Thursday, October 29

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 October 2020

Out Of Frogs Error Edition

Tech News

  • I'll have to buy more strawberry Freddos.  Or just turn the lights off and pretend I'm not home.


  • Radeon RX 6000 is here. (AnandTech)

    Three initial high-end models:

    • 6800 with 60 CUs for $579
    • 6800 XT with 72 CUs for $649
    • 6900 XT with 80 CUs for $999

    All three models feature 128MB of cache and 16GB of 16GHz GDDR6 RAM on a 256-bit bus.

    The 6800 competes evenly with the RTX 3070 (or the 2080 Ti).  It costs $80 more than the 3070 but has twice the RAM.

    The 6800 XT competes evenly with the RTX 3080, is $50 cheaper, and has 16GB of RAM vs. 10GB.  It has 20% more shaders and is clocked about 10% higher than the base 6800, for just $70 extra, making it easily the best value here.

    The 6900 XT competes with the 3090; it seems from AMD's benchmarks that it's not quite as fast, but on the other hand it's $500 cheaper.

    All cards support ray tracing, new anti-aliasing methods, accelerate loading of textures from SSDs (like the Xbox and PS5), and, if you also have a Ryzen 5000 CPU, direct mapping of the entire VRAM address space.

    Hoping to build myself a Ryzen 5900X / Radeon 6800 XT system next year. We'll see how things work out.


  • Apple's A14 chip shows that 5nm is 50% denser than 7nm.  (SemiAnalysis)

    TSMC's earlier announcements indicated that 5nm was nearly 50% smaller than 7nm - that is, 100% denser - but the fine print noted that this only applied for logic transistors.  SRAM does not scale nearly as well to the new node.

    And a large part of modern chip designs is SRAM - the Radeon 6000 dedicates six billion transistors to its Infinity Cache.


  • I violated a code of conduct.  (Fast.AI)

    A speaker at a tech conference took the topic of "This previous talk was wrong and here's why."

    He got shipped off to the re-education camp for the crime of... Making two people uncomfortable.


  • Asteroid 16 Psyche is worth $10 quintillion.  (Observer)

    I think this one may have come up before, but a quick search didn't find it.  The asteroid appears to be one huge chunk of metal.  Imagine West Virginia only made entirely out of nickel.

    NASA is launching a mission in 2022 to claim it for the fatherland.  (JPL)  Uh, Terran Empire.  Something.


  • Nice doggo attacks evil AI.  (Embrace the Red)

    If you know the image scaling algorithm used by an object detection AI, you can steganographically embed one image in another, so that after rescaling only the hidden image is visible and the AI makes comical mistakes like nuking your entire city.


  • Old Spare Laptop has decided to start charging again.  I have no idea why.


  • This seems significant.




  • The Scottish National Party wants to criminalise "offensive" speech in private homes.

    Sargon has a few words.




  • Removing §230 will remove speech from the internet.



    Really, Jack?  Fucking really?

    Was it removing Section 230 that locked the Twitter account of the New York Post - which account is still locked?

    Was it removing Section 230 that banned Twitter users from linking the Post article - which ban is still in effect contrary to your sworn testimony before Congress?

    Repeal Section 230.  Let the internet burn.  I don't fucking care anymore.


Kettle and Dolphin Video of the Day



Turn on CC for English subtitles.


Haachama Will Rock You Video of the Day



Apparently Haato* lives in Australia.  I don't know if this explains anything or just makes it all the more confusing.

* Haato and Haachama are the same person.  Yes, this confused me too.


Miko Will Rock You Video of the Day



Possibly with an actual rock.


Fubuki Will Rock You Video of the Day


Alien space cat is here to rock everybody.  And to sing the guitar solo.


Pekora Will Rock You Video of the Day



Chicken!


Matsuri Will Rock You Video of the Day


Fortunately the comments contain a full transcription.


Disclaimer: It has been met with some controversy because it's insane.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:14 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 687 words, total size 7 kb.

1 "Code of Conducts can be a useful tool, when thoughtfully created and thoughtfully enforced, to address sexism, racism, and harassment, all of which have been problems at tech conferences."
Drink that Kool-Aid, you muppet.
Has anyone heard of an instance where a CoC was used for something *other* than to shut down someone who made someone else feel bad, or to get a straight white male out of the picture?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 29 2020 11:32 PM (eqaFC)

2 Claiming that someone has violated the Code of Conduct is a violation of the Code of Conduct.  Burn it to the ground, kill the survivors, salt the earth.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  (I)gnore, (R)etry, (F)ail?

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 30 2020 07:46 AM (obo9H)

3 If the platinum in a particular asteroid is worth $SOME_GRILLIONS, actually extracting it will make it pretty quickly worth $SOME_GRILLIONS/1000000.  And similarly for all the other metals.  Perhaps fortunately, there's no efficient way to mine asteroids for now.  On the other hand, platinum suddenly being cheaper than textured vegetable protein would open up a lot of industrial uses that might have never even been considered in the past.  And similarly for all the other metals.

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 30 2020 07:52 AM (obo9H)

4 E.E. "Doc" Smith, 1928:
"What are you going to do with it all, Dick?" asked Crane. "That is enough to break the platinum market completely."
"That's exactly what I'm going to do," returned Seaton, with a gleam in his gray eyes. "I'm going to burst this unjustifiable fad for platinum jewelry so wide open that it'll never recover, and make platinum again available for its proper uses, in laboratories and in the industries."

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, October 30 2020 02:06 PM (ZlYZd)

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




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