• A majority of AI researchers say a majority of the tens of billions of dollars poured into AI research each year is wasted, and should be given to them instead.  (Futurism)
  
  Commercial AI companies are laser-focused on making their AIs bigger, rather than understanding what they are doing or making something that works at all.
  
  I'll take exception though with one particular part of this article:

  DeepSeek, meanwhile, pioneered an approach dubbed "mixture of experts," which leverages multiple neural networks, each specializing in different fields - the proverbial "experts" - to help come up with solutions, instead of relying on a single "generalist" model.

  They're called multimodal LLMs and DeepSeek did not "pioneer" them at all.

• Booting Unix on a 40 year old DEC Professional 380.  (Old VCR)
  
  This is made slightly tricky because working hard drives - or even floppy drives - for these old models basically no longer exist.
  
  
  
• If you were put off spending $2000 for an RTX 5090 even before they sold out instantly and became completely unavailable, you can now spend $8000 for the same card with a different name and more memory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Memory costs around $2 per gigabyte right now, probably a little more for GDDR7, so Nvidia charges around $100 per extra gigabyte for the 96GB RTX Pro 6000, which is under the covers still an RTX 5090.
  
  
  
• Some ringworlds and Dyson spheres are stable.  (Phys.org)
  
  They may not exist, but they are stable.
  
  
  
• If you want an extra mini original Macintosh, you can now sort of get one.  (Liliputing)
  
  With a 4" display (no details) and up to a Ryzen 370 CPU, it's at least 60,000 times faster than the original version.  It supports up to 128GB of RAM - a million times as much as the first Mac - and two M.2 slots, as well as two USB4 ports and two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports.
  
  
  
• AMD's 9060 XT is on the way.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This supports up to 16GB of RAM, but apart from that is basically a 9070 XT cut in half, with the bus shaved down from 256 bits to 128, and the GPU chip itself reportedly cut from 64 GPU cores to 32.
  
  I'm thinking of buying an RX 580 from Amazon as a backup video card.  Everything I have - assuming anything still works - is truly ancient, because the last time I built my own PC was around 2013.
  
  You can find a no-name model, new, for under $100.  Given what Nvidia offers at that price, that's a great deal.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 24 2025 10:05 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 24 2025 10:09 AM (NEIix)

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• Regent, a "media investment firm", has signed a deal to buy TechCrunch from Yahoo for an undisclosed but not enormous sum.  (Axios)
  
  I didn't realise that Yahoo owned TechCrunch, but there it is in the copyright notice right at the bottom.
  
  Just a few days ago Regent bought Foundry from IDG.  Foundry is the home of the various "world" publications, such as Macworld, PCWorld, and InfoWorld, which has been in operation since 1978.
  
  What all of this means for those various publications is unclear.
  
  
  

Tech News

• What's behind Jeff Bezos' changed relationship with Donald Trump?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Reality.  Something with which the Ars commentariat is demonstrably unfamiliar.  The article itself is from the Financial Times which is why it's less insane than usual.
  
  As the article quotes a source on the money-losing Washington Post:

  He’s a highly rational person. I think he was comfortable losing $20 million a year. When it gets to $100 million a year, I don’t know what his appetite is for that.

  Reality always wins.
  
  
  
• Microsoft to Windows 10 users: Stop being poor.  (XDA Developers)
  
  Just buy a new PC, losers.
  
  
  
• Zen 5 Threadripper chips have been spotted in Indian shipping manifests, indicating that they exist.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So far the 24 core 9965WX and 32 core 9975WX, which based on AMD's naming conventions would support 8 channel memory and 128 lanes of PCIe 5.
  
  
  
• The Court of Milan has ordered Google to falsify DNS results to hide the IPs of IPTV pirate sites.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Time to block Europe at the firewall.
  
  
  
• "Vibe coding" is a dangerous fantasy.  (NMN)
  
  "Here's how I built a B2B SAAS platform without knowing how to code."
  
  (Five minutes later.)
  
  "We regret to inform you that our site has been hacked and all user data corrupted and/or stolen."

• The Asus Ascent GX10 is a $3000 version of the $4000 Nvidia DGX Spark.  (Serve the Home)
  
  That is, it's a mini-PC designed specifically for AI processing, with 20 Arm CPU cores, a custom Nvidia AI GPU, and 128GB of RAM.
  
  It's a reasonable price for what it is, if you want that.  If it was 80% cheaper I might buy one myself.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Huawei Pura X is a flip phone that flips the other way, becoming a very small - 6.3" - 16:10 tablet.  (Liliputing)
  
  It costs $1000.
  
  If it was 80% cheaper I might buy one myself.
  
  
  
• Netflix has a new plan for games.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  It's called failure.
  
  
  
• Putting the LincStation N2 to the test.  (Liliputing)
  
  As expected from an all-SSD solution, it can saturate its 10Gb Ethernet link on reads, while delivering 7.5Gbps on writes, sipping power, and being basically silent.  Not bad if you don't need a huge amount of storage - it takes four M.2 drives and two 2.5" SATA drives.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• Micron and Hynix have unveiled their new SOCAMM memory modules for laptops, mini-PCs, and anything else that needs a lot of memory in a little space.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They start at 128GB running at 7500MHz.  And that's with 16Gbit chips, where Micron is already shipping 32Gbit chips.
  
  The modules measure 14mm x 92mm, so about the same size as an M.2 SSD.
  
  These aren't proprietary but also aren't the same as existing (if rare) CAMM2 modules, and will initially be produced specifically for Nvidia's new AI servers.

• AMD has already sold 200,000 9000-series graphics cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 9070 XT is mostly out of stock but the base 9070 module seems to be in good supply, with even overclocked models available at or close to MSRP.
  
  
  
• GitHub Actions are a mess.  (Feldera)
  
  These "actions", which let you automatically run code against your code, are what led the other day to 20,000 projects being compromised at once, because on action belong to another project which they all relied on was in turn compromised.
  
  But when you look more closely, things get even worse.
  
  
  
• Why I'm no longer talking to architects about microservices.  (Container Solutions)
  
  Because nobody can agree what a microservice is.
  
  
  
• Twitter users are asking Grok to fact check people and it's kind of annoying.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And often wrong, like any other AI.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• Ryzen 7900 (non-X)
• Sapphire Radeon 7800 XT  (these two parts I have already)
• Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wifi motherboard
• Crucial Pro 128GB DDR5-5600 (2 x 64GB)
• 2 x Crucial T500 4TB PCIe 4 SSDs
• Corsair RM850x power supply
• Hyte Y40 / Y60 Hololive limited edition case (which I already have)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, March 20 2025 05:18 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 20 2025 05:21 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, March 21 2025 02:10 PM (QE7eq)

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• Google has signed a $32 billion deal to buy security firm Wiz (who?) even while it is in the midst of a life-or-death struggle with the DOJ to avoid being divided into the first seven letters of the alphabet.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's a bold strategy.

• SpaceX carried out a picture-perfect rescue mission to return the stranded Butch and Sundance from the ISS and Ars Technica is incandescent with rage.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The space coverage was one of the few (only?) areas of the site that hadn't succumbed to the mindless liberal fascism that has overtaken the site in recent years, but now they too have lost their minds.
  
  The coverage of the mission at The Verge in comparison is straightforward, factual, and almost celebratory.
  
  And The Verge is insane.
  
  
  
• Nvidia showed off some new things that will be available at some point and will cost some amount of money.  (Liliputing)
  
  They were not more specific.
  
  
  
• The new HP ZBook 8 has (up to) a 2560x1600 120Hz display, a twelve-core Ryzen 370 CPU, 64GB of user-upgradeable RAM, and very nearly the Four Essential Keys.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The Home key doubles up as the F12, but I only use that for opening Chrome Dev Tools and I don't do that all that often, so close enough.
  
  The RAM is almost certainly upgradeable to 128GB with the new kits from Micron/Crucial, since they've already been shown to work with the Ryzen 370.
  
  And two Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 ports (same thing, really), HDMI, wired Ethernet of an unspecified speed, a regular USB port, and an audio jack.
  
  It ticks all the boxes I want for a new laptop...  Only right now I don't want a new laptop.
  
  
  
• The DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously - and for once, correctly - that AI generated art cannot be copyrighted.  (Yahoo)
  
  This upholds the district court's decision and the opinion of the Copyright Office, and reflects previous rulings that art produced by animals cannot be copyrighted either.
  
  
  
• In an unexpected gift, the March Windows updates have been mistakenly removing Copilot from some systems.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Sadly, Microsoft plans to fix this.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, March 19 2025 05:52 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, March 19 2025 11:43 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, March 20 2025 03:47 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 20 2025 08:59 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 20 2025 09:05 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 20 2025 10:53 AM (PiXy!)

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• The top broadband official at the Commerce Department has stormed off in a minute and a huff.  (Politico)
  
  Evan Feinman resigned and fled the building in the middle of a spittle-flecked rant about the horrors of Elon Musk and the damage cheap, fast, reliable internet will cause to rural communities.
  
  Under the Biden administration, Feinman was the senior official in charge of a $42.5 billion nationwide rural broadband fund that connected - I am not making this up - precisely zero people.

• Qualcomm has announced a range of new chips to power portable gaming devices.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The new top of the line G3 Gen 3 - no, that's not redundant, that's actually what it's called - has one Kryo core, five Kryo cores, and two low-power Kryo cores.
  
  That's what Qualcomm calls all its CPU cores to make it impossible for buyers to have any idea of their performance.
  
  There's also the G2 Gen 2 and the G1 Gen 2, which have less stuff in them.
  
  The G1 Gen 2 is featured in the new Retroid Pocket Classic, which looks like a grown-up Game Boy, has a 1240x1080 screen, and starts at $119.
  
  
  
• Ayaneo announced the Gaming Pad based on the G3 Gen 3, an 8.3" Android gaming tablet with detachable controllers.  (Ayaneo)
  
  Full specs are not available yet, but the 2160x1440 screen is pretty good, and the photos suggest that with the controllers detached it's not the best part of an inch thick like some competing gaming devices.
  
  Which means it might be useful for non-gaming tasks.
  
  
  
• After 47 years, OpenVMS now has a package manager.  (Raymii)
  
  It's all downhill from here.
  
  
  
• Testing the new Acemagic F3A with 128GB of RAM.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is one of the crop of new Ryzen 370 mini-PCs with socketed rather than soldered RAM.
  
  The extra sauce here is that Micron has started producing 64GB DIMMs for desktop and laptop systems just recently.  They're not plentiful yet - I ordered the desktop version from Amazon today and left only one in stock - but the exist and they work and they're no more expensive per gigabyte than 32GB or 48GB modules.
  
  And they put them in this mini-PC, which is a lot of memory for a mini-PC.
  
  Anyway, short story shorter is that most people don't need 128GB of RAM in a mini-PC; 32GB is probably enough and a model with soldered RAM will run 10% faster.
  
  But if you do need 128GB of RAM in a mini-PC, you get get it, and it works.
  
  Except for the DisplayPort output during boot on this particular model.
  
  
  
• Monoculture is bad: 23,000 GitHub projects were all compromised at once because all of them were using the same third-party GitHub Actions project and that in turn was compromised.  (The Register)
  
  Joy.
  
  
  

Minecraft Update

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, March 19 2025 03:38 AM (KOtXO)

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• The LibreWolf developers are insane.  (Reddit)
  
  So is Reddit, but leave that for the moment.
  
  There's this guy named Bryan Lunduke.  He's a Linux journalist and YouTuber who comments extensively on the fallout of wokeness in open-source software projects - like the Godot game engine, which woked itself to death last year.
  
  He has spoken out against software codes of conduct - what I call codes of cancer.  His name is one of the handful that ChatGPT would sooner die than speak aloud.
  
  And his name has been banned from the LibreWolf forum.  (LibreWolf is a fork of the Firefox browser.)
  
  And if you ask why, you will be banned.
  
  Ask why someone was banned, and you will be banned.
  
  They haven't gone full Mullenweg yet, but the clock is ticking.
  
  "Libre" does not here mean "Congress shall make no law"; it means "Join the glorious revolution or die, and we don't care which".

• The Akira ransomware can be cracked in ten hours with 16 4090 video cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That puts an upper price on the ransom of about $7000, because you can rent a cluster of 16 servers with RTX 4090s for a month for that amount.
  
  
  
• If you Atari has a broken bit, you can get replacement parts.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Controllers, keyboards, disk drives, tape drives, individual bits like replacement sockets and crystal oscillators, you name it, Best Electronics has in stock.
  
  Continuously, for more than 40 years.
  
  
  
• A Mac Studio M3 Ultra cluster that is doing nothing uses half as much power as a particularly power-hungry network switch.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Unless it doesn't.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 18 2025 09:43 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, March 18 2025 09:55 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, March 18 2025 12:56 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, March 18 2025 04:57 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, March 19 2025 03:23 PM (ZLF73)

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• Amazon has announced Alexa+, which updates the existing voice assistant to...  Something something generative AI something.  (Liliputing)
  
  What's the catch?
  
  
  
• The option to have your smart devices not transmit everything you say straight to Amazon HQ will be removed on March 28.  (Ars Technica)
  
  George Orwell did not dream of this.

• 64GB DDR5 DIMMs have hit retail.
  
  Still a little scarce but showing up already on Amazon UK and Germany.  And there's no significant price bump for the new chips.
  
  This lets you install 128GB with a dual-channel kit and 256GB in a standard desktop motherboard.  I'm considering a 128GB kit for my new desktop; that's more memory than I really need but that's preferable to less memory than I need.
  
  SODIMMs for laptops are expected to follow.
  
  
  
• Super Flower's 2800W Leadex power supply is here for $899.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Never mind why, I want to know what you're supposed to plug this thing into.  That's not only more than a standard US wall socket can provide, it's more than a standard AU 230V wallet socket can provide.
  
  There are 15A AU sockets - and matching 16A IEC cables - that could drive this beast, but curiously there are no photos anywhere that show that side of the power supply so that I could tell if that's what they've done.
  
  Guess you can plug it into your stove or dryer outlet if nothing else works.
  
  
  
• CloudFlare is blocking smaller browsers.  (Pale Moon)
  
  Yes, Pale Moon is one of those, and so are SeaMonkey, Waterfox, and LibreWolf.  That last one is run by crazy people and shouldn't be used, but it's still a big problem that they can't access sites behind CloudFlare's overly-protective wing.
  
  
  
• The best alternatives to Skype, which will go away in early May.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Mind you, all of the alternatives are bad.

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 16 2025 10:42 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 17 2025 01:33 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 17 2025 01:37 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: David Eastman at Monday, March 17 2025 02:21 AM (aAyxl)

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• SpaceX has launched the latest crew mission to the International Space Station, with four astronauts onboard to take over operations and relieve Butch and Sundance who have been stranded there ever since the trouble-stricken Boeing Starliner test seventeen years ago.  (AP News)
  
  The mission was delayed a little because the latest new Crew Dragon module needed a new battery, so SpaceX chose to re-use an existing module.
  
  
  
• CNN wants you to know that the stranded astronauts were not stranded and the decision by the Biden administration to leave them there never actually happened.  (CNN)
  
  Thanks, CNN.  Where would we be without you?

• In other space news, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted the deceased Athena lander, which a week ago landed safely and then tipped over and sank into the moondust.  (Space)
  
  This was Intuitive Machines' second mission, after February 2024's Odysseus lander, which...  Landed safely and then tipped over and sank into the moondust.
  
  Intuitive's IM-3 lander - which doesn't have a catchy name yet, like gerbils and hamsters that might not survive little Timmy's tender care for very long, is due to launch early next year.
  
  
  
• No-one knows what the hell an AI agent is.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  In particular, the neoadjective "agentic" needs to die.
  
  
  
• Google is rolling out a fix for all the dead Chromecasts, of which there are apparently many.  (The Register)
  
  The problem is apparently an authentication certificate baked into the firmware of some models which has now expired.  Without that, the device loses connectivity to most Google services.
  
  Once the fix is ready, Chomecasts which have been left powered on should pick it up automatically.
  
  If you tried to fix it yourself with a factory reset, your problems might run a little deeper.  Google will post a guide to restore from that.  Soon.
  
  
  
• A new Copilot upgrade for Xbox plans to ruin gaming for you.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Thanks, Microsoft.  Where would we be without you?
  
  
  
• Linux or landfill?  What happens to old PC with Windows 10 going gently into that good night this October.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or October next year if you pay the thirty bucks.
  
  
  
• Valve may be planning to launch SteamOS for desktop users soon.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That may be a viable solution.
  
  SteamOS already runs the Steam Deck and Lenovo's Legion Go.  Windows games mostly just work on it.  Throw on a browser and you have 90% of what 90% of people need.