• There's not a lot of tech news this week so I'm going to mention another government that has fucked things up (though not destroyed the entire country): The average household energy bill in Britain is expected to soar from £1,300 to £3,300 in the space of a year.  (BBC News)
  
  That's with price controls.  The article mentions that 30 energy companies have gone broke due to soaring gas prices but doesn't say why the one would lead to the other.  But if costs go up and the price you can charge is limited by government fiat, you are going to go out of business.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile here in Australia it took our new center-left government two weeks to create an energy crisis and our own soaring prices.  And here's me moving to a much larger all-electric house in a much colder climate in the middle of winter just as electricity prices spike to new records.  Yay.

• Alibaba's new 128-core Arm server CPU is a little faster than AMD's existing 64-core chips.  (Serve the Home)
  
  If it weren't, they'd have a problem.
  
  
  
• Axie Infinity got hacked - and lost $620 million worth of Monopoly money - from a fake job offer posted by North Korea.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• The Nokia T10 is a pretty solid small Android tablet except for the low-resolution screen.  (Liliputing)
  
  WHY DO THEY DO THAT?
  
  It has dual A75 cores and six A55 cores, which would make it much faster than my Lenovo Tab M8 FHD, but the screen is 1280x800.  My 2013 Nexus 7 was 1920x1200.
  
  
  
• Is the NZCT N5 Z690 a good motherboard?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No, not particularly.
  
  
  
  

• Not strictly tech news and the blog has covered this but Sri Lanka just collapsed due to insufficient poop and it was all predicted back in March.  (Foreign Policy)
  
  Bubble-dwelling cretins decided to ban the artificial fertilisers essential to feeding the world (which is where Sri Lanka is located) and also to the country's economy, dependent as it is on agricultural exports, insisting that "organic" farming methods would survive, when everybody knows that this is quite literally impossible because there's not enough poop to go around.
  
  Because that's what organic farming runs on.  Everyone knew there wasn't enough poop and said so, but Sri Lanka's government insisted it would create that poop.

  From the moment the plan was announced, agronomists in Sri Lanka and around the world warned that agricultural yields would fall substantially. The government claimed it would increase the production of manure and other organic fertilizers in place of imported synthetic fertilizers. But there was no conceivable way the nation could produce enough fertilizer domestically to make up for the shortfall.

  They're just getting warmed up:

  While the proximate cause of Sri Lanka’s humanitarian crisis was a bungled attempt to manage its economic fallout from the global pandemic, at the bottom of the political problem was a math problem and at the bottom of the math problem was an ideological problem—or, more accurately, a global ideological movement that is innumerate and unscientific by design, promoting fuzzy and poorly specified claims about the possibilities of alternative food production methods and systems to obfuscate the relatively simple biophysical relationships that govern what goes in; what comes out; and the economic, social, and political outcomes that any agricultural system can produce, whether on a regional, national, or global scale.

  "Organic" produce is food for the privileged (and indoctrinated) few.  It is completely untenable as a substitute for modern scientific farming and everyone knew that.  
  
  But well-funded Western advocacy groups kept pushing for it - keep pushing for it - regardless, as we see right now in the Netherlands.

• A photographer catalogued everything she owned.  (PetaPixel)
  
  12,795 items.  Now a book.

  The total value of all the objects in Iweins’ house is estimated to be €123,169, and 37 percent of her Playmobil figures are bald.

  Playmobil pattern baldness is no laughing matter.
  
  
  
• You will always have more problems than engineers.  (Better Programming)
  
  Because, as the article points out, the default state of the world is chaos.  Any semblance of order comes from one of two sources: Never-ending hard work, and crystal formation.
  
  
  
• A prebuilt gaming PC with a fast CPU and GPU, plenty of RAM and SSD, an attractive case, effective and quiet cooling, and immaculate cable management.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  What's the catch?
  
  It costs $4799.

1 Those kittens certainly rocketed to fame, didn't they

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, July 12 2022 11:07 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 12 2022 11:55 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Wednesday, July 13 2022 06:38 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 13 2022 08:05 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, July 13 2022 10:00 AM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 13 2022 06:45 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 14 2022 03:13 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 14 2022 03:24 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 14 2022 03:40 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, July 16 2022 12:23 PM (2tHvf)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Elasticsearch is the QNAP of databases.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Mangatoon (who) got breached and the details of 23 million users exfiltrated, including auth tokens from social networks.
  
  I think if you run Elasticsearch on a QNAP NAS the universe might spontaneously reboot.
  
  
  
• Netflix to staff: Shut up and do your jobs.  (The Verge)

  In the Google doc, one person commented, "In Ted’s email to directors, he calls out that Dave Chappelle is ‘one of our most popular comedians today’ and his last special is ‘our most watched, stickiest, and award winning stand up special to date.’ My interpretation of this message is that sticky metrics outweigh the possibility of harm. Is that a fair interpretation of that email?”

  Days passed, and the question remained unanswered.

  The answer is, shut up and do your job.  Or don't.  You can be replaced.  Probably by a hamster.

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 11 2022 09:33 PM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Me: I am absolutely unavailable this weekend even if there's an emergency.
  Work: We have an emergency.
  Me: ...
  
  
  
• Monday, this is a $25 stock.  (NBC News)
  
  Twitter's board, which fought desperately against Musk's takeover bid, claiming it severely overvalued undervalued the company, is now fighting desperately to enforce the offer.
  
  Good luck with that lawsuit, guys.  Discovery is a female dog.
  
  
  

Tech News

• ASRock's DeskMeet is a compact desktop PC but not that compact.  (Liliputing)
  
  Available in AMD and Intel versions (the Intel model is better) for around $200, it includes the case, a 500W power supply, and a mini-ITX motherboard.  Which interestingly features four RAM slots, not at all common on mini-ITX boards.  You add the CPU, RAM, and storage yourself.
  
  It has room for a small video card - two slots wide, full height, and up to 8" long.  Which makes sense because the case is very roughly an 8" cube.
  
  The one notable shortcoming is that it only ships with gigabit Ethernet, not the 2.5Gbit that is finally becoming standard.
  
  
  
• Well yes, but actually no.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• RISC-V has shipped 10 billion cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Is that a lot?
  
  Which reminds me of one of the common elements of post-apocalyptic fiction, where there are no computers anymore and everyone has to rely on whatever it was we relied on before computers.
  
  I forget.
  
  Anyway, yes.  The slowest RISC-V core is probably a thousand times faster than the Apple II and there are more of them around than there are people, and RISC-V is still a relatively minor player in the market.  
  
  As of last year, 180 billion Arm chips had shipped from dozens of companies, many with multiple cores, with around 2 billion more chips being produced every month.
  
  
  
• Do not dumb here.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Both sides could have handled that better, I think.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 10 2022 11:14 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, July 11 2022 05:50 AM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 12 2022 11:59 PM (BMUHC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Elon Musk has notified Twitter he is breaking off the engagement after Twitter failed three times in a row to solve that captcha where you have to identify all the squares containing traffic lights.  (CNBC)
  
  Twitter has vowed to sue and says it will prevail because it can do the one with the taxis, two times out of three.

• The HP Pavilion 14 Plus looks like a solid laptop.  (Thurott.com)
  
  Starting around $700 with the top configuration at $1300, it's not a bargain item but it's not overpriced.  It's available with 10, 12, and 14 core CPUs (Intel Alder Lake, so they all have 8 low-power cores), and RTX 2050 graphics in one model.
  
  Display is choice between a 2240x1400 LCD and a 2800x1800 OLED, either one a solid choice, and it has a reasonable selection of ports thought they're somehow all on the wrong side.  I guess if you're left-handed, your time has finally come.  The Four Essential Keys are all present and correct as well.
  
  Only real flaw is that it's limited to 16GB of RAM (soldered to the motherboard), and that's only a flaw if you're a software developer running ac complex IDE or something like that.
  
  
  
• Intel has new NUC laptop kits on the way.  (Liliputing)
  
  The previous generation came with a choice of RTX 3060 or 3070 graphics and were generally quite sold mid-range laptops.  You have to provide your own RAM, SSD, and operating system, but on the other hand that means they are designed to let you open them up and install your own RAM, SSD, and operating system, which is huge.  In the HP laptop above for example, the RAM is soldered in place and if my experience with recent HP models is any guide, the SSD is a real bitch to replace.
  
  Four Essential Keys too.
  
  The problem - potentially - is that these new models come with Intel's new Arc graphics chips, which are, shall we say, unproven.

Posted by: andycanuck at Saturday, July 09 2022 10:46 PM (yikp0)

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, July 10 2022 12:24 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 10 2022 09:27 AM (BMUHC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• You will own nothing and honestly we don't care whether you like it, part one: Sony is deleting movies "bought" via the PlayStation Store in Germany and Austria.  (FlatPanelsHD)
  
  The alternative would be for them to pay to retain the license for products they ostensibly sold on to customers in perpetuity, and that is simply not on the cards.
  
  Nor is there any mention of refunds.
  
  
  
• You will own nothing and honestly we don't care whether you like it, part two: Google's "Democratic AI" is better at redistributing wealth than America.  (Motherboard)
  
  Well, I would hope so.  Though if it were worse, perhaps we could learn from it, because a key factor that makes America great is not redistributing wealth.
  
  Players in the game that tested this algorithm preferred it because it was a game and they didn't have to look at their paycheck each month and see what the government had stolen.
  
  On top of that, of course, is the fact that we've known for nearly a century that redistributing wealth doesn't work.  Writing in 1926, JBS Haldane - himself a socialist - pointed out that socialism cannot possibly work on the scale of the modern nation state.  San Marino or Andorra, maybe, but not much beyond that.
  
  If Google had a million players in that game, the redistribution would either be grossly and obviously unfair, or take far longer to calculate than playing the game itself, like ending a turn late in a game of Civilization.
  
  Or both.  There's no solution to the problem, but it's always possible to make it worse.

• Florida once again has giant calamitous snails that spew parasitic brain worms.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Their names are Nikki and Rebekah.
  
  
  
• Twitter says it removes over one million spam accounts per day.  (Reuters)
  
  And a whole lot of innocent victims too.
  
  The company says that spam and bot accounts constitute less than 5% of the users who are presented with advertising, which is not what anyone was asking.  I mean, that's good in that they are not defrauding the advertisers who pay to keep the whole mess running, or at least not much, but it doesn't answer at all how many spam accounts are active on the site.
  
  
  
• You will no longer need a Facebook account to use the Oculus Rift VR headset.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Instead you can simply use any Meta login.
  
  ...
  
  Meta is Facebook.
  
  
  
• QNAP.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Billions of years from now when the Sun has expanded into a red giant and boiled away Earth's oceans and atmosphere leaving a charred cinder, QNAP engineers will still be filing weekly disclosures of critical vulnerabilities and recommending that their users disconnect their devices from the internet.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 08 2022 09:48 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 09 2022 12:12 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 09 2022 12:15 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 09 2022 01:36 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 09 2022 01:37 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 09 2022 01:46 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, July 09 2022 07:12 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 09 2022 11:34 AM (BMUHC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Posted by: sunny-dee at Thursday, July 07 2022 09:40 PM (Z2HD7)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 07 2022 09:40 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: sunny-dee at Thursday, July 07 2022 09:41 PM (Z2HD7)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 07 2022 01:35 PM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Side note: A number of people asked - reasonably enough - why on Earth I would take a variable rate home loan rather than locking in historically low interest rates with a 30 year fixed mortgage.
  
  The reason is, so far as I can tell, 30 year fixed rate mortgages are a uniquely American creation.  They simply don't exist in Australia.  The closest thing I could find here is a 10 year mortgage at 7.45%, when my variable rate loan is currently at 3.15%.
  
  That rate will be going up again after the latest Reserve Bank announcement here, but it would have to go up a lot to match the fixed rate.
  
  
  
• Also, thanks - a few people pointed me at CZUR scanners, and that does look like the way to go.
  
  
  
• Closer to home but not much the EU has declared war on Apple.  (MacRumors)
  
  More specifically they've adopted legislation requiring big tech companies (including but not limited to Apple and Google) to allow developers to use third party payment providers (killing the 30% cut they take of every transaction) and access all services provided by the hardware device if given permission by the user.
  
  Users meanwhile are covered by a requirement to allow third-party app stores and sideloading.  Not a drama for Android, but a huge change for iOS.
  
  Apple would also not be able to force developers to use the Safari web engine, and manufacturers and carriers would not be allowed to pre-install applications that the user cannot remove.
  
  Cue a great wailing and a gnashing of teeth from the Bay Area.
  
  Just a few short years ago I would have decried this as massive government overreach, but Big Tech pooped their bed and now they must lie in it.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Bun is a JavaScript and TypeScript packaging tool, transpiler, and runtime, written in Zig.  (Bun)
  
  It transpiles your JavaScript code to C, and since you might not have a C compiler handy, embeds one in your code just to be safe.
  
  On the one hand this is insane; on the other hand it is three times faster than Node.js.
  
  On the third hand Node.js is the single worst thing humanity has created.
  
  
  
• Congratulations!  You have solved philosophy.  (Neal.fun)
  
  My kill count was 93 but I'm sure you can do better.
  
  
  
• The QNAP TS-h1290FX is a 12-bay desktop NAS with everything.  (Serve the Home)
  
  On the one hand, QNAP.  On the other hand, it ships with 2x 2.5Gb and 2x 25Gb Ethernet as standard, and runs an AMD Epyc CPU with at least 64GB of ECC RAM.  On the third hand the 25Gb Ethernet ports are SFP+, 25GBASE-T and Cat 8 cables not being exactly commonplace at this juncture.
  
  On the fourth hand it has four PCIe slots - 3 x8 and one x16 - so you have plenty of upgrade room.  On the fifth hand, it's aimed at NVMe SSDs, not hard drives.  The article says "One can utilize SATA as well" but it's not clear if that's the neuter indefinite pronoun or a specific count, which would be very different.
  
  Goes and checks.
  
  It is the neuter indefinite pronoun, but also those are 2.5" drive bays.  Which means that it's smaller than I expected but given the stated net weight of 20lbs is apparently constructed of cast iron.
  
  Oh, and it supports up to 1TB of RAM, but that might start to get expensive.
  
  
  
• Intel says its 4nm process - formerly called 7nm but roughly on par with TSMC and Samsung's 4 and 5nm processes and it's all marketing anyway - is on track for the second half of this year, which is what we are currently in.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which means devices in customer hands in the first half of next year, because it takes a long time for any sausages to come out the other end of the machine.

• Me: Interest rates are at historic lows, screw finding a new place to rent, I'm going to buy a house.
  
  Reserve Bank of Australia: Increases interest rates three times in three months.  (Domain)
  
  Thanks guys.  Though at least our reserve bank is doing something, and we don't have anyone down here blaming inflation on the Great Patriotic War.
  
  On the eleventh hand, my mortgage payments have gone up 13.5% and I haven't finished moving yet.
  
  
  
• Private information - including police records - on a billion people has reportedly been stolen and is up for sale for 10 Bitcoin.  (Nikkei Asia)
  
  In a novel twist, the data has been stolen from China.
  
  Reportedly hackers exfiltrated the Shanghai National Police database.  There's no such thing as the Shanghai National Police, but that doesn't mean there isn't such a database, and reports say at least some of the data checks out.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Anyone know of a good solution for scanning large physical media like LP cover art?  A3 scanners aren't too expensive but are just slightly too small.
  
  
  
• A Xiaomi 12S Ultra and a very steady hand might do in a pinch.  (Engadget)
  
  It has a 50MP Leica camera with a 1" Sony CMOS sensor.
  
  If you're thinking to yourself that a 1" sensor is far too large to fit and the camera bump would take up the entire back of the phone the answer is basically yeah it does.  (Xiaomi)
  
  
  
• Xiaomi also has a couple of new laptops with high-resolution OLED screens and the four essential keys.  (VideoCardz)
  
  They max out at 16GB of RAM so they're not really aimed at me, but they do look pretty.
  
  
  
• You can no longer see permissions required by an app in Google's Play store.  (BlueSpace)
  
  You can still see them, but only after you have downloaded and installed the app, which is a bit too late if you wanted to check if the app was safe to install in the first place.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 05 2022 11:46 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 05 2022 11:47 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, July 05 2022 11:59 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: wheels at Wednesday, July 06 2022 01:35 AM (CtNcn)

Posted by: David Eastman at Wednesday, July 06 2022 10:24 AM (D6Mju)

Posted by: benzeen at Wednesday, July 06 2022 10:40 AM (H7VDR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 06 2022 10:59 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment