Ambient Irony

Saturday, December 04

Daily News Stuff 4 December 2021

Aargh Edition

Top Story

This server is beginning to annoy me. I disabled the audible monitoring alert while I was fixing it from the last crash and forgot to turn it back on, so all I got this time was an email, which is not always sufficient to wake me up despite my hypertrophied site outage senses honed to a microtome edge by nearly two decades of pain.

Server move imminent. Got three weeks off starting the 18th. I know I'm going the get interrupted by work stuff and three weeks will turn into two, but that's better than my usual Christmas break which is one week turning into zero.
I found another source for the perennially out of stock gluten free jelly beans I'm currently waiting on from Amazon. They're a little more expensive, but only by about 10% if you buy in bulk, and you can buy in bulk, which Amazon won't let me. They also have jelly babies from the same brand, which I didn't know were sold separately; I've only had them before in their "party mix" which has too much stuff I don't like to be worth the trouble.

Their site tracks expiry dates of the products and they're all late next year. So I'm considering buying 12 pounds of candy a month after Halloween.
We're number one. Again. (The Guardian)
Frequency of being drunk â€“ top 10 countries

1 Australia
2 Denmark
3 Finland
4 US
5 UK
6 Canada
7 Ireland
8 France
9 Sweden
10 Netherlands
Also of note, Russia is suffering crippling alcohol shortages and New Zealand is lying.
Apple has started test production on the M3 chip using TSMC's 3nm process. (WCCFTech)

While that's a rumour and Apple hasn't said anything about it, Apple was TSMC's first customer on 5nm and 7nm, so it's implausible that Apple hasn't already started testing on the new production node.

The details of the rumour are that there will be M2 chips in between on either 5nm or 4nm. That's also plausible since it's not expected that 3nm will deliver in volume until early 2023, with a few more months beyond that before products using the chips can reach customers.

Tech News

The new Lego AT-AT model - which is huge and looks just like the ones in The Empire Strikes Back and costs a small fortune - can't be taken apart once assembled. (Brickset)

Well, it's not entirely impossible; there's a tiny slot in one of the components where if you slip in the point of an X-Acto knife and lever it verrrrry carefuly you can unlock it and tease it all apart again.

Looks like it's inadvertent; it's just that things slide too neatly into place and leave no affordances for disassembly.
Microsoft has confirmed that it won't leave the mess that is Windows 11 unpatched for the next year. (Thurrott.com)

Also, if you order Dell's business-grade notebooks, including higher-end Inspirons, they are still perfectly happy to give you Windows 10 Pro.
Two men have been indicted over a $20 million YouTube Content ID scam. (TorrentFreak)

The scam is pretty simple: Assert copyright over content you don't own, post claims against YouTube channels you don't run, and steal all the advertising money.

This goes on all the time and YouTube doesn't care. This particular scam was big enough that it caught the attention of law enforcement, which is also rare.

False DMCA takedown claims can be perjury, but Content ID doesn't require a DMCA takedown claim. The charges in this case relate to wire fraud and money laundering.
Alder Lake laptops are on their way. (Tom's Hardware)

Something worth noting is that these new chips go backwards in terms of full-size cores. The low-power parts only have two P-cores; the full-size parts have six. Current 11th-gen laptops have four or eight full-size cores.
Test results of an early sample of next year's Raptor Lake have popped up on the net. (Tom's Hardware)

These results - if real - confirm the configuration of 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores.

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

I don't think I've heard the extended album version of this song before, and I certainly haven't seen this video. Everything about it is great.

Disclaimer: Well I'm cold-blooded; I'm a lizard you see. If there's a cold snap I'll fall out of a tree.

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