• Advantage: Japan.
  
  My package from Amazon Japan has arrived.
  
  My packaged from Amazon US that I ordered earlier has not yet shipped.
  
  
  
• NASA has successfully stream an 8k ultra-high-resolution cat video a distance of 18 million miles from the Psyche space probe back to Earth.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is important because Psyche is on a five year mission to find alien catgirls, and we wouldn't want to miss the video.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Rite Aid has been banned from using facial recognition systems for five years after getting it wrong.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That?  That's not a face.  This is a face.
  
  They should be back on line just in time for the catgirls.
  
  
  
• The HP Omen Transcend 16 doesn't look terrible.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It has an Intel 13900HX - 8 P cores plus 16 E cores, Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics, up to 96GB of RAM, a 2560x1600 240Hz display, and the ten essential keys (which is to say, a full desktop cursor pad).
  
  Plus two Thunderbolt ports, HDMI, wired Ethernet, regular USB, HDMI, and a headphone jack.
  
  It comes in black or white, and could be worth considering if you want a laptop that can play games but can also pass as a boring business model.
  
  Price varies in the vicinity of $2000, so if it's much more than that, wait for a sale.
  
  
  

• Insecurity company Okta is buying smaller competitor Spera for $100 million.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's about $4 million per employee.
  
  
  
• "Insecurity company?"
  
  Okta provides online security services.
  
  Earlier this year they suffered a data breach that they said at the time affected around 1% of their customers.
  
  The actual number was closer to 100%.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And by "was closer to" I mean "was".

• An ex-Amazon engineer has pleated guilty to hacking two crypto exchanges.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  His position as an Amazon engineer has nothing to do with the hack, though.  The problem was that the code used to manage such exchanges has more holes than a screen door in tornado season.
  
  
  
• A ransomware gang has allegedly seized back its domain from the evil clutches of the FBI.  (The Verge)
  
  And declared open season on critical infrastructure.
  
  Or...  Not.  These guys don't really follow a strict adherence to facts in their press releases.
  
  And neither do the hackers.
  
  
  
• A Citrix vulnerability was exploited at Comcast, resulting in the leak of the personal information of 35 million customers.  (The Verge)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
   
  
  
• RFC9518: What can internet standards do to combat centralisation?  (RFC Editor)
  
  Not much.

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, December 22 2023 07:10 PM (sZ6tC)

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• Details have leaked of AMD's upcoming Epyc Turin server CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These will have up to 128 full-size Zen 5 cores, or 192 of the slower (by about 20%) Zen 5c cores.
  
  This is not great news for Intel, which only just announced its latest 64 core server chips.
  
  They'll ship next year.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Wikipedia entry for the Ship of Theseus has now been edited so many times that none of the original content remains.  (Twitter)
  
  On the plus side we may have deciphered the world's oldest "walks into a bar" joke.
  
  
  
• AI customer service is probably not a good idea just yet.  (Twitter)
  
  Amazing at clearing old inventory though.
  
  
  
• Linux has removed support for Intel's Carillo Ranch line of motherboards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Partly because they're 17 years old, but mostly because they don't exist.
  
  Support was added in 2006, but the boards just...  Never showed up.
  
  
  
• Google is moving to end geofence warrants, after it created the blasted things with its overzealous data hoarding.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Apple received 13 geofence warrants in 2022, but already stopped keeping data that could relate to them.
  
  Google stopped releasing details of how many geofence warrants it was receiving annually after 2020, when the number reached 11,554.
  
  Which is a lot more than 13.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, December 19 2023 08:47 AM (bg2DR)

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• Small is the new Large: Microsoft has announced Phi-2, which it terms a "small language model".  (VentureBeat)
  
  With 2.7 billion parameters it generally outperforms Llama-2 and Mistral with 7 billion parameters, while being small enough to run happily on graphics cards with just 4GB of RAM.
  
  It's comparable to Mistral on language tests, but significantly better on mathematics and programming.
  
  If that's too big for you, Microsoft recently released Phi-1 and Phi-1.5 which will run on any reasonably specced potato.
  
  I'm happy to see this progress in making improvements to small models you can run yourself, that have potential to do some limited set of things well.  The push to ever larger models at astronomical expense is going to fail unless fundamental changes are made to the designs - and  to the culture of the companies building them.
  
  
  
• Mistral also announced what they call Mixtral last week.  (Mistral)
  
  This a similar idea.  Rather than building one huge model that tries to handle everything, Mixtral uses eight small (7 billion term) models, each able to fit on a commodity graphics card, and each tuned to a specific kind of task.
  
  It outperforms the largest version of Llama-2 (70 billion terms) while being 30% smaller overall (for all eight models combined) and working on hardware at one twentieth the price.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Speaking of commodity graphics cards Nvidia is expected to launch "new" models in January.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The models we're looking at are the 4070 Super, 4070 Ti Super, and 4080 Ti.
  
  The only one of interest is the 4070 Ti Super, which is a cut-down 4080 and lowers the price point for a good 16GB Nvidia card.  I mean, there is the 4060 Ti, but it's kind of crap.
  
  
  
• MongoDB got hacked.  (MongoDB)
  
  They believe this is limited to the corporate systems and does not extend to their cloud offerings.  If it turns out it does extend to their cloud offerings, that would be catastrophic.
  
  I run MongoDB at my day job - just finished migrating a huge cluster from one cloud to another - but that's using regular cloud servers rather than cloud databases.
  
  
  
• All these worlds are yours, except Europa.  And Enceladus.  (NASA)
  
  In fact, all these worlds are ours.  Piss off back where you came from.
  
  
  
• Intel, Samsung, and TSMC have now all shown off working CFETs - CMOS transistors with the n-type and p-type transistors stacked on top of each other, rather than adjacent.  (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  This is not as profound a change as stacked flash cells, which changed the entire storage industry, but is equivalent to a free process node advance.
  
  Given that process nodes are going to run out of room for improvement in ten years, that's a good thing.
  
  
  
• Hasbro is continuing layoffs at Wizards of the Coast, makers of Magic the Gathering and owners of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise.  (Geekwire)
  
  Despite Wizards of the Coast repeatedly fucking over its own customers with woke bullshit, those two product lines are major money earners for Hasbro.  It makes little sense for the company to fire core staff working on both products, and yet the announcements from those affected are all over Twitter.
  
  Okay, maybe it does make some sense.  (Twitter)
  
  If your team's major accomplishment after a year of work is agreeing not to use AI-generated art, you should expect to be fired.  At a minimum.
  
  
  
• Apple's M3 Max is faster than an RTX 4090 in AI-based transcription tasks if you use an utterly broken benchmark.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If you use the correct benchmark, the 4090 is twelve times faster.
  
  
  
• If you need to run AI models on the go, here's a laptop with a 64-core CPU and a desktop RTX 4080.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You may need a bigger lap though.  This beast is not small.
  
  
  

VTuber News

• Life hack: You can get Japanese products sooner (often by months) and cheaper by simply ordering them from Amazon Japan.
  
  The Pop Up Parade figures for Kiara and Ayame which I had on pre-order through Amazon US, with estimated shipping dates in March and February respectively, are in stock at Amazon Japan right now.
  
  
  
• The Telescreen (Amazon $499) was in front of the painting (Etsy $299).  Marketing companies aren't actually listening in on your private conversations.  Probably.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Even if they say they are.
  
  A marketing team within Cox Media Group claimed it had a tool it called Active Listening, which involved, not to put too fine a point on it, illegally spying on other companies' customers, with the tag line "It's true.  Your devices are listening to you."
  
  If it were actually true, the resulting lawsuits would burn the entire company to the ground.  Fortunately it seems to be marketing, or in other words, a complete lie.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Regular desktop motherboards now support 256GB of RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't get the necessary 64GB memory modules yet, but those are coming next year.
  
  Which is not very far away.
  
  
  
• The updates from Asus and ASRock for 256GB memory support also leaked details of AMD's upcoming Ryzen 8000G chips.  (Notebook Check)
  
  These are laptop chips retargeted for desktop use.  That means they have much better onboard graphics - up to six times faster than the existing desktop chips from AMD - but are limited to eight cores and probably have fewer PCIe lanes.
  
  These will probably be legitimately announced at CES.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has a "Super Hot Run" of chips in the ovens at TSMC for new AI cards to be delivered to China.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The urgency is because (a) Nvidia's mainstream AI cards have been banned from export to China, including cards that were previously assembled in China, and (b) if they don't get the new, legal cards shipped and fulfil orders quickly, they will likely get banned too.
  
  
  
• The Utah Supreme Court has ruled that police cannot force you to provide the unlock code for your phone.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This is pretty obviously protected under the Fifth Amendment, but even so some state courts have ruled otherwise (looking at you, New Jersey) so it is likely to head to SCOTUS.
  
  
  
• Twitch has cleared up its confusing content guidelines, and allows some nudity and sexual content so long as it is clearly labeled as adult material.  (Engadget)
  
  Okay.  Good for them I guess.
  
  

• The square ones in the middle always get me.  (XKCD)
  
  I only managed 57.
  
  
  
•  That lasted two whole days.  (Engadget)
  
  "We didn't realise that if we said you could post porn, you would actually post porn.  That is not okay, even if we said it was okay."
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 16 2023 09:11 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: wheels at Sunday, December 17 2023 11:11 AM (DTsuO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 17 2023 11:38 AM (PiXy!)

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• Finished up a major project at work that had taken over my life recently - a cloud migration from one crappy provider to another slightly less crappy one - involving dozens of applications, multiple database types, and over 100TB of data.
  
  Celebrated by ordering the latest edition of The Art of Computer Programming from Amazon.  I already have volumes 1-3 - somewhere - but it didn't cost much more for the now five-volume full set than for just the two new volumes.
  
  Not from Amazon, anyway.  A lot more elsewhere.
  
  
  
• Intel's Meteor Lake laptop chips - the real 14th generation - are out.  (AnandTech)
  
  14th generation desktop chips are already here, but those are just relabeled 13th generation parts, just as some 13th generation desktop chips were relabeled 12th generation parts.
  
  How's the performance?
  
  We don't know.  Intel didn't provide any review models, not to anyone.
  
  
  
• Samsung's Galaxy Book 4 range has the new Meteor Lake CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It will be available in South Korea next month, and in the rest of the world...  Eventually.

• Intel has some new server CPUs as well.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These do have benchmark results, and they perform well enough to make it into fourth or fifth place on some tests.
  
  Intel also has some other server CPUs but without benchmarks.
  
  And some desktop CPUs rebadged for servers also without benchmarks but we know how these ones will perform because we've had the desktop models for a couple of years now.  They're...  Meh.
  
  
  
• Voyager 1 has stopped talking to us.  (CNN)
  
  I guess maintaining a long-distance relationship at the age of 46 might seem more effort than it is worth.
  
  Voyager 1 was last heard from on November 14, 15 billion miles from Earth.
  
  
  
• The EU Commission has filed a GDPR complaint against Twitter over microtargeting of political advertising by the EU Commission.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Yes, you read that right, the EU is claiming Twitter broke the law for running the EU's own advertising.
  
  
  
• Thinks are not looking good for The Verge.  (The Verge)
  
  Seriously, these people are not well.
  
  
  
• a16z - Andreeesen Horowitz - will contribute to the campaigns of any politicians willing to fight the over-regulation of the tech industry.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Fortunately Tech Crunch is here to explain that this is what the Nazis would do.

Posted by: normal at Friday, December 15 2023 10:06 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 16 2023 01:38 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: benzeen at Saturday, December 16 2023 03:17 AM (P9n0+)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 16 2023 04:18 AM (LADmw)

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• ChatGPT creator OpenAI has signed an "unprecedented" deal to provide live news in response to user queries.  (CNBC)
  
  The deal is with publishing group Axel Springer, provider of virtual birdcage liners such as Politico and Business Insider.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Dropbox has signed a deal with OpenAI to...  Bring AI to your Dropbox.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Details are not so much vague, exactly, ads entirely absent.  
  
  There is a button to turn it off (it is on by default).
  
  Do that.
  
  

• TSMC's 1.4nm process is expected to come online sometime in 2027.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is somehow not the far future anymore, but practically next week.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Threadripper 7000 range will blow a fuse if you overclock them.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They won't stop working; it's not that kind of fuse.  Rather it's a permanent record that you did in fact overclock your $10,000 CPU.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 14 2023 09:54 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Friday, December 15 2023 12:35 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 15 2023 03:15 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 16 2023 12:32 AM (LADmw)

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• How are things going with our friends at The Verge oh God.  (The Verge)
  
  Did you know chlorpromazine comes in tanker cars now?
  
  I think two or three should do the job.
  
  For today.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Google Fiber is now rolling out its 20 gigabit internet service, for $250 per month.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For $250 per month I can get 250 megabits.  While that's A$250 - about US$150 - 250 megabits is a lot less than 20 gigabits.
  
  
  
• TSMC is ramping up to ship 2nm chips in volume in 2025.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Apple will be the first major customer, as has become the norm.  But the iPhone has paid for TSMC's massive technical advances over the past decade, so I don't begrudge Apple its typical 12-month exclusivity period.
  
  
  
• Huawei meanwhile is working on 5nm chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China is currently stuck at 14nm because they can't buy the EUV optical tools needed for finer process nodes due to sanctions, and can't make their own because they're decades behind in that particular part of the tech sector.
  
  So what they're doing is something called multi-patterning: By running a chip through the process multiple times, very very carefully, you can end up with finer details than you can by just doing it once.
  
  Problem is each pass through the machine increases the cost and increases the failure rate, so cost goes up exponentially.  It's very much a stopgap approach, and unlikely to see adoption in any mainstream devices.
  
  
  
• After acquiring VMWare, Broadcom is on a newfound mission to fuck both its customers and its staff.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Perpetual licenses are out; all products will now be subscription-only.
  
  Also out are nearly 3000 employees.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, December 13 2023 08:10 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Wednesday, December 13 2023 10:56 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Wednesday, December 13 2023 11:01 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 14 2023 12:44 AM (BMUHC)

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• In the lawsuit brought by Epic Games, a San Francisco jury has unanimously found that Google's Play Store violated antitrust law in control both access to content and payment options.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Which is great news for Epic Games - and other mobile content creators - except that two years after Epic won a similar but narrower victory against Apple, that decision is still going through the appeals process.

• Speaking of mobile content and antitrust violations Beeper Mini, the iMessage app for Android, is back again, just days after Apple killed it.  (Beeper)
  
  You need to use it with an Apple ID for now (a registered email address) rather than directly with your phone number, but they're working on restoring that functionality.
  
  Since Apple is likely to try to break it again, they've made the app free as well.
  
  
  
• Looking to spend over $4000 for a four-port 100Mb Ethernet switch this Christmas?  Yes?  Stop that right now.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can get a five-port gigabit switch for under $10 these days, and this thing is worse in every possible way.
  
  
  
• The Aurga Viewer is a remote control device for anything with an HDMI port and USB.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That could be a PC, a games console, an AV transceiver, or even a toaster.
  
  It doesn't require any software to be installed on the device you are controlling, just plug it in and wreak havoc.