Friday, December 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 December 2020

Hush Edition

Tech News

  • New washing machine arrived safely and has been installed.  It's running the recommended quick-wash-before-use cycle right now.

    It's quieter than my computer.


  • Speaking of which, my SSDs are in Hawaii.  Oops, no they're not, that was this morning.  Now they're in Sydney.


  • One of Micron's fabs in Taiwan experienced a power outage.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The power outage lasted an hour.  The factory should be back online in a couple of days.  But because it takes weeks for a chip to pass through all stages of production, some of them will have been in the middle of a critical stage and will have to be discarded.


  • Intel's upcoming Core i9-11900K is nearly as fast as AMD's sixth-fastest mainstream desktop CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It's behind only the 5800X, 3900X and XT, 5900X, 3950X, and 5950X.


  • A Google security researcher created a worm that can steal the contents of any iOS device within WiFi range even if the device's WiFi was turned off.  (ZDNet)

    And then hop from there to any other iOS device in range of the first.  And so on.

    This illustrates the problem with Apple's corporate motto of We know better than you.  You can't actually turn the WiFi off on an iOS device.  You can only humbly suggest to iOS that maybe it would be nice if it didn't use WiFi quite so much.


  • Google has accepted the resignation of one of their AI ethicists.  (VentureBeat)

    Since ethicists generally have as much functional value as a football made of yogurt, they would be well advised not to issue ultimatums (ultimata?) to their employers.

    And if you guessed she was a painfully annoying elitist holier-than-thou CRT-spouting nutcase, you win a Kewpie doll.

    That they seized the opportunity to cut her loose is the first healthy sign I've seen from Google in at least two years.


  • 95 books on retro computer games for $30.  (StoryBundle)

    These aren't books on how to write games, though many of them are books on how games were written, so still of value to a developer.


HoloEN March Video of the Day



One of the HoloEN members recently had the top album on iTunes and Spotify worldwide.  Not this one, though.  But I watched the karaoke stream this was taken from and it was a lot of fun, even if she's not a great singer.

Speaking of which, Calliope just started a Minecraft stream.  I'd just caught up on the English-language Minecraft streams from HoloEN and Pikamee, so this is perfect timing.  Can watch it while I do the laundry.


Disclaimer: There is no escape, not that you'd want to.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:26 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 444 words, total size 4 kb.

1 "The AWDL bug itself was due to the common category of memory security flaws, which Beer describes as a "fairly trivial buffer overflow" due to programming errors Apple developers made in in C++ code"

Tsk, tsk, should've switched to Rust.


"Apple's XNU (X is Not Unix) kernel."


Also, hur hur hur.  That was funny 35 years ago when RMS did it.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 05 2020 02:28 AM (eqaFC)

2 Paranoid rant:  You know there are probably dozens of these sorts of "security issues" that certain state actors have known about for a while.  If you can't take the battery out or physically disconnect the networking (including bluetooth) your device isn't anywhere near secure.  I mean, there are very good reasons that the US military prohibits deployed troops from carrying certain devices.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 05 2020 04:45 AM (LADmw)

3 "You drank all my scotch and then ran out with my bank card and bought every fucking stick of deodorant in five different stores, you timnit!"

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 05 2020 04:52 AM (LADmw)

4 Just what the hell does this mean?
"algorithmic fairness research and combating algorithmic bias with the potential to automate oppression."

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, December 05 2020 07:08 PM (Bkp4m)

5 It's not complete bullshit, though it's mostly bullshit.  If you train an AI on a limited dataset it can produce bad results when confronted with real-world data outside its training set.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 05 2020 09:09 PM (PiXy!)

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




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