The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.

Tuesday, March 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 March 2025

Idesn't Of March Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • There's a new RISC-V motherboard available for Framework's Laptop 13.  (Liliputing)

    Where the previous model offered just four cores running at 1.5GHz, this model offers eight cores running at 2GHz.  Which is taking things in the right direction, at least.

    Memory is still soldered, but at least now you can specify up to 64GB of it instead of the 8GB included with the current model.


  • How to think like a senior developer.  (Qntm)

    Go without coffee for a week, sleep on a rock, and deliberately stub your toe as you enter the office every morning.

    I mean, I don't do any of that.  It just feels like it.


  • Volkswagen says it was a mistake to remove physical buttons from cars.  (PC Magazine)

    Yes.  We know.


  • Quick Minecraft update: The modpack exploded.

    Turns out to be due to the latest version of Create, which breaks everyone's modpack.  The situation is a mess at the moment, but if I leave create at the previous version (0.5.1 rather than 0.6) and also leave some other mods at the previous version (Supplementaries, Another Furniture) it works again.

    I've also been playing a bit of vanilla Minecraft on a community server, and...  Modded all the way.


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Eight nations, though, that might represent a problem.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 271 words, total size 3 kb.

Monday, March 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 March 2025

Entschuldigung Problem Edition

Top Story

  • Nvidia's next GPU to launch will be the RTX 5060 Ti and it maybe - just maybe - might not suck.  (WCCFTech)

    The 4060 Ti had a 128-bit memory bus, leaving you with the choice of an 8GB model which didn't have enough memory, and a 16GB model which had more than the card's performance warranted, and which cost too much.

    The 5060 Ti has a 128-bit memory bus again, and 8GB and 16GB models, but with GDDR7 the memory runs 33% faster.  So if the price is right it could be a decent entry point for the new range.

    If the card is available.  And bits don't fall off.

    So probably not, on reflection.

Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: I think YouTube paid to put that line in.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:27 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 316 words, total size 3 kb.

Sunday, March 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 March 2025

Unrained Edition

Top Story

  • AMD may finally be breaking the 16 core ceiling with the Zen 6, offering as many as 24 and  even, well, 24 cores.  (Hot Hardware)

    The next generation is expected next year, and will offer 12 Zen 6 or 16 low-power Zen 16c cores on each CPU chiplet, with the standard two chiplets on desktop chips.

    So 24 Zen 6 cores, or 32 Zen 6c cores which will run at about 75% the performance, which works out to...  Exactly the same.

    Zen 6 is expected to arrive on the AM5 platform, the same motherboards used for Zen 4 and Zen 5, so it should be a pretty healthy upgrade.


  • Intel meanwhile is rumoured to be preparing a 52 core desktop chip.  (TweakTown)

    That's 16 full-size cores, 32 low-power cores, and 4 really low-power cores.

    Intel's low-power cores are a separate design and run at about half the speed of the full ones, and Intel no longer supports hyperthreading on its consumer CPUs, but with that many cores it's hard to go wrong.

    Except perhaps in power consumption, and even there Intel has reduced power draw of recent parts for horrifying to merely bad.


Tech News

  • Micron has shown off the world's fasted PCIe 6.x SSDs, deliver 27GB per second.  (Tom's Hardware)

    That's not quite twice as fast as the best PCIe 5.0 models, or eight times as fast as the three-year-old PCIe 3.0 drive I'm running now.

    Power consumption is quoted as "lots" and temperatures cited as "hot", albeit not by Micron.  I wouldn't expect these to show up in consumer products anytime soon, but I was wrong when I said that about PCIe 5.0.

    Though not about PCIe 5.0 graphics card, which only showed up this year and which only run about 3% slower when plugged into PCIe 3.0.


  • Snack makers are looking to remove artificial colours from, well, snacks.  (Bloomberg / MSN)

    But not from breakfast cereals, which you can remain assured will contain colours not found in nature, or indeed on the electromagnetic spectrum.


  • Burned down, fell over, and sank into the regolith: The Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander is dead.  (CNN)

    Not that private lunar mission, another private lunar mission.  Which landed in the same week.

    This one did land successfully at the Moon's south pole, but then tipped over.  The solar panels are pointing away from the Sun now, and its battery is empty after a single day of operations.


  • Did I slip a gear earlier this week and suggest some new NAS supported 5.25" hard drives?  I think I did.  Anyway, the LincStation S1 and N2 definitely don't.  (Liliputing)

    The S1 supports four 3.5" drives and two M.2 SSDs, and the N2 supports two 2.5" drives and four M.2 SSDs.

    Crowdfunding prices are $429 for the hard-drive based S1 and $309 for the SSD-oriented N2, which also offers 10Gbit Ethernet rather than the S1's slower dual 2.5Gbit.


Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: Yeah, I know what the lyrics say.  I don't look for informed political commentary from 1970s New Zealand pop groups.  It's still a good song.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 521 words, total size 5 kb.

Saturday, March 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 March 2025

Alfredon't Edition

Top Story


Tech News


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: I can see the fnords!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 375 words, total size 4 kb.

Friday, March 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 March 2025

Alfred Approacheth Edition

Top Story

  • The Trump administration is planning to demand the social media accounts of people applying for green cards, US citizenship, and asylum or refugee status.  (The Verge)

    Which is entirely sensible.  You'd have to be stupid to document criminal plans online where anyone can read them, but people are indeed stupid.
    "One way of looking at this is that it's an attempt at basically catching up to modernity," Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute’s US immigration program, told The Verge.  Bush-Joseph, whose work partly focuses on efforts to modernize the US immigration system, said that the immigration system "does not really reflect the reality of the twenty-first century in important ways."
    I'm pretty sure that's not what The Verge wanted to hear.
    Two documentary filmmakers sued the first Trump administration over the State Department's social media policy in 2019, arguing that it violated the First Amendment and hadn’t proven necessary to protect national security interests. ...  A federal judge dismissed the case with prejudice in 2023.
    So perish unbelievers.


Tech News

  • AMD may have an unexpected winner in the Radeon 9070 non-XT.  (YouTube)

    It's a little faster than expected, and a little cheaper than expected, and it very power efficient - possibly the best of recent graphics cards from any manufacturer.

    The cards are selling out and retailers are suggesting and restock won't come in at MSRP, though AMD is disputing that.


  • The US Department of Labor is investigating Scale AI.  (Tech Crunch)

    Scale AI is not an AI company; rather it employs large number of people to help feed training data into new AI models.  Two lawsuits have recently been filed by employees over the conditions of their employment.


  • Has Brother's printer division done an HP?  (The Register)

    The company says no, but users are reporting that their printers no longer support third-party ink and toner after the latest firmware updates.


  • If you need more memory on you graphics card, the Zeus from Bolt Graphics might be what you want.  (Serve the Home)

    The base model uses 120W of power, includes 32GB of LPDDR5X memory onboard and two DDR5 SODIMM slots for another 96GB, and a 400Gb Ethernet port so you can connect an entire cluster of them together.

    The top of the line runs at 500W, has 256GB of onboard memory and eight SODIMM slots, and six 800Gb Ethernet ports.

    Availability is expected late next year.


  • Cyclone Alfred continues to take its own time to reach the coast.  While delivering 110 mph winds, it's only moving as a system at around 5 mph.

    It's expected to finally arrive around mid-day tomorrow.

    Update: Yeah, the winds here are starting to pick up now, and I'm nowhere near the storm.


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: The previous disclaimer is false.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:42 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 467 words, total size 4 kb.

Thursday, March 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 March 2025

Oops All Pumpkins Edition

Top Story

  • AMD's 9070 XT is here and it's (read through nine pages of review) good.  (Tom's Hardware)

    At $600 MSRP it's a hair slower than Nvidia's $750 5070 Ti on non-ray-traced titles.  On ray tracing it's a hair slower than Nvidia's $800 4070 from last year.

    Now a 5070 Ti will cost you around $900 at retail if you can find one - which you actually can right now - and the 4070 Ti super is completely gone.  But we don't know yet what the supply will be like for MSRP 9070 XT cards, so it's not clear if Nvidia costs 20% more for similar performance, or 50% more.

    Reviewers have also noticed that the performance is very consistent, holding steady throughout a benchmark and also between benchmark runs.  That matters because a card that peaks at 80 fps but often drops down to 50 fps can feel worse than one that delivers 60 fps all the time.

    It's also 50% faster than my 7800 XT in non-ray-traced games, and 60% faster in ray tracing.  It will probably offer worse performance per dollar because I got my card at 20% under MSRP, but if you can't find a deal like that it should look much better.


Tech News


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Sorry, town's down.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:52 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 444 words, total size 4 kb.

Wednesday, March 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 March 2025

$81 Trillion Dollar Man Edition

Top Story

  • Citigroup needed to credit $280 to a customer's account.  They instead credited $81 trillion.  (MSN)

    That used to be a lot.
    Regarding Citi's transformation, the company spent $11.8 billion on technology in 2024, CFO Mark Mason said during its Q4 2024 earnings call in January. The focus was on "digital innovation, new product development, client experience and other areas such as cybersecurity," Mason said.
    They forgot "noticing individual transactions that approach the global GDP".

    Two employees approved the transaction and it was deposited into the customer's account before it was noticed and reversed 90 minutes later.

    Which raised the question: How?

Tech News

  • It Nvidia's new RTX 5070 a $549 4090 replacement?  No.  (The Verge)

    Is it at least significantly faster than last year's 4070 Super?  Also no.

    Is it at least available?  If you wanted to buy the Founder's Edition, still no.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Watching some review videos today, I noted that my brand new 7800 XT can only achieve an unplayable 4 fps on the new Indiana Jones game (at 4k resolution with maximum ray-tracing settings).

    The 5070 can't play it at all on those settings.  It crashes almost instantly then refuses to restart.  This review notes that in Cyberpunk 2077 the 5070 can only achieve 6 fps at 4k with full ray-tracing without upscaling or fake frames.


  • Scientists working on reintroducing the woolly mammoth have advanced another step: They created woolly mice.  (NPR)

    This is from Massive Dynamic Colossal Biosciences, the company that is also working to bring back the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger.


  • Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander has landed.  (AP)

    On the Moon.

    It's the first private mission to post a successful Moon landing thus far, though a few have posted unsuccess.


  • Mad King Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, the owner of WordPress, is talking succession.  (Tec Crunch)

    He's not planning to give up the throne, though.


  • Eastern Australia is about to be clobbered by Tropical Cyclone Alfred, which is inconvenient because that's where I keep all my stuff.

    I'm perfectly safe since I live inland, up in the mountains, and far south of where it expected to make landfall...  Which just happens to be dead center on Brisbane, our third largest city.

    At high tide, tonight.   Tomorrow night.

    Update: Actually they have no idea when it will arrive.  In the last few hours the forecast arrival has been pushed out by 24 hours.  That's not good news; even where I live hundreds of miles away we've started to get wind and rain from the edge of the storm system, and towns on the coast are experiencing gale force winds and storm surges.

    With northern Australia so empty, it's 50 years since a capital city here was hit directly by a cyclone - and it pretty much wrecked the place.


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Oh no, not again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:35 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 484 words, total size 5 kb.

Tuesday, March 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 March 2025

Overbugged Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: One step forward, two steps backward...  Good thing we weren't trying to get anywhere today.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:32 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 366 words, total size 3 kb.

Monday, March 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 March 2025

Taken Angles Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Do not.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:51 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 287 words, total size 3 kb.

Sunday, March 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 March 2025

Eucatastrophic Edition

Top Story

  • GPT 4.5 is here and it's... Not great.  (Ars Technica)

    It's slightly better than GPT 4o on some things, slightly worse on others...  And costs up to 30 times as much.

    That's not a great combination.

Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: You can pet the dog.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:25 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 193 words, total size 2 kb.

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