• 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.
  
  
  

• A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past.  (Motherboard)
  
  It doesn't.
  
  
  

Tech News

• A new treatment for prostate cancer kills the tumour with a nanoknife.  (Telegraph)
  
  Which is basically a tiny electrified scalpel, which can kill the cancerous cells while leaving the healthy tissue intact.  It's minimally invasive, can be done on an outpatient basis, and early cases indicate it has significantly few side-effects and less chance of infection than even over minimally invasive methods.
  
  
  
• The 2023 version of the Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is here.  (Asus)
  
  This one has a 14.5" 2880x1800 120Hz OLED touchscreen (with 100% of DCI-P3 colour space), a 12.7" 2880x864 IPS display with stylus support, and in the model sold here in Australia, a 14 core Intel 13900H, 32GB of RAM, Nvidia RTX 4050 graphics with 6GB of VRAM, a 1TB SSD, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one regular USB port, HDMI 2.1, a headphone jack, and a microSD slot.  Plus a barrel jack for a power supply so you don't need to tie up a Thunderbolt port for charging.
  
  It doesn't have the Four Essential Keys, but that's not a design mistake: There's no room.  What it does have is an app that lets you put custom controls on the second screen that can do whatever you want, so you can make your own Four Essential Keys.
  
  The RTX 4050 looks to be somewhere between the performance of the laptop and desktop versions of the 3060, so it's pretty decent for basic gaming.  There's also a version of the laptop with an RTX 4060 but it doesn't seem that model has made it to these shores.
  
  It's not cheap, and it's a bit heavy for a 14" laptop at 1.75kg (3.85lb) but it's a very capable little machine.
  
  
  
• The Xerox Alto is 50 years old this month.  (The Register)
  
  This is the system that showed off the very first graphical user interface - and had the very first mouse.
  
  This isn't the one that inspired Steve Jobs to create the Macintosh - that was the later Xerox Star - but its direct ancestor.

Posted by: normal at Friday, March 17 2023 09:40 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, March 18 2023 03:25 PM (r9O5h)

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• Banks are still fucked.  (The Verge)
  
  1. Pin interest rates at record lows to boost the economy through wasteful spending.
  2. Crash the economy anyway by locking everyone into their homes.
  3. Boost the economy by printing trillions of dollars and flinging it to the four winds.
  4. Hike interest rates to combat the inevitable inflation that you predicted was impossible.*
  5. Bail out the banks that fail due to having all their money stuck in long-term low-yield bonds.
  6. You are here.
  7. Either cut interest rates to save the banks and send inflation soaring, or hike interest rates to fight inflation and set off a new round of bank failures.
  
  * This works by taking money from the middle class, who would otherwise be tempted to spend it, and basically just keeping it.  It doesn't work very well.
  
  
  

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, March 16 2023 10:37 PM (zR9mW)

Posted by: exanter at Friday, March 17 2023 06:48 AM (XPlEl)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 17 2023 11:17 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: exanter at Wednesday, March 22 2023 02:57 AM (XPlEl)

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• OpenAI, the company behind the world's favourite ultra-woke pathological liar digital intern ChatGPT, is back again with GPT4.  (OpenAI)
  
  Yay?
  
  
  
• Reddit went down.  (Engadget)
  
  They fixed it.

• AMD announced its new lineup of embedded server CPUs.  (Serve the Home)
  
  They are the same chips as AMD's non-embedded server CPUs.  Literally.  StH was not impressed.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 4070 will allegedly launch with prices starting at $749.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which would make it pretty much DOA, because the 4070 Ti and AMD's 7900 XT are only $50 more.
  
  
  
• Meta (Facebook, Instagram) is cutting another 10,000 jobs.  (The Register)
  
  And closing 5000 open vacancies.
  
  Sounds like they're not expecting an economic rebound any time soon.
  
  
  
• Netgear's Nighthawk RS700 delivers WiFi 7 for $700.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has 10Gb WAN and LAN ports - though only one of each - and four gigabit ports for some reason.  It's really time for 2.5Gb to become standard on all but low-end equipment, certainly on switches and routers.
  
  WiFi bandwidth is a theoretical 19Gbps, but of course that's divided among all the devices on the network.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 15 2023 11:34 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, March 16 2023 06:51 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 16 2023 10:22 AM (r9O5h)

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• Following swift and decisive action from the federal government, the American banking system is once again on a firm footing and no further troubles are anticipated well fuck.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Shares in First Republic Bank dropped by 62% yesterday and Western Alliance shares dropped by 47%.
  
  Wall Street analyst Robert Kiyosaki, who predicted the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008, said there was no reason for investors to panic but it might be time to stock up on canned food, guns, and ammo.  Well, he said silver and gold, but you can't eat those, or fight off the zombie horde.

• AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7640U looks to be a great chip for thin-and-light laptops.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The U series is rated at a 15W TDP, where the HS chips are 45W and HX are 55W.  The 7640U manages to get within 10% of the fastest laptop chips at an power rating on single-threaded tests, and is 60% faster than the previous generation's 6600U on multi-threaded tests.
  
  It's a 6 core chip, so it's not going to match a 24 core 13980HX, but it's not going to set your pants on fire either.
  
  
  
• How to make ChatGPT provide sources and citations.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is about as productive as asking a chocolate-smeared three-year-old who ate the cake you left out on the counter.
  
  
  
• Hackers stole $197 billion from crypto lender Euler Finance.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Wait, what's that?  Million?  With an M?  Well that's hardly worth reporting, isn't it.  Get back to work.
  
  
  
• Meta - the parent company of Facebook and Instagram - has said fuck NFTs, whose stupid idea was this anyway?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Facebook tried to launch its own blockchain, called Libra, but the project was torpedoed by regulatory requirements.  Support for NFTs was seen as a way to funnel people onto its own blockchain, and now that's gone there's no reason to support something they can't control.
  
  
  
• It's not all bad news, though: Microsoft has laid off its entire AI "ethics and society" team.  (The Verge)
  
  And replaced them with a copy of Asimov's I, Robot which is cheaper and doesn't argue as much.

• Crypto-friendly Signature Bank, with $88 billion in deposits, has gone splut and been taken over by the feds, the third bank failure in a week.  (The Verge)
  
  But there's no risk of contagion and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise they are Nazis.
  
  
  
• Depositors with both Signature and Silicon Valley Banks will be made whole.  (CNN)
  
  Both banks have sufficient assets that this is not expected to cost anything; the FDIC is acting as a receiver.  But the $250,000 limit on insured deposits is effectively dead at this point.  What the fallout of that will be is more complicated.

• The Apex Storage X21 is a PCIe 4.0 x16 card that supports up to 21 M.2 SSDs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That gives you up to 168TB of storage in a single slot, or 84TB with much cheaper 4TB SSDs.
  
  Pricing has not been announced but it won't be cheap.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 14 2023 01:13 AM (LADmw)

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• This just in: Silicon Valley Bank is still splut.
  
  
  
• No, Apple's A17 Bionic mobile CPU is not going to be 59% faster in single-threaded performance than the A16.  (WCCFTech)
  
  As a rule of thumb, CPU performance rises with the square root of the issue width, and complexity and transistor count (and also power consumption) rises with the square of the issue width, so to increase performance by 59% without increasing the clock speed Apple would need to make a chip more than six times larger using six times the power.
  
  Increasing the clock speed by the same amount would have similar effects on power consumption.
  
  And both approaches have limits where requirements zoom off the charts for minimal gains.  You can see this in existing chips, where the 170W Ryzen 7900X is only 7% faster than the 65W 7900 non-X model.
  
  This supposed leak is garbage.

• Pimoroni's DV Stick will use two RP2040 chips to provide a retro-gaming tinkerer's delight.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The RP2040 is the chip in the Raspberry Pi Pico.  It has no video circuitry at all, but it is flexible enough nonetheless to generate and encode an HDMI signal.
  
  That keeps the chip pretty busy, so Pimoroni has added a second RP2040 to act as the CPU while the first is being the the video chip.
  
  Each chip has 256k of RAM, more than enough for old-school games, though the included language of choice is MicroPython rather than Basic.
  
  
  
• At the higher end of the gaming scale, AMD's 7800X3D is almost here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD launched the more expensive 16 core 7950X3D first, knowing that everyone would buy the cheaper 8 core 7800X3D if it were available.  At $449 it averages 20% faster in AMD's admittedly selective benchmarks than Intel's $589 13900K, while also using much less power.
  
  It's slower for heavily multi-threaded tasks - if you want to game and also run particle accelerator data analysis you should go for the 7950X3D.  Unless you live above the Arctic Circle where the 13900K's furnace-like qualities would be a net win.
  
  
  
• Google hired thousands of employees it didn't want or need just to make the company look bigger - and to make them unavailable to competitors.  (Yahoo)
  
  And they just sat there doing nothing while drawing huge salaries.
  
  Allegedly, but it certainly fits the results we've seen from Google in recent years: Nothing.

• Silicon Valley Bank, with $175 billion in deposits, went splut and has been taken over by the FDIC.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This doesn't appear to be the usual Ponzi scheme or outright theft that we have become familiar with in recent years, but instead a good old-fashioned bank run.  SVB apparently held 97% of its $209 billion in assets in long-term mortgage-backed securities.
  
  Which is fine unless rumours start circulating of trouble at your bank and more than 3% of your customers want to withdraw their money at the same time.
  
  Which is exactly what happened.
  
  
  
• SBV is - was - a proper, regulated bank so if you had less than $250k in your account it's insured and you'll have access to it on Monday.  If you had half a billion in there - like Roku - you're not going to be seeing your money any time soon.  (CNBC)
  
  You probably will see your money, since assets significantly exceeded deposits, but now that the government is involved it won't be quick.
  
  
  
• If you were holding funds in the USDC stablecoin you should also start panicking.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Circle - the company running USDC - says it held $3.3 billion in liquid reserves at SBV.  The whole point of a stablecoin is that it is backed 1:1 with cash equivalents at banks, and apparently that was the case, right up until the bank ceased to exist.
  
  The result has been billions of dollars in transfers of USDC and congestion and soaring gas prices on the Ethereum blockchain, which to be fair is what happens any time a gnat farts in the crypto world.

• The EU, being run by retards, effectively banned 8k TVs.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  8k TVs use more power than lower resolution models, and the EU set power consumption limits that would require 8k TVs to run at miserably low brightness settings.
  
  So Samsung, not being run by retards, set its 8k TVs in Europe to run at miserably low brightness settings out of the box, with a button to turn off the crippling eco mode, which since it's an action by the individual and not the company does not violate the regulations.
  
  
  
• G.Skill has announced 8GHz 24GB DDR5 memory modules.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Pricing was not announced.  It will be interesting to see what it costs - and what voltage it runs at - because that is faster than LPDDR5X laptop memory.

• Need a workstation with 120 cores, four high-end Nvidia graphics cards, 2TB if RAM, and 28TB of SSD, but you also want it to look cool?  Lenovo has you covered.  (AnandTech)
  
  As long as someone else is paying, because that configuration will cost over $100k.
  
  They do have smaller, cheaper models, but none of them are actually small or cheap.

• If you want to build a small, cheap workstation/server - for example in a discontinued Silverstone case that arrived at your door yesterday - here are a couple of tips.
  
  Gigabyte's B650I is a solid motherboard with three M.2 slots, four SATA ports, and 2.5Gb Ethernet.  It can drive three displays over DisplayPort, HDMI, and USB-C (one of each).
  
  That's an AMD motherboard, but AMD CPUs use less power than Intel, even when they have the same 65W power rating.  The 7900 for example peaks at 89W, and is 50% faster than the 13500 which peaks at 151W.  Not a drama in a desktop system but these cases are quite small and will be packed full of drives, so I want something relatively low power.
  
  Silverstone, the same company that made the case, also makes an M.2 SATA controller.  The case can hold eight drives, and the motherboard only has four SATA ports, so this is handy.  There are other models, but this one comes with a chunky heatsink, which is apparently a necessity if you want these little controllers to work consistently.
  
  And if you want something faster than the built-in 2.5Gb Ethernet, since the PCIe slot is still free you can add a dual 25Gb Ethernet card for about $80.  Which is crazy overkill for a small server like this but the price can't be beat.  25Gb switches aren't cheap but it will work fine with 10Gb SFP+ switches or RJ45 transceivers.  (25Gb Ethernet uses SFP28, which is not the same as SFP+, but is backwards compatible.)
  
  
  
• The Solidigm P44 Pro seems like a decent SSD if you can find one for a decent price.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Who the hell is Solidigm?  Well, a while ago Intel sold its consumer SSD division to Korean group SK Hynix.  This is them.
  
  Also, Nextorage is Sony.  Why they don't just call it Sony I don't know.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, March 11 2023 06:02 PM (BzEjn)

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• A team at the University of Rochester has discovered the Holy Grail of physics - one of the Holy Grails of physics, for there are many - a substance that acts as a room temperature superconductor.  (Science)
  
  Or so they say.  Nobody trusts them because they're not releasing the details, and Nature retracted a paper from the same group last year after nobody could replicate the results and they refused to release any more data.
  
  It looks like this one is just warmed-over cold fusion.
  
  Quanta also has a writeup of the story that may be more accessible.

• ASRock Rack has a new server motherboard for Ryzen 7000, with dual built-in 10Gb Ethernet ports and 8 SATA ports.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's microATX, but if they release a mini-ITX version - and they did for Ryzen 5000 - I'll buy two of them.
  
  
  
• AMD's 7745HX appears to be as fast as Intel's 13700HX.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 7745HX is the low end of the high-end Dragon Range family of laptop chips, with 8 cores; the 13700HX has 16 cores (8P + 8E).
  
  On the other hand, the 7745HX uses 50W when playing games, which is a lot for a laptop chip, where the 13700HX uses 80W.
  
  Oh.  That's the same hand.
  
  
  
• GDDR7 uses PAM3.  (AnandTech)
  
  GDDR7 is the next generation of memory for video cards, and will be about 50% faster than the latest current GDDR6X (and twice as fast as typical GDDR6).
  
  PAM3 is more interesting: It's trinary.  It runs at three voltages, -1, 0, and 1.  This allows three bits to be encoded as two signals - there are nine possible values and 0, 0 is treated as an error.
  
  The upcoming USB 4 v2 (which will hopefully become USB 5 before it arrives) also uses PAM3 to reach speeds of 80Gbps, twice as fast as regular USB 4.

Posted by: normal at Friday, March 10 2023 12:36 AM (LADmw)

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