• 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

Musical Interlude

• 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.

• 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.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 07 2025 11:15 PM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 07 2025 11:18 PM (NEIix)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, February 08 2025 04:31 AM (KOtXO)

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• 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.
  

• 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.
  
  

Musical Interlude

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, February 05 2025 02:55 PM (QE7eq)

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• 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.

• China's new AI DeepSeek reportedly cost just $6 million to train but that was after the company spent $1.6 billion on Nvidia AI accelerators.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  My car accelerates very quickly to 60mph if it starts at 70mph.
  
  
  
• Intel's new 255H laptop chips have 30% better single-threaded performance than the 155H.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Multi-threaded performance is neither great nor terrible, but that single-threaded performance, if borne out by more tests, is desktop-class.
  
  
  
• What Okta did.  (N0rdy)
  
  What Okta did was trust the Bcrypt library it was using.
  
  What that meant was that for accounts with very long usernames, anyone could log in without a password, because the maximum key length for Bcrypt is 72 characters.
  
  And that bug - depending on which programming language you are using - could have been lurking there since 1997.  In the author's tests, Go was the only language that didn't stumble on this - three months after the very public Okta incident.
  
  
  
• AI sucks.  I'll blame my phone.  (The Verge)
  
  The Verge proving that it's not just dumb about politics.
  
  
  

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Tuesday, February 04 2025 04:27 AM (KOtXO)

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• 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.
  
  

• While we're engaging in wild speculation, will there be a desktop version of the Ryzen 370?
  
  This is a laptop chip with four Zen 5 cores, eight slower Zen 5c, and sixteen RDNA 3.5 graphics cores, and it's quite a sold performer.
  
  Originally there seemed to be no chance for this arriving in an AM5 socket because it only supports soldered LPDDR5 memory.  Except last month Geekom, Acemagic, and Minsiforum all announced mini-PC models with the Ryzen 370 and socketed DDR5 memory, and if that is possible then a regular AM5 model should also be possible.
  
  
  
• OpenAI has announced o3-mini, and updated reasoning model that is smarter and smaller than o1.  (Ars Technica)
  
  According to OpenAI.
  
  
  
• The US is - as expected - imposing tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China.  (The Verge)
  
  The Verge here is helpfully explaining that companies don't pay taxes; the cost is always passed on to the consumer...  Oblivious to the fact that this fact directly counters a critical Democratic talking point.
  
  
  
• I'm not saying it's a cult but...  Wait, yes I am.  This is definitely a cult.  (SF Gate)
  
  What the hell kind of name is Ziz, anyway?  Zardoz.  Now there's a proper name.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, February 03 2025 04:54 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: wheels at Monday, February 03 2025 08:05 AM (2j87q)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, February 03 2025 11:29 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, February 03 2025 03:42 PM (QE7eq)

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• The Minimal Phone is a minimal phone.  (Liliputing)
  
  Well, technically it's a minimal smartphone.  It runs Android 14 and has an 800x600 display and supports 4G - though not 5G.  And it has a camera - optionally two - and USB-C.
  
  And a physical keyboard and a genuine headphone jack and a microSD slot, all of which are becoming less common.  And the screen is a relatively tiny 4.25".
  
  Also less common is the use of an e-ink display, which gives much better battery life but is not great for watching videos or checking your photos, since it's black and white.  The video review attached to that article suggests it's not the most responsive device ever created either, likely directly tied to the slow e-ink display.
  
  Price is $399 despite the lower-end specs, presumably because phones that aren't bloated and annoying don't sell.

• Meanwhile Google's update to improve battery life on the Pixel 4a can improve it by as much as negative 50%.  (Liliputing)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Electronic Arts has re-released The Sims and The Sims 2, since its current games are selling in negative numbers.  (The Verge)
  
  The games have been updated to run on Windows 10 and 11, but supposedly not changed otherwise.  And you do get all the released expansion packs, of which there were many.
  
  You can get both complete game series and The Sims 4 as well (which is free) for $40.
  
  
  
• Intel's Falcon Shores AI chip is dead.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Design was completed and it was ready for manufacture...  Three years behind where it needed to be.
  
  
  
• Intel's Clearwater Forest server processors have merely been delayed by six months to the first quarter of next year.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These are built using only the slower, but smaller and more efficient, E cores.  Which is fine for a server - running hundreds of efficient cores is exactly what you need in many cases.
  
  Intel said the chips were delayed because the market "had not materialised", which is a curious statement since these are the first such chips Intel has produced.
  
  AMD meanwhile is selling all the server CPUs it can make and has another year of runway to devour the market.
  
  
  
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman noted that OpenAI is not open and never has been, but that the company would consider thinking about it at some point, maybe.  (Tech Crunch)

  "I personally think we need to figure out a different open source strategy," Altman said.  "Not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it’s also not our current highest priority...  We will produce better models [going forward], but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years."

  Well, that certainly clears up the company's plans.

  In a follow-up reply, Kevin Weil, OpenAI's chief product officer, said that OpenAI is considering open sourcing older models that aren’t state-of-the-art anymore.  "We'll definitely think about doing more of this," he said, without going into greater detail.

  Y'know, I really think they're getting into this "open" idea.
  

1 If you want a really minimal phone you can order that cell phone kit that has the rotary dial retro-look

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, February 02 2025 02:57 AM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, February 02 2025 02:52 PM (NEIix)

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, February 02 2025 08:50 PM (+i6Xr)

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• If you were waiting for an RTX 5090 or 5080 - which you weren't if you've been reading the reviews - they're gone.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Micro Center is sold out of both cards at all stores, though they only had 233 5090s in the entire country.  Taiwan, where the chips are made, received an allotment of just 84.
  
  In Australia, meanwhile, there aren't any.  Not that many people care with a starting price of A$4000 for the cheapest model.
  
  The 5080 - half the price for a chip half the size with half the memory - is more plentiful in the sense that there were a lot more for sale initially.  It is also completely sold out.

• Contec health monitoring devices are sending your information to China.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Though why they are doing that is a good question.
  
  When notified, Contec provided a series of firmware updates to resolve the problem.
  
  None of the updates actually fixed anything.
  
  
  
• Apple announced a quarterly profit of $36 billion on sales of $124 billion.  (Mac Rumors)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Google offered its Pixel/Android/Chrome software team voluntary redundancy after it smooshed them all together.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The last significant advance in Android was in 6.0's storage updates, so I'm not overly fussed if they all leave.
  
  
  
• The Pentagon is moving to block Chinese spyware DeepSeek after workers - who should all be fired immediately - connected to it from their work computers at work.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What?
  
  
  
• Italy has blocked DeepSeek entirely.  (Reuters)
  
  The country's regulators asked what data the company kept about its users and whether it is stored in China, which we know for a fact it is because the servers weren't secured at all and people were able to log in and download it, and the answers were "considered to totally insufficient".

Posted by: Frank at Friday, January 31 2025 10:05 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 31 2025 11:14 PM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 31 2025 11:20 PM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 31 2025 11:21 PM (NEIix)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, February 01 2025 10:44 AM (QE7eq)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 01 2025 02:10 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 01 2025 06:12 PM (PiXy!)

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• Nvidia's RTX 5080 is here and while it is tempting to blame it for the company's $600 billion share price free fall that was probably just a jumpy and irrational stock market and not directly related to the profound ordinariness of this card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's slightly faster than last year's 4080 Super, which was slightly faster than the previous year's 4080.
  
  It does best at 4K resolutions, where it's 9% faster, probably thanks to the much faster GDDR7 memory.  At lower resolutions where memory bandwidth doesn't matter so much, performance gains average just 3%.
  
  And with average gains that low, yes, it is sometimes slower than the previous model.  I'm not sure how, because by all the numbers it should be at least a little better.
  
  All the benchmarks seem to pit it against AMD's 7900 XTX, which comes out looking pretty good aside from ray tracing, since it is cheaper, includes 24GB of RAM compared to the 5080's 16GB, and is just as fast for anything except ray tracing.
  
  This review bizarrely suggests skipping the 5080 for the 5090, which delivers 50% better performance for twice the price.  Yes, if a $1000 video card isn't fast enough to justify the price, you should spend twice as much for something that is even worse value.
  
  We're going to see a repeat of this next month when the cheaper models - the 5070 Ti and 5070 - arrive.  In March we might see something interesting as AMD's new cards launch.
  
  But probably not.
  
  

• So Chinese AI platform DeepSeek reportedly ripped off OpenAI, but OpenAI ripped off everyone on the internet, so nobody cared.
  
  And it reportedly was collecting massive amounts of data from its users, but so is everyone on the internet, so nobody cared.
  
  But it was also leaking that data everywhere through misconfigured logging servers that were open to everyone on the internet.  (Wiz)
  
  I don't think that part was intentional.
  
  
  
• Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is going to spend tens of billions of dollars on AI this year regardless of the DeepSeek nonsense.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The company is planning to develop - and release as almost-open source - two new models in the Llama series to compete head on with the closed source ChatGPT.
  
  (The Llama license has a provision that you can't use it for free if you're a trillion-dollar tech giant, so technically it's not open source, but most of us don't need to worry about that.)
  
  
  
• AI-created artwork can receive copyright protection if it's not entirely AI-created.  (Associated Press)
  
  Which was already the case.
  
  
  
• Federal government workers unions, which rely for their funding on the number of federal government workers, are against plans to reduce the number of federal government workers.  (The Register)
  
  That follows.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, January 31 2025 04:25 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 31 2025 07:27 AM (NYS94)

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