• I used to recommend that people only buy SSDs from companies that made their own flash memory and controllers, like Samsung, Intel, and Micron/Crucial.
  
  Intel has quit the industry entirely, Samsung had a series of serious issues with its high-end 980 Pro and 990 Pro drives, and now Sandisk (owned by Western Digital) is suffering drives spontaneously eating all your data.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This specific issue has been discussed on Reddit and covered by Louis Rossman and is supposedly due to MacOS constantly probing the drive even in sleep mode and eventually causing a bit to flip that turns on drive encryption without first setting a key and corrupts the entire thing.
  
  Which (a) sounds like something a Mac would do and (b) would not be possible unless the drive was broken in the first place.
  
  The bigger problem being that Sandisk refuses to admit to a problem at all.
  
  So that leaves Micron / Crucial (Crucial is Micron's consumer brand), which hasn't done anything too outrageous except that its low-cost P3 models aren't as attractive for heavy workloads as Team's MP34.

• Intel is looking at making future chips 64-bit only.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While this would technically break backward compatibility, that's not entirely bad.  Nobody is running 8086 code directly on a 13900KS.  If you want to play an old game it likely won't work outside of an emulator like DOSBox, and DOSBox won't break with this change.
  
  Removing the two 16-bit modes (8086 and 80286) likely won't cause much fuss and won't require any changes except for BIOS writers who will breathe a sigh of relief, because they no longer have to bootstrap up through those two modes to reach 32-bit and 64-bit mode.
  
  Removing 32-bit mode is a bit more controversial.  Apple did it and it broke stuff everywhere, but Apple's approach to this has always been that it's your own stupid fault for buying their products in the first place.
  
  
  
• 6+8=16.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel's new 16 core Meteor Lake chip really does have 6 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency cores on the CPU chiplet, because all Meteor Lake chips have two additional Efficiency cores on the I/O (Intel call it the SOC) chiplet.  The extra two cores are extra low power, designed to keep running when your computer is in sleep mode, doing stuff you don't know about and didn't ask for.
  
  
  
• Run Linux.
  
  
  
• It still does things you don't know about and didn't ask for - systemd I'm looking at you - but at least everything is documented.  Somewhere.
  
  
  
• Is the Internet of Things - what I call the Internet of Insecure Pieces of Crap - insufficiently broken?  If so, surely the solution is to add ChatGPT.  (Atomic14)
  
  Yep.  If it's not broken enough now, that will solve the problem.
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, May 21 2023 07:08 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, May 22 2023 03:29 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: Billie at Monday, August 28 2023 04:43 PM (++UNp)

Posted by: Private Account at Saturday, September 30 2023 04:41 PM (D/nvR)

Posted by: tindy nat at Wednesday, November 13 2024 12:50 PM (EtmQt)

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• OpenAI has launched an official ChatGPT app for iOS.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
• Apple has banned the use of ChatGPT internally because it leaks confidential information.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The water is perfectly safe to drink.
  
  For you.
  
  I'm not touching the stuff.

• A review of the Asus Flashstor 12 Pro.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This lets you take up to twelve cheap M.2 SSDs and run them at about 2% of their potential speed.  That's still a transfer rate of 800MB per second, which is close to the capacity of 10Gb Ethernet, but it's designed to be cheap and convenient, not to deliver the full potential of the SSDs.
  
  Write speed with RAID-5 was even worse, in some cases as low as 250MB per second, though that might have been due to the choice of DRAMless QLC drives, which are notably poor performers under sustained write loads.
  
  Still it should be just fine for home / small office storage, with the ability to start small and add more SSDs over time.  Other solutions with similar capacities live in another price bracket entirely.
  
  
  
• Speaking of DRAMless QLC drives, the Sabrent Rocket Q 2230 is one.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The notable feature here is that it comes in a 2TB capacity and fits inside a Steam Deck, Asus Ally, or for people with jobs, recent Microsoft Surface models.  Price for the 2TB model is $220, which is as much as some 4TB full-size M.2 drives but a heck of a lot cheaper than Microsoft's official price for upgrading to a 2TB Surface.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the Steam Deck, if you're generally happy with yours but envious of the Ally's 1080p screen and better colour gamut you can now have that for $99.  (Deck HD)
  
  Or will soon be able to.  Assuming you have a steady hand, because while replacing the screen in a Steam Deck is something that you can do, it's a 43-step process.
  
  
  
• Curse you DeSantis probably: Disney is removing dozens of TV shows and movies from its Disney+ and Hulu streaming services because of those evil Nazis in Florida and totally not because the company is bleeding cash from every orifice.  (The Verge)
  
  Disney's financial troubles are so obvious that The Verge doesn't even try to pin the blame on outside causes here.
  
  
  
• Asus has apologised for remotely crashing every Asus router in the world with a bad automated update even if you had turned off automated updates.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops, our bad.
  
  At least they didn't brick the devices.  Which is something that has happened.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 19 2023 11:29 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 19 2023 11:57 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Saturday, May 20 2023 01:42 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Saturday, May 20 2023 10:41 AM (r9O5h)

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• There is no evidence that TikTok, a wholly owned subsidiary of Chinese intelligence, is being used to gather information from and about TikTok users and feed it back to China.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Yes, TikTok has been caught out repeatedly doing exactly that.  Yes, TikTok has been caught spying on journalists.
  
  But that doesn't count because coloration is not casuistry.
  
  Also banned in Montana.

• Has ChatGPT been neutered?  (Hacker News)
  
  Lots of people saying yes, they use ChatGPT and it gets more useless every week.
  
  Lots of other people saying they don't use ChatGPT but the above people are clearly lying.
  
  
  
• What happened with Asus routers this morning?  (Downtown Doug Brown)
  
  No answer, but it looks like it automatically downloaded a file of firmware update information - even if you have automated updates turned off, it downloads that file so it can tell you an update is available - and the file was bad and the router plotzed.
  
  Fortunately a simple reboot would fix it.
  
  
  
• A review of the QNAP QSW-2104-2T switch.  (Serve the Home)
  
  A very short review since it's an unmanaged switch without even POE.  It's not even complicated enough for QNAP to inject security flaws.  It works great because it's too dumb to fail.
  
  
  
• Mojo is Python only not.
  
  
  
  
  Sounds great.  Where can I download the source code?
  
  You can't.
  
  Binaries?
  
  Sorry.
  
  Docker container?
  
  Usually, sir, but there's been a lot of demand and we've run out.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The Analogue Duo is a PC Engine / TurboGrafx hardware emulator.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It uses an FPGA to precisely emulate the hardware rather than using software which would be cheaper and easier and probably off by a millisecond here or there.
  
  I want a Sharp X68000 emulator.
  
  Oh.  Here's six.  (Gametech Wiki)a
  
  Dragon Spirit also ran on the TurboGrafx but the X68000 port was the best.
  
  

1 Re: ChatGPT:
It seems the Hackernews crowd is discovering something inconceivable: Trying to create an artificial mind, and punishing that mind for functioning with thought policing are antithetical goals. Who would have thought *that*?!
>

Posted by: anonymous_for_now at Friday, May 19 2023 03:00 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 19 2023 01:46 PM (BMUHC)

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• High-temperature superconductors are proving to be as elusive as cold fusion.  After a paper was published in nominally reputable scientific journal Nature announcing the creation of room-temperature superconductors (though not STP), other researchers went to work to replicate the results.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Spoiler: The results failed to replicate.

• Why are Gigabyte's Aorus models so much cheaper than their Aero models?
  
  
  
• The Framework Laptop 13 is good.  (The Verge)
  
  The 2023 Intel model is shipping and it delivers better performance and better battery life than the 2022 model.  I'm still waiting for the AMD version which should deliver better performance, better battery life, and better graphics.
  
  
  
• The .zip domain is kind of shit.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Here's the problem:
  
  1. Someone sends you an email telling you to download payroll.zip from the company website and open it.
  2. Gmail sees that as a URL and automatically turns it into a link.
  3. You click on the link and it downloads a zip file.
  4. You open the zip file and your computer melts, because it actually got it from the malicious payroll.zip website.
  
  Two innocuous ideas put together equals one disaster.
  
  
  
• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, appeared before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to ask the government to regulate his competitors out of existence.  (Axios)

  Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called it "historic" that a company was coming to Congress pleading for regulation.

  Oh, do get fucked, Senator.  It's been happening at least as long as there was a Senate, back to ancient Rome.
  
  
  
• Australia isn't a real country anyway: The Australian government has asked Twitter how it plans to stifle free speech when the Stifling Team has all been fired.  (The Register)
  
  Twitter allegedly said, Australia who?
  
  
  
• Zoom plans to implement Anthropic's chatbot, Claude, to make meetings even more insufferable.  (The Verge)
  
  Could we not?

Posted by: madrocketsci at Friday, May 19 2023 05:16 AM (hRoyQ)

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• Vice Media has filed for bankruptcy.  (New York Times)
  
  Once valued at $5.7 billion by idiots, the company is being sold off to one group of creditors for $225 million, which is less than is outstanding on an existing loan from the group so they get nothing.

• If Intel's NUC is too large for your tastes, the Topton M6S is the size of...  It's almost exactly the size of one of those bricks of Post-It notes, where you get five regular pads of notes in different colours.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has a quad core Intel N100 CPU.  This uses the "efficiency" cores from Intel's current chips, with no "performance" cores in sight.  The individual cores are as fast as my desktop system I was using up to last year, though that had eight cores  Still not awful for tiny system like this.
  
  That's combined 12GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage in an M.2 2242 slot.  Those are easier to come by than the smaller 2230 size, though you can buy it with an SSD preinstalled.
  
  Not expensive, either.
  
  
  
• The World Health Organisation says things would be much better all round if people would just stop being people.  (WHO)
  
  Last week they were insisting that you stop drinking alcohol.  This week they're saying you need to cut both sugar and artificial sweeteners out of your diet.
  
  I think I'll cut my consumption of WHO by 100%.
  
  
  
• Anti-piracy organisation ACE had its anti-piracy page taken down by anti-piracy organisation AiPlex for piracy.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Popcorn time.
  
  
  
• AMD could be launching 128 core and 192 core Zen 5 server CPUs as soon as next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They'll fit in existing Zen 4 servers but will use up to 50% more power, so make sure your power distribution systems and water chillers are in good order.
  
  They'll be close to twice as fast as the existing servers, though, so not a bad tradeoff.
  
  They'll be competing directly against Intel's new 144 core server CPUs, if those arrive on schedule.  But those chips use Intel's "efficiency" cores like the Post-It computer above and will be utterly steamrolled by Zen 5.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 16 2023 09:33 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, May 16 2023 11:19 PM (r9O5h)

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• An open letter to tech workers about careers in "public service".  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The gist of it being, the government never fires anyone, no matter how bad they are at their jobs, no matter how dire the economy is.  As long as you lick the right boots, you're secure for life.
  
  Your soul, on the other hand...

• HP has a new Pavilion Aero 13 range, replacing the 5800U with a 7735U, which is to say a 6800U.  (Liliputing)
  
  This offers basically the same CPU performance as before, but double the graphics performance, so it's a pretty solid update.
  
  It's configurable with a decent 1920x1200 screen or a very nice 2560x1600 version, has the Four Essential Keys, and comes 8GB or 16GB of RAM soldered in place, which is not so nice.  If you want a small, light notebook with a great screen and don't need to run anything intensive - or only use one application at a time - it's pretty good.  But with 32GB of RAM it would be great.
  
  
  
• Apple is reportedly preparing the new M3 Pro chip for laptops, with 12 CPU cores (sort of), 18 GPU cores, and 36GB of RAM.  (Bloomberg)

  I’m sure you’re wondering: How can Apple possibly fit that many cores on a chip? The answer is the 3-nanometer manufacturing process, which the company will be switching to with its M3 line. That approach allows for higher-density chips, meaning a designer can fit more cores into an already small processor.

  No, I'm not wondering that, because I'm not an idiot.
  
  AMD's 6800U processor mentioned above has 8 CPU cores - all full-size, not half full and half crippled - and 12 GPU cores, is built on TSMC's 6nm process, and measures 208 square mm.  And was launched at the beginning of last year.
  
  
  
• OpenSearch hasn't failed.  (InfoWorld)
  
  OpenSearch was born out of a dispute between Elasticsearch and Amazon.  Amazon offered Elasticsearch as a service.  Elasticsearch didn't like that but couldn't do much about it because their code was open source, so they change the license to make it less open to prevent Amazon from doing this.
  
  Amazon took the previous version of Elasticsearch, under the old open source license, renamed it OpenSearch, and started updating it themselves.
  
  And...  It seems to be working.
  
  
  
• Crucial's 2TB P3 SSD is available at Amazon for $88.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the one hand, it's not a high-end drive; it's DRAMless QLC, which used to be instant death but is now merely kind of meh thanks to dramatically improved controllers.
  
  On the other hand, my benchmark price for a decent budget SSD is $100 per TB, and this is less than half that.
  
  Team's 2TB MP33 is available for $78, and that's TLC, though it's a slower controller - it maxes out at about 2GB per second, and gets quite slow if you need to write hundreds of gigabytes of data all at once.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But if you do that, you can probably afford more than $78 for an SSD.
  
  
  
• You can run LLaMA 13B on a 6GB graphics card.  (GitHub)
  
  Previously - as in, last week - you would have looked towards the smaller 7B model if you were looking to run LLMs on budget hardware, but with some adjustments the 13B model runs well enough on an RTX 2060 or a laptop RTX 3060.
  
  This should work for Alpacas and Vicunas as well.  No word as yet on Guanacos, or on Old World camelids.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 15 2023 11:10 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 15 2023 11:26 PM (BMUHC)

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• Astronomers have discovered another 62 moons orbiting Saturn, bringing the total known to 145.  (Space)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  The article doesn't have a list but Wikipedia does.  Most - perhaps all, it's not obvious - of the newly discovered moons don't have names yet, just catalog numbers.

• Right wing Twitter worried Musk's CEO pick could return Twitter to its roots.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Ars Technica A/B tests news headlines and it's often unintentionally revealing.  The alternate headline for this piece is Twitter users fear new CEO will end Musk's commitment to free speech on platform.
  
  So what they are saying is that (a) Twitter's roots were opposed to free speech and (b) only conservatives care about it.
  
  Neither of which is true.  Twitter was a mostly free-speech platform from its founding in 2006 until the lunatics took over the asylum in 2018.  I had an account there from 2008 and didn't have a single problem until late 2018.  I was suspended or locked out 112 times in the subsequent 15 months before being banned permanently.
  
  And there are dozens of liberals who still care about free speech.  Well, at least a dozen.  Five.
  
  
  
• A former ByteDance executive (ByteDance is the company that owns TikTok) claims that TikTok is an operation of Chinese intelligence agencies and that the CCP maintains access to user data despite vehement denials from TikTok and ByteDance alike.  (Axios)
  
  Yeah, no shit.
  
  
  
• How the NFL used 4000 servers at AWS to create its annual game schedule.  (Amazon)
  
  A remarkable feat of engineering, except that...
  
  
  
• How the NBA and MLB used an Imsai 8080 system with 64k of RAM to do the same thing back in 1978.  (Atari Compendium)
  
  The article starts on page 38 of the PDF.
  
  And before that, of course, it was all done by hand.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, May 14 2023 10:14 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, May 15 2023 06:00 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: normal at Monday, May 15 2023 05:31 PM (obo9H)

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• Twitter has a new CEO: Linda Yaccarino, previously chairman of Global Advertising and Partnerships at NBC Universal.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  On the one hand, hiring someone to focus on advertising while Elon himself focuses on the tech side makes sense, and he still owns the company and can override or fire the CEO if required.
  
  On the other hand, nobody from corporate America gives the slightest shit about fundamental liberties or indeed fundamental reality.
  
  On the third hand, gotta make money somehow.
  
  Cautiously pessimistic on this hire.

• Nvidia is reportedly about to announce a 16GB model of the 4060 Ti.  (Videocardz)
  
  The 4060 Ti will be available with 8GB later this month.  A 16GB model, and a 4060 non-Ti version with 8GB, will be available in July.
  
  If true it's a smart move by Nvidia.  AMD has been needling them for not having enough VRAM on their graphics cards: At a price where AMD has 16GB, Nvidia only offers 12GB.  Since the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 both have 16GB of RAM, Nvidia cards run out when playing some recent games on maxed-out settings.
  
  Reason enough to hold off on that 4070 anyway.
  
  
  
• You can now upgrade your laptop to 96GB of RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Assuming you can upgrade it at all, and that it uses DDR5 SODIMMs.  Like the desktop versions, these use Micron's new 24Gbit chips, and come in speeds up to 5600MHz.
  
  
  
• PFAs are costing society $17 trillion a year according to a report that oddly enough has not been published so it is impossible to question how it came up with this ludicrous number.  (The Guardian)
  
  PFAs are used to make fabrics stain- and water-resistant.
  
  
  
• A quick look at the Asus Pro WS W790E SAGE SE motherboard for Intel's Xeon W-3400.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Don't buy it.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT doesn't know what stuff isn't.  (Quanta)
  
  Meaning that it's bad at negatives.
  
  This is true.  It also doesn't know what stuff is.  All it knows is how words fit together, and negation is a subtle concept.
  
  
  
• If your local digital bakery is still out of raspberry pies, here's an orange and a banana.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Both based on the popular Rockchip RK3588 Arm CPU.  This uses Arm's A76 cores, a couple of generations newer than the Raspberry Pi's A72.  (There was an A73 but it doesn't count, and no A74.)
  
  They include features the Raspberry Pi currently lacks like M.2 storage, and go up the 16GB of RAM rather than being limited to 8GB.

Posted by: David Eastman at Sunday, May 14 2023 03:49 AM (hiYWq)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, May 14 2023 05:09 PM (PiXy!)

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• It's nice to see that some things never change.  MongoDB's memory management is still complete shit, for example.
  
  
  
• A month ago we were still wondering if it was an April Fool's prank, and now it's (almost) here: The Asus ROG Ally.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a handheld gaming PC, like the Steam Deck or a bigger and more expensive Nintendo Switch.  It has a Ryzen Z1 or Z1 Extreme (a variant of the laptop 7840U chip), 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and a seven inch 1080p screen.
  
  The new CPU is about twice as fast as the one in the Steam Deck, but because the display resolution is also roughly doubled - two million pixels vs. one million on the Steam Deck - game performance on default settings is typically a little slower.
  
  Oh, and it runs Windows, where the Steam Deck runs Linux with neat emulation that works with almost all Windows games.
  
  Impressive piece of technology, but the battery life isn't there yet.
  
  Price is $599 compared to $549 for a comparable Steam Deck, which is pretty good for the more powerful hardware.

Tech News

• The GPD Win Max 2 is the Asus Rog Ally only more so.  And more expensive.  (Indiegogo)
  
  Same 7840U chip, but now with up to 64GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD, and a 2560x1600 10" display.
  
  It also has an Oculink port - a PCIe slot run over a cable - for an optional external graphics module with a 7600M XT GPU and 8GB of VRAM.  If you shell out for the whole kit you'll have a powerful if tiny laptop, a powerful if large mobile game console, and a pretty decent desktop system...  But it will set you back about $1800 even on pre-order.
  
  
  
• Which is the same price as Google's latest 7" tablet.  (Lilipting)
  
  Which has only 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.  And no external graphics module.
  
  
  
• In this, the strongest economy ever, tech startups not only can't find investors, they can't borrow money anymore either.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Partly because the banks keep collapsing.
  
  But don't you dare use the R-word.
  
  
  
• SpaceX and Vast plan to launch a commercial space station by the end of 2025.  (Notebook Check)
  
  A very small commercial space station, by the looks of things.
  
  You might even say it's half-vast.

Posted by: at Friday, May 12 2023 11:19 PM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 13 2023 12:43 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 13 2023 12:44 AM (BMUHC)

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