What happened?
Twelve years!
You hit me with a cricket bat!
Ha! Twelve years!

Tuesday, February 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 February 2025

Large Ham Edition

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Tech News

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Infinite ham?

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

Monday, February 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 February 2025

Gouda Nuff Edition

Top Story

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

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

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

    Everyone knows that's Venezuelan beaver cheese.

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Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Bonk.

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

Sunday, February 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 February 2025

Blep Panda Edition

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Tech News

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

    This is usually considered a bad thing.


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

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

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

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

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


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: You killed my hostage!

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

Saturday, February 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 February 2025

Nimitable Edition

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Tech News



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Disclaimer: Oops.

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

Friday, February 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 February 2025

Tired Tapir Edition

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Tech News


Musical Interlude


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

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


Disclaimer: Close only counts in horseshoes and retrocomputing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:05 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 236 words, total size 2 kb.

Thursday, February 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 February 2025

Plot Pant Edition

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Disclaimer: Better than rolling on gravel.

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

Wednesday, February 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 February 2025

You Can't Get Here From There Edition

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Tech News

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Can't stand not tea either.

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

Tuesday, February 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 February 2025

Heartbreak Hovel Edition

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Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: I never want to see gravel again!

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

Monday, February 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 February 2025

Apopliptic Edition

Top Story

  • AI systems with unacceptable risk are now banned in the EU.  (Tech Crunch)

    What risk, we ask.

    The EU actually answers that, sort of.

    "Unacceptable risk" AI is Class 4, and Class 3, which is not banned but regulated, includes AI systems for recommending medical treatment.  Fair enough; medical anything tends to be regulated, and there's no reason not to subject medical AI to standards and tests.

    Under Class 4, banned outright, we see:

    * AI used for social scoring, where the social scores are applied outside the context in which they are calculated - e.g. firing someone because of their Reddit posts
    * Inferring a person's likelihood to commit a crime unless you are the police and already have the criminal banged up because you think they done it
    * Subliminal advertising, which doesn't work anyway
    * Something so broad that it encompasses all advertising, which will be interesting
    * Anything that can infer someone's emotional state
    * Biometric analysis except when the government really wants to

    So yes, commies gonna commie, and the legislation has enough holes to drive the Bagger-288 through.

    Companies - anyone operating however tangentially in Europe - are expected to be in full compliance by, uh, yesterday.


Tech News


Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: Migraine, migraine, go away.  Come again when I'm somewhere else.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:47 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 404 words, total size 4 kb.

Sunday, February 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 February 2025

Combat Wombat Edition

Top Story

  • Nvidia's RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti might arrive in March to steal the thunder from AMD's launch of its Radeon 9000 family, but probably won't succeed at doing that.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The problem is twofold.

    The best selling point of the 4060 is its low power consumption, and Nvidia is using the same 4nm TSMC process for the 5000 series, so there are no easy wins there.  They can use GDDR7 memory, but that's more expensive and the chip on the 5060 is unlikely to be fast enough to make good use of it.

    With the 5060 Ti things are more complicated.  The 4060 Ti is 40% faster in theory than the base 4060, but has exactly the same 8GB of GDDR6 RAM on a 128 bit bus, so the performance of the card is meh, and collapses as soon as games demand more than 8GB.  You can get a 16GB model, but it's still constrained by the 128 bit bus.

    With the 5060 Ti, Nvidia can use GDDR7 - around 40% faster - and use 24Gbit chips so that the base model has 12GB of VRAM instead of just 8GB.  That would give the chip a lot more breathing room - but if it works well it will encroach on the 5070 and Nvidia can't have that.

    Also Intel's B580 already exists, has 12GB of VRAM, and costs just $250, constraining both AMD and Nvidia when it comes to lower-end cards.


Tech News



Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: Crazy little thing called Ziz.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:10 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 464 words, total size 4 kb.

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