• A day after firing Sam Altman, OpenAI is in talks to bring him back.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
• No they're not.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well, that certainly clears that up.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Twitch founder Emmett Shear will be the new CEO of OpenAI.  (The Verge)
  
  It looks like the researchers and non-profit board wanted a CEO who would run the business, and not try to also run the non-profit side of things.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday.  (Microsoft)
  
  Apparently with a driver update that broke the microphone in my laptop.
  
  
  
• After 33 years of searching, two groups of mathematicians have independently discovered the ninth Dedekind number.  (Quanta)
  
  The first four numbers are 2, 3, 6, and 20.
  
  The ninth number is 286,386,577,668,298,411,128,469,151,667,598,498,812,336.  So it does grow a bit after that start.
  
  
  
• There is no cloud, there is only someone else's computers...  Or your own.  (The Register)
  
  Microcloud from Canonical - the company behind Ubuntu - is designed to make it easy to deploy your own small cloud - where "small" is anything from three Raspberry Pis to fifty 128-core AMD servers.  Which is a pretty large value of small.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 21 2023 12:15 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 21 2023 12:19 AM (LADmw)

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• Starship's second test flight successfully reached space - and then went boom.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Not everything went to plan, but it went a lot better than the first test, with all 33 engines in the booster working, a clean separation of the second stage of the rocket, and reaching a height of nearly 150km before the automated self-destruct system got bored and decided to join in the fun.

• The Silicon Power UD90 is one of the cheapest 4TB SSDs around.  How does it perform?  Poorly.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It is rated for 5000MBps reads and 4500MBps writes, perfectly respectable numbers.
  
  It gets just slightly over that read speed in independent tests...  And slightly over 5% of that write speed.
  
  Avoid.
  
  
  
• You can find the Team MP34 4TB for $151.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Its rated speeds are lower, but it actually delivers what it says.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's investors allegedly want the used car salesman back in charge.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI has an odd corporate structure: It's a non-profit in charge of a for-profit company.  The non-profit board fired the for-profit CEO, but there are investors putting money directly into the for-profit company and they want their snake oil guy back.
  
  Fortunately companies like Mistral and Meta are working hard to make OpenAI irrelevant.
  
  
  
• AMD's previous-generation Radeon 6750 GRE comfortably beats Nvidia's RTX 4060.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't buy one though; it's a China exclusive.  Because reasons.
  
  

• What the fuck is going on at OpenAI? (Tech Crunch)
  
  Snake ail salesman Sam Altman has been dismissed as CEO and removed from the board, and co-founder Greg Brockman, who yesterday was chairman and president, is now neither of those. CTO Mira Murati is interim CEO until a replacement can be found.
  
  Altman is also deeply involved in the thoroughly sleazy Worldcoin project, and the moderately dubious Humane AI pin. It might be something as simple as a conflict of interests, or it could be something... More.
  
  Sam Altman strikes me as a high-functioning version of Sam Bankman-Fried, so these events surprise me not at all.

• An online atrocity database got hacked and leaked the personal details of the victims of said atrocities. (The Intercept)
  
  Who thought this was a good idea?
  
  
  
• A Canadian court has overturned a government ruling that single-use plastic items are toxic, on the basis that they aren't. (Reuters)
  
  The government wants to ban single-use plastic, so rather than pass legislation, it just defined them as toxic so they'd be banned automatically.
  
  The only problem with that is, well, they're not toxic at all.
  
  A little surprising that a Canadian court would take issue with this, but welcome nonetheless.
  
  
  
• What could be toxic, though - as mentioned previously - is eye drops. (Ars Technica)
  
  An inspection of one factory in Mumbai found workers wandering around barefoot - inside an allegedly sterile production area where not only shoes but shoe coverings, gowns, and gloves are required.
  
  They did detect the inevitable contamination. They just... Kept right on going.
  
  
  
• You can save oil by taking your kids to school on an electric moped, and even more when you all get killed in a traffic accident on the first day. (The Conversation)
  
  Take a look at the photos in the article. Sad to say, those people are statistics waiting to be calculated.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile:
  
  

  Getting back to productive matters, Starship flight 2 launches in ~6 hours!!

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2023

  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, November 18 2023 06:07 PM (bg2DR)

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• Running Signal - an encrypted messaging app with hundreds of millions of installs worldwide - costs $40 million a year.  (Wired)
  
  That's not a lot on the scale of major platforms, but the breakdown is interesting.
  
  Nearly half of it goes on salaries and benefits.  Signal has a relatively small engineering team but keeping engineers working in a major US city is expensive.
  
  $1.7 million goes to pay for 20 petabytes of data transfers for voice and video calls.  
  
  And $6 million is spent just on the verification messages sent via SMS when new users sign up - a markup of around 50,000% over the real data costs incurred by mobile carriers.
  
  

• UnitedHealth is using an AI system to decided when to pay out on health insurance claims.  They say they're not, but they would.
  
  The AI is wrong 90% of the time.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Wrong in UnitedHealth's favour, of course.  Otherwise it would have been kicked to the curb long ago.
  
  
  
• A 96 core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX overclocked to 5.2GHz on all cores uses three times the power and runs four times as fast as an Intel 14900K.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which sounds reasonable, except using three times the power of a 14900K means it's pulling about a kilowatt.  Not the whole system, just the CPU.
  
  That's easily enough current to make it glow red hot, so they had a pretty substantial cooling system for this particular benchmark run.
  
  
  

• Is my toddler a stochastic carrot?  (New Yorker)
  
  No.  Your toddler is actually capable of learning.
  
  This piece of art is a better discussion of the risks, benefits, and underlying mechanisms of generative AI than I have seen coming from almost anyone in the industry.

• Microsoft has renamed Bing Chat to Stochastic Carrot.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or if it hasn't, it should.
  
  
  
• Amazon has stopped selling seven brands of eye drops that lacked FDA approval.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  Eye drops might not seem like a big issue.  All you need to do is take a saline solution, boil it so it's sterile, and bottle it.
  
  And yet in the past year in the US, eye drops have caused infections, blindness, and at least four deaths.
  
  Oh, and there's lead in baby food.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Do you people want an overbearing regulatory state?  Because this is how you get an overbearing regulatory state.
  
  
  
• Developers keep putting security keys into public code.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Stochastic carrots.
  
  
  
• Asus has apologised for its "Evengenlion" limited edition motherboards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All purchasers will get an extra year of warranty coverage and a replacement part that correctly spells "Avengelyne".
  
  I'm sure that will make everybody happy.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 17 2023 02:03 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 17 2023 11:22 AM (bg2DR)

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• A federal district court in California has ruled that Facebook, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat have to face lawsuits alleging that they are running social networks.  (The Verge)
  
  The plaintiffs claim that the social networks have deleterious and addictive effects on children, which seems plausible because social networks have deleterious and addictive effects on everyone, because they're social networks.
  
  
  

Tech News

• An in-depth review of the new AMD model of HP's Pavilion Plus 14.  (Notebook Check)
  
  I'm typing this on last year's Intel-based Pavilion Plus 14.  Great screen, good keyboard, pretty fast CPU (12700H), Intel integrated graphics, and 16GB soldered RAM which is the only major shortcoming.
  
  This new version has a Ryzen 7840U.  That offers about the same CPU performance - a bit better on multi-threaded tests - and twice the graphics performance.
  
  At as little as half the power consumption.
  
  And since HP also increased the battery size this year, battery life has jumped from eight hours to sixteen.
  
  All they need to do is offer 32GB of RAM and it would be perfect.
  
  
  
• Rivian released a software update for its electric vehicles on Monday, which bricked the onboard infotainment systems, affecting literally dozen of customers.  (Electrek)
  
  The cars might need physical servicing to restore them to normal operational state, because everything is awful.
  
  
  
• Is there some law of nature requiring that websites proposing radical redesigns of the web must look terrible?  (Camen Design)
  
  Or is it some kind of alien conspiracy?
  
  Or both?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 16 2023 06:35 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 16 2023 06:41 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 16 2023 10:20 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 16 2023 04:31 PM (PiXy!)

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• SpaceX is planning a test launch of Starship as early as this weekend.  (FAA)
  
  If the FAA website stays up.  Maybe even if it doesn't.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile further out, the James Web Space Telescope is finding hundreds of rogue planets at a time.  (Quanta)
  
  These aren't neatly orbiting stars, but just floating around in the middle of nowhere.
  
  Often in pairs, which is not something we normally see planets doing.  They've been called JUMBOs, for Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, and there seems to be a lot of them.

• Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI.  (Arxiv)
  
  Or, What the Fuck is AGI Anyway?
  
  It examines nine definitions for AGI, dismisses them all as useless, and posits that current state-of-the-art AI systems are approaching AGI Level 1, which is to say, a mechanical idiot.
  
  
  
• Samsung's 990 Pro - one of the best consumer SSDs around short of the still wildly overpriced PCIe 5 models - is now $250 for 4TB.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's a lot for a little and it has no shortcomings.  It's not limited to PCIe 3, it's not DRAMless, it's not QLC, it's not from a second or third tier manufacturer.
  
  Ten years from now that will look absurdly expensive but right now it's a steal.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced its 5th generation Emerald Rapids Xeon range, along with some very, very selective benchmarks.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Understandable, because these models go up to 64 cores, where AMD already goes up to 128 cores.  Intel has certain areas of strength but overall they just get clobbered.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT's new Code Interpreter function lets you upload your data for processing - and also lets other people steal it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you upload a file, and that file contains a link to a web page, and that web page could be interpreted as instructions for ChatGPT, ChatGPT will thus interpret them.
  
  As I said earlier, mechanical idiot.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 14 2023 10:34 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, November 15 2023 02:15 AM (r9O5h)

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• Now that Sam Bankman-Fraud has been found guilty on all charges, what is next?  Well, sentencing is scheduled for March 28, but before that he goes on trial again for another long list of crimes.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oh no.
  
  Anyway...

• In a US first, a plant has started pulling carbon from the air.  (Yahoo)
  
  I kind of thought that was what plants had been doing all along.
  
  No?
  
  
  
• Developers are being targeted by malware on the Python package index.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This is a real thing.  I haven't been bitten yet but I am far more cautious about installing Python packages than I used to be, double-checking exactly what I am asking for every single time.
  
  
  
• Apple's upcoming M3 Ultra could have twice as many GPU cores as the M3 Max, which is not really a surprise because the M3 Ultra is two M3 Max chips glued together.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Okay, it's a slow news day.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 14 2023 01:48 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 14 2023 01:48 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, November 14 2023 12:36 PM (sZ6tC)

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• The Tuxedo Pulse 14 is a Ryzen 7840HS laptop with a 2880x1800 OLED display.  (Tuxedo Computers)
  
  It has 32GB of RAM - soldered, but at least there's a good amount, room for two M.2 2280 SSDs, four USB ports, HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort, uh, ports.  It comes installed with Linux by default but you can choose Windows instead, or install it yourelf.
  
  There are 29 keyboard layouts to choose from, including the option of a fully custom layout where you edit the design template and upload it when placing your order.  That's about $85 extra but that doesn't seem unreasonable.
  
  So, can you get the Four Essential Keys?
  
  Lol.  No.
  
  
  
• The Fedora Slimbook 14 is a Core i7 12700H laptop with a 2880x1800 OLED display - these displays are showing up everywhere, which is great because they are terrific displays - Thunderbolt and USB-C ports, two regular USB ports, HDMI, a full-size SD card reader, a headphone jack, and a separate power socket.  (Slimbook)
  
  It supports up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM in two SODIMM slots, and a single M.2 SSD.
  
  There are 14 keyboard layouts available with further options for other layouts, though they don't detail exactly how that works.
  
  So, can you get the Four Essential Keys?
  
  Lol.  No.
  
  But.
  
  The Fedora Slimbook 16 weighs just 1.5kg - barely more than my existing 14" laptop, has Nvidia 3050 Ti graphics, and a three-column numeric keypad with a single-height enter key.
  
  Which means, if they support custom keyboard printing, that you can turn it into a 15-key macro pad with any layout you can dream of.  (Actually 18 as there are three half-height keys above the main keypad.)  Four essential keys and another fourteen.

• AMD could be looking to Samsung's 3nm process for some of the chips coming next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This would make sense, from a perspective of not putting all your eggs in one basket hanging directly over a hungry snake, and also from a perspective of not buying all your eggs from one egg shop.
  
  Samsung's 3nm process isn't quite as good as TSMC's, but that's like saying a Ferrari isn't quite as good as a Lamborghini, when the third option is an Edsel.
  
  
  
• Monaspace is a monospace programming font superfamily from GitHub.  (GitHub)
  
  Good monospaced fonts used to be scarce; in the last couple of years there's been a flood of them.  This particular font provides five styles, seven weights, twenty-six widths, and twelve degrees of slant
  
  This has a couple of interesting features, including ten sets of ligatures - where adjacent characters are combined into a more complicated glyph - and what they are calling "texture healing".  If you have the letters imi in that sequence, in a normal monospaced font that looks ugly because the i characters are wide and the m character is squished.  Texture healing keeps everything in the monospaced grid, but lets the m fill the entire width of its cell while each i is moved to to give the m more room.
  
  If your application properly supports TrueType/OpenType fonts, it doesn't need to know anything about this; it uses a trick built into TrueType that us normally used to support variants of Arabic characters - in Arabic, letters can look different depending on where they are located in a word.
  
  You can play with it on the GitHub page and it certainly seems to work.
  
  
  

Posted by: Siergen at Monday, November 13 2023 12:42 AM (WUBpd)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 13 2023 02:01 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 13 2023 02:01 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 13 2023 02:05 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, November 13 2023 02:46 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 13 2023 04:04 AM (BMUHC)

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• Apple says 8GB of RAM on a Mac is equivalent to 16GB on a real computer.  But how does an 8GB Mac perform objectively on simple tasks?  Poorly.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If you leave your browser open with a bunch of tabs while using Lightroom, expect things to take 2.5x longer.  If you're using Final Cut Pro to edit video, up to 4x longer.
  
  There's absolutely no excuse for the existence of a $1600 laptop with only 8GB of RAM.  16GB of RAM is barely adequate for running any serious desktop task these days.

• Childhood vaccine rates are falling right across the US.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Some of the commenters even understand why.  Many of the childhood vaccines really are safe and effective, and we don't want a return of polio.
  
  But whenever the usual suspects try to blame conservatives, they run head-first into the fact that Mississippi has the highest vaccination rates in the US, and Hawaii one of the lowest.
  
  
  
• Microsoft now wants to give you a quiz when you close OneDrive.  (PC World)
  
  There needs to be a write in option for fuck off and stay there.
  
  
  
• Comments might be down for a few minutes between 2AM and 4AM Eastern tomorrow.  I'm setting up database replication on the server in preparation for some upgrades I'll be making to the blog.