Twelve years, and four psychiatrists!
Four?
I kept biting them!
Why?
They said you weren't real.
Wednesday, October 09
Lasagna Code Edition
Top Story
- Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in AI. (Tech Crunch)
Real AI, not this modern crap.
Hinton invented the technique of back propagation in 1978, and Hopfield invented the Hopfield network in 1982, which is (says Wikipedia) a form of recurrent neural network, or a spin glass system, that can serve as a content-addressable memory.
The key trick for winning the Nobel Prize continues to be not dying before the committee recognises your work. Hinton is 76; Hopfield is 91.
- Speaking of Wikipedia the site really seems to have fucked the goat this time. (The Publica)
Downplaying over a thousand documented cases of child sexual abuse that have led to the arrest and conviction of 36 people so far.
No, Wikipedia, I don't think I will be donating to your fund drive.
Tech News
- AI image processing effortlessly transforms your precious memories into flavourless pap. (The Verge)
If even The Verge noticed this, it must be bad.
- Roblox is inflating its player numbers, says an investor newsletter aimed at short-sellers. (The Verge)
Gold is shiny, says an investor newsletter aimed and gold collectors.
Roblox called bullshit on this, citing its public earnings figures. However user numbers are calculated, revenue has increased 22% over the past year.
Not At All Tech News
As Tsunderia and Prism Project already have.
As with Prism, the company is releasing the virtual models and streaming and social media accounts to the individual talents, who are planning to continue on independently.
Speaking of vtubers, my pre-order of the Murasaki Shion Pop Up Parade figure from Amazon Japan (or rather, their marketplace) got cancelled, and now there aren't any. But it's still available to pre-order from Amazon US, and the shipping to Australia is dirt cheap (these things don't weigh very much), so I just put the order in again.
Amane Kanata is already shipping in Japan, so I ordered her and the Pop Up Parade Frieren figure, who can hide among all the Hololive girls.
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Tuesday, October 08
Top Story
- Artist* Jason Allen has requested judicial review of the US Copyright Office's decision to deny him copyright on his* piece Théâtre D'opéra Spatial. (Ars Technica)
At issue is that Allen did not paint the image, neither in a traditional physical medium, nor in a digital one. It was generated using Midjourney."Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" is a wholly original image expressing his idea, Allen said, and to produce that human expression, he dedicated more than 100 hours to refining Midjourney text prompts through an iterative process that he estimates took more than 600 prompts. Allen told Ars that through this process, he crafted his own prompt language after determining "which parts of his instructions were effective and which were not," as well as which parts were "not even considered."
If it took you ten minutes to try each prompt, I would have to wonder what you were doing in between.The Copyright Office has said that Allen's prompts are copyrightable, but only Midjourney was responsible for the output derived from the prompts. Walsh told Ars that if Allen had used any non-AI tool to transform the final image a little, even just applying a filter, he would be "good to go" to register his work and sue anyone who "verbatim copies" it.
Surprisingly, and the EFF concurs, the Copyright Office has this pretty much right.
* For some value of this term.
Tech News
- Bad news for Google, good news for Android users everywhere: The judge in the Epic vs. Google case has issued his final ruling, requiring Google to make third-party app stores (like Epic's) available via the Google Play Store. (The Verge)
No more monkey business like Google attempted with Samsung to make it all but impossible to sideload apps. The app stores must be installable from the Play Store itself.
In addition, Google can no longer require app developers to use its own payment services, or restrict how developers communicate with their customers how to install and pay for their software.
No such decision has been reached against Apple as yet - at least, not in the US. Things are not looking great for Apple in the EU.
- If you want a Lego model of an AMD Epyc server CPU - the current 4th generation model with 12 CPU dies - this is now a thing that exists. (Tom's Hardware)
It's not a working model, but it is a model.
- Asus' new "Nitropath" memory slots help your RAM run faster on partly-populated motherboards. (Tom's Hardware)
Up to 400MHz faster, which could increase overall performance of your computer by... 2%. If you're lucky.
Not without value, but not a big deal.
- How a Clinton-era law opened up US secrets to China. (Tech Crunch)
Yeah, who could have ever predicted that mandating back doors would lead to adversaries focusing their attention on those back doors?
- Speaking of which, Okta. (HackRead)
Okta is a "security" company that lets other companies outsource logins to their applications.
Okta is a constant target for hackers as a result. And they were successful. Again.
Buy Me Some Radioactive Peanuts and Cracker Jack Video of the Day
I don't care if I never get back.
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Monday, October 07
For Whom The Vacuum Vacuums Edition
Top Story
- Insecure "Deebot" vacuum cleaners made by Chinese company Ecovacs are recording you and taking pictures and measuring every corner of your house and sending the data back to the manufacturer. (ABC) (no, the other one)
But you agreed to this when you were silly enough to buy one of their products.The Chinese home robotics company, which sells a range of popular Deebot models in Australia, said its users are "willingly participating" in a product improvement program.
But I can use the app to delete my data, right?When users opt into this program through the Ecovacs smartphone app, they are not told what data will be collected, only that it will "help us strengthen the improvement of product functions and attached quality".
It also states that voice recordings, videos and photos that are deleted via the app may continue to be held and used by Ecovacs.
But at least the data doesn't go any further, right?Cybersecurity researcher Dennis Giese reported the problems to the company last year after he found a series of basic errors putting Ecovacs customers' privacy at risk.
But... Lerian Jihad time."If their robots are broken like that," he asked, "how does their back-end [server] look?
"Even if the company's not malicious, they might be the victim themselves of corporate espionage or nation state actors."
Tech News
- Intel's new Core Ultra 9 285K desktop CPU - expected to arrive this week - sets a new single-threaded performance record. (WCCFTech)
It scores 5268 on Passmark (my preferred benchmark for mainstream CPUs), about 10% ahead of competing chips from AMD and Apple.
On the multi-threaded version of the test, though, things are not so rosy.
There the 24 core (8P, 16E) 285K comes in behind AMD's Ryzen 7 7900, which has 12 cores, is two years old, and uses between half and one third the power of the Intel chip.
That might be a hiccup, but the 285K has only 8 full-size cores, without hyper-threading. (Intel has removed hyper-threading in this generation.) The Ryzen chip has 12 full-size cores with hyper-threading.
- React on the server is not PHP all over again. (Christoffer Artmann)
No, it's not.
- It's worse. (Infrequently Noted)
And here's why.
- After shutting down its cashierless stores - where you can walk in, pick out what you want, and just leave - Amazon is looking to sell the technology to other companies. (CNBC)
I hear this is already big in California.
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Sunday, October 06
Dexanthanisation Edition
Top Story
- Back at the dawn of time - which is to say, a few years ago - when an AI didn't know how to answer a question it would say it didn't know how to answer the question. Either that or tie itself into knots, spit out an entire ream of gibberish, and crash.
AIs today are much more sophisticated. Like many humans when they don't know how to answer a question, they lie. (Ars Technica)
This is what you get when you reward answers rather than accuracy. It's the comment spam problem all over again.
What's worse, the more advance the AI - the larger its training set - the stronger the tendency to lie.
And the more effort that is put into supervising the AI after the bulk training - a process called alignment - the stronger the tendency to lie and get away with it.
It's not really lying, of course, since the current crop of commercial AIs have no intentionality. It's just that they also have no concept of truth, and the way they are trained rewards giving answers, not just giving the right answer.
Tech News
- SSD capacity could quadruple by 2029 as the number of layers in flash memory chips continues to increase. (Tom's Hardware)
Before the development of multi-layer flash cells, SSDs had a real problem. We couldn't make the cells any smaller or they would leak - in fact, they were already leaking, and the newest SSDs were slower and less reliable than the previous generation.
The first multi-layer cells were significantly larger than in the chips they replaced, which made them faster and more robust, but the multiple layers provided much more storage in the same size chip.
If you don't want to wait five years, though, you could just buy four SSDs.
- Chinese state hackers reportedly gained access to the US wiretap system. (MSN)
So if the DOJ was listening in on your conversations, so was the CCP.
- Plastic-eating bacteria could combat pollution and possibly also utterly destroy civilisation. (MSN)
Scientists say that the latter scenario is "unlikely".
- California has passed a law protecting "brain information". (GovTech)
So if you are trapped in an advanced VR game where if you die in the game you die in real life, you can rest assured that the company that created the game cannot legally sell your neural scans.
- The latest HP OmniBook 14 Ultra isn't bad. (Notebook Check)
It lacks the Four Essential Keys and the screen is a 2240x1400 IPS model with a 60Hz refresh rate and 100% sRGB colour, which is good but nothing amazing.
But it has a twelve core Ryzen AI 9 HX 375, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.
According to the article it costs around $1050, which is reasonable for those specs, but I was unable to find that exact configuration in HP's online store.
Totally Not Tech News
But by the same measure xanthan gum will make the coating on your fried chicken chewy rather than crisp.
Doesn't hurt either that tapioca starch is cheaper than the flour blend. I tried straight cornflour as well, which was fine, but the tapioca worked better.
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Saturday, October 05
The Magic Word Is Tapioca Edition
Top Story
- Mark Muppetly, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, continues his spiraling descent into psychosis: WordPress.org just belongs to me. (The Verge)
WordPress.org is not non-profit organisation managing the open-source WordPress code."I happily provide WordPress.org services to literally every other host," Mullenweg says. There is "no requirement to give back. WordPress will be open-source forever and ever, and so there will never be any legal requirement to give back." But WordPress does still "request" that companies contribute something. "It's better for WordPress if they give back."
WP Engine's lawyers are reportedly looking at replacing their Porsches with Ferraris.
- 159 Automattic employees (the commercial side of WordPress) have taken the hint and the available severance offer and walked out. (The Register)
They are not going down with the ship.
- Meanwhile Melk Murgatroyd decided to join in a Hacker News thread on the WP Engine suit and... Potentially libel the party suing him. (Hacker News)
This seems unwise.
Tech News
- Having crashed the stock price by 90% through years of abject mismanagement, the Guillemot family and Tencent are looking to buy Ubisoft. (WCCFTech)
Yves Guillemot is CEO of Ubisoft and behind the decisions that have ruined the company.
Sounds like an amazing plan:
1. Destroy your own company.
2. Stock price crashes.
3. Buy it for pennies on the dollar.
4. Spend years fighting shareholder lawsuits.
5. Price continues to decline.
6. Lose everything.
- Civilization VII recommends 32GB of RAM, a 16 core CPU, and an RTX 4070 to play at 4K resolution. (Tom's Hardware)
Civ VI recommended 8GB of RAM.
- After getting smacked down by the courts last year, the SEC is going after the Ripple blockchain yet again. (CNBC)
It's the usual thing: The SEC says that everything and anything is a security without ever issuing any written regulations.
They just show up out of the blue with a lawsuit, and if you win, they just do it again the next year.
- The Pilet 5 is a big clunky PDA that you can't buy. (Liliputing)
It's kind of cool in an industrial retro way. It's a case, screen, keyboard, and battery that fits a Raspberry Pi 5.
According to the developer the hardware includes a laser pointer that "has the power to destroy planets, just like the death star" though this feature is not confirmed by the official specs.
- TSMC's 2nm node - called, reasonably enough, N2, is 25% more efficient than the current N3E process. (Notebook Check)
But also twice as expensive per wafer as the mainstream N5 and N4 processes.
Expect leading-edge devices to cost more when N2 chips start shipping next year.
- As expected, the Ars Technica commentariat is shrieking with rage that a judge has chosen to uphold the Constitution with an injunction against California's ban on inconvenient satire and the site itself has pinned the blame on Emmanuel Goldmusk. (Ars Technica)
Plus ca change, plus la orange.
- Ars also offered its own take on the WordPress debacle that is so hilariously one-sided that its own commenters are roasting the site. (Ars Technica)
Good.
Pixy Is Reading
The anime makes it through the end of volume five of the manga, out of thirteen volumes published so far. It's completely faithful to the material, with only minor changes where the anime could handle things better - where the details of how things moved or sounded were the key to a scene. The manga had to spell it out, where the anime could show you.
Volume six explains a couple of things that happen earlier, not in the retcon sense, but in the the-author-obviously-had-that-in-mind-all-along sense.
Still solid. Not Frieren or Apothecary Diaries level, but well worth the time.
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Friday, October 04
Yesterday Is Another Day Edition
Top Story
- A federal judge has issued a temporary injunction blocking California's new law against "AI deepfakes" noting that the law is overbroad and subjective. (Tech Crunch)
The judge is, as the kids would say, based.While a well-founded fear of a digitally manipulated media landscape may be justified, this fear does not give legislators unbridled license to bulldoze over the longstanding tradition of critique, parody, and satire protected by the First Amendment. YouTube videos, Facebook posts, and X tweets are the newspaper advertisements and political cartoons of today, and the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to speak regardless of the new medium these critiques may take.
Indeed.
...
California’s interest and the hardship the State faces are minimal when measured against the gravity of First Amendment values at stake and the ongoing constitutional violations that Plaintiff and other similarly situated content creators experience while having their speech chilled.
- Amelia Watson Hyte Y40 Limited Edition PC Case Status: Acquired
Sitting in the front hall right now.
- Calliope Mori Hyte Y40 Limited Edition PC Case Status: Order confirmed
Hyte confirmed that the order was processed before things fell apart, and they've fixed it. I've now received the confirmation email and the order is showing in my account on their site.
I'm not sure that I want to go through all that again for the Dokibird case. It ended up costing me an extra $200 to air freight a PC case to the other side of the world, and a regular Hyte Y40 only costs $130.
Tech News
- Cloudflare has blocked a 3.8Tbps DDOS attack, the largest on record. (Bleeping Computer)
Everything is awesome.
The attack was using a wide range of compromised devices, notable Asus and Microtik routers.
- Conservatives on social networks are censored more than liberals. (Nature)
But it's their own fault, say the researchers, for sharing unapproved information.
- What happens to all of 23andMe's DNA when it goes bankrupt as seems likely? (NPR)
It all goes in the jar.
Don't ask.
- The Magic the Gathering community is undergoing yet another incredibly stupid and very public meltdown. (The Verge)
At least in the old days, if someone thought you were cheating at cards they would just shoot you.
- What goes around: After Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, went nuclear on WordPress hosting provider WP Engine, blocking the company's access to the open source WordPress components and updating the WordPress dashboard to include posts targeting WP Engine, WP Engine has fired back with a lawsuit accusing Mullenweg and WordPress owner Automattic of extortion and libel. (MSN)
I hate WordPress.
Pixy Is Reading
Looks like the anime was consistently covering two chapters per episode, which worked well. There's 77 chapters out now, so nearly three seasons worth.
I'm reading through the part the anime covers and the adaptation is completely faithful. No material added, changed, or removed; just brought to life. Even the little interstitials explaining various things from the world they're in come straight from the manga.
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Thursday, October 03
Well Of Course Edition
Top Story
- Eric Adams' phone pleads the Fifth. (The Verge)
The FBI obtained two of the New York mayor's phones under a warrant served almost a year ago, but they still haven't managed to access any data.
Adams changed the password after the warrant was served - to prevent staff from deleting information that was required for the investigation, he says - and then promptly forgot it.
- The Amelia Watson Hyte Y40 PC limited edition PC case is winging its way toward me as we speak. Or as I write and you read. Or trucking its way.
The shipment of Calliope Mori Hyte Y40 limited edition PC cases to Australia disappeared into the Nether, so I broke down and finally ordered it directly from the US, exorbitant shipping and all.
The site took my money and then promptly crashed, because of course it did.
Tech News
- The TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus is an 8 slot M.2 NAS with 10Gb Ethernet. (Serve the Home)
It competes with Asus' Flashtor models, which come in 6 and 12 slot versions, but has more oomph. The 8 core N305 CPU is more than twice as fast as the older 4 core model in the Asus unit.
It's a bit fiddly to install and the operating system is meh, but it can deliver a steady 9Gbps over the network.
- If you run a Zimbra server which you probably don't it's time you patched it. (Ars Technica)
Nasty exploit in the wild.
- The modern economy rests on a single road in North Carolina. (Twitter)
The Spruce Pine quartz mine - the source of the purest natural quartz in the world - supplies critical materials used in every single leading-edge chip manufacturing plant.
- That road is gone. (Axios)
It's not known when the mine might reopen."This is second order of priority," The Quartz Corp said in a statement. "Our top priority remains the health and safety of our employees and their families."
- Cerebras - maker of the world's largest AI chips - is filing for an IPO. (Tom's Hardware)
A single Cerebras chip is the size of a dinner plate and contains 900,000 cores.
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Wednesday, October 02
Rat Attack Edition
Top Story
- After Broadcom bought VMWare, there were numerous stories of smaller customers being pushed to the wayside. Broadcom's general approach to marketing products is to have 600 customers and ignore everyone else.
Broadcom now seems to be experimenting with pushing everyone to the wayside. (The Register)
Court filings in a suit from AT&T say that Broadcom sought to increase prices by 1050% while also blocking its reseller channel from doing business with AT&T at all.
AT&T says that the proposed pricing makes the payoff time for moving from VMWare to literally anything else short enough that they see it as an investment rather than an expense.
Tech News
- A Chicago lab scooped up $83 million in federal payments for fake COVID tests. (Ars Technica)
The DOJ gave the lab owner a deal where he pled guilty to a single count of wire fraud.
I wonder who he knows.
- AMD's Epyc 8004 embedded server family is here. (Serve the Home)
I'm not sure what makes these specifically embedded, as they're socketed and work just fine in conventional rackmount servers.
These are lower-end and cheaper than the 9004 series, with 6 memory channels and 96 lanes of PCIe 5.0.
The processors are only available configured with Zen 4c cores, which are slower and use less power than Zen 4. Not a lot slower in a server CPU; these are clocked at 3GHz where Zen 4 chips run at up to 3.6GHz.
Prices start at $409 for an 8 core chip, and range through $855 for 24 cores, up to $4950 for 64 cores.
The 24 core model looks good if your needs lean more towards memory capacity or I/O bandwidth than CPU performance, since it would be slower than a 16 core desktop chip.
Even the 64 core version only draws 200W, which is another advantage.
- Microsoft Copilot can now read your screen and talk to you. (Tech Crunch)
Not if you uninstall it.
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Tuesday, October 01
Chiku Taku Edition
Top Story
- An 81 year old Montana man has been sentenced to six months in prison and three years probation, and ordered to pay $24,000 after he cloned and bred a race of giant sheep. (ABC)
He used genes from the Marco Polo variety of sheep found in central Asia, which weigh up to 300 pounds and have horns up to five feet long, which he crossed with existing Bighorn sheep to create an even larger hybrid population he called the Montana Mountain King.
As for the giant sheep, they've been ordered to be killed and their meat donated to create a race of giant pigs.
Tech News
- AMD has increased the performance of the Ryzen 9600X and 9700X models by increasing the TDP. (Tom's Hardware)
These currently run at 65W by default, but with a new BIOS update will be configurable to run at 105W, with the 60% extra power giving that 10% extra performance.
You could do the same thing with overclocking, of course, so the only real change is that this is fully supported under warranty.
- AMD has also released two small language models. (Tom's Hardware)
These are just like large language models, only small. With 135 million tokens, they will run on any functioning graphics card; you don't need an RTX 4090.
- Star Wars Outlaws has sold a million copies. (WCCFTech)
For a major game release, that's not good. Dwarf Fortress has sold a million copies, but that has two developers, not hundreds.
Ubisoft needs to sell at least four million copies of this game to break even on the development costs, never mind the licensing costs. That won't happen.
Their next big title, Assassin's Creed Shadows, is looking to be an even bigger failure. The company's shareholders are rioting.
- Google has won a lawsuit against scammers who filed false DMCA takedown requests to remove their competitors from the search index. (TorrentFreak)
Filing a false DMCA request is perjury, which is a felony, but I'm not aware of anyone ever being charged with that crime in such a case.
Here Google was awarded a default judgement because the scammers never responded.
- Epic Games is suing Google, again, and also Samsung. (The Verge)
Epic Games got a court order forcing Google to allow third-party app stores on Android devices.
So Google and Samsung collaborated to introduce new security features that effectively prevent users from installing unauthorised applications, while not providing any means for applications to become authorised.
Again, I don't like Epic, but Google and Samsung need to be smacked down hard here.
Not At All Tech News
The flower represents the 20 members of Hololive's English branch - the colours and patterns match each of the talents' costumes.
Frieren Season Two Production Trailer of the Day
No date yet but production has started.
Not At All Tech News Video of the Day
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Monday, September 30
Desert Bus Stop Edition
Top Story
- California governor Gavin Newsome has vetoed SB 1047, the "AI safety" bill that did nothing for AI or safety. (Tech Crunch)
Well, good, I guess.
- He has however signed into law 18 other bills involving AI. (Tech Crunch)
These range from common sense regulations on the use of AI when interacting with customers, to blatant violations of the First Amendment.
Mostly the latter.
Tech News
- MSI has confirmed that CUDIMMs work with AMD as well as Intel processors. (Tom's Hardware)
These are memory modules with clock regenerator chips onboard, allowing them to run stably at higher speeds - up to 9.6GHz currently, with even faster speeds promised.
The problem is that they are otherwise still standard DDR5 modules, so to hit those speeds they have to run at much higher than normal voltages.
- Kia's online dealer portal could be used to steal with the click of a button. (Bleeping Computer)
This has reportedly been fixed but who the hell thought that was a good idea?
- Are software developers gaining from the miracle of generative AI? No. (CIO)
Productivity has not improved, bugs have not been reduced, and developer burnout is as bad as ever.
If anything, unfamiliar AI-generated code is making the situation worse.
- Lenovo's 2024 Legion Y700 tablet is here. (Liliputing)
This is the only good small Android tablet on the market. And when I say "on the market" I mean not on the market, because it is almost impossible to buy outside of China.
Why? I have no idea.
Anyway, this model appears to remove the microSD card. The previous update removed the headphone jack.
Why? Because fuck you, that's why.
- After Unity committed suicide with its overbearing and larcenous new licensing terms, open-source competitor Godot had its moment in the sun.
It just committed suicide in a very messy and public way.
Godot's community manager went psychotically woke on Twitter, not just affirming LGBTQIA+ bullshit over everything else, but blocking users and hiding replies from anyone who dared to question this in even the most polite terms.
Hundreds of people. It just keeps going.
And the CEO of Godot has gone into hiding.
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