Wednesday, April 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 April 2021

My Disappointment Is Immeasurable And My Day Is Ruined Edition

Top Story

  • Apparently Hololive forgot to renew their Minecraft Realms account for the EN server and streams from Ollie, Ina, and Amelia all got derailed.

    According to the Minecraft help site you can't renew a Realms subscription once it's expired, which is (a) dumb and (b) possibly untrue.

    http://ai.mee.nu/images/SecretRenewButton.png?size=640x&q=95

    If you can't renew expired accounts, why exactly is there a renew button on expired accounts?


    But in any case you can download your world for 18 months after your account has expired, and upload it to a new Realms account or to your own server.  That's pretty good retention; if you don't notice for a year and a half you probably weren't using it much.

    Meanwhile as I type this Reine is fishing for creepers.

Tech News

  • AMD's Ryzen 5000 desktop APUs are here - the real Zen 3 deal - and you can't buy them.  (AnandTech)

    This is the ongoing story of 2021: Here's a great new technical advance.  No, you can't have it.

    The 5300, 5600, and 5700 are available in G and GE versions - 65W and 35W respectively.  Compared to the existing Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs they have half as much cache, PCIe 3.0 rather than 4.0, and slightly slower boost clocks, but they also have 6, 7, or 8 graphics cores.


  • GPUs are in such short supply that Chinese scammers are trying fake recall programs as a way to get their hands on them.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Apparently four-year-old Radeon RX 580 cards are selling to crypto miners for as much as $500, when they only cost $229 new.

    I have two of them; unfortunately they're integrated into the motherboards of my two Dell Inspiron 27 all-in-one systems and not particularly easy to part out.


  • SiFive has taped out a 5nm RISC-V chip with 7.2Gbps HBM3.  (Tom's Hardware)

    "Tape out" means that the initial design is complete, ready for a test run from the silicon foundry.  It's called that because the first ICs were designed by manually laying down tape on a sheet of glass before photo-reducing it for manufacture.

    I didn't know HBM3 at 7.2Gbps was even a thing.  HBM2 is used in some high-end graphics cards, but typically at speeds around 2Gbps.  7.2 is quite an advancement on that.


  • A former CIA director says that governments should embrace Bitcoin, not ban it.  (Decrypt)

    Because all Bitcoin transactions are public, and they can use that to spy on everyone.


  • Apple ruins everything.  (The Verge)

    Discord is banning NSFW servers from their iOS app to fit with Apple's bizarre Marxist-puritan mindset.  Tumblr previously purged all their porn for the same reason, unleashing a flood of previously safely contained insanity that has since destroyed Twitter.

    To be fair, Twitter was on the way to destroying itself, but the Tumblrite hegira gave it a healthy push.


  • Starship is a cross-shell prompt written in Rust.  (Starship)

    I mean, sure, I guess.  Seems like overkill but if you spend all your time in Bash fighting with Git I can see the appeal.


  • Why some developers are going web-only and telling Apple and Google to go fuck themselves.  (Fast Company)

    Mobile app development is a nightmare.  Even if you get your app to work, your job has only just started.  You actually have to get it listed on the respective app stores, and keep it there.  And they take 30% of everything.

    Go web-only and you can write your code once for every platform, it just works, and you get to keep all the money.

    Of course there are some things you are simply not permitted to do in a mobile browser, because - everyone sing along - fuck you, that's why.


  • Dell has a new range of Inspiron laptops unless they don't.  (Thurrott.com)

    The article links to a post on Dell's site which links to a list of all the models in that range which doesn't include any of the new models being announced.

    Good work.

    That said, the Inspiron 14 7400 looks nice.  At least in Australia.  For some reason in the US there are exactly two models, not configurable at all, maxing out at just 8GB of RAM.

    In Australia there are a whole bunch of models.  They're crazy expensive but also regularly discounted by 40% because they want to make the purchase process as annoying as possible.


  • TCP/IP stack vulnerabilities make millions if IoIPoC devices vulnerable to hackers.  (ZDNet)

    That's "Internet of Insecure Pieces of Crap" in case you were wondering.  It's the new term that replaces the outmoded "Internet of Things".


  • Las Vegas wants to ban lawns.  (AP)

    I mean. it is a desert.  That's not absurd.  Overbearing maybe, but not absured.


  • Why is everything computer-related out of stock?  The global PC market grew by 55% between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021.  (Canalys)

    Yep, that'll do it.  I mentioned in a previous post that chipmakers TSMC and SK Hynix are each investing $100 billion in new factories to try to have supply catch up with demand.


  • Tech workers at the New York Times have formed a union.  (The Verge)

    I fully support this effort and the company's forthcoming collapse and bankruptcy.


  • There's a bug in CS:GO and it's a doozy.  (Motherboard)

    You can hack a player's computer by sending them a Steam invite.


  • How fast is the Radeon 6900XT exactly?  (Hot Hardware)

    In general it falls in between the Nvidia RTX 3080 and 3090, which is also where it falls price-wise.  On some AMD-friendly games it outpaces the 3090, while on ray tracing - a known weak spot - it performs more like the RTX 3070.

    It has the advantage of actually being available for purchase where the 3070, 3080, and 3090 are not.

    That's in Aussie dollars, and includes sales tax.... And a roughly 50% fuck you markup.


Essential Minecraft Mods Video of the Day



Time to thicken the chicken.

Kiara is a member of Hololive English - the same one we saw playing Diablo 2 yesterday.  Her streams are often a little, um, colourful.  She's the perfect foil to her teammate Ina, who has the demeanour of a retired Swiss kindergarten teacher.


Disclaimer: Calm, soothing, overly fond of puns, and armed to the teeth.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:21 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1045 words, total size 9 kb.

1 "Meanwhile as I type this Reine is fishing for creepers.Meanwhile as I type this Reine is fishing for creepers."
Have you run into jockeys yet?  Originally they were baby zombies riding chickens, or skeletons riding spiders.  A bit annoying in that hitting them usually only kills the ride, and then the hostile mob comes after you.  At some point they changed it so there are more varieties.  I once ran across a creeper on a spider.  A couple of days ago I was watching a GrayStillPlays video and I saw a creeper-creeper jockey, only they were both charged creepers.  That's some bad juju.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 15 2021 12:04 AM (eqaFC)

2 So after I posted comment #1 up there, the comment form, instead of being empty, still had the body of the comment, and the below in the name/mail/web fields (only i changed the left square bracket to a paren in case the parser tried to eat it.  Don't know if this was some kind of transient or what.
(f#^_^sqkwg#f.user.name]
(f#^_^sqkwg#f.user.name]
(f#^_^sqkwg#f.user.name]

Posted by: at Thursday, April 15 2021 12:12 AM (eqaFC)

3 Huh.  Well, it was f#^_^sqkwg#f instead of "final".  Also, I guess I forgot to put my real info back into those fields so apparently "" posted it.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 15 2021 12:13 AM (eqaFC)

4 Las Vegas:  I recall the same complaint in Phoenix 30 years ago.  Grass lawns in a desert are an idiotic waste of water.
Only tangentially related:  Have you see the trailer for Army of the Dead?  It's Ocean's 11 in Las Vegas, only Las Vegas is full of smart zombies.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 15 2021 12:18 AM (eqaFC)

5 [f#^_^sqkwg#f.stats] indeed!
Yeah, the whole thing of watering a lawn (with treated, potable water no less) in the desert is absurd.  Plus, the sand worms really hate that stuff.

Posted by: at Thursday, April 15 2021 12:47 AM (LADmw)

6 The obvious solution is to tax lawns at some absurd rate so the wealthy and connected types can still show off.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 15 2021 12:50 AM (LADmw)

7 "The PC is more than just a piece of technology, it’s a gateway to your passions, your work, your play, and who you are,” Dell’s Kevin Terwilliger writes in the announcement post. "Nothing brings you closer to the things that matter than our new Inspiron series, featuring a lineup that empowers the freedom of expression, connection, and communication with a whole lot of style.”

20 years ago this would have been blindingly obvious parody.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 15 2021 12:57 AM (LADmw)

8 The server got overloaded and made a mess, including a couple of things it shouldn't have done.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 15 2021 03:58 AM (PiXy!)

9 Ah, I see.  It somehow coughed up the internal post-processing tag.  That marks things that need to be interpreted even if the page is loaded from the cache.  Not sure how it did that without breaking the page outright.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 15 2021 04:24 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




60kb generated in CPU 0.0185, elapsed 0.1094 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.0984 seconds, 347 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.