• A new attack on GPUs can steal data from web pages as you view them.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This affects all significant GPU manufacturers - not just AMD and Nvidia, but also Intel (including integrated graphics), Apple, ARM, and Qualcomm's Adreno graphics, and impacts Chrome and Chromium-based browsers including Microsoft Edge.
  
  How worried should you be?
  
  Not at all.
  
  In the example provided by the security researchers, visitors to a malicious website that showed Wikipedia in an embedded frame (which Wikipedia allows websites to do) could have their usernames read by the site inside of, well, half an hour.
  
  If they didn't scroll the page at all during that time.
  
  What the hack does is very clever though not very useful, but is a great example of an entire class of tricks called side-channel attacks.
  
  The host website (the malicious one) loads the Wikipedia content, and then starts drawing over it invisibly using SVG filters.  (SVG is scalable vector graphics, a set of drawing operations supported by web browsers.)
  
  Most browsers support hardware acceleration for SVG, and if that is in effect, there is a consistent, measurable - though tiny - difference in the time taken to draw SVG filters depending on what is behind the filter.
  
  So by drawing filters over and over, at slightly different angles and screen locations, you can tell the difference between white background and black text depending on how long the drawing operations over each pixel take on average.
  
  It's statistical, and slow, but it gives you a blurry copy of what is showed on screen in a page that is supposed to be safely sandboxed away from the malicious site.
  
  So after half an hour of busily drawing invisible filters, the host website - knowing where on the page Wikipedia shows the username - has a blurry copy of that tiny section of the page and can OCR it and find out who you are.
  
  Of course, if you scroll the page at all during that half hour, its fun is ruined and all it gets is a jumbled mess.
  
  And what hackers really want is passwords and credit card CVCs, and all that it can get there - even if you leave the page whirring away with the login box open for half an hour - is *******.
  
  But when you see these hacks that leak data at the rate of one bit per minute or something like that, they are doing the digital equivalent of very, very slowly shading in a page on a notepad to get an impression of what was written on the previous page.

• Intel has clarified its clarification: Meteor Lake will be coming to the desktop, but there will only be Meteor Lake laptop CPUs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No build-your-own, no socketed chips at all.  Only laptop chips in NUCs and all-in-one systems.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Meteor Lake Intel's Ultra 7 165H - which is one - reportedly underwhelms in Geekbench 6.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though actually that's a decent score, so it will come down to price.  AMD's 7745HX beats it on both single and multi-threaded scores, but that's a...  Oh.
  
  The AMD chip has 8 cores; the Intel chip has 16.  And it's slower.
  
  Yeah, underwhelms is right.
  
  
  
• Why don't Americans eat mutton?  (Modern Farmer)
  
  Long story short: WWII field rations.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is raising funds at a valuation of $90 billion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Nah.
  
  
  
• The FCC wants to have another shot at enforcing Net Neutrality rules.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Here we go again.
  
  
  
• Even nine out of ten Ars Technica readers now concedes that the Jodie Whittaker era of Doctor Who was poop.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Most of the blame is laid at the feet of showrunner Chris Chibnall, but I think that is correct.  He also wrote some of the worst episodes in the Matt Smith era.
  
  
  

• Hong Kong crypto exchange JPEX increased withdrawal fees to $999 and set a withdrawal limit of $1000 a week ago amid fears that JPEX was a fraud and would soon collapse.  (Web3 Is Going Great)
  
  Nah, everything will be fine.
  
  
  
• Hong Kong crypto exchange JPEX collapsed yesterday and the senior management are on the run.  (Web3 Is Going Great)
  
  Everything will be fine.
  
  
  
• Hong Kong crypto exchange Mixin was hacked and thieves made off with $200 million.  (Web3 Is Going Great)
  
  Fine, I tell you.

• Samsung has announced that LPCAMM memory modules for laptops will be arriving next year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These replace the existing SODIMMs - or more often, replace memory soldered directly to the motherboard.  The modules are 128 bits wide so you only need one of them - and they're about the same size as a single SODIMM - and are designed to use low power, high speed LPDDR5X chips.
  
  They will be available in capacities from 32GB to 128GB, which means that finally we won't be stuck with laptops that have everything you need except they ship with 8GB of RAM and it's solder in place.
  
  I expect to see these modules soldered in place, because laptop manufactures seem to be driven as much by malice as anything else.
  
  
  
• Apple: Removes button from the iPhone.
  Totally Unbiased Press: This is the greatest thing ever!
  
  Apple: Adds button to the iPhone
  Totally Unbiased Press: This is the greatest thing ever!  (The Verge)
  
  Whatever would we do without our news media?

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 26 2023 11:41 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 26 2023 11:43 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 26 2023 11:46 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: at Tuesday, September 26 2023 11:46 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 27 2023 06:42 AM (obo9H)

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• Yes, Meteorella, you shall go to the ball!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel says that Meteor Lake will be coming to desktops.  It will launch on laptops in December but then follow on with desktop versions next year.
  
  Only problem is it ends up sandwiched between Raptor Lake Refresh - 14th generation chips - later this year, and Arrow Lake - 15th generation - later next year.
  
  Three updates in the space of 12 months?  Really, Intel?
  
  I suppose it's better than no updates at all.

• In which Donald Knuth plays Twenty Questions with ChatGPT and runs into the usual authoritative-but-entirely-wrong answers.  (Stanford)
  
  For example, the answer to:

  6. Where and when will the sun be directly overhead in Japan on July 4?

  Is completely wrong, because the Sun is never directly overhead any town in Japan.  As far as I can tell, no populated place in Japan is in the tropics; even Iriomote, made famous in Azumanga Daioh and at the southern extreme of the Ryuku Islands (which include Okinawa) is still somewhat north.  You'd have to go to a two acre coral reef called Okinotorishima for that.

  11. Write a sonnet that is also a haiku.

  Is the kind of thing ChatGPT is good at, except of course that it is strictly speaking impossible because sonnets have fourteen lines and haiku have seventeen syllables.
  
  And it does actually produce a sort of sonnet-haiku, while noting that it is strictly neither, so all credit to OpenAI for that.

  10. How many chapters are in The Haj by Leon Uris?

  This is a simple factual question, the kind that ChatGPT is notoriously bad at, and indeed the answer is wrong in every respect.
  
  Knuth was also pleased to hear that he made "contributions to" TeX (which he created) but at least ChatGPT recognised him as the author of the classic The Art of Computer Programming.
  
  
  
  
• I'm not saying it's aliens, but... A mind-boggling creature spotted in Japan has finally been identified.  (Science)
  
  And it's not Kson in that red dress.
  
  In this case, the mystery sea creature that nobody could identify turned out to be a perfectly normal agglomeration of bimodal larvae of degenean trematodes, a fluke belonging to the superphylum lophotrochozoa.
  
  But flukes are normally parasitic, so what these guys were doing just wandering around in the ocean remains uncertain.
  
  
  
• A new fully open source version of the Falcon LLM - Falcon 180B - is available.  Can it run on your computer?  No.  (Substack)
  
  By default it requires 720GB of video memory, which is more than most cards offer.  You can get that down to 360GB with some adjustment to the load process, which means you only need five $33,000 Nvidia AI accelerators to run it.
  
  You can get it to start by having all the parts that don't fit swapped to SSD, but there are limits to computational masochism.
  
  Also, no, you can't put a 4x128GB RAM kit in your computer.  That would be registered memory, and it just won't work.
  
  Fortunately for those of us who don't have a spare $165,000 just sitting around there's also a Falcon 7B, and that will run nicely on a 16GB graphics card.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 25 2023 11:46 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Raul at Tuesday, September 26 2023 05:26 AM (vms9e)

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• Well, poo.  Fixed now.  Automated backups ate all the disk space.
  
  
  
• Unity has fixed the major issues in its new revenue plan, now that it no longer has customers to provide it with revenue.  (The Verge)
  
  Shame they didn't give us advance warning so we could short the stock.
  
  
  

Tech News

• India's Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander, after completely failing to catastrophically impact on the Moon's surface, appears to have successfully succumbed to the frigid two-week lunar night.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  The lander wasn't designed to survive the lunar night in the first place, but they were kind of hoping it would wake up again when dawn arrived.  So far no such luck.
  
  
  
• Can philanthropy save local newspapers?  (Washington Post)  (archive site)
  
  Betteridge's Law applies.  Doubly so, because that headline was used in the Slashdot story about this Washington Post opinion piece, where the piece itself is headed:
  
  Even $500 million isn't enough to save local journalism.
  
  Interesting to see that coming from the Washington Post, because the Post itself survives only thanks to the bottomless purse of Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow Jeff Bezos, who is not Steve Jobs' widow so far as I know
  
  Because when it comes to actually reporting the news, the Post is utter bullshit.
  
  So what does the $500 million fund discussed in the article promise?  If you expected more of the same, piled higher and deeper, you win a Kewpie doll:

  That’s changing, however, because American democracy and American journalism both need help. Though funding journalism was formerly viewed as being outside the "democracy tent," in Mr. Brady’s formulation, it’s now squarely inside, along with voting rights, civic education and other long-standing priorities of charitable organizations.

  "Democracy dies in darkness," threatens the Post, "smothered by a pillow, if we have anything to say about it."
  
  
  
• The equinox is not what you think it is, ackshually.  (Scientific American)
  
  The name means "equal night" but because it starts getting light before dawn and isn't fully dark until after dusk, it's not equal.  In practical terms, days are longer than nights on average.
  
  Also amid all this pedantry they failed to note that what they were describing applies only in the northern hemisphere, and is reversed in the south.
  
  
  Edit: To be fair, there is a generic disclaimer at the top of the article; the author knows that the world is round. But when noting that the "actual" equinox is on a different date to the nominal equinox, it doesn't mention that this means that the "actual" equinoxes are on different dates in the different hemispheres - not just inverted, but off by several days.
  
  
  This disclaimer says:

  But also, just reverse the seasons and add six months to the dates as you read them, and you’ll be fine.

  But for the precise detail under discussion, this is not true.
  
  
  So am I simultaneously criticising the article for being too pedantic and not pedantic enough?  Yes.  Deal with it.
  
  
  
  
• New York has hired a 5'2", 420lb security guard to patrol Times Square subway station at night, and is paying $9 per hour.  (Gothamist)
  
  Oh, and it's a robot.
  
  I'm sure this will solve all the city's problems.  Or be destroyed by vandals in the first week.  One of those.
  
  
  
• The Eyertec (who?) AD650i is a mini-ITX motherboard with a laptop CPU and six M.2 slots.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which could make for a good small server.  It only has two SATA ports, but you might be able to use an M.2 to SATA adapter to get five or six more, depending on the available room in your case below the motherboard.
  
  Downside: No PCIe slot, and only 2.5Gb Ethernet.
  
  Oh, and Eyertec is a brand of Minisforum, who make some good NUCs.
  
  
  
• Sabrent is now shipping an 8TB SSD for the PlayStation 5.  (AnandTech)
  
  It costs twice as much as the PS5 itself, or five times as much as a basic 4TB SSD.
  
  
  
• The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District has partnered with OceanWell to explore desalinating water on the seafloor off the California coast.  (Yahoo News)
  
  Why the seafloor?

  "Basically the weight of the ocean helps drive the reverse-osmosis process," said Kalyn Simon, OceanWell's director of engagement. "By taking the [reverse-osmosis] process to a place in nature where that pressure naturally exists, we don't have to create an artificial pressure gauge on land, as we traditionally do in desalination."

  Uh, what?
  
  Okay, presumably you never let the pressure equalise, because then it would immediately stop working, so we're not talking perpetual motion here.  It just means that you need to pump both the desalinated water and - reading through the details - the salinated water from the other side of the filter, all the way up from the seafloor to the surface.
  
  Maybe that works out more energy-efficient, though I'm not sure how.
  
  Meanwhile:

  "Our policy is that ocean desalination should always be the last resort," said Charming Evelyn, chair of the Sierra Club's water committee in Southern California. "Water is not an infinite resource. It is extremely finite, and the ocean is not something we just get to dip a large straw in and pull whatever we want out, because even the ocean has to maintain a balance."

  Fuck off you human-hating retards.  They're not shooting the water into space.  Every molecule they process is going to end up back in the ocean.

Definitely Not Tech News Probably

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 24 2023 09:40 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 24 2023 09:42 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, September 25 2023 04:47 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, September 25 2023 11:55 AM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 25 2023 04:49 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 25 2023 08:45 PM (r9O5h)

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• Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.  (Markets Insider)  (archive site)
  
  Remove "95% of", "now", and "probably".
  
  My personal theory is that the NFT bubble was quantitative easing - free money flooding the economy looking for somewhere do go, and ending up in annoying place and making everything smell, the way floods always do, and why I live on a hill.

• Who is the son of Tom Cruise's mother?  ChatGPT has no idea.  (Substack)
  
  It knows who Tom Cruise's mother was, but it doesn't know who her son is.
  
  This is because LLMs - what passes for AI right now - don't know anything except which words commonly go together.
  
  
  
• The tragedy of Google Search.  (The Atlantic)
  
  Leaving aside the moment the irony of The Atlantic commenting on a once-prominent institution turned to shit.
  
  Google is facing an antitrust lawsuit right now, and is arguing that there are limits to economies of scale, which is absolutely true.  But Google Search has turned to shit because (a) Google has turned to shit and (b) the internet has turned to shit, and is propped up by Google spending billions to keep it the default search engine everywhere.
  
  The real problem here is (b).  How can anyone build a good search engine today when the good content is drowning in shit?  Breaking up Google doesn't help, because the internet is still shit.
  
  
  
• Ten reasons why Windows is going in the wrong direction.  (PC Magazine)
  
  Actually, 10 features that show that Windows is going in the wrong direction.
  
  The reason is Panos Panay, who is leaving Microsoft and heading over to Amazon to ruin their devices division.
  
  
  
• Can government debt solve fertility?  (Overcoming Bias)
  
  When the underlying problem being discussed is government debt.
  
  No.
  
  This is stupid, you're stupid, and I feel stupid for having read your nonsense.
  
  
  
• The problems with Cython.  (PythonSpeed)
  
  Cython is a halfway house between Python and C, which is great if you want to interface Python and C, but bad for anything else.
  
  The solution on offer here is Rust, with code examples that look like a compiler vomited.
  
  
  
• I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser.  (A Day in the Life Of)
  
  Not me, someone else.
  
  Good luck.  Not an easy task but all the worthwhile advances are created by people who are fed up with the status quo.
  
  100 opinions I hold.
  
  Not me, the browser guy.
  
  Though almost all of them are opinions I share, which is pretty damn unusual with lists of opinions found online.
  
  
  
• The PQXDH Key Agreement Protocol.  (Signal)
  
  How Alice and Bob can chat privately in a post-quantum world without that damn Carol sticking her nose in.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, September 23 2023 10:53 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 25 2023 01:30 AM (BMUHC)

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• Cisco is acquiring Splunk in a $28 billion deal.  (Bloomberg)
  
  If you were thinking Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter - and he did - then rest assured that the market hasn't come to its senses.
  
  What is Splunk?  I was under the impression that it was a log aggregation tool, which would never be worth $28 billion.
  
  It is.
  
  
  

Tech News

• CNLabel Contact Relation Younger Cousin
  Mothers Siblings Daughter Or Fathers Sisters Daughter  (Apple)
  
  This is a constant in iOS for localisation.  What the hell it localises to I have no idea.
  
  (Parses...)
  
  It means your youngest female first cousin, excepting for some reason daughters of your father's brothers.
  
  There is a language out there that has a word for that.
  
  
  
• Rishi Sunak defies critics and presses on with "Net Zero" U-turn.  (The Guardian)
  
  What this garbled headline means is that the Prime Minister of Britain has told the "Net Zero" death cult to get knotted and is acting in an almost sane and only partly self-destructive manner, which is the best we can hope for in Heinlein's Crazy Years.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is threatening to release an update to Windows 11 with AI shit smeared all over it.  (The Verge)
  
  Even Microsoft Paint is getting an AI update.
  
  If you have Windows 11 installed, it's not too late to scrub it and replace it with Windows 10.
  
  
  
• Microsoft also announced the inadequate Surface Laptop Go 3 and the overpriced Surface Laptop Studio 2.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Neither has the Four Essential Keys.
  
  On the plus side, they're at least not shipping models with 4GB of soldered-in RAM anymore.
  
  
  
• [url]https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/21/authors_guild_openai_lawsuit/]Authors Guild sues OpenAI for using Game of Thrones and other novels to train ChatGPT.  (The Register)
  
  OpenAI has countersued the Authors' Guild, saying that after reading A Game of Thrones, ChatGPT hasn't written anything for twelve years.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: FreeKnight at Friday, September 22 2023 11:16 PM (gXw+B)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 22 2023 11:55 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 22 2023 11:57 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, September 23 2023 01:34 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 23 2023 02:15 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, September 23 2023 11:54 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 23 2023 03:16 PM (r9O5h)

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• Workers looking for methane in a small village in the Lorraine region of France may have found something else: 46 million tons of hydrogen.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Oops.

• Re-Logic, creator of the smash-hit "2d Minecraft" game Terraria, has donated $100,000 each to the development funds for open source game engines Godot and FNA.  (Twitter)
  
  Terraria isn't even written in Unity; that's just how annoyed people are.
  
  I guess they can afford it though.  Re-Logic only employs ten people and Terraria has sold over 45 million copies.
  
  It's pretty fun, and will run on a potato.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile miHoYo, creator of a little title named Genshin Impact, which had over 23 million downloads in its first week, and which is written using Unity, suddenly has 39 new jobs open for game engine developers.  (Twitter)
  
  Not sure yet about the blackjack and hookers situation, but it looks like they're making their own game engine.
  
  
  
• A couple of years ago, the price of Bitcoin crashed by more than 80% in the space of a minute, before recovering almost as quickly.  We never knew who was responsible.  It was FTX.  (Adi's Thoughts)
  
  The were selling Bitcoin and misplaced the decimal point in the price, instantly losing millions of dollars.
  
  Which on the scale of the entire FTX debacle is not a lot, but still...
  
  
  
• Amazon now has its own WiFi 7 mesh network.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Where a base two-node Orbi 970 system from Netgear costs a whopping $1699, the same configuration from Amazon costs only, uh, $1149.  Which is less, true, but still not cheap.
  
  An Amazon Eero WiFi 6E two node setup costs $279, which is a lot less than $1149, let alone $1699.
  
  
  
• The Teclast P85T is another 8" Android tablet with an inadequate screen.  (Notebook Check)
  
  1920x1200 minimum.
  
  At least this one's cheap at $80.  Not sure if it comes with free malware.
  
  
  
• Always mount a scratch monkey.  (The Verge)
  
  "We're not obsessed with Elon Musk", added The Verge.  "We're not we're not we're not we're not."

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 21 2023 11:39 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, September 22 2023 02:01 AM (r9O5h)

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• Intel announced its Meteor Lake 14th (?) generation laptop chips, due to launch December 14.  (AnandTech)
  
  Meteor Lake is a laptop-only design; on desktop we're getting warmed-over 13th generation designs this year.
  
  The laptop chips are built on Intel's new 4nm process - at least parts of them are.  Each CPU is made up of four smaller chiplets, which interestingly is something AMD does with its desktop CPUs but not with mainstream laptop parts.
  
  They come with new CPU cores - both the Performance and Efficiency cores have received updates - and a 33% larger GPU, which will move it from half the speed of AMD's current chips to two thirds.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel also showed off an early engineering sample of Lunar Lake, a low-power CPU due some time next year.  (AnandTech)
  
  This looks to be built on Intel's even newer 2nm process, though we don't know much yet except that the sample works well enough to risk a live demo.
  
  Lunar Lake will be followed in 2025 by Panther Lake, about which we know nothing at all.
  
  
  
• Intel Announces 288-Core Sierra Forest CPU, 5th-Gen Xeon Arrives December 14/  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is like saying US Bombs Hiroshima, Hitler Dead, because while both statements are true they are entirely unconnected.
  
  Intel's 5th generation Xeons, codenamed Emerald Rapids, will have up to 64 cores, competing with AMD chips with 96 or 128 cores.
  
  The 288 core chip - built with lower-performance Efficiency cores only - will arrive some undefined amount of time later.
  
  
  
• Netgear's Orbi 970 WiFi 7 mesh system offers 10Gb network ports and up to 10Gbps of wireless bandwidth between the nodes.  (AnandTech)
  
  Sounds great.  I might not have to get an electrician in to wire the other three rooms with Cat 6.
  
  Prices start $1699 for the router and one satellite node, and another $899 for additional satellites.
  
  Scratch that idea.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, September 20 2023 11:40 PM (JqCHh)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 21 2023 11:38 PM (BMUHC)

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• A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction against California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, noting that the law - passed unanimously by both houses in the state legislature - is almost certainly unconstitutional.  (The Verge)
  
  Laws by other states - including Texas and Arkansas - to protect children from online porn have foundered on the same principles as California's law to prevent data collection of children: You can't conclusively prove that someone is a child online without placing an unconstitutional burden on adults, or on the children, or both.  Sometimes the threat is sufficiently direct that this is not considered unconstitutional - as for example in creating porn rather than merely viewing it - but none of these laws appear to reach that mark.
  
  Australia recently dropped planned age-verification legislation because, while we don't have the same constitutional protections here, someone involved was sensible enough to recognise that the the whole thing was an unworkable mess.

• Speaking of sense in unexpected places, the CDC doesn't have any:

  Updated COVID-19 vaccines are recommended for everyone 6 months and older and will be available by the end of this week at most places you would normally go to get your vaccines.

  But Australia:

  For younger people or older adults without severe immunocompromise who have already had a dose in 2023, no further doses are currently recommended. Their baseline risk of severe illness is low if they have already been vaccinated, and particularly if they have also had prior infection.1Therefore a further 2023 dose will offer little additional benefit even if it has been more than 6 months since their last dose.

  Australia's Department of Health doesn't recommend an additional booster for adults under 65 unless they are severely immunocompromised, or for children under any circumstances.
  
  You have to wonder how two health organisations can look at the same set of data and come to two so widely diverging opinions.
  
  
  
• Tonga is filling up with scrap.  (ABC)
  
  With a booming economy comes garbage, and with a small island comes nowhere to put that garbage.
  
  You might be thinking, wait, doesn't Tonga have an active volcano?  Build a trebuchet and problem solved.
  
  Well, yes, it does, but (a) it just exploded and (b) the caldera is about 500 feet under water.  Perhaps not insurmountable issues but that does make it harder to recoup costs by making it a tourist attraction.
  
  
  
• HyperDX is an open source alternative to DataDog, which is to say, a flexible monitoring platform for complex server environments.  (GitHub)
  
  I discussed DataDog briefly a while back after finding that the monitoring client was a 250MB download - 750MB installed - that included an entire Python runtime and who knows what else.
  
  After seeing that monstrosity I took at the matching client for StatusCake, which while somewhat less comprehensive was a single shell script that I could and did audit in under half an hour.
  
  The entire HyperDX codebase is a 5.6MB download.
  
  
  
• AMD has announced its Epyc 8004 Zen 4c low-end server CPUs, codenamed Siena.  (AnandTech)
  
  "Low end" now goes up to 64 cores, it seems.
  
  These start at around $400 for an 8 core chip, which isn't bad considering they have six memory channels and 96 lanes of PCIe 5.
  
  But they also run at around half the clock speed of Ryzen desktop chips, so just to match a 16 core 7950X (around $600) you'd need a 32 core Epyc ($1900) and things don't get interesting until you get to the 48 core model ($2700).
  
  We'll have to wait and see what the pricing is like on Zen 4 Threadripper workstation parts, but since clock speeds will be higher I wouldn't expect prices to be lower.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk has again floated the idea of charging a small fee for all Twitter users.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  He's focused on bots again, reasonably enough; they're a plague.  And charging any sort of monthly fee would eradicate them.
  
  Presumably these bots aren't using the official APIs and work by faking a web user, because the official APIs have already moved to paid plans (and absurdly expensive ones at that).
  
  The problem is, charging a monthly fee would eradicate the bots, but it would eradicate Twitter too.

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, September 20 2023 12:51 PM (BzEjn)

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• ChatGPT is not coming for your programming job - unless you are a very bad programmer.  (Wired)
  
  Programming is hard.  Or rather, programming well is hard.
  
  It's rather like painting: Anyone can pick up a brush and do a quick doodle, but Rembrandts are far and few between.
  
  It's actually worse than painting: A painting just has to be pleasing to the eye to be passable (it requires more to be great, of course).  A program has to work.  And a program of even moderate complexity can be a machine with half a million interoperating components, every one of which exhibits non-linear response.

  FORTRAN was supposed to allow scientists and others to write programs without any support from a programmer. COBOL's English syntax was intended to be so simple that managers could bypass developers entirely. Waterfall-based development was invented to standardize and make routine the development of new software. Object-oriented programming was supposed to be so simple that eventually all computer users could do their own software engineering.

  None of that happened, because programming is a fairly specific skill.
  
  What did happen is that programmers could use these new tools to accomplish more complicated tasks more quickly.

  We've introduced more and more complexity to computers in the hopes of making them so simple that they don’t need to be programmed at all. Unsurprisingly, throwing complexity at complexity has only made it worse, and we're no closer to letting managers cut out the software engineers.

  ChatGPT - or its open-source successors, like ArbitraryCamelid-7B7 - could make a difference in certain areas such as feature tests and pen-testing.  But LLMs won't and can't by their nature replace programmers, because they don't understand what they are doing in the first place.
  
  The LLMs, I mean.  Often the programmers too, but the distinction is, not always.
  
  We'd require a different, older, and harder form of AI to do that, and right now nobody is even looking in that direction.

• The Mac didn't bring programming to the people.  (Eclectic Light)
  
  Because the people can't program.
  
  That is, most individuals have neither the interest nor the aptitude - the two very often go together.  If you do have the interest, you can probably learn.
  
  
  
• Catala is a programming language for legislation.  (GitHub)
  
  You can annotate laws with code that provides a mathematically precise definition of the requirements and outcomes of the text.
  
  The problem with this is that (a) legislators can't code, (b) lawyers can't code, (c) judges can't code, and (d) laws tend to be deliberately vague.  What good is a law if you can't abuse it to your own benefit?
  
  
  
• Roblox game developers got duped by malicious NPM packages that used custom compression techniques to sneak past automated filters.  (Cyber-Oracle)
  
  How this differs from non-malicious NPM packages I am not sure, because the core problem seems to me to be NPM rather than the hackers.
  
  
  
• Embattled game engine developer Unity has closed two offices and canceled an all-hands meeting after receiving death threats...  From its own staff.  (The Register)
  
  The call is coming from inside the house.
  
  
  
• Speaking of malicious packages, remember when Unity merged with malware developer IronSource?  (PC Gamer)
  
  That was last year.
  
  
  
• Formatting Text in C++: The old and the new ways.  (Marius Bancila)
  
  I mostly program in Python these days.  I'm about to embark on a project that will require the use of C++, which is rather like swapping an electric chainsaw for a lump of obsidian.
  
  The examples shown here - old and new alike - are hopelessly antiquated nonsense.  Not the fault of the author but of the language itself.
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, September 19 2023 12:43 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, September 19 2023 06:29 PM (JqCHh)

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