• Amazon workers are demanding "data" explaining why they should return to working in the office.  (Seattle Times)  (archive site)

  Workers who have asked the company to share data have been provided anecdotes and a consistent trope that innovation is more likely to happen in person.

  Which is true.

  That has left some workers feeling demoralized, distracted and undervalued as they struggle to stay focused and motivated, according to interviews and internal communications shared with The Times.

  Well, perhaps less true with a useless pack of mopes like this lot.

  An Amazon manager, who is based on the East Coast and asked to speak anonymously to protect their job, said it is "dehumanizing," and feels as if leadership doesn’t trust its employees to understand their reasoning. In Slack messages, employees anonymously posted that Amazon’s decisions were "dystopian" and creating "just a horrible situation."

  I was going to suggest simply firing them all, but after hearing this heartfelt message I would like instead to propose turning them into jam.

• The LG Gram Style is a great laptop except apparently for the touchpad.  (The Verge)
  
  It's light - 2.7 lbs is great for a 16" laptop.  It has a beautiful 3200x2000 120Hz OLED display.  RAM is soldered but at least there's 32GB of it, paired with an Intel 1360P CPU and 1TB of SSD.  The keyboard has the Four Essential Keys albeit in the form of a three-column numpad, which is an acceptable tradeoff.  And it has two USB-C ports, one USB-A, a headphone jack, and a microSD reader.
  
  Oh, and it changes colour depending on the angle.
  
  Around $1400 at Best Buy which, so it's not exactly cheap, but not insanely expensive either.
  
  
  
• Good Omens season 2 is diverse!  (The Verge)
  
  But is it any good?

  The sheer breadth of representation across the second season of Neil Gaiman’s divine comedy is nothing short of miraculous.

  So that's a no.
  
  Not that you need to take The Verge's word for it: I've watched the whole thing.
  
  Season one, adapted from the classic book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, is great.  Not perfect perhaps, but technically excellent, well-acted, and faithful to the book.
  
  Season two, by Neil Gaiman alone, is technically excellent, well-acted, and quite passable up until the final episode which is an unmitigated disaster.
  
  Hopefully the writers' strike will go on forever and we'll never get a season three.
  
  
  
• 1.4 billion people will need to "reskill" over the next three years as AI transforms the workforce.  (IBM)
  
  Skills most likely to be in demand include:
  
  * The patience to coax a coherent response out of an utterly broken AI system
  * Apologising to customers after the company's AI has screwed up their order
  * Fixing AI errors before they send the company bankrupt
  * Switching the AI off entirely without management knowing about it
  
  
  
• Russia's Luna 25 automated lander has "ceased to exist" after colliding with the Moon.  (CNN)
  
  That'll do it.
  
  
  
• After Elon Musk suggested that the block function would be limited to DMs, so many users left Twitter for Jack Dorsey's Bluesky Social that the newer platform buckled under the load.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  How many?
  
  So many!
  
  Like?
  
  Five thousand.
  
  Yes, 0.0015% of Twitter's active monthly users was enough to make Bluesky cave in.
  
  While it's true that Thread's 100 million users didn't stay around for long, nor do much while they were there, at least the platform didn't collapse under them.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, August 21 2023 10:33 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 22 2023 07:48 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 22 2023 09:42 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 22 2023 12:55 PM (BMUHC)

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• What is real and what is not in TikTok's mental illness plague?  (The Verge)
  
  What is the difference between someone pretending to be mentally ill for the social benefits and someone who is actually mentally ill?

  It was TikTok, in Robinson's eyes, that was driving the sudden rise in pediatric DID referrals. "It's possible that social media is revealing new ways for individuals with genuine DID to express themselves," he said in his lecture. But he also issued a warning: "however, it’s also very possible that social media and internet trends are contributing to increased DID claims that are not genuine." That is, people claiming to have DID might be mistaken, confused, or simply faking it.

  As a licensed professional, Dr Robinson is required by law never to give a straight answer.
  
  As a licensed unprofessional, on the other hand, I can tell you this: Everyone on TikTok is faking being crazy for social credit points.
  
  If you want to find people who are legitimately mentally ill, check the bios on Twitter.

  He started with a clip of a rainbow-haired DID system purchasing a personalized cake to celebrate their official DID diagnosis, something Robinson thought was "surprising," as it contrasted with the typically "hidden" nature of the disorder. He shared footage of a system cycling through eight elaborate neon outfits - complete with wigs and cat-like paws - attributed to their different alters, "overt changes" of appearance that Robinson felt were "not characteristic" of the DID patients clinicians see each day.

  Thanks doc, and no shit.  Identity disorders don't come with complimentary wardrobes.  These are adult-sized children who want to live in cartoon world.

• Why do old books smell so good?  (Science Switch)
  
  Bacon.  They're made of bacon.
  
  
  
• AMD is reportedly preparing a $299 RX 6750 GRE model to compete with the 4060 Ti at the price of the 4060.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Good.  The 6700 / 6750 family are still strong options given the lackluster offerings in the latest generation.
  
  
  
• Intel meanwhile keeps improving the drivers for its own graphics cards.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  These are also becoming a viable option.
  
  
  
• A look - literally - at Samsung's 256TB SSD.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's not small.
  
  
  
• Those fancy blue-light blocking glasses are a useless gimmick.  (New Atlas)
  
  Which should be obvious, because if they actually blocked a significant proportion of blue light, everything would turn yellow when you put them on.
  
  
  
• Cellebrite - the phone hacking tool company - tells its customers, which is to say cops, that they have to keep the tools and their use of those tools secret.  (Tech Crunch)

  In a leaked training video for law enforcement customers that was obtained by TechCrunch, a senior Cellebrite employee tells customers that "ultimately, you’ve extracted the data, it's the data that solves the crime, how you got in, let’s try to keep that as hush hush as possible."

  Yeah, that's illegal.

  Cellebrite spokesperson Victor Cooper said in an email to TechCrunch that the company "is committed to support ethical law enforcement. Our tools are designed for lawful use, with the utmost respect for the chain of custody and judicial process."

  Sure, Jan.

  When asked whether Cellebrite would change the content of its training, the spokesperson did not respond.

  I am shocked, shocked, to find a phone hacking company acting shady.
   

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Monday, August 21 2023 11:51 AM (r9O5h)

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Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 19 2023 11:08 PM (obo9H)

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• Fools and money: Purchasers of ugly monkey jpegs - which is to say, distributed database entries which are unique identifiers of digital images of ugly monkeys stored on someone's server somewhere - are suing auction house Sotheby's and ugly monkey jpeg purveyor Yuga Labs alleging that they, which is to say the buyers of said ugly monkey jpegs, are too stupid to be allowed out of the house without a leash.  (Ars Technica)
  
  And while this is undoubtedly true, it might be hard to establish as a point of law that this idiocy is the fault of Sotheby's or of Yuga Labs.

  Sotheby's sold a lot of 101 Bored Ape NFTs for $24.4 million at its "Ape In!" auction in September 2021, well above the pre-auction estimates of $12 million to $18 million. That's an average price of over $241,000, but Bored Ape NFTs now sell for a floor price of about $50,000 worth of ether cryptocrurrency, according to CoinGecko data accessed today.

  Or rather, don't sell at that price.
  
  At least you can eat tulip bulbs.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Is the PCIe 5 Seagate Firecude 540 worth buying?  (Serve the Home)
  
  No.  But it's less not worth buying than ugly monkey jpegs - about a thousand times cheaper, for a start, and you actually own it.
  
  
  
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says AI is a tidal wave as big as the internet.  (Bloomberg)
  
  A tidal wave?  As in, it brings nothing good, you can see it coming a mile off, and you'd best seek high ground right away?
  
  Seems apt.
  
  
  
• The iKoolCore R1 Pro is a four port 2.5Gb Ethernet router that measures 3x3x2 inches and includes a quad core Pentium N6005 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and up to 1TB of SSD.  (Liliputing)
  
  It also has HDMI, USB-C (and a second USB-C for power input), two USB-A ports, and a microSD slot.
  
  This is all identical to the iKoolCore R1 non-Pro edition released a few months ago except that this model has upgraded cooling and doesn't crash all the time.
  
  Which is a plus.
  
  
  
• The Verge continues to descend into Musk-induced insanity.  (The Verge)
  
  Today's report is titled "Elon Musk is killing 'Environmental Twitter'" but instead makes the case that environmental activists are mindless zealots who will brook no opposition, or indeed anything but the most slavish support.
  
  Which is true.
  
  
  

• LK-99: Not a superconductor.  (Nature)
  
  Ace already posted on this a couple of days ago but this article in Nature seems to explain what the Korean researchers were observing.
  
  Pure LK-99 is not a conductor at all, so what the were measuring was LK-99 "doped" with specific impurities.  And the important one looks to have been copper sulfide, which shows a phase transition and change in conductivity right at the point where the researchers thought they were seeing a transition to superconductivity.
  
  But it was just the temperature at which their sample's resistance dropped by a factor of 10, not by a factor of infinity.  Below that temperature the electromagnetic properties of their sample changed drastically, but it was still not actually a superconductor.
  
  So, no flying cars for another twenty years I'm afraid.
  
  
  

Posted by: anonymous at Friday, August 18 2023 10:10 PM (hRoyQ)

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• Instagram's Twitter competitor, Threads, broke all records in the speed at which it reached 100 million users.  How is it doing now, a couple of weeks later?  Usage has plummeted, and Threads now has less than half the active daily users of Twitter.  (The Guardian)
  
  This is technically correct, since half a percent is indeed less than half.
  
  While Twitter averages around 100 million active users each day, Threads is around 576,000.
  
  
  

Tech News

• You don't hate Jira, you hate your manager.  (Hacker News)
  
  Everyone in the comments: No, we hate Jira.
  
  
  
• China's chip production technology is five generations behind the rest of the world.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China's leading-edge production is 14nm, where Taiwan, Korea, and the US are all ramping up production at 3nm.  But most of China's fab capacity is even further behind, at 28nm.  And 28nm kind of sucks.
  
  AMD was stuck at 28nm for years because TSMC and Samsung fumbled the transition to FINFETs - only Intel got that right.  That almost bankrupted the company.
  
  
  
• Need to pack 64TB of M.2 SSDs into a standard U.2 carrier with active cooling but without fans?  Yes?  What the hell are you doing?  (AnandTech)
  
  Anyway, Mac aftermarket stuff maker OWC has teamed up with fanless fan maker Frore to build, well, what I just said.
  
  The interesting part here is the Frore AirJet, a piezoelectric device that uses tiny vibrating crystals to shoot air out one end at about a thousand miles an hour, keeping whatever it is attached to cool without making a lot of noise, or at least without a lot of noise that anyone other than a bat can hear.
  
  
  
• The Verge's coverage of Elon Musk keeps getting creepier.  (The Verge)
  
  These people need an intervention.  Or sedation.  Or both.
  
  
  
• It's time to rethink our relationships with streaming services.  (The Verge)
  
  I don't have a relationship with streaming services.  What is wrong with you people?
  
  
  
• Google Chrome will now use AI to automatically summarise articles for you so you don't need to read them.  (The Verge)
  
  <summary>The Verge is garbage.</summary>
  
  
  
• The tech jobs market is as strong as it ever was.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Now that hundreds of thousands of people have been laid off.
  
  
  
• ISPs are complaining that new FCC rules requiring they tell customers what they are being charged are excessively onerous.  (Ars Technica)
  
  "How will we rip people off if we have to list all the applicable fees?" asked one executive.  "That sounds ominously like work."
  
  Also, Ars Technica has banned me for a month for very politely telling their Creative Director that he's a credulous idiot.  So while I'm sure there's every kind of nonsense going on in the comments over there, I can't tell you exactly what kind.
  
  
  
• Streaming site SportsBay has been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars to DISH Network.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  That's $2500 for a DMCA violation and, uh, over two million violations.
  
  They had to count them all.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 16 2023 09:18 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, August 16 2023 10:37 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 17 2023 12:07 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 17 2023 12:23 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, August 17 2023 12:33 AM (JqCHh)

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• Large Language Models can generate valid JSON 100% of the time.  (Hacker News)
  
  If you install a plugin that smacks the LLM over the head with a ruler any time it tries to emit a character that would make the output invalid.
  
  It's like lining up an infinite number of monkeys and shooting all the ones that aren't typing out Hamlet.  Yes, it works in theory, but what are you going to do with all the dead monkeys?
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Beelink GTR7 Pro: A great small computer with a completely nonstandard power connector.  (Serve the Home)
  
  And unlike Apple with MagSafe, you're not going to find third-party replacements.
  
  
  
• The Delhi High Court has ruled that under Indian trademark law, Google cannot sell ads against trademarked search terms.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Google operates something of a protection racket here: Competitors place ads against your company name to steer traffic away from you, so you not only need to advertise under your own search term, you have to outbid the competition to get top billing.
  
  Not surprising someone would find this questionable.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fried used $100 million in stolen customer funds for political donations.  (Reuters)
  
  Will they give the money back?
  
  No, they're Democrats.
  
  Also, he's going to be held in the same jail where Epstein did not kill himself, so there's no need.
  
  
  

Posted by: bob in houston at Tuesday, August 15 2023 11:44 PM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 16 2023 12:59 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 16 2023 10:59 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 16 2023 11:01 AM (BMUHC)

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• Stack Overflow is introducing its own AI question answering system because somehow getting the answer wrong 77% of the time is appealing to the company's CEO.  (ZDNet)
  
  You jump off bridges when it's bridge-jumping time, and apparently right now it's garbage AI time.
  
  Stack Overflow plans to fix the problem of generative AI giving plausible but unsound answers by, according to the article, waving its hands around.  It wants an expert system, but Large Language Models are the exact opposite of expert systems.
  
  CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar also believes AI will solve the cultural problems at Stack Overflow, to wit, that the platforms top users are a bunch of autistic narcissists who actively attack anyone asking questions, where the entire point of the platform is for people to ask questions.
  
  The New Stack reached out to the moderators at Stack Overflow for comment on being replaced not merely by an AI but by an AI that has already been tested and proven not to work.
  
  The moderators had not responded at time of publication because they are all on strike.
  
  I swear I am not making this up.

• Apple plans to retire 8GB laptop models with its next generation M3 range, replacing them with 12GB.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Adding a whole $5 to the cost of the system to be very slightly less pathetic.  Good work.
  
  
  
• TSMC is discovering that building a chip factory in Arizona was a mistake.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The company is trying to bring in workers from Taiwan because it can't find qualified workers locally, but the local unions are, of course, fighting it.
  
  Plus there's the slight problem that chip factories use a lot of water and Arizona is a desert.
  
  
  
• The world in which IPv6 was a good idea.  (Apenwarr)
  
  That is not this world.
  
  
  
• A tale of two internets.  (Tailscale)
  
  More thoughts on the same subject from the same author three years later.
  
  
  
• What happens when people start reading privacy policies.  (The Markup)
  
  They find out they have no privacy.

• Some of the Hololive EN streamers have an expression: One guyed.
  
  It's when they're playing a game or trying to solve a technical issue and ask chat for help, and get a prompt and authoritative answer from one guy among the thousands watching that turns out to be completely wrong.
  
  ChatGPT is that one guy.  (The Register)
  
  Taking a look at ChatGPT answers to Stack Overflow questions - a devil's brew of epistemic closure if I ever saw one - researchers found that ChatGPT had no better than a 50% chance of being correct, and for the best and most authoritative answers - the ones that were accepted by the questioner as definitive - ChatGPT was wrong 77% of the time.
  
  I've said before that the entire model of ChatGPT is building an artificial arts student, but really it seems to be building an artificial confidence trickster.

• Intel's 14700K has been benchmarked, and is between 5% and 20% faster than the 13700K.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  5% on single-threaded tasks thanks to a 200MHz speed boost; 20% on multi-threaded tasks thanks to four additional Efficiency cores.
  
  Nothing groundshaking but if they keep the same price it will be a worthwhile improvement.
  
  Big changes may be coming at the entry level, with the 14100 rumoured to have six Performance cores, up from four.  If true, and if the price again remains the same, that will be a great little chip.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile on the great big chip front AMD is preparing to release Epyc Siena for low-end servers and Threadripper 7000 Pro for high-end workstations.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Siena will support up to 64 cores at a 200W TDP, while the new Threadrippers will offer up to 96 cores at a 350W TDP.
  
  The two families of chips will share the same SP6 socket, which is the same physical size but a different pin layout as the previous generation of Epyc CPUs.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix has launched 24GB LPDDR5X-8500 memory...  Things.  (AnandTech)
  
  They're not modules in the sense of DIMMs, but each one contains 8 memory chips in a stack, so they're not chips either.
  
  Anyway, since they're 64 bits wide a laptop would need two of them, giving 48GB of RAM, which is enough even for me.
  
  
  
• Mediatek's Dimensity 9300 meanwhile supports LPDDR5T-9600 memory, which is one louder.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And has four Cortex X4 cores and four A720 cores - four fast cores and four ultra-fast cores - with no slow cores at all.
  
  Sounds like a good chip for a laptop, actually.  Most phone chips only have one of the Cortex X series cores, which is fine for phone use but not so great in more demanding applications.
  
  
  
• LPython is a Python compiler...  Ish.  (LPython)
  
  It seems to be designed primarily for type-annotated Python code, though it can run unannotated code as well, compiling it into C and thence to native code, rather like Cython.
  
  But it can also JIT-compile live code, rather like PyPy - or given that it uses decorators to do this, like PyPy's predecessor Psyco.
  
  And unlike Mojo, you can actually download it and try it out right now.
  
  
  
• A look inside the Linux kernel.  (Seiya)
  
  The Linux kernel as of version 6.5 is 36 million lines long, too much for any one human to comprehend.  So this article doesn't try; it instead looks at Linux 0.01, the first public version, which is only 10,000 lines.
  
  
  
• How the FBI goes after DDOS attackers.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Very, very slowly.
  
  
  
• Dinner tonight was the spécialité de la maison: Satay kangaroo with fried rice.
  
  Not bad.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 14 2023 02:50 AM (BMUHC)

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• Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced head of failed crypto Ponzi scheme FTX, has had his $250 million bail revoked and been sent to jail to await trial, under new charges of witness tampering.  (CNBC)
  
  Because he spoke to the press.
  
  Bankman-Fried is a fool and a phony and I'm almost starting to believe he's innocent of the specific charges.  Not that I would ever let him within a dozen firewalls of my digital funds.

• Google wants content scraping by AI tools to be considered fair use.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Of course they do.
  
  But...  Why shouldn't it be?
  
  I can read whatever I like on the internet, and express my opinions here.  Well, not if Prime Minister Albonazi manages to shove his godforsaken misinformation bill through Parliament but until then we have the tacit assumption of freedom of speech down here, even if it is not specifically protected under our Constitution because nothing else is either.
  
  And not that those specific protections are worth much in the US anymore.
  
  Anyway.
  
  Why shouldn't training AIs on public material be fair use under the First Amendment?  How can we have free speech if we don't have free listening?
  
  
  
• Disabling the Efficiency cores on Intel CPUs nets a 50% performance boost on new game Atlas Fallen.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is apparently not an unauthorised sequel to Shrugged.
  
  I'm not sure who exactly screwed this up, but the article points the finger at the game developer and not Microsoft.
  
  
  
• Use text-to-speech to instantly create your own podcast.  (Hacker News)
  
  No.
  
  
  
• The You Can't Just Say That S25-0801 offers eight 2.5Gb ports and one 10Gb port, but the 10Gb port is SFP so it goes straight onto the trash pile.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Around $100.  Shame about, uh, that.

  The bottom of the switch has two mounting points. It also has a You Can't Just Say That product label. We will just quickly note that the "You Can't Just Say That" name was one of the most frequent points that commenters focused on in the YouTube video.

  You don't say.
  
  Probably because you can't.
  
  
  
• Austria's telecommunications regulator has ruled that courts can order DNS blocks for various nefarious activities, but cannot require ISPs to block IP addresses.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Which is a sport our own authorities in Australia are a little too keen on as well.
  
  The problem in this case is that a single IP address can host, say, 96,530 individual websites.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 13 2023 04:29 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, August 13 2023 08:25 AM (liVFZ)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 13 2023 09:06 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, August 13 2023 02:26 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 13 2023 04:23 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, August 13 2023 09:56 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 14 2023 03:39 PM (PiXy!)

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