• Why we're unlikely to get artificial general intelligence anytime soon.  (MSN)
  
  Because all the money - somehow - is working on artificial vapid idiots.

  "The technology we're building today is not sufficient to get there," said Nick Frosst, a founder of the AI startup Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered AI researcher of the last 50 years.  "What we are building now are things that take in words and predict the next most likely word, or they take in pixels and predict the next most likely pixel.  That's very different from what you and I do."

  This is of course true and makes me wonder how Nick has avoided being executed as a heretic.

  Opinions differ in part because scientists cannot even agree on a way of defining human intelligence, arguing endlessly over the merits and flaws of IQ tests and other benchmarks.  Comparing our own brains to machines is even more subjective.  This means that identifying AGI is essentially a matter of opinion.

  Correct.  But we are at least getting good at creating vapid idiots.
  
  I'm not sure why we are doing that, but we are good at it.

• Running the latest Nvidia RTX 5000 GPUs on a nearly 20 year old Intel Core 2 CPU turns out to deliver underwhelming results.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It does work.  That is, Windows runs and the graphics drivers load.  Doing anything useful is left as an exercise for the reader.
  
  
  
• Fancy - and very expensive - printer manufacturer Procolored delivered a free bonus with every printer: Malware.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  For months.
  
  
  
• Why did Amazon's flying delivery drones crash during testing?  (MSN)
  
  Because that's what testing is for.
  
  
  
• Tech startup Firecrawl is ready to pay $1 million to hire three AI agents as employees.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Nuke the entire site from orbit.

• Proton - the company behind secure email ProtonMail and also ProtonVPN - has said it will leave Switzerland if new legislation passes that would require all internet service to maintain IP logging.  (Tech Radar)
  
  Proton keeps only very short-term logs to keep the system running, and only provides customer information reluctantly and with a court order.  Proton's CEO says the new laws would violate privacy in ways already forbidden in the US and EU.
  
  
  
• So where would Proton go?  Well, not anywhere in the EU, which is planning legislation that would outlaw security entirely.  (Tech Radar)
  
  The proposed rules would mandate backdoors in all end-to-end secure protocols, affecting not just Proton's services, but every website and app in the world except for those that are already not secure.

• Introducing Pyrefly, a new tool that hacks type checking into Python after the fact.  (Facebook)
  
  Use a type-safe language in the first place.
  
  
  
• Like Seed7.  (Thomas Mertes)
  
  Probably not, because this is a language written by one guy in a cave with a box of scraps.
  
  But maybe, because it looks to be well-designed and well-documented.  It's a pretty conventional member of the Pascal family of languages - not at all a bad thing - with a pretty solid set of built-in types and structures.  If you have a passing familiarity with any language descended from Pascal you can read Seed7 code.
  
  
  
• No, the universe will not disintegrate in 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years.  You idiots.  (Azimuth)

  Thus, if the underlying space-time admits a everywhere time-like Killing field, the vacuum state is indeed stable and phenomena such as the spontaneous creation of particles do not occur.

  Fair enough.

  This condition of having an "everywhere time-like Killing field" says that a spacetime has time translation symmetry.  Ashtekar and Magnon also assume that spacetime is globally hyperbolic and that the wave equation for a massive spin-zero particle has a smooth solution given smooth initial data.  All this lets us define a concept of energy for solutions of this equation.  It also lets us split solutions into positive-frequency solutions, which correspond to particles, and negative-frequency ones, which correspond to antiparticles.  We can thus set up quantum field theory in way we’re used to on Minkowski spacetime, where there’s a well-defined vacuum which does not decay into particle-antiparticle pairs.

  I know several of those words.
  
  
  
• Stack Overflow just committed suicide.  (DevClass)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• I've said many times that Unicode is a semantic Superfund site.  It tries to express every human language ever - including some imaginary ones - using a single character set.  But since the same character is used in directly contradictory ways in different languages, the Unicode team ended up with multiple character codes for visually identical characters.
  
  Oh, not only is Unicode a complete semantic disaster, but both Unicode and the fonts used to display it are Turing-complete - the text is a programming language that executes itself.  (Stack Exchange)
  
  Which gives you an infinite attack surface for every program written using Unicode, which these days is all of them.  (Daniel Stenberg)
  
  SIXBIT or bust.
  
  
  
• Silicon Power's new CUDIMMs run at 9200MHz.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Albeit at 1.45v.  The standard voltage for DDR5 memory is 1.1v.
  
  And also only on Intel CPUs.  On Ryzen 8000 and 9000 CPUs they drop back to default speed, which is just 3200MHz.  On Ryzen 7000 CPUs they don't work at all.

Posted by: Tim Turner at Sunday, May 18 2025 09:53 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 19 2025 01:23 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: MP at Monday, May 19 2025 01:50 AM (B9Qbl)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, May 19 2025 09:41 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, May 19 2025 01:21 PM (+i6Xr)

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• Facebook is arguing in court that the FTC has no case that Facebook has become terrible because Facebook was always terrible.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They might have a point there.

• Verizon is paying $9.6 billion and taking on $10 billion in debt to acquire Frontier.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Frontier previously bought Verizon's network operations in California, Florida, and Texas in 2016, and fucked everything up.
  
  
  
• Charter is buying Cox (the Communications cancel out) for $21.9 billion.  (Reuters)
  
  There will be no competition and we don't much care whether you like it.
  
  
  
• NASA has restored the primary roll thrusters on Voyager 1, twenty years after they were deemed unrepairable, and just before a long maintenance window on communications would have canceled out any such efforts.  (Space)
  
  The backup thrusters are also failing and without them the spacecraft could not continue pointing its antenna back at Earth.
  
  This was not considered an issue when the thrusters were sidelined in 2004 because honestly nobody thought the probes would keep working this long.
  
  
  
• MIT has formally requested arXiv take down one of its preprint papers, not because of any beef with the service, but because the paper is apparently garbage.  (MIT)
  
  They won't say what the problems are, but we'll know soon enough.  Preprint services provide access to scientific papers that have not yet been peer reviewed and published, so it's not unusual for there to be errors, and everyone understands that.  So taking down even the preprint suggests it's a bit embarrassing.
  
  
  
• The end of Windows 10 is nigh, but don't chuck your old PC yet even if it can't be upgraded to Windows 11 because Microsoft sucks; you can still run Linux or - the article doesn't mention this option - keep right on running Windows 10.  (The Register)
  
  Microsoft will stop updating Windows 10 itself, true.  But security updates for Windows Defender antivirus, and patches for the various version of Microsoft Office running on Windows 10, will continue through 2028.
  
  That's plenty of time for a PC to naturally implode all by itself.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is planning a new datacenter in Abu Dhabi that covers ten square miles and uses five gigawatts of power.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is four times larger than the company's new datacenter in Abilene, Texas.
  
  With any luck, that will also implode by 2028.
  
  
  
• Crypto company Coinbase has disclosed a data breach involving inside actors affecting up to a million users and expected to cost the company up to $400 million to offset customer losses.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The people behind the breach demanded $20 million in ransom to not release the data.  Coinbase told them to go fuck themselves.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, May 17 2025 07:17 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, May 18 2025 03:20 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, May 19 2025 06:43 AM (ZLF73)

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• Netflix will show ads created with generative AI mid-way through shows and movies.  (Ars Technica)
  
  No it won't.  Not to me anyway, because I already cancelled my subscription.
  
  Not over this, specifically, but because it's awful.
  
  

Tech News

• The launch of the first all-Australian orbital rocket has been delayed because the front fell off.  (Ars Technica)
  
  
  
  
  
• ChatGPT will soon record, transcript, and summarise your meetings.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  No it won't.  See the item on Netflix.
  
  
  
• Harvard Law paid $27 for a copy of the Magna Carta.  Turns out it's not a copy.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  Well, it is a copy, but it's a very authorised copy.  Authorised by Edward I in the year 1300, and subsequently lost in 1762, and likely worth over $20 million.
  
  
  
• I stubbed my toe on the coffee table I left sitting in the hallway after spending the night in a drunken stupor.  I blame Trump.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The Verge having another normal one I see.
  
  
  
• Google has agreed to release the Nextcloud app from permissions prison.  (Nextcloud)
  
  Some good news for a change.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 16 2025 08:11 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, May 17 2025 03:18 AM (KOtXO)

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• The Kids Online Safety Act is back and has the potential to change the internet - or to get struck down immediately over the obvious First and Fourth Amendment issues.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The bill has strong bipartisan and industry support, which means it is just astoundingly awful.

  "Apple is pleased to offer our support for the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Everyone has a part to play in keeping kids safe online, and we believe [this] legislation will have a meaningful impact on children’s online safety," Timothy Powderly, Apples senior director of Government Affairs, said in a statement.

  Everyone involved in the creation of that sentence should be summarily executed.

• Zotac has announced a new mini-PC based on AMD's Ryzen 390 CPU.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is slightly slower than the top-of-the-line 395, with 12 Zen 5 cores and 32 RDNA3 graphics cores, cut down from 16 and 40 respectively.
  
  Since the full chip is likely to be thermally limited in a mini-PC (read: it would overheat) this seems like a reasonable decision.  If the price is right.
  
  
  
• A California judge has slapped counsel in one case with $31,000 in fines after they presented a well-reasoned, tightly argued legal case citing a multitude of relevant decisions that didn't exist.  (The Verge)
  
  The judge fortunately took a minute to look them up.
  
  
  
• Uber has announced its newest invention: Buses.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  No, really.
  
  
  
• ArtificialCast is an AI powered tool for .Net that that type-cast and transform any value to any defined datatype, safely and automatically.  (GitHub)
  
  Yes, it's guaranteed to work 100% safely and automatically.  Correctly?  You're asking a bit much, bucko.

  ArtificialCast is a demonstration of what happens when overhyped AI ideas are implemented exactly as proposed - with no shortcuts, no mocking, and no jokes.

  It is fully functional.  It passes tests.  It integrates into modern .NET workflows.  And it is fundamentally unsafe.

  There's a lot of that going around.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, May 15 2025 10:23 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: vermindust at Thursday, May 15 2025 11:40 PM (p/9aS)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, May 16 2025 03:06 AM (KOtXO)

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• The Kosmos 482 space probe has landed safely - sort of - in the Indian Ocean.  (Space)
  
  Safe for everyone else, anyway.
  
  The probe was supposed to go to Venus, more than 50 years ago, but got slightly lost.
  
  
  

Tech News

• It's 2025.  Why are banks still getting authentication so wrong?  (Jamal Habash)
  
  Because they're banks.  Something that is bad and barely works but has known risks is preferable to something that is good and works well but has unknown risks.
  
  
  
• There's some sort of kerfuffle between Google and Nextcloud over app permissions.  (The Register)
  
  Google has denied the Android Nextcloud app the permission to even ask for permission to access any file on your device to sync with your Nextcloud server.  (Nextcloud lets you run your own little cloud storage service - and other services as well - on your own hardware under your control.)
  
  Google only allows permission to access media files.  But isn't that largely the point of managing files on an Android device?  They're great for accessing content and awful for anything else.
  
  
  
• House Republicans have tried to jam a ban on state-level AI regulations into the budget reconciliation bill.  (404 Media)
  
  Okay.  Works for me.
  
  
  
• The universe is now expected to decay in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
  000,000,000,000,000,000,00,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, much less than was previously calculated.  (Phys.org)
  
  Make sure you have clean underwear.
  
  
  
• Curious variants of Intel's B580 graphics card have been spotted in shipping manifests, including a model with dual GPU chips and 48GB of total VRAM.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  These might be announced soon, but are not expected to actually be available for some time, if at all.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• Listings have started to appear for Nvidia's RTX 5060 graphics card ahead of its official launch at Computex next week.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There is one model priced at the MSRP of $299, which won't be available, with other models mostly priced towards or over $400, a price that should buy you the faster 5060 Ti with 16GB of RAM.  But doesn't.
  
  The base 5060 with 8GB of RAM is not something anyone should buy.  We'll see soon enough what AMD and Intel have to offer in competition.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Nvidia is increasing GPU prices by 10 to 15%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because of course they are.

• TSMC's $100 billion investment in new factories in the US seems to be paying off, with all US production now fully booked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Currently that's just the slightly older 4nm process, but the company is installing 3nm equipment right now and has started construction on additional buildings for new 2nm and 1.6nm production lines.
  
  
  
• The Asus DriverHub software is now the Asus Instant Vulnerability software.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't leave it running until they fix it.
  
  
  
• You wouldn't read a book, so why would you let AI read a book?  (The Register)
  
  Copyright law protects the right to make copies.  That's not what AI does.
  
  
  
• Slate Auto has received 100,000 reservations so far for its any-colour-so-long-as-it's-grey $20,000-after-rebates truck.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  A good start.
  
  
  
• Update: I found it!  (The Audio Guide to Babylon 5)
  
  When I tripped over the Sabaton / Babylon 5 crossover this was what I was looking for - the opening of episode 45 in the podcast.  It's a parody of Jonathan Coulton's Shop Vac song but rather more upbeat.  The singing perhaps isn't all that great but it's fun.

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Wednesday, May 14 2025 12:36 PM (XsuFr)

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• The killer app for generative AI is coding, say people who know nothing about coding.  (Fast Company)
  
  "Our new spreadsheet performs calculations faster than ever before, and only gets half of them wrong."
  
  
  
• Fake NPM packages claiming to support the Cursor AI coding system infected 3200 users before they were taken down.  (The Hacker News)
  
  And it's going to get much, much worse.

• Meanwhile an NPM package that previously did something useful suddenly contained a RAT instead.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  So much worse.
  
  
  
• Sandisk has a new SSD controller designer to support 1PB drives.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  128TB models are planned this year, with 256TB drives coming next year and 512GB in 2027.  1PB drives presumably will follow.
  
  Do not send to know for whom the price tolls.
  
  
  
• The boyfriend of jailed Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes has launched a new company that...  Sounds exactly like Theranos.  (The Daily Beast)
  
  This will end well, I'm sure.
  
  
  
• A team of physicists at the University of Texas has solved a major problem in making nuclear fusion a viable energy source.  (UTexas)
  
  It is now only twenty years away.
  
  
  
• You don't own what you just bought, Nintendo edition.  (Beta News)
  
  If you violate the terms of your license agreement - which Nintendo can change after the fact - the company can brick your Switch 2.
  
  
  
• The Overwatch 2 team just unionised.  (Kotaku)  (archive site)
  
  Aaaand it's dead.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, May 13 2025 04:26 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, May 13 2025 01:35 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 13 2025 06:17 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 14 2025 01:46 AM (yeIbg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 14 2025 10:50 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 15 2025 02:48 AM (SXtuF)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, May 15 2025 03:38 AM (rcPLc)

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• Microsoft is planning an update to Windows 11 with a less terrible version of the start menu.  (Thurrott)
  
  Don't worry, all the other terrible features are still there.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, Teams is basically Skype.
  
  I installed the free app for work.  It's...  Not horrible.

• AMD is changing sockets for its next-generation server CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Two sockets, in fact.  The low-end SP8 supporting up to 96 Zen 6 cores or 128 Zen 6c cores, and the high-end SP7 supporting up to 256 Zen 6c cores.
  
  I don't know why SP7 is bigger than SP8.  It just is.
  
  No specific word on whether the current AM5 desktop socket will support the next generation of desktop CPUs, but probably.  AMD's own history suggests it will only change once DDR6 memory is available, which will be a couple of years yet.
  
  
  
• Google will pay Texas a $1.4 billion settlement over collecting Texans' data without permission.  (AP News)
  
  And they promise not to do it again, pinky swear.
  
  
  
• The Beelink Me Mini NAS is now available starting at $329 including a 2TB SSD.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has an Intel N150 CPU - not fast, but it gets the job done, 12GB of soldered RAM, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, three USB ports, HDMI, and six M.2 slots.
  
  Those slots mostly only support PCIe 3.0 x1, but even that is enough for a single SSD to flood both network ports.
  
  
  
• There's a new stupid TikTok trend that is actually less likely than others to leave children dead or in jail.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The same site that promoted cheque fraud and autoasphyxiation is now just teaching children to short out their school-supplied laptops.
  
  So that's nice.
  
  
  

Chemical Interlude

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, May 11 2025 06:48 PM (QE7eq)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 12 2025 01:32 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Monday, May 12 2025 03:18 PM (bg2DR)

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• A lithium deposit valued at $1.5 trillion has been discovered in Oregon.  (Earth)
  
  Well, that's Portland sorted out.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Mexico has sued Google over naming the Gulf of America the Gulf of America on American maps after the American government voted to name it the Gulf of America.  (The Guardian)
  
  Yes, that's sure to work.
  
  
  
• A Florida state bill requiring backdoors for minors' social media accounts has quietly died...  But not before passing the state Senate.  (Tech Crunch)

  Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation called the bill "dangerous and dumb."  Security professionals have long argued that it is impossible to create a secure backdoor that cannot also be maliciously abused, and encryption backdoors put user data at risk of data breaches.

  State legislatures tend to be dangerous and dumb.  Sometimes their worst instincts are restrained.  Sometimes you get California.
  
  
  
• What's new in Swift 6.2?  (Hacking with Swift)
  
  Things.  I haven't really looked at Swift since I tested it against the PyPy Python compiler and found it about 0% faster.
  
  
  
• AI use damages professional reputation.  (Ars Technica)
  
  As it should.

Posted by: furball at Saturday, May 10 2025 08:44 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: furball at Saturday, May 10 2025 08:45 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: furball at Saturday, May 10 2025 08:52 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 11 2025 12:19 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, May 11 2025 02:54 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: David Eastman at Sunday, May 11 2025 03:23 AM (aAyxl)

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