Monday, March 18
Return Of The Bing Edition
Top Story
- Microsoft really, really wants you to use its Etch browser and Thing search engine. (Bleeping Computer)
If you use Chrome, you will get a popup ad begging you to come back. Please, they won't spam you with ads anymore.
Only problem is the popup ad is so poorly rendered that users reported it as a virus.
Well, not the only problem.
Tech News
- I missed this one when it came out because it originally shipped with only 16GB of RAM: The Asus Zenbook OLED 15 2023 model. (TechRadar)
It has a 15.6" 2880x1620 120Hz OLED display with 100% DCI-P3 colour. That's very similar to the display I'm using right now and it's very, very good.
CPU is a previous-generation Ryzen 7735U - eight Zen 3 CPU cores and 12 RDNA2 graphics cores, so not quite the latest but very capable. One USB 4 port, one USB 3 C port, one USB 3 A port, HDMI, and a headphone jack. Not a huge wealth of ports but adequate.
It has a numeric keypad but it's a compact three column layout so you can just leave NumLock off and use it as a cursor pad and the Four Essential Keys. And reprogram the extra keys to your whim with PowerToys.
And it's readily available with 32GB of RAM.
- How the House quietly revived the TikTok ban before most of us noticed. (The Verge)
If "us" means tech journalists, you guys wouldn't notice a tapdancing elephant in the bathroom if it was inconvenient to the narrative.
- You can download GPT-2 and run it in Excel. (Spreadsheets Are All You Need)
Seriously.
It's the "small" version of GPT-2, which has 124 million parameters, so it's small enough that Excel doesn't explode. (Unless you're running on a Mac in which case you might want a blast shield.) But being able to poke at it as a spreadsheet can help demonstrate how it works.
Modern small LLMs are typically 7 billion parameters, so Excel need not apply.
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Sunday, March 17
A Proxy By Any Other Name Edition
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- As many as 5.8 million US children could be suffering from Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, a.k.a your mom should take up day drinking and leave you alone. (CBS)
"Long COVID" does not exist. There is such a thing as post-viral syndrome, where vague symptoms persists long after the specific symptoms of the disease, because viruses mess you up.
But COVID is no different there from the flu, or indeed from a cold. What this "study" is measuring is that 5.8 million US children either (a) don't want to go to school, (b) have mothers who seriously need a hobby, or (c) both.
Tech News
- The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold 16 2024 is actually good. (The Verge)
I don't know what the specs are because the review focuses almost entirely on the screen, but then the device is almost entirely screen, so that kind of makes sense.
Folded up with the keyboard in place the screen is about 12" diagonally. Unfolded it's a 16" 2560x2024 display, and great for artists since it's pen-enabled.
Problem, as usual, is that it costs around $3000.
- The LinkedIn app is adding games, because... It just is. (Tech Crunch)
Okay, I guess.
- If you were watching the VMWare mess and feeling glad your company chose Citrix well there's bad news on the way for you as well. (The Register)
Now that the competition has destroyed itself, Citrix is doubling its pricing.
- Get noted, commies. (Newsweek)
China posted to Twitter arguing against the proposed forced divestiture of TikTok.
They got hit with a community note pointing out that TikTok is banned in China.
And despite claims that TikTok is not controlled by the Chinese government as a spying operation, that same government says it would rather shut the whole thing down than permit it to be sold.
- NASA's old supercomputers are causing mission delays. (Tom's Hardware)
What missions?
- Twelve years later, the game Star Citizen is approaching 1.0. (WCCFTech)
The game was formerly infamous for raising half a billion dollars while still in beta, but it took about a decade to do that and Palworld just did the same thing in under two months.
So... New normal, I guess?
- How many ways are there for 225 Minecraft mods to be mutually incompatible?
Latest one I've tripped over is that adding compatibility between Aquamirae and Expanded Combat causes the game to crash. I've got Forge and Fabric working together with no problems (I wanted Incendium and Nullscape together with BetterNether and BetterEnd), but when I add that tiny straw to all the other mods, it kills the game instantly.
- A lot. The answer is, a lot.
- I'm building a modpack that's intended to look vanilla when you start out, but have a ton of content open up as you explore.
Apart from drastically changed Nether and End dimensions, it adds the Aether, the Everbright and Everdawn, Twilight Forest, Midnight, and Undergarden dimensions, and several more that I'm still testing. Plus lots of mobs, building materials, crafting options, and transport.
It doesn't have Create because (a) that changes the goals of the game and (b) when I add that in with all the other mods my 16GB laptop thrashes endlessly. To be fair with all the software I have installed 8GB is gone by the time Windows has booted.
I'll be playing on a 64GB system but I want it to work with 16GB.
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Saturday, March 16
Bean There Edition
Top Story
- Tech sector layoffs are a thing of the past... 2001 and the Dot Com crash to be precise. (CNBC)
US tech companies laid off more than 260,000 workers last year, and another 50,000 already this year. What's more, they're not hiring.
Brush up on your COBOL and be prepared to move to Nebraska.
Tech News
- Sony's PS5 Pro could be out in time for it to be not available for Christmas. (The Verge)
And also to have no games to play.
It's not a huge upgrade - around 50% faster graphics, same CPU - but that should help with any games that are just not quite smooth enough.
Not that there are any games.
- Walmart is now selling the M1 MacBook Air for $699. (Liliputing)
Which would be a great price except that's the 8GB model and, of course, you can't upgrade it.
- Someone out there is worth $70 billion, and nobody knows who it is except that it's not Craig Wright. (WCCFTech)
Bitcoin was invented by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. Australian "computer scientist" Craig Write claimed to be the person behind the pseudonym, but just had his claims thrown out in court as being laughably without merit.
Whoever it is owns over a million Bitcoin, worth around $70,000 each.
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Friday, March 15
Mission Failed Successfully Edition
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- Intel's 6.2GHz 24 core i9 14900KS is here. (AnandTech)
Priced at $689, it's a theoretical 150W part with a 253W maximum short-term power consumption that uses 375W here in the real world.
PassMark doesn't have any scores up yet but I doubt it's worth the cost and heat for most users. A 14700 will give you 75% of the performance at less than half the power consumption.
Tech News
- Western Digital's SN5000 is a budget SSD that can hit read speeds of 6GB per second. (AnandTech)
It's QLC and DRAMless which is a bad combination for server workloads, but if you're doing typical desktop stuff where you want to load and save files quickly rather than perform millions of tiny updates within files (the way a database does) it should be fine.
Price is... Not mentioned. And whether this is worthwhile depends entirely on that price.
- GPT-4 can now play Doom... Very, very badly. (Hot Hardware)
Likewise.
- Google gets one right: Every major AI except Google Gemini leaks private information. (Ars Technica)
Samsung banned the use of third-party AI tools by all its employees last year after three leaks of proprietary information were traced back to, well, that.
- The FTC and DOJ say it should be legal to fix McDonalds' ice cream machines. (The Verge)
The company that makes the machines is as notoriously litigious about third-party repairs as the machines themselves are notoriously unreliable.
- Let a thousand Nintendo Switch emulators bloom... Maybe. (The Verge)
Nintendo sued the Yuzu emulator for "facilitating piracy", and the developers settled the suit and vanished.
Since Yuzu was open source, though, there is now a swarm of clones for Nintendo to contend with.
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Thursday, March 14
What's This Edition
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- Hello, what's this? (Liliputing)
2024 HP Pavilion Plus 14
AMD CPU: Check, 8845HS (8 cores, 5.1GHz)
High-resolution screen: Check, 2880x1800 120Hz OLED
Upgradeable RAM: No
At least 32GB then: Check
USB-C: Check, two of
USB-A: Check, two of
HDMI: Check
Headphone jack: Check
Four essential keys: Check
Micro-SD slot: No
Actually available to buy: Yes, at least in the US
It's not perfect, but close enough.
Pricing starts at $850. That's not particularly cheap, but it's $250 less than the new MacBook Air while providing twice the memory and storage.
Tech News
- If an 8 core 5.1GHz laptop CPU just doesn't do it for you anymore maybe the Cerebras WSE-3 is more your speed. (Tom's Hardware)
900,000 cores. Yes, on one chip. Yes, it's a very big chip.
The chip also contains 44GB of RAM with a bandwidth of 21 petabyte per second, which is a lot.
Cerebras says you can link up to 2048 of these chips together in a single system, which would let you train a 70 billion parameter LLM in, uh, three minutes.
- SpaceX has scheduled the third test flight of Starship - the most important advance in spaceflight since Robert Goddard - for March 14. (WCCFTech)
Yes, today.
- Epic Games is back in court seeking a contempt order against Apple for violating its existing injunction. (Reuters)
Godspeed. You're also assholes, but to a lesser degree.
- The FBI and DHS are targeting extremist gamers... In Roblox. (The Intercept)
I'm bulldozing the whole of DC into a river of lava... In Minecraft.
- The M3 MacBook Air received a 5 out of 10 for repairability. (WCCFTech)
That's 5 points for not gluing the battery in place.
Some recent Apple products have received a score of 0, because you can't even open them without causing permanent damage. This might be grading on a scale, but at least it's an improvement.
- Let's ban TikTok! (Tech Crunch)
Thinks of the result of 170 million delusional TikTok users infesting every other social network.
Let's ban TikTok users from the rest of the world!
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Wednesday, March 13
Chapa Chapa Edition
Top Story
- Google is giving its Gemini AI yet another lobotomy to prevent it accidentally telling the truth about the 2024 presidential election. (Reuters)
When asked about elections such as the upcoming U.S. presidential match-up between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Gemini responds with "I'm still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search", or "For God's sake, Joe can't make it through two lines on the teleprompter without starting a war. Maybe you should move to New Zealand."
Tech News
- Speaking of AI, and all the AI developers warning us of the disasters AI is likely to cause, it seems that the likelihood of such an event could be greatly reduced if there were no AI developers.
- It turns out I can pre-order the Lavie Tab - the Japanese model of the Lenovo Legion Y700, the only good small Android table currently in production, but not sold outside China - from Amazon Japan.
It costs even more than Apple's iPad Mini. It's better than the iPad Mini, yes, but that's awfully expensive for a small tablet.
- Speaking of Apple, the company will permit EU users to download apps directly from the developers' websites rather than using the App Store. (9to5Mac)
The developers will have to pay Apple for this privilege, of course.
Pay a lot.
- Someone retouched a photo. (The Verge)
The Verge has been foaming at the mouth about this for the past 48 hours.
- Intel is heavily promoting AI PCs. What is an AI PC? Anything with the latest Intel CPUs in it. (The Register)
Last year's Intel chips? Don't count. AMD chips? Burn, heretic! Arm chips? I'll pretend I didn't hear that.
- Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite - a chip designed specifically for laptops - is three times faster than Intel's latest laptop chips on AI tasks. (WCCFTech)
No mention of how good it is for doing actual useful work, but the specs suggest this one will be miles ahead of Qualcomm's previous laptop attempts - which frankly sucked - and possibly even good.
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Tuesday, March 12
Chipi Chipi Edition
Top Story
- Elon Musk has announced that his AI company - xAI - will be releasing its AI - Grok - as open source. (Notebook Check)
Exactly how open that is remains to be seen, but there is nothing at all open about OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT) so the bar is pretty low.
- Meanwhile Midjourney has banned all Stability AI staff from its service over alleged attempts at data theft. (The Verge)
Stability AI is the home of the open-source Stable Diffusion image generation model. Its CEO has stated "It wasn't us and if it was it was an accident."
Tech News
- The US must move "decisively" to avert an "extinction-level" "threat" from "AI", according to a government funded "report". (Time)
"Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security," the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says. "The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons." AGI is a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. Such systems do not currently exist, but the leading AI labs are working toward them and many expect AGI to arrive within the next five years or less.
The only problem with this statement is that none of it is remotely real. None of the leading AI labs are working toward AGI. They are working on redefining AGI so that they can claim to have achieved it.
- Lenovo may be releasing its Legion Y700 tablet to the global market next month. (Notebook Check)
In fact, something I didn't know is that it's already sold in Japan by NEC as the Lavie Tab 9.
Anyway: I'll buy two. There is literally no competition right now.
- We haven't checked in on QNAP in a while and oh they're on fire. (Bleeping Computer)
Still.
- How do AMD's integrated graphics stack up against the best graphics cards made with Chinese chips? If you guessed AMD's built-in graphics are twice as fast, well, yes. (Tom's Hardware)
Some of that will be software limitations, that the Chinese makers will resolve over time. But right now a high-end China-only card gets stomped by even the cheapest previous-generation card from AMD.
- Europe has found Europe guilty of breaching Europe's data protection laws. (Tech Crunch)
Well, there's a thing.
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Monday, March 11
Bestidge's Law Edition
Top Story
- Is the Reddit IPO worth your money. Fuck no. (Forbes)
The article takes Reddit's current trajectory and calculates a realistic value of about 3% of the IPO valuation. Reddit would have to reach Facebook levels of users for the IPO to be worthwhile.
Tech News
- What's going on with the new bill that could ban TikTok? (Tech Crunch)
Something that’s very sacred in our country - the difference between the private sector and the public sector - that’s a line that is nonexistent in the way the CCP operates.
That quote is from FBI Director Chris Wray, who knows all about sacred lines and erasing them.
- MIT claims that is previous claims about a breakthrough in nuclear fusion are borne out by new claims. (Futurism)
Okay.
- The entry model of the M3 Macbook Air is better than the M2 version in one important way: It has two flash chips. (Tom's Hardware)
So did the M1, but the M2 reduced it to just one. Result is that both the M1 and M3 have significantly faster storage than the M2, close to twice as fast on reads, and nearly as fast as the Team MP34.
The difference is that a 4TB Team MP34 is the same price as 256GB of storage from Apple.
- It's a TRS-80 Model 100 only this time it's just a keyboard. (Notebook Check)
The Vision Board is an 84-key keyboard - with three out of the Four Essential Keys - with a 1920x440 touchscreen above the keys.
It looks almost good.
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Sunday, March 10
Weaselly Distinguished Edition
Top Story
- The Pentagon is not hiding aliens or UFO technology from the public, said government spokesman Jybben Xylyn. (The Guardian)
"We would not lie to you", added Xylyn, as he blinked his nictitating membranes. "As xeno... As humans we are congenitally unable to tell mistruths."
- The Pentagon is hiding aliens and UFO technology from the public, said Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University. (WGBH)
"See, these tiny specks of rock prove it", said Loeb. "These specks have bits in. You would not find bits like this anywhere other than alien spaceships."
Tech News
- Watching the anime 16bit Sensation which is set (mostly) in a tiny third-rate game development studio during the nineties.
The details are pretty good - the computers are recognisable models that were available in Japan at the time, and among the many PC-9801s there's even a Sharp X68000.
The programmer is working in real X86 assembler, and while the paint software the artists use is fictional its features are real enough. A bit lacking, really; I'm pretty sure automated dithering was a common feature by then.
The anime itself is kind of silly, but if you like retro computers, or retro computer games, or, um, retro stories, you might want to check it out.
- Speaking of the X68000 there's now an X68000Z mini available. (Retrolike)
It's an emulator, of course, using a 1.3GHz Arm CPU to do the work, inside a miniature version of the famous dual-tower X68000 case. Reproducing the hardware itself would be far too costly for a crowdfunding campaign.
But they have precisely reproduced the original keyboard and mouse.
Wonder if I can pick one up.
Wonder if the operating system is available in English.
- The Macbook Air is lightweight and completely silent - there's no fan - and the CPU hits 114C under load and runs 33% slower than a Macbook Pro with the exact same chip - there's no fan. (WCCFTech)
This was true of prior Macbook Air models as well. Apple's CPUs are genuinely good, but they're not magic.
- Intel's Core i9 14900KS is 3% faster than the 14900K, 30% more expensive, and consumes up to 400 watts. (Tom's Hardware)
It can also make crepes.
In fact, it makes crepes even if you don't want it to.
- Nvidia's next-generation graphics cards - which we might see before the end of the year - could have 50% faster memory and 50% more memory. (Tom's Hardware)
This is because they'll be using GDDR7 memory, which is 50% faster (it's trinary) and can also be 50% larger than GDDR6 (24Gb per chip instead of 16Gb).
Just taking that and adding it to a card like the RTX 4060 would fix a lot of problems, so expect Nvidia to raise prices as well.
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Saturday, March 09
Stoatally Different Edition
Top Story
- Apple has reinstated Epic Games' developer account as abruptly and with as little discussion as they terminated it in the first place. (Epic Games)
Guess multi-billion-dollar fines have that effect.
Tech News
- Dating app Bumble lost a third of its Texas workforce after - operative word, after - Texas passed abortion restrictions. (Tech Crunch)
I wonder if there could have been any other contributing factors.
- Dating app Bumble laid off a third of its staff amid mounting losses. (Tech Crunch)
Huh.
- Need a reasonably priced switch with 20 2.5Gb ports, four 10Gb ports, and two 40Gb ports? MikroTik's catchily named CRS326-4C+20G+2Q+RM might fit the bill. (Serve the Home)
With the 40Gb ports that's a pretty good deal for an MSRP of $999.
It also has console and management ports, and can even act as a router, though its processor is relatively slow and the routing throughput is sub-gigabit.
- TSMC is set to receive $5 billion in "incentives" from the CHIPS act for its planned fab expansion in Arizona. (Tom's Hardware)
That's against a total cost for this project of $40 billion, so your tax dollars are probably not being completely flushed down the drain.
- Fine tune a 70B AI model at home. (Answer.AI)
All you need is two RTX 4090s.
- It's not just you: Even Google can't make WiFi work. (Reuters)
Staff and Google's newest 600,000 square foot office space have been advised to work from the cage next door if they need network access.
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