Tuesday, September 05
Daily News Stuff 5 September 2023
Blender Dysphoria Edition
Blender Dysphoria Edition
Top Story
- The EU is preparing to push for a global phase out of fossil fuels at the COP28 climate summit. (Euro News)
I guess LARPing at ruling the world is less effort than actually doing so.
Tech News
- Sapphire has shown off a Radeon 7800 XT card that isn't an awful blinged-up ultraviolet catastrophe. (WCCFTech)
It's a little chunky - a 2.5 slot model by the look of it - but otherwise unobjectionable.
$499 unless Nvidia does something drastic in the next few hours.
- Performance looks to be pretty good - but definitely wait for reviews. (Tom's Hardware)
The 7700 XT clobbers the 4060 Ti, and the 7800 XT is convincingly faster than the 4070, except for ray tracing benchmarks, and even there both cards actually win some of the comparisons.
The one game where both the AMD cards lose badly is Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing set to medium or higher. At the ray tracking "overdrive" setting the game is unplayable on either of the AMD cards - but the 4070 only manages 18 fps, so while much better it's still terrible.
- Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python. (Vgel)
Not a complete implementation, but a working compiler nonetheless.
It targets WebAssembly rather than any native instruction set, but the author thinks that actually made it harder, because WebAssembly is a very poor fit for C.
- Why are Germany's wild boars radioactive? (Washington Post / MSN)
Because they eat radioactive truffles.
And why are the truffles radioactive?
Because they grow underground and cesium from nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s is slowly leaching through the soil, where the mushrooms absorb it.
Result: Glowing green eggs and ham.
- Invasive species cost humans $423 billion each year. (The Guardian)
Close the border then.
- Llamas vs. chinchillas. (GitHub)
I'm sure this is very informative if you know what a cosine schedule is, but the article doesn't tell you.
It's about the time spent training LLMs compared against the quality of the results, and it seems that smaller models are better at every point.
Disclaimer: And "plus size" is right out.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:23 PM
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1
Curiously, the elites's preferred lifestyle devices somehow end up at the very end of the "phasing out" of all of this stuff that's bad for us.
Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 05 2023 09:17 PM (obo9H)
2
Good luck convincing China and India to phase out "fossil" fuels.
Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 05 2023 11:37 PM (BMUHC)
3
Personally, I think the idea of fractional slot width is ridiculous and the vendors should be mocked for daring to make such claims. It's a 3-slot card, because you can't put another card in that third slot.
Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 05 2023 11:46 PM (BMUHC)
4
Is Caterpillar producing a battery powered variant of the D9 dozer or any of it's other large earthmoving vehicles? No? Then we still need a robust world-wide fossil fuel economy. Our politicians are so stupid however, that I don't doubt we're going to collapse that economy too fast, and find that we've made things very difficult and expensive for all the hidden, but very important people who use heavy equipment to keep our society running.
Posted by: David Eastman at Wednesday, September 06 2023 01:24 AM (R7Z4D)
5
More of "AI" doing what it does best.
"404 Media reports that The New York Mycological Society has raised an alarm over the increasing number of AI-generated mushroom foraging books appearing on Amazon. According to the society, these books could pose serious risks to public health. "These AI-generated foraging books could actually kill people if they eat the wrong mushroom because a guidebook written by an AI prompt said it was safe," the NYMS stated on social media.
Sigrid Jakob, president of the New York Mycological Society, elaborated on the risks involved in using AI-generated foraging guides. "There are hundreds of poisonous fungi in North America and several that are deadly," Jakob said. "They can look similar to popular edible species. A poor description in a book can mislead someone to eat a poisonous mushroom.""
PS: "smart" quotes still causing Akismet to puke.
"404 Media reports that The New York Mycological Society has raised an alarm over the increasing number of AI-generated mushroom foraging books appearing on Amazon. According to the society, these books could pose serious risks to public health. "These AI-generated foraging books could actually kill people if they eat the wrong mushroom because a guidebook written by an AI prompt said it was safe," the NYMS stated on social media.
Sigrid Jakob, president of the New York Mycological Society, elaborated on the risks involved in using AI-generated foraging guides. "There are hundreds of poisonous fungi in North America and several that are deadly," Jakob said. "They can look similar to popular edible species. A poor description in a book can mislead someone to eat a poisonous mushroom.""
PS: "smart" quotes still causing Akismet to puke.
Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 06 2023 07:43 AM (BMUHC)
6
I've noticed newer motherboards skip a lot of slots now.
I've also never seen anything that plugs into a PCI x1 slot. (My 12 year old computer has one or two of those. There might be SSDs that do it, but I don't think they're supported.)
I've also never seen anything that plugs into a PCI x1 slot. (My 12 year old computer has one or two of those. There might be SSDs that do it, but I don't think they're supported.)
Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, September 06 2023 02:28 PM (BzEjn)
7
I was going to say something about PCIe 1x cards, but now I can't remember the details. Old modems? 100MB ethernet? Sound cards?
Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 06 2023 09:30 PM (obo9H)
8
Lots of things will fit in x1 slots: wifi 6, sound card, extra USB3 ports, LAN, 4-port SATA, video capture cards, etc. If you're feeling retro, there's stuff like Firewire.
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 07 2023 06:00 AM (BMUHC)
9
"I've noticed newer motherboards skip a lot of slots now."
So much stuff has migrated onto motherboards, there's less need. Sound, LAN, sometimes wifi; my motherboard has ten USB ports, including a USB-C 10Gbps and a USB 20Gbps on the back, plus headers for something like 7 more ports (USB2, USB3, and another USB-C 20Gbps on the front) and slots for 10 drives (4 M.2 and 6 SATA). There's not a lot of need for extra connectivity, although the board does have an x1 and a second x16 slot (that I think is electrically x4).
So much stuff has migrated onto motherboards, there's less need. Sound, LAN, sometimes wifi; my motherboard has ten USB ports, including a USB-C 10Gbps and a USB 20Gbps on the back, plus headers for something like 7 more ports (USB2, USB3, and another USB-C 20Gbps on the front) and slots for 10 drives (4 M.2 and 6 SATA). There's not a lot of need for extra connectivity, although the board does have an x1 and a second x16 slot (that I think is electrically x4).
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 07 2023 06:08 AM (BMUHC)
10
"I've noticed newer motherboards skip a lot of slots now."
So much stuff has migrated onto motherboards, there's less need. Sound, LAN, sometimes wifi; my motherboard has ten USB ports, including a USB-C 10Gbps and a USB 20Gbps on the back, plus headers for something like 7 more ports (USB2, USB3, and another USB-C 20Gbps on the front) and slots for 10 drives (4 M.2 and 6 SATA). There's not a lot of need for extra connectivity, although the board does have an x1 and a second x16 slot (that I think is electrically x4).
So much stuff has migrated onto motherboards, there's less need. Sound, LAN, sometimes wifi; my motherboard has ten USB ports, including a USB-C 10Gbps and a USB 20Gbps on the back, plus headers for something like 7 more ports (USB2, USB3, and another USB-C 20Gbps on the front) and slots for 10 drives (4 M.2 and 6 SATA). There's not a lot of need for extra connectivity, although the board does have an x1 and a second x16 slot (that I think is electrically x4).
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 07 2023 06:09 AM (BMUHC)
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