Ambient Irony

Thursday, March 13

Daily News Stuff 13 March 2025

Anarcho-Anarchist Edition

Top Story

Roomba manufacturer iRobot says it's not dead and doesn't want to go on the cart. (Ars Technica)

Amazon tried to buy the company in 2022 but the deal was stymied by European regulators who claimed it would reduce consumer choice.

Now consumer choice seems set to reduce all by itself with the company not being willing to commit to its own future existence.

Tech News

UserBenchmark has reposted its foam-flecked boilerplate screed about AMD GPUs, claiming that they lack real-world performance despite every independent reviewer praising the new models real-world performance, and also their real-world existence, not to mention their real-world not bursting into flames. (Tom's Hardware)

If you do a comparison search between two CPUs or GPUs you are often directed to UserBenchmark.

Unfortunately the site is run by a meth-addled hobo living under a bridge in Centralia, Pennsylvania, who has been defying government attempts to relocate him to a safer location for thirty years.

Apparently.
Biwin (who?) has announced 6400MHz 192GB memory kits for Intel and AMD. (Tom's Hardware)

Good luck getting that to work. Two DIMMs - 96GB - sure. Four DIMMs, not so much.
The AOOSTAR G-Flip is a mini PC with a 12-core Ryzen 370 CPU, two M.2 slots, two SO-DIMM slots, and... A 1080p screen? (Liliputing)

It's well-equipped with I/O, including two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, HDMI and USB4 for video output, and OCuLink for external whatevers.

I can see a use for this as I run a small Linux cluster on some Beelink mini-PCs and I have a portable monitor to plug in when I need to work on them locally. If I could just glance over and see what they were all doing that would be neat.

I doubt the price would be particularly welcoming for that use case though.
All this bad AI is wrecking a generation of gadgets. (The Verge) (archive site)

It is. I mean, mostly you can still turn it off and get a usable device, but with all the effort going into AI that doesn't work, nothing is actually improving.
Trump is bringing back McCarthyism to go after Mahmoud Khalil. (The Verge) (archive site)

McCarthy was right.

Musical Interlude

I found a channel on YouTube with remastered versions of 70s, 80s, and 90s music videos. Often what is available either has third-generation VHS video quality or the video is fine but the audio is barely listenable, so a few times I've had to post just the audio version instead.

Disclaimer: Also they shouldn't be region-locked, though they might spontaneously combust due to copyright strikes.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:33 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 436 words, total size 4 kb.

1 I've been surfing the archives with javascript off, and something about how results gets served up is wonky. I got back to 29 or so, june or july of last year, and I was getting more recent pages served up among those. (Browser is Pale Moon.) I was searching for info on laptops without soldered in RAM and SSDs. Four essential keys maybe unnecessary for this application, but being able to get an NVidia GPU is probably best.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 14 2025 07:16 AM (rcPLc)

2 I've seen that as well; I think it's a server-side caching issue and not browser-related.
The site uses JavaScript very sparingly, so it's probably something I did wrong on my end.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 14 2025 02:46 PM (PiXy!)

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