• Do not drop a computer on your feet, or if you must, do not drop a computer on your feet and then complain about the pain. Pain is just a signal that everything is working, including your feet and your computer.
  
  Ow.
  
  
  

Tech News

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 29 2025 10:01 PM (1zWbY)

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• How to break security on any modern LLM-based AI system: Just keep nagging it with idiocy until it gives up.  (The Register)
  
  Because of the many things that LLMs are not, high among them is security models:

  "The most practical mitigation today is not to rely solely on the model for safety. We advocate for a 'defense-in-depth' approach, using external systems like AI firewalls or guardrails to monitor and block problematic outputs before they reach the user. A more permanent, though much more difficult, solution would involve building safety into the model's foundational training from the ground up."

  LLMs inherently have no concept of security; they at best pretend that they do.
  
  If you want any kind of security, you have to implement it using something else.  LLMs offer no security themselves and never will.
  
  
  
• Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales - between begging for money - says the site could used AI.  (404 Media)  (archive site)
  
  Wikipedia editors say in unison, the hell we can.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Is GMP damaging Zen 5 CPUs  (GMPLib)
  
  Plausibly, yes, it you run GMP constantly for months on end.
  
  
  
• Google has eliminated 35% of its managers in the past year.  (CNBC)
  
  It's a start.
  
  
  

How Those Early Atari Computers Worked

Bacon Interlude

• Ow my feets.
• Have a plumber here today because things don't happen when it's convenient  for you.
• Already done a battery of tests for Mystery Medical Condition because see above.
• If you have kids or niblings, the trades are where it's at.
• Medtech might be a more reliable job than doctor, too.
• I have two plumbers here now.  That's either good news or someone's kids are getting braces.
• That sounded interesting.  Interesting to be inside the house above when it cut loose anyway.
• Venimus, vidimus, cloacas reseravimus.
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, August 28 2025 01:24 PM (QE7eq)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, August 28 2025 02:29 PM (oJgNG)

3 Forgot to ask earlier - is that last bullet point giving the name of whatever you've been diagnosed with

Posted by: Frank at Friday, August 29 2025 10:43 AM (+i6Xr)

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• The Geekom A9 Max is a 5" square mini-PC with a Ryzen 370, up to 128GB of RAM, and room for a 2280 and a 2230 M.2 drive. (Liliputing)
  
  And dual HDMI, dual USB4, and dual 2.5Gb Ethernet. A pretty solid little system, though somewhat expensive at $999.
  
  
  
• The Geekom A9 Mega is an 8" square mini-PC with a Ryzen 395+, up to 128GB of RAM, and room for two 2280 M.2 drives. (Notebook Check)
  
  And dual HDMI, dual USB4, and dual 2.5Gb Ethernet. A pretty solid little system, though somewhat expensive at $1899.
  
  This looks like a Mac Studio next to a Mac Mini. Looks quite good actually.

• AMD and Intel have both cut the prices of their top server CPUs by up to 50%. (WCCFTech)
  
  Huh.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, August 26 2025 02:45 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, August 27 2025 12:21 AM (oJgNG)

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• Bluesky has blocked users from Mississippi over that's state's age verification requirements for social networks.  (Bsky)
  
  Rather than check if you are from that state, if the law applies to you, and if you are a permitted user, you are simply blocked.  Safer and simpler.
  
  Comically, the Tech Crunch article on situation is blocked if you are running an ad blocker.
  
  This is the first time such a law has survived preliminary injunctions in the US and it is already making a mess.

• 99,000 AI-generated songs are uploaded every day - including fake ones by established artists.  (BBC)
  
  It is becoming untenable.
  
  
  
• Google is running a sneak AI experiment that makes real videos look fake.  (Yahoo)
  
  Y tho?
  
  It may just be A/B testing on video sharpening algorithms.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 26 2025 09:39 AM (e0fX0)

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• Who are the 400 million people who made Threads the second most popular discussion platform after only Twitter?  (Mashable)
  
  The article doesn't seem to understand its own conclusion: That these are the same people who made The Big Bang Theory the most popular show on television: Bipedal sphex wasps.
  
  In short, they don't exist, or at least not as recognisably individual human beings.  They are trivially interchangeable corporate drones, the same people who made CB (formerly Cracker Barrel, the nation's foremost fine dining cheese experience) a household name for all the wrong reasons.
  
  
  
• Speaking of households, I peeked out of mine this afternoon.  It was a warm winter's day, so I essayed out to tackle the easiest part of the garden - the patch of lawn nearest the house - which was dusted with small weeds and could do with a trim before the season kicks off for real next month.
  
  Even my smaller lawnmower (an 18V Bosch unit) could handle the task, though I did need to swap batteries at the midpoint because I had neglected to do so before putting it away for the winter.
  
  On the other hand, that virus really did a number on me, and I also needed to recharge half-way through mowing less than half the lawn.  It'll likely be weeks before I'm back to normal.
  
  
  
• Also had a migraine.  Just 'cause.

• Will Trump help 4Chan escape the UK's Thought Police?  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Uncertain but hopeful. Certainly someone needs to drag the Latter Day Stasi to one side before they bring down the entire internet in civil war.
  
  
  
• Will the FTC help Europe escape its own catastrophic meddling in critical internet security protocols?  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  So many idiots, so little time.
  
  
  
• Coinbase's CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn't try AI immediately.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Because he's an asshole.

  "I jumped on this call on Saturday and there were a couple people that had not done it.  Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some tri p or something, and some of them didn’t [have a good reason].  And they got fired."

  And then Coinbase was nuked from orbit, and oh how we laughed.
  
  
  
• InnoDisk demonstrated DDR5 MRDIMMs running at capacities up to 128GB and speeds up to 12,800MHz.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These could be interesting in a second-generation AMD Strix Halo desktop - expandable memory and 50% more bandwidth than the soldered solutions currently available, which cap out at 8500MHz.

Posted by: David Eastman at Monday, August 25 2025 03:19 AM (aAyxl)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 25 2025 06:44 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, August 25 2025 07:06 AM (QE7eq)

Posted by: stargazera5 at Monday, August 25 2025 09:41 AM (WM5vz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 25 2025 01:34 PM (PiXy!)

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• The US government has signed a deal with Intel to convert $8.9 billion in planned but as yet unpaid grants under the CHIPS act into a 9.9% stake in the company.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The previously planned grants did not offer the government an ownership stake, but came with technical goals that Intel may not be able to meet in the current climate, making the revised deal a palatable alternative.  Intel stock was up 5.5% after the news broke on Friday.
  
  
  
• In addition, if Intel decides to sell off a majority of its chip foundry division, the government will have the option to buy another 5% of Intel common shares at the same price of $20.  (WCCFTech)
  
  With great bargains come great responsibility.

• In further addition, the government is looking at allocating $2 billion of the $8 billion unspent in the Biden Administration's CHIPs to break China's stranglehold on rare earth elements.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Rare earth elements are not particularly rare.  China has significant reserves, yes, but so do the United States, Brazil, India, Vietnam, Australia, and possibly Greenland.
  
  
  
• Minisforum is planning another of those AMD Strix Halo mini-PCs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Same core specs as the rest: Sixteen CPU cores, 40 GPU cores that work well for games and very well for AI, and 128GB of RAM of which up to 96GB can be assigned to GPU tasks.
  
  This model also comes with why-the-hell-didn't they just call it USB5 - that is, UBS4 v2, which has the new 80GBps trinary data link found in Thunderbolt 5.  You can just plug two of those directly together to build a small but fast cluster.
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 24 2025 02:35 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, August 24 2025 02:56 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, August 24 2025 07:43 AM (QE7eq)

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• Australia's largest bank - the Commonwealth Bank - has been forced to rehire employees laid off in tests against their AI counterparts when it turned out that the tests had not been testing on anything like an even playing field.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Who knew?  Apart from everybody.
  
  Fortunately only 45 people had been fired by that point.  It could have been a lot worse, and soon will be.

• The Terramaster F4 is four-bay NVMe NAS with a 5Gb Ethernet port.  (Liliputing)
  
  The 5Gb port is a nice touch.  It can handle that transfer rate without any trouble at all.  Internally it can handle about 900MBps, close to the limit of 10Gb Ethernet.  Which it doesn't have.
  
  About $360 at the moment.
  
  
  
• Google says its AI systems barely sip water when answering questions, while "experts" say they are true water guzzlers.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The truth as always is somewhere off to one side in I don't care territory.
  
  
  
• We already got a Commodore 64 remake, and now it seems the company - or a company anyway - will be releasing a clone of the rather more capable Amiga 1200.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  With a Motorola 68020 CPU an an effectively 64-bit chipset, the A1200 offered about four times the performance of the original Amiga.

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Friday, August 22 2025 07:48 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 22 2025 10:04 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 23 2025 03:48 AM (e0fX0)

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• Copilot broke your audit log but didn't tell you.  (Pistachio)

  But what happens if you ask Copilot to not provide you with a link to the file it summarized?  Well, in that case, the audit log is empty.

  AI tools do this kind of thing a lot.
  
  
  
  

• Samsung has announced an 8TB version of the 9100 Pro SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Given the pricing of 8TB SSDs and of PCIe 5.0 generally, it costs $1050.
  
  Just buy two 4TB PCIe 4.0 drives if that is an option.
  
  
  
• The CEO of AWS says that replacing entry-level tech stuff with AI is the "Dumbest thing I've ever heard".  (The Resigster)
  
  It's up there, I'll grant that.
  
  Labubu could make $1 billion this year.  (Tech Crunch)  (archive site)
  
  But not the dumbest.

• A three judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals handed a win to Tesla in its fight over prosecution by the NLRB when it ruled that the entire bureau was probably unconstitutional.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oof.
  
  
  
• Meta is shaking up its AI group again.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  At some point it plans to launch AI products.
  
  Maybe.

• 95% of generative AI pilot programs are failing.  (Fortune)
  
  You gotta pump those numbers up.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, August 20 2025 06:36 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, August 20 2025 09:56 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 20 2025 11:03 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, August 21 2025 02:22 AM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, August 21 2025 02:55 AM (rcPLc)

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