• In a move that surprised absolutely no-one except for Google employees who don't read their email, Google has laid off 12,000 staff.  (WCCFTech)
  
  As noted previously, I might feel bad if the company didn't suck so much.  And since they're being given severance packages starting at six months' salary, maybe not even then.
  
  Will Google take this opportunity to clear the decks of zombies and right the ship the way Twitter is trying to do?
  
  No.
  
  The zombies are in charge.
  
  
  
• Much less ouch today.  Which is good because last night, not long after I posted the abbreviated update, it got so bad that I threw up.

• Why are Radeon 6000 cards suddenly exploding?  Because all the affected cards are second-hand from a crypto miner and were horribly abused and stored in a vat of nitroglycerin.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, the last part might not be technically correct, but they were abused for mining cryptocurrencies and then abused again by being stored at the bottom of a swamp:

  These catastrophically damaged GPUs show that, even though they worked fine initially, the effects of humidity that had gotten deep into the products caused the silicon to crack during / after their first rigorous session under load.

  Don't buy second-hand graphics cards.  An entire second-hand computer, sure, just wipe the operating system and you're probably good to go.  But buying second-hand graphics cards right now is like ordering badgers off eBay: Even if you actually get a badger you're likely to regret it.
  
  
  
• Currently available graphics cards ranked by value.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So what should you get?  Well, unless you're spending someone else's money probably not a current generation graphics card.  Excepting the new Intel models - which are looking rather better now than they did at launch - the best ranking for any of the current generation is 27th.
  
  If you don't care about ray tracing then a Radeon card between the 6600 and 6750 XT is a good bet, with pricing ranging $235 to $400.  While a 4070 Ti (27th) twice as fast as a 6600 (1st), it's also nearly four times the price.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 chip for PCs might not suck.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Actually it very likely won't suck because after the disappointment of Gen 1 and Gen 2 (which was exactly the same chip as Gen 1), Gen 3 finally delivered a worthwhile Windows-on-Arm platform.
  
  The new Gen 4 is expected to support up to 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM.  Gen 3 supports 32GB of LPDDR4X - enough to be useful and double the current iMac - and is available in a $600 developer kit from Microsoft if for some reason you're interested.
  
  Which would actually be a reasonable price compared to the Mac Mini if Windows-on-Arm had the level of support of MacOS-on-Arm.  It does not.
  
  
  
• The TSA No Fly List has been leaked yet again.  (Daily Dot)
  
  Not by the government itself this time around, but by airline CommuteAir (who?) who left the CSV sitting on a test server exposed to the internet.
  
  
  

Posted by: Jennie at Saturday, January 21 2023 10:39 PM (Db2k/)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 22 2023 02:23 AM (BMUHC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• T-Mobile got hacked (again) leaking personal data for 37 million customers (again).  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Life Hack: Always lie when filling out official documents.
  
  
  
• Ouch.

• Microsoft will end sales of Windows 10 on January 31.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Windows 11 isn't the worst thing ever and Windows 10 isn't the best, but still.
  
  
  
• Wizards of the Coast has backtracked, apologised, and offered a new new version of the Open Gaming License releasing the core game mechanics under a Creative Commons license.  (Polygon)
  
  Have they truly seen the light or are they still the same weasels they were yesterday.
  
  If you said "weasels" you win a scary clown.
  
  
  
  
  
• Ouch.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 20 2023 07:01 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: DougO at Saturday, January 21 2023 03:55 AM (T6enK)

Posted by: DougO at Saturday, January 21 2023 03:56 AM (T6enK)

Posted by: Aliya at Monday, January 30 2023 05:39 PM (w+6m8)

Posted by: at Wednesday, July 05 2023 08:54 PM (AWDS1)

Posted by: at Saturday, July 08 2023 06:08 PM (O7Og5)

Posted by: at Saturday, July 08 2023 10:56 PM (tn8l5)

Posted by: at Saturday, July 08 2023 11:19 PM (tn8l5)

Posted by: at Sunday, July 09 2023 05:49 PM (zkIAm)

Posted by: at Sunday, July 09 2023 10:37 PM (zkIAm)

Posted by: at Monday, July 24 2023 11:56 PM (bnRQa)

Posted by: at Saturday, August 05 2023 09:17 PM (6HkrG)

Posted by: at Sunday, September 03 2023 08:51 PM (v2qJR)

Posted by: at Tuesday, September 05 2023 02:23 AM (2BQP0)

Posted by: at Sunday, September 10 2023 09:24 PM (aW4rz)

Posted by: at Wednesday, September 13 2023 10:44 PM (ZyUGD)

Posted by: user2 at Sunday, December 17 2023 05:30 PM (1hBcA)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Apple's new M2 MacBooks and Mac Minis are out.  Should you buy one?  No.  (Sneak.Berlin)
  
  Remember the fuss when Apple was planning to scan the photos on your iPhone and alert the police if they thought anything on there might be untowards?
  
  Well, they've implemented that, only on MacOS.  
  
  Without telling anyone.
  
  And you can't turn it off.
  
  This is unusual behaviour for Apple.  It's not like they tracked all their users with unencrypted cookies, systematically locked users out of their own systems, or disabled third-party firewalls and network monitors that would let you track such activity.
  
  Oh, wait, they did all those things.

• Microsoft may start laying off 10,000 staff this week amid slowing economy.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, let's not panic until it's confirmed.
  
  
  
• Microsoft starts laying off 10,000 staff amid recession.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They used the R word.
  
  
  
• Amazon is laying off 18,000 staff.  (Bloomberg)
  
  I might feel bad about this if these companies didn't suck so much.
  
  
  
• Speaking of suck, a TV adaptation of Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber is under way...  With Stephen Colbert named as the series producer.  (Variety)
  
  Yeah, this is going to be bad.
  
  
  
• Mailchimp got hacked.  Again.  In exactly the same way as last time.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  See my note about feeling bad if they didn't suck so much.
  
  
  
• Someone stole my car and now I own hundreds of vinyl records.  (Substack)
  
  San Francisco?
  
  (Checks.)
  
  Los Angeles.  Not too far off.

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, January 19 2023 09:53 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 19 2023 10:40 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, January 19 2023 10:54 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, January 19 2023 11:39 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 20 2023 03:00 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, January 20 2023 03:23 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 20 2023 08:46 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 20 2023 08:48 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Friday, January 20 2023 10:54 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, January 20 2023 03:52 PM (oJgNG)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Apple has announced new MacBooks based on the M2, M2 Pro, and M2 Max chips, up to 20% faster than the identical models with the M1.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Apple advertises them as 2.5 times faster than the fastest Intel MacBook, which while not untrue on some benchmarks, neglects to mention the fact that last year's so were Intel's laptop chips from last year.
  
  Prices start at $expensive for the basic 14" model and go up to $really_fucking_expensive for a fully-equipped 16" model.
  
  
  
• There's also a new M2 Mac Mini that starts at $not_too_expensive for a configuration that would have been more or less adequate in 2013.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Fortunately, you can easily upgrade...  Nothing.  You can upgrade nothing.

• Toy giant Hasbro, which owns card game company Wizards of the Coast, which owns TSR, which owns Dungeons and Dragons, which originated more than 50 years ago as a medieval wargaming rule system named Chainmail, has taken the game and its decades of history and uncounted millions of loyal fans and flushed it straight down the toilet.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Hasbro hired a new CEO for WotC with the bright idea of turning a game anyone can pick up and play into a locked-in recurring revenue stream, with the utterly predictable result that all those millions of people picked up and left.
  
  The provisions in the new license for third-party content ranged from paying a 25% royalty, to WotC being able to revoke your license at any time for any reason, to granting them an irrevocable right to take your work and publish it themselves and keep the money.
  
  Result being that everyone - normal humans and the lunatics at Ars Technica and everyone in between - hates Wizards of the Coast now.
  
  
  
• Micron has announced 24GB and 48GB DDR5 modules - for Intel and AMD desktops.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  SK Hynix is working on 64GB modules but hasn't indicated when those are likely to ship, so for now 192GB is the new limit.
  
  
  
• TSMC is slowly ramping up 3nm production to avoid the issues that Samsung ran into.  (AnandTech)
  
  Don't expect anything other than high-end mobile chips to be made on this new process before next year.  AMD and Nvidia are using a mix of 7nm, 6nm, 5nm, and 4nm, but 4nm is 5nm and 6nm is 7nm, while 3nm is a whole new ball game.
  
  Intel has its own fabs and its own - very aggressive - plans for new process nodes, but we've seen what happened with Intel's process plans before.

• Intel's new 24 core i9-13980HX is faster than AMD's 32 core Threadripper.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The Threadripper 2990WX to be specific.
  
  From 2018.
  
  Which was kind of terrible.  Zen 1 / Zen+ was a different design to what we have today, and the 2990WX was just four Ryzen desktop chips wired together with only two of them having direct access to RAM and the other two having to hop through the other chips.  It did work and was one of the fastest chips around at the time, but that didn't last for long: It is slower than the 12 core 3900X that came out only one year later.  (WCCFTech)
  
  So Intel's 24 core laptop chip from 2023 is beating a AMD's 12 core desktop chip from 2019.  Not bad, but not remarkable either.
  
  
  
• Weather forecast indicates one more day of summer here in New House City, followed by thunderstorms, rain, flooding, plague of frog, and all the rest.  Good times.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• China's population declined last year for the first time since Mao's genocide spree in the 1960s.  (CNBC)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Why is Amazon selling fake 16TB SSDs?  (ReviewGeek)
  
  Because they don't give a shit.
  
  
  
• Do you need a 4 port 100Gb Ethernet switch for under $700? No?  Here's one anyway.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Also works as a 16 port 25Gb switch, because 100Gb Ethernet is four 25Gb ports bonded together.
  
  I'll be happy if I can get 10Gb working at the new place.
  
  
  
• CAMM is the new SODIMM maybe.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Laptops have increasingly used soldered RAM lately, partly for reliability, partly for power efficiency, partly for speed (LPDDR is faster than regular DDR but doesn't work in regular DIMMs), and partly just as a fuck you that's why money grab not naming any Apple names.
  
  CAMM is a new module design that works with high-speed memory like LPDDR5X and designed with future DDR6 in mind.  It was created by Dell but has been adopted by memory standards body JEDEC and looks set to become the new laptop memory standard.
  
  If that means that they stop selling laptops with amazing CPUs and screens and 16GB of RAM that you can never, ever upgrade, I'm all for it.
  
  
  
• Apple could be announcing new Macs tomorrow.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Or not.
  
  One of those.
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 17 2023 10:31 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Jen at Tuesday, January 17 2023 11:21 PM (Db2k/)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 18 2023 12:22 AM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 18 2023 12:28 AM (k3/O4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• BuzzFeed used ChatGPT to write a story about CNET using ChatGPT to write stories.  (BuzzFeed)
  
  How did it go?

  Note: This article was written entirely by ChatGPT and reviewed by a human editor. (Actually, we had to rewrite the prompt a few times to get it to stop inserting factual errors.)

  So rather better than usual then.
  
  
  
• Kronii case arrived.  I am slightly disappoint that it didn't come in a fabulously Kronii box the way the Bae case did.
  
  Now I have two shiny new computer cases but still zero shiny new computer parts to put in them.
  
  
  
• Happy godawful modern sculpture day!

• Why is there a global shortage of silicon chips?  A global shortage of silicon potatoes.  (Jabil)
  
  Basically.
  
  Pretty much everything needed to make chips is in short supply - so the chips themselves are in short supply.
  
  Thinking of making myself some dual RP2040 hobby boards.  Those at least you can get.
  
  
  
• Nope, that's it.  No huge security disasters today, no blockchain meltdowns.  All quiet.
  
  
  
• Too quiet.

• So a couple of years ago Apple launched its own credit card, backed by Mastercard and Goldman Sachs.
  
  How's it going?
  
  Well, Goldman Sachs has lost about $3 billion on it so far.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Which used to be a lot, but -
  
  
  
• The Swiss Central Bank just posted a loss of $143 billion.  (CNBC / MSN)
  
  Not a decline in market cap, but a realised loss.
  
  Pretty sure that's still a lot.

• I read the news today, oh boy.  19,618 transistors in Intel's 8086.  (Righto)
  
  Now they know how many transistors it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
  
  The author arrived at this number by the simple expedient of counting them all.  The usual number given is 29,000, but that includes mask ROM and PLA grids where a logical zero means the transistor isn't actually present.
  
  
  
• The CircleCI hack was done by compromising an employee's laptop and stealing session tokens.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's not 100% clear but it sounds like a proper corporate VPN would have prevented reuse of those tokens.
  
  This kind of thing is why, while I could easily buy a nice tablet like the Legion Y700 imported from China and with the Google Play Store preinstalled by, well, someone, I haven't.  It's part of my job to be paranoid about this stuff.
  
  
  
• Medium, the failing Substack clone launched by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, now has a Mastodon instance.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which is something any sysadmin can set up on a Friday morning and then spend the afternoon drinking beer.
  
  So, yeah, news is quiet again.

• YouTube will now demonetise your video if you swear in the first fifteen seconds.  Oh, and that's retroactive and applies automatically to every video you've ever uploaded.  (The Verge)
  
  You can manually edit each of your videos, reupload them, and file an appeal, and maybe they'll undo their mass monetisation murder spree for you.  Or maybe they won't.
  
  Or as Linus Tech Tips reports, maybe they'll hit a lot more of your videos because you dared complain about their very selective puritanism
  
  Advice: Learn Tagalog, or Bahasa.  Lots of creative swearing that YouTube probably won't pick up.
  
  Also, move to Rumble.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Twitter files, categorically proving the collusion of social media and the government to illegally stifle dissent?  Nothingburger.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The point being so far as I could read through this propagandist swill without throwing up (which I'd prefer not to do again this week) is that of course they are corrupt lying hacks looking to deplatform anyone who dares deviate from the designated Party line: They're communists.  And so are we.  Quit whining and go to the end of the queue.  Today's ration is one whole potato and if you miss out that's it until August.
  
  
  
• Slightly less dead today.  Two medical and one domestic problem that have been plaguing me the last couple of weeks have been mostly cleared up through the judicious application of explosives modern chemistry.  And heavy drinking.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel's 6GHz Core i9-1300KS is here.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's 25% more expensive and uses 20% more power (officially) than the regular 13900K, and it's 2% faster.
  
  Avoid.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in a less insane sector of the desktop CPU space the first PassMark score of AMD's Ryzen 9 7900 is up.  (PassMark)
  
  This puts it at 6% slower in single-threaded and 8% slower multi-threaded than the full 7900X, which is not bad at all given that the 7900 is 20% cheaper (at least at MSRP, since the 7900X is currently discounted everywhere) and runs at 65W vs. 170W for the full version.
  
  The 12 core 65W 7900 is also faster than the previous generation's 16 core 105W 5950X (which is what I have in the new servers I'm preparing right now).  Though not by a lot.
  
  If you need a reasonably high end but not absolutely maxed out desktop, this is a good choice.  The GPU market is currently a mess though.  The cheapest current-gen graphics cards cost twice as much as this CPU.
  
  
  
• Grad students hardest hit: ChatGPT - with a lot of editing - can turn out reams of stultifying drivel to justify your research grant.  (Arxiv.org)  (PDF)
  
  The paper was written using ChatGPT, one section at a time, then manually edited.  It's barely distinguishable from traditional human-generated academic excrement: Wordy, boring, and ultimately pointless.
  
  
  
• Live by the woke, die by the woke.  (The Register)
  
  Nobody uses Apache anymore anyway.  (Checks servers.)  Uh.
  
  
  

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Saturday, January 14 2023 03:22 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Yulha at Tuesday, January 17 2023 07:58 PM (Db2k/)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• There's a lot of uranium and thorium around.  If we used those elements for all our energy production (ignoring that hydro is also entirely viable in some locations), and we built efficient breeder reactors to reuse fuel, how long would the known reserves last?
  
  4.3 billion years. (What is Nuclear)
  
  About 700 million years after that, the Sun will expand to the point that everything on Earth dies in a blaze of, well, just a blaze really, and energy needs will become a moot point.
  
  That's the highest estimate I've seen and a lot longer than my own quick calculation which was "only" 5 million years.  I'll check the math at some point when I'm not rolling around on the floor.
  
  
  
• The bankruptcy team now running collapsed crypto Ponzi scheme and left-wing campaign contribution laundering machine FTX has recovered about $5 billion worth of, well, things.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not including the bullshit self-created cryptocurrencies that were used to keep the whole scheme inflated at a valuation of $32 billion.  That's about half the total customer funds that disappeared when the bubble popped.
  
  Customers and creditors are likely to see a decent amount of their money returned.  Unsecured shareholders are just screwed though.

• Want a 480 core Linux server?  Got a few hundred grand to spend?  Inspur has you covered.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's a 6U rack-mount system so it's not small by modern standards, but we're not at a point yet where any 480 core server is exactly small.   You can pack 480 cores into 2U if you don't mind them being divided across four modular servers, but they you can do the same with AMD and get 768 cores.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 7000X3D will be released on February 14.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'll definitely wait that long before building a new system; it will probably be March or April.
  
  Meanwhile the non-X parts are at retail and slightly cheaper than the X parts.  In the case of the 7700, the price at my formerly local retailer is exactly the same as the 7700X.
  
  Since you can overclock the 7700 and get exactly the same performance as the 7700X, and you can reduce the power consumption of the 7700X and make it behave exactly like the 7700, it's not a surprise that the retail prices aren't hugely different.
  
  No Passmark scores up yet for these models.  I'll keep an eye out for that one as it has historically tracked closely with the performance I measure with my own workloads.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is piloting a professional version of ChatGPT.  (TechCrunch)
  
  "Professional" here means you pay for it and it doesn't just randomly stop working.  Which, really, is what professional means in other contexts as well.