• The most valuable gemstone on Earth is not blue diamond, or Padparadscha sapphire, or imperial jadeite.  It's a little-known mineral called kyawthuite.  (ScienceAlert)
  
  Composed of an unusual formulation of bismuth antimonite and formed in cooling magma flows, it gets its value from its scarcity.
  
  There's exactly one stone, and it's less than a quarter of an inch long.

• How should we treat beings that might be sentient?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Olive oil, pepper, and garlic.
  
  
  
• The joy of upgrading from an iPhone 8 to the latest model iPhone 16.  (Bearblog)
  
  Spoiler: There was no joy.
  
  
  
• Low code tools are still bad.  (Radan Skoric)
  
  Programming using a programming language is going to work out better than programming using something that is not a programming language.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 03 2024 09:30 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: stargazera5 at Tuesday, December 03 2024 01:59 PM (r9lDC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 04 2024 02:22 AM (nUXd1)

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• What will a less psychotic SEC mean for crypto over the next four years?  We asked a dozen experts and here's what dribbled out of them.  (The Register)
  
  Molly White runs the invaluable Web3 is Going Just Great which lists all the frauds and failures of the crypto space.
  
  Turns out that beyond that she's basically just another leftist lunatic.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The OpenWRT One router is now available at $89.  (Software Freedom Conservancy)
  
  You can install OpenWRT on many common routers, but this one is designed to just work.  It has 1Gb and 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, WiFi 6, USB, and an M.2 2242 NVMe slot if you want it.
  
  CPU is a dual-core 1.3GHz Arm A54 with 1GB of RAM, which should do the job just fine.
  
  
  
• Intel looks set to launch two graphics cards next week.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are the second-generation "Battlemage" models, the B580 with 12GB of VRAM, and the B570 with 10GB.  Expected to list for $250 and $200 respectively.
  
  The main catch with the previous "Alchemist" range was concerns whether Intel would continue to develop and support the hardware.  The answer would appear to be yes.
  
  
  
• An anti-spam WordPress plugin from CleanTalk lets anyone from anywhere do anything to your site.  (MSN)
  
  Oops.
  
  WordPress itself has fewer security problems these days, though it is run by crazy people.  The plugins are a different matter.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 02 2024 09:55 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 02 2024 05:48 PM (PiXy!)

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• When you read about million dollar bananas, expect money laundering, not conceptual art.  Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun eats $9.5 million banana artwork Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan.  (ABC / MSN)

  A cryptocurrency entrepreneur has eaten a $US6.2 million ($9.5 million) banana artwork he purchased.

  This is the Australian ABC, so it's really only a $6 million dollar banana, not a $9 million dollar banana.

  The debut of the edible creation at the 2019 Art Basel show in Miami Beach sparked controversy and raised questions about whether it should be considered art - Mr Cattelan's stated aim.

  And no, the banana wasn't five years old.  The banana wasn't part of the "art".  There was merely the concept of a banana:

  The artwork owner is given a certificate of authenticity that the work was created by Mr Cattelan as well as instructions about how to replace the fruit when it goes bad.

  This is banana.  Is taped to wall.  Replace when become drippy.

  The 34-year-old crypto businessman was last year charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission with fraud and securities law violation in relation to his crypto project Tron.

  Yeah, no shit.

• Vintage digicams aren't just a fad they're an artistic statement.  (Wired / Ars Technica)
  
  Uh.  Well, maybe.  Old-fashioned point-and-shoot digital cameras, with larger lenses and sensors and without the AI processing glorp of modern phone cameras, did produce images with a distinctly different look to what you see on Instagram.
  
  Of course, you can just turn off the AI processing glorp on your phone and get much the same result.
  
  
  
• Canada's largest news organisations, including the Yellowknife Typewriter and the Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague-du-Cap-Tourmente Post-Intelligencer, are suing OpenAI for stealing their content.  (Toronto)
  
  OpenAI responded, saying Merde.
  
  
  
• Meta (Facebook) is planning to build a $10 billion cable linking the US west coast and east coast - the long way round.  (MSN)
  
  Via South Africa, India, and Australia, avoiding temperamental regions where cable breaks are common, such as pretty much everywhere else.
  
  
  
• Apple will reportedly be using an updated 3nm process for its next-generation M5 chips rather than jumping immediately to 2nm.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This doesn't mean much for Apple - just that the M5 will be a little slower, a little more power-hungry, and a little cheaper than it might have been - but may be more significant for TSMC, which manufactures all of Apple's CPUs.
  
  For years Apple has been the first customer on every new process node TSMC has made available, guaranteeing full order books as soon as the new technology comes online.
  
  TSMC is running at 100% capacity on its mainstream 7/6/5/4nm processes, so this is not a huge drama, but may slow plans for the subsequent 1.6nm process expected in 2026.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 01 2024 12:20 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, December 01 2024 04:17 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, December 01 2024 11:22 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 01 2024 05:01 PM (PiXy!)

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• The price of tea beans is set to hit record highs after it (checks note) rained in Brazil.  (Semafor)
  
  This apparently is an unusual event that nobody was prepared for.
  
  

• Need a faster network connection on your Thunderbolt / USB4 equipped laptop or mini-PC?  The RaidenDigit LightONE might be what you need.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It is a general-purpose dock, with four USB-C ports (plus a fifth one purely for power), four USB-A ports, full-size and micro SD card slots, and a DisplayPort port.  Where it stands out is that it also offers two 25Gbit Ethernet ports.
  
  Yes, they're SFP, but while 25Gbase-T is a recognised standard using Cat-8 cables, there are approximately zero devices supporting it, so I can't really fault the designers there.
  
  Only problem is that if you don't already have one of these you apparently can't get one.  There was a Kickstarter, they delivered, the product worked, and then they disappeared.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is not using your Word and Excel data to train AI.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Australia has passed a law to ban children from social media.  (The Register)
  
  The government was repeatedly asked how this was supposed to work, and it had no idea.  The legislation nonetheless passed with bipartisan support, because our nominal opposition party is as useless as our nominal government.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, November 29 2024 11:53 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, November 30 2024 04:28 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 30 2024 04:49 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 02 2024 09:07 AM (rcPLc)

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• Do not squeeze the lime.  (Ars Technica)
  
  A man who did squoze the lime developed a nasty case of phytophotocitrolimeodimeodermatititis.

  Specifically, the toxic chemicals are furocoumarins, which are found in some weeds and also a range of plants used in food. Those include celery, carrot, parsley, fennel, parsnip, lime, bitter orange, lemon, grapefruit, and sweet orange. Furocoumarins include chemicals with linear structures, psoralens, and angular structures, called angelicins, though not all of them are toxic.

  Avoid all of these things.  Stick to safe inorganic ingredients, like arsenic.

• A combination of PFAS and microplastics is more toxic than either one by itself - to fleas.  (The Guardian)
  
  A warning that it is important to keep in mind if you happen to be a flea.
  
  
  
• The Fifth Circuit has thrown out the Treasury Department's sanctions on Tornado Cash, an online program that lets anyone anonymise blockchain transactions.  (CoinDesk)
  
  The Treasury Department claimed that "anyone" included people that the department didn't like.  The Fifth Circuit told the department to go squeeze a lime:

  "Tornado Cash’s immutable smart contracts (the lines of privacy-enabling software code) are not the 'property' of a foreign national or entity," according to a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuitruling, so they can't be blocked under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control "overstepped its congressionally defined authority" when it did so.

  
  
  
• Data broker SL Data Services left background checks on 600,000 people behind in a taxi.  (The Register)
  
  Well, a taxi called Amazon S3.  Which means that anyone on the world could read all the files, not just the next person to catch that particular cab.
  
  When informed of this oversight, the company said the documents were in an opaque folder and nobody could read them without opening it.
  
  
  
• Baldur's Gate 3 is getting another free update.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There will be no sequel or DLC because developer Larian so despised working with Dungeons and Dragons owner Hasbro that they would rather forego the hundreds of millions of dollars in profit just so they never have to talk to them again.
  
  But they continue to update the game for free.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 29 2024 02:55 AM (NEIix)

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• Intel has received a $7.9 billion grant from the US government under the CHIPS Act.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This is not a different grant to the previous $8.5 billion grant though.  That one had not been completed, and has been reduced by $600 million due to the $3 billion contract Intel has received to produce secure chips for the Pentagon.
  
  Which when compared to the nonsense the government so often gets up to - this grant goes to pay Americans working at American companies in America - seems almost quaint.
  
  
  
• I am reminded as I am every couple of years that Perth exists.
  
  That USB storage device I bought was in stock and shipped just hours after I placed my order with Amazon...  From the far edge of the asteroid belt.
  
  
  

Tech News

• ISPs told an FCC inquiry that the reason their customers don't simply leave is down to the excellence of their customer service.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Still funnier than Saturday Night Live.
  
  
  
• Is Redis going full WordPress?  (GitHub)
  
  After abandoning open source itself, Redis is going after open-source libraries supporting Redis and suggesting they sell out to Redis or else.
  
  
  
• The US Senate is proposing a minimum security standards law for healthcare providers.  (The Register)
  
  On the one hand, security standards of US healthcare providers are shit.
  
  On the other hand, this is the Senate.  They are idiots who take advice from idiots to draft legislation for idiots.  And this is bipartisan, which means there are twice as many idiots involved.
  
  
  
• Huawei's Mate 70 phones will run the new Android-free HaronyOS.  (The Verge)
  
  Which is Android.
  
  
  
• Apple offered Indonesia a $100 million bribe to un-ban the iPhone 16.  (The Register)
  
  Indonesia is holding out for more money.
  
  
  
• Britain meanwhile is trying to shake down Google for $8.8 billion.  (The Register)
  
  And you get a tariff, and you get a tariff...
  
  
  
• The Pilet 5 and Pilet 7 are hand-held computers from an alternate universe 1990s that went in a very interesting direction.  (Liliputing)
  
  Resolutely function-over-form, these devices are big and clunky and have not just physical buttons but trackballs and trackpads and joysticks and dials and rollers and actual physical I/O ports.
  
  They're based on the Raspberry Pi 5 so they're quite capable as well.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 28 2024 03:49 PM (bg2DR)

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• Do Not Stab: Google has released an update to the Google App for iOS that...  Inserts Google Search links into third-party web sites.  (9to5Google)
  
  There isn't even a Do Not Stab header for this one:

  The feature, Google says, will offer an opt-out for website owners through a form. It’s pointed out by SERoundTable that opting out can take up to 30 days, while the feature is live now.

  Thanks Google.
  
  
  
• Both sides of the Google antitrust case blathered incoherently in closing arguments.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  Can't they both lose?

• I bought myself a Terramaster D8 which is a small, cheap, and fairly dumb hybrid storage box.
  
  It holds 4 x 3.5" drives and 4 x M.2 NVMe SSDs, attached over 10Gb USB.   So it's much faster than my old Synology boxes, but it only does RAID-0 and RAID-1 and even that only on the first two drives.  You want to configure that on the system it's attached to.
  
  But it is cheap; I paid about $250 including tax and shipping, and you are not getting an 8-bay 10Gb Synology solution for that.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, QNAP.  (The Register)
  
  They issued a timely software update.
  
  It bricked users' devices.
  
  
  
• Amazon's new Kindle Colorsoft is kind of good except kind of not.  (The Verge)
  
  It's a 7" colour e-ink device with a resolution of 300 dpi, which is pretty good, and 4096 colours, which is tragic for an LCD but again pretty good for e-ink.
  
  But in colour mode the resolution is cut in half taking it from pretty good territory to pretty bad.
  
  And while Amazon claims a battery life of 8 weeks on a charge, that assumes that you barely use the device; the reviewer estimated it will last for 20 hours of actual reading.  Which again, is not bad, but is a lot less than 8 weeks.
  
  Also it doesn't seem to be available in Australia.
  
  
  
• Teamgroup has announced a 16TB external SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's basically the size of a 2.5" external hard drive, probably because it's a 2.5" SSD in a metal box, only it stores more, runs ten times faster, is a lot more robust, and costs an estimated $2000.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 26 2024 11:04 PM (NEIix)

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• RFC 35140: The Do-Not-Stab flag in the HTTP Header.  (5SNB)
  
  An idea whose time has come.

  Over the last 50 years, advancements in peripherals have allowed websites to stab users. A number of industries have popped up to provide SaaS (Stabbings as a Service). Some users have expressed discomfort when a knife is plunged into their chest, and this header allows those users to express their personal preferences.

  A user preference can, of course, be ignored by bad actors. However, most stabbings are not done by malicious actors, they are simply law-abiding companies which will gladly stop stabbing you if you ask. This standard provides a method for a user to easily opt-out of all stabbings, except those mandated by law, and ones that the company wants to do anyways.

  Seems entirely fair.  Who could possibly object to this?

  Syntax

  The header has only one form, Do-Not-Stab: 1.  This is because the lack of a header indicates a clear preference that the user wants to be stabbed.

  Understandable.

  Defaults

  A user-agent MUST NOT adopt Do-Not-Stab: 1 as the default preference. If a user-agent were to do this, web services SHOULD ignore the preference and stab the user anyways.

  This is of course a parody of...  Well, pretty much everything the big tech companies do these days.
  
  Or is it?

• This website is hosted on Bluesky.  (Daniel Mangum)
  
  Well, not this one.  And not the one linked above, either.  But the one linked in the article linked above.
  
  I mean, sort of.  It requires jumping through several flaming hoops and is entirely pointless, but...  Not sure there is a but.
  
  
  
• Outlandish recursive query examples with SQLite.   (SQLite)
  
  Like solving Sudoku with a database query.  Or plotting the Mandelbrot set...  With a database query.
  
  
  
• Yes, we seem to have run out of tech news.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 26 2024 08:29 AM (rcPLc)

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• Elon Musk is directing harassment towards individual federal workers.  (The Verge)
  
  Is he indeed, O Verge?
  
  The example cited - the only example cited - is of Musk suggesting that Director of Climate Diversification at the International Development Finance Corporation was a "fake job".
  
  Now, "climate diversification" in this sense means recommending alternative crops to grow to make the food supply more robust against short and long term changes in weather.
  
  Which is a task that could easily by filled by a fairly small book.
  
  And in this case, it involves making those recommendations to other countries.
  
  So, never mind "individual workers".
  
  USAID, its 10,000 employees, and its $50 billion budget: Afuera!

• In a small bit of welcome news in the never-ending shitfest that is Australian federal politics, the government has abandoned one of its attempts to strangle free speech across the entire world.  (ABC)
  
  The so-called "misinformation bill" would have set up the government as the arbiter of truth, and anything untrue would have become illegal speech.  The bill did not specify how this was supposed to work; it just legislated it into reality.
  
  And now it's dead for the current session of Parliament, and the left-wing Labor government is likely to be out of power before Parliament votes on any new legislation.
  
  Still moving forward is the government's Won't Somebody Think of the Children Act, which bans minors under the age of 16 from using social networks, though again it never specifies how this is supposed to be achieved.  This has the support of the nominally conservative Liberal Party and is likely to pass in some form, even though it is obviously completely unworkable.
  
  That's the same party that previously wanted to ban encryption, claiming that Australia's laws superseded mathematics, so this betrayal of conservative principles comes as no surprise.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 uses the new CAMM2 memory module in place of SO-DIMMs, but with a twist.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not only does it use the new, more compact modules, it uses LPDDR5X memory rather than regular DDR5.
  
  This reduces power (LP = low power) and also runs faster at 7500MHz.
  
  This is particularly welcome as AMD's Zen 5 laptop chips don't support regular DDR5, so without these modules, laptops based on those chips would not have any path for memory upgrades.
  
  
  
• I don't remember if I wrote about this - the story is from six months ago - but yes, LPDDR6 is on its way.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  LPDDR6 promises initial transfer rates of 10.6GHz and eventually 14.4GHz, which is not dramatically faster than the best LPDDR5X chips available now.
  
  Except that the bus is also 50% wider, and instead of fetching 8 words at a time it fetches 12.
  
  Which makes 288 bits, which is not very useful for 64-bit computers, so the extra 32 bits at the end is used for very strong ECC (DECDED guaranteed).
  
  Which makes 10.6GHz LPDDR6 90% faster than 7500MHz LPDDR5.
  
  This matters because current integrated graphics solutions from AMD and Intel are bottlenecked not by the chips but by memory speeds.  Apple's higher-end M-series chips have (as far as I can tell) 256-bit or even 384-bit buses, and AMD's upcoming Strix Halo chips will also have a 256-bit bus, but regular laptops only offer 128-bit memory.
  
  So when LPDDR6 arrives we can expect a big jump in integrated graphics performance.
  
  (My new laptop has DDR4 memory running at 3200MHz.   So...  Yeah.)
  
  
  
• Can ChatGPT-o1 complete a junior front-end developer's task?  (Charbel Ghossain)
  
  Well, yes, if you aren't worried about it working properly.
  
  The code produced for this example sort of works, in that it doesn't break the page.  But on a scale of 0 to 100, it only does anything at all for the range from 20 to 80.
  
  
  
• It is shockingly easy to jailbreak LLM-driven robots.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This is not shocking.  LLMs are notoriously insecure and unreliable.
  
  Simple solution: Don't fucking build LLM-driven robots.
  
  
  
• Who the heck is the M4 iMac aimed at?  (The Verge)
  
  It's a lovely piece of engineering, but the screen is too small for serious work, the memory cannot ever be upgraded, and the network speed is limited to 1Gbit when even the Mac Mini has a 10Gbit option.  And Apple has long since abandoned monitor mode, where an aging iMac with a perfectly good screen could serve as a monitor for another computer.
  
  Which would all be forgivable if it were cheap.  
  
  The 10 core model with 16GB RAM and 512GB of SSD costs $1699.
  
  
  
• Does GitHub Copilot improve code quality?  (GitHub)
  
  Yes, says GitHub.
  
  No, says literally everyone else.
  
  
  

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Monday, November 25 2024 04:53 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Lowell at Monday, November 25 2024 09:51 AM (NnIKN)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 25 2024 06:12 PM (PiXy!)

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• Elon Musk's new ideas for improving government efficiency are not in fact new.  (The Verge)
  
  Do tell, O Verge.

  Though DOGE isn’t a real department - and may in fact just be President-elect Donald Trump’s way of placating Musk by giving him the appearance of a real job - it represents a long-running right-wing attempt to gut the civil service, a plan the incoming administration fully supports.

  So it only appears to be a real job, but the administration fully supports it?

  In any case, Musk and Ramaswamy have proposed cutting "thousands" of federal regulations and determining the "minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions."

  Awesome.

  This time around, it's not clear whether the courts would stop Trump, who, in his first term, nominated more judges to the federal judiciary than any of his predecessors and will inherit an extremely friendly Supreme Court. And as Musk and Ramaswamy noted in their explanation of how DOGE will function, the incoming Trump administration has something new at its disposal: the recent Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the landmark case that overturned Chevron deference.

  Better and better!

  The goal is mass deregulation - a weakening of checks and balances and a major cut to basic government services, all in the name of concentrating power among a small group of plutocrats.

  As opposed to the way things are now, where government regulations are the primary tool for concentrating power among a small group of plutocrats?
  
  
  

• Is AI hitting a wall?  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Yes.  Also, if you read to the end of the article, it is literally Hitler.
  
  
  
• The future of Windows is cloud and AI.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Literally Hitler.
  
  
  
• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is opening an investigation into an advertising group that organised a boycott of Twitter.  (Tech Crunch)

  Trade organizations and companies cannot collude to block advertising revenue from entities they wish to undermine," said Paxton in the press release. "Today’s document request is part of an ongoing investigation to hold WFA and its members accountable for any attempt to rig the system to harm organizations they might disagree with."

  Good.
  
  
  
• The DOJ is looking to disempartnerise Google and Anthropic.  (Pymnts)
  
  Because it can, apparently.
  
  
  
• Amazon meanwhile is throwing another $4 billion down the Anthropic drain.  (CNBC)
  
  None of the big AI companies are in the same universe as profitable.
  
  
  
• TSMC, which is profitable, expects 1.6nm chips to be coming off its production lines in 2026.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  My new laptop has a Ryzen 7730U CPU, which is built on a 7nm process.
  
  So...  Yeah.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, November 24 2024 12:57 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: stargazera5 at Sunday, November 24 2024 11:55 AM (vLfRn)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, November 25 2024 02:58 AM (rcPLc)

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