• All the D&D 5th Edition stuff you could ever want.  (The Trove)
  
  Also, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 3.5th, 4th, and in a folder labeled "BECMI", the Basic / Expert / Companion / Master / Immortals boxed sets, which were an interesting alternate take on D&D.  And the original edition plus expansions in a folder under within the 1st Edition.
  
  Meanwhile, thanks to a bunch of Humble Bundles, I have a pretty complete collection of entirely legitimate Pathfinder PDFs.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Humble Bundle they have a really nice Cities Skylines bundle going right now.
  
  For $18 you get the base game and the Concerts, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, Mass Transit, Green Cities, Industries, and Campus expansions, plus four content packs.  That only leaves Parklife and the recent Sunset Harbor expansions, and a few radio stations.
  
  
  
• Liva has a new Socket AM4 mini PC.  (PC Perspective)
  
  It takes any 35W AM4 APU, and supports two SODIMMs for up to 32GB (and probably 64GB),  an M.2 NVMe slot, and a 2.5" drive.
  
  I/O consists of six USB 3.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, VGA, two DisplayPort ports, a good old DB9 serial port, a USB 3.1 type C port, headphone and microphone jacks, and WiFi 5 a.k.a. 802.11ac.
  
  The only problem is that the review unit didn't entirely work - it crashed while they were running benchmarks.
  
  Which I must admit is a rather substantial problem.
  
  It's rather larger than a NUC - about 8" x 7" - but needs to be to fit all those ports and a socketed CPU.
  
  
  
• Perhaps the MSI Modern 14 would be a better choice.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has a Ryzen 4000 APU - a choice of a 4500U in the $649 model, or a 4700U in the $749 model, two SODIMM slots, an M.2 slot supporting both PCIe 3.0 and SATA drives, two USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3 Type-C port, an audio combo jack, and a microSD card slot.
  
  The screen is a 14" 1080p IPS model, which is adequate, and the battery is a 52 Wh unit delivering up to 10 hours of operation.
  
  And it has dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys and weighs just 1.3kg.
  
  I'd like perhaps a higher-resolution display, but the light weight and socketed memory and storage make it an attractive buy.  The eight core 4700U model should keep up with application demands for a good long while given that you can throw as much as 64GB of RAM into it.
  
  
  
• In other news, Elon Musk and NASA collaborated to launch an apatosaurus into orbit.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That capsule looks rather roomy.  By comparison.
  
  
  
• Beekeeper Studio is either a studio for keeping bees or a SQL editor and database management tool.  (GitHub)
  
  One of those.
  
  Probably.
  
  
  
• Intel's Xeon Gold 6250 is a high clock speed 8 core server part that costs $3400.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Which by strange coincidence is just $50 less than the current price for the 64 core Threadripper 3990X meaning you'd have to be completely crazy to buy the Xeon.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
• Oh.  Looks like one of our Threadripper servers rebooted itself.  And my restart script wasn't quite production-ready.
  
  
  
• That was a nuisance.  The MongoDB startup script was timing out before the journal recovery could complete, so it would start up, then shut down again, over and over.
  
  
  
• In corporate America, website port-scan you.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  There's actually a good reason for this: A number of malicious programs keep known ports open on your computer.  Your browser can connect to a local port and check if it's open, so if you're doing online banking your bank can check your computer for certain types of malware on the spot.
  
  On the other hand, they can also do bad stuff.  As I've mentioned before, you need to password-protect even local web servers.
  
  
  
• Google has postponed the launch of Android 11 due to (spins wheel) an international Vegemite shortage.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  
  
• An eighth Amazon worker has died of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague.  (Slashdot)
  
  Which puts Amazon at about 1/30th of the national average.
  
  
  
• A repeal of CDA Section 230 might be bad news for social networks.  (WBUR)
  
  Okay, so yes, that's true.  And given that I am attempting, fitfully, to launch my own social network, I am personally in the crosshairs.
  
  On the one hand, CDA 230 is why all the social networks that have survived are based either in the US, or in China where the CCP wants people to speak freely and openly of their political views so that they can be shoved into a van and carted off for reprogramming.
  
  On the other hand, Twitter.

Posted by: normal at Monday, June 01 2020 12:48 AM (obo9H)

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• Hivelocity - a server hosting company - has declared war on Gelbooru.
  
  
  
  
  Catgirls hardest hit.  Won't somebody think of the catgirls?
  
  
  
  Knowing what the fans get up to, there are probably some objectionable images in there.  But Hivelocity is handling this with Twitterish levels of professionalism.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 4000 is 90% faster than Ryzen 3000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Except that this is APUs, so we're talking about the new 8-core parts against the old 4-core parts, so we'd expect them to be 90% faster.  At least they are indeed meeting expectations.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new Galaxy Book S is the first product based on Intel's Lakelake architecture.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Field Lake?  Lakefield?  One of those.
  
  This has one Core core and four Atom cores.  Unless these Atom cores are significantly faster than any previous ones, it really needs at least two Core cores to run modern apps smoothly.
  
  
  
• Mike Masnick has a blind spot the size of Iowa.  (TechDirt)
  
  No matter how blatant Twitter's anti-conservative bias, he will always excuse them on the grounds that they were only applying their rules.  And their rules don't actually say "we hate conservatives" therefore they don't hate conservatives.
  
  
  
• Critics - by which we mean idiots - are angry with Facebook for not censoring President Trump.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  So simultaneously (a) social networks aren't censoring anyone and especially not conservatives and (b) Facebook is bad for not applying the same censorship as the other networks.
  
  
  
• Better Red than Red.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Serve the Home compared a RAID array built of regular Western Digital Red drives against one made up of the shingled model.
  
  For most tests, the shingled models worked reasonably well, though somewhat slower than the regular ones.  But when it came to rebuilding a (deliberately) failed array, well:

  The WD40EFAX performed so poorly that we repeated the test on a second disk to rule out user error.

  In this case the shingled drives were fifteen times slower than the regular ones.

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, May 30 2020 11:37 PM (ZlYZd)

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• President Trump has issued an executive order to conduct a review of CDA Section 230.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Full text of the order is here.  (WhiteHouse.gov)
  
  It doesn't repeal Section 230, because an executive order can't do that.
  
  It doesn't even postulate any infringement of First Amendment rights.
  
  It just questions the assumptions that predicate Section 230, and the way it is applied in practice, and asks for a review.
  
  Naturally, Twitter is going bananas.
  
  
  
• Twitter hates Roof Koreans.*
  
  
  
  
  Edit: Huh.  It doesn't show on the embed.  You'll have to click on that to see what they're up to now.
  
  Brought to you by Twitter's new Department of Proving Trump Right.
  
  * I realise the words used by Trump come from a different, earlier event, one that I am unfamiliar with.  The point though is the same: Twitter is run by idiots.
  
  
  
• Censorship is an irregular verb.  (TechDirt)
  
  I exercise discretion.
  You moderate.
  He censors.
  
  The fundamental flaw in this idiocy is that Twitter's censorship - and Facebook's, YouTube's, Google's - does come with a threat, implicit or explicit.  If you don't comply with the rules that change every five minutes and are mostly secret anyway, your account gets wiped.
  
  All your content, gone.  All your friends and contacts, gone.  If you try to create a new account, that in itself is grounds for you to be banned immediately.  If you try to appeal, you account stays suspended while they sit around laughing for a week before they reject your appeal without any response whatsoever.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 4000 with its Zen 3 core might be produced on TSMC's 5nm process and launch at CES next year but I really doubt it.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not least because the rumour the very next day is that Ryzen 5000 will also feature Zen 3 and be produced on 7nm.
  
  It's pretty clear that no-one actually knows anything.
  
  
  
• Run Solaris on your PowerPC!  (Virtually Fun)
  
  Because... Nope, can't think of a reason.  Do I even have a...  Oh, yeah, of course I have a PowerPC system.  Just made by Apple, not IBM. 
  
  I have the Cube.  In my closet.
  
  
  
• Bleeping Computer is back after its server mishap and is full of blargh.
  
  It would probably be quicker to make a list of who hasn't been hacked.
  
  
  
• Android Studio 4.0 is out.  (Google)
  
  It's based on the same framework as PyCharm and therefor does not completely suck.
  
  
  
• Australia's NBN now supports gigabit speeds except for wherever it is you happen to live.  (ZDNet)
  
  If you have FTTP, which no-one does, you can get it now, maybe.  If you're on the ancient decaying HFC system, you can get it now, with full download speeds being available for up to 50 seconds per day.
  
  If you're on FTTC or FTTN, fuhgedaboutit.
  
  
  
• The ACLU is suing Clearview AI over invasion of privacy.  (New York Times)
  
  First useful thing they've done since...  Um.
  
  
  
• YouTube says that their deletion of all comments critical of Chinese fascists was not influenced by outside parties.  (The Verge)
  
  "We're just morons", said CEO Susan Wojcicki.  "We'd forget our own shoes if they weren't stapled to our hands."
  
  
  
• Amazon is planning to offer permanent jobs to 70% of the 175,000 temporary hires they put on during the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague.  (Reuters)
  
  That seems like good news.  Are we allowed to have good news?
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, May 30 2020 04:24 AM (obo9H)

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• The problem is Twitter.  (TechDirt)
  
  TechDirt is drunk again, arguing that this is somehow complicated.

  The basic problem is that there is no easy answer for what to do with Trump's tweets, also for many reasons. One fundamental reason is that content moderation is essentially an impossible task.

  There is an easy answer, though.  The easiest answer.  Leave them the fuck alone.  Stop thinking that everything is a problem and that you are required to solve every problem.
  
  
  
• Reuters is reporting on a supposed draft of the executive order behind all this fuss. 
  
  Do they actually provide the executive order they claim to have?
  
  They do not.
  
  
  
• Python in 917 easy steps.  (GitHub)
  
  A sufficiently determined programmer can turn anything into Node.js.
  
  
  
• Python 3.9 is in beta.  (LWN)
  
  It has two new string functions.
  
  And dict unions.
  
  
  
• Intel vs. AMD on the Linux desktop.  (Phoronix)
  
  On 380 benchmarks - a mix of single and multi-threaded workloads - the 10900K edged out the 3900X but was in turn beaten by the 3950X.
  
  
  
• There's an 8GB Pi available now.  (Tom's Hardware)
    
  $75, compared to $35 for 2GB and $55 for 4GB.  The default OS is still 32-bit so an individual user process can only address 3GB of RAM, but that's likely fine for anything you would run on a Pi, and there is now a 64-bit option as well.
  
  
  

• It's just a flesh wound.
  
  
  
  
  Gotta love a bug report that includes the words "do not under any circumstances" in bold all-caps.
  
  
  
• Arm has two new cores: The A78 and the X1.  (AnandTech)
  
  The A78 is the regularly scheduled update with IPC and clock speed improvements, balancing performance against power consumption.
  
  The X1 is a new core designed for burst performance in phones like Apple's in-house Arm designs.  It's a five-issue design up from four-issue on recent A7x cores - compared with six-issue on Apple's recent cores.  It delivers a 30% IPC boost over A77, and a doubling of floating-point performance.
  
  And that brings a licensable core into Intel and AMD territory.  Apple's Arm cores might be there already - the estimate is that A13 is 10% ahead of X1 - but you can't get them so no-one knows for sure.
  
  
  
• A friendly if overly loquacious guide to the Lakes District.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel hypothesises as to why people use their codenames.  Well, it's because their branding is fucking meaningless.  What the hell is "10th generation"?  They're not even all the same core.
  
  
  
• A wild bunch of cheap Ryzen laptops from Xiaomi appeared.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A choice of 6 or 8 cores, 8GB or 16GB RAM, 512GB or 1TB SSD, and a 13", 14", or 16" 1080p display.  Prices range from $532 to $700, and weights from 1.2kg to 1.8kg.  Curiously, the 14" model is the lightest. 
  
  The 16" model has dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, but the 13" model doesn't appear to.  I couldn't find a keyboard photo of the 14", but the existing Intel version doesn't have them so that's not looking great either.
  
  All models will go on sale starting June 1.  In China, and on the usual sites.
  
  
  
• Someone just noticed that Adam Schiff is a dirty cop.  (TechDirt)
  
  Wake up and smell the coffee, guys.
  
  
  
• All is not well in wolf-kink erotica fanfic land.  (TechDirt)
  
  Still nothing compared with knitting forums.
  
  No, seriously.
  
  
  
• Twitter: We hire only the most qualified zombies.
  
  
  
  
  Never send to ask how Twitter became such a hellsite.  This is all down to Jack.  Who is an idiot.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 3000 XT might only be a 100MHz boost.
  
  
  
  
  As commenters are saying, that's not much.  Presumably it will replace existing models at the same price.
  
  
  
• Twitter themselves fact-checked a pair of Trump tweets.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Naturally, our timeline being what it is since the space lobsters ate Earth 2 and we had to wipe everyone's memories and reboot here on Earth 3, Trump was right and the fact-checking was a lie.
  
  
  
• SD 8.0 ups transfer speeds to 4GB/s unless it doesn't (WCCFTech) except in this case it definitely does.  (SDCard)
  
  A PCIe 4.0 x2 interface to be specific.
  
  
  
• What all those AWS services do.  (A Day in the Life Of...)
  
  Not always super-detailed:

  Amazon Braket

  Some quantum thing. It’s in preview so I have no idea what it is.

  
  
  
• Catalina phone home.  (Sigpipe)
  
  In fact, Catalina phone home an awful lot.  Catalina apparently phone home on every new shell script.
  
  
  
• The CDC is warning of increasingly aggressive rodents looking for new food sources.  (Seattle Times)
  
  Or as we call them here, journalists.

Posted by: Jay at Thursday, May 28 2020 01:29 AM (0jVI9)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, May 28 2020 01:34 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 28 2020 07:02 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Will at Thursday, May 28 2020 07:38 AM (uI1wi)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 28 2020 08:21 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, May 28 2020 12:26 PM (Ix1l6)

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• Ryzen 3000XT adds 300MHz to base clocks, 200MHz to boost clocks unless it doesn't.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Except for the 3600XT which does the opposite.  That's probably enough to match Intel's 10th generation chips on game performance.
  
  WCCFTech has the same story but I wanted to do that to a different site for once.
  
  
  
• Every iPhone is jailbreakable.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  For now.  Apple recommends against doing so.
  
  
  
• Gigabit NBN will be available starting Friday.  (ZDNet)
  
  If you're on FttP which no-one is, particularly me.  Still, that plan only does 50Mbps upstream, and I already get 42.

• A Thai database leaked 8.6 billion -  (Rainbow Tables)
  
  Yes, Elasticsearch.  Got it in one.
  
  It does now ship with password support.  Or rather, it now ships with an option module that provides password support, once you install and configure it.
  
  Great work guys.
  
  
  
• Quantum computing either is or is not possible.
  
  
  
• Or both at the same time.  (Shtetl-Optimized)
  
  Or neither.  One of those.
  
  
  
• GitLab the software is great.  GitLab the company's security practices not so much.  (Silicon Angle)
  
  It doesn't matter how strong your encryption is if you are wide open to social engineering.
  
  Also GitLab 13.0 is out with Nunnally Johnson, Erica Eleniak, and Aldo someone-or-other.  Alan Alda?  That'll do.
  
  

• No, really, pizza arbitrage.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
• Zawinski's Law: Every system expands until it can send email.  (GitHub)
  
  Pixy's Corollary to Zawinski's Law: Every type system expands until it is Turing-complete.
  
  
  
• Jack Dorsey and Andrew Yang: Idiots in a pod.  (CNBC)
  
  
  
• Wikipedia's focus is to create a safe space for everyone.  (BBC)
  
  It's certainly not to create an accurate reference site.
  
  
  

• Biostar leaked a list of upcoming Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs as part of their motherboard support documentation unless they didn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Models range from the 35W 4200GE with a base clock of 3.5GHz to the 65W 4700G with a base clock of 3.6GHz.
  
  Um, and presumably the 4200 has four cores and the 4700 has eight, but they didn't bother to leak that detail.
  
  
  
• The rumour of a desktop Ryzen 3000 refresh has also been confirmed unless it hasn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This version lists the refresh parts as the 3600XT, 3800XT, and 3900XT.  Which does make sense, as those are high TDP parts that likely have headroom for speed improvements.  I wouldn't expect more than 200MHz on any of them though.
  
  
  
• A helpful list of fictional inventions by actual year.  (Technovelgy)
  
  Keep it handy in case you find yourself transported to an unknown year.  In a book.  A list by fictional year might be more useful in that situation, come to think of it.
  
  
  
• Move at least some Zig.  (GitHub)
  
  Zig is a cleaned-up version of C that doesn't attempt to provide the expressive power of D or the safety of Rust, on the principle that simplicity has value in itself.
  
  They're not wrong - as we saw with that example of Python code recently that didn't do at all what it appeared to do.
  
  
  
• The Dynabook (formerly Toshiba) Portege X30L-G is a 13.3" laptop that weighs 870 grams.  (ZDNet)
  
  Despite its diminutive size it manages to include a Core i7-10710U, 16GB RAM, a 512GB SSD, 1080p display, USB-C with charging and a separate charging support, headphone jack, microSD slot, two USB 3.0 ports, full size HDMI, wired gigabit Ethernet, dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, and close to a 10 hour battery life.
  
  
  
• SpaceX is go to launch their Crew Dragon to the International Space Station on the 27th.  (Space.com)
  
  This will be the first manned American launch since 2011.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, May 24 2020 12:16 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Avatar at Monday, May 25 2020 01:32 PM (v29Tn)

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• Putting Amazon's Graviton2 Arm processor through its paces.  (Phoronix)
  
  A 64 core Epyc beats a 64 core Graviton2 by an average of 51%, though Graviton takes the lead in a number of benchmarks.
  
  The problem is that in a number of other benchmarks, Graviton gets absolutely creamed.  Epyc is four times faster for NAS operations, five times for OpenSSL, and close to twenty times for PostgreSQL.
  
  Some of those point to specific optimisation issues - MariaDB doesn't show anything like the problem with PostgreSQL - so if you aren't using those particular applications you won't have those problems.  And if you're on AWS you can easily mix and match.
  
  
  
• The first benchmarks for Intel's Rocket Lake have leaked unless they haven't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Rocket Lake is based on the much improved Sunny Cover architecture rather than are refresh of Skylake.  Compared to the current generation i5-10400, the new chips are...  Oh.  The new chips are -7% faster.
  
  That doesn't make a lot of sense because Sunny Cove really is a significant upgrade.  More cache, more execution units, wider issue (sort of), new instructions.  And it does perform better on Spec benchmarks.  So probably this is an outlier.
  
  
  
• AMD is lining up refreshes for the 3700X and 3800X unless they aren't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Six months ago their highest-clocked dies were in short supply; now they are plentiful.  So they can probably bump the clock speeds by 100 or 200MHz.
  
  
  
• AMD is also looking to release a new low-end chipset, the A520.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Really this is more of a chipsetless like the A320.  All Ryzen CPUs and APUs have built-in SATA and USB, so all that is really necessary is something to control the boot process.
  
  The advantage to this - apart from the price - is that it frees up an extra four PCIe lanes that are normally used to connect the chipset to the CPU.  And it inherently supports PCIe 4.0 because there's no chipset to not support PCIe 4.0.  Though it's up to the motherboard makers whether to build their boards up to PCIe 4.0 spec.