Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?
Thursday, February 13

Protobugs Edition
Top Story
- Oracle chairman Larry Ellison says governments should unify all their data into a single feed for training AI. (MSN)
Fragmented sets of data about a population’s health, agriculture, infrastructure, procurement and borders should be unified into a single, secure database that can be accessed by AI models.
This is not unreasonable for already-public broad-scale data. Getting it all into a standard format so that AI - and non-AI computer tools - can analyse it could be valuable. If all of USAID's funding had been out there so that anyone could plug it into a spreadsheet and look for fraud...
Actually, people have been doing that for years and hardly anyone cared.
Anyway. He also wants your DNA. (The Register)
So that's a no.
Tech News
- Intel's new Core Ultra 9 285H - the top of the line of the middle-of-the-line Arrow Lake H series - is here. Is it any good? (Hot Hardware)
Actually, yes. Intel's Lunar Lake laptop chips are a bit limiting, since memory is soldered directly onto the CPU and there are just four fast cores and four slow ones. Now you can have memory soldered onto the motherboard and six fast cores and ten slow ones.
Which is better.
And it performs very well in tests, including - on this specific laptop - battery life. A big part of that is the MSI Prestige 16's 99Wh battery, but it lasts just shy of 24 hours playing video constantly, and weighs 3.3lbs which is pretty light for a 16" laptop.
- Emojis and other Unicode characters can be hacked to smuggle data invisibly. (Tom's Hardware)
I've said before that Unicode is a semantic Superfund site.
Now I think that ASCII was a mistake and we should all go back to SIXBIT.
- Why firing programmers and replacing them with AI is a mistake. (Defrag Zone)
Because AI is shit.
All the points made are obvious, but they are also correct.
- AI is shit. (The Register)
At summarising news headlines, but at many other things too.
- A neutrino moving with the energy of a ping pong ball has been detected by a deep sea telescope. (Phys.org)
Ping pong balls don't have that much energy by macroscopic standards, but neutrinos are about as far from macroscopic as you can get without ceasing to exist entirely. The single particle was so energetic that it triggered a third of the detectors in the telescope all by itself.
Minecraft Modpack Mischief
All the overlapping recipe issues have been resolved, thanks to the Polymorph mod, which resolves overlapping recipe issues.I had one crash, which looks to have been memory size related. I increased the cap from the default 4GB to 6GB and haven't had an issue since.
Remaining bugs:
- Turkeys lay chicken eggs. This was fixed last year, but since then the developers of the Let's Do series of mods have rearranged things and it seems to have become unfixed.
- Pressing B for my backpack when it's in the Curios slot on my back doesn't let me access the inventory. The backpack works, you just have to access it from your main inventory, or put it down and access it that way. Not sure why; I fiddle with my key mappings but got nowhere. (This was with a Traveler's Backpacks backpack; I haven't tried yet with a backpacks from Let's Do Camping.)
Update: If you equip the backpack via the backpack's own UI, the B key works - and leaves the Curios slot on your back free so you can also carry a quiver for your arrows. Not sure why it doesn't work otherwise, but this way is better so I'm not going to worry about it. And it all renders properly, so you are running around wearing exactly the customised backpack you created.
If you have a mod that generates swamp villages though, they can become ghost towns very quickly because villagers can't dig.
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Wednesday, February 12

Quicksand Preparation Edition
Top Story
- Average CPU speed actually went down in 2024, for the first time in twenty years. (Twitter)
There's a lot of speculation as to why, but no clear answers. The fastest available desktop CPUs are two years old, with no replacement models in sight. Meanwhile Intel has dropped its hyper-threading support - multiple threads per CPU core - which meant multi-threaded scores declined for newer chips.
But this average includes AMD chips which still have hyper-threading, and Apple chips which never had hyper-threading, so who knows?
Tech News
- A new attack on Google's Gemini AI lets users permanently plant false memories into the system, so that they are shared with unsuspecting users on the same account. (Ars Technica)
As far as I can tell, this doesn't affect the core Gemini training data; that's fixed irrevocably. So it doesn't persist across Google accounts, limiting the damage it can do.
But LLMs are fundamentally insecure to this kind of attack, like kindly grandmothers with confidence tricksters, and every patch is just a Band-Aid atop a growing heap of Band-Aids.
- How Elon Musk's bid for OpenAI could gum up Sam Altman's for-profit conversion. (Tech Crunch)
OpenAI is still, in theory, a non-profit operation with a secondary for-profit company commercialising the product. The bid was made for the non-profit group which owns all the intellectual property.
The state attorneys general in California and Delaware have already filed inquiries with OpenAI over its plans and the valuation of the nonprofit entity, so Sam Altman and the commercial side of OpenAI cannot underbid in their attempt to wrest control."Musk is throwing a spanner into the works," said Stephen Diamond, a lawyer who represented Musk's opponents in corporate governance battles at Tesla, in an interview with TechCrunch. "He's exploiting the fiduciary obligation of the nonprofit board to not undersell the asset. [Musk's bid] is something OpenAI has to pay attention to."
Which is the last thing Altman wants right now.
- While Tech Crunch has a sane article mentioning Elon Musk, other sites have gone as insane as The Verge. (The Register)
The writer feebly attempts to liken Elon Musk's team rooting out waste and fraud to a CPU microcode exploit, ignoring the fact that in such an analogy the CPU would be on fire to begin with.
- Speaking of AI Google is considering using it to make Chrome change compromised passwords for you automatically. (Ars Technica)
I assume they mean in navigating the password change process for each compromised website; this is not otherwise complicated.
- Smol GPU is an open-source GPU for RISC-V designs. (GitHub)
Meant more as a learning tool than a real product, but if you are synthesizing a small RISC-V core on an FPGA - and who isn't, these days - and need a GPU to go with it, it might be worth a look.
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Tuesday, February 11

Large Ham Edition
Top Story
- A group of investors led by Elon Musk has made a $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI. (Tech Crunch)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said "no thanks" and offered to buy Twitter, but neither decision is up to him.
- Meanwhile French president Emmanuel Macron said that Europe is not in the AI race. (CNN)
Ignoring the fact that increasingly Europe is not in the anything race.
Tech News
- Meanwhile Microsoft asked the question "Is AI making us dumber?" and found that the answer is yes. No. What was the question again? (404 Media)
So, does this mean AI is making us dumb, is inherently bad, and should be abolished to save humanity's collective intelligence from being atrophied? That's an understandable response to evidence suggesting that AI tools are reducing critical thinking among nurses, teachers, and commodity traders, but the researchers' perspective is not that simple. As they correctly point out, humanity has a long history of "offloading" cognitive tasks to new technologies as they emerge and that people are always worried these technologies will destroy human intelligence.
In other words, yes.
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The Yao conjecture on the time taken to fill the last empty slot in a nearly full hash table turns out to be false. (Quanta)
For forty years that time has thought to be O(n). It's actually just O((log n)2).
Don't you feel much better knowing that?
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If you need a single-board computer with more memory and I/O than the Raspberry Pi, the ROCK 5T from Radxa is one. (Liliputing)
It's not a lot faster than the Raspberry Pi - it has the same four A76 cores, but also has four slower A55 cores that the Pi lacks. But it has up to 32GB of RAM, dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, and two M.2 slots for storage as standard.
It does start to get expensive though.
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Monday, February 10

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.
Tech News
- Brainfly is a high-performance Brainfuck JIT and AOT compiler built on top of C# type system. (GitHub)
Why it is, we don't know.
- The Brave browser is getting a feature like the old Firefox Tampermonkey plugin, to let you automatically add scripts to web pages. (Bleeping Computer)
This lets you adjust the page layout of sites that fill the entire screen with a banner image, for example.
- How close is Elon Musk to controlling a nuclear weapon? (The Verge)
They got their answer:Launching a nuke requires physical access to the weapon itself. Missileers have to turn keys. A submarine crew must prep and fire a missile. A bomber crew must pull levers and hone in on targets. Short of Musk or his employees entering a silo, climbing onto a stealth bomber, or getting into a submarine, it’s not going to happen.
The entire article is pointing out that the premise is insane. But The Verge published it anyway, because so are they.
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Sunday, February 09

Blep Panda Edition
Top Story
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has weighed in on the DeepSeek drama, saying that in tests the performance of the Chinese AI was "the worst of basically any model we'd ever tested". (Tech Crunch)
He went on to say:It had absolutely no blocks whatsoever against generating this information.
What he's complaining about is that it answered the question.
The full interview transcript is here.
Now, the claim is the information related to bioweapons, and "can't be found on Google or can’t be easily found in textbooks", which means that this is public information, not military secrets, and the entire complaint is that DeepSeek works.
And that is simply not allowed.
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.
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Saturday, February 08

Nimitable Edition
Top Story
- How one of the DOGE team, who are all too young to know what they are doing in taking a wrecking ball to decades of government waste, incompetence, and fraud, solved the puzzle of how to read the vitrified scrolls of Vesuvius. (Tech Crunch)
Farritor had studied Latin and was fascinated by ancient civilizations. "I always read about archaeology growing up, and it’s like, wow, now I get to actually be involved in a project with Richard Janko," he recalled, referring to the classics scholar who was a judge for the Vesuvius Challenge.
Luke Farritor and his friends won a $700,000 prize by using advanced scanners and 3D reconstruction to read scrolls from Herculaneum that were burned almost beyond recognition but otherwise physically intact.
Watching the media tie itself into knots trying to tar these young geniuses as fascists is at least briefly amusing.
Tech News
- The UK government has secretly ordered Apple to hand over encryption keys that would allow it to read any information from any Apple user anywhere in the world. (MacRumors) (archive site)
And speaking of fascists...
Apple may simply stop providing iCloud in the UK in response.
- Nothing in this article is true. (The Verge) (archive site)
The Twenty Minute Hate, screaming at the sky about the unwinding of decades of government waste, incompetence, and fraud.
- Whatever happened to the Xeon E? (Serve the Home)
The Xeon E was Intel's low-end server CPU range, based on desktop chips but with support for ECC memory.
Intel still sells them, but they've been utterly demolished by AMD. The fastest Xeon E, the eight-core E-2488, is slower than AMD's six-core 9600X. And uses more power. And is a lot more expensive.
- Intel is however reportedly preparing 52 core desktop processor. (Tom's Hardware)
That's 16 performance cores, 32 efficiency cores, and 4 low-power cores.
Which is a lot.
- Minisforum makes motherboards. (Amazon)
You wouldn't know it from their website, but they make both mini-ITX and micro-ATX boards with laptop chips embedded on them. And not any old laptop chip either, but the 16 core 7945HX, which is as fast as a 12 core desktop 9900X )on multi-threaded tasks) while using half the power.
Which is interesting because at least in Australia, the board including that CPU is cheaper than the 9900X alone.
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Friday, February 07

Tired Tapir Edition
Top Story
- Arm has abandoned its quest to revoke Qualcomm's Arm license, largely because it already lost its lawsuit. (The Register)
Nuvia, which had an Arm license, developed a new Arm core.
Qualcomm, which had an Arm license, bough Nuvia to acquire the new core. This is where Qualcomm's new range of laptop chips originated.
Arm sued both Qualcomm and Nuvia, arguing that although both companies had paid Arm for a license they mumble mumble mumble and therefore mumble.
The jury laughed at them.
Tech News
- Qualcomm says its CPUs can be found in 10% of Windows laptops priced over $800. (Hot Hardware)
Not sure whether that is good or bad.
- The former head of the USDS - the department now running the DOGE team - has resigned effective immediately. (The Verge) (archive site)
He stated explicitly that he is not taking the fork. Apparently someone already stole it.
Musical Interlude
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.
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Thursday, February 06

Plot Pant Edition
Top Story
- The biggest breach of US government data is underway. (Tech Crunch)
What Tech Crunch means here is that decades of government malfeasance is being brought to light.
And they hate it.
- The biggest heist in American history: DC is just waking up to the Elon Musk takeover. (The Verge) (archive site)
What The Verge means here is that decades of government malfeasance is being brought to light.
And they hate it.
Tech News
- Typing on the world's largest keyboard maybe. (Tom's Hardware)
It has 178 keys, and is even larger than you might expect because the top two rows are all double-width. My Everest Max by comparison only has 136, but is both modular and much more compact. And prettier. And cheaper.
- ASRock's NUC BOX-255H performs pretty well. (Serve the Home)
Mini-PCs based on AMD's Ryzen 370 are still 25% faster than this. But also more expensive.
- No, Apple didn't just install SpaceX on your iPhone. (9to5Mac)
But if you have an iPhone 14 or later and you're on T-Mobile, you have satellite support today.
Because Apple just installed SpaceX on your iPhone.
- The Fruit Jam is a credit-card sized computer based on the RP2350B - the second edition of the Raspberry Pi Pico chip - with video output. (Tom's Hardware)
People quickly figured out with the original Pi Pico that it was possible to get it to produce a DVI video signal even though the chip has no video logic on board. Now you can get that without needing to make the hardware yourself.
Price has not yet been announced but the existing version sells for $15.
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Wednesday, February 05

You Can't Get Here From There Edition
Top Story
- AMD shares slid 5% on the market after annual results revealed a 14% increase in revenues and a 92% increase in net income. (Thurrott)
Because analysts were expecting even more.
Maybe at some point greed stops being good.
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.
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Tuesday, February 04

Heartbreak Hovel Edition
Top Story
- Intel has achieved the unthinkable and shaken half a billion dollars free of the European Union's grasping claws. (Tom's Hardware)
This is the interest on a billion-dollar fine levied against Intel back in 2009, and then largely overturned after a court battle lasting more than a decade.
Tech News
- Will no-one rid mid of this turbulent richest man in the world? (The Verge) (archive site)
Yet another article in the endemic genre of fascists weeping over the restoration of the Republic.Still, based on the events that have transpired so far, it seems the clear goal here amounts to a coup over the administrative state.
Jane, you ignorant slut, the administrative state is a coup.My editor reminds me that many of you were not paying attention in civics class and so: our government's famed checks and balances system relies on Congress controlling spending.
That's entirely backwards.
The executive cannot spend money not apportioned by Congress, but (with few exceptions) it is entirely within its power not to spend money so apportioned.
That's all it is doing.
- PNY's 1.5TB microSD card delivers 100MBps on writes and 150MBps on reads. (Serve the Home)
Which is pretty decent performance for the typical use cases of such a card, like... What do you do with 1.5TB of microSD storage anyway?
- AI company Anthropic has told job applicants not to use AI when applying for jobs with Anthropic. (404 Media)
Feel free to lie everywhere else though.
- How to run DeepSeek R1 without expensive GPUs. (Notebook Check)
Spoiler: An AMD Epyc server CPU and 768GB of RAM.
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