Ambient Irony

Sunday, March 16

Daily News Stuff 16 March 2025

Mode A La Pie Edition

Top Story

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.

Tech News

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

Disclaimer: Discord on the left of me, Slack on the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle with Zoom.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:24 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 342 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Cloudflare is I think a little bit responsive to the people who contract with it, in being really obnoxious.

I think both AO3 and FFN use it, and I've had different experiences with the cloudflare interdiction.

Two types of experiences. One was with a fanfic download plugin for calibre, and one year, around January first, FFN's cloudflare stopped letting that scrape the chapters and updates for me. AO3 still worked with it for a while (I haven't checked recently). I can download versions of some stories through AO3's mechanism these days.

The second was just reading, in my browser.

AO3 is still fine in Pale Moon with javascript off, most of the time. Sometimes cloudflare gives me trouble.

I was using calibre and the downloader, in the first place, because Pale Moon reading with javascript off had gotten hard, and the ads screw with memory and processor when they display.

Anyway, the ad blocker hasn't been working well enough with FFN in Pale Moon. So far, relatively few issues in Vivaldi.

(Though, FFN's server situation, and interaction with cloudflare, seems to be starting to fail. Last three updates of a fic that has updated about once a month, are inconsistently present in whatever server I happen to be talking to.)

In conclusion: The browser and OS people at Google, Microsoft, and Apple are doing, or seem to be doing, some very awful things. Cloudflare seems to be doing some of what they are asked to do, and some of the frustrations are downstream of other people. I'm still pissy, but there are a lot of things very wrong with the internet.

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

2 "What's the catch?"
No more local processing, apparently? Everything it hears will get uploaded to the mothership.

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

3 Whoops, yes, the next link, from Arse Technica, mentions that.

I've noticed in the last few months--hadn't paid enough attention previously for it to rise to the conscious level, but along with Arse' rabid Trump hatred, they've become much less of a useful tech site. There was barely any notice of Ship's 8th test flight, the quality and frequency of their tech reviews, in particular, has dropped off a cliff, there's a lot more climate doomsday pontificating, and so on. And that's not mentioning the commentariat.

Even Eric Berger's space reporting is succumbing to anti-Musk hysteria.

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

4 I used to read Ars Technica regularly, because even with their massive bias, it was at least something obvious that you knew was there and could work around, and they had a quality and readability that I haven't found elsewhere. But lately, that's just gone. The articles are uninteresting, poorly written, and more and more frequently on subjects that I just don't care about.
I'm sure it's at least partly due to the TDS. It's a crippling disease. I've got a co-worker, who had been one of my favorite people to work with, he's competent, writes good code, meets his timelines, is perceptive at looking ahead and realizing where the problems are going to be, etc. But he's got level 3 TDS, and it's just driving him insane, to the point that he's not focusing on his work, and has started letting stupid obvious bugs get into his code, missing timelines, etc. He's already been pulled aside by our manager once, and will be gone in a few weeks if he doesn't get over it, and I don't think he will.

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

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