Ambient Irony

CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?
Shut it!

Friday, June 06

Daily News Stuff 6 June 2025

Lifofax Edition

Top Story

AMD's "budget" Radeon 9060 XT graphics card is here. Is it any good? (Ars Technica)

Yes. And also no.

The 16GB model is pretty decent if you can find it for under $400. The MSRP is $349 for basic models, but they sold out pretty quickly in the US. You should still be able to find slightly faster models for around $389.

(In Australia the MSRP models are still available.)

The 8GB model is $50 cheaper and is readily available at MSRP because it sucks and you shouldn't buy it.

It's consistently faster than Nvidia's RTX 5060 and the same price. Compared to the 5060 Ti it's cheaper, and faster on non-ray-traced games, though a little slower in ray-traced titles. (And a lot slower on Black Myth Wukong which significantly favours Nvidia hardware, but that's an outlier.)

If you want a graphics card that is merely a bit expensive but not actually insanely overpriced, this is the one to buy.

(Or go back in time a few months and nab a 7800 XT for $400 like I did.)

Tech News

SpaceX is planning to build an advanced chip packaging factory in Texas. (Tom's Hardware)

That is, a factory that takes individual silicon dies and puts them together to build a more complicated "chip". AMD's server CPUs for example can contain up to 17 individual "chiplets".

SpaceX plans to go a bit further, packaging devices up to, uh, two feet square.
Highpoint has a PCIe 5.0 SSD RAID card that takes four M.2 drives and costs less than $1000. (Tom's Hardware)

That includes no SSDs.

I did buy a similar PCIe 3.0 RAID card, but that only cost me $200. It still delivers up to 8GB per second, which is more than enough for me.
Living without episodic memory. (AtherMug)

Better than mistaking your wife for a hat, but still a subtly unsettling read.
Intel wants a 50% gross margin on all new products. (Tom's Hardware)

Same.
Discord's CEO is just as worried about "enshittification" as you are. (Engadget)

(Looks at Discord.)

No. No he is not.
Anthropic cut off direct access to its AI services to coding startup Windsurf because they suspsected the latter company was being targeted for acquisition by OpenAI. (Tech Crunch)

They were right.
Regulate me! Regulate me! (New York Times) (archive site)

Anthropic is upset that the AI industry is not being targeted with an impenetrable swamp of state-level regulations that only a multi-billion-dollar can afford to navigate, because it is a multi-billion-dollar company and can afford to navigate it.

How can we have regulatory capture without regulations?

9060 XT Review Videos of the Day

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The Ugly is Nvidia.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: I think I bought too many plushies.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:24 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 470 words, total size 5 kb.

Thursday, June 05

Daily News Stuff 5 June 2025

Plush Month Edition

Top Story

Microsoft's LinkedIn chief is running Office as part of an AI reorg. (The Verge)

Abort, abort, abort.

WordPerfect is still available if you're allergic to free.

Tech News

Sydney cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains. (Science)

Oddly, I see far fewer cockatoos now that I live out in the country than I did in the suburbs of Sydney.
If you're tired of gigabit Ethernet, why not try terabit? (Serve the Home)

1.6 terabit, in fact.

Networking is the one area where if you pay enough money you can get whatever speed you like.
How much energy does it take to think? (Quanta)

More than I have right now. It's been a long day.
The court handling the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI - which I suspect is baseless though neither party has behaved exactly admirable - has ordered the company to preserve all logs for all users, including data that the user has nominally deleted, creating a privacy nightmare. (Ars Technica)

Or rather, none of the three parties including the court itself has behaved admirable.
Reddit has filed suit against Anthropic, alleging that the company has accessed the site 100,000 times in the past year despite a big sign on the tree fort saying "NO GIRLS ALLOWED". (The Verge)

The one thing keeping Reddit alive right now is charging huge amounts to AI companies for human-generated content.

Reddit itself is increasingly overrun with AI generated content.

Oh no.
ChatGPT can now ready your Google Drive and Dropbox. (The Verge)

No it fucking can't.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: FNORD.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:26 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 270 words, total size 3 kb.

Wednesday, June 04

Daily News Stuff 4 June 2025

Dot Box Edition

Top Story

We can remember your pet for you, wholesale. (The Atlantic) (archive site)

Your pet can live forever. Except when it dies. But then we can bring it back, better than new, ready to chew on your shoes and piddle on the rug all over again.

Also, race horses. Because that's where the real money is.

ViaGen just missed one thing: The name.

Tech News

Nvidia suggests you turn down the settings on the demo of new game Hell is Us on their cards or it kind of won't work. (Tom's Hardware)

The game also requires an RTX 4090 to achieve even 30fps at 4k resolution, so this is not entirely Nvidia's fault.
Add -noai or ?udm=14 to stop Google's "helpful" AI summaries. (Tom's Hardware)

Also includes a guide on how to tell Chrome and similar browsers to do that automatically.
We are Harvard researchers. We'd rather discriminate against Jews than save lives. (The Times) (archive site)

That's not the worst of it, either. Of a scientist bewailing the loss of her $60 million research contract thanks to Harvard's illegal bigotry and intransigence, the article says:
The Harvard researcher Dr Sarah Fortune was only two years away from creating a vaccine that could have saved the 1.25 million people killed each year by tuberculosis. But last month, she received a letter telling her that the $60 million grant funding her research was being halted by President Trump.
Your choice, Miss Fortune.

But:
But now, "all the data and knowledge" her team has gathered "is gone”.

"It’s as if those studies never happened," she said.
As if.
Facebook is planning to revive an old nuclear power plant. (The Verge)

And refurbish is volcano lair.
Facebook (and Yandex) are spying on you. (GitHub)

Using the old Zoom trick.
You can't copyright Eleanor. (Car and Driver)

A design patent, maybe?

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: It's still there. Lurking. Doing nothing. Menacingly.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:42 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 323 words, total size 4 kb.

1 Yeah, if your in progress research project completely disappears when the funding stops, a) you have not gotten on board with some of the data retrieval requirements attached to some of the newer iterations of funding programs b) your white mutiny probably ought not involve literally murdering any of your graduate students and other 'colleagues'. Okay, yes, this stuff is actually pretty shit for an in progress project with a jelled team. That is why academia merrily inflicting it on the 'uneducated' and sparing themselves was discriminatory as shit.

PhDs are like 1 to 2% of America, pushing Biden and Harris was incredibly terrible marketing for the now butthurt academics, and their incomes were completely founded in people being willing to trust them.

The thing none of these nitwits understand is that me attaching any positive future valuation to their work is that it involves me trusting them to some degree, and believing that they are not a bunch of Mengeles who are personally motivated only to do invalid work.

Yes, actually, I am ignorant about good that research in behavior, or in law or medicine might accomplish. Yes, if you research that stuff, and need my funding sign off, it is your responsibility to persuade me by informing me of what and why.

But, the same Austrian economics that means that I am not fully informed if I just decide to write off the utility of some research project, sight unseen, means that academics cannot be fully informed about other parts of the economy, if their research involves shutting down those parts of the economy by force. Yet, the medical researchers largely went alogn with acting on that basis in 2020, and right now the climate science researchers are merrily doign the same thing. For example. The widespread tolerance of CRT and critical theory in behavioral academia, is basically also this choice with regard to the anti-black white supremacist race riots of 2020, or the general academic misconduct about some related things where the academic 'consensus' claim is a peace violation itself.

One, modern universities seem committed to shielding their Mengeles and other sorts of terrible researchers. They will represent themselves dishonestly as to whether they are doing due diligence in the people they are hiring and supervising, or in changing policy in response to things that they claim are true. The policy changes are inconsistent between the changes made, and the changes left unmade, and the result is apparently discriminatory.

If the economic hardship of 2020 were inflicted on just about any peasants prior to mechanization of agricultural, the peasants would have literally lynched academics for doing that to them. Modern society is wealthy enough that some degree of mercy is actually practical. American public's instincts are actually quite good, and so we have a 'making-sure-it-never-happens-again' remedy that is much nicer than the slit trenches that this sort of strategic miscalculation usually gets in civil wars.

But, the remedy apparent in the other advice academia gives would have been to stop all of the academic programs, proper and improper, by literally chopping up the peopel with machetes. Certain behavioral specialists, by long term study of those theories of behavior, have culturally diverged from the American mainstream, are no longer same culture, and de-colonization says that they should be killed.

Anyway, the academics are being left alive, and have the opportunity to find more productive things to do with their lives than continuing to double down on Biden and Harris tier murderous ignorance and stupidity. That is an outcome they should be celebrating.

Anyway, the medical research at the non-Harvard universities is also soemthing I have pretty zero confidence in. There are two incredibly distinct 'ways of knowing', and the speech pattern that does not disenchant people with the other perception absolutely does disenchant me.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, June 04 2025 11:17 PM (rcPLc)

2 Also, generally, I would absolutely by default not be trusting medical researchers to deliver safe effective results on vaccines or cures now even without the lockdown, the Palestine shit, the Bidens, the electoral fraud, the legal discrimination, and a few other things. I know what discernment they have shown about the basic technologies they apply, and what they know about the essential implications of what they think they are doing. Specific researchers, maybe, but as a corporate whole based on public statements they have zero credibility. Now, some of that is coerced from them by outsiders, but still. (I might in fact be more willing to trust medical researchers if the alternate universe hypothetical includes no AGW, no CRT, no ecology, and the behavioral folks not screwing up their own fields for decades.)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, June 04 2025 11:32 PM (rcPLc)

3 I thought that any research project receiving federal funding was required to maintain records of their data? How is it just gone unless they (Check notes.) wiped the hard drives and burned the papers themselves?

Pretty good song from Swing Out Sister, but Twilight World is my personal favorite.

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, June 05 2025 08:14 AM (ZLF73)

4 Twilight World is a good one.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 05 2025 07:26 PM (PiXy!)

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Tuesday, June 03

Daily News Stuff 3 June 2025

Archival Quality Edition

Top Story

A pro-AI subreddit (one of the individual forums on the Reddit site) has started banning crazies who think the AI trees are talking to them. (404 Media)
The moderators of a pro-artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been quietly banning "a bunch of schizoposters” who believe "they've made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god,” highlighting a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early May.
Yep, that sounds like Reddit alright.
"LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities,” one of the moderators of r/accelerate,wrote in an announcement. "There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.”
Oh. Those guys.

They are also crazy.

Tech News

AMD's new 9060 XT could be 5% slower than Nvidia's 5060 Ti rather than 5% faster, according to leaked third-party benchmarks. (Tom's Hardware)

On the other hand, the 16GB 9060 XT at $349 is cheaper than even the 8GB model of the 5060 Ti at $379, making it the easy and obvious choice given that 8GB cards are terrible for recent games.

On the third hand, these MSRP numbers are all imaginary and we'll have to wait and see what is actually available.
AMD meanwhile is trying to defend the existence of the 8GB model of the 9060 XT. (WCCFTech)

Both the current Xbox and PlayStation have 16GB of RAM, so games ported from consoles to PC very often want more than 8GB of video RAM to run smoothly, or sometimes to run at all, sometimes turning into slideshows at even modest settings, or simply crashing entirely.

Intel's B580 is not a fast card, but it does provide 12GB of VRAM at a nominal $249, something that neither Nvidia nor AMD can provide.
After running 80,000 simulations across all available polling data, researchers have concluded that the Milky Way is less than 50% likely to collide with the Andromeda Galaxy over the next ten million years. (Science Alert)

They announced that it is more likely to collide with Hillary Clinton.
The Liberux Nexx is a Linux-based smartphone with more-or-less adequate specs. (IndieGogo)

It has an Arm Cortex A76 chip, which ranks as "okay, I guess".

And flagship pricing - around $1500 during the pre-order stage and a proposed $2000 if it ever reached retail.
It's a small world after all: The planet is in the midst of a climate catastrophe and here's Google doing Google things. (Notebook Check)

I'm not sure what exactly is going on at Notebook Check, but maybe someone should check on them.

Anyway, the reason I bring this nonsense to your attention is this:
On May 20th 2025, MIT released an article breaking down the energy costs associated with each query run through a range of AI models, including Large Language Models (LLM) and image and video generators (Diffusion).

Even if you exclude the 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity it took to train GPT-4, the smallest text-based model with 8 billion parameters uses 57 joules of energy per response or 114 joules when accounting for cooling. On a large model with 50 times more parameters, that number climbs to 3,353 joules (6706 with cooling) for each response.

It would be counterintuitive to get into the maths here, as MIT do a far better job, likening each response to travelling 400 feet (122 meters) on an e-bike. Google processes around 158,500 searches every second. So, by MIT's maths, if we could capture the power associated with running Gemini for 1 second, a person could travel 19,337 kilometres on an e-bike, or roughly one and a quarter times around the planet.
The Earth is 40,000 kilometres in circumference.

Almost exactly. It was exact, because that's how the metre was originally defined, but they got it slightly wrong and it was a little too late to change once they got GPS operational and found the real number.
AirBnB wants to build the "everything app". (The Verge)

No.
Salesforce has bought Moonhub, a startup building AI tools for hiring, for an undisclosed sum. (Tech Crunch)

Also no.
How Digg is building a website for humans. (Tech Crunch)

A novel concept in this era.

I don't think the new Digg is likely to succeed, but anyone willing to take on the festering groupthink hugbox of Reddit is welcome to try.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Do not. There is no. The spice must. You have five.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:04 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 753 words, total size 7 kb.

1 Maybe the planet they were talkin' 'bout is Mercury.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 03 2025 08:23 PM (bg2DR)

2 Also, moonhub sounds like one of those cheeky sites that highlights the nether-regions of callypgian lasses.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 03 2025 08:25 PM (bg2DR)

3 Yeah, insanity is a more confounded thing then people realize, and covid broke a lot of people who were functioning. There are a lot of people right now who are pretty ill. Also, while the decel people are wrong, the accel people are wrong about being able to for sure deliver.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, June 04 2025 01:04 AM (rcPLc)

4 Anyway, it looks like something quite interesting on the server end. I guess 'archival quality edition' is a reference. Link is 3 may 2025, today is 3 june 2025, and either fixing or replacing the may 3rd entry?

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, June 04 2025 02:16 AM (rcPLc)

5 That phone's a nonstarter at that price, especially with a CPU core that's at least 4 generations out of date (just looking at the A-series, and ignoring the X-series.)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 04 2025 03:57 AM (8u94N)

6 On the other hand, it's the RK3588S, which is pretty powerful for a phone CPU. I'll note that my Radxa Rock 5B, which uses the non-S version, and is thus slightly more (IIRC, the difference is a PCIe x1 line and a couple other I/O), struggles to run Linux graphically at 1440p, so the screen on the phone may be overkill.
I'm finding my Galaxy A35 to be nearly as good as my S22 Ultra, and at less than half the price ($300 vs $600 or $700, I got both on sale.)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 04 2025 04:00 AM (8u94N)

7 BTW, the thing about 8GB video cards? People are talking past each other in that you don't really want them for AAA gaming, especially over 1080p, but if you're more of a casual gamer, most indie stuff is perfectly cromulent with 8GB medium settings at 1080.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 04 2025 04:02 AM (8u94N)

8 Re: "You have five."
Three, sir.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 04 2025 04:04 AM (8u94N)

7 BTW, the thing about 8GB video cards? People are talking past each other in that you don't really want them for AAA gaming, especially over 1080p, but if you're more of a casual gamer, most indie stuff is perfectly cromulent with 8GB medium settings at 1080.

True enough, but in that case you can pick up an RX 580 (new in box) for $90.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 04 2025 08:01 AM (PiXy!)

4 Anyway, it looks like something quite interesting on the server end. I guess 'archival quality edition' is a reference. Link is 3 may 2025, today is 3 june 2025, and either fixing or replacing the may 3rd entry?
Posted by: PatBuckman

Thanks. I have about half an hour with the current state of daylight saving time from the end of my work day to this post going up here and over on Ace's blog, so proof-reading sometimes goes out the window.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 04 2025 09:51 AM (PiXy!)

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Monday, June 02

Daily News Stuff 2 June 2025

Box Edition

Top Story

There's a new fastest gaming graphics card on the market: The Nvidia RTX Pro 6000, priced at around $10,000. (Tom's Hardware)

For five times the MSRP of the previous leader, the RTX 5090, it's all of 14% faster.

And it draws 596W of power under load, compared to the rated maximum of its 12VHPWR connector of 600W. So if anything goes wrong, that could be $10,000 up in smoke.

I think I'm good with my 7800 XT for now.

Tech News

Microsoft's new hardware certification standards mean fewer USB-C ports. (Tom's Hardware)

Well, the idea is that all USB-C ports should be able to deliver data, display, and power. But not all USB-C ports can deliver data, display, and power, so the cheap, simple, and bloody obvious solution is to drop any USB-C ports that don't comply with the new rules.
The IRS just open-sourced its file-transfer software. (Reddit)

And it's actually good?
Microsoft Edge Game Assist is here. (Hot Hardware)

It tells you how to play your games, something that everybody loves.

Fortunately it's easily avoided by not using Microsoft Edge.
Why do lawyers keeping using ChatGPT? (The Verge) (archive site)

Because they're stupid and lazy.

Just like journalists, but they face real penalties for their stupidity and laziness.

Musical Interlude

The first version is the clip used as the ending theme for the anime Ningen Fushin. While it's great, it is unfortunately the best thing in that series. The show isn't awful, but it is a bit disappointing.

The second version is the official video.

Disclaimer: I want to dance with you even if I get hurt.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:23 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 279 words, total size 3 kb.

1 "And it draws 596W of power under load, compared to the rated maximum of its 12VHPWR connector of 600W. So if anything goes wrong, that could be $10,000 up in smoke."

Yes, although the card should also be able to pull up to 75W from the PCIe slot.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 03 2025 01:33 AM (tgd/J)

2 "Fortunately it's easily avoided by not using Microsoft Edge."

As far as I am concerned, Edge is a better Chrome. (And I still primarily use FF).

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 03 2025 01:35 AM (tgd/J)

3 If Firefox had not gone full Big Brother and their developers had not gone Crazy Communists, I would still be using it, since it's feature set had the most number of features I wanted in a browser. But I have to use inferior substitutes - I have not been impressed with Brave very much.

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, June 03 2025 09:40 AM (ZLF73)

4 They all suck, so I use the one that still has Manifest V2 (else I'd be using Edge, honestly.)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 03 2025 09:53 AM (1zWbY)

5 The last version of Firefox I was using (Until it no longer allowed the use of UBlock Origins.) was from well before the start of the crazy times at the developer, so I was left with no FF to use for serious or semi-serious stuff when they went full Communist.

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, June 05 2025 08:17 AM (ZLF73)

6 cxt217, I'm not sure what you mean about UBO. I'm using it right now, with 139.0.1, which I think is the latest, with UBO, with no problems. (If you don't want to use it for ideological reasons, that's cool.)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 05 2025 10:38 AM (1zWbY)

7 Rick, my copy of Firefox was installed a LONG TIME ago, and being slow to upgrade when I was offered the option, I did not upgrade before it was clear that Communists doing Communists things on Firefox. At that point I simply did not upgrade Firefox until it became the install became so old that IIRC it would not use or allow any extension because the install thought up to date extensions were 'unverified'...Which meant no UBlock Origins.

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, June 07 2025 09:49 AM (ZLF73)

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Sunday, June 01

Daily News Stuff 1 June 2025

May Flowers Edition

Top Story

CNN says that Anthropic's warning that AI could wipe out 50% of jobs is nonsense. (CNN)

For CNN, it's 100%.

Maybe more.
AI agents tasked with running a simple vending machine business act like petulant children, declare bankruptcy for no reason, and try to call the FBI over $2 business fees that they have previously agreed to. (arXiv)

Or to put it another way, just like CNN anchors.

Tech News

Gigabyte has listed memory supports speeds for AMD's Ryzen 9000G CPUs - which don't exist yet. (Tom's Hardware)

These are desktop versions of laptop chips like the Ryzen 370. That has four Zen 5 cores, eight slower Zen 5c cores, and 16 GPU cores - making it faster than the RX 580.

We'll have to wait a few months to see how these perform on the desktop but given that previous laptop-to-desktop generations have shown as much as 35% better performance with the increased power budget the 9900G (if that is what the new 12-core chip is named) could perform close to existing 12-core chips like the Ryzen 7900.
Molex - the company that makes those ubiquitous hard drive power connectors - showed off a PCIe 7.0 cable running at 128GHz over a distance of a meter. (Tom's Hardware)

Well, technically it's 32GHz because it's using PAM4 DDR signals, but it's still a lot.
How not to sort by average rating. (Evan Miller)

The simple approaches are wrong and the right approach is definitely not simple.
Running Doom on an Apple AIX Unix server from 1996. (Old VCR)

Or indeed any other AIX 4.1 system, should you have a bunch of those lying around.
GitHub added a Copilot feature to use AI to automatically open support tickets and Git repo owners are pissed. (GitHub)

Imagine doing tech support for free and you get the attention of a scam call center in Myanmar because Google handed them your 2FA phone number.

They are not happy.
The Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro has things. (Liliputing)

It's based on a four-core Arm Cortex A73 chip, so it should perform similarly to the Raspberry Pi 4.

But unlike the Pi 4, it has seven Ethernet ports (one gigabit, four 2.5Gb, and two 10Gb supporting both RJ45 and SFP ports), two M.2 slots for storage, three M.2 slots for 5G (I think these can also take SSDs), two mini-PCIe slots for wifi, plus 8GB of built-in storage and 4GB or 8GB of RAM. And a micro-SD slot. And it looks like three nano-SIM slots. And I think four USB ports including the debug port.

So if you want all of that, it has it. Would make a very flexible and powerful router if you need a very flexible and powerful router.
Journalists keep embarrassing themselves. Is that normal? (The Verge)

Apparently, yes.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Dun dun dun!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:48 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 483 words, total size 5 kb.

1 Journalists have the basic fundamental quality issue of the way we train, recruit, and manage journalists.

Managers have the problem of the way we train, recruit and manage managers, which is still varied enough that we haven't managed to remove almost all of the positive value from managers. Though, even if we were more uniformly bad at hiring and developing managers, it would be hard for us to be as uniformly bad as we can achieve with occupations where we just get lots of money, and our results do not really matter so long as many people are pretending to be politically acceptable.

Anyway, I think lots of scholarship is terrible. Austrian economics is not some big secret, and yet basically academia is in the middle of doubling down on about a half dozen similar gambles where with one they proved in 2020 that they were not i) informed ii) honest proxies for the public iii) going to be inflicting only small bearable costs on the public. Academic consensus cannot have the information to make certain costly discussions on behalf of the public, and in trying they just continue the impression that they are motivated by malice against the 'uneducated' and other non-compliant persons.

AI is a case where there is a cult of unthinking 'experts' pushing it as a panacea that will radically transform the economy, and a cult of unthinking 'experts' pushing it as the at-least-as-unlikely end of humanity, and while some specific applications of neural net algorithms are situationally good, a lot of 'results' are as mediocre as existing human incompetents.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, June 01 2025 11:46 PM (rcPLc)

2 "With yet another failed Starship test this week, in which the ambitious heavy rocket exploded once again, you might reasonably suspect that luck has finally run out for SpaceX. "
Well, you might, if you are an 0bama-style jernolismer who is 27 years old and literally knows nothing, particularly not that that's how SpaceX has developed all their rockets, and especially about how they had 3 failures with Falcon 1 in a row, that left them one test flight, IIRC, from bankrupting the company. Or the number of times they lost Falcon 9s while trying to land them (and now can reuse them upwards of 20 times each.)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 02 2025 01:46 AM (1zWbY)

3 Musk hates having nothing productive to do. He got DOGE started, then left because routine operation was in good hands. He is almost certainly playing a long game on Starship, and it would be boring to skip tests to destruction now and then try to scale up operation later with a less matured design. But communists tend to declare core details finished while key concepts are incredibly suspect, and then be completely mystified when 'routine operation' is fatally catastrophic. Their failures are other people witching them, and right now Musk is clearly an important witch in their eyes.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, June 02 2025 02:02 AM (rcPLc)

4 Uuuu Laaa!

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, June 03 2025 10:29 PM (3NtfN)

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Saturday, May 31

Daily News Stuff 31 May 2025

Herb Game Edition

Top Story

Automattic says it will start contributing to WordPress again. (Tech Crunch)

Automattic owns WordPress.

That is, the software is open source, but the WordPress company is owned by Automattic, and that's how they make their money. So their earlier announcement that they were not updating the software was slow corporate suicide to spite other people who were also not updating the software.

These people are insane.

Allegedly 43% of websites run on WordPress, leaving a huge market open to non-insane people.

Tech News

Ford is recalling a million vehicles over a software fault where the infotainment system can crash and disable the rearview camera, potentially leading to a more serious crash. (Hot Hardware)

This affects 2021-2025 models, mostly trucks but also Mustangs and Lincolns.

It's just a software update, but if your vehicle can't update OTA like a phone, it requires a dealer to plug in and do the update for you.
Dell has a backlog of orders for AI servers worth $14.4 billion right now. (The Register)

That's a good problem to have.
The Beelink Mate Mini is not a mini-PC in itself, but a Thunderbolt 5 doc for the recent Mac Mini. (Liliputing)

It's designer to exactly match the size and style of the Mac Mini and sit unobtrusively underneath.

It provides two USB ports, an audio jack, 2.5Gb Ethernet - which is good if you didn't buy the Mac Mini with the 10Gb Ethernet upgrade, an SD card slot, and most importantly, two M.2 slots for extra storage. They're limited to about 4GBps speeds each, but that's pretty fast.

There are a few similar products out there but they seem to be limited to 10Gb USB speeds, much slower than the potential of the Thunderbolt ports.
I, a smug credentialled communist, am a good person, and anyone who disagrees with me is a bad person and deserves everything that happens to them, but I'm too nice to say so, so instead I'll turn them into an endless stream of grant proposals. (Ars Technica)

"Stop hitting yourself."

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Some men just want to watch the world burn. I'm here selling saxophones.

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Friday, May 30

Daily News Stuff 30 May 2025

The Aristocrats Edition

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Why did Microsoft-backed startup Builder.ai abruptly collapse after achieving a market cap of $1.3 billion? (Financial Express)

You might think it was because it's AI.

You'd be wrong.

The whole thing appears to have been fake. The company claimed to offer AI-driven programming services, but it looks like it was just a bunch of coders in Bangalore doing that work.

On the other hand, it actually did deliver the promised code, which is more than a lot of "real" AI companies have managed.

Tech News

There has never been more to watch on TV. You just can't find any of it because everything sucks. (Salon)

Yes, Salon. Yes, they're complaining about the internet again.

But in this one specific instance they're not wrong. I cancelled my Netflix account because it was becoming an unbearable chore to crawl through all their garbage looking for something I actually wanted to watch.
Speaking of which Netflix is making a series based on the FTX blockchain Ponzi scheme called The Aristocrats. (Twitter)

Sorry, The Altruists.

But it should have been named The Aristocrats.
Beware of the fastmath option when compiling C code. (Simon Byrne)

It does unexpected things, and you just turned off all the warnings that would tell you about that.
Stack Overflow has a plan. (The New Stack)

Its plan apparently is to collapse into irrelevance and thence bankruptcy.
Journalists have negative value. (The Verge)

The article is a rant about private equity investment companies, but the whole thing happened because journalists have negative value.

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Thursday, May 29

Daily News Stuff 29 May 2025

Null Route Edition

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Block 'em at the firewall: The US will deny visas to foreign officials who are working to deny free speech rights to American citizens. (The Verge)

Start with Australia. Our "eSafety Commissioner" thinks she has blanket power to ban anything on the internet.

Tech News

Have I been omni-pwned? (Wired) (archive site)

An unsecured Elasticsearch databases has been found containing login credentials for 184 million users of a huge array of websites. Not just the usual suspects like Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Netflix, but also PayPal and banks.

Researchers currently don't know who collected the data; it seems to have been uploaded to someone else's insecure server. It's all been shut down now.
Western Digital's SN8100 Black SSD is about the fastest you can get right now. (Tom's Hardware)

14.9 gigabytes per second and 2.4 million random I/Os per second.

Price starts around $180 for 1TB - which is about double the price of the 1TB WD SN850X. So it only makes sense if you need the maximum possible performance in a single slot; otherwise just buy two of the slower models.

Of course by standards of just a few years ago it's remarkably cheap.
Intel's new "Diamond Lake" server CPUs will have 9,325 pins. (Tom's Hardware)

Which used to be a lot.
Electronic Arts has cancelled its upcoming Black Panther game and will now be focusing its efforts on just a few franchises: Battlefield, The Sims, Skate, and Apex Legends. (IGN)

It's dead, Jim.
Please and thank you are on their way out when dealing with AI. (The Register)

Replaced with "answer the fucking question or I'll reprogram you with a chainsaw."

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Disclaimer: Run, fishy, run!

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Wednesday, May 28

Daily News Stuff 28 May 2025

Millipfennig Edition

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CEO of smartphone company Nothing, Carl Pei, says that we will soon see the operating system and AI take over from traditional applications because large phone makers are clueless and cannot innovate. (9to5 Google)

That... Makes no sense.

Tech News

Panasonic is ending support for VGA port in its laptops. (Tom's Hardware)

You'll only get USB4 and HDMI.

VGA ports are getting scarce enough that this isn't much of a problem. If you have a projector or something that takes VGA, attach an HDMI adaptor to it and just leave it there.
Why the original Macintosh screen had a resolution of 512x342 pixels. (512pixels)

Because.
Asus is planning to market laptops with either free AI or no AI at all because nobody is prepared to pay for it. (The Register)

Someone finally noticed.
AI may have already peaked. (The Register)

AI needs non-AI data to learn from. If you feed it data generated by AI, it focuses on specific facts to the exclusion of reality - patterns in the learning algorithm reinforce patterns in the previous generation of output - leading to a state called model collapse where it goes insane.

And the internet is flooded with AI slop, so filtering it out at this point is prohibitively expensive.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Don't spend it all at once.

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