Sunday, December 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 December 2021

Notched Quanta Edition

Top Story

  • "I'm going to need your smallest violin."
    "This is the Stradicaster 50000.  Each one is hand-crafted by an ancient order of Bolivian nuns from a single neutrino.  Only three of its kind exist, and nobody knows where the other two are.  The price is-"
    "I'll take it."

    Right-wing activists are openly 'weaponizing' Twitter's new private media policy. (CNN Business)

    You'd have to have a heart of basalt not to collapse in a fit of giggles.  Twitter's latest attempt to curtail unapproved speech has backfired because it turns out - as everybody except apparently the room-temperature IQ goldfish running Twitter immediately realised - that the new policy banning the sharing of photos, even those taken at public events, without the explicit consent of everyone depicted therein directly targets the most popular pastime of Twitter's own core audience of rabid Maoist lunatics, which is to say, doxxing and destroying the lives of everyone with whom they disagree.

    Twitter thought they were targeting conservative pushback against violent left-wing nutcases, but what the rule actually says is that nobody can post photos of people without their consent.

    So everyone to the right of Kropotkin has started reporting the offenders en masse and they're getting them banned.
    In January, Samuel Braslow was covering an anti-mask protest at a Los Angeles mall for the Beverly Hills Courier, the 56-year-old local newspaper where he is a staff reporter.  During the public event, Braslow tweeted a video of a standoff between anti-maskers and a mall official — a common practice in the age of digital reporting.

    Braslow couldn't have known that, this week, someone would file a report about that same photojournalism and cause Twitter to lock down his account.  The complaint led to Braslow being unable to tweet until he either successfully appealed the report or deleted the old tweets.  He was stuck.
    Ahahahahahaha.
    "The videos in [my] post clearly represent newsworthy content, as they subsequently were picked up for broadcast by multiple affiliate stations and national outlets," said Braslow, who has previously appeared on CNN discussing his coverage of anti-vaccine rallies.
    Let me see where Twitter's policy has an exemption for newsworthiness....

    Oh wait, it doesn't, because the entire point of this policy is to shut down free speech.
    The rapidly unfolding campaign highlights how a tool intended to help protect vulnerable individuals has quickly evolved to help shield others from the scrutiny that might stem from their public actions.
    Funny how nobody predicted that this is exactly what would happen.  Oh wait.
    "It's really important to view the current mass-reporting actions by the far right as just the latest salvo in an ongoing, concerted effort to memory-hole evidence of their crimes," said Chad Loder, an anti-fascist activist* who said they use their Twitter account to document examples of far-right extremism and police misconduct.
    Translator's note: "Anti-fascist activist" means fascist.
    On Thursday, Loder said they were trapped in an "endless cycle" of reports, account locks and appeals as one of their tweets was reported under the policy, restored by Twitter following an appeal, and then reported again on the same day, resulting in another temporary suspension linked to the same tweet.
    I am so upset by this that I have the hiccups.
    The speed, scale and enthusiasm with which some groups have invoked the policy — along with numerous enforcement errors — have prompted some experts to conclude that Twitter's policy is backfiring.
    Where would we be without experts?

    Probably Alpha Centauri.

    Even that idiot Popehat is weighing in:
    It's impossible they didn't know this would happen, and it's inexplicable they didn't plan for it.
    No, Ken, that's easy to explain.  They're morons.


Tech News

  • Apple's M1 Max CPU has a secret interconnect bus. (Tom's Hardware)

    And when I say secret, not only did Apple fail to mention it, they edited the published die photos to hide it.

    Not until someone sacrificed an expensive MacBook Pro and took their own die photos was this discovered.

    There are rumours that Apple is working on 20 core and 40 core Arm CPUs to replace Intel in their high-end systems, and now we know exactly how they plan to do that.  The M1 Max is a 10 core chip, so two or four of those connected together will produce the rumoured high-end parts.

    AMD has been doing this for years - the 32 core Epyc server processors released in 2017 were simply four 8 core desktop chips wired together using the built-in interconnect.

    AMD has also done the secret feature trick more recently - apparently all Zen 3 chips shipped in the past year have the circuitry needed for the expanded cache in the recently announced high-end Milan-X server chips.

    It costs a lot of money to design a new chip and prepare it for production, so if you can bundle in a feature that you're not going to need for a year without delaying anything else, that can make commercial sense.

    It's likely that the interconnect, while present, isn't 100% functional yet, and there will be either a respin or a whole new version before the high-end multi-die processors can ship.  But in the meantime Apple has an unlimited supply of test units.


  • ActiLizzard management are not nice people. (WCCFTech)

    "I am shocked, shocked, to find bad behaviour going on in the gaming industry."
    "Your underaged Belorussian sex slave sir."
    "Oh, thank you very much."


  • Windows 11 now lets you set a default browser. (Bleeping Computer)

    In earlier releases you had to track down at least four separate settings.
    "Through the Windows Insider Program you will continue to see us try new things based on customer feedback and testing.  Most of them will be complete shit because ninety percent of our UX team is on meth, but what are you gonna do?  No, seriously, what are we gonna do?  These idiots are killing me."


  • A hermaphroditic cannibal has washed up dead on a beach near San Diego. (MSN)

    Hrm.

    Oh, fish.  A hermaphroditic cannibal fish has washed up dead on a beach near San Diego.

    That's normal.


  • Python library of the day is LocalStack, which provides a local test version of AWS. (GitHub)

    Without the Amazon part.  Install it on your own hardware or hosted server and spin up whichever services you need.

    The free version doesn't support every single AWS feature, but it goes a long way:

    • ACM
    • API Gateway
    • CloudFormation
    • CloudWatch
    • CloudWatch Logs
    • DynamoDB
    • DynamoDB Streams
    • EC2
    • Elasticsearch Service
    • EventBridge (CloudWatch Events)
    • Firehose
    • IAM
    • Kinesis
    • KMS
    • Lambda
    • Redshift
    • Route53
    • S3
    • SecretsManager
    • SES
    • SNS
    • SQS
    • SSM
    • StepFunctions
    • STS

    There's a paid version for €20 per month per developer that has even more features, but that's kind of a problem.  What happens to the software running on my own server if I stop paying the monthly license fee?

    The answer seems to be, don't do that.  Inviting as it might be, this is for testing not for persistent data.  Even the paid version has only a very basic persistence mechanism.  The free version uses a replay log to restore the state - if you reboot it starts with a blank slate and just runs every API call you've send since you last explicitly reset the data.


What If Everything Were Spiders?

No people. No language. No war. Only spiders.

We communicate through sensation alone, touch, smell, taste. Feeling with our eight long legs. Beady black eyes look out, only to see a swarm of our brothers and sisters. They look back. We click. We scamper.

No air. No sea. No land. Only spiders.

We crawl over the bodies of one another. Suffocate against one another. A dark, writhing mass. We eat one another for sustenance. We lay our eggs in the carcasses of the deceased. Life and death cycle as it can, the living spring from the dead to have their turn. We breed. We rot.

No heat. No time. No space. Only spiders.

Were a wayward, miraculous human scientist to somehow observe us, it could be speculated that our atoms and molecules resemble the mass of our whole selves. Were a wayward, miraculous human scientist to somehow speculate on our universe, the shape of it could be thought to have a large abdomen, and eight scampering legs. We are, everything is spiders.



A Long Walk Down a Windy Beach Video of the Day



Old and Busted / New Hotness Video of the Day



She has a point.


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day



I think this is the stage of the party where it's getting late and the couples are slow dancing and I'm in the corner talking to the cat.



Disclaimer: You're the only intelligent person here, Miss Fluffyboots.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:02 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1440 words, total size 12 kb.

1 I followed that mac twitter link and now my whole house smells like soy.

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 06 2021 01:38 AM (obo9H)

2 Is there any actual evidence the M1 thing is an actual interconnect or is this just someone's wet dream?  Don't get me wrong--this'd be pretty cool if it were true, but the idea of just stacking multiple M1 Maxes to make, I guess, a SuperMax Pro Ultra Pro seems to be wishcasting.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 06 2021 02:41 AM (Z0GF0)

3 Twitter own goal:  stop, I can't breathe, I'm laughing so hard.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 06 2021 02:42 AM (Z0GF0)

4 In funny-without-being-so-schadenfreudelicious news, I bought a Roomba last week.  Yesterday it committed suicide, high-centering itself on the leg of my chair--it's one of those where the legs are pipe that runs down to make the front leg, then back along the floor and up to make the back leg--3 or 4 times.  I kept picking it up and moving it and it kept beaching itself, until the battery died.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 06 2021 02:49 AM (Z0GF0)

5 BTW, I know you've been busy lately but it's December today.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 06 2021 02:50 AM (Z0GF0)

6 The most shocking thing about the twitter shit show is that they would actually try enforcing their moronic policy in a non-partisan way.  I'm sure that's the way it will continue to work, as well.

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 06 2021 04:27 AM (obo9H)

7 Twitter will no doubt tell their employees--without, of course, putting it in writing anywhere--that doxx blocking Antifa won't violate Twitter's community rules.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 06 2021 05:30 AM (Z0GF0)

8 And when I check the september archives in the side bar, the behavior is strange.

Page one and two, are too late int he month to have it.  So I next try going to five in the url.  Contains  1 and 2.  So, skip to four, again 1 and 2.

Three only goes back to sept 10, and initially it seemed like something wierd showed up with the loading on sept 11. 

So, I think the name space collision broke soemthing?

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 06 2021 06:29 AM (r9O5h)

9
Is there any actual evidence the M1 thing is an actual interconnect or is this just someone's wet dream? Don't get me wrong--this'd be pretty cool if it were true, but the idea of just stacking multiple M1 Maxes to make, I guess, a SuperMax Pro Ultra Pro seems to be wishcasting.
No direct evidence, but it looks like an interconnect (different IP blocks actually look different), it's placed like an interconnect (right on the edge of the chip, which is valuable real estate), and this is the only way Apple could make the rumoured chip with 40 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores.

Apple could make a 40 core CPU without graphics, but they don't have any use for that at the moment, since they want to drop third-party CPUs and GPUs both.  The 40 CPU / 128 GPU monster is about three times larger than it's possible to manufacture even on 5nm.

That's why AMD's CPUs are built with chiplets, Intel is going that way, and all the high-end GPUs next year will also be chiplet designs.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 06 2021 08:44 AM (PiXy!)

10
BTW, I know you've been busy lately but it's December today.
What?  How?  It was August just last week.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 06 2021 08:50 AM (PiXy!)

11 As far as I can tell from reading Philip K. DIck, it's still 72 AD.

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 06 2021 08:58 AM (obo9H)

12 Now I can see page 4 of the archives again.

Looks like I was pretty salty on the actual September 5th.

Not sure if important or not, but when I was skipping through the Sept.  archives again, it looks like nothing was posted between Sept. 19 and Sept 25?  Page two and page three, there are two undated entries between those dates, so I dunno.

Thanks.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 06 2021 10:00 AM (r9O5h)

13
Not sure if important or not, but when I was skipping through the Sept. archives again, it looks like nothing was posted between Sept. 19 and Sept 25? Page two and page three, there are two undated entries between those dates, so I dunno.
There's a weird caching bug where sometimes archive pages get mixed up.  The posts are there.  There are posts that aren't there, but those are all safe somewhere else, waiting to be returned to there.

Apropos of not very much I have three weeks off starting on the 18th.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 06 2021 10:49 AM (PiXy!)

14 Three weeks without bosses or phones or much of anything except crispy-fried fish sounds like heaven.

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 06 2021 12:38 PM (obo9H)

15 In other news...Given how Dave Rubin's pay day (Which, I try not to blame him because he needs to do what he needs to do.) means that his attempt at a non-biased social platform has ended, are you planning more work on yours'?

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, December 06 2021 02:10 PM (MuaLM)

16 Oh right, Locals merged with Rumble.  I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

Yes, I'm planning on moving ahead with my own social network, and I'll be releasing the server code as open source.  The UI uses some Bootstrap themes I licensed so that part I can't release.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 06 2021 02:24 PM (PiXy!)

17 The merger of Locals and Rumble was a bit concerning from an overall consolidation point of view, the recent 'merger' between Rumble and a shell company (CFVI) to go public is even more so.  I think that is what cx217 was talking about.  Supposedly Rubin maintains voting control.  On the plus side, this gives them the money they need to expand.  On the other hand, who is it that now has a big seat at the table?

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Tuesday, December 07 2021 02:53 AM (j3+MC)

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




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