• Microsoft wants to make Windows an AI operating system.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The problem with Windows 10 was that it worked.  When you have a product that works - and never wears out - all you have to bring in money is new users.
  
  So what you have to do is create a new version with new features that people are willing to pay for.
  
  Which Microsoft has singularly failed to do.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Google is putting ads in AI search results.  (The Verge)
  
  AI search results are a complete waste of time, so of course they are putting ads in them.

• The only Copilot+ AI feature that matters is a huge privacy risk.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes.
  
  
  
• The new Qualcomm laptops otherwise look pretty good.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln...
  
  
  
• I want flexible queries, not RAG.  (Win Vector)
  
  RAG is the latest AI term; it stands for "retrieval augmented generation".  What this means is that AI search delivers garbage, and everyone knows it, so the solution is to replace the search results from the AI with the original search results, which raises the question of why we are using AI in the first place.
  
  In this case, the author was looking for a recipe for a Sicilian dish of rice and eggs that his mother grew up with.  ChatGPT helpfully provided a recipe from Naples, which is notable not in Sicily.
  
  After a great deal of searching, his wife found a book called Bruculinu, America, a sort of memoir in recipes.
  
  This had two recipes that looked likely.
  
  They made the first one, and his mother confirmed that it was what she remembered.
  
  The utility of AI in all this?  Zero.
  
  
  
• IGN has acquired a number of gaming news sites, including Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, and VG247.  (The Verge)
  
  Rock Paper Shotgun used to be the best games news site, period.
  
  Then they got woke and it all turned to shit.
  
  
  
• AMD has announced the low-end Epyc 4004 server CPU range.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are Ryzen 7000 CPUs.  They are literally Ryzen 7000 CPUs.
  
  That's not a bad thing.  Ryzen 7000 CPUs are great.  It's just what they are.
  
  
  

Anime Music Video of the Day

<s>Song is Engel by Rammstein.  Anime is Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is kind of a mess.

This is a 4K AI upscale of the HD remastered version, which was a frame-for-frame remake of the SD remastered version, which was a frame-for-frame remake of the original version, which was cut together with two VCRs and a stopwatch.</s>

Well, that's blocked in the US, all four versions of it.  So here's The Irresponsible Captain Tylor.

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, May 23 2024 10:43 AM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 23 2024 06:06 PM (PiXy!)

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• Microsoft Recall is the AI-powered future of PCs.  (The Verge)
  
  This new feature coming to Windows 11 lets you find and replay any moment in your PC's history...  By constantly taking screenshots.  Of everything.  Private email.  Passwords.  Personal chat messages.  Confidential business documents.  Credit card numbers.  Personal identification.  Everything.
  
  Not DRM-restricted content, though.  That would be taking things too far.
  
  And don't worry, all this information will be kept safe on your computer and Microsoft takes security very seriously.  (Tech Radar)
  
  
  
• I just set up two PCs running Windows 10.

• That Orwellian nightmare isn't coming to every computer , though.  You'll need a Copilot+ PC to inflict that upon yourself, which is a fresh hell unleashed by Microsoft today.  (Liliputing)

  Recall, specifically, sounds like it could be a privacy nightmare if your data were sent to the cloud for processing.

  Yes.  Yes it does.
  
  
  
• The first wave of these Copilot+ PCs are based on Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X chips.  In fact every new Snapdragon X laptop - and there are models from Dell, Acer, HP, Samsung, Asus, and Lenovo, as well as Microsoft itself, so this is a huge industry-wide push - every single one appears to be infected with this Copilot+ bullshit.
  
  In a single stroke, Microsoft has turned one of the largest advances in Windows laptops in years into a floating dumpster fire.
  
  
  
• Intel will be bringing out new laptop chips too.  (AnandTech)
  
  Congratulations, Intel.
  
  
  
• The 8GB iPad Pro models have 12GB of RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Probably just because of which memory chips were available in volume, and these devices are completely locked down so you can't use that extra memory.  But it's there.
  
  
  
• Reminder: There are no security flaws in Microsoft products.  You do not need to worry about all your data being stolen.  (Security Week)
  
  Well, that's a relief.

Song is Stick Together by Elias Naslin, featuring Lucy and Elbot.  I don't know who any of those people are, but the song works well here.

Anime is Little Witch Academia, which started out as a short film, then got a Kickstarter-funded sequel, and was finally expanded into a 25-episode TV series.  The TV series differs a little in continuity from the original films, but it is very good.


Disclaimer: Never pick a fight with someone who once blew up the Moon by accident.

I'm not sure what programmers are thinking when they do things like this.  Two cases I ran into over the weekend:

• In the LXD service for managing containers and virtual servers, you can route individual ports from the public internet to specific containers.  If you have an email server in a container, you can route just the email ports (SMTP, POP, IMAP and so on) to it, without exposing anything else.
  
  If you want to preserve the public IP address - important in a lot of tasks - you have to set up this route in NAT mode.
  
  You can't do that; your container needs a static IP first.
  
  You can't add a static IP to your container; you can't override the network connection on the default bridge.
  
  You can't override the default bridge...  Wait, you can override the default bridge?  Why can I do that, but not just assign a static IP, which is a much more trivial operation?
  
  
  
• When setting up multiple blogs under WordPress, the first thing you need to do is edit the WordPress source code.
  
  Then you have to disable all your plugins.
  
  Then you can run the setup routine to configure a multi-site network.
  
  What that setup routine does is give you a list of additional changes you need to make to the WordPress source code - and to your Apache configuration.
  
  This makes my own blogging software feel like a beacon of light in a howling void, when at this point it's mostly kind of meh and seriously needs updating.

• This USB flash drive can only store 8kB of data but will last you 200 years.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Problem: The drive has 8kB of FRAM, which is very fast and robust but too small for most applications, and also 4MB of conventional flash to hold the firmware.
  
  How does it work when the FRAM is still good but the firmware has gone to the great bit bucket in the sky?
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 6 will reportedly bring with it 32-core chiplets.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And in theory 64-core desktop CPUs - regular desktop, not workstation.
  
  And 384-core server CPUs.
  
  
  
• Hertz has been charging customers hundreds of dollars for fuel...  For Teslas.  (The Drive)
  
  That's gotta, uh, sting.
  
  
  
• Minisforum has announced a cheaper 16GB model of its V3 tablet to undercut the cheapest model of Microsoft's surface which is priced at $999.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The cheapest Surface only has 8GB of RAM making it landfill-ready straight from the box.
  
  The Minisforum V3 looks good and early reviews are positive.
  
  
  
• This article is idiotic garbage.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Do not read.

Song is Counting Stars by OneRepublic.  Anime is of course Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea.  Some people don't think highly of Ponyo.  Those people are bad.


Disclaimer: So is PHP.

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• LLMs - large language models, which form the basis for all current commercial "AI" research - are as secure as the telephone network in the 1970s.  (Schneier)
  
  And indeed they are secure in exactly the same way as the telephone network in the 1970s.
  
  Which is to say, it's a house of cards with the very finest locks, which are also made out of cards.

• Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects online platforms from most civil and criminal action if all they do is faithfully present data provided by their users (and take appropriate action when informed that action needs to be taken).
  
  But that law may not provide any protection at all when the data is rewritten using AI.  (MSN)
  
  Oh no.
  
  Anyway...
  
  
  
• AMD's beastly Strix Point Halo CPU could be even more of a beast than previously anticipated.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This chip - or rather, module, since it seems to consist of three smaller chiplets - will have 16 full Zen 5 CPU cores (rather than the anticipated Zen 5c, which is fully compatible but smaller and slower) and 40 RDNA3 graphics cores, with a 256-bit bus.
  
  It will also have some number of Zen 5c cores on the graphics part of the module, though we don't yet know how many.
  
  It's basically a PlayStation 5 except with three times the CPU performance.
  
  (AMD also designed the chip for the PlayStation 5.  And the Xbox Series X and S.)
  
  
  
• It's not a bubble!  With AI startups booming, the rest of the Silicon Valley bullshit is back too.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's a bubble.
  
  
  
• LXD can do anything.
  
  You just have to be prepared to jump through seventeen flaming hoops to get there.
  
  Was having a lot of trouble preserving client IP addresses coming into a containerised proxy.  This is the solution:
  
  1. Forget binding public IPs to your containers; use LXD's proxy devices wheich are more specific and hence more secure.
  
  2. To preserve the client IP the proxy device must be running either in NAT mode or proxy protocol mode.
  
  3. Proxy protocol mode doesn't work at all with Caddy, at least in default settings.  It just turns every request into a 400 error.
  
  4. To configure NAT mode just add nat=true to your proxy commands, e.g.
  
  lxc config device add $MY_CONTAINER http-proxy proxy listen=tcp:$PUBLIC_IP:80 connect=tcp:$CONTAINER_IP:80 nat=true
  
  5. This will fail.
  
  6. You need to make CONTAINER_IP a static address - by default it's picked up from the hosts file.
  
  7. You can't.
  
  8.  Unless...  You delete and then re-add the container's network device following the instructions here.
  
  9. Now your proxy server will keep the client IP addresses.
  
  10. Yay.  I only spent five hours on that.
  
  
  

Anime Music Video of the Day

Song is Long Gone and Moved On by The Script.  Anime is Usagi Drop a.k.a Bunny Drop, which tells the story of a family gathering when the clan patriarch passes away - only to find he's left them an unexpected gift in the form of his six year old daughter.  

When the ostensible adults in the room are discussing what should be done with her - the mother has disappeared - Daikichi, the 30-something man you can see in the video, says Fuck you guys, she's family, I'll take her in if you're all too useless.

He knows absolutely nothing about raising children, but he finds a way to make it work.

• Slack is taking customer data and using it for AI training.  (Security Week)
  
  "You can opt out", said Slack, which didn't actually bother to tell anyone it was doing this in the first place.  "You just have to call customer support."
  
  "The data is not shared with third parties and never leaves Slack's trust boundary" added a Slack representative, missing the point that Slack's trust boundary is now zero.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Reddit has signed a deal with OpenAI to train ChatGPT on its users' content.  (The Verge)
  
  This deal and a similarly lucrative one with Google put Reddit's financial future on a solid foundation.
  
  Reddit's moral foundation is more like a house of cards in a hurricane.
  
  
  
• How DeviantArt died.  (Slate)
  
  AI and greed.  Greed and AI.  A story as old as time, or 2022, whichever came first.
  
  
  
• Three years after acquiring Biritish open access science publisher Hindawi, American publishing group Wiley is shutting it down and writing it off.  (The Register)
  
  What happened in between was Wiley retracting over eleven thousand scientific papers published in Hindawi journals because they were AI-generated garbage.
  
  
  
• The Mac vs. PC war is back on, says some idiot.  (The Verge)
  
  Macs aren't even an afterthought in the global PC market at this point.  Even Apple doesn't want to sell them.
  
  
  
• CSC ServiceWorks operates a million washers and dryers in hotels and apartment builds that charge residents and guests automatically on use - a nationwide digital laundromat.  So far so good.
  
  Not so good: You can use the machines without paying.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Even less good: CSC has been aware of this for some time.
  
  I mean, bad for CSC.  Great for everyone else.
  
  
  
• Adobe has sent a legal threat to game emulator Delta claiming that the software steals Adobe's logo.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Does anyone remember what Adobe's logo looks like?  Anyone?
  
  
  
• France has banned TikTok in New Caledonia following widespread riots which in turn follow changes to voting laws that will allow non-citizen residents to vote after ten years.  (Politico)
  
  Critics - which is to say TikTok - warned that this set a dangerous precedent.
  
  
  
• Staff leaving OpenAI are subject to a life-long non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreement.  (Twitter)
  
  If they don't sign within sixty days, they permanently lose any ability to sell their already-vested stock, which would have been a larger part of their compensation package than their salary.
  
  This sounds like a field day for whichever law firm lands the class action suit.
  
  
  
• When an 8-core 11900K beats a 24-core 14900KS.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This despite the 11900K running its DDR4 memory at 3.9GHz and the 14900KS running DDR5 at 9.3GHz.  Sometimes it's the small numbers that matter (latency settings) more than the big ones (bandwidth).
  
  
  
• All my computers are running DDR4.
  
  
  
• Intel's new Falcon Shores processor uses 1500W.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Asus has vowed to "improve clarity" over its blatantly illegal handling of warranty claims.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oh.  That's alright then.

Song is Best Day of My Life by the band American Authors.  Anime is Non Non Biyori, which follows the daily lives of the children - all five of them - in a remote Japanese farming community.  The location is fictional but the hints are that it would be somewhere in northwestern Honshu.

Their dilapidated school building though is entirely real.

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Posted by: wheels at Sunday, May 19 2024 10:32 AM (rUROc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, May 19 2024 05:38 PM (PiXy!)

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• Western Digital has announced a 6TB 2.5" hard drive.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's their first new model of 2.5" drive since 2017.
  
  
  
• Ampere has announced a 256 core Arm server CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Shipping next year.  Don't ask the price.
  
  
  
• NetBSD has banned AI-generated code.  (NetBSD)
  
  Not because AI-generated code is intrinsically bad, but because of potentially disastrous copyright and patent issues.
  
  
  

Anime Music Video of the Day

No reason, I just like it.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 18 2024 09:25 AM (BMUHC)

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• Google is adding an AI feature to Android that will listen in on your calls and interrupt you.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Specifically it will interrupt you if it thinks you are being scammed.
  
  Which, well, I don't need it since I never answer the phone.
  
  You don't need it.
  
  But there are certainly people who would benefit from this, and there's a slim chance that Google won't screw this up, so let's see what happens.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Making a Postgres query 1000 times faster.  (Mattermost)}
  
  Okay, yes, fine, but the answer was completely obvious.
  
  
  
• Swift sucks at web serving - or does it.  (Wade Tregaskis)
  
  A little more in depth - particularly when the author finds bugs in the benchmarking tool - but if you're going to test thousands of simultaneous network connects you really should check that your computer allows you to make thousands of simultaneous network connections.
  
  
  
• Introducing F-UTF-8.  (GitHub)
  
  F-UTF-8 is 100% UTF-8 compliant while being as annoying as possible.
  
  And while UTF-8 is compatible with ASCII and F-UTF-8 is compatible with UTF-8, F-UTF-8 is as far from compatible with ASCII as it is possible to be.
  
  
  
• Two MIT students stole $25 million from arbitrageurs on Ethereum in the span of twelve seconds in a combination front-running / transaction sequencing attack and then got caught because they didn't pay taxes on it.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Oops.

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 17 2024 07:45 AM (K4jh7)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, May 17 2024 12:22 PM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Alice12 at Thursday, September 19 2024 07:02 PM (B+Tao)

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• Qualcomm is bringing support for its upcoming Snapdragon X CPUs to Linux, and by "is bringing", I mean "has brought".  (Liliputing)
  
  I hope these chips are as good as they seem on paper.  They'll likely be slower than Apple's M4, but you'll be able to buy them and do whatever you want with them, without paying a 1200% markup on RAM upgrades.
  
  You can run Linux on Arm-based Macs too, but Apple's involvement in that project only goes as far as not suing the people working on it.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Samsung and Hynix have stopped making DDR3 RAM, focusing instead on the far more profitable HBM3 modules for AI systems.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I didn't know they were still actively producing DDR3 memory.  It's available for sale, but since DDR4 appeared in 2014, I assumed that was just old stock they couldn't shift.
  
  
  
• VMWare's Workstation and Fusion desktop virtualisation packages are now free for personal use.  (The Register)
  
  These are generally pretty good, though I don't know how much effort Broadcom will put into updating them going forward.
  
  
  
• Amazon has a trailer up for season two of its half-billion-dollar flop, The Rings of Power.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Nobody knows why.
  
  
  
• Google's new Gemini Pro in Workspace Labs summarises your email so you can delete it without reading either the email or the summary.  (Ars Technica)
  
  As a paid upgrade it will just lose your email automatically.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 15 2024 11:49 PM (BMUHC)

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• Dell spilled all the beans, leaking details of the next four generations of Intel's laptop CPUs and some future Nvidia GPUs as well.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're pretty boring beans, but Dell spilled them anyway.
  
  
  
• Dell also spilled Qualcomm's beans, including wholesale pricing.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The upcoming X Elite Arm-based CPUs will have similar performance to Intel's current laptop chips, use half the power, and even better, cost half as much.
  
  

• What do we want?  Mmff mff!  When do we want it ?  Myow.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  AI protesters don't know what they want, except to protest.
  
  
  
• Apple's 2024 iPad Air is pretty good.  Don't buy it.  (The Verge)
  
  If you need a new iPad, buy the iPad.  It's two years old, but it's cheap (ish) and it does what you need a tablet to do.
  
  If someone else is paying, get the iPad Pro, because why not?
  
  And if you already have a tablet that works, there's no reason to upgrade at all.

Today it's Haachama.  She's a bit confused but she has the right spirit.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 14 2024 11:05 PM (BMUHC)

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• Twitter has won a significant victory as an Australia federal judge has told Australia's e-Safety commission to fuck off.  (Sky News)
  
  Our e-Safety commissioner - a Yankee import and former Twitter censor - wanted to block video of the stabbing attack of a Sydney bishop from viewers worldwide.
  
  Justice Geoffrey Kennett today said, and I quote, Nah.
  
  Or more precisely:

  The application to extend the interlocutory injunction granted on 22 April 2024 (as extended on 24 April 2024) is refused.

  Which is federal judgespeak for Nah.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Australia plans to continue expanding the extraction and exports of natural gas through to at least 2050, by which time everyone will have been dead for 38 years.  (BBC)
  
  This is annoying all the right people.

• Leaked details of Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake desktop CPUs indicate that the company is abandoning hyper-threading.  (Forbes)
  
  Hyper-threading allows a single core to work on two tasks at once, or almost at once, interleaving instructions from two different programs on alternate cycles.
  
  This improves overall performance by around 20%, but at the cost of increased complexity and power consumption and the introduction of subtle security issues.
  
  Since Intel's new efficiency cores run at about the same speed as each thread on a hyper-threaded performance core - but use half as much space on the chip to do it - removing hyper-threading at this point makes perfect sense for Intel.
  
  AMD doesn't have efficiency cores as such.  It has its "c" cores, where c probably stands for compact, but they are functionally identical to the full-sized cores and include hyper-threading themselves.
  
  
  
• Workers at the Towson, Maryland Apple Store have voted to authorise a strike.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Right you are then.  Have fun.
  
  
  

Vtuber Music Video of the Day

Today's song is Rhythm by former Prism Project member, pocket-sized singer/songwriter/audio engineer Pina Pengin.  Prism was a small vtuber agency that was taken up by Sony Music and then dropped, hard, a year later.

In the space of a year Sony went from owning four vtuber agencies to just one, Vee.

Thankfully all the talents under Prism were given their model and channels so they could continue their careers as independents.  Which they are doing.  Inimitably.

Don't ask about Luto.  She's Australian.

I mean, so is Sara, but we don't hold it against her.





Disclaimer: So is Nana Asteria.  In fact, Prism had a dangerously high concentration of Aussies, and one Kiwi.