Tuesday, December 29
Daily News Stuff 29 December 2020
Drawing The Shortbread Straw Edition
Drawing The Shortbread Straw Edition
Tech News
- Xiaomi has announced the Mi 11, the first official announcement of a Snapdragon 888 device. (AnandTech)
Though there have been leaks.
The Snapdragon 888 includes one X1 core and three A78 cores, and should be a good bit faster on single-threaded tasks than the current A77-based chips. I'm not sure exactly how much faster, though, because the benchmarks I've seen are for the server-optimised N1, N2, and V1 cores, and not the mobile-optimised X1.
But faster, anyway.
- Gigabyte's B550M Aorus Pro looks like a decent inexpensive AMD motherboard. (Tom's Hardware)
The B550 chipset isn't as capable as the X570, but it's ahead of last year's X470. It's not bad by any means. This board for example has two x4 M.2 slots, something most X470 motherboards lacked. (The PCIe on the X470 chipset was only 2.0 speed in any case.)
- The Ryzen 5900H mobile APU is nearly as fast as Intel's Core i9-10900 unless... No, this one is probably right. (WCCFTech)
The 10900 is barely faster than a desktop 3700X at server tasks, so I'd be surprised if this were not the case.
- How Nissin caused the great bucatini shortage of 2020. (Grub Street)
With a delay of several decades between cause and effect.
- Watson is an esoteric language for configuration files. (Reddit)
Me: Ha. That's funny, I was just watching Hololive's Amelia Watson earlier today.
Watson docs:You can create arbitrary integers by using these instructions:
As the thread says, r/hololive is leaking again.
$ echo 'BBuaBubaBubbbaBubbbbaBubbbbbaBubbbbbba' | watson decode -t json
123
- How AWS added Mac Mini nodes to EC2. (Serve the Home)
Basically, they took Mac Minis and stuck them in a rack. Oh, and a bunch of completely custom hardware for remote management over Thunderbolt.
- LG's new 86" 8K TV has 30,000 lighting zones. (ZDNet)
Should be great for HDR. Apparently Samsung is preparing something similar, which is odd because they stopped making LCDs.
- China has jailed the journalist who broke the news on Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague for breaking the news on Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague. (BBC)
Seriously though, the story is appalling. China ruins everything, but most of all, China ruins China.
October
- On October 1 Humble's Corel Draw Bundle didn't actually contain Corel Draw, the Surface Go was adequate - if you avoided the terribly underpowered entry model, the Surface Pro X was meh, the XMG DJ 15 had all the ports, 3270font was what it said on the tin, the Great Peanut Brittle Shortage of 2020, The Elf and the Hunter's Item Atelier, and the Intel 8051 had 128 bytes of RAM.
- On October 2 Dwarf Fortress turned out to be a great source of low-resolution bitmapped fonts, Transport Tycoon and the Memotech MTX 512, and a leaked benchmark of the 5900X turned out to be pretty damn accurate.
- On October 3 the 11th generation ZenBook 13 wasn't terrible, we took a guided tour of the pixel-packing plant, and Apple patched the fix to their update.
- On October 4 Green Sardine joined Navy Flounder, Sienna Cichlid, and Dimgrey Cavefish, NestedText was 98% less insane than YAML, which is still a bit insane, Ubuntu 20.10 beta was here, and so was PHP 8 RC1 because we can't have nice things.
- On October 5 running Doom 3 on an RTX 3090 - as a RAM disk, a preview of a preview of the Xbox Series X, Windows kernel timers were horrible, and I was tricked by Western Digital's naming. Also, DOOG.
- On October 6 Nvidia replaced video meeting codecs with video puppets, USB 4 was worse than USB 3, Python 3.9 was out, and I was watching YouTube streams from a parallel universe.
- On October 7 the House Judiciary Committee report on Big Tech came back and recommended taking off and nuking the entire site from orbit, Netflix got indicted, Apples T2 security chip was broken and unfixable - though exploits require physical access, and we got a Baldur's Gate 3 release trailer.
- On October 8 Intel announced its new Rocket Lake desktop lineup which is still months away even now, AMD announced the Ryzen 5000 family, and the former head of Apple's App Store testified that yes, the store's policies are set up explicitly to illegally abuse a monopoly position.
- On October 9 Hololive livestreams were unwatchable - a problem that turned out not the be the streams themselves but Chrome's terrible handling of YouTube chat, the latest Acer Nitro 9 paired Renoir with Turing, and AMD was rumoured to be looking to buy Xilinx, which as it happened, they were, and did.
- On October 10 you could no longer run Star Citizen on a Pentium, not that the game will ever actually see release, the Xeon W-1270 was kind of meh, scientists found a better solution to the Travelling Salesman problem - 0.0000000000000000000000000000000002% better, yes, but it was thought to be impossible, and Twitter escalated its war against its own users.
- On October 11 lunasvg was a standalone SVG rendering library, CSV at 2GB per second, automating reversible functions in Julia, and all DRAM has the same access speed. DDR1-333 has the same random access latency as DDR5-6400.
- On October 12 the Seeed Grove Beginners Kit was good value at $19.90, Telepath was a new social network for idiots, JuliaMono had all the glyphs, an office suite in four lines of code, and the Pentagon contracted SpaceX to deliver mail by rocket.
- On October 13 the Ryzen 5600 was probably on its way and probably still is, the Xeon W-1290P was the fastest small-server Xeon and still meh, a new Amiga for 2021, and serverless was always bullshit.
- On October 14 the iPhone 12 came out, Krita 4.4 came out and we couldn't remember what Krita was, sneaky tricks with cartridge ports, Amazon Prime Video wasn't good, but Netflix was worse, and Torchlight 3 got a launch trailer. Apparently the latest update makes it into a fairly decent game.
- On October 15 everything about the Hunter Biden laptop story was true, and everything the mainstream media and Big Tech said about it was a calculated lie. Oh, and something about a room-temperature superconductor.
- On October 16 Twitter crashed, Slack quickly followed suit, we were somewhat irate with the utter bullshit flowing from social media companies' spokespuppets, Nim 1.4 was out and pretty good, and we reported in on the LA jetpack guy.
- On October 17 Ryzen 5000 and liquid nitrogen - two great tastes, Atlassian took a leaf out of Apple's book and told it's customers to get fucked, and GitLab 13.4 is out. While GitLab has had a few bumps along the way, and it's getting kind of memory-hungry, they consistently pump out solid new releases with solid new features for free. They make their money from enterprise customers, and I hope they continue to succeed because it's great stuff. Oh, and PHP sucked.
- On October 18 we got 1.2TB of microSD cards,the New York Post's Twitter account was still locked over an entirely accurate and correct news story, 50Gb Ethernet cards, twenty-five European governments announced plans to set €10 billion on fire, and more Node malware. Note Node itself, other Node malware.
- On October 19 Google and Facebook went to war with Australia's ABC, who are also filthy commies but the old school variety that you don't see so much anymore, the Raspberry Pi 4 compute module was, an Intel laptop with Intel graphics from Asus, AMD made its model numbering problems even worse, and there would be four models of the Radeon 6900, maybe. Oh, and God Mode in Windows 10. Literally.
- On October 20 the battery on my nice Dell Laptop was 110% dead, Intel sold its flash memory division to Hynix, and Epyc Milan looked promising. Still does, because it's still not available. If you're a regular user, anyway; apparently Amazon, Microsoft, and Google aren't having trouble getting them.
- On October 21 Osiris Rex landed safely on Bennu, and there was no
DanaFreeNas, onlyZuulTrueNAS.
- On October 22 the 5950X hit 5GHz with a regular cooler, no liquid anythings, the 3070 could outrun a 2080 Ti but you couldn't get one, OAuth 3 was heading our way to make everything worse, and how the perfectly nice ironclad beetle survives getting run over.
- On October 23 Intel shipped its DG1 graphics chip to an eager audience of nobody, the Ryzen 5600X was fast, Amazon was openly engaging in fraud, Ubuntu 20.10 was out, and a small shark hit one million subscribers.
- On October 24 we got a new Penric and Desdemona story, the RTX 3070 Ti died on the vine, leaked benchmarks of the Radeon 6000 family looked great - shame we didn't get leaked availability data, GitLab went down - we did mention a few bumps, Xerox PARC got a DARPA contract and we expressed surprise that either entity still existed, Patreon banned QAnon, Hololive streamed 32 hours of Minecraft content in one day, and The Outer Worlds came out. Oh, and the RIAA Streisanded youtube-dl.
- On October 25 it was fourteen degrees in Sydney in late October, somehow, someone tweeted out the source code for youtube-dl, someone else managed to get it into GitHub's official DMCA repo - sort of, then they came for the Jacobins, some cookies were more equal than others, and programming in Algol on the Atari XL.
- On October 26 Azerbaijan posted notices of Armenian violations of their ceasefire agreement - but accidentally pushed Send before the violations supposedly happened, escaped cloned female mutant crayfish took over a Belgian cemetery - a headline that could not be beaten in a normal year, Twitter censored warnings about Twitter censoring warnings, passive cooling was hard, the RIAA was full of crap, and the Ryzen 5950X showed up. In Passmark. It went whoosh.
- On October 27 AMD bought Xilinx as we mentioned, Zoom censored warnings about Zoom censoring warnings, 3% of Starlink satellites failed shortly after launch which is about the industry average, and The PlayStation 5 looked terrible. Not its capabilities, the physical design. Seriously, what the hell? And there was water on the Moon.
- On October 28 AMD recorded record records, the RTX 3070 got tested and pronounced "good but nonexistent", GitHub played the good guys - for real, and MacOS would damage your computer.
- On October 29 we ran out of frogs, AMD's Radeon RX 6000 arrived for approximately seven femtoseconds, 5nm was 50% denser than 7nm, the ten quintillion dollar asteroid, and the Scottish National Party is run by Nazis. Oh, and Hololive really likes Queen.
This is probably my favourite clip because of the trouble she goes to to play the song in-game.
Also the pure Elite Miko energy. Though Haachama's recent video was actually in tune.
- On October 30 Zen 3 was a lot better than Zen 2 which was a lot better than Zen 1 which was vastly superior to Bulldozer which was not very good, Intel released more details of chips that still don't exist, yes we have no video cards, restaurants had had enough of Grubhub's shit, and I played laptop charger badminton.
- On October 31 Big Navi got benchmarked, it was time to launch Twitter Safety into the Sun, Sony reportedly wanted to buy Crunchyroll, and Mars declared independence.
Disclaimer: Out of frog error. Redo from start.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:44 PM
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1
Well, based on how long it took me to get a 4800H laptop, I'm sure the 5k stuff will be shipping in volume sometime in 2022. Still better than Skylake MCCCXIV refresh on 14nm++++++++++++++ that will ship concurrently.
Posted by: normal at Wednesday, December 30 2020 10:16 AM (obo9H)
2
Also, one day a couple of years ago I was staring at Roman numerals and it occured to me that the glyphs I and X were pretty obviously just tally marks, and that C and M were later additions based on the Latin Cent- and Mil-. Now, where do V, L, and D come from? Well, V is literally just half (the upper) of X, L is the lower half of C, and D is the Latin version of the Greek Lambda, which is either the right or left half of M.
Posted by: normal at Wednesday, December 30 2020 10:20 AM (obo9H)
3
Delta, not Lambda. Sheesh. I must be drinking or drunk or something.
Posted by: normal at Wednesday, December 30 2020 10:21 AM (obo9H)
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