• I went out to the shops this evening for the first time in about three weeks.
  
  The process was slightly complicated by the fact that I threw out my shoes last weekend. At the time this seemed like a reasoanable thing to do, as (a) the heels had pretty much disintegrated and (b) I had at least four unworn pairs of shoes in the Strategic Shoe Repository at the bottom of the closet.
  
  I picked a pair of brown lace-ups, laced them up, and made it about two blocks before they fell apart.
  
  Not good.
  
  Trudged back home again and took a closer look at the remaining pairs. Turned out that I hadn't got a faulty pair; rather they'd been sitting there so long that the soles had denatured somehow and were only slightly stronger than damp cardboard. That's likely what did in the previous pair as well.
  
  Fortunately the fourth and final pair were made of a different material and were in good shape, so I did eventually make it to my destination and restock on gluten-free chicken nuggets and mi goreng and other essentials. You know you're eating the fancy ramen when it comes with five little sachets of stuff.
  
  Everything was open, including the RSL club, and pretty busy. Unlike Melbourne which right now is in total lockdown, again.
  
  This second wave is no joke though; it's killed nearly as many people as the first wave and much more quickly. Interstate travel has been largely halted until Victoria can get things back under control. I give it thirty years.
  
  
  
• Philosphers discuss GPT-3. (Daily Nous)
  
  
  
• GPT-3 discusses philosphers. (Pastebin)
  
  
  
• Hacker News dicusses GPT-3 discussing philosophers discussing GPT-3. (Hacker News)
  

  One consequence of GPT-3 is that I am now highly sceptical of the human provenance of any HN comment on an article about GPT-3. It has made my HN experience objectively less enjoyable, because I’m constantly expending effort to spot nonsense and avoid wasting time reading it.
  
  Perhaps most worrying is not how "human-like” GPT-3 can be, but how "GPT-3 like” humans can be. When I am in "nonsense-detection” mode, I drill down into paragraphs to spot non-sequiturs etc and I find plenty of HN comments are rambling, contradictory, or I just can’t ascertain the meaning of the text.

  Yeah, pretty much.
  
  
  
• GPT-3 channels Harlan Ellison by way of Fritz Leiber. (0bin)
  
  The first paragraph was provided as a writing prompt. The rest is GPT-3.
  
  
  
• Looking at all this, you start to wonder how much of philosphy consists of deepities and the unvoidable conclusion is that it's deepities all the way down.

  We are all trapped in a cycle of life and death. Death is merciful. It brings an end to the suffering. We should embrace it when it comes.
  
  In other news, GPT-3 also seems to have a deep interest in art.

  
  
• Envoy is a proxy sort of thing. (EnvoyProxy)
  
  It's what I'd call an application router. The idea is that you run an instance of Envoy alongside each of your applications. Your application listens and sends all its requests to localhost and doesn't need to know anything about where other services actually live.
  
  It handles HTTP, of course, but also MongoDB and Redis and PostgreSQL and generic TCP sockets.
  
  
  
• Amazon has received the go-ahead to launch 3236 satellites. (The Verge)
  
  I'm so old I remember when that was a lot.
  
  
  
• Sort by controversial. (Slate Star Codex)
  
  Three thoughts:
  
  1. This is a great idea for a new social network if you want to watch the world burn.
  2. It's probably fiction.
  3. It's probably not written by GPT-3.
  
  
  
• Thanks for nagging me, Font Awesome.
  
  No, seriously.  I've been so busy the past week that I forgot about the 50% off FA 6 offer for backers of the FA 5 Kickstarter.  Grabbed it with 11 hours to go.
  
  $49 per year (regularly $99) for all their icons for five seats.  I'd forgotten that part; makes it a great deal for small companies with a few developers / designers.

• So, you decided to post this.
  
  
  
  
  Turns out I'm not the first person to think of the term cervixen in response to this nonsense.

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, August 01 2020 01:09 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 01 2020 06:11 AM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The Boothole bootloader vulnerability allows the Grub bootloader to execute arbitrary code.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Since that is the entire purpose of a bootloader, in most cases this means absolutely nothing.  But if you are running UEFI Secure Boot, this pokes a hole in it.
  
  On the third hand, you need to have root privileges to install this.
  
  
  
• Real Capitalism 2.0 has never been tried.
  
  What a depressingly stupid article.  Socialists: Identifying real problems and making them worse since 1867.
  
  
  
• You wouldn't download a Mac.  (GitHub)
  
  I mean, you can if you want.  The whole thing is only 239MB and it runs on pretty much anything.  Well, not itself, but apart from that.
  
  
  
• Big Navi is big.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Leaks suggest 128 CUs - 8192 shaders - running at over 2GHz, more than twice as fast as anything AMD has produced to date, even ignoring the architectural improvements from Vega to Navi.
  
  As for when and how much, the leaks say HPC systems with 8 of the new cards will be available next March.  No prices and no details of consumer GPUs.
  
  
  
• It's just a flesh wound.  (ZDNet)
  
  Arm fired the CEO of their Chinese joint venture over conflicts of interest - specifically that he was running his own competing investment fund.
  
  The CEO came up with a novel defense: He simply says he hasn't been fired.

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, July 31 2020 01:43 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, August 01 2020 02:46 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 01 2020 06:12 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 01 2020 06:14 AM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• According to Wikipedia, all DDR5 memory modules are registered.
  
  I took a quick look at the docs released by Micron, and they only discuss registered modules, but don't explicitly say that unbuffered modules don't / won't exist.
  
  If they are all registered - and we already know that DDR5 mandates on-die ECC - then there's little difference between desktop RAM and server RAM.  Just full-channel ECC in case of bus errors, and LR (load reduced) modules for maximum die stacking.
  
  I'm not certain if DDR5 being registered will work exactly as it does with DDR4, but if it does then the next generation of desktop CPUs will support at least twice as much memory, without needing to wait years for denser DRAM.
  
  Which means that the next-plus-one generation of even entry-level servers will likely support up to 32 cores and 256GB of RAM.
  
  
  
• Zen 3 is due this year.  (AnandTech)
  
  Speak the name three times and it will appear.
  
  This means both server and desktop parts.  Also next-generation Navi cards for both gaming and datacenter use.  Oh, and Xbox Series X and Playstation 5.  It will be a busy few months for AMD.
  
  
  
• A passively-cooled 10Gb home server/router from Supermicro for only $1500.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's no Cobalt Qube.
  
  
  
• Two of Intel's next-generation Ice Lake Xeons beat a single current-generation Epyc.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  By 7%.  If you use AVX-512, which Epyc doesn't have.  Will wait for more benchmarks, because Ice Lake should be a significant upgrade, if and when it ever arrives.
  
  
  
• Someone needs to explain to physicists that humans don't live in trees.  (Vice)
  
  
  
• A lot has been written about the technological singularity.  My view is that (a) it's impossible (at least the way it is depicted in science fiction) and (b) as far as it is possible, it is happening right now which is part of the reason everything is so fucking weird.
  
  I'm not the only one to make that observation.  (Less Wrong)
  
  Also of interest is this article about the potential speed of the singularity.  (Sideways View)
  
  The two things to expect when it really kicks into gear, is rapid shifting in the labour market leading to high unemployment, and at the same time, global GDP growth in the mid double digits.
  
  The key point of the notiong of the Singularity, though, is that at some point the trends go literally vertical, and that prediction of what things will be like on the other side of that point on the graph are impossible.  That is exactly what I predict will not happen, though if I'm wrong no-one will ever know.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 30 2020 01:56 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 30 2020 01:57 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 30 2020 02:04 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 30 2020 02:07 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 30 2020 02:12 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Jay at Thursday, July 30 2020 02:39 AM (0jVI9)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 30 2020 07:28 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 30 2020 09:37 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 30 2020 11:06 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 30 2020 11:16 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 30 2020 11:18 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 30 2020 11:44 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Intel's Chief Engineering Officer has gotten the boot following five years of nothing.  (AnandTech)
  
  He features significantly in AdoredTV's latest video as the source of much of the internal politics that has derailed Intel these last few years.
  
  
  
  I have no independent information so I don't know if he's the cause of the problems, a convenient scapegoat, or a voluntary sacrifice to appease investors.
  
  
  
• On the other hand there is now an i9-10850K.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is a 10900K only 100MHz slower and $35 cheaper.  I wonder how scaling it back just 100MHz affects power consumption.  I suspect the difference may be quite substantial.
  
  
  
• A spiritual successor to the wildly popular Suikoden series - which I have never played - launched on Kickstarter and immediately crashed the entire site.  (Kickstarter)
  
  Three times, apparently.
  
  Despite that it was fully funded inside three hours and is now at three times its initial goal of Â¥53,808,516.  Which seems oddly specific.  Oh, and has already unlocked seven stretch goals.
  
  
  
• Intel may or may not be outsourcing fabrication of their discrete GPUs to TSMC.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It would make more sense to do this with a brand new product with no existing market than with any of their core products, and TSMC is very familiar with producing GPUs.
  
  
  
• Intel's Ice Pickle.  (Serve the Home)
  
  AMD's second-generation Epyc Rome parts, launched last year, were intended to head off Intel's 10nm Ice Lake Xeons.
  
  Rome launched on schedule.  Ice Lake didn't, still hasn't, and has only been promised to trickle out in limited quantities before the end of the year.  At which time AMD will be shipping the Zen 3 based...  Genoa?  Venice?  San Marino?  Milan, that's it.
  
  Which leaves Intel in a bind because their storage, networking, and FPGA divisions have started producing PCIe 4.0 devices, but the only x86 CPUs available with PCIe 4.0 are from AMD.
  
  
  
• S3 considered harmful.  (Twilio)
  
  Why, yes, a cloud storage option that can be accidentally configured to be writeable by the entire fucking internet is a sensible idea that the world's largest cloud services provider should definitely offer.
  
  
  
• Arm-based Macs will change the world.  (ZDNet)
  
  
  
• Arm-based Macs are irrelevant - even to Apple.  (ZDNet)
  
  Clearly ZDNet got their writers to do these two articles as a deliberately provcative pair, but the first one comes across as, frankly, slightly insane.
  
  
  
• Campbell's Law.  (Wikipedia)
  

  The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

  This is very close to one of Pixy's Laws - or at least a point I've discussed in relation to Google's Pagerank algorithm and its role in creating the entire comment spam industry.
  
  Not really surprising that someone pointed it out decades before me.
  
  Slightly surprising that I learned of this specific formulation from a left-wing educator explaining why left-wing education policy (which is to say, all education policy) so often does more harm than good.
  
  
  

Pixy Is Currently Reading

Otome Game no Hametsu Flag shika nai Akuyaku Reijou ni Tensei shite shimatta... a.k.a Bakarina and Jishou Akuyaku Reijou na Konyakusha no Kansatsu Kiroku a.k.a Bertia.

They're isekai / otome manga where the heroine is stuck in the role of the main villain.  Both girls work tirelessly to make things work out okay in the worlds they find themselves trapped in, hampered only by the fact that they collectively have the IQ of dish soap.

Wakfu Music Video of the Day

• The One Plus Nord delivers $450 worth of phone for $450.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Six cameras and a flat screen, but no headphone jack or microSD slot, so fuck 'em. 
  
  Also, not something you'd want to leave in your back pocket.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not currently for sale in the US anyway.
  
  
  
  Warning: Do not watch the above video.
  
  
  
• The Ryzen 4750G's graphics are faster than the Xbox One or Playstation 4.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Interesting benchmarks included, highlighting that yes, the GPU side delivers over 2 TFLOPS, but the CPU side is not shabby at all with over 1 TFLOPS.  In double-precision mode the CPU is four times faster than the GPU.
  
  
  
• PHP 8 supports named arguments.  (Stitcher.io)
  
  Congratulations, PHP!  You've caught up with ALGOL 60.  In one specific area, anyway; you're worse at everything else.
  
  
  
• Well, that wasn't predictable at all.  (ZDNet)
  
  Step 1: Store your code on a public web service, where your only protection is authentication.
  Step 2: Grant authentication token to a third party to gather code analytics.
  Step 3: Third party gets hacked.
  
  
  
• Dave's not here, man.  (ZDNet)
  
  Step 4: Now that hackers have access to your code, they can comb through it for weak points or accidentally leaked tokens.
  Step 5: You get hacked.
  
  

Posted by: Jay at Tuesday, July 28 2020 02:47 AM (0jVI9)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 28 2020 05:03 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 28 2020 08:14 PM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• This video card will leak in 100 20 days.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Since it's Intel's Xe graphics we're talking about, and word is that political infighting has already killed off any hope of dedicated cards this decade, no-pne much cares.
  
  
  
• Intel's share price declined 16% after reporting another quarter of record profits.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Because the other thing they reported is that 7nm is a mess, just like 10nm.  It looks like Intel will be stuck on 14nm for the bulk of their products even longer than AMD was stuck on 28nm.
  
  
  
• I feel pretty comfortable in predicting that we won't be seeing hydrogen-fueled Airbuses (Airbi?) in the next decade.  (AIN Online)
  
  Hydrogen is a pain to work with.
  
  
  
• European outraged to discover rest of world.
  
  Turns out you can avoid the impact of European laws by the simple tactic of not being European.

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 27 2020 03:03 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 27 2020 11:09 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, July 28 2020 11:05 AM (4i7w0)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The Fairness Doctrine must end now.  (TechDirt)
  
  Never tiring of righting wrongs that aren't happening and excusing wrongs that are.
  
  I'm about to drop them from my list of sources as they're rapidly turning into a mirror image of One Angry Gamer.
  
  
  
• Rocket Lake may hit 5GHz.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is Intel's 11th generation and it's not Skylake this time, it's Icelake or Sunny Cove or Emu Plains or some such nonsense.  Anyway, finally a significantly updated architecture with real IPC gains.
  
  It will apparently be a bit slower than the 10900K in some respects (down from 5.3GHz and 10 cores to 5GHz and 8 cores) but the IPC gains are estimated at 18% so it is better overall for most use cases.
  
  Still at 14nm and still probably eats electricity like a moose eats spirulina, but them's the breaks.  It should give Intel a clear lead on single-threaded performance for the time being.  Zen 3 will likely overtake the 10900K, but not the whatever they call the new chip is.
  
  
  
• In the interests of creating a safe space for all our readers, we are kindly asking our readers to get fucked.  (Distractify)
  
  We in this case is Yahoo, who have just nuked their commenting system because, apparently, people were using it to comment.
  
  
  
• The Chuwi Larkbox now comes with a free mini keyboard / controller / thing.  (Indiegogo)
  
  Was thinking about this the other day, because if you just take it and add a very stripped down version of Linux that boots straight into FreeBASIC, you have an instant retrocomputer, except that it has working HDMI and wifi and is really really fast.
  
  Well, almost.  I don't think FreeBASIC has an interactive mode; you'd have to write that.  But you could do that in FreeBASIC.
  
  
  
• What is ReactiveX?  (ReactiveX)
  
  No idea, sorry.  I read that page twice and still don't know.
  
  
  
• Ethereum is still fucked.
  
  
  
  
  62 is better than 100, the same way that a .45 to the chest is better than a .50.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, July 26 2020 01:09 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 26 2020 01:13 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, July 26 2020 09:56 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 27 2020 11:07 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Intel's 7nm process is a year behind schedule.  (AnandTech)
  
  Desktop 7nm is now expected by the end of 2022, with server parts in 2023 - more than three years behind AMD.
  
  This is a driving factor behind Intel's "Foveros" die stacking technology.  If you're tightly constrained on your leading-edge process, breaking out I/O functions to a second chiplet produced on an older process in plentiful supply has a multitude of benefits.
  
  It's probably possible to build a 64-core Zen processor on a single die, but shipping it in volume is an entirely different question.
  
  And despite these problems, Intel just posted another record quarterly profit.
  
  
  
• Putting the new Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs through their paces.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're not slow.  CPU side competes with Intel's brand new 10700K, and graphics side can play League of Legends - admittedly not the most GPU intensive game - at over 100FPS on max settings at 4K.
  
  
  
• Prices for the 4000 Pro desktop APUs have also leaked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's a shame you can't buy them because they're pretty good value.  The 6 core / 7 CU 4650G Pro comes in at $209, just $10 more than the 3600 Pro without GPU.
  
  
  
• The reason I'm so hyped for the Ryzen APUs is that this is just the beginning.  At 5nm, with DDR5 RAM, AMD will be able to double everything - 16 cores and 16 CUs - while keeping the die size the same and still keeping TDP under control.
  
  The 15W Zen 2 laptop chips are already faster than my 65W Zen 1 desktop CPU, and when AMD starts shipping 5nm parts they'll be Zen 3 if not Zen 4.
  
  A 16 CU Navi IGP would still be slower than my current RX 580, but would certainly not be slow.
  
  Going much beyond that would require either a large graphics cache or more memory channels - which is what we see in the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5.  Both of those are really just Ryzen APUs with large IGPs.
  
  A Ryzen APU with quad-channel DDR5 would deliver gaming performance not far behind those consoles, but I'm not sure if the market is ready for it.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 25 2020 11:32 PM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro provides near flagship specs for just €999.  (AnandTech)
  
  Yay, I guess.
  
  
  
• Shoulda bought AMD stock back in 2016.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Of course, had no money back in 2016.
  
  AMD has its earnings call next week, and will likely give us hints of future goodies to fuel uninformed speculation by tech bloggers.  Cough cough.
  
  
  
• TechDirt is not partisan.  (TechDirt)
  
  Whenever you see a publication insist that it is not partisan, you know you have at most three paragraphs before they accuse Trump of putting children in cages.
  
  
  
• Why Google needs a $99 tablet.  (ZDNet)
  
  I'd settle for $199 if it's any good.  (The article gives a reasonable list of requirements and says $150, despite the headline.)
  
  
  
• Every problem I have with PyPy is due to its garbage collection.
  
  Case in point: If you use partials inside a loop in a Mustache template and process it through Pystache under PyPy, it can be an order of magnitude slower than CPython, despite the fact that PyPy averages 4.4x faster than CPython across a broad suite of benchmarks.  (And indeed outside of this specific case, Pystache is 4.5x faster under PyPy than CPython.)
  
  Another case in point: PyPy uses far more memory than Python.  Simple tasks that work fine under Python can leak gigabytes of memory and get the attention of the OOMK if you're not paying attention.
  
  I'm not sure how central to PyPy's performance that choice of garbage collection algorithm is to PyPy's performance, but it's annoying since it really has no other major flaws.  (Startup time for the JIT aside.)
  
  On the other hand, I was able to shave 1.5 seconds off the load time of a web application at my day job this afternoon.  We migrated servers a couple of months ago, from aging physical servers to the cloud, and in the process replaced EOL'd CPython 2.7 with still-supported PyPy 7.2.  This one app had been slow ever since, and today I finally got time to go down that rabbit hole.
  
  
  
• In the fuck this shit department:
  
  
  
  
  We have Ethereum integrations into several of our apps at my day job.  Those integrations start to have problems when the gas price is above 4, and stop working when it's above 10 unless someone manually intervenes.
  
  Fortunately, at a gas price of 100 nobody's Ethereum integrations are working.  It's like using Amazon or Cloudflare - if they go down, so does half the internet, so no-one blames you for it.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 24 2020 11:20 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 24 2020 11:26 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 24 2020 02:32 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 24 2020 02:38 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Metacritic sees its new role as defending terrible games that no-one likes.  (Engadget)
  
  Mere mortals who actually paid for the game will be required to wait 36 hours before submitting their reviews.  The useful idiots of the gaming press are under no such restrictions, of course.
  
  
  
• You can't get the Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs just yet, but that hasn't stopped people overclocking them.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In this case the victim was a 4750G Pro and the target was the memory bus, which got cranked all the way up to 6234 MHz.  That's quite a lot.
  
  The 4000 series APUs are designed to work in laptops with soldered LPDDR4X memory at 4266MHz, so evidently the memory controller has been significantly upgraded.  Another 3% and it will be at DDR5 speeds.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile ASRock looks set to release an updated embedded computer board based on Ryzen 4000 laptop parts.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Their existing embedded boards are based on Ryzen Embedded processors, which are first-generation 14nm parts.  Not bad, but both significantly slower and more power-hungry than the latest chips.
  
  
  
• 10.16 == 11 if you're Apple.  (Eclectic Light)
  
  Apps running the latest version of MacOS will return the OS version as either 10.16 or 11 depending on how they are compiled.  That's not going to cause any problems.
  
  
  
• Sabrent has a 4TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD available for just...  US$750?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I mean, the price isn't terrible, but - wait, QLC?  Hell no.