If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.
Wednesday, July 31
No Kids Allowed Edition
Top Story
- Kids have been banned from the internet. (The Verge)
That's not what they are saying, but that's the likely result of the Senate passing the Kids Online Safety Act, which requires online services to actively monitor children using their services and protect them from all possible sources of harm, real or imaginary.
Which is more than parents do.
Far cheaper and easier to just ban children outright.
Of course this nonsense passed by a 91-3 majority. Senator Rand Paul called it a "Pandora’s box of unintended consequences."
I call it dogshit.
There is a matching bill in the House but the article doesn't indicate the current status except that it hasn't been passed yet.
Tech News
- Wait until it goes on sale. (The Verge)
The Amazon Echo Spot has no camera. And no ads because the limited screen can't handle them.
But it's also kind of dumb. Smart for a clock/radio, which is what it really is, but still dumb.
- Apple is skipping Nvidia and going to Google for its AI platform. (Tom's Hardware)
It's not Nvidia's fault that everyone is throwing billions of dollars at them right now, but it's still annoying.
- Other companies are also seeking alternatives to Nvidia: AMD's datacenter revenue increased by 115% year-on-year. (WCCFTech)
Partly due to increased server market share but also partly thanks to the company's own datacenter GPUs for AI and other numerical loads.
- Meta (Facebook) is paying Texas $1.4 billion in fines over using customers biometric data without permission. (Texas Tribune)
Facebook was running facial recognition on every photo uploaded to the platform, without ever asking for permission. This has been illegal under Texas law since 2009.
- Perplexity AI, an answerbot recently caught stealing everyone's content, has offered to share its stolen revenue with the people it stole it from. (CNBC)
Very generous.
Also, many people are accepting the offer, because (a) it's cheaper than a decade-long lawsuit and (b) it gets Perplexity on your side to sue the next company that tries this.
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Tuesday, July 30
Don't Make Me Tap The Sign Edition
Top Story
- AI has been determined by the State of California to cause rats in laboratory cancer: SB-1047 - legislation introduced by Scott Wiener, so you know it's bad - aims to make it illegal for AI to do things which are illegal in the first place and which it cannot possibly do in the second place. (Ars Technica)
The bill lays out a legalistic definition of those safety incidents that in turn focuses on defining a set of "critical harms" that an AI system might enable. That includes harms leading to "mass casualties or at least $500 million of damage," such as "the creation or use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon" (hello, Skynet?) or "precise instructions for conducting a cyberattack... on critical infrastructure." The bill also alludes to "other grave harms to public safety and security that are of comparable severity" to those laid out explicitly.
It's illegal to kill people, even in small numbers.
It's illegal to destroy property that is not your own, even when it's less than half a billion dollars in damage.
It's illegal to create chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons.
It is trivially easy to find information on how to do any of these things, and that information cannot be erased, because people have done all of these things.
Tech News
- The Asus ProArt PX13 is another Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 laptop. (Notebook Check)
Now there are two of them.
Again it lacks the Four Essential Keys, which is a shame because the specs are great. Though the cheapest model is $1999 (with 24GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and RTX 4050 graphics) and it goes up to $2999, so I wouldn't have been in the market anyway.
Also, it seems that these chips don't support regular DDR5 DIMMs. There's no particular reason that they couldn't use CAMM2 modules instead of soldered LPDDR5X, but there are very few laptops supporting CAMM2 modules at the moment.
- You're blocking it wrong. (404 Media)
Not a huge story but a handy guide to how to block the scourge of new AI web crawlers from your site.
- The Dasung Paperlike Color is a 12 inch 2560x1600 USB-C display weighing just under a pound. (Liliputing)
When you see a display specifically named as "color" you can be pretty sure it's e-ink rather than LCD or OLED, and it is.
One problem: It costs $849, so you'd need to really want an e-ink display for this to be worthwhile.
- Elon Musk reposted a parody video of Kamala Harris and the usual suspects are rioting. Virtually. (The Verge)
It would be a lot funnier if these idiots didn't vote.
- microjs is a collection of JavaScript libraries, many of the under 1k in size. (microjs)
Since it's literally impossible for any single piece of data to measure one microbyte, I'll accept it for what it is.
There are a lot of libraries on there and many of them seem useful.
- FastHTML lets you write web applications in Python. (fastht.ml)
I'm not sure I like this. If you don't know HTML and CSS and JavaScript and don't need to fine-tune your website, I can see how it would be useful.
And you can customise the HTML, CSS, and Javascript; you're not stuck with what it generaties.
But the home page for it is kind of ugly, which is not a great start.
- If you are running VMWare ESXi and you create a group called "ESX Admins" it gives that group admin access. (Ars Technica)
And if you are running Microsoft Active Directory, you don't even need to do this on the ESXi server. If you can create a group on Active Directory it will apply just fine to ESXi.
I don't run any of that stuff, but a whole lot of people do.
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Monday, July 29
Bit Rot Edition
Top Story
- AMD's Zen 5 laptop chips are here. In particular, the (deep breath) Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.
Anandtech reviews the Asus Zenbook S 16.
Tom's Hardware reviews the Asus Zenbook S 16.
Notebook Check reviews the Asus Zenbook S 16.
And Phoronix reviews the Asus Zenbook S 16 - but this time under Linux.
You might be thinking that there are limited options available to the consumer at this precise moment, and you might be right.
This is a pretty good laptop and the benchmark scores are solid, but it lacks the Four Essential Keys so it is dead to me.
Tech News
- AMD's desktop CPU delay might not be due to an issue with the chips, but an issue with the labels on the chips. (Tom's Hardware)
Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X samples have been spotted marked as Ryzen 9. If that's all it is, then it's still a thousand times better than anything Intel has done.
- Like the latest report from Intel that the fatal CPU degradation problem affects mid-range 65W chips and not just the high-end parts previously listed. (Tom's Hardware)
So everything from the past two years could be toast, except the entry-level 13100 and 14100.What's troubling is that Intel has not and will not issue a recall for the affected CPUs. It also hasn’t halted processor sales pending the updated microcode rolling out.
Way to go, Intel. - Dragon Age: The Veilguard took this long because Bioware wanted to get it right. (WCCFTech)
The game looks terrible.
- The New Internet. (Tailscale)
Okay, it's basically a sales pitch. But it's a sales pitch written by an engineer who's been in the industry for 25 or 30 years and who has seen some shit, man, and kids these days, let me tell you...
And I'm here for that.
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Sunday, July 28
Rat Tart Without So Much Rat In It Edition
Top Story
- Now you can go hiking without all that exhausting having to walk by yourself nonsense. (Tech Crunch)
There are many uses for powered exoskeletons, from restoring mobility to people with injuries, to giving rescue workers superhuman strength on demand.
But renting them to lazy people at tourist sites is certainly something.
- On the other hand, balloons in space is not an altogether bad idea. (Tech Crunch)
If your hazards are moving at sixteen thousand miles per hour it doesn't matter much if they hit sheet metal or a clever polymer fabric. They'll go straight through without even noticing. The key is what the material does afterwards. If it retains its integrity apart from the actual puncture, it's worth trying.
Tech News
- Intel's Arc A750 graphics card lines up against AMD's RX 6600. (Tom's Hardware)
The cards are roughly equal at 1080p, with the Intel card pulling strongly ahead at 4k resolutions.
Though at 4k even the Intel card can't manage 30fps, so you might want to look at spending more than $200 on a video card if that is your goal.
- Wizards of the Coast (owner of Dungeons and Dragons) wants to ship one or two computer games per year starting in 2025 or maybe 2026. (WCCFTech)
This is going to be a disaster.It's not the first time we heard [CEO Chris] Cocks talking about a push toward the videogame industry, particularly for the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. However, last year Wizards of the Coast canceled five games, including two D&D projects in development at Hidden Path Entertainment and OtherSide Entertainment.
So that's negative five so far.Wizards of the Coast is also in talks with various partners to continue the Baldur's Gate franchise following Larian's decision to find its own path elsewhere.
The popular Baldur's Gate series of games recently returned after twenty years, with Baldur's Gate III seeing huge success - 2.5 million copies sold in early access, and over 10 million to date..
The developer, Larian, hated working with Wizards of the Coast so much that they refused to consider a sequel or even an expansion, even though they were guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.
- LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has brain damage. (The Register)
He recently contributed $7 million to a Kamala Harris PAC, stating that he regarded Harris as better for business than Trump, with the demand attached that Harris fire FTC chairman Lina Khan.
Hoffman is apparently unable to grasp that (a) Harris is a Marxist, and (b) the easiest way to get Lina Khan out of Washington is to elect Trump.
- Decrappifying Windows with Windows. (Notebook Check)
This is something you need to do at install time, and if you install a lot of Windows systems you'd already know this, but by dropping an Unattended Windows Setup file onto your install drive you can get rid of almost all of the crap Microsoft wants to shovel at you.
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Saturday, July 27
Takin My Chances With Lamarck Edition
Top Story
- Journalistic Lysenkoism: What a Kamala Harris presidency would mean for science. (Scientific American)
Starvation, slavery, misery, and death. Possibly not in that order.As the daughter of a cancer researcher, Kamala Harris would bring a lifelong familiarity with science to the presidency, experts say.
The same type of experts caused millions of people to starve to death in the 20th century. Wikipedia:Lysenko claimed that the concept of a gene was a "bourgeois invention", and he denied the presence of any "immortal substance of heredity" or "clearly defined species" ... Instead, he proposed a "Marxist genetics" postulating an unlimited possibility of transformation of living organisms through environmental changes in the spirit of Marxian dialectical transformation...
Sound familiar? Sound like what gets thrown up by the mainstream media every single day?
There's a reason for that.
Back to the article:Health and science have been a part of Harris’s life since an early age: her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who Harris cites as a major influence, was a leading breast-cancer researcher who died of cancer.
This is what led to Kamala atttending Stanford Medicine, passing near the top of her class, and becoming a star pharmaceutical researcher with a well-regarded blog spanning more than twenty years.
Oh wait, that's someone else.As senator, Harris co-sponsored efforts to improve the diversity of the science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) workforce.
Nothing to improve science. Everything to improve "diversity".
Tech News
- A federal judge just ruled that while the US CBP can search your bags and vehicle at the border for contraband and/or Nickelback CDs, it cannot search your electronic devices without probable cause and a warrant. (Reason)
That's a pretty strong ruling, and Reason also italicised the and there. A border officer might just claim probable cause post-facto, but it's a lot harder to claim a warrant where none exists.
This is the fourth such ruling in recent years, all pointing in the same direction, so this is likely headed to the Supreme Court soon.
- There is no fix for Intel's crashing 13th and 14th generation chips - any damage is permanent. (The Verge)
I mentioned this before, but this is a good summary and it's time to throw the poor Verge a bone for getting one right.
If you have one of these chips and it's not dead yet, it's probably a good idea to update the BIOS. Of course, updating your BIOS is not risk-free either, but in this case not updating your BIOS may be worse.
But if you have one of the bad chips suffering from via oxidation (the wires inside the silicon are called "vias" and in some of Intel's chips they are rusting), or if your chip has already started crashing, all you can do is hope it doesn't get worse.
In light of AMD delaying a major launch to run further tests on chips before they are sold to customers, what is Intel doing for chips that have already been sold?Intel has not halted sales or clawed back any inventory. It will not do a recall, period. The company is not currently commenting on whether or how it might extend its warranty. It would not share estimates with The Verge of how many chips are likely to be irreversibly impacted, and it did not explain why it’s continuing to sell these chips ahead of any fix.
So we've got that going for us, which is nice.
Intel’s not yet telling us how warranty replacements will work beyond trying customer support again if you’ve previously been rejected. It did not explain how it will contact customers with these chips to warn them about the issue.
But Intel does tell us it’s "confident” that you don’t need to worry about invisible degradation.
- Boeing's Starliner is still stuck at the ISS. (Ars Technica)
At some point you just gotta jump.
- SpaceX meanwhile is back in operation after a recent failure with a second-stage booster. (Ars Technica)
The failure was as unspectacular as they come, just leaving a group of satellites in too low an orbit. SpaceX engineers identified the problem within hours - a redundant sense line cracked due to engine vibration and a loose clamp - and worked with the FAA to mitigate this in future launches and get approval to restart.
Successfully:And by all measures, it performed. The first stage booster, B-1069, made its 17th flight into orbit before landing on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Then, a little more than an hour after liftoff, the rocket's second stage released its payload into a good orbit, from which the Starlink spacecraft will use their on-board thrusters to reach operational altitudes in the coming weeks.
Amazing what you can achieve if you don't hire communists.
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Friday, July 26
Just Say No To IPFS Edition
Top Story
- OpenAI has unveiled its Google rival, SearchGPT. (Tech Crunch)
Kill it with fire.OpenAI seems to have taken note of the blowback and says it’s taking a markedly different approach. In a blog post, the company emphasized that SearchGPT was developed in collaboration with various news partners, which include organizations like the owners of The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Vox Media, the parent company of The Verge. "News partners gave valuable feedback, and we continue to seek their input," Wood says.
Kill it with fire and sow the ground with salt.The rapid advancements by OpenAI have won ChatGPT millions of users, but the company’s costs are adding up. The Information reported this week that OpenAI’s AI training and inference costs could reach $7 billion this year, with the millions of users on the free version of ChatGPT only further driving up compute costs. SearchGPT will be free during its initial launch, and since the feature appears to have no ads right now, it’s clear the company will have to figure out monetization soon.
Though maybe if we just wait a bit they'll encounter the delicious salty fires of bankruptcy.
Tech News
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants a US-led freedom coalition to fight authoritarian AI. (The Register)
Great. They can start by destroying ChatGPT.
- AMD's 128 core Epyc 9755 goes zoom. (Tom's Hardware)
AMD already has 128 core server chips, but those are Zen 4c and this is the full-size Zen 5 core, so it's about 60% faster.
- Runway AI, a startup valued at $1.5 billion, is reported to have scraped its training material from YouTube. (WCCFTech)
Oops.
- AI didn't take my job. (DAVA)
Not your job, maybe. AI still makes a lousy programmer. The latest AI tools sometimes get typeahead right and save me 30 seconds.
And sometimes get it wrong and cost me 30 minutes.
- But if you're an artist working for Activision Blizzard you might well be screwed. (Player One)
Half the artists are being laid off and many of the remaining staff are being tasked with training their AI replacements.
I'm not sure how well that will work. In theory art doesn't need to work; it needs to look like it works. But that's not entirely true when you put art into a computer game.
- Hundreds of motherboards from Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro have completely broken secure boot functionality. (Ars Technica)
They use a brain that was marked Abby Someone.
Pretty much literally.
This matters less than you might think. Your computer will still work perfectly well unless you get a BIOS virus.
So... Just don't do that.
- AOOSTAR (dumb name, I know) has announced an AMD version of its Intel-based four-bay NAS. (Liliputing)
While it still has four bays and two 2.5Gb Ethernet port, the 4 core N100 CPU is replaced with an 8 core Ryzen 5825U (essentially the same as the laptop I am using right now), with up to 64G of RAM and two M.2 2280 slots for SSDs.
The AMD chip is about three times faster than the Intel one, so if you want to run server tasks on your NAS it's a much better option.
- Here's why David Sacks, Paul Graham, and other venture capitalist types got into a spat on Twitter. (Tech Crunch)
Short version: They're Mean Girls with money.
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Thursday, July 25
Oopsed Edition
Top Story
- KnowBe4, a US company providing security awareness training, hired a North Korean hacker. (Ars Technica)
KnowBe4 operates in 11 countries and is headquartered in Florida. It provides security awareness training, including phishing security tests, to corporate customers. If you occasionally receive a fake phishing email from your employer, you might be working for a company that uses the KnowBe4 service to test its employees' ability to spot scams.
Or it could be a North Korean hacker whose scam was not spotted.
- Meanwhile in security failure news after causing billions of dollars in damage worldwide, CrowdStrike has sent out $10 Uber Eats gift cards to its affected partners. (Tech Crunch)
No, there aren't any digits missing there. Yes, that will just about cover a medium fries from McDonalds.
Tech News
- The launch date of AMD's Ryzen 9000 series has been pushed back by one to two weeks after faulty chips were detected in the initial production run. (AnandTech)
Apparently all chips shipped to retailers have been recalled for testing before any are sold. The low-end 9600X and 9700X will be available by the 8th of August now, and the 9900X and 9950X by the 15th.
Which is a lot better than selling them for a couple of years before admitting that there's a problem.
- JEDEC is preparing for LPDDR6 CAMM2. (AnandTech)
CAMM2 modules have just started showing up in laptops. They are thinner than SODIMMs since they rest flat on the motherboard, and are 128 bits wide so you only need one of them for full bandwidth.
With LPDDR6 the plan is to increase the width to 192 bits, and the maximum speed from 9.2GHz to 14.4GHz - more than twice as fast overall.
That should allow for a significant increase in internal graphics performance for laptop chips, since they are currently limited more by memory bandwidth than anything else. All while retaining memory upgradability.
With two of these you'd get almost the bandwidth of a current high-end card like Nvidia's RTX 4080 Super - and be able to upgrade the memory on your graphics card to 192GB, maybe even 384GB.
Almost enough to run the new Llama 405b.
- Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake-S beats the 14900K by up to 18% when both are constrained to 250W. (Tom's Hardware)
In fact, it's even slightly faster than a 9950X at 160W. Allow the 9950X to use its default maximum power of 230W and it regains the lead by about 7%.
- If you fork a public repo on GitHub, push something to it you shouldn't have, and then delete the entire fork in a panic, don't worry. You're screwed anyway so there's no point in worrying. (Truffle Security)
And vice versa. If someone forks your public repo, and you delete the public repo, everything is still there.
- Someone spent $22,000 trying to buy a Hugo Award, but failed because they are lazy and/or stupid. (The Guardian)
The Hugo administration subcommittee, which tallies the votes for the annual awards, issued a statement on Monday saying that they had determined that 377 votes had been cast by individuals with "obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics".
Most depressing point is the analysis that says that even the Best Novel Hugo is not worth $22,000 in sales.
These included voters with almost identical surnames, with just one letter changed and placed in alphabetical order, and some whose names were "translations of consecutive numbers".
-
In cheerier news OpenAI is expected to lose $5 billion in 2024. (Datacenter Dynamics)
Couldn't happen to a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
- More technical details on Zen 5, specifically the mobile chips. (Serve the Home)
Just a note: I previously said that Zen 5 increased the instruction issue rate from 4 instructions per cycle to 8. That's not correct.
Zen 3 and Zen 4 could decode 4 instructions per cycle, and issue 6 operations. (One X86 instruction can be broken up into multiple operations.)
Zen 5 increases both the decode and issue width to 8 per cycle.
- The Verge is big mad that Marc Andressen and Ben Horowitz have escaped the reservation. (The Verge)
How dare venture capitalists focus on venture capitalism and not vote for the destruction of the country like good little robots?
- AI needs high-quality human-generated data for training. That comes from the internet. But the internet is becoming increasingly overrun with AI-generated garbage. How screwed is future AI training? All the screwed. (Tech Crunch)
But the thing is, models gravitate toward the most common output. It won’t give you a controversial snickerdoodle recipe but the most popular, ordinary one. And if you ask an image generator to make a picture of a dog, it won’t give you a rare breed it only saw two pictures of in its training data; you’ll probably get a golden retriever or a Lab.
The paper in Nature is pretty technical, and the supplementary content even more so, but in the Tech Crunch article there is an image that explains everything. In just four steps, the AI goes from a fairly representative idea of dogs to complete garbage.
Now, combine these two things with the fact that the web is being overrun by AI-generated content and that new AI models are likely to be ingesting and training on that content. That means they’re going to see a lot of goldens!
-
The Fifth Circuit has issued an en banc ruling holding that the FCC's "Universal Service Fee" is a tax and therefore unconstitutional. (Reason)
They actually used the term misbegotten so you know they're serious.
This one will be going to the Supreme Court for sure.
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Wednesday, July 24
Ameliope Morson Edition
Top Story
- SpaceX is cheaper and more capable than any other rocket company, and it's not even close. Here's why that's a bad thing. (Ars Technica)
NASA estimated that de-orbiting the ISS in 2030 would cost $1.7 billion.
SpaceX gave them a fixed-price quote of $680 million.
The closest competitor, Northrop Grumman, came in around NASA's estimate.
Sure, it would be great if we had a couple of other companies capable of competing with SpaceX. But the key here is scale, and SpaceX is creating its own scale with Starlink. It's not at all clear how another company is going to compete.
- Local Hyte distributor expects the Calliope Mori and Amelia Watson Hyte / Hololive limited edition cases in stock in the next few days. I've been chasing the Calli case for an entire year at this point, and was looking at having to spend hundreds of dollars to ship one by air from the US.
They still won't be cheap, but they'll be a lot cheaper this way.
There's a Dokibird model coming out in November but I think I'll have enough cases after these two. If it was Sana or perhaps Maid Mint I'd consider it, but while I like Doki I'm not sure I $300 like Doki.
Or Pippa, but I don't need ants.
Tech News
- Visual effects studio ModelFarm says fuck this we're going AMD. (Tom's Hardware)
They say 50% of their 13900K and 14900K CPUs have failed, and their new systems will all be based on the Ryzen 9950X.
- The Intel problem - as finally confirmed by Intel, is twofold:
First, the CPUs ask the motherboard for voltage levels high enough to fry their circuits.
Second, the chips rust from the inside.
Not a great combination.
Intel is pushing out a microcode update next month to fix the first problem, but if your chip is already affected, this comes much too late.
Intel has also been rejecting warranty returns despite knowing of these problems internally for some time.
My most recent Intel system is a 12th gen laptop, so I escaped this one.
- AMD's new 9900X is slower than the 7800X3D for gaming. (Tom's Hardware)
Not sure exactly how relevant this is, because AMD's 12 core chips are not ideal for gaming. Current generation consoles have 8 cores on a single chip, and AMD's 12 core CPUs have 6 cores on each of two chips, so they have cross-chip latency for games that need 8 cores.
If you're focused on gaming, get the cheaper 9700X, or the 9800X3D when it arrives, or if you run heavy productivity workloads as well as games, go all out and get the 9950X.
- Facebook's new Llama 3.1 405b LLM is billed as the world's largest open-source AI model. (The Register)
As a 16-bit model it requires 810GB of video RAM to run.
There's also an 8-bit version that brings that down to 405GB.
Which used to be a lot, and still is.
- 1 bit LLMs can be nearly as good though. (IEEE)
These are typically 1 trit models though - they are trinary, so each element can have a negative, positive, or zero weighting.
This would reduce Llama 3.1 405b down to around 80GB of video RAM.
Which, yes, is still a lot.
- GitHub is starting to feel like legacy software. (Misty's Internet)
Not entirely accurate. Legacy software often works very well, because nobody dares touch it in case it blows up.
GitHub feels like legacy software that someone is pasting an ill-considered flashing interface over.
Because it is.
- The Minisforum V3 tablet - the 32GB / 1TB model - is currently $949 on Amazon. (Liliputing)
That's a pretty good price, though I don't know if I'd spend that much on a single device from a company in that tier.
Though my Beelink PCs were about $250 each and they work perfectly, so maybe I'm overly cautious.
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Tuesday, July 23
Beans Lots Of Beans Edition
Top Story
- The US is all-in on nuclear rockets. For realsies. (Ars Technica)
The article starts with a review of past US experiments with nuclear rockets:The first of those reactors was called Kiwi-A. The test done on July 1, 1959, proved that the concept worked, but there were devils in the details. Vibrations caused by the flow of hydrogen damaged the reactor after just five minutes of operation at a relatively meek 70 megawatts. The temperature reached 2,683 K, which caused hydrogen corrosion in the rods and expelled parts of the core through the nozzle, a problem known as "shedding."
Shedding, also known as "Fuck this I'm moving to Bouvet Island and you can contact me by albatross".
The primary impetus for this renewed interest despite some issues with past attempts is China's growing space industry. Nuclear rockets make far more efficient use of the reaction mass than chemical rockets, but are only practical for general use once you pass a certain size - about the size of SpaceX's starship - because you can't make small nuclear reactors.
Not unless you are willing to kill everyone who works on the project, anyway.
Tech News
- Greece's land registry was hacked and 1.2GB of data stolen. (Bleeping Computer)
If you think that's not a lot for a national government department, you're right. The attackers accessed the database but were stopped before they could steal more than 0.0006% of the data.
- An interview with the lead architect of AMD's Zen lineup, discussing Zen 5 which arrives in the next week. (Tom's Hardware)
A couple of interesting points:
First, the laptop versions do not have the full 512-bit version of AVX-512. They have a half-size version, the same as Zen 4.
Second, the compact cores (AMD's equivalent of Intel's efficiency cores) are planned for desktop... Eventually. Not yet though.
Third, Zen 5 will be launching on TSMC's 4nm process, but 3nm versions will follow relatively soon. No mention on which specific models will get the 3nm chips though.
- Wiz has turned down a $23 billion offer from Google. (Fortune)
I would have taken the money and allowed Google to ruin my work. Google is Google, but $23 billion is $23 billion.
- Inside a 64-port 800Gb Ethernet switch. (Serve the Home)
That's a whole lot of bits.
- Elon Musk's X and xAI have fired up their new training system. (Tom's Hardware)
This training system has 100,000 of Nvidia's $30,000 H100 AI processors.
That's a lot.
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Monday, July 22
Slow News Week Edition
Top Story
- Southwest Airlines escaped the CrowdStrike debacle because they are still running Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. (Tom's Hardware)
One small problem with this story: It's complete bullshit. (Twitter)
It's an internet meme. But even the guy who created the meme got confused and thought it was real.
Seriously, nobody runs their business on Windows 3.1. It doesn't even work properly on a computer with more than 512MB of RAM. Neither does Windows 95.
Tech News
- Speaking of which: The Apollo DN10000, a four-processor Unix workstation form 1988 with up to 128MB of memory. (Jim Rees)
Which used to be a lot.
- Global IT outage shows dangers of cashless society, campaigners say. (The Guardian)
Yeah, no shit.
- A ransomware attack has shut down the largest trial court in the US, the Superior Court of Los Angeles County. (AP News)
Shame. A couple of hours later and all their computers would have been down with the CrowdStrike disaster and safe from hackers.
- Speaking of which more than 1500 flights were cancelled yesterday as technicians continue to turn things off and on again. (CNN)
Meanwhile interest in retiring and moving to Idaho to take up potato farming is at an all time high.
- A fake hotfix for the CrowdStrike problem is actually a RAT. (HackRead)
Because of course it is.
- Elon Musk is "gambling with Tesla's future" by endorsing Donald Trump. (The Verge)
Gotta love how they quote Trump saying But you can’t have 100 percent of your cars electric. as though it's a gotcha moment rather than a simple fact.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:08 PM
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