• If you save a post with the Twitter X in it on mee.nu, the post will vanish without a trace, and without an error.
  
  Don't ask me how I discovered this.
  
  
  
• EU fires urgent warning at Elon Musk’s X over illegal content and disinformation following Hamas attacks.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That tangled and breathless headline is the original, not mine.
  
  What happened is that Europe's Bookburner General, Thierry Breton, whined impotently on Twitter today that people were saying unapproved things.
  
   Elon Musk responded to ask what unapproved things?
  
  Breton's response did not in fact contain a list of unapproved speech, but rather more impotent threats.
  
  Quelle fucking surprise.
  
  In other surprises, Tech Crunch, a card-carrying member of Journalists for Censorship, is harshly critical of Musk and Glenn Greenwald's (obviously correct) position that the EU is in no place to determine what is and is not "disinformation".
  
  
  

Tech News

• A tale of two websites:
  
  Sam Bankman-Fried was a terrible boyfriend.  (The Verge)

  I’ve got some shitty ex-boyfriends, but none of them made me the CEO of their sin-eater hedge fund while refusing to give me equity and bragging about how there was a 5 percent chance they’d become the President of the United States, you know? Absolutely counting my blessings after Caroline Ellison’s first day on the stand. I wonder how many of the nine women on the jury are doing the same.

  That's how the Teen Vogue of the tech world sees the story.
  
  The fraud was in the code.  (Molly White)

  Much of the conversation revolved around the allow_negative flag that was introduced to the FTX codebase on August 1, 2019. Wang testified that Sam Bankman-Fried had asked him and Nishad Singh (former FTX engineering director, who has also pleaded guilty) to add the flag. Github screenshots show Singh making a code change to add the column in the database, and adding logic to exempt accounts with the flag from checks that would otherwise determine if they had sufficient funds to withdraw.

  Same story, except actually covering the story and showing the precise code that allowed Caroline Ellison to withdraw infinite amounts of money from customer funds.
  
  Less of the former, more of the latter, s'il vous plait.
  
  
  
• An 18th century Unicode.  (Public Domain Review)
  
  Pantographia, published the same year the Rosetta Stone was discovered, was an attempt to collect all the world's written languages - 164 alphabets in all.
  
  And since that was more than two hundred years ago, there's a link on that page to download it as a PDF.
  
  Very, very slowly for some reason, but there is a link.
  
  
  
• A multifault earthquake threat for the Seattle metropolitan region revealed by mass tree mortality.  (Science)

  Here, we use dendrochronological dating and a cosmogenic radiation pulse to constrain the death dates of earthquake-killed trees along two adjacent fault zones near Seattle, Washington to within a 6-month period between the 923 and 924 CE growing seasons. Our narrow constraints conclusively show linked rupturing that occurred either as a single composite earthquake of estimated magnitude 7.8 or as a closely spaced double earthquake sequence with estimated magnitudes of 7.5 and 7.3.

  Pretty neat.  The article discusses how they cross-linked tree cores in the Seattle area with precisely dated samples from other regions to narrow down a catastrophic event a thousand years ago to within six months.
  
  And rather less neatly notes that Seattle is simply not built to withstand an earthquake of magnitude 7.8, and if one hit today the city would basically cease to exist.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 11 2023 11:39 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, October 11 2023 11:57 PM (2ByFe)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, October 12 2023 12:13 AM (r9O5h)

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• John Riccitiello is now the former CEO of Unity.  (The Verge)
  
  Whether the company will survive its self-inflicted injuries remains to be seen, but unlike Hasbro it at least has had the sense to go look in the bathroom cabinet for Dettol and Band Aids.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Acer is also offering a new 8.7" Android tablet with a crappy screen.  (Liliputing)
  
  Gee, thanks guys.
  
  
  
• Why USB was originally designed with 540-degree rotational symmetry.  (PC Gamer)
  
  It saved several cents.
  
  
  
• I wrote some C++ code this morning using funky pointer arithmetic and type casting.
  
  It worked first time.
  
  Not sure what to make of that.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 10 2023 09:46 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 10 2023 11:22 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: DougO at Wednesday, October 11 2023 01:56 AM (IPP/W)

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• JavaScript has no place on the server part one: The barrel file debacle.  (Marvin H)
  
  After all these years, it's still a toxic hellbrew of bad decisions.  Not so much JavaScript in itself, which is merely eh, as the choice to use it in server applications where it is obviously completely unsuitable, to do so via an event loop, which is obviously completely unsuitable, and then to add the worst package manager ever devised, a software version of the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus.*
  
  * Which doesn't exist, but should.
  
  
  
• JavaScript has no place on the server part two: The hidden performance cost of Node.js.  (Software at Scale)
  
  Here the problem is trying to implement GraphQL naively in an event loop architecture, which creates a cascade of asynchronous requests - called promises - which totally gum up the works.
  
  This problem was solved all the way back in 1961, before the geniuses behind Node.js decided to inflict it on a whole new generation.

• Fine tuning Mistral-7B on Python code with a single GPU.  (Weights & Biases)
  
  Large Language Models have a lot of problems, stemming from the facts that they don't know anything except what words go together, they're promoted by frauds, and they are actively hamstrung from doing anything but reciting woke bullshit.
  
  But Mistral-7B is completely open-source and you can download it and do anything you like.  And if what you like is programming, well, it turns out you can get a long way in programming just by knowing what words go together.
  
  It helps because you can automatically check if the AI got the basics right - does the code it generated even compile, for example?
  
  I'm still more interested in using AI for testing than for generating code, but having a generally good LLM that is free to everyone and small enough to run on commodity hardware is a win either way.
  
  

Unrelated

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 10 2023 12:19 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 10 2023 12:42 AM (obo9H)

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• Samsung's new small Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab A9, is here, and it's shit.  (Liliputing)
  
  The 8.7" screen has a resolution of 1340x800, barely better than Google's original Nexus 7 model from 2012.  The 2013 model immediately fixed that with a much improved 1920x1200 screen.
  
  To still be offering such low resolutions in 2023 is laughable.  Every other spec is good - it's like offering a high performance sports car with 9" wheels.
  
  There's a Tab 9+ model with a 1920x1200 screen - but that's 11", and there are literally dozens of models like that.

• Berry is a scripting language for microcontrollers.  (Berry)
  
  Without the compiler it needs just 40k of ROM and 4k of RAM, so it will fit easily in a Raspberry Pi Pico, which has 2M of ROM and 264k of RAM.
  
  The whole thing, compiled, is under 300k.
  
  The language itself is very clean and simple.  If you know Python all you need to do is remember to put in end statements and stop with the : at the beginning of blocks.  If you know Ruby you'll just need to adapt to Python-style classes and exceptions.
  
  Is it fast...  Uh, no, not particularly.  Faster than Python in trivial benchmarks.  More than 20 times slower than LuaJIT - though that is rather less suitable for use on microcontrollers.
  
  
  
• Senators Marco Rubio and Mark Warner want to block China from building RISC-V processors...  Which are open source.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I wondered if there was more to this than there seemed at first glance, so I also read the Reuters article linked by Tom's Hardware.
  
  Nope.  It's just stupid.  It's like trying to forbid China from learning algebra.  It's already out there, you idiots.
  
  
  
• Gibson Research, maker for many many years of hard drive repair tool SpinRite, has released a free utility to check USB drives.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's been a flood of implausibly cheap drives recently with implausibly large capacities from implausibly-named vendors like...  Huh.  Amazon seems to have been cleaning up a bit.  Though there are still a whole lot of 2TB micro SD cards from "Lenovo" that you shouldn't touch with a burnt stick.
  
  Anyway, they put a 4GB microSD card inside a USB thumb drive and reprogram it to pretend to be 2TB.  Plug it in, write files to it, it all works fine.  Until you use 4GB of space whereupon it simply starts overwriting earlier data.
  
  
  
• Asus has a new PCIe card that can take four PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs, for a combined 60GBps of bandwidth.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That sounds like it should be horribly expensive, but it's just $80.  That's because all the logic needed to run it is built into your CPU...  If you have an AMD chip.
  
  If you're on Intel you may find that only two of the four slots work.
  
  And you can only put it in the primary PCIe slot in your system - where the graphics card would normally go.
  
  Good for building small servers though, where you don't need a graphics card at all.
  
  
  
• Should you buy a $3 SSD made by a brand you've never heard of from AliExpress?  (Storage Review)
  
  No, but they're better than Storage Review's performance graphs, which somehow go backwards.
  
  
  
• Smart programmers write STUPID code.  (Medium)
  
  Please tell me that's not an acronym.

  The S stands for Simple

  Closes browser.
  Shuts down laptop.
  Sets laptop on fire.
  Flings burning laptop from window.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare's support for "Encrypted Client Hello" breaks ISP-level site blocking.  (Torrentfreak)
  
  Europe is very fond of this.  Australia does it too.  America mostly just shoots the site operators.
  
  Anyway, with this technology the ISP can no longer tell what website you are looking at, so they can't block you.  And they can't block Cloudflare because that's about 16% of the entire internet, including a lot of major sites.
  
  
  
• Brave has laid off 9% of its workforce.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I hope they weather the Recession We Must Not Name, because their browser is pretty good and they haven't piled up millions of dollars and set it on fire like so many other tech startups.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 09 2023 02:12 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 09 2023 02:19 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: bob in houston at Tuesday, October 10 2023 12:07 AM (YBLgY)

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• August: The tech job recession is over.  When will hiring accelerate?  (Business Insider)

  "The Tech Job Recession is Over," the Bernstein analysts declared in a recent email to clients. "Tech layoffs have slowed to a trickle. When will the hirings start to reaccelerate?"

  
  
  
• September: Tech layoffs are all but a thing of the past.  (Tech Crunch)

  Layoffs in the technology industry have slowed sharply in recent months, bringing the number of jobs lost to tech’s efficiency push to a near stop.

  
  
  
• October: Two tech giants lay off more workers as cuts continue.  (San Francisco Chronicle)  (archive site)

  Tech giant Meta and the Twitch division of Amazon laid off additional workers in the past week, underscoring that job cuts continue in the hard-hit industry nearly a year after huge reductions began.

  Unexpectedly.

• The NSA and CISA have shared their list of the top ten cybersecurity misconfigurations.  (CISA)
  
  The list includes:
  
  1. Doing the wrong thing
  2. Not doing the right thing
  3. Your mom
  
  Yes, it really is that useless.
  
  
  
• A data leak from 23andMe has resulted in DNA analyses of 1.3 million Chinese and Ashkenazi customers being sold online.  (The Record)
  
  This one is a bit weird.  It doesn't seem that 23andMe itself was hacked, but that the classic trick of trying logins from other sites that have been hacked still works.
  
  But that was compounded by 23andMe's feature that lets you see information on other users who are close genetic matches.

  The data included profile and account ID numbers, names, gender, birth year, maternal and paternal genetic markers, ancestral heritage results, and data on whether or not each user has opted into 23andme’s health data.

  That's not good.
  
  The real question - and it's a question The Record has asked 23andMe but not received a satisfactory answer - is what the multiplication factor is.
  
  Did the hackers have tens of thousands of accounts that reused their login and password, and then find a few matches for each?
  
  Or did they start with a relatively small number of accounts and then parlay that into a massive data leak?
  
  23andMe isn't saying, and while they might not know the exact answer, they should at least know the statistics.  And since they're not saying, it might not look good.
  
  
  
• I'm Back is a 20 megapixel Sony Micro Four Thirds digital camera sensor...  Tucked into a 35mm film roll.  (Petapixel)
  
  Which is a great idea except for - or rather despite - the fact that the field of view of the sensor is half that of actual film.
  
  
  
• Real Water - a premium water brand that was once sold at outlets like Whole Foods - was neither real nor water.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, it contained water.
  
  It also contained hydrazine.
  
  As in, rocket fuel.

  "These people were outrageous," Kemp said. There was "no safety testing, no analysis of the product to see what was in it." He said that the person who developed the water treatment process for Real Water bought the titanium tubes "from some Russian guy in the 80s" and spent four to five months making alkaline waters in his garage, working until he had a formula that didn't make him vomit or have diarrhea.

  A jury just awarded a $228 million verdict against Real Water, which, considering that the stuff actually killed people, seems justified.
  
  Meanwhile, speaking to Real Water's customers: Water is not supposed to be alkaline, you idiots.
  
  Water is not supposed to be anything.  It's water.  It's neutral by definition.  If it's not, you're watering wrong.
  
  I just checked and my local supermarket does sell a different brand of alkaline water.  I only hope that one doesn't cause liver failure in babies.

• I'm not a programmer and I just used AI to write my first bot.  (Replit)
  
  Congratulations!
  
  You're still not a programmer, that's not an AI, and...  Well, that's technically a bot in the Slack sense of the term, and your peers are idiots.
  
  
  
• Chatbot hallucinations are poisoning web search.  (Wired)
  
  Back in July a researcher published a paper in which he showed that commonly used generative AI tools will happily answer questions about books that don't exist.
  
  Microsoft Bing picked up that paper and happily ingested this new and entirely imaginary knowledge.
  
  Thankfully someone at Microsoft still cares about the truth - or at least about their share price if they are sufficiently embarrassed in the marketplace - and the fictional results have been removed.
  
  But seeing the rate at which Google results have gone downhill in recent years, I don't expect that state of affairs to last long.

• You don't need to use a large, expensive Large Language model to generate nonsensical garbage anymore.  A small, cheap, Tiny Language Model can do the job just as well.  (Quanta)
  
  There is actually a point to this.  While GPT-4 was very expensive to create and does a lot of things, all of them badly, a model that is a thousand times smaller can potentially do one thing tolerably well - and everything else not at all.
  
  
  
• Amazon is offering a one million dollar prize for the best evidence of alien visitors in the October edition of Oceania's Funniest Telescreen Recordings.  (Vice)
  
  Yeah, nah.
  
  
  
• HP's Envy Move is not the worse device the company has ever sold but certain involved the least engineering effort.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  1. Glue a plastic pocket to the back of a monitor.
  2. Put keyboard in pocket.
  
  
  
• The worst device?  The company's multi-function printers which refuse to scan when they are low on ink.  (ABC News)
  
  If you think such arrant nonsense would invite a class-action lawsuit, well, it did.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 06 2023 11:55 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 07 2023 12:02 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 07 2023 01:49 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 07 2023 03:01 AM (r9O5h)

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• A new communications satellite has instantly become one of the brightest objects in the night sky and astronomers are peeved, though when are they not?  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  BlueWalker 3 is a test run for AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird satellite constellation, designed for direct orbit-to-ground smartphone service.  To achieve this the satellites are much larger than Starlink's - 64 times larger as seen from Earth, and thus 64 times brighter.

  To find the specific impact of BlueWalker 3, the authors of the new study compiled observations of the satellite recorded by amateur and professional astronomers in Chile, the United States, Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Morocco. This global campaign revealed that BlueWalker 3 reached a magnitude that made it as bright as Procyon and Achernar, two of the 10 most luminous stars in the sky, according to the study.

  The problem is not so much that it is bright, as that it moves relative to the stars and spoils your photos, like an inquisitive squirrel at a wedding.

  "I really like how they used many different telescopes from many different places in the world; it highlights how this is truly a global problem,” said Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan who was not involved with the study but wrote an article in Nature that accompanied it. "One country, or one small company, launches a satellite and it can be seen everywhere in the world.”

  That is how satellites work, yes.

  "We shouldn’t have progress at any cost,” Dr. Tregloan-Reed said. "It’s like building a brand-new development over a historical site. You can’t just do that. You have to protect these things.”

  More like building a brand-new development in an uninhabited wasteland.  There is literally nothing there.

  He also acknowledged that astronomers don’t own the night sky but have a vested interest in preserving it.  "What we’d like to do is share the night sky, just not with you” he said.

• Researchers say current AI watermarks are trivial to remove.  (Engadget)
  
  Just use an AI watermark removing AI.
  
  
  
• Other researchers say they have created unremovable watermarks for AI models themselves.  (Engadget)
  
  They distribute signature data throughout the model that can be used to confirm ownership, and which can't be removed without major changes to the model.

  "It doesn't matter how clever you are—unless the change you make to the neural network parameters is very large, you cannot come up with a method for removing the watermark.”

  But since the signature data has no value to the model, it is safe to make major changes to the model to remove it.
  
  
  
• I'll give The Verge a pass today: Twitter has done something dumb again, and it is directly Elon Musk's fault.  (The Verge)
  
  If  you include a link in a Tweet, Twitter will look up the page to see if it has tags for summary text and header images and include them in the tweet.
  
  Or it did.  Now the summary text is gone.
  
  Because it looks prettier that way.  Useless, but pretty.
  
  
  
• Speed-ish: A British driver was kidnapped by his new electric car when it refused to slow down below 30 mph, or stop, or be turned off.  (BBC)
  
  And it's not some idiot pressing the accelerator rather than the brake pedal; the police had to park a van in front of it to stop it getting away while they waited for a technician to show up and put it out of its misery.
  
  In case you were wondering, the car was an MG.  So we should be glad that it was moving in the first place.
  
  
  
• SoftBank CEO Son (that's his name) says artificial general intelligence (real AI) will be here within 10 years.  (Reuters)
  
  Bloody unlikely given that everyone has stopped working on it to chase after glorified autocorrect systems.
  
  
  
• Los Angeles is now using AI to predict who might become homeless.  (NPR)
  
  "It must be broken.  It just says 'Los Angeles'".

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 05 2023 08:25 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: bob in houston at Thursday, October 05 2023 11:23 PM (YBLgY)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, October 05 2023 11:55 PM (XD1z7)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 06 2023 01:57 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Frank at Friday, October 06 2023 06:21 AM (2ByFe)

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• Intel is spinning off its "programmable solutions" division as a separate company.  (AnandTech)
  
  What is Intel's "programmable solutions" business?
  
  It's Altera.  Intel bought the company in 2015 and filed off the serial numbers.
  
  Which does at least make it easy to come up for a name for the newly formed company...
  
  Coincidentally, AMD recently bought Altera's major competitor.

• Moronity Report: How good are the most advanced AI systems at predicting crime?  Not.  (The Markup)

  Diving deeper, we looked at predictions specifically for robberies or aggravated assaults that were likely to occur in Plainfield and found a similarly low success rate: 0.6 percent. The pattern was even worse when we looked at burglary predictions, which had a success rate of 0.1 percent.

  At least the Plainfield PD scrapped the system after two years and only wasted about $35,000.  As this kind of nonsense goes that's practically winning the lottery.
  
  
  
• Inside the A510, Arm's boring workhorse CPU.  (Chips and Cheese)
  
  If you like all that fiddly detail about pipeline stages and result forwarding and branch misprediction penalties, this will be a feast for you.
  
  The A5x series, unlike the higher end A7x and now Xx cores, is an in-order design.  That makes it much simpler (and lower power), but it can't dynamically rearrange the instructions in your program to suit itself and still get the right answer, which is the crazy trick more powerful out-of-order cores do.  Even something as simple as a Raspberry Pi does that these days.
  
  
  
• Much ado of a muchness: Comparing Intel and AMD CPUs on the same laptop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They didn't test GPU performance (where the AMD model should really shine), so the results are pretty close.  Intel is around 5% faster on Geekbench, AMD nearly 10% ahead on Cinebench.
  
  On battery life tests, the Intel model lasted 11 hours 39 minutes, where the AMD version racked up 11 hours 38 minutes.
  
  So...  Pick your poison.
  
  
  
• The Surface Laptop Studio 2 is a think that exists.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At $3299 I don't know why though.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has overhauled OneDrive, and by overhauled they mean smeared AI shit all over it.  (The Verge)
  
  Can we not?

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 04 2023 10:23 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, October 05 2023 01:46 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: David Eastman at Thursday, October 05 2023 01:57 AM (R7Z4D)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 05 2023 02:24 AM (obo9H)

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• Elon Musk (boo! hiss!) is being sued for $1 million for falsely claiming a man was a Neo-Nazi. (Tech Crunch)
  
  What? Just a neo? Not even a real one? Pfft, what are you even doing here, Elon?
  
  So what did he say?

  Very odd

  Yes, that's literally it. That's what he's being sued over.
  
  Ars Technica has an even more unhinged report on events and their commentariat takes it to the next level.

• What big captchas you have, grandma. (Ars Technica)
  
  Now Bing can read captchas. Which gives us a simple solution: Only allow people to comment if they can't read the captcha.
  
  
  
• Kenya's parliament is recommending that the country ban Sam Altman-Fried's Worldcoin project. (Reuters)
  
  This plot from a third-rate Bond film, probably one of Timothy Dalton ones nobody remembers, seeks to scan the retinas of entire third-world nations in exchange for a pot of message.
  
  (This is the weasel in charge of OpenAI, not the weasel in charge of FTX.)
  
  
  
• The debug table for Google Chrome is over 4GB. (Random ASCII)
  
  That used to be a lot. It still is a lot. Ugh.
  
  
  
• The absolute minimum any developer needs to know about Unicode. (Tonsky)
  
  We peaked with SIXBIT and it's been downhill ever since.
  
  Unicode is designed to let you represent every human language, ever, with a single character set.
  
  The problem is that it is impossible to consistently and unambiguously represent every human language, ever, with a single character set, so Unicode is the semantic equivalent of a typhoid epidemic where the only plumber in town is the first victim.
  
  
  
• If you plan to build a small hobby computer board, make it fit in a Raspberry Pi case. (Old VCR)
  
  That aside, the 265SXB looks neat. The 65265 is a much-updated 6502, but still old-school enough that you can easily solder it yourself.
  
  

• As above, so below:
  
  

  The independent @RBAInfo’s decision to keep interest rates on hold at 4.1% is a relief for many already doing it tough. The @AlboMP Govt is rolling out billions of dollars of relief to take the edge off cost-of-living pressures without making inflation worse. #auspol#ausecon

  — Jim Chalmers MP (@JEChalmers) October 3, 2023

  
  
  Yes, Australia now has its very own catastrophic inflation reduction act.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 04 2023 12:43 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 04 2023 10:45 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 04 2023 10:46 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, October 04 2023 12:20 PM (BzEjn)

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