• Happy birthday, America! If there's one truth you should always keep close to your heart, it is this: Communists are not people.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, I really could have done without that sequence of events, though if Event C hadn't led me to discover Event D when I did, it could have been a whole lot worse.
  
  I'll just say I'm glad I bought that carpet washer and that it has a dry function as well as shampoo and vacuum.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, those LG UP850-W monitors I bought and still hadn't got around to unboxing? Pretty sweet monitors.
  
  
  
• Speaking of things we could do without: Bug bounty company HackerOne had a weasel in its midst. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The idea behind this is pretty straightforward:
  
  1. You spot a security flaw (might be another bug, but security problems are the big ones) in an online service.
  2. You report the details via HackerOne.
  3. The operator of the online service pays you for the information. And hopefully fixes the problem.
  
  Where this came unstuck is that a HackerOne employee decided to cut out the middle man - which is to say, HackerOne - and just sell the security flaws to the highest bidder.
  
  Which was very lucrative for them, right up until they got caught.
  
  Also, this year being this year, there's this stupidity:

  HackerOne notes that its former employee had used "threatening” and "intimidating” language in their interaction with customers and urged customers to contact the company if they received disclosures made in an aggressive tone.

  Sure, they stole security information and sold it to hackers, but they were also rude.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Amazon has spent half a billion dollars on the first season of their Lord of the Rings prequel. (Indie Wire)
  
  Chances are it will suck. Chances are we will point and laugh.
  
  They could have done a Beren and Luthien mini-series - probably the most readily adaptable of the tales of the Second Age - but they wanted their own Game of Thrones.
  
  
  
• If you don't know exactly why you are using Kubernetes, you shouldn't be. (Jeremy Brown)
  
  Docker is understandable. Docker is just developers giving up on ever getting anything to install properly, so every application gets its own operating system, Kubernetes - which manages large numbers of Docker containers - presupposes that having large numbers of Docker containers is desirable in the first place.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 05 2022 01:27 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Kurt Duncan at Wednesday, July 06 2022 12:59 AM (y8o1E)

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• One of the things I want to do fairly soon is replace my four Synology boxes with one new one.  They're from 2012 and 2013 and so are the drives.
  
  I was planning on a new DS1821+ but when I looked there were none to be had anywhere.  That was going to give me a nice topic for a rant but when I looked again they were available so now I'm just confused.
  
  It's not a perfect device - the default network configuration is 4 x 1Gb interfaces which is just irritating - but filled with 12TB drives it would give me the same capacity as the existing four units without the drive failures and performance limitations of decade-old hardware.
  
  
  
• Meta's Novi - formerly Diem - formerly Libera from formerly Facebook - is toast.  (CNet)
  
  This was a technically promising crypto project backed by over a dozen industry leaders that withered and died because (a) all the industry leaders hate each other and (b) absolutely everyone hates Facebook.

• EVGA's 3090 Ti now comes with a free 1600W power supply.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It doesn't technically require a 1600W power supply.  Not yet.  I think.
  
  
  
• Benchmarks of 13900K engineering samples put it just in front of the 12900K on single threaded tasks, but far ahead in multi-threaded work.  (WCCFTech)
  
  As much as 60%, which is more than I would have expected.  They've increased clock speeds a bit and added eight more Efficiency cores, but the main Performance cores stay at eight.
  
  I'm a bit dubious about having mixed speed cores like this but at some point I might build a system to see how it really behaves.  Both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance numbers are good, and while it doesn't support ECC (which Ryzen chips do, unofficially) DDR5 RAM at least has on-chip ECC.
  
  
  
• Intel's 13th gen chips will be accompanied by new motherboards, but will work fine in current boards.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Also it will still support DDR4, which AMD has dropped.  On the other hand, DDR5 now costs only 50% more than DDR4 rather than double, so that's gradually becoming a less compelling feature.
  
  

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, July 03 2022 08:47 PM (rglbH)

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• Well, work insanity is finally easing for at least a couple of days. Have a big project kicking off next week and October is likely to be another write-off, but at least I won't be working 18 hour days and moving house at the same time.
  
  These posts will gradually return to their usual schedule and content.
  
  
  
• It seems like I picked the right week to be on a big city salary with a small town mortgage: The GPU shortage is over.  (The Verge)
  
  Do I need a new GPU?  There are games I want to play and applications I want to run that can benefit from teraflops of crunching power, but I already have two laptops with RTX 3060 graphics, which while far from high end are perfectly fine for Minecraft and...  Also Minecraft.
  
  Still, with GPU prices down 57% since January it's awfully tempting.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
  
• In fact, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple are all cutting back on 5nm production for their next-generation parts.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Thanks to our leaders for running a pump-and-dump scam on the entire global economy.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Does this mean I can get a PS5 or Xbox Series X?
  
  No.  (GamesRadar)
  
  
  
• Well, does it indicate that the supply chain issues are resolving themselves?
  
  No.  (CNBC)
  
  
  
• In fact Chinese authorities announced and then deleted that they will pursue their disastrous Zero COVID policies for the next five years.  (The Guardian)
  
  That worked so well for New Zealand, and China is also a small remote island.  There's no chance that anything could go wrong and I am totally not buying everything I need for the new house at the earliest possible opportunity.
  
  
  
• Redbean in Docker gives you an automatically deployable web server - indeed, application server if you want - in as little as 186k.  (GitHub)
  
  No matter how screwed up the supply chain becomes, I expect I will have 186k of disk space available.
  
  
  
• The Patriot P400 seems like a perfectly serviceable SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  1TB for $100 and transfer rates up to 5GB per second.  It's DRAMless, so not suitable for servers (or developers who run local copies of applications, like me), but for most desktop use should do fine.
  
  
  
• OpenSea ran into supply chain problems of a different sort.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  An employee at their email provider made off with their customer list.  If you use OpenSea - which I do, for work - you will have already seen messages from OpenSea telling you not to trust messages from OpenSea.  
  
  It's all quite meta.
  
  
  
• Oh, and Arm has new CPU and GPU cores out.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  CPU cores are the high-end X3, middle-end A715, and low-end A510, which, yes, is the same as before.
  
  GPU cores include the Mali G615 and G715, and the new high-end Chuuni G715.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 03 2022 12:18 AM (obo9H)

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• Apple's senior legal executive in charge of preventing insider trading of Apple stock has been convicted on charges of insider trading of Apple stock.  (The Register)
  
  Was that wrong?  Should I not have done that?

Tech News

• Dell has replaced the old New Inspiron 16 Plus, which I rather like, with a new New Inspiron 16 Plus which is also mostly good and sort of much cheaper.
  
  The new model swaps the 11800H CPU for a 12700H - 20% faster on single-threaded tasks and 30% faster multi-threaded.  It only has six full size cores (down from eight) but also has eight half-size cores, for a convincing win overall.
  
  The 3072x1920 16" screen is still there, as are the Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics on the high-end model.  RAM is now DDR5, but be careful - except on the high-end model, half the RAM on this new version is soldered in place and can't be upgraded.
  
  The list price in Australia seems to be about the same as the old model when it was 40% off.  Since I got both of mine at 40% off I'm not mad about that, but I wonder if the new model will also get discounted.  It will be a bargain if it does.
  
  The only other change is that the numeric keypad has bitten the dust.
  
  
  
• The Ryzen 5800X3D is a mixed bag.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is the 8-core 5800X with a jetpack strapped to it in the form of an extra 64MB of L3 cache.  This reduces the thermal efficiency of the cooler so it is clocked slightly lower than the regular version.
  
  The results depend on whether you need fast memory access, fast cores, or lots of cores to win a particular benchmark.  It's the fastest CPU around for Dwarf Fortress for small and medium worlds, but lags behind for large worlds.
  
  Playing Factorio it is up to 60% faster than Intel's i9-12900K, a massive difference.  But on many tests the extra cache doesn't help at all, and it's competing against chips with 16 or 20 cores, so those results aren't pretty.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 01 2022 09:39 PM (obo9H)

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