• The DOJ has apparently succeeded in shaking down Binance for $4 billion.  (Wall Street Journal)  (archive site)
  
  The fines will settle civil liabilities over violating US financial sanctions in allowing people to transfer imaginary money over the internet, and CEO Changpeng Zhao will plead guilty to one criminal charge and - since he's not a Republican - probably get off with probation.

• Sarah Silverman's lawsuit alleging that all generative AI constitutes copyright infringement continues to fall apart.  (Hollywood Reporter)
  
  If only someone could have predicted this.
  
  
  
• Sunbird is a secure messaging app that doesn't store any of your private information on its servers.  (The Verge)
  
  It stores them on someone else's servers.
  
  Unencrypted.
  
  
  
• Striated caracaras perform as well as Goffin's cockatoos with puzzle boxes.  (Phys.org)
  
  Wait, I think that might be the wrong link.
  
  
  
• Rich people have money.  This is bad.  (Phys.org)
  
  The solution is to make sure nobody has any money, and if at all possible, make sure there are no people at all.
  
  
  
• Intel's Meteor Lake laptop chips - the real 14th generation, for small values of real - are almost here, and they're just plain not very good.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Lots of off-the-record quotes from laptop makers who are basically saying they're turning to AMD because Intel is a hot mess right now.
  
  
  
• Former OpenAI employees call Sam Altman a scum-sucking pig and soul vampire.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Well, they didn't use those words.  Or they might have done; I didn't read it all.
  
  But after he joined as CEO the company's attrition rate spiked to 50%.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, November 22 2023 07:52 PM (0001W)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 23 2023 01:39 AM (LADmw)

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• Elon Musk went nuclear on Media Matters.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The article tries do pretend this didn't happen, because as the saying goes You don't hate journalists enough.  You think you do, but you don't.
  
  Media Matters ran a shock exposé showing that Twitter ran ads against extremist content, leading to a flight of major advertisers.
  
  The only problem is, Twitter was watching while they did this.
  
  What they did was create a new account and:
  
  1. Follow every Nazi meme account they could found (which was not many).
  2. Follow the major advertising brands they wanted to scare away from Twitter.
  3. Sit there hitting refresh over and over until they got the screenshot they wanted.
  
  Only problem with that is that Twitter logged everything they did and can show that the only account in the world that saw those ads on those tweets was Media Matters, because they spent an entire day setting things up to get that result.
  
  Does Tech Crunch tell you that?  No.
  
  Does The Register tell you that?  No.
  
  Does Ars Technica tell you that?  No.
  
  They're all-in on censorship.
  
  
  
• Oh, and the Texas Attorney General has announced a criminal investigation into Media Matters conduct.  (MSN)
  
  You don't hate journalists enough - but maybe Ken Paxton does.

• To be fair Ars Technica already filled its weekly quota of one article not hating Elon Musk.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yes, the Starship flight was a good test.  It might be too much to say it was a success, but it achieved the stated goals.  If your kid comes home with a 90 on their math exam, you shouldn't complain that they weren't able to answer the bonus question which was actually a copy-paste of the Goldbach Conjecture.
  
  
  
• How many Jacaranda trees are there in Sydney?  1539.  (Observable)
  
  They specifically mean the central business district, not the metropolitan area, where there are far, far more of these purple fuckers.
  
  
  
• The DOJ is trying to shake down Binance for $4 billion.  (Bloomberg)
  
  What did Binance do?  Apparently it sent customers' money where the customers asked for it to be sent, rather than stealing it the way FTX did.
  
  
  
• Airliners flying over the Middle East are experiencing advanced Denial of Service attacks on GPS guidance systems and nobody knows what to do.  (Vice)
  
  I can think of a couple of things.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Threadripper 7000 range is here.  (AnandTech)
  
  I'd like to get excited about these, but the price is simply too high - a 32-core chips is four times the price of a 16-core desktop chip - and for many task the performance barely improves.
  
  If you do 3d rendering for a living, then one of these systems will dramatically improve your workflow and earn back the cost in no time.  Otherwise make sure to find a benchmark that matches your workflow and decide whether it's worth it for you.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has hired Sam Altman and Greg Brockman after they were fired from OpenAI.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I have ceased to care about any of this nonsense.

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, November 22 2023 11:51 AM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 22 2023 05:21 PM (PiXy!)

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• A day after firing Sam Altman, OpenAI is in talks to bring him back.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
• No they're not.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well, that certainly clears that up.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Twitch founder Emmett Shear will be the new CEO of OpenAI.  (The Verge)
  
  It looks like the researchers and non-profit board wanted a CEO who would run the business, and not try to also run the non-profit side of things.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday.  (Microsoft)
  
  Apparently with a driver update that broke the microphone in my laptop.
  
  
  
• After 33 years of searching, two groups of mathematicians have independently discovered the ninth Dedekind number.  (Quanta)
  
  The first four numbers are 2, 3, 6, and 20.
  
  The ninth number is 286,386,577,668,298,411,128,469,151,667,598,498,812,336.  So it does grow a bit after that start.
  
  
  
• There is no cloud, there is only someone else's computers...  Or your own.  (The Register)
  
  Microcloud from Canonical - the company behind Ubuntu - is designed to make it easy to deploy your own small cloud - where "small" is anything from three Raspberry Pis to fifty 128-core AMD servers.  Which is a pretty large value of small.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 21 2023 12:15 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 21 2023 12:19 AM (LADmw)

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• Starship's second test flight successfully reached space - and then went boom.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Not everything went to plan, but it went a lot better than the first test, with all 33 engines in the booster working, a clean separation of the second stage of the rocket, and reaching a height of nearly 150km before the automated self-destruct system got bored and decided to join in the fun.

• The Silicon Power UD90 is one of the cheapest 4TB SSDs around.  How does it perform?  Poorly.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It is rated for 5000MBps reads and 4500MBps writes, perfectly respectable numbers.
  
  It gets just slightly over that read speed in independent tests...  And slightly over 5% of that write speed.
  
  Avoid.
  
  
  
• You can find the Team MP34 4TB for $151.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Its rated speeds are lower, but it actually delivers what it says.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's investors allegedly want the used car salesman back in charge.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI has an odd corporate structure: It's a non-profit in charge of a for-profit company.  The non-profit board fired the for-profit CEO, but there are investors putting money directly into the for-profit company and they want their snake oil guy back.
  
  Fortunately companies like Mistral and Meta are working hard to make OpenAI irrelevant.
  
  
  
• AMD's previous-generation Radeon 6750 GRE comfortably beats Nvidia's RTX 4060.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't buy one though; it's a China exclusive.  Because reasons.
  
  

• What the fuck is going on at OpenAI? (Tech Crunch)
  
  Snake ail salesman Sam Altman has been dismissed as CEO and removed from the board, and co-founder Greg Brockman, who yesterday was chairman and president, is now neither of those. CTO Mira Murati is interim CEO until a replacement can be found.
  
  Altman is also deeply involved in the thoroughly sleazy Worldcoin project, and the moderately dubious Humane AI pin. It might be something as simple as a conflict of interests, or it could be something... More.
  
  Sam Altman strikes me as a high-functioning version of Sam Bankman-Fried, so these events surprise me not at all.

• An online atrocity database got hacked and leaked the personal details of the victims of said atrocities. (The Intercept)
  
  Who thought this was a good idea?
  
  
  
• A Canadian court has overturned a government ruling that single-use plastic items are toxic, on the basis that they aren't. (Reuters)
  
  The government wants to ban single-use plastic, so rather than pass legislation, it just defined them as toxic so they'd be banned automatically.
  
  The only problem with that is, well, they're not toxic at all.
  
  A little surprising that a Canadian court would take issue with this, but welcome nonetheless.
  
  
  
• What could be toxic, though - as mentioned previously - is eye drops. (Ars Technica)
  
  An inspection of one factory in Mumbai found workers wandering around barefoot - inside an allegedly sterile production area where not only shoes but shoe coverings, gowns, and gloves are required.
  
  They did detect the inevitable contamination. They just... Kept right on going.
  
  
  
• You can save oil by taking your kids to school on an electric moped, and even more when you all get killed in a traffic accident on the first day. (The Conversation)
  
  Take a look at the photos in the article. Sad to say, those people are statistics waiting to be calculated.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile:
  
  

  Getting back to productive matters, Starship flight 2 launches in ~6 hours!!

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2023

  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, November 18 2023 06:07 PM (bg2DR)

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• Running Signal - an encrypted messaging app with hundreds of millions of installs worldwide - costs $40 million a year.  (Wired)
  
  That's not a lot on the scale of major platforms, but the breakdown is interesting.
  
  Nearly half of it goes on salaries and benefits.  Signal has a relatively small engineering team but keeping engineers working in a major US city is expensive.
  
  $1.7 million goes to pay for 20 petabytes of data transfers for voice and video calls.  
  
  And $6 million is spent just on the verification messages sent via SMS when new users sign up - a markup of around 50,000% over the real data costs incurred by mobile carriers.
  
  

• UnitedHealth is using an AI system to decided when to pay out on health insurance claims.  They say they're not, but they would.
  
  The AI is wrong 90% of the time.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Wrong in UnitedHealth's favour, of course.  Otherwise it would have been kicked to the curb long ago.
  
  
  
• A 96 core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX overclocked to 5.2GHz on all cores uses three times the power and runs four times as fast as an Intel 14900K.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which sounds reasonable, except using three times the power of a 14900K means it's pulling about a kilowatt.  Not the whole system, just the CPU.
  
  That's easily enough current to make it glow red hot, so they had a pretty substantial cooling system for this particular benchmark run.
  
  
  

• Is my toddler a stochastic carrot?  (New Yorker)
  
  No.  Your toddler is actually capable of learning.
  
  This piece of art is a better discussion of the risks, benefits, and underlying mechanisms of generative AI than I have seen coming from almost anyone in the industry.

• Microsoft has renamed Bing Chat to Stochastic Carrot.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or if it hasn't, it should.
  
  
  
• Amazon has stopped selling seven brands of eye drops that lacked FDA approval.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  Eye drops might not seem like a big issue.  All you need to do is take a saline solution, boil it so it's sterile, and bottle it.
  
  And yet in the past year in the US, eye drops have caused infections, blindness, and at least four deaths.
  
  Oh, and there's lead in baby food.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Do you people want an overbearing regulatory state?  Because this is how you get an overbearing regulatory state.
  
  
  
• Developers keep putting security keys into public code.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Stochastic carrots.
  
  
  
• Asus has apologised for its "Evengenlion" limited edition motherboards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All purchasers will get an extra year of warranty coverage and a replacement part that correctly spells "Avengelyne".
  
  I'm sure that will make everybody happy.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 17 2023 02:03 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 17 2023 11:22 AM (bg2DR)

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• A federal district court in California has ruled that Facebook, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat have to face lawsuits alleging that they are running social networks.  (The Verge)
  
  The plaintiffs claim that the social networks have deleterious and addictive effects on children, which seems plausible because social networks have deleterious and addictive effects on everyone, because they're social networks.
  
  
  

Tech News

• An in-depth review of the new AMD model of HP's Pavilion Plus 14.  (Notebook Check)
  
  I'm typing this on last year's Intel-based Pavilion Plus 14.  Great screen, good keyboard, pretty fast CPU (12700H), Intel integrated graphics, and 16GB soldered RAM which is the only major shortcoming.
  
  This new version has a Ryzen 7840U.  That offers about the same CPU performance - a bit better on multi-threaded tests - and twice the graphics performance.
  
  At as little as half the power consumption.
  
  And since HP also increased the battery size this year, battery life has jumped from eight hours to sixteen.
  
  All they need to do is offer 32GB of RAM and it would be perfect.
  
  
  
• Rivian released a software update for its electric vehicles on Monday, which bricked the onboard infotainment systems, affecting literally dozen of customers.  (Electrek)
  
  The cars might need physical servicing to restore them to normal operational state, because everything is awful.
  
  
  
• Is there some law of nature requiring that websites proposing radical redesigns of the web must look terrible?  (Camen Design)
  
  Or is it some kind of alien conspiracy?
  
  Or both?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 16 2023 06:35 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 16 2023 06:41 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 16 2023 10:20 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 16 2023 04:31 PM (PiXy!)

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• SpaceX is planning a test launch of Starship as early as this weekend.  (FAA)
  
  If the FAA website stays up.  Maybe even if it doesn't.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile further out, the James Web Space Telescope is finding hundreds of rogue planets at a time.  (Quanta)
  
  These aren't neatly orbiting stars, but just floating around in the middle of nowhere.
  
  Often in pairs, which is not something we normally see planets doing.  They've been called JUMBOs, for Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, and there seems to be a lot of them.

• Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI.  (Arxiv)
  
  Or, What the Fuck is AGI Anyway?
  
  It examines nine definitions for AGI, dismisses them all as useless, and posits that current state-of-the-art AI systems are approaching AGI Level 1, which is to say, a mechanical idiot.
  
  
  
• Samsung's 990 Pro - one of the best consumer SSDs around short of the still wildly overpriced PCIe 5 models - is now $250 for 4TB.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's a lot for a little and it has no shortcomings.  It's not limited to PCIe 3, it's not DRAMless, it's not QLC, it's not from a second or third tier manufacturer.
  
  Ten years from now that will look absurdly expensive but right now it's a steal.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced its 5th generation Emerald Rapids Xeon range, along with some very, very selective benchmarks.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Understandable, because these models go up to 64 cores, where AMD already goes up to 128 cores.  Intel has certain areas of strength but overall they just get clobbered.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT's new Code Interpreter function lets you upload your data for processing - and also lets other people steal it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you upload a file, and that file contains a link to a web page, and that web page could be interpreted as instructions for ChatGPT, ChatGPT will thus interpret them.
  
  As I said earlier, mechanical idiot.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 14 2023 10:34 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, November 15 2023 02:15 AM (r9O5h)

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• Now that Sam Bankman-Fraud has been found guilty on all charges, what is next?  Well, sentencing is scheduled for March 28, but before that he goes on trial again for another long list of crimes.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oh no.
  
  Anyway...

• In a US first, a plant has started pulling carbon from the air.  (Yahoo)
  
  I kind of thought that was what plants had been doing all along.
  
  No?
  
  
  
• Developers are being targeted by malware on the Python package index.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This is a real thing.  I haven't been bitten yet but I am far more cautious about installing Python packages than I used to be, double-checking exactly what I am asking for every single time.
  
  
  
• Apple's upcoming M3 Ultra could have twice as many GPU cores as the M3 Max, which is not really a surprise because the M3 Ultra is two M3 Max chips glued together.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Okay, it's a slow news day.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 14 2023 01:48 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 14 2023 01:48 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, November 14 2023 12:36 PM (sZ6tC)

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