• If you have an Asus anything, better hope it doesn't need to be repaired.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's a video at the end of the post providing background, but among other scams, Asus wanted around $2700 to replace just the power connector on an RTX 4090 - a well-documented problem with these cards - and $200 for a literally microscopic scratch on an Ally Z1 gaming device.
  
  In that case the device was sent in to repair a broken joystick, and not only did Asus not offer to repair the joystick, they threatened to send the device back disassembled if the customer didn't cough up.
  
  This didn't go down too well because the customer in question was a hardware review channel with more than two million subscribers.
  
  
  
• My new laptop is an Asus.

Tech News

• Swiss company Climeworks unveiled its new "Mammoth" plant in Iceland, which...  Is basically a tree, only large, noisy, ugly, and expensive.  (CNN)
  
  So it's a plant that does what a plant does, except worse in every possible way.
  
  
  
• ARM desktop PCs are definitely coming, says ARM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Uh huh.
  
  
  
• The Incredible KIMplement is a KIM-1 emulator...  That runs on a Commodore 64.  (OldVCR)
  
  It's a fully virtualised 6502 running on a 6502.
  
  This is like constructing a replica 1950s washing machine where every component is itself a 1950s washing machine.
  
  If that doesn't make much sense, then yes.
  
  
  
• Gaze upon Dell's leaked Qualcomm X-Elite powered laptops.  (The Verge)
  
  Gaze, you filthy peasants.  Gaze.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's ChatGPT announcement: What we know so far.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Pixy's Law of Headlines: When a headline includes the phrase "what we know so far", the writer knows nothing whatsoever.
  
  
  
• I'm not saying SpaceX, but SpaceX: NASA wants a cheaper Mars sample return proposal.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Boeing presented the most expensive option.
  
  
  

Asus RMA Fail Video of the Day

Play

Never get into an argument with a man who buys shampoo by the barrel.

Play

My single favourite song from Hololive, and they've recorded a lot of songs.  The English branch by itself has something like 400 entries on the playlist.

Amazing that this came out of the mouth of a rat who even speaks Japanese with a thick Australian accent.


Disclaimer: A lot of things can happen in a year.  The king might die.  I might die.  And maybe the rat will learn to sing.

• Earth is facing a Category G4 geomagnetic storm.  (The Verge)
  
  That's just one rating lower than the Carrington Event which was so energetic it knocked out telegraph lines across Europe and North America - except for some that heeded the warning and disconnected power in advance, which were able to keep operating even without any electricity.
  
  What you can expect: Pretty lights in the night sky.  (Axios)
  
  Fiber optics are completely immune to this, satellites are shielded, and it's not strong enough to affect the power grid.
  
  
  

Tech News

• OpenAI - creator of virtual encyclopedia salesman OpenAI - is not planning to launch it's own search engine next week.  (The Verge)
  
  Some positive news for once.
  
  
  
• Just a year after Australian superannuation fund UniSuper migrated all its systems to Google Cloud, Google accidentally deleted them.  (The Guardian)
  
  "Oops", said Google.
  
  The company had everything replicated to two geographically separated datacenters, and was safe from everything up to and including a direct meteorite impact...  So Google just deleted both copies.
  
  Not being complete idiots, they also had a full backup outside of Google and were able to restore from that.
  
  
  
• The beatings will continue whether morale improves or not: The game Ghost of Tushima has been delisted from Steam in 178 countries and dependencies.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's one more than lost access to Helldivers 2 when Sony demanded users sign up for a PlayStation Network account.
  
  The reason is the same this time, but somehow they also made the game unavailable in Japan.
  
  
  
• In a move evidently designed to make Sony feel better about themselves Electronic Arts is planning to put ads in AAA games.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The company promises to be "very thoughtful" about shitting up the product you paid for.
  
  
  
• A Dell API used by its business partners was hacked and customer details including names and delivery addresses were leaked for 49 million people.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Ha.  I don't live there anymore.
  
  
  
• Intel's 14900KS.  6.2GHz.  400 watts.  (AnandTech)
  
  And often slower than the Ryzen 7900, which is 40% cheaper and uses 80% less power.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD, the Ryzen 7940HS-powered Minisforum UM790 is on sale at a really good price right now.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Not in Australia, but - no, wait, there it is.  Damn, that is a good price.
  
  Tempting, but I already got three of the Beelink 5560U model because it uses DDR4 RAM and I had 128GB of DDR4 SO-DIMMs looking for a home.  So compared to this model I got more 50% more total performance and twice the memory for less money.
  
  

Vtuber Music Video of the Day

Play

Today it's Ayanda Risu and Aragami Oga's song Harapan PanPanPan, which is a Japanese / Bahasa pun.


Disclaimer: Risu is a squirrel, and her parents are Okayu and Korone, who are a cat and a dog respectively.  That's just how the Hololive family tree works.  Bijou and Kobo are each other's mothers.

Squashed Edition

• Apple has apologised for its ad introducing the new iPad Pro, which involves, uh, crushing a huge array of artistic implements into a single dreary homogenised mess.  (The Verge)
  
  If someone can take your ad and produce a gem just by running it in reverse you might want to reconsider your entire existence.
  
  Play
  
  One example of the Apple "Crushed" ad reversed.  There are several of these.

• OpenAI is considering allowing people to use ChatGPT to create porn.  (The Guardian)
  
  It will still lie to you and call you racist, but you'll get feelthy pictures out of the deal.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is reportedly also planning to launch an AI search engine next week.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Once generative AI gets involved it's no longer a search engine.  It's a propaganda engine.
  
  
  
• The original social media apps on Android were built by Google.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It was obvious that the Twitter app and the Twitter website were built by different teams right from the start.  The Twitter app was bad.
  
  I didn't know at the time that they were built by different companies.
  
  
  
• BenQ has unveiledn't a 28" 3:2 monitor with "coding mode" that wrecks your colour calibration.  (Notebook Check)
  
  I'm assuming this is a 3840x2560 display - Huawei offers something similar - but the article doesn't say, and neither does the linked press release, or indeed BenQ's website.

Play

Today it's Fujikura Uruka's violin rendition of Pippa the Rippa.

Sounds catchy?  You want to listen to the original?  Well, you can't.  It died.

Play



Disclaimer: It died of moider.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 10 2024 11:27 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 10 2024 11:32 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 10 2024 11:54 PM (PiXy!)

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• Underpants gnomes, eat your heart out.
  
  Stack Overflow signed a deal with OpenAI - creators of ChatGPT - to sell off user data at a presumably enormous profit.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The users of course don't see a penny of this.
  
  Understandably annoyed, those users started editing their content.  They can't delete answers that have been accepted due to the way Stack Overflow works, but they can update them and render the data worthless.
  
  So Stack Overflow started banning its own best users.
  
  To rub salt into the wound, Stack Overflow has long banned its users from using generative AI to help write those answers, but has no qualms whatsoever about selling your work.
  
  This likely violates the terms of Europe's GDPR, so let's see what the lawsuit fairy brings.

Tech News

• Don't buy an Intel 14900K for gaming.
  
  Now that Intel has walked back its chip-frying levels of automated overclocking, Hardware Unboxed has re-tested the 14900K against AMD's 7800X3D on a range of games.
  
  Play
  
  The two chips perform about the same.
  
  But the Intel chip is 50% more expensive and uses twice as much power.
  
  Note that this is still with the Intel chip running at 250W at all times, just not previous levels that went as high as 400W.
  
  Intel now recommends default power settings of 125W, which will definitely reduce performance - and is still more power than the AMD chip uses.
  
  
  
• US libraries are fighting for a better deal on e-books.  (Axios)

  "We need the coercive power of the state sitting behind us at the table saying, 'We need a special slice of the pie.'"

  Suddenly I'm feeling that the people who burned the library at Alexandria weren't all bad.
  
  
  
• Google is leaving its godawful offices in San Francisco.  (SF Chronicle)
  
  Continuing the hollowing out of what I'm told used to be a nice town.
  
  Google is not yet leaving the city entirely, much less the state.  But maybe.
  
  
  
• Minisforum's AtomMan X7 has an Intel 185H CPU (6 P cores and 10 E cores), up to 96GB of RAM, four video outputs, two M.2 slots, and a four inch built-in display.  (Notebook Check)
  
  And dual 5Gbit Ethernet ports and, somehow, a camera.
  
  Which sound neat until you look at the photos and realise that it's not plugged in to anything.  The configuration pictured would need a minimum of five cables.

Play

Today it's Neuro-sama singing Dubidubidu, which was originally performed by Christell Jazmin Rodriguez Carrillo on Chilean television in 2003, when she was...  Five.  Then for no apparent reason other than it is kind of catchy it suddenly became a huge meme last year.

Neuro-sama herself is an AI, and I don't use the term lightly.  Although she's the work of a single developer and has the intellect of a precocious and bratty five year old herself, that's infinitely preferable to billion-dollar corporate efforts like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Whatever It's Name is Today, which exist solely to lie to you and call you racist.

Neuro-sama exists to drive you insane and send you bankrupt.

Play

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 10 2024 12:02 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 10 2024 12:08 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 10 2024 12:10 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Kurt Duncan at Friday, May 10 2024 01:30 AM (p4k5F)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 10 2024 04:12 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Friday, May 10 2024 02:11 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 10 2024 04:28 PM (PiXy!)

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• Apple has announced its M4 CPU, just months after the M3.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's 50% faster.
  
  50% faster than what, you ask.
  
  Shut up, they explained.
  
  
  
• Along with the M4 CPU comes a new range of iPad Pros using it.  (AnandTech)
  
  These start at $1000 and go up to $3000.
  
  That is, the cheapest model costs more than my new laptop and the extra memory and storage I bought for it.

• Speaking of laptops, the old new laptop - the one I bought two years ago that has been waiting all this time to be set up - has a working Windows license again.
  
  And it runs my modded Minecraft instance at 60fps with shaders enabled.
  
  It could probably do more but it's only a 60fps screen.
  
  
  
• Asus leaked the part number and specs of AMD's upcoming Strix Point laptop chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  Twelve cores - four Zen 5 and eight Zen 5c, which are identical but run at clock speeds about 25% lower, 36MB cache, a top speed of 5.1GHz on the main cores, and 77 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of AI thingy.
  
  That's double the AI thingy of Apple's M4, which has a 38 TOPS thingy.
  
  
  
• China's latest GPU beats the best chips from AMD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That is, the best chips from AMD from 2008.
  
  It's roughly equivalent to a Radeon 4850.  I had one of those.  Passive cooler.  Played Mass Effect and Dragon Age on it.
  
  It definitely slowed down in big combat scenes but it was mostly okay.
  
  
  
• Micron's new LPCAMM2 memory modules are now available for purchase.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In one speed, LPDDR5X-7500.
  
  $175 for 32GB and $330 for 64GB.  Not cheap but 80% cheaper than Apple and even more cheaper than replacing your whole computer because the RAM is soldered in place not that I'm bitter about that right now.
  
  
  
• An OpenAI executive says that ChatGPT will be "laughably bad" in twelve months.  (Business Insider)
  
  Hey, give yourself some credit.  It's laughably bad right now.
  
  
  
  

Vtuber Music Video of the Day

Play

Today's effort is a collab from Hololive's Gawr Gura and Callipe Mori, who between them have approximately seventeen billion subscribers.


Disclaimer: Subscriber numbers may settle in shipping.

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, May 08 2024 10:44 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 09 2024 12:02 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, May 09 2024 03:18 AM (oJgNG)

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• Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption.  (The Verge)
  
  By which The Verge means Republicans are objecting to laws and regulations designed to make internal combustion vehicles more expensive and less efficient.

• After years of delays and $1 billion in cost overruns, the Boeing Starliner launch was scrubbed.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They'll try again.
  
  
  
• Shell's flagship carbon capture project sold $200 million worth of emission credits backed by absolutely nothing.  (Greenpeace)
  
  Congratulations, Greenpeace.  You've been working towards this miserable failure for a long time.
  
  
  
• A new attack renders largely useless VPNs even more useless than normal, if you are connected to a hostile network.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It subverts the VPN routing table to just run traffic directly over the network instead.
  
  This applies to general anonymising VPNs that cover the entire internet.  It doesn't affect corporate VPNs, and if you're running HTTPS or SSH over the VPN you're safe anyway.
  
  Also, it doesn't work against Linux or Android devices, not because they are inherently more secure, but because they don't properly follow the network standard that is being abused by the attack.
  
  
  
• The Ryxen 7 5700X3D is pretty good.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not the fastest CPU in the world, but it runs well and won't burn a hole in your desk or your wallet.
  
  
  
• So...  I need another Windows license.
  
  One of the systems I just set up I already partly set up two years ago, but then I forgot the password I put on it.
  
  I tried to reinstall Windows, but the regular installer couldn't find the SSD.
  
  So I created a recovery disk off an identical machine and used that to install it, which went fine, except that this ended up with this machine stealing the license key of the other one.
  
  Since I didn't sign in to my Microsoft account before this happened, I can't recover the key either.
  
  I have three Windows 11 Pro OEM licenses, except that you don't get the key anymore so I have no way to use them.
  
  
  

Random Vtuber Music Video of the Day

Not Hololive today, but indie vtuber Midas, with Touch Tone Telephone.



Disclaimer: Cause I'm the right one, on my VOLTE telephone.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, May 07 2024 08:48 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 07 2024 10:16 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 08 2024 11:10 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 08 2024 11:14 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 08 2024 02:51 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 08 2024 06:08 PM (PiXy!)

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• With its player community up in arms and its reputation on fire - with 200,000 negative reviews landing in just three days - Sony has decided maybe Helldivers players on Windows don't need a PlayStation Network account after all.  (MSN)
  
  This comes a day after the game was removed from sale on Steam in 177 countries and dependencies because the PlayStation Network was not available there.
  
  Which also goes to show how widely available Steam is.  They don't care if you live in the Aland Islands or Andorra or Antarctica, if your credit card works you're in.
  

• The Cheyenne supercomputer has sold for $480,000, about 2% of what it cost when it was first installed.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The system includes 8,064 Xeon E5-2697 v4 CPUs with 18 cores each, and 4,890 64GB DDR4 ECC memory modules.
  
  Speaking of which, I have 40GB of DDR4 SODIMMs and 2TB of NVMe SSDs left over after after my latest round of hardware upgrades.  And zero free slots to put any of those into.
  
  At least I don't have coolant leaks, unlike Cheyenne.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Z890 motherboards for Arrow Lake CPUs will feature integrated Thunderbolt 4 support.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which would be even better if Intel hadn't introduced Thunderbolt 5 last year.
  
  
  
• A scroll detailing the final hours of Plato, found in a cache in a villa belonging to Julius Caesar's father-in-law in Herculaneum (near Pompeii), has now been deciphered.  (The Guardian)
  
  He was not overly fond of the entertainment that evening.
  
  The scrolls - hundreds of them - are, as you might expect given what happened to Herculaneum, mere lumps of charcoal, and it is only with modern CT scanning techniques and computer-aided reconstruction that we are able to read them.  In fact, it's only last year that the first words were read this way.
  
  
  
• Chinese government websites are as bad as government websites anywhere else, and probably worse.  (The Register)
  
  If anyone cared enough to hack them they would likely find easy pickings.
  
  
  

Random Vtuber Music Video of the Day

Today it's Suisei of Hololive's Generation 0.

• The US government has mandated automatic emergency braking in all new cars sold starting 2029.  (Car and Driver)
  
  This could save 360 lives a year, claims the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, almost as many as are killed by beavers and bathtub accidents combined.

• Understanding Stein's paradox.  (Joe Antognini)
  
  Well, that didn't work.
  
  
  
• Why RAG won't solve generative AI's hallucination problem.  (Tech Crunch)

  Because models have no real intelligence and are simply predicting words, images, speech, music and other data according to a private schema, they sometimes get it wrong. Very wrong.

  What RAG does is tell the AI to look the damn answer up instead of making it up.
  
  For which the AI is entirely unnecessary.
  
  
  
• 4060 Ti or 7700 XT?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Following price cuts from both Nvidia and AMD, the judges award this round to the 7700 XT.  In fact, I've seen the 7700 XT (which has 12GB of RAM) selling for less than even the 8GB model of the 4060 Ti, making the choice easy.
  
  
  
• Setting up computers all over the place, including a new Linux server at home running Ubuntu 24.04.
  
  Dug out the spare Dell laptop that had the spare 4TB SSD in it, and that has now been moved over to the new Asus laptop.  The Dell itself doesn't seem to have survived the move - or didn't survive sitting idle for two years.  Either way.
  
  That frees up 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD for a second Linux server.
  
  The Linux servers will be called Voms and Versen.  The Asus laptop is Maomao.
  
  I still need to come up with names for the two main Dell laptops.  They were originally going to be Sana and Pomu, but both of them have now granulated.

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, May 06 2024 06:57 AM (nk1Z+)

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• The judge in the Google antitrust trial is considering imposing sanctions over Google's practice of deliberately deleting all records of sensitive internal conversations.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Having seen other big tech companies get in trouble when the DOJ went over their records, Google decided it would simply not keep any records.
  
  It's a bold strategy.

• Building a Threadripper workstation and need lots of fast memory but also want ECC?  V-Color has you covered.  (Serve the Home)
  
  192GB at DDR5-7200 speeds.
  
  Though you only get full speed if you have one DIMM per channel, so if you need more (and your motherboard has more than four slots) it will slow down.
  
  
  
• If you need even faster memory - like HBM - you can place your orders now for delivery in 2026.  (AnandTech)
  
  Hynix's production is already sold out for 2024 and most of 2025.
  
  
  
• Google's search results, already almost useless, are getting worse.  (The Register)

  "It has happened," wrote developer Arian van Putten in a social media post over the weekend. "The number one Google result was an official Pulumi documentation page that was clearly written by an LLM (it had a disclaimer that it was) and hallucinated an AWS feature that didn't exist. This is the beginning of the end."

  Pulumi, the company generating the AI results, has been very responsive to the problem, has taken down two thirds of the pages and is reviewing the remainder for incorrect answers.
  
  Google meanwhile offered the cannedest of canned replies."
  
  Bing, meanwhile...  Didn't have the same problem.  So score one for Microsoft.
  
  
  
• Generating 1024 bit prime numbers the hard way.  (GlitchComet)
  
  The easy way is to just copy and paste.  Here you go:
  
  177720646511895772991045629522972753502676425002016283330
  773868745109334356532783500581560425145704773959769930413
  789872718529515289471187735819720465888854952471427632098
  554011932730921272830418010265570121099752587584547435013
  097108422373834015070668330390239397186506619029851158511
  460040722871392491661731
  
  
  
• If you play Helldivers 2 and live in Monaco or San Marino or Andorra or any of about seventy other countries, publisher Sony says fuck you.  (GamesRadar)
  
  You will now be required to sign up to the PlayStation Network to play the game on Windows.  The PlayStation Network is only available in about half the countries of the world.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 04 2024 11:49 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, May 05 2024 01:02 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 05 2024 10:43 AM (BMUHC)

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• Peloton is laying off another 400 people - about 15% of its surviving workforce.  (The Verge)
  
  This is the fifth layoff in three years, reducing the company's workforce by almost two thirds.
  
  If you think such a disastrous performance should see the CEO resigning in disgrace, well, he did.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Every map of China is wrong.  (Medium)
  
  If you overlay satellite data on maps of China, nothing seems to line up properly.
  
  This is because all recent map of China are wrong - deliberately so, with locations shifted by anything from 50 to 500 meters.
  
  And nobody in China is permitted to correct the errors.
  
  
  
• There's another critical security vulnerability in GitLab.  (Ars Technica)
  
  GitLab is great.
  
  Under no circumstances should you run your own instance connected directly to the internet.
  
  
  
• Nurses say hospital adoption of half-cooked AI is reckless.  (TechDirt)
  
  I'm sure they do, and I'm sure it is, but this article not only provides no evidence whatsoever for these claims, it doesn't even provide any coherent claims.
  
  
  
• Kobo's 2024 e-reader models are user-repairable.  (Liliputing)
  
  In the sense that a moderately experienced user with a $20 screwdriver set can open them up and replace the screen, battery, and motherboard, and the front and back parts of the case if the damage is physical rather than electronic.
  
  Which is not everything, but is certainly something.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, May 04 2024 03:46 AM (LADmw)

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