:58 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, April 01 2023 11:54 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Berto Dalisay at Thursday, May 30 2024 07:55 AM (8MGMD)

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• US government efforts to ban communist spy and propaganda application TikTok have been stalled by...  Senator Rand Paul.  (Reuters)
  
  Senator Paul is just being his usual contrarian self and there is nothing at all to worry about in the comfortingly-named RESTRICT Act.  
  
  Let's see...  First born child, uh huh.  Plagues of blood, okay.  A fire upon the deep, makes sense.  Demons from the Ninth Circle of Hell eating your liver, yep.
  
  Everything is totally above board here and there is nothing to worry about and the government is not trying to shove through an unprecedented and violently unconstitutional infringement of civil rights under the pretext of fighting those filthy commies blinkblinkblink blink-blink-blink blinkblinkblink
  
  
  

Tech News

• A full review of the new Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  With two screens, a 16 core Ryzen CPU, and an Nvidia RTX 4090, this is one of the most powerful and flexible laptops around but.
  
  But it seems that Nvidia couldn't decide who they were making this laptop for and ended up with something that won't please anybody - unless it arrives as an unexpected gift.  It's by no means bad; it's just not focused.
  
  Creators don't need a 240Hz display or an RTX 4090, they'd be better off with a cheaper (quieter, cooler) GPU and a higher-resolution, wider-gamut display.  The 16" LCD panel covers only 85% of DCI-P3 - which used to be very good and again is not bad, it's just decidedly unremarkable for a high-end laptop.
  
  Gamers don't need the second screen or the cramped keyboard and small trackpad caused by its inclusion, and more conventional laptops have better cooling and run faster.
  
  If you work and play on the go and need to pick just one laptop, again, it's not a bad choice.  It's also not remotely cheap - the tested configuration cost $4000.  US, not Australian.  It's A$7000 here.
  
  
  
• Memory prices continue to fall which is great for consumers in the short term but not great for the companies that produce the chips, with Micron losing $2.3 billion for the quarter.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The last collapse of DRAM pricing left only three major producers of memory chips.
  
  
  
• Intel plans to release the successor to the lackluster Sapphire Rapids server (and workstations) CPUs by the end of this year.  (AnandTech)
  
  They should look up Osborne Effect.
  
  They really should, because Emerald Rapids - the replacement for Sapphire Rapids - will be followed by Sierra Forest in the first half of 2024, then Granite Rapids in the second half of 2024, then Clearwater Forest in 2025.
  
  It seems simpler to just buy AMD.
  
  
  
• 1100 virtue-signaling nitwits signed on to an open letter calling for a six month moratorium on AI research, pointing to the existential threat posed by crappy chatbots.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Yeah, right.
  
  
  
• Stable Diffusion will kill all life on Earth by lunchtime Wednesday if we don't act NOW!!!!!  (Time)
  
  Just in case you thought the wankers from the previous article were insufficiently hysterical.
  
  
  

Louis Rossman Ranting About That RESTRICT Act Video of the Day

• There's a bank run on Binance now.  (WSJ)
  
  The crypto trading platform has seen outflows of $2 billion as thieves, scammers, and terrorists scurry for cover.  But it's weathered similar outflows recently, so this doesn't necessarily mean doom.
  
  I'm sure the US authorities hope it does mean doom, because they hate crypto.
  
  For the wrong reasons.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in brighter news Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced CEO of bankrupt Ponzi scheme FTX, has been charged with paying $40 million in bribes to Chinese officials.  (CBS News)
  
  No, you idiot.  You take bribes.  You don't pay them.

• In other good news Disney's layoffs of 7000 staff have wiped out its metaverse unit.  (Deadline)
  
  Signs that someone at Disney is awake?
  
  
  
• You can now run Doom on the Commodore 64.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  By shoving an entire Raspberry Pi into the cartridge slot, but still.
  
  
  
• HP's Omen Transcend 16 has the Four Essential Keys.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In fact, it has an entire ten-key desktop cursor pad - four arrow keys, the 4EK, plus Insert and Pause, plus another three keys above those.
  
  It would be hands down the best full-size laptop keyboard layout around except for some fucking reason the power button is sandwiched between F12 and Delete where you guaranteed to hit it with some regularity.  This is particularly galling because there is an obvious location for it at top right where they have positioned the Print Screen key.
  
  PowerToys can probably fix that.
  
  Anyway, apart from that the laptop has up to an Intel 13900HX CPU (6P + 8E cores) or AMD 7940HS (8P cores), RTX 4070 graphics, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of SSD, and a 2560x1600 16" display with mini-LED lighting.
  
  Prices start at $1670 though, so not exactly a budget item.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti are expected to launch in May, after the 4070 arrives next month.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The desktop models, that is; the laptop versions are already on store shelves.  Inside laptops.
  
  These are expected to have 8GB of RAM.  One of the good things about the existing 3060 is that it comes with 12GB of RAM.  Well, not the laptop version, which only has 6GB, and not the butchered 8GB model, but the regular desktop card.  That looks to have been cut with the new release.
  
  
  
• Intel's most expensive 4th generation Sapphire Rapids server CPUs can run Stable Diffusion image generation ten times faster.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Ten times faster than what, you ask.
  
  Ten times faster than previous generation CPUs.
  
  But nobody runs Stable Diffusion on CPUs, you say.
  
  Well, yeah.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, March 29 2023 11:42 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 30 2023 03:03 AM (BMUHC)

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• The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has filed a complaint against Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao for - basically - not taking the CFTC seriously.  (CNBC)
  
  On the one hand, the entire crypto industry is full of this kind of rule-bending bullshit when it's not outright stealing money and setting it on fire.
  
  On the other hand, the people enforcing the rules sat around with their thumbs up their butts while the industry stole that money and set it on fire, and are only now taking action against much more minor infringements.

• Intel's 13th generation NUCs are here.  (AnandTech)
  
  Along with a handy chart that shows the difference between the 1340P and 1360P.  Not much at all on the CPU side, but the iGPU has 96 cores instead of 80 and runs 100MHz faster.
  
  Dual HDMI, dual Thunderbolt, dual DDR4 SODIMM slots - not DDR5, which makes it more attractive to me because not only is DDR4 cheaper but I already have 128GB in 16GB modules sitting around from earlier upgrades, one M.2 slot, and 2.5Gb Ethernet.
  
  I'd prefer AMD but AMD's 7000 series doesn't support DDR4 memory.
  
  
  
• And then there were none: Agatha Christie's novels are the latest to be gruesomely murdered by British "sensitivity readers".  (The Guardian)
  
  I'm not saying woodchippers, but...  Woodchippers.
  
  
  
• Some of Twitter's source code was leaked on GitHub by an embittered ex-employee.  (Cyber Kendra)
  
  Which narrows it down to about 9000 suspects.
  
  
  
• China sucks.  TikTok sucks.  Those who claim that - for example - America and Facebook are just as bad do not know what they are talking about.  (The Register)
  
  A well-written article, so of course the comments are full of idiots.
  
  
  
• The Verge is also full of idiots.  (The Verge)
  
  The ideal of an open internet is not a suicide pact, you retards.
  
  
  

Midjourney Art of the Day

• Microsoft needs to stop shoving crap into Windows.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  An evergreen story, but in particular this time about the MSN news that is shoved down your throat unless you go through and switch it off in seventeen places.  The Start Menu search will still look things up on Wikipedia which is something that nobody on the planet has ever wanted and I don't know how to turn that off.

• If you remember my experiments with AI image generator Midjourney from a few months ago, well, that was version 2, and they're now on version 5, and it's improved just a tiny bit.
  
  
  
  Hands are still its bête noire, but it's improving there too.  I only had to retry that one once.
  
  If you want something that looks like hand-drawn art it can do that too.
  
  
  
  The old version was very good at generating body horror and Lovecraftian creepiness; I'll have to try that again and see if the changes have removed that or if it's still lurking.
  
  
  
• The Arduino Uno R4 has been announced, with 16 times the RAM of the R3.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That brings it up to 32k.  Yes, kilobytes.  Yes, the R3 has 2k of RAM.
  
  
  
• Amazon has released Mountpoint, an open source tool to mount S3 buckets as truly awful filesystems.  (InfoQ)

  Oh no, what has AWS done? I didn’t spend fifteen years yelling at people not to use S3 as a file system just to be undone by the S3 team itself!

  S3 is absolutely awful at managing files.  It's as effective at that as a bucket is at holding angry bobcats.  Treating it as a filesystem just makes that all the more painfully obvious.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, March 28 2023 12:35 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 28 2023 12:56 AM (LADmw)

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1. The new server structure made the image filesystem read-only.  I got that sorted out the first week after the chaos of the move.  (Wait, no I didn't, but it did get sorted out a while ago.)
   
   
2. The file upload API changed and renamed the filetype field, causing image uploads to fail.
   
   
3. The new filetype was an object rather than a string so I couldn't even parse it to get the image type.
   
   
4. There has been a bug in the code for fifteen years that only surfaced after I updated the MySQL server during the move, so even after uploading the file it wasn't accessible.  The record was created with invalid data and then immediately updated so this problem was invisible - it lasted less than a millisecond each time - until the new version of MySQL enforced stricter checking and refused to create the records at all.

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Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 26 2023 10:00 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, March 27 2023 01:30 AM (rglbH)

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