They are my oldest and deadliest enemy. You cannot trust them.
If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.

Wednesday, September 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 September 2023

Pixellated Edition

Top Story

  • 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.


Tech News

Disclaimer: Donna Noble has an overdue library book.  Donna Noble has been fined.

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Tuesday, September 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 September 2023

Failure Cascade Edition


Top Story


Tech News

  • 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?


Disclaimer: Retire to our summer homes on Mars, probably, to live out our remaining centuries in peace and harmony.

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Monday, September 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 September 2023

Chellenge Pellow Edition

Top Story

  • 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.


Tech News

  • 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.


Disclaimer: Put not your trust in ChatGPT, in LLMs, for they are subtle and quick to bullshit.

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Sunday, September 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 September 2023

Oops Part Four Edition

Top Story

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

Kiryu Coco of Hololive Japan's Generation Four was billed as a six-foot-tall shitposting drug-dealing Yakuza dragon with huge honka donka badonkers - in her own words.

How much of that can be empirically proven remains an open question but there is now one less question than there was previously.

(Yes, that's really her.)


Disclaimer: I wonder if, with a suitable filter, you could extract fresh drinking water from idiots, who do appear to be an infinite resource.

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Saturday, September 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 September 2023

Too Many Words Edition

Top Story


Tech News

  • 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.


Disclaimer: This open-source project is governed by the Pipkin Pippa Community Guidelines, as laid out below:

1. Fuck you.

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Friday, September 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 September 2023

Help Me Step Bro's Second Cousin's Best Friend's Pet Raccoon I'm Stuck Edition

Top Story

  • 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

Disclaimer: Which is a win all round, I'd say.

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Thursday, September 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 September 2023

Pies Of A Feather Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • 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."


Disclaimer: You know, I don't think they're at all well over there.

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Wednesday, September 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 September 2023

Talk Like A Parrot Edition

Top Story

  • 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



Disclaimer: On second thought, scratch all the ideas, I'm going to lunch.

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Tuesday, September 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 September 2023

Volcanic Irruptions Edition

Top Story


Tech News

  • 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.


Disclaimer: Did I say "problem"?  What I meant was...

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Monday, September 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 September 2023

ChatGPT Or Not ChatGPT Edition

Top Story

  • 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.


Tech News


Disclaimer: Bleah.

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