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Amelia Pond! You're the little girl!
I'm Amelia, and you're late.

Thursday, February 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 February 2025

Protobugs Edition

Top Story

  • Oracle chairman Larry Ellison says governments should unify all their data into a single feed for training AI. (MSN)
    Fragmented sets of data about a population’s health, agriculture, infrastructure, procurement and borders should be unified into a single, secure database that can be accessed by AI models.
    This is not unreasonable for already-public broad-scale data. Getting it all into a standard format so that AI - and non-AI computer tools - can analyse it could be valuable. If all of USAID's funding had been out there so that anyone could plug it into a spreadsheet and look for fraud...

    Actually, people have been doing that for years and hardly anyone cared.

    Anyway. He also wants your DNA. (The Register)

    So that's a no.

Tech News

Minecraft Modpack Mischief

All the overlapping recipe issues have been resolved, thanks to the Polymorph mod, which resolves overlapping recipe issues.

I had one crash, which looks to have been memory size related.  I increased the cap from the default 4GB to 6GB and haven't had an issue since.

Remaining bugs:

  1. Turkeys lay chicken eggs.  This was fixed last year, but since then the developers of the Let's Do series of mods have rearranged things and it seems to have become unfixed.

  2. Pressing B for my backpack when it's in the Curios slot on my back doesn't let me access the inventory.  The backpack works, you just have to access it from your main inventory, or put it down and access it that way.  Not sure why; I fiddle with my key mappings but got nowhere.  (This was with a Traveler's Backpacks backpack; I haven't tried yet with a backpacks from Let's Do Camping.)

    Update: If you equip the backpack via the backpack's own UI, the B key works - and leaves the Curios slot on your back free so you can also carry a quiver for your arrows.  Not sure why it doesn't work otherwise, but this way is better so I'm not going to worry about it.  And it all renders properly, so you are running around wearing exactly the customised backpack you created.
My new worst enemy is marsh blocks from another of the Let's Do mods.  For the player, it holds you in place and does slow damage until you dig yourself free, which is easy enough even empty-handed.

If you have a mod that generates swamp villages though, they can become ghost towns very quickly because villagers can't dig.

I also need to go through and adjust the spawning probabilities for Artifacts and Relics.  If you're playing on your own server and can just loot every village you come across, it's too easy to find subtly game-changing items at the default settings.  (How many inexhaustible food supplies do you need?)


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: 13780 Devil Gate Drive, next to the Episcopalian church.

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Wednesday, February 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 February 2025

Quicksand Preparation Edition

Top Story

  • Average CPU speed actually went down in 2024, for the first time in twenty years.  (Twitter)

    There's a lot of speculation as to why, but no clear answers.  The fastest available desktop CPUs are two years old, with no replacement models in sight.  Meanwhile Intel has dropped its hyper-threading support - multiple threads per CPU core - which meant multi-threaded scores declined for newer chips.

    But this average includes AMD chips which still have hyper-threading, and Apple chips which never had hyper-threading, so who knows?


Tech News

  • A new attack on Google's Gemini AI lets users permanently plant false memories into the system, so that they are shared with unsuspecting users on the same account.  (Ars Technica)

    As far as I can tell, this doesn't affect the core Gemini training data; that's fixed irrevocably.  So it doesn't persist across Google accounts, limiting the damage it can do.

    But LLMs are fundamentally insecure to this kind of attack, like kindly grandmothers with confidence tricksters, and every patch is just a Band-Aid atop a growing heap of Band-Aids.


  • How Elon Musk's bid for OpenAI could gum up Sam Altman's for-profit conversion.  (Tech Crunch)

    OpenAI is still, in theory, a non-profit operation with a secondary for-profit company commercialising the product.  The bid was made for the non-profit group which owns all the intellectual property.

    The state attorneys general in California and Delaware have already filed inquiries with OpenAI over its plans and the valuation of the nonprofit entity, so Sam Altman and the commercial side of OpenAI cannot underbid in their attempt to wrest control.
    "Musk is throwing a spanner into the works," said Stephen Diamond, a lawyer who represented Musk's opponents in corporate governance battles at Tesla, in an interview with TechCrunch. "He's exploiting the fiduciary obligation of the nonprofit board to not undersell the asset. [Musk's bid] is something OpenAI has to pay attention to."
    Which is the last thing Altman wants right now.


  • While Tech Crunch has a sane article mentioning Elon Musk, other sites have gone as insane as The Verge.  (The Register)

    The writer feebly attempts to liken Elon Musk's team rooting out waste and fraud to a CPU microcode exploit, ignoring the fact that in such an analogy the CPU would be on fire to begin with.


  • Speaking of AI Google is considering using it to make Chrome change compromised passwords for you automatically.  (Ars Technica)

    I assume they mean in navigating the password change process for each compromised website; this is not otherwise complicated.


  • Smol GPU is an open-source GPU for RISC-V designs.  (GitHub)

    Meant more as a learning tool than a real product, but if you are synthesizing a small RISC-V core on an FPGA - and who isn't, these days - and need a GPU to go with it, it might be worth a look.


Musical Interlude


Song is Counting Stars by One Republic.  Movie is Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea by Hayao Miyazaki.



Disclaimer: Every piece of ham I eat makes me feel alive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:30 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 510 words, total size 5 kb.

Tuesday, February 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 February 2025

Large Ham Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Infinite ham?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:55 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 318 words, total size 3 kb.

Monday, February 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 February 2025

Gouda Nuff Edition

Top Story

  • Did Google fake the AI output in its Super Bowl ad?  Yes.  (The Verge)

    Not only was it wrong, it was a verbatim copy of text that has appeared on the web since 2020, before Google Gemini existed.
    But Google maintained that the website description was written by Gemini all along. In addition to showing Gemini "generate" the description in the commercial, Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler said on X that the Gouda stat was "not a hallucination," adding that "Gemini is grounded in the Web."
    Well, if by "grounded in" you mean "a human copying and pasting directly from", then sure.

    The original text claimed that Gouda accounts for 50 to 60 percent of cheese consumption worldwide, and is "one of" the most most popular varieties of cheese, which is comical.

    Everyone knows that's Venezuelan beaver cheese.

Tech News

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Bonk.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:21 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 315 words, total size 3 kb.

Sunday, February 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 February 2025

Blep Panda Edition

Top Story


Tech News

  • Speaking of DeepSeek the iOS app sends unencrypted data back to Chinese servers.  (Ars Technica)

    Chinese servers controlled by ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok.

    This is on top of the previously reported logging servers at DeepSeek that were open to the entire internet.

    So basically not only can DeepSeek and its Chinese partners see everything you do, but so can everyone else.


  • A massive brute force attack against insecure commercial VPN devices is under way, using insecure consumer routers in an enormous botnet.  (Bleeping Computer)

    2.8 million devices have been compromised - notably 1.1 million in Brazil where Mikrotik routers are popular, but extending to many other countries and devices from Cisco, ZTE, Huawei, and others.

    All trying to guess the passwords to corporate VPN devices that are also insecure, though not quite as much.  The software is smart enough to block repeated failed logins from a single source, but can't figure things out when it's under attack from 2.8 million directions at once.


  • VSCode's remote development agent is an unsecured remote access tool.  (Fly.io)

    This is usually considered a bad thing.


  • If you need a not too expensive docking station with a ton of ports, this is one.  (Notebook Check)

    It has two DisplayPort ports, HDMI, and VGA, Ethernet - though only gigabit, eight USB ports at various speeds, SD and microSD slots, three audio jacks, and a volume knob.

    You can't run all four video ports at 4K, but that's true of pretty much all docks.  USB4 and Thunderbolt can only deliver two 4K streams in, so a dock without its own graphics hardware can only deliver two 4K streams out.

    The lack of at least 2.5Gb Ethernet made me curious how cheap docks with that feature are these days, and you can find them for less than $50 on Amazon US.

    On Amazon AU, somehow, you can get one for $16.  I just ordered two.  It's a basic model with only one video output, but that's ridiculously cheap.


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: You killed my hostage!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:31 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 460 words, total size 4 kb.

Saturday, February 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 February 2025

Nimitable Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: Oops.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:55 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 395 words, total size 4 kb.

Friday, February 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 February 2025

Tired Tapir Edition

Top Story


Tech News


Musical Interlude


Axel F, the theme from Beverly Hills Cop, played more or less on an original Amiga.  It looks like this is an emulator, and it has 1MB of RAM where a stock Amiga had just 512K, but pretty close.

The Amiga had four sound channels playing 8-bit audio at 15.75kHz, so for anything other than electronic music it didn't sound quite so good.  But it nailed this piece.


Disclaimer: Close only counts in horseshoes and retrocomputing.

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Post contains 236 words, total size 2 kb.

Thursday, February 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 February 2025

Plot Pant Edition

Top Story



Tech News


Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: Better than rolling on gravel.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 287 words, total size 3 kb.

Wednesday, February 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 February 2025

You Can't Get Here From There Edition

Top Story


Tech News

  • Using the time-tested method of hitting things with stuff, physicists have confirmed the existence of a third form of magnetism.  (Science Alert)

    Termed altermagnetism, the individual atoms in the crystal lattice have their quantum spin in opposite directions to their neighbours, but with a novel twist, that they don't explain very well and which I don't understand but can apparently be used to store data somehow.


  • Australia has also banned Chinese spyware DeepSeek from government devices.  (The Register)

    The country also moaned bitterly that nobody takes it seriously when it says the internet can be used to look at naughty pictures.


  • Plugging a handheld gaming device into a dock with an Nvidia RTX 5090.  (The Verge)  (archive site)

    First, it actually worked, and second, it worked pretty well for the most part.  On Horizon Zero Dawn it saw a significant loss of performance compared with a desktop system with a 5090, which may have been the OCuLink connection or may have been the thermal limits of the pocket-sized device.

    The 5090 itself offers a PCIe 5.0 x16 connector, but OCuLink only provides PCIe 4.0 x4 - one eighth as much bandwidth.  Tests have showed that the 5090 keeps chugging right along with PCIe 4.0 or 3.0 x16 slots, but this is half that again.

    So if you really need to play Horizon Zero Dawn on your handheld device plugged into a desktop graphics card that it is not currently possible to buy, you may be limited to just 80fps.


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Can't stand not tea either.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 312 words, total size 3 kb.

Tuesday, February 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 February 2025

Heartbreak Hovel Edition

Top Story


Tech News

Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: I never want to see gravel again!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:29 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 280 words, total size 3 kb.

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