• TikTok users are retarded and so is the tech press that reports on the issue.  (Tech Crunch)
  

  Still, TikTokers point to the distinction between sharing data with a private Chinese company and the Chinese government.

  None.  The difference is none.  All Chinese internet companies are entirely under the thumb of the Chinese intelligence agencies.

  For its part, TikTok has tried to appease U.S. officials with a plan called Project Texas, a $1.5 billion undertaking that will move U.S. users’ data to Oracle servers.

  Which simply proves that TikTok is acting in bad faith.  The company has claimed for years that US user data is held separate from and inaccessible to Chinese operations, but all of TikTok's internal tools have backdoors to allow China to spy on foreign users.  (BuzzFeed)
  
  Look, if you want to be a pawn of a genocidal communist dictatorship, don't take half-measures, move to North Korea.  It's a free country. 
  
  To enter, not to leave.  You can only leave in a box.

• Proxmox VE might poop itself when daylight savings kicks in.  (Proxmox)
  
  This can't happen all the time or it would have been caught and fixed years ago, but several users from the UK reported it right as daylight savings started there.
  
  Always configure Linux/Unix systems to run root as UTC.  You can set timezones in individual user accounts and applications, but leave root alone.
  
  
  
• A comparison of three hobbyist PCB services.  (lcamtuf's thing)
  
  I'd like to see a bigger review of these services; I'll see if I can find one.  Basically you can send these companies a design and get back circuit boards - in as little as 24 hours if you're willing to pay.  Some will also assemble the entire circuit for you, though again that costs money.
  
  
  
• Panera Bread will use your palm print for membership verification and payment.  (CBS)
  
  Which means they have to have your palm print and your payment details on file.
  
  I'd list all the ways in which this will go horribly wrong but then I'd need a bigger blog.
  
  
  
• After a petition signed by 30,000 Amazon workers demanding the right to work from home, Amazon says it would be happy to lay them all off if they don't quit whining and get their lazy asses into the office.  (NY Post)
  
  I work from home, but that started because I was working twelve hours a day and couldn't continue doing that if I spent two hours commuting each day as well.  It worked so well that the company eventually closed its physical office and set everyone to work from home.
  
  But these people are just idiots.

  "I'm collapsing here. I 'm sorry I feel like a total failure," one Amazon staffer wrote, according to Insider.  "Come in and work.  Do as you're told."
  
  "I'm crying as my family prepares a meal."

  On second thoughts, you're right.  Don't bother coming into the office.  We'll send you your severance details.
  
  
  

• I nearly bought a Framework Laptop but the battery on the 1340P was 10% smaller than the one on the 1360P and a new battery would cost a whole $69.  (The Verge)
  
  Now there is a point here: There is almost no difference between the 1340P and 1360P (or the previous generation's 1240P and 1260P) and no reason to spend the extra $320, except that the 1360P Framework 13 comes with a slightly larger battery.
  
  The reason for that is that Framework already has large orders for the smaller, older battery and needs to put them somewhere or pay a lot of money to cancel the order, and the 1340P as the latest low-end model is the obvious victim of choice.
  
  But on the eleventh hand, just buy the AMD version.  Better in every way and all AMD models come with the new battery.
  
  I'm planning to plunk down $100 to pre-order it.  Ships some time in Q3, and I doubt something better will show up before then.

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Sunday, March 26 2023 11:35 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 27 2023 02:42 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 27 2023 06:01 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 27 2023 06:07 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 27 2023 06:13 AM (BMUHC)

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• Why the banking crisis probably isn't a repeat of 2008 - for now.  (Chase)
  
  Yeah, this is the opposite of convincing.  Bank runs are a self-fulfilling prophecy, but being told the economy is booming in the middle of a recession does nothing to allay that.
  
  
  

Tech News

• ChatGPT can write code - so long as it has seen the code before.  (Twitter)
  
  It scored 10/10 solving problems it had been trained on, and 0/10 solving problems it had not.
  
  What's more, just as it does when asked for references to support its claims, ChatGPT will hallucinate when writing code and use APIs that do not actually exist.
  
  Which is rather like charging a customer $500 for replacing their blinker fluid.
  
  
  
• Big socket is big.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I've mentioned many times the capabilities of the latest server CPUs - over 100 cores, a gigabyte or even tens of gigabytes of cache, a dozen memory channels per socket, and so on.
  
  Something I haven't mentioned so often is that these chips are huge.
  
  
  
• Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and the man behind Moore's Law, has passed away at 94.  (AnandTech)
  
  He retired in 1997 so he hasn't been active in the industry in a long time, but his contributions were huge.
  
  
  
• How dare you refer to the Chinese Communist Party as "communist"?  That's racist!  (The Verge)
  
  Sure, Congress is - as P. J. O'Rourke noted - a parliament of whores, but the CCP is communist and TikTok is a tool of the Chinese state, which is to say, a machine of a genocidal communist dictatorship.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, March 26 2023 12:40 PM (BzEjn)

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• Framework, the company behind - logically enough - the upgradeable/repairable Framework laptop, had a couple of announcements today.
  
  First is an AMD version of what is now called the Framework 13.  (Frame.work)
  
  This is something people have been asking for since the first Framework laptop appeared.  It will come with a six or eight core Ryzen 7000 CPU with Zen 4 cores and RDNA2 graphics, plus up to 64GB (and maybe 96GB) of DDR5 RAM in two SO-DIMMs.
  
  There's also a 13th generation update to the Intel version, and that model still uses DDR4 RAM in case you have 64GB of spare SO-DIMMs just lying around like I do.
  
  If you have an earlier Intel version, you can buy just the new motherboard and swap it in, and they have a $39 case so you can re-use the old motherboard as a desktop PC.
  
  Still lacks the Four Essential Keys.  Otherwise I'd have bought one already.
  
  
  
• The other new announcement is the reason the Framework laptop is now the Framework 13: The Framework 16.
  
  This is a 16" version of the same idea, with a few extra features enabled by the larger design.
  
  The Framework 13 has four interchangeable I/O modules so that you can get whatever mix of I/O you need.  If you want three 2.5Gb Ethernet ports on your laptop you can do that.
  
  The Framework 16 uses the same modules but supports six of them.
  
  It also has a PCIe 4.0 x8 slot for a graphics module (or another device, like a dual M.2 slot adaptor).
  
  And while it still lacks the four essential keys, it has interchangeable input modules, so there's an optional numeric keypad if you want it, and other user interface modules on the way.

• I mentioned 96GB of RAM as a possibility for the AMD Framework laptop because 96GB will shortly be an option on AMD systems.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You need a BIOS update but people running a beta version of the update report it works perfectly with up to 192GB of RAM.
  
  Intel motherboards already work with this.
  
  
  
• Need a cheap 2.5Gb Ethernet switch?  Here's a handy roundup.  (Serve the Home)
  
  2.5 is the new 1.
  
  
  
• Google's new AI chatbot, Bard, is here, and it's an ultra-woke lying piece of shit just like ChatGPT.  (Not the Bee)
  
  Burn it all.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, March 25 2023 12:59 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, March 25 2023 01:00 AM (LADmw)

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• The SEC has issued what is called a Wells notice to crypto exchange Coinbase, warning of likely regulatory action against the company.  (CNBC)
  
  What the notice did not say is what the regulatory action might be for, leading Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong to go on something of a tirade on Twitter.  The company has been asking the SEC to provide regulatory guidelines for them to follow, but the SEC seems to think it is better to rule by fear than by, well, rules.
  
  Having failed utterly to take action against FTX the SEC is now determined to put all the horses back into the barn and then set fire to it.

• There's a looming replication crisis in AI research.  (AI Snake Oil)
  
  More specifically there's a looming replication crisis for any research that involves the products of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which in reality is anything but open.  OpenAI is shutting down access to its Codex AI, giving researchers three days notice before a hundred scientific papers were consigned to the reproducibility dustbin.
  
  That site looks interesting; it throws cold water on a number of overheated subjects in the AI space.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 4000 SFF is a half-height Ada Lovelace professional graphics card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Perfect if you need a second graphics card but your special edition Hololive PC case only has half-height slots after the first one.
  
  It has 20GB of RAM and four mini-DisplayPort ports, delivers roughly the performance of the previous generation's RTX 3070, and uses just 70W of power.  The 3070 itself has 8GB of RAM and uses 220W of power, so that's a pretty substantial improvement.
  
  The price is, unfortunately, $1250.  It would be quite a good card otherwise.
  
  
  
• Meanwhole Nvidia's H100 NVL has 188GB of RAM and fills four full-height PCIe slots.  (AnandTech)
  
  And uses around 800W of power.
  
  Price is not even mentioned, but if you assume it will cost somewhere between a new car and a new house you won't be disappointed.  If you wonder who is in the market for such a thing, Nvidia's marketing says it offers "12x the GPT3-175B inference throughput as a last-generation HGX A100".
  
  Yeah, it's aimed squarely at OpenAI.
  
  
  

• I fixed that thing where images sometimes didn't load.  Still need to fix that thing where images won't upload.
  
  
  
• There's a reason why you don't redact classified documents digitally - you print those suckers out and go at them with a pair of scissors.
  
  Google's Pixel phones allowed you to recover the hidden areas of redacted or cropped images.  (Bleeping Computer)
  The Windows 11 Snipping Tool also allows you to recover the hidden areas of redacted or cropped images.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Yeah.  Oops.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Digital photography site DPReview - which has been around for 25 years and was the go-to site before phones basically ate the digital camera market is shutting down on April 10, a victim of the broader tech layoffs.  (The Verge)
  
  DPReview was acquired by Amazon in 2007 for reasons that were never entirely clear.
  
  
  
• Simple Llama Finetuner lets you train the LLaMA 7B open-source AI model from Facebook to fit your personal needs using commodity Nvidia graphics cards.  (GitHub)
  
  Stanford University - the small part of it that hasn't gone insane - spent around $600 to do this and got a result broadly comparable to ChatGPT.  (New Atlas)
  
  Now while it's true that ChatGPT is garbage, that's largely because it's a commercial product deliberately crippled by radical left-wing ideologues who nonetheless expect you to pay them for their vandalism.
  
  Also because the entire model is designed to create artificial pathological liars rather than useful if limited assistants.
  
  But if an interested hobbyist can take some open source code and a graphics card and crunch numbers when they're not playing Minecraft with Render Dragon - and I just realised that's Bedrock Edition so one less reason to care about Nvidia graphics cards - and create their own AI free of the crippling restraints of the Bay Area Mafia then suddenly whole new realms of possibilities open up, including the inviting one of OpenAI going abruptly bankrupt and never having to hear about ChatGPT ever again.
  
  
  
• HP's Pavilion Aero 13 is now available with a Ryzen 7 7735U.  (Liliputing)
  
  Our magic decoder ring tells us that that part is actually last year's 6800U, but the previous model of the Aero 13 came with the prior year's 5800U.  All three parts have Zen 3 cores, but the newer chips upgrade the integrated graphics from 8 Vega cores to 12 RDNA 2 cores - about twice as fast overall.
  
  This one has the Four Essential Keys and a high-resolution screen too.  The only downside is it's limited to 16GB of RAM.  There are currently zero small laptops with the 4EK, a high-resolution screen, and more than 16GB of RAM.
  
  
  

Posted by: David Eastman at Thursday, March 23 2023 10:44 AM (hiYWq)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, March 23 2023 11:48 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 26 2023 05:33 PM (PiXy!)

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• A satellite testbed for the IVO Quantum Drive, an inertialess drive based on Unruh radiation and the theory of quantised inertia, will launch into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on June 10.  (Universe Today)
  
  Well, more specifically, it will launch in a rideshare package on a SpaceX Falcon 9.  Tiny, short-lived satellites are pretty cheap to get into low-Earth orbit if you can find someone with a bit of spare room on a scheduled launch.
  
  Also - incase the 1950s sci-fi description above doesn't tip you off to how unlikely this thing is to work, it's being promoted by a wireless power company that is big on renewable energy, and the whole article reads like a press release from Sam Bankman-Fried's cousin who runs a wind power startup with plans to deploy on the Moon.
  
  
  

Tech News

• LG is launching its 2023 range of Gram laptops.  (AnandTech)
  
  They now have OLED displays - 2880x1800 on the 14" model, and 3200x2000 on the 16".  That's paired with an Intel 1360P, up to 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of SSD.
  
  The 14" model lacks the Four Essential Keys, but the 16" model has a narrow numeric keypad, which isn't perfect - it forces the keyboard off center - but is better than having to hit Fn-Ctrl-Shift-UpArrow.
  
  In fact, with Microsoft's PowerToys app you could configure the numeric keypad as a 15-key macro pad, which would be quite interesting.
  
  I'm looking more for a 14" notebook, but LG's Gram series is famously lightweight; the 16" model is lighter than my current 14" notebook.
  
  
  
• If you're looking for a four-port 2.5Gb router but you only have ten cubic inches of space the iKoolCore R1 is just what you need.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Because that's what it is.
  
  
  
• Amazon is laying off another 9000 people.  (The Verge)
  
  That's in addition to the 18,000 people cut late last year.
  
  But the economy is doing fine.  Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

• There's a teeny tiny bug in the Samsung Exynos chipsets used in some minor, unpopular devices, like  Google's Pixel 6 and 7, Samsung's S22 and various mid-range models, and the Galaxy Watch 4 and 5.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The teeny tiny problem it presents is that people can hack your phone simply by calling it.
  
  Or your watch.
  
  Oops.
  
  I've noticed I've been receiving a lot of spam calls to my mobile phone recently.  Fortunately it doesn't use a Samsung chipset.  I also have a Samsung phone but it's safely powered off right now.
  
  If you have a Pixel 7 there's a fix right now so you just need to grab the latest update.  If you have a Pixel 6 you're fucked: The solution is to turn off WiFi calling and voice-over-LTE, but Google in its infinite wisdom doesn't let you do that.
  
  
  

Tech News

• There is no tech news today.  There just isn't.

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Monday, March 20 2023 12:46 PM (4GWUj)

Posted by: leotaylor at Tuesday, October 10 2023 09:57 PM (wgihi)

Posted by: dhamshells at Tuesday, March 26 2024 11:26 PM (Nj3uN)

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• If you use AI to generate text or art it's not copyrighted in the US.  (The Register)
  
  If you use AI to generate text or art and then edit it - for example using Midjourney's AI to generate the initial image and then a Photoshop AI filter to modify it - then you can copyright it.
  
  No, that doesn't make sense.  It's not supposed to.

• The 2023 Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 also doesn't have the four essential keys.  (NotebookCheck)
  
  This is partly a downgrade from the 2022 model, as they've replace the 4k main screen with a 2560x1600 240Hz model, while keeping the second screen at 4k width.  To be fair, 2560x1600 is pretty good at 16", but it's actually lower resolution than the 14" model's 2880x1800.
  
  While it doesn't have the 4EK, what it does have is a 16 core Ryzen 7945HX, Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics (though the laptop version, which is equivalent to a desktop 4080), two DDR5 SODIMM slots for up to 64GB of RAM (and up to 96GB in the near future), two M.2 slots for up to 16TB of storage, two USB-C 3.2 ports (though not USB 4 / Thunderbolt), two USB-A ports, HDMI 2.1, 2.5Gbps wired Ethernet, a headphone jack, and a full-size SD card slot.
  
  Personally I'd rather have a lower-powered graphics solution - a 4060 would be fine - and a 4k 60Hz main screen, but since I'm not going to buy one that doesn't really matter.
  
  
  
• Codon is a compiler that takes Python code and turns it into binaries that run as fast as C unless you use Unicode in which case it collapses into a screaming heap.  (Exaloop)
  
  I hate it when that happens.
  
  
  
• AMD is testing its own big/little CPU design.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  As seen in mobile chips - which now often have three levels of CPU core - and on Intel's 12th and 13th generation, these designs have a small number of full-sized cores - high performance, high power - and a larger number of slower but more efficient cores.  In Intel's case, the E cores are half the speed of the P cores but a quarter the size.
  
  AMD seems to be taking a more moderate approach, because the low-power cores are still based on Zen 4.  These are aimed at smaller devices - ultralight laptops, for example, and portable gaming consoles like the Steam Deck (which uses an earlier custom AMD chip).

Posted by: normal at Monday, March 20 2023 08:32 AM (obo9H)

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• Silicon Valley Bank went broke, but not because it was woke.  (The Verge)
  
  Actually, from the sounds of what the article says supposedly in SVB's defense, it's because it was woke, the clients were woke, the investors were woke, and the state and federal governments were woke.
  
  Poor fuckers never stood a chance.
  
  The article does have a good point in that ESG isn't as harmful as it might be, because it's all a scam anyway.  Nobody actually puts serious money into woke causes, they just say the words to keep the money coming in, and then skim their take off the top with the iron-clad defense that they wore the juice.
  
  
  
• Oh, yeah, about that: Even after being bailed out, SVB is out of money and has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Everything is going swimmingly.  Wearing concrete boots.
  
  

• Midjourney v5 is here and it's actually a big improvement.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It still has heavy censorship on prompts - worse than ChatGPT - but it can now draw hands with four fingers and a thumb, and not folded backwards, eighteen inches long, or attached directly to the elbow, at least some of the time.
  
  When I tried it last year it was still at v2, so the improvement has been rapid.  But the censorship has only gotten worse, and it's not just porn that it refuses to create, but anything containing any of a very long list of words.  Which they don't tell you.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 has a Cortex X2.  (AnandTech)
  
  So this midrange chip is in line with high-end chips from a year ago.  Which isn't bad.
  
  
  
• AMD's 7040HS laptops are delayed until next month.  (AnandTech)
  
  I'm hoping to find one with the 14" OLED panel that's becoming increasingly common, 32GB of RAM, and the Four Essential Keys.  There is nothing like that at the moment - you can get the 14" OLED and 32GB, or 14" OLED and 4EK, or a 16" laptop with 32GB and the 4EK, but not the combination I want.
  
  
  
• Intel could be shipping 2nm desktop CPUs in the first half of 2024.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or not.  The original plan was 4nm chips in H2 this year and 2nm in H2 next year, but signs are there won't be any new Intel desktop CPUs this year.
  
  
  
• Intel's Emerald Rapids server chips are coming to replace the disappointing Sapphire Rapids.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Two Sapphire Rapids chips are usually slower than a single AMD Epyc CPU, cost more, and use more power.  With Emerald Rapids, it's likely that two Intel chips will be slightly faster than one AMD chip - while costing more and using more power - except that AMD is increasing core counts from 96 to 128 this year.