If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.
Friday, July 21
Stupid Cupids Edition
Top Story
- AI generated clickbait will lead to the demise of search and web publishing/ (Tom's Hardware)
This is so obvious that you have to wonder why anyone does it.
- We tried using OpenAI to generate "marketing strategies" and it worked. (Tech Crunch)
Oh. That's why.
Tech News
- Alleged pricing for AMD's Radeon 7700 and 7800 has leaked. (Tom's Hardware)
The rumour puts the 7700 at $450 and the 7800 at $550, which is probably true because both prices are $50 too high.
At $400 the 7700 would compete directly against Nvidia's 8GB RTX 4060 Ti and crush it, and at $500 the 7800 would face up against the 16GB 4060 Ti model and make mincemeat out of it.
It was AMD's fight to lose and they did.
- Solidigm has announced 60TB QLC SSDs for the datacenter. (AnandTech)
Prices are not mentioned in the article, but one of the comments has the details: You can expect this to be around $4000. Which is a lot of money, but only 20% more per TB than the list price of the 4TB Team MP34.
If you need over a petabyte of fast storage in a 2U server, it's now easy.
- At the other end of the scale you can get a 2TB WD SN850X at Best Buy for $99. (Tom's Hardware)
It's a good drive and that's a great price. If you need 2TB of storage, no reason to wait. Prices will probably continue to trend downwards, but when it's already under $100 there's only so much further it can go.
- Apple is threatening to remove online services from the UK if planned surveillance legislation passes. (BBC News)
This isn't even a "maybe they both can lose" situation. Apple is right; the legislation is awful.
It would make it legal for British police and intelligence agencies to do everything their US equivalents currently do illegally.
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Thursday, July 20
Shut Her Down She's Sucking Mud Edition
Top Story
- OpenAI has not made GPT-4 dumber, says OpenAI. (Tom's Hardware)
However, GPT-4's ability to figure out whether the number 17077 is prime (it is) has fallen from 97.6% in March to 2.4% in June.
This highlights a couple of problems with the whole notion of GPT-4 and other Large Language Models:
1. They literally know nothing. It's all word games. If you understand what a prime number is it might take you a few minutes to run through the possible factors on a calculator and get the right answer, or even better program a computer to do it for you. GPT-4 is incapable of doing that.
2. They literally learn nothing. If someone keeps asking you if 17077 is prime (it is) you might want to remember the answer, maybe even write it down. GPT-4 is incapable of doing that as well.
Tech News
- Linux now accounts for nearly half the desktop Linux market. (The Register)
The other half of the desktop Linux market is owned by ChromeOS, which is also Linux but pretends not to be.
- Intel's N50 CPU, with two E cores, is very slow. (Tom's Hardware)
That's it. That's the story.
- A balanced article about Robert Oppenheimer. (Science)
Not quite the Fauci of the day. He was actually a competent scientist - maybe second-tier, but the first tier was people like Einstein and Dirac and Fermi, so that is no shame. But he was also a communist who craved the sense of power.
He is not on record as having tortured dogs, which is another plus in his column.
- Genoa-X and Bergamo put to the test. (Hot Hardware)
Genoa is AMD's current mainstream sever CPUs. Genoa-X is the same design with extra cache dies stapled to the top to deliver up to 1152MB of cache per socket. And Bergamo is a more compact design running at lower clock speeds but increasing core counts from 96 to 128.
Interesting to see how they each fare on a long list of different tasks. Bergamo is ideal for cloud providers like AWS, while Genoa-X runs away from the pack but only in certain very specific benchmarks.
(Genoa-X is the server edition of the 7800X3D, currently the fastest gaming CPU available, but actually slower than a regular 7800X for other tasks.)
- Elon Musk is annoying all the right people once again by increasing Tesla's revenues by 50% year-on-year. (Tech Crunch)
Margins are down due to price cuts, but the company actually is making it up on volume, with sales increasing more than enough to compensate.
Tesla stock is down 5% in after-hours trading because no good quarterly report goes unpunished.
- Meanwhile the District of Columbia has awarded a $680,000 contract to fit all its electric vehicles with pine-scented prayer beads. (Ars Technica)
Rather, they awarded the contract for a blatant free energy scam, which has significantly less utility than pine-scented prayer beads.
- The Cyber Trust Mark is a voluntary IoT label coming in 2024. What does it mean? Absolutely nothing. (Ars Technica)
It's a voluntary label with federal government involvement, so possibly less than nothing.
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Wednesday, July 19
Top Story
- Framework's new 16" laptop - dubbed reasonably enough the Framework Laptop 16 - is now available for pre-order. (The Verge)
If you want one you'll be waiting a while because the first five production batches sold out in the first day.
It comes with a Ryzen 7840HS or 7940HS CPU, up to 64GB of DDR5 RAM (and probably 96GB, but that depends on BIOS support), up to 6TB of SSD (10TB if you install your own), and optional Radeon 7700S graphics with 8GB of VRAM.
The screen is a solid all-rounder: 2560x1600, 165Hz, 100% DCI-P3 colour, and 500 nits brightness. The CPU isn't high-end - it has eight cores while AMD now offers 16 core laptop chips - but should be plenty for most users.
And the optional dedicated GPU is truly optional: It works without it, you can add it later if you want, you can remove it, and you can upgrade it later on. There's a plan for a storage module with two more M.2 slots to go in that expansion bay if you don't need the advanced graphics.
It also has six little I/O modules, supporting a choice of USB-C, USB-A, DisplayPort, HDMI, microSD, 2.5Gb Ethernet, storage modules up to 1TB, and/or a headphone jack. Only three of the module bays support external video, so you can't put anything anywhere, but it is very flexible.
The keyboard is also modular. The default keyboard lacks the Four Essential Keys, but you can add a numeric keypad or a 24 key macropad. Or you can get both and swap between them on a whim. The keyboard modules are programmable and each has an embedded RP2040 - the chip in the Raspberry Pi Pico.
And everything is designed to be user-replaceable eith just a screwdriver and some patience.
It's not cheap, but neither is the MacBook Pro, its polar opposite in terms of serviceability.
Tech News
- Logitech has acquired Loupedeck, maker of fancy control surfaces for audiovisual editing that look great but kind of suck. (The Verge)
This is probably good, because Loupedeck had great ideas but lacked the money and engineering depth to bring them fully into fruition.
- Intel has stopped making NUCs - now Asus will make them instead. (Serve the Home)
Asus has bought the existing designs and the rights to manufacture and sell them, plus the rights to the brand and to produce future designs.
Which is good because NUCs were generally decent designs. Not world-shattering, but not awful.
- The largest lithium mine in North America has been cleared to start operations in Nevada. (NPR)
This is NPR, so naturally they think this is a bad thing, and they are switching their cars to run on unicorn farts.
- Neopets is relaunching with $4 million in fresh funding. (BBC)
Nobody tell Pippa, she has enough obsessions already.
In the scheme of things, with how much money has been flushed down the drain on much dumber ideas (Juicero burned through $120 million trying to sell a juicer that created juice from, well, juice) this seems like a 24 carat investment.
- No, the Radeon 7800 isn't just a 16GB Radeon 7700. (Notebook Check)
My fault, I misread the article in Tom's Hardware yesterday. The 7800 should be a 20-25% upgrade over the 6800, and the 7700 a 20-25% upgrade over the 6700 XT. Nothing amazing, but the only amazing cards in this generation are the RTX 4090, which is amazingly fast and amazingly expensive, and the MooreThreads MTT S80, which is amazingly awful.
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Tuesday, July 18
Can't Get There From Here Edition
Top Story
- You can't run MongoDB 5.0 or later on Linux under VirtualBox on Windows 11.
Which doesn't affect most people at all, but one of the reasons I wanted a laptop with 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD was so I could have a complete test environment with two virtual servers in a cluster running all my code, and we use MongoDB a lot at my day job.
The reason it doesn't work is that Windows 11 is already virtualised - a lot of the new security features depend on virtualisation, and so does WSL2 if you use that. So when you run VirtualBox you are running a virtual environment inside a virtual environment.
Which with earlier versions of VirtualBox simply didn't work. Now it works, unless you want to run specific programs - like MongoDB - that use the AVX instruction set.
Why the AVX instruction set is disabled in this case I have no idea. The VirtualBox window has a little turtle icon to indicate it's running under Microsoft's Hyper-V paravirtualisation system and thus suffering from institutionally-enforced mental retardation, but the only fix is to disable WSL2 and all the new security features.
Or upgrade to Windows 11 Pro. Or backgrade to Windows 10.
Or Linux.
Laptop hasn't crashed today so yesterday's incident may have been due to my messing around trying to get VirtualBox working.
- Samsung's new 27" 5k monitor is here. (Tom's Hardware)
It costs $1600 where Dell's 32" 6k monitor costs $2400, so while yes, it is cheaper, if you're in the market for a high-end professional monitor I'm not sure that you're going to quibble about the extra $800 for a larger, higher-resolution screen.
Also the Samsung has built-in smart TV features, which many people would pay to avoid.
Tech News
- Is the Radeon 7800 a 16GB Radeon 7700? (Tom's Hardware)
Maybe. If so it would be no faster than the previous generation 6800, but would leave plenty of room for a faster 7800 XT model.
And if the price is right - no more than $500 - it could kick Nvidia where it hurts. Well, actually, it won't hurt at all because Nvidia is swimming in an AI startup money pool at the moment, but it would at least make a good graphics card for normal users.
Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti caught a lot of flack for having just 8GB of RAM on a 128 bit bus. The 7700 will have 12GB of RAM on a 192 bit bus, and the 7800 will have 16GB of RAM on a 256 bit bus. So unless AMD screw up the pricing - which they probably will - they should have a much more attractive offering in the $400-$500 range.
- JumpCloud, an IT firm serving 200,000 orgs, says it was hacked by nation-state
"Extremely targeted" attack involved a data injection into JumpCloud's commands framework. (Ars Technica)
This is legally-mandated security breach disclosure speak for "some idiot clicked on a link in an email".
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Monday, July 17
Kerpow Splat Edition
Top Story
- New laptop crashed twice today. Don't know why; I ran the built-in tests and they all came back good.
I loaded two terabytes of stuff onto it over the weekend without a hiccup, and the core temperature seems to be hovering around 54C, which isn't much at all. Only thing I can think of is I was using my Linux VM more, but I don't see why that would make a difference.
I did uninstall McAfee, but that shouldn't make anything worse.
- SpaceX has now launched 1612 satellites using just two rockets. (WCCFTech)
Those are the kinds of numbers you need to achieve if you're serious about taking over the global space launch market, and they is.
Tech News
- Over 50% of young Danes gave streamed or downloaded content illegally. (Torrentfreak)
The other 50% have learned how to lie.
- The GPT Win 4 (2023) has a 6" 1080p screen, a Ryzen 7840U CPU, and up to 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD. (Liliputing)
Why can't we get regular laptops like this? The only thing it doesn't have is a dedicated GPU, which is understandable in a 6" device but they also have a dock with a Radeon 7600M GPU if you need that.
- Christopher Nolan wants Oppenheimer to be a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley. (The Verge)
Don't nuke Hiroshima, check.
I'll also note that President Truman thought that Oppenheimer was a jackass.
- Has the VIC-II chip in your faithful Commodore 64 finally fried itself after forty years? Help may be at hand. (GitHub)
The new version drops straight into the socket previously occupied by your expired chip, but has one or two new tricks, like an 80 column mode, increasing the colours available from 16 to 262,144, supporting VGA, DVI, and HDMI output, an extra 64k of dedicated video RAM, doubling the vertical resolution for modern monitors that can't cope with ancient low-resolution signals, and a blitter.
This is good to see because you can still buy 6502 CPUs. There's a company called Rochester Electronics that has stockpiled fifteen billion old chips because there's always someone, somewhere, who needs fifty original model Z80A processors to replace failed signal controllers in a subway, because running a new controller through modern safety qualifications would cost millions of dollars and take at least a decade.
But custom chips like the VIC-II were never available for Rochester to stockpile, and before long there won't be any working chips left to replace the failed ones.
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Sunday, July 16
Anyone's Race To Lose Edition
Top Story
- The Ninth Circuit has denied the FTC's appeal after the agency was denied an injunction blocking Microsoft's acquisition of Actilizard. (The Verge)
Which is good. I think.
- Meanwhile the Fifth Circuit has granted a temporary stay on a preliminary injunction blocking one of the Biden Administration's largest censorship and propaganda efforts. (New York Times) (archive site)
Not as good.
Tech News
- Intel is preparing to offer 16nm FINFET production to third-party designers - as a budget node. (AnandTech)
Simple chips like microcontrollers - the RP2040 in the Raspberry Pi Pico for example - are typically built on much older processes than the latest mainstream CPUs. While AMD's laptop chips are built on TSMC's 4nm process, the RP2040 is built on 40nm, with planar transistors rather than the more efficient FINFETs.
So for that market 16nm would be a huge step forward if the price is right.
- If you're in Europe and want to use Instagram's Threads because, I don't know, you have multidrug-resistant neurosyphilis or something, you double can't. (Thurrott)
Threads isn't available in Europe because it breaks every EU law regarding data collection and targeted advertising, and now Facebook has blocked access via VPNs as well.
- Bing is being sued because its miracle AI-powered news summaries accused an Air Force veteran and rocket entrepreneur of treason. (Reason)
Turns out that Professor Jeffrey Battle of Battle Enterprises, while possibly ill-advised in representing himself in this suit, is not the same person as Jeffrey Leon Battle, who tried to enlist with the Taliban in the wake of 9/11.
If Bing had merely linked to another website where this claim was made, Microsoft would be protected under DMCA Section 230. But this is their own work.
Oops.
- Samsung is launching a new range of big, expensive Android tablets. (Liliputing)
No small cheap ones. I have the A7 Lite, and it would be perfectly fine if the screen weren't a reject from 2012. But there is nothing better on the market right now except for Lenovo's Y700, which you can't buy.
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Saturday, July 15
One Louder Edition
Top Story
- So as I mentioned yesterday my laptop charger decided to emulate Chernobyl at 5PM on a Friday.
And the reason for that was that something shorted out. Not the charger itself - it wouldn't be that, because I have many chargers. Not the cable - I have at least a dozen USB-C cables. It was the single solitary USB-C port on my laptop.
Fortunately I also have many laptops, and I already set up the latest one for my recent trip because it looked like my regular one was on the way out.
- Apropos of nothing, Windows 11 is dogshit. It works, it's just endlessly annoying.
Microsoft, I don't want any of that. All the changes are bad. All of them.
- The unions of Hollywood are trying to save it from itself, the way Tamerlane saved Isfahan. (The Verge)
Here's the problem: The actors are siding with the writers against the studios, when the writers have collaborated with the studios for years to burn the city to the ground.
You're your own worst enemy, Fran Drescher, just like Microsoft.
Tech News
- I mentioned that I have a 4TB Team MP34 in the new laptop, and it's one of the cheapest drives around in that size, with no apparent flaws at least on paper. It's only PCIe 3, but most of the time that makes no difference. But until now I hadn't put it under any real stress.
Today I set up a Linux virtual machine (Ubuntu 22.04 desktop) and pre-allocated a 100GB volume for it. Ran at a steady 1.6GB per second throughout. I'm not sure whether the drive or the CPU was the bottleneck, but that's nothing to complain about as a real-world result.
As for the laptop itself, an HP Pavilion 14 (not the Plus model, the cheap one): It's pretty good. The Ryzen 5625U is not the latest chip, and not even the fastest in the range from two years ago, but it works fine. The keyboard feels good, and while I need to get used to the layout, it's exactly the layout I was looking for, so if I don't like it that's on me.
The screen is mostly fine. It's only 1080p, a noticeable downgrade from the 2560x1600 panel on my Dell Inspiron 14 Plus - a model they no longer make. The Pavilion 14 Plus model comes with a 2880x1800 OLED panel which looks amazing, but is limited to 16GB of RAM which is not so amazing. But while the resolution isn't off the charts, it's still sharp and clear and the colours are vibrant.
Only notable annoyance with the hardware is that it only charges from the right - it has a USB-C port and a barrel jack, but they're both on that side. No SD card slot either, but I hardly use that these days.
A few minor tweaks would turn this from a pretty good laptop to near-perfect, but nobody cares to do that.
- Media execs haven't learned a thing from recent AI tests. (The Verge)
Yes they have. They've learned that they need to spend a couple more months tweaking the prompts before they fire the whole lot of you worthless bastards.
- Google Docs now has a built-in AI feature. It's garbage. (Tom's Hardware)
Barely more reliable than a tech journalist.
- AVX-512 works fine on AMD laptop chips. (Tom's Hardware)
Slightly amusing because Intel invented AVX-512 and then had to disable it on all its consumer chips because it made the existing power consumption problems even worse.
AMD implemented AVX-512 so that it performs two 256-bit operations on subsequent clock cycles, and while that is obviously slower, it also uses much less power so the CPU can run at higher clock speeds. So it's slower than a full 512-bit implementation, but much better than half the speed - and it's competing with Intel chips that now don't have AVX-512 at all.
- Could an industrial civilisation have predated humans on Earth? (Nautilus)
No.
- Reddit just deleted all chat messages more than six months old. (Mashable)
"That was in a changelog a year ago," says Reddit.
No it fucking wasn't.
The changelog says that chat messages posted after 1 January 2023 will be migrated to new infrastructure as of 30 June. It doesn't say a word about deleting everything older than that.
- Don't use Avast or AVG. (Safety Detectives)
The company is run by amoral scumbags.
They have stopped beating their wives - in fact there is a special section at the top of this article that proudly announces the cessation of connubial corporal correction - but, well, frog, scorpion.
- AI junk is starting to pollute the internet. (Wall Street Journal)
Starting to?
- Lenovo is launching a new model of its Legion Y700 Android tablet next week. (Notebook Check)
This shares the high refresh rate 2560x1600 8.8" IPS display with the previous model, while upgrading the CPU to a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 (with a Cortex X2 core, so this is very fast for a small tablet) and up to 16GB of RAM.
I would buy this like a shot except for the tiny fact that Lenovo doesn't sell it outside of China. You can buy it from third parties, unlocked, switched to English, and with the Google Play store installed, but that inherently means that some random person has updated the firmware.
Accidental Purchases Redux
And what the party was about was the release of new merch - a set of plushies - designed by Sana and including a Sana figure even though she left the company nearly a year ago.
Sometimes things getting stuck in Production Hell is a blessing, because now it's possible to get this stuff shipped to Australia, when it wasn't during the Wuhan Bat Flu Death Plague.
Three bears came along
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Friday, July 14
Of Course There's An App Edition
Top Story
- If you have a VanMoof (who?) e-bike and are worried about getting locked out of the app now that the company is in administration, a friendly Cowboy has ridden to the rescue. (Tech Crunch)
Of course there's an app.
There is a way to use these bikes without the app but some of the functionality is missing. Now though there are at least three third-party apps to choose from, none of them depending on the continued existence of corporate servers.
Tech News
- Twitter has started delivering on its promised revenue sharing payments to top accounts subscribed to Twitter Blue. (The Verge)
Left Twitter in a huff after Elon took charge? Congratulations, you just missed out on upwards of $10,000.
- Reddit has scrapped gold. (The Verge)
As usual for Reddit, without warning and without any alternative.
Reddit let you buy virtual coins to give awards to users for good posts. They just shut down that very popular system with zero notice.
I'd already stopped buying coins after Reddit set itself on fire, so maybe it wasn't that popular anymore.
- AMD won't follow in Intel's footsteps with P cores and E cores. At least, not on the desktop. (WCCFTech)
And we're not likely to see more than 16 cores in mainstream CPUs anytime soon, because two memory channels doesn't provide enough bandwidth to warrant it.
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Thursday, July 13
Off By Zero Edition
Top Story
- Microsoft has won its court battle with the FTC over its acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, which is rather like a cat winning a fight with a crow over who gets to eat the rear end of a dead mouse. (The Verge)
The FTC was seeking an injunction, which has been denied. That means the acquisition can go ahead, and any further action by the FTC would be up against a fait accompli.
- The FTC has appealed the ruling on the basis of nothing. (The Verge)
That is, they've file a notice of appeal, but given no reasoning whatsoever. Presumably there will be a reason given at some point, but they need to think of it first.
Tech News
- Elon Musk has launched YAFAC, Yet Another AI Company. (WCCFTech)
The legal name of the corporate entity is xAI, but we all know what it is.
- Big businesses running subscription services (which is all of them, it would seem) are fighting the FTC's plan for click-to-cancel rules. (The Register)
They allege that being able to cancel your subscription easily would harm their customers because their customers are mindless zombies as evidence by the fact that they subscribed in the first place.
Fair.
- The latest version of MacOS is looking more like an iPhone than ever. (The Verge)
Which is great unless you want to use your Mac as if it were a real computer, in which case you're fucked. MacOS used to be great because it was a pretty UI over a solid Unix system, but Apple is working tirelessly to fix both of those problems.
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Wednesday, July 12
Pup And Cattybee Edition
Top Story
- The state of Massachusetts has been sued over colluding with Google to put spyware on residents' phones. (The Federalist)
The spyware in question was a COVID contact-tracing app, which was nominally entirely voluntary but became rather less so when citizens failed to volunteer.
According to the suit, the software was installed without the users' awareness or permission, reinstalled itself automatically if it was removed, and communicated with other nearby devices over Bluetooth.*
Massachusetts' Attorney General has filed for dismissal on the grounds that while they did indeed murder all those people, the point is moot because they are not murdering anyone at this precise moment in time.
Take a moment to admire the chutzpah while you are gathering the tar and feathers.
* Disable Bluetooth when you are not actively using it. It's not so much a security hole as a security rabbit warren.
Tech News
- The Samsung 990 Pro - the company's current top of the line consumer SSD - is currently available for $129 for 2TB. (Tom's Hardware)
A year ago that would have been a good price for a 1TB model. And if you that's enough storage for your needs, the 1TB model is now just $59, which was a price reserved for bargain-basement drives not so long ago.
- Intel is set to stop making NUCs. (AnandTech)
This is their line of mini-PCs - about four inches square and two inches high - that they've been producing for the past ten years. There are numerous competitors, from Taiwanese brands like Asus and Gigabyte, to Chinese models like Minisforum and Beelink, but with Intel there was a bit more assurance that the products would still be around next year... Until there wasn't.
- Amazon says it is not a VLOP - a very large online platform - under the EU's new rules governing VLOPs. (Ars Technica)
As far as I can tell, though, the rules are very broad - EU laws tend to be like that, unlike US laws that tend to be very specific because of constitutional restrictions - and Amazon is full of shit.
- VanMoof (who?), an e-bike maker that raised $200 million, seems to have spent it all. (Tech Crunch)
Oops.
Their bikes are kind of cool: All the electrical stuff is completely hidden, so they look like regular bicycles with chunky frames. Horribly expensive, but that doesn't matter since you can't buy one anyway.
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