Twelve years!
You hit me with a cricket bat!
Ha! Twelve years!
Saturday, November 22
None Dare Call It A Bubble Edition
Top Story
- In our Daily Dose of Tech Executives are Idiots Google tells employees it must double capacity every six months to meet AI demand. (Ars Technica)
It's not just college students who can't do math.During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC. Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides showing the company needs to scale "the next 1000x in 4-5 years."
That would put Google Cloud Services at around $60 trillion in revenue per year, more than double the entire US GDP.
Where do you expect the money to come from to fund this insanity?While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking "for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," he told employees during the meeting.
Oh. Magic."It won’t be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we’re going to get there."
No, you're not, and everyone knows you're not.
Progress over the last seven years, at truly massive cost, has been around 60% better AI performance per watt annually. Chip improvements, algorithm improvements, and manufacturing improvements combined.
You're asking your team to boost that to 300% overnight.
Tech News
- SK Hynix is planning to increase memory production at its facility in Icheon, South Korea, from 20,000 to 140,000 wafers per month. (WCCFTech)
This won't even scratch the surface if the AI bubble keeps demanding hardware on its current trajectory.
And the memory makers aren't going to build new factories any faster because only three of them survived when the last bubble burst.
- Speaking of idiot tech executives, the CEO of the world's most popular game, Roblox, sat down for an interview with the New York Times. It did not go well. (Kotaku)
Asked how the company was dealing with its pedophile problem, CEO David Baszucki responded:"We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well."
Remarkably, things actually went downhill from there.
- Speaking of not being able to do math the International Association of Cryptologic Research has cancelled its annual leadership election after... Oh. (Ars Technica)
"Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share," the IACR said. "As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election."
An entirely understandable mistake, assuming all these people are idiots.
- What killed Perl? (Entropic Thoughts)
Mostly, Perl.
- WhatsApp allows anyone who knows your phone number to look up your public details on the app, assuming you have an account.
So what's to prevent someone from just iterating through all the 63 billion of so potential phone numbers in the world and finding all the people with WhatsApp accounts?
Nothing. (The Register)
That's the problem with systems on this scale. The researchers were probing the system with 100 million API requests per hour, for weeks, from a single IP address, and nobody noticed.
- Qualcomm bought open source hobbyist hardware maker Arduino six weeks ago. At the time I predicted it might not mean imminent doom since Qualcomm is not as bad as, say, Broadcom. (The Register)
And they've already fucked it. Though it seems the TOS clause about reverse-engineering was already in place, the rest of the changes pushed through yesterday are a complete train wreck for its customer base.
Frieren Interlude
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Friday, November 21
Turbo Intercal Edition
Top Story
- High King Mustafa, Lord of Microsoft's AI division, is angered by your insufficient displays of appreciation for his bountiful distribution of AI slop. (PC Magazine)
"Remember the days," he asked, "when all you had to eat was bread and cheese, and meat, and vegetables, and fruit in season, and pasta, and rice, and beans, and fish, and eggs, and chocolate cake? Why aren't you properly grateful for the disgusting slop we are forcing down your miserable gullets? Don't you know how lucky you are to live in an age where slop like this is available?"
He then reportedly threw a chair at an intern.
Tech News
- Nvidia posted record revenues of $57 billion for the quarter, up 62% from the same period last year. (Tom's Hardware)
Nvidia predicts an even better result next quarter. Since the company already charges $100 per GB for memory on its high-end graphics cards, it is not going to feel the same pinch as regular users as memory prices soar across the board. It might cut margins from 90% to 85%.
- Intel has reduced the price of its flagship Ultra 9 285K CPU to $429. (Tom's Hardware)
Not only is this a dead-end platform set to be replaced next year, but the upcoming - though still dead-end - Ultra 7 270K will provide the same performance for less money. The 270K is a refresh of the current 265K, which is selling for $300.
- What happens when even college students can't do math anymore? (The Atlantic) (archive site)
This has been the case for a very long time, but it suddenly got a lot worse.
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Thursday, November 20
Sparkly Edition
Top Story
- The EU is considering scaling back the GDPR rules after learning that every website on the planet uses cookies. (The Verge)
Finally."We have all the ingredients in the EU to succeed. But our companies, especially our start-ups and small businesses, are often held back by layers of rigid rules," said Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-president for implementing layers of rigid rules at the European Commission.
You don't say.
Tech News
- Is the detector that detects whether the watcher that is watching the monitor that monitors DownDetector down? (A Site Whose Name Is Too Long)
No.
But DownDetector itself was down during the Cloudflare outage.
- If you need to replace your Nintendo GameBoy - which you likely do since the original came out in 1989 - the Ayaneo Pocket Vert looks like just the thing. (Liliputing)
It's about the same size as the original model, but has replaced the 2.5" monochrome screen with a 3.5" colour model, and upgraded the resolution from 160x144 to... 1600x1440.
Which is better than a whole lot of things.
It has four hidden trigger buttons on the back and turns the blank areas of the faceplate into an invisible touchpad.
No pricing information yet.
- More PowerPoint slides than you ever wanted about the upcoming Snapdragon Elite X2. (Hot Hardware)
The Snapdragon Elite sank without a trace in the PC hardware market because it wasn't better enough - and certainly not cheap enough - to make up for the compatibility issues that come from running x86 software on Arm hardware.
As for this second attempt, the 18 core flagship model looks nice, but unless they've solved the pricing and compatibility issues that may not matter.
- Screw you guys, I'm installing Linux. (The Verge) (archive site)
2026 will be the year of Linux on my desktop, at least.
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Wednesday, November 19
Packagisation Edition
Top Story
- So, Cloudflare. (Cloudflare)
Cloudflare carries something like 20% of the world's web traffic, but for a few hours late last night (my time) or early yesterday morning (US time) it wasn't carrying much of anything, because it stopped working.
Six times.
Not a DNS problem like the recent outages at Azure and Amazon, but a fumbled configuration file change like that massive Crowdstrike outage sixteen months ago.
- And it's going to keep happening, so buckle up. (The Verge) (archive site)
I run traditional unshared physical servers at a smaller datacenter, not bound to any of the major players. On the one hand, a few years ago that datacenter had a fire and while the fire didn't cause any damage, the same could not be said for the sprinkler system mandated by local fire codes. (Yes, a sprinkler system. In a datacenter.)
On the other hand, not one of these big global outages have affected us.
Tech News
- It's now been discovered that the popular Mac Classic II model from 1991 - the original compact format with an updated 68030 processor - never actually worked. (PC Gamer)
A developer working on the MAME emulator found that an emulated Mac Classic II running in 32-bit mode would crash immediately on startup.
100% of the time, despite MAME being a reliable and thoroughly-tested emulator for the 68030 (and many other architectures) and the testing being conducted with a bit-perfect copy of the original firmware.
Testing traced this to a single bad instruction in the Apple ROMs for this hardware. But the hardware was shipped, and it sold well, and it worked fine.
It wasn't until the developer bought and restored an original Mac Classic II to test the code on the the real hardware that he worked out what was going on: Magic.
- Bitcoin prices have crashed to just $90,000. (Tom's Hardware)
After hitting $125,000 in early October.
I told you at the time that you could double your money by investing in DRAM.
Well, I didn't, but imagine if I had.
- If you get an email from Monotype, burn it without reading. (Insanity Works)
Trust me on this.
- Microsoft is adding an "Agentic AI" features settings to Windows 11 for all the stuff you don't want but that they insist on shoving in. (Windows Central)
Thanks, I think.
- Talking to your Windows PC quickly reveals how much Windows sucks, and Copilot AI sucks, and the combination is exponential rather than merely additive. (The Verge) (archive site)
Translation: Don't do that.
- The CEO of LLM marketplace Hugging Face says we're not in an AI bubble, just in an LLM bubble. (Tech Crunch)
This is a valid point.
LLMs are generative AI - you tell them to draw a picture of a frog eating a set of deep-fried bagpipes and they pull together petabytes of tagged and shredded images and spit out something that may or may not resemble what you asked for.
That's the bubble.
Discriminative AI is where you point your camera at some weird piece of modern art and it figures out it's supposed to be a frog enjoying a meal of deep-fried bagpipes. Or more usefully, when your self-driving car swerves the precise amount needed to avoid a black cart darting across an unlit road on a moonless night.
That's getting less than 10% of the attention but represents 99% of the long-term value.
Hold My Beer Interlude
160 proof beer? What could possibly go wrong?
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Tuesday, November 18
Ambient Everything Edition
Top Story
- If you gaze too long into CoreWeave, CoreWeave gazes back at you. (The Verge) (archive site)
Some actually sound reporting from The Verge's usually reliably crazy Elizabeth Lopatto, about deeply dubious datacenter holding company CoreWeave.But as I began to look more closely at the company, I began feeling like I’d accidentally stumbled on an eldritch horror. CoreWeave is saddled with massive debt and, except in the absolute best-case scenario of fast AI adoption, has no obvious path toward profitability. There are some eyebrow-raising accounting choices. And then, naturally, there are the huge insider sales of CoreWeave stock.
Yes, naturally there are those.
Wait, what?After I unfocused my eyes a little, I realized CoreWeave did make a horrible kind of sense: It’s a tool to hedge other companies' risks and juice their profits. It's taking on the risk and the costs of building data centers that bigger tech companies can then rent while they build their own data centers which may very well wind up competing with CoreWeave. What’s more, it’s part of a whole stable of companies that are propping up demand for the behemoth of the AI boom: Nvidia.
The usual names pop up in the list of investors in CoreWeave. Nvidia is a major investor and is selling the company billions of dollars worth of GPUs, which CoreWeave then provides access to for customers like OpenAI and Microsoft, which are also major investors.
It also has billions in outstanding loans at variable interest rates.
It's not a bubble.
- Meanwhile Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is deeply worried about the power a handful of unelected people like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have to shape the future of AI. (Business Insider)
Deeply worried, I tell you. Deeply.
Tech News
- Why, when AWS was down, we were not. (Authress)
Just use DNS to switch point to somewhere that isn't down.
Also, don't use AWS US-East-1 (Virginia). Yes, it's the flagship location, but it's also the least reliable in terms of major incidents in recent years.
- Speaking of Virginia, NetChoice has sued to overturn the state's one-hour limit on social media access for children under the age of 16, on the grounds of, and I quote, "Are you fucking kidding me with this bullshit?". (The Verge)
Well, paraphrase.
- The EU is looking at whether it can subject the major cloud providers like Microsoft, Google, and AWS to the idiotic rigours of the Digital Marketplace Act without them simply pulling the plug on the entire reeking continent and leaving them to calculate the penalties on abacuses. Abaci? Holy crap, it actually is abaci. The more you know. (Bloomberg) (archive site)
The leading European cloud provider has a reputation for becoming entirely too cloudy at times.
- Professional bloviator and occasional US Representative from California Ro Khanna is now complaining about the use of AI in video games. (PC Magazine)
AI has been used in video games since 1951.
Yes, the game in question - the latest game from the Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops 7 - is kind of crap, but the culprit there is human laziness and not AI.
- Luminal has raised $5.3 million to develop a better standard framework for code running on GPUs. (Tech Crunch)
This is one of the most sensible investment stories I've seen in months. GPUs simply calculate lots of numbers very quickly, so even without AI distorting the market, better tools for making use of that power are well worth a few million.
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Monday, November 17
Who's On First Edition
Top Story
- The world's first microprocessor wasn't Intel's 4004, but the 20-bit MP944 control system built for the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. (Tom's Hardware)
Which I already knew, because while it was classified information in 1970 when it first launched - literally - it was declassified in the late 90s. (And because a while back I was doing a search for computer hardware with unusual word sizes, and 20 bits qualified.)
It's also not true.
- The first true microprocessor was probably the AL1 from Four-Phase Systems. (Wikipedia)
It was an 8-bit device, but it was what was known as a "bit slice" design: You could simply chain multiple units together to create a larger word size. The AL1 was never sold by itself, but the company did sell the System IV/70, a video terminal controller, that used three such chips to create a 24-bit CPU.
It was announced and in use two months before the first working samples of the MP944, and a year before Intel's 4004.
Tech News
- That great sucking sound you just heard was PC makers buying up all the nonexistent memory inventory so you double can't have any. (Tom's Hardware)
That's just wonderful.
- THEA1200 is an A1200. (The Register)
Well, it's an Arm-based emulator in a full-sized A1200 case, but that's pretty close.
And it costs about $200.
Plus $30 for shipping if you live in Australia.
That's not too bad, considering.
- The president of Windows announced Microsoft's plans to suck even more in the future and got roasted so hard he had to close replies on Twitter. (Tom's Hardware)
Good. More of this.
- The latest attack on npm was a tea-farming project that spanned 150,000 fake packages. (The Register)
If you don't know what any of that means, count your blessings.
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Sunday, November 16
Turn The Beep Around Edition
Top Story
- The jury in a federal court case has sided with medical equipment manufacturer Masimo and awarded them $643 million in their lawsuit against Apple over patent infringement in the Apple Watch. (Tech Crunch)
The patent applies to blood oxygen monitoring, which is a little curious since such devices are now everywhere.
Also - according to Apple - this applies to a single very specific patent that expired in 2022.
Of course, Apple would say that. But it also doesn't mean it's not true.
Tech News
- I was reading through the service manual for the HP 9121 disk drive that I found on Bitsavers - it rained this weekend - and it turns out it did in fact run at 600 rpm, twice as fast as was common for other 3.5" drives.
I then asked Grok to check some details for me, and was swiftly reminded that Grok is less reliable than random half-remembered facts I read in a long out-of-print publication twenty years ago.
I asked if there were any historical 10-bit processor architectures, and it gave me a couple of examples from the late 60s and early 70s. It even gave me the detailed opcode format of one of the models and a bunch of links for further details.
The machines were real.
They were not 10 bit, though; they were 16 bits, which is hardly a rarity.
The opcode format was entirely fictional, which is actually a little impressive. Very minimal but it could have worked.
The links were also entirely fictional.
- Some models of Intel's Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs have more cores. (WCCFTech)
The 250K, which replaces the 245K, and the 270K, which replaces the 265K, both add 4 efficiency cores, taking them from 6 + 8 to 6 + 12 and 8 + 12 to 8 + 16 respectively.
The high-end 290K is basically a 285K but 1.8% faster... And also just 1.8% faster than the new 270K making it ENTIRELY POINTLESS.
- Copy-and-paste is now the leading cause of corporate data leaks. (SCWorld)
Because people are copying and pasting data into AI to get it to lie to them.
- Google has filed a sweeping lawsuit against one of those companies that are constantly spamming you with fake SMS messages. (BGR)
Google's legal action is comprehensive and is intent on completely dismantling Lighthouse's operations. The search giant is bringing claims under RICO, the Lanham Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
I'm not sure yet how it will turn out that this is a bad thing.
- No uncertainty with this one, though: A group of developers has been working tirelessly behind the scenes to restore a lost video game AND IT'S FUCKING CONCORD. (Aftermath)
Concord came out in August last year and quickly achieved notoriety for two reasons: First, it cost $400 million and took eight years to develop, and second, it made absolutely no money whatsoever because it was so bad Sony shut down the servers and refunded everyone after just two weeks.Concord wasn't a bad game
Yes it was. Objectively so. It cost $400 million to make, sold just 25,000 copies in total at $40, and was gone in just two weeks.
Until now. Until now, you bastards.
- The International Energy Agency now predicts we will reach Peak Oil by 2050 maybe. (CNBC)
Okay.
- Scientists have confirmed what is inside the Moon. (Science Alert)
Cheese sauce?A thorough investigation published in May 2023 found that the inner core of the Moon is, in fact, a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron.
Ah. Cheese and garlic sauce. An important distinction.
Thanks scientists.
- Turkey is stuffed, seasoned, and in the oven. We'll see how it goes.
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Saturday, November 15
Lasers For Fun And Profit Edition
Top Story
- There is no hope. There are also no socks. (Apple Insider)
That Apple sock? The thing they called the "iPhone Pocket" even though it is neither an iPhone nor a pocket. That thing that costs less than a dollar to make and they are charging $230 for?
You can't buy one.
Because it has already sold out.
- Half of American households still have cable TV. (Business Inside)
The surprising number is the reverse of what the article thinks it is.
Tech News
- It's always lupus: The autoimmune disease lupus - which despite the memes is a real thing - may be triggered by the Epstein-Barr virus. (NBC)
Most people have Epstein-Barr in their systems, making it hard to track this down. It parks in your body and just sits there, menacingly.
The thing is that it infects lymphocytes, and the rate of infected lymphocytes in lupus patients is 25 times higher than in the general population. That doesn't prove a causal effect but it's a hell of a correlation.
- Reviewing the Ubiquiti Mini Flex, a tiny managed 2.5gb Ethernet switch. (Serve the Home)
About $40, which is a good price for a 2.5gb switch, and a very good price for a managed switch. It's Ubiquiti so it's part of their UniFi system and you have to use their software to manage it and not just a web browser, but even without that it's a small, unobtrusive, inexpensive switch that can be powered over PoE or USB-C.
- IBM filed a patent for Euler's continued fraction formula. (LeetArxiv)
I think Leonhard Euler can probably claim prior art, or could have if he hadn't died in 1783.
IBM didn't claim some specific novel application of Euler's work, either; they claimed the formula itself.
Incandescent Moon Interlude
Transcendent Teal Interlude
(Maybe. Some people don't report anything special, but it worked for me and it was rather startling.)
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Friday, November 14
Tree Turkey Edition
Top Story
- The three big memory chip makers - Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix - have two messages for you: First, things are going to get worse before they get better, and second, they never said anything about things getting better. (Tom's Hadware)
AI server deployments are eating all available memory production sending prices soaring for everyone else, and the big three have already committed to $54 billion in factory expansion.
Despite the supply crunch they are loath to commit more funds right now, because there used to be a lot more memory producers and the reason there are only three survivors is because of the bust that came after the last bubble burst.
- Meanwhile Elon Musk's companies are looking to expand their own semiconductor production facilities. (WCCFTech)
Currently Tesla has a PCB plant in Texas, and is building out an advanced packaging facility - working with bare dies to create tightly integrated modules - to come online next year.
Longer term the group is looking at building its own chipmaking facilities, but that just shifts the bottleneck from TSMC to ASML, the one company in the world that makes leading edge chip fabrication equipment.
Tech News
- They stuck the landing: On the second launch window, New Glenn sent the Escapade mission on its way to Mars and then successfully landed on Blue Origin's drone ship. (Tech Crunch)
Good to see.
- Netflix is now streaming casual party games. (The Verge)
I've already cancelled my subscription, which makes it hard to show them how I feel about this.
- Want faster networking but have a laptop with only wifi, or at best wired gigabit Ethernet? Qnap has you covered. (Notebook Check)
The Qnap QNA-UC25G2SF is a USB4 (or any USB-C port) adapter that offers not one, but two 25Gb Ethernet ports.
No, not 2.5. Ten times that.
It's kind of chunky and costs a lot more than, say, a dual 40Gb PCIe card (which you can pick up for $40 if you shop around), but if you don't have a PCIe slot you don't have a ton of options.
- Chinese hackers used Anthropic's AI to automate cyberattacks. (MSN)
Yay.
- Programming the Commodore 64 with Microsoft .Net. (RetroC64)
No.
Just... No.
- Bought a turkey. It's defrosting in the fridge right now, set to become Sunday dinner. Unless I fail spectacularly somehow, which I probably won't given I've roasted at least a hundred chickens and one duck without such a mishap.
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Thursday, November 13
ZFS Implosion Edition
Top Story
- Valve has followed up on its very popular Steam Deck gaming handheld with a desktop Steam Machine and a wireless Steam Controller. (Tom's Hardware)
Like the Steam Deck, the 6" black cube called the Steam Machine is at its heart a PC built on AMD components. It has a six core Zen 4 CPU, and a 28 core RDNA3 GPU.
It comes with 16GB of RAM in two DDR5 SODIMMs, 8GB of GGDR6 RAM for the graphics card, and 512GB or 2TB of SSD in an M.2 2230 slot. There's a vacant M.2 2280 slot to add storage of your own.
On the I/O front it has HDMI, DisplayPort, one USB-C port, four USB-A ports, and somewhat disappointingly, gigabit Ethernet.
It also has four built-in antennas for wifi, Bluetooth, and the Steam Controller, and a built-in 300W power supply so you don't need an external brick. It's cooled by a single 120mm fan.
And most importantly it comes running SteamOS rather than Windows.
Give how determined Microsoft is to drive its own users away, I am looking forward to this little device. It's literally half the speed of my current desktop (which has a 12 core Zen 4 CPU and an RDNA3 graphics card with twice the graphics cores and RAM) but for something that sits quietly in the living room attached to the TV it looks ideal.
No prices yet. Shipping "early 2026".
Tech News
- Trying out the latest Framework 16 laptop with the RTX 5070 graphics option. (Tom's Hardware)
It's a Framework 16 laptop with RTX 5070 graphics - which on this particular laptop are upgradeable.
The one surprise is that the graphics upgrade somehow upgraded the display from 100% sRGB to 100% DCI-P3, which is probably really just a colour profile switch.
- Microsoft really wants you to use their Edge browser. (PC Magazine)
For something other than downloading Chrome.
- A study commission by Apple says that when Apple cut its commissions charged to developers, the developers mostly kept the savings rather than reducing prices to customers. (Mac Rumors)
Well, yes. And?
- Need a faster CPU? How about 1024 cores at 6GHz, with 24 channels of DDR5-17600 RAM and 128 lanes of PCIe 7.0? (WCCFTech)
Oh, and it runs both x86 and Arm instructions.
One small problem: It uses 1600W of power.
Oh, and it's not expected to ship before 2027.
They have shipped FPGA-based emulators to developers, so it's not entirely vaporware. Other than that, wake me in a couple of years.
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