• Half of China's major cities are sinking.  (NPR)
  
  Everyone said I was mad to build a city in a swamp, but I built it all the same.
  
  It sank into the swamp.
  
  

• Daniel Dennett, one of the few philosophers of the past hundred years worthy of respect, has passed away.  (Daily Nous)
  
  You may not agree with everything he said, but he was right more often than wrong, which is a stellar feat in philosophy.
  
  For example:

  Postmodernism, the school of "thought" that proclaimed "There are no truths, only interpretations" has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for "conversations" in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

  He was 82.
  
  
  
• Speaking at the Open Source Summit, Linux creator Linus Torvalds shared his thoughts on AI, security, and everything else.  (ZDNet)
  
  On the AI question, the most useful thing he sees is that Nvidia now talks to the Linux kernel developers so they can work around hardware bugs.
  
  Other than that, he suggested that AI might actually be useful in 10 years.
  
  Maybe.
  
  
  
• To nobody's surprise, Twitter clone Post News is dead.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  If you want to take on Twitter you have to start with a platform that is already useful - and have a way to add Twitter's functionality without driving away all your users.
  
  Even Facebook is struggling with Threads.
  
  
  

• Micron is receiving $6 billion under the CHIPS Act to build $100 billion in memory fabs in New York state.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Micron is at least an American company.

• Grok keeps making up news stories.  (Ars Technica)
  
  So does the entire mainstream media - and the tech media including Ars Technica - but nobody mentions that.
  
  That said, they're not wrong.  I've pointed this out on Twitter myself.  In one case it decided six victims in a murder spree weren't enough and added another nine.
  
  
  
• Testing Intel's Core i5-14400 low-mid-range CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Personally I'd spend the extra few dollars to move up to the 14500 - which has four extra E cores - but for many people it won't make any difference and you might as well save the money.
  
  It's, well, it's fine.  And it runs fine with cheaper DDR4 memory, not just with DDR5.  And when I say fine, I mean spectacularly fast compared to anything even a few years old no matter how expensive.
  
  If you're aiming at gaming performance (and don't already have an Intel motherboard) it's worth paying another $20 for AMD's Ryzen 5700X3D.  It also uses cheaper DDR4 RAM and the performance boost is around 30%.
  
  
  
• What would happen if a USB cable company built a NAS?  (Kickstarter)
  
  In the case of the UGREEN NASync, the answer is...  It's really good.
  
  The software (a fork of Debian) is still in development, but if you just want your NAS to be a NAS, it just works.
  
  You can install your own operating system, but it's currently not easy.  And you might need one of the higher end models that have a separate - removable - SSD for the operating system.
  
  
  

• Turns out I was wrong: Google had nine of yesterday's pro-Nazi protesters arrested, then fired all of them.  (CNBC)
  
  I still wouldn't trust Google with anything sharper than a rubber spoon, but this is a rare positive sign.
  
  
  

Tech News

• How many bathrooms contain neanderthals?  (John Hawks)
  
  The number may surprise you.  Because it's greater than zero.
  
  
  
• With some power plants still offline following the recent earthquake, TSMC has stepped in.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  TSMC has backup generators for all of its many factories - big ones - because having the power go out can ruin tens of millions of dollars of chips.
  
  So now it's helping back up Taiwan's electrical grid as power plants are return to operation.
  
  
  
• Samsung will be introducing 10.7gbps, 32GB LPDDR5X modules later this year.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not sure if that's a 64-bit or 128-bit bus.  Checking their existing products, it looks like they only offer up to 64 LPDDR5X RAM, so two of these packages would give 64GB of very fast memory.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has announced the A400 and A1000 video cards, for people needing professional graphics cards but not professional graphics speeds.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These are half-height, single-slot cards that only use 50W, so don't expect them to be speed demons.  The A1000 is likely about half the speed of a 4060, and the A400 half of that.

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 19 2024 07:53 AM (PiXy!)

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Posted by: Mauser at Friday, April 19 2024 09:49 AM (nk1Z+)

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• The modern world depends on a handful of ships.  (The Verge)
  
  Specifically, the 22 ships designed and dedicated to repairing the undersea cables that make the internet inter.
  
  It's a good article, and it covers the whole history of undersea cables and cable repair:

  Field fared no better. Twelve years after he began, he had endured severed cables, near sinkings, and had one "success”: a cable laid in 1858 that prompted celebrations so enthusiastic that revelers set fire to New York City Hall. The cable failed weeks later.

  We need more of this.
  
  The only problem is that as you scroll through it, every so often it hits an image gallery and scrolls sideways.
  
  I'm impressed they found something worse than the experimental UI over at YouTube.
   

• Google's ethnically diverse Nazis are staging a sit-in to protest the company having a contract with Israel.  (MSN)
  
  It's so helpful the way the useless idiots self-identify so that they can be fired.
  
  Google won't take the opportunity, because at this point it's idiots all the way down.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's 4070 or AMD's 7900 GRE?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 7900 is 15% faster on non-raytraced games; the 4070 is 15% faster on raytraced games.
  
  The 7090 has more memory; the 4070 uses less power.
  
  If you're running AI workloads, the 4070 is a clear winner, running Stable Diffusion in half the time.
  
  Either card is a pretty good option though.
  
  Or just get a Radeon RX 580 which for $80 can deliver 500fps in Minecraft at 4k resolution.
  
  
  
• Samsung is to receive $6.4 billion - all direct funding, not loans - under the CHIPS Act to build a $40 billion chip factory in Texas.  (AnandTech)
  
  I'm not a huge fan of government handouts, even when it's not my government and not my tax dollars, but as I've said before, almost everything the government spends its money on is worse than this.

Posted by: Kurt Duncan at Wednesday, April 17 2024 11:26 PM (dMQGF)

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• Tesla is laying off 10% of its workforce - about 14,000 people - amid slowing sales of electric vehicles despite governments everywhere doing everything short of targeting conventional vehicles with drone strikes.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Tesla actually had a record year in 2023 in terms of units sold, but that was with some pretty significant price cuts.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Minisforum's V3 tablet is officially here, with preorders open and shipping expected next week.  (Liliputing)
  
  For $1199 you get an eight core Ryzen 8840U processor, a 14" 2560x1600 165Hz display with 100% DCI-P3 colour, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD, a detachable keyboard with the Four Essential Keys, and a touch-sensitive pen.
  
  Ports include two USB4 ports, another USB-C port for video input, a headphone jack, and an SD card slot.
  
  It's not Earth-shattering but it's very good - at least on paper - and half the price of an equivalent Microsoft Surface model.
  
  
  
• If you bought Ubisoft's game The Crew, well, you didn't.  (Tech Spot)
  
  It's gone now.  No, you don't get a refund.  Don't be silly.
  
  This case is a bit different because (a) this is probably illegal in France, and (b) Ubisoft is based in France.
  
  French intellectual property lawyers right now are looking at the holiday homes they'll buy in Santorini when the lawsuit is done.
  
  
  
• Roku is making two-factor authentication mandatory for all accounts after 600,000 customers got hacked.  (The Register)
  
  It doesn't seem that Roku itself was hacked, but that a lot of people still reuse passwords across multiple sites.  Understandable, but not a good idea.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile smart lock company Chirp still hasn't fixed 50,000 locks that it was informed were insecure in 2021.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  Yeah, with one of these here smart locks your home can be even less safe than your television channel.
  
  
  
• 
  

Top Story

• Axios sees artificial intelligence coming, and is shifting its strategy. (Seattle Times) (archive site)

  In the view of Jim VandeHei, CEO of Axios, artificial intelligence will "eviscerate the weak, the ordinary, the unprepared in media."

  Which is all of them. Yes, obviously Axios, but who is there in that industry that doesn't fit at least two out of three of those categories?

  VandeHei says the only way for media companies to survive is to focus on delivering journalistic expertise, trusted content and in-person human connection.

  Stop laughing, this is serious.

  "Fast forward five to 10 years from now and we’re living in this AI-dominated virtual world - who are the couple of players in the media space offering smart, sane content who are thriving?" he added. "It damn well better be us."

  Axios is a money-bleeding garbage mill, and always has been. As competition for stochastic garbage heats up and AI delivers for pennies a year what takes a six-figure salary for pompous overeducated leftists, we can only hope to see the evisceration VandeHei envisages.
  
  I wonder if bidding has opened on the hotdog concession.

  The company has also introduced a $1,000-a-year membership program around some of its journalists that will offer exclusive reporting, events and networking.
  
  "We're not prostitutes," said VandeHei. "Or if we are, we're the kind that expects you to shower first."

Tech News

• The purpose of a system is what it does: Maria Cantwell ran for the Senate promising privacy legislation. She has spent the 24 years since then blocking all efforts towards it. (Washington Post) (archive site)
  
  If you deliver what you promised, they don't need you anymore.
  
  
  
• Is that 368TB portable SSD just not the same as it was yesterday? Here's a 30,000TB tape library. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That used to be a lot.
  
  The article says 75,000TB, but that includes compression, and I don't know who exactly has 75,000TB of data that isn't already compressed in some manner.
  
  
  
• Minecraft modpack update: The squirrels in Luminous are animated better than the ones in Zoo Architect.
  
  Since both are working I'm not fussed.  Also the ones in Luminous come in four colour variants, which fits the theme of the mod.  There are new variants for almost all the common mobs - sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, cats, and wolves - plus new zombies, skeletons, creepers, endermen, golems, and spiders.
  
  No crashes in the latest test world.  It loads and runs - just - in 4GB of heap.  Looking pretty good at this point.
  
  I put Blue Skies and The Undergarden back in, along with Aether Redux; I'd previously taken them out due to their size but it seems okay now.  That took the base heap size from 3.3GB to 3.6GB; I'm running with a heap limit of 6GB.
  
  
  

• Google just announced at its big annual Cloud event, that it is all-in on ethnically diverse Nazis.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Cloud is old hat.  You don't want cloud.  You want Nazis.
  
  Says Google.
  
  It's no coincidence that one of my projects at work right now is to extricate our app currently running on Google Cloud and move it to old-fashioned dedicated servers that cost one tenth as much.

• Scientists think they have found a way to double the lifespan of lithium-ion batteries.  (Science Daily)
  
  Lithium-ion batteries wear out a little each time they are recharged (and have another flaw that if you keep them on the charger full-time they can swell up and destroy your expensive gadget entirely).
  
  In testing the effects of different charging patterns, researchers found that charging with high-frequency AC power caused half as much wear as regular DC power.
  
  It should be cheap and simple to implement as well.
  
  
  
• Yes, Virginia, the CPI is bullshit.  (Forbes)
  
  Ace might have covered this previously - the Forbes article is undated, but the research paper came out in February.
  
  Calculating the CPI using the same approach used up until 1982, annualised inflation in the US peaked at 18% in 2022, more than double the official number, and worse than the  darkest days of the Carter Era.
  
  So no, you're not imagining it.  Anyone who has been inside a grocery store in the past five years knows that, but some economists now also know it.
  
  
  
• Apple executives have defended the company's practice of selling expensive laptops with just 8GB of RAM and no possibility of ever upgrading that unless you learn surface-mount resoldering techniques and probably not even then.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I looked up the cost of the chips themselves, and the 8GB RAM upgrade that Apple charges you $200 for - only at the time you order the machine, since it can never be upgraded afterwards - appears to cost the company less than $5.
  
  Apple's markup on memory upgrades is between 2000% and 4000%, depending on the model.
  
  That's why they won't let you add memory yourself.
  
  Their markup on storage is tame by comparison - about 600% over retail SSD pricing, likely 1000% on wholesale prices.
  
  
  
• Modpack status: Functional but overweight, with 368 mods and no crashes.
  
  I am deliberately testing on a less-than-ideal system: A laptop with 16GB of RAM, loaded up with background apps that use most of that RAM by the time Windows has booted, with Intel integrated graphics and a high-resolution (2880x1800) display.
  
  I was getting around 60 fps previously, but with the latest additions and changes it's become slower and has noticeably more frame rate hitches.
  
  It also takes a good while to load.
  
  I hope to test it on my new laptop this week.  That probably won't be any faster, but since it has 40GB of RAM it will determine whether that is the limiting factor; if it loads and run smoothly that will be a good sign.
  
  I've set ModernFix to dynamic mode which has let me add Every Compat back in (adding 25,000 new wooden items) without the Java heap exploding - with static allocation, Every Compat would use up 2.5GB of RAM all by itself - but the modpack is still pretty memory hungry.
  
  I've also seen a squirrel and a silk cocoon in the latest test world, which means Zoo Architect and Critters and Companions are working.  And the villagers were shooting back at the nearby pillagers, so Guard Villagers is working too.
  
  
  
• Update 2: Caverns and Chasms has a known incompatibility with Friends and Foes.  They're both open source and the developers have communicated, but there's currently no fix.
  
  That's what was causing those crashes.
  
  I think I want F&F more than C&C, so if there are no other incompatibilities I'll leave C&C disabled.
  
  
  
• Update 3: Slimming it back down now.  One camel, eight penguins, no crashes.

• Google is threatening to stop providing news links to California after California announced legislation charging companies that provide news links to California.  (The Verge)
  
  It's obvious to everyone that this is what will happen if these stupid laws pass, but they still pass these stupid laws.
  
  
  

Tech News

• After winning its antitrust suit against Google over Play Store restrictions, Epic Games has asked the judge to hand them the keys.  (Thurrott)
  
  Basically.
  
  Epic wants Google to allow developers and users to choose their own payment methods.
  
  Google wants to keep taking its cut of every sale, of course.  It's slightly less avaricious on that regard than Apple, but only slightly.
  
  
  
• If a 4TB SD card isn't enough for you Western Digital has announced a 368TB portable SSD.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Well, kind of portable.  It weighs 28 pounds.
  
  
  
• Asus has announced a new 32" 8K monitor.  ( Notebook Check)
  
  It has not announced a price, but the existing 4K model costs $3000, so this one will not be cheap.
  
  
  

• The Humane AI Pin is the solution to none of technology's problems. (Engadget)
  
  Ouch. Well, what about The Verge, they love pointless shiny toys...
  
  
  
• Humane AI Pin review: Not even close. (The Verge)
  
  Maybe those idiots at Wired?
  
  
  
• Humane AI Pin: 4 out of 10. Too bare bones and not all that useful. (Wired)
  
  There's just no pleasing some people, particularly when your product is garbage.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Western Digital has announced its 4TB SD card. (AnandTech)
  
  Full size, not shipping until next year, and definitely not cheap, but still cool.
  
  That's an entire library in the size of a postage stamp - as a consumer item, not a scientific curiosity.
  
  And when I say library, I mean library.
  
  
  
• Intel's brand new Core Ultra 7 155H laptop chip gets put to the test... And meh. (AnandTech)
  
  I mean, it's not terrible, but it's not particularly good either.
  
  In most cases, the AMD chip they compare it with is faster and uses less power.
  
  
  
• Apple is focusing on AI with its upcoming M4 CPU lineup. (Bloomberg)
  
  You will be made to care.
  
  
  
• A look at SpaceX's financials shows a lot of money spent on moonshot bets. (Tech Crunch)
  
  In other industries that might indicate a gamble. Here it's their core business.

Minecraft Modpack Update

Touch Tone Telephone Music Video of the Day

• The SEC is planning to sue crypto exchange Uniswap because.  (CoinDesk)
  
  Because, basically, the SEC can't decide what to do about cryptocurrencies so it is planning to sue every company that doesn't steal all its customers' money and disappear.
  
  The SEC took no action against FTX until after the meltdown, so now they're making up for lost time by taking action against, basically, everyone.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Kobo has announced two new colour e-readers: The 7" $220 Colour Libra and the 6" $150 Colour Clara.  (The Verge)
  
  These offer a resolution of 300 dpi in black and white and 150 dpi in colour - fairly washed-out colour.  But they're e-ink screens, so they'll last a month or more on a single charge.
  
  The more expensive model also supports the Kobo Stylus, and the combination of colour, long battery life, and note-taking make it an interesting option.
  
  
  
• CrystalRuby lets you embed Crystal in Ruby.  (GitHub)
  
  Those are programming languages.
  
  This is kind of neat.
  
  
  
• A record number of books are targeted for bans in the US.  (Sherwood)
  
  The number has increased from one in 2023 to, well, still one.
  
  I'll try to find the title, but as far as I know there only one edition of one book banned in the US, and that was because it contained classified information.  It somehow made it to print before anyone caught on, and was pulled from the shelves and pulped.
  
  It's hard to find the title because every article you see talking about banned books is lying.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is the QNAP of Elasticsearches.  (Tech Crunch)

  The researchers notified Microsoft of the security lapse on February 6, and Microsoft secured the spilling files on March 5.

  Good work, lads.