Sunday, March 22
************ Edition
Top Story
- An Ohio datacenter planned by Japanese company SoftBank will cost $40 billion to build - and require a new 9.2GW gas turbine generator complex that will cost another $33 billion. (Tom's Hardware)
Or, as the article notes, 9 nuclear reactors, though that option is off the table due to the excruciatingly long lead times thanks to a thousand layers of bureaucratic nonsense.
Which is ironic considering that the site chosen for the datacenter near Piketon was used to produce nuclear fuel from 1956 until 2001.
Tech News
- Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100 billion to buy existing manufacturing companies and automate them using AI. (MSN)
That's probably better than letting the companies slowly go broke. Maybe. I guess.
- AMD has released its updated FSR 4.1 AI-based upscaling technology - the company's equivalent to Nvidia's DLSS. (Tom's Hardware)
Reports are that it's genuinely good.
But AMD is still keeping a pillow firmly over the face of FSR 4 for older RDNA2 and RDNA3 graphics cards, even though following an accidental leak of the source code it is known to work perfectly well. Not as efficiently as on RDNA4, but still fine.
And it's not as if you can just buy a top-of-the-line Radeon 9070 XT below MSRP right now. I mean, you can, and I did, but I'm an idiot when it comes to money.
- Crimson Desert is here and AMD used it to demonstrate FSR 4.1. Should you buy it? Nnngh. (PC Gamer)
Reviews are mixed, with some calling it the greatest thing since cut cheese and others calling it a buggy mess, and Intel graphics card owners crying in their soup - because the game simply won't start.
One of the strongest criticisms apart from that comes from leaked internal conversations that allege the company didn't decide on the plot of the game until shortly before release. Which rings true because the developer, Pearl Abyss, is best known for it's MMO title Black Desert. In fact, I'm not sure they've released anything else.
- It does run at 50 fps on a MacBook Neo, though. (Notebook Check)
Albeit at 180p, upscaled to 540p - in testing the reviewer had to cut the desktop resolution to salvage something - and with frame generation to create fake frames with AI.
The game fully supports Mac systems, but recommends at least an M3 CPU. And even the just-released and seriously M5 Max is hardly a gaming powerhouse, requiring both upscaling and frame generation to perform acceptably.
- You know sometimes you see something for sale that is obviously, painfully useless and simultaneously has an eye-watering price tag, and you wonder who could possibly be the target market? (The Verge)
- Trivy supply chain attack triggers self-spreading CanisterWorm across 47 NPM packages. (The Hacker News)
What?
- Widely-used Trivy scanner compromised in ongoing supply-chain attack. (Ars Technica)
Slightly better.
- Trivy vulnerability scanner backdoored with credential stealer in supply-chain attack. (CSO Online)
The best headline I've seen so far, because it explains what Trivy (it scans for vulnerabilities in your software) and what the attack does (it steals your login sessions).
That's horrifying. The very people most interested in making sure systems were secure were the target here. If they built Trivy into their code testing process, it would have automatically pulled in the compromised version and stolen their GitHub credentials (this targeted GitHub) and used that to spread the chaos further.
That's what led to the CanisterWorm attack on those NPM packages - and that is probably a very incomplete list.
More at Socket and Wiz.
The maintainers of Trivy posted a thread on GitHub to communicate the details to their users - which the attackers promptly deleted since they had effective control over the Trivy GitHub account at that point.
- Fuck systemd. (It's FOSS)
Musical Interlude
Contains spoilers. Contains very spoilers for four of the most dramatic fight scenes in the first season. Since the first season only really contains four dramatic fight scenes - this is a character-driven series, not monster of the week - you might want to avoid this one if you want to watch the show.
Disclaimer: And I do recommend this series, even to those who do not usually watch anime. I did find the episodes near the end of the first season a bit of a slog - into each great anime a tournament arc must fall - but it resolves itself with the same wit and grace that makes the rest of the story shine.
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Saturday, March 21
Tuna Piano Edition
Top Story
- Press X to doubt: Microsoft says it is fixing Windows 11. (Nerds.xyz)
Almost everything on the list is reversing changes that they push on users against vehement objections, or side effects of those changes.
I'll believe it when I see it. Or six months after that, really.
Meanwhile the Windows 10 IoT Enterprise Edition still exists (and there's a Windows 11 version that is also less broken than the Home edition, if you need support for recent features like Ethernet-over-Thunderbolt.)
Tech News
- Opera GX is here for Linux. (Nerds.xyz)
This is not the browser you are looking for. Opera is now owned by a group whose primary business is payday loans in Africa. The entire technical team left and launched Vivaldi.
I'm not saying that Opera GX is actively scamming users; I'm just saying that I would not need to borrow Sarah Hoyt's shocked face if that turned out to be the case.
- Blue Origin has filed an application with the FCC to launch 51,600 datacenters into space. (Tom's Hardware)
That seems to be rather a lot.
- Suspicious compliance: The story of Delve. (Substack)
Who will certify the certifiers?
- Trump's AI framework targets state laws, sifts child safety burden to parents. (Tech Crunch)
Well. I had mixed feelings about this: Tenth Amendment notwithstanding, state legislation on complex technical issues is usually bad, but federal legislation on complex technical issues is also usually bad. And in this particular case, the people working and reporting on the complex technical issues are also usually bad.
But if Tech Crunch is against it, I'm sold.
- Another day, another state: Don't-call-it-gambling agency Kalshi is banned in Nevada. (Tech Crunch)
Not that Nevada is against gambling, just that the state demands its cut.
Musical Interlude
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Friday, March 20
Dove Grey Afternoon Edition
Top Story
- Bluesky, one-time social network and latterly psych ward for those who can't cope with the harsh truths dished out daily by CNN and whatever MSNBC is called today has raised $100 million in a new funding round. (Tech Crunch)
That's million with an M. Almost enough to buy -
- Your new car might need 300GB of RAM. (The Register)
Said US memory maker Micron, whose most recent quarterly results showed three times the revenue and nine times the profit of the same period the previous year.
Tech News
- Walmart is flooded with previous generation Nvidia RTX 4000 series graphics cards. (Tom's Hardware)
At reasonable prices, so as you might expect the flood has been mopped up pretty damn quickly.
If you're in Australia and don't have easy access to Walmart, look around for Radeon 9070 XT cards which for some reason are steeply discounted right now, sometimes selling for less than the slower Radeon 9070.
I expected shortages and price increases, and some Nvidia 5000 series cards have all but disappeared from US store shelves, but overall... Not so much.
- A rogue AI cause a security incident at Meta. (The Verge)
Again.
- UK censorship agency Ofcom tried to levy fines against 4Chan again. (BBC)
They got a picture of a giant hamster instead.
- Kitten TTS is a text-to-speech model. (GitHub)
That's not remarkable, at least not in the 22nd century where we find ourselves when we're not being stupid which is rarely.
Where was I?
Oh, right. What's remarkable is the whole thing fits in 25MB. Megabytes with an M.
- Half the size of the front page of the New York Times website. (Daring Fireball)
That page on Daring Fireball uses 0.1% that much bandwidth.
- The Verge is having another normal day. (The Verge)
By which I mean they are barking at the moon.
- Can I run Crimson Desert? (Notebook Check)
Well, probably. It runs at more than 60 fps at 1080p native using high settings on five year old midrange cards like the 3060 Ti or 6750 XT.
Musical Interlude
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Thursday, March 19
Antibipartisanarianism Edtion
Top Story
- A bipartisan gaggle of US senators is looking at blowing up DMCA Section 230, the law that makes modern social networks - and to a certain degree, blogs and forums - possible. (The Verge)
Section 230 shields website operators from lawsuit over the behaviour of commenters. But it also serves as a shield for website operators that deliberately inculcate certain behaviours in their users - or that censor users to block behaviour they find undesirable.
It's a people problem, basically. There is not single technical or legislative answer to this mess.
Tech News
- Federal cybersecurity experts thought Microsoft's cloud service offering to the government was "a pile of shit". (ProPublica)
They approved it anyway.
- Apple dropped the Musi app - which streams music from YouTube, apparently without paying anyone or making ads visible - from its app store. A judge ruled they can do that. (Ars Technica)
And sanctioned Musi's lawyers for making shit up.
- AI job losses aren't particularly high, unless you're writing for a fourth-tier news outlet that prevents people from reading your articles, in which case you're boned. (404Media)
Sign up to access this post?
No, I don't think I shall.
- SK Hynix says memory shortages will last until 2030. (Tom's Hardware)
Production currently only covers 80% of demand, and nobody is rushing to fill the gap because everyone who behaved that way went bankrupt in previous memory boom/bust cycles.
- Remove your Ring camera with a claw hammer. (How Things Work)
From the same tertiary syphilis patient who brough us such hits as The Subway Is Not Scary, Quit Your Evil Job, and Things You Can Lie About.
- A new font-rendering trick hides malicious commands from AI tools. (Bleeping Computer)
That is, the commands are visible to humans but invisible to AI agents.
I'm more concerned about the opposite approach, where invisible-to-human instructions are fed to AI agents, but I see no reason why this couldn't be used that way as well.
Musical Interlude
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Wednesday, March 18
Download Some Stuff Edition
Top Story
- Overwhelmingly Negative: Everybody hates DLSS 5. (Ars Technica)
Ars Technica rounds up the response to Nvidia's showcase of its DLSS 5 $10,000 AI slop filter and concludes that... It's bad.
(Not kidding about the cost: The demo required two RTX 5090s and they currently cost between $4000 and $6000 each, depending on the model. Yes, they launch at $2000. That was then; this is now.)
- A roundup of some of the memes. (Notebook Check)
AI-generated. Because of course.
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says you're holding it wrong. (Tom's Hardware)
Thanks Steve.
Tech News
- AI still doesn't work very well, and businesses who claim it does are faking it. (The Register)
Or are looking at a very specific use case. If you need to translate code from one language to another, it works pretty well.
Sometimes.
Maybe.To underscore the consequences of not having that kind of data, Smiley pointed to a recent attempt to rewrite SQLite in Rust using AI.
"It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right," he said. It's 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite. Two thousand times worse for a database is a non-viable product. It's a dumpster fire. Throw it away. All that money you spent on it is worthless."
-
Except that's not actually accurate. (Medium)
It wasn't 2000 times slower. It was 20,000 times slower. A query that took 90 microseconds on the real thing took two seconds on the AI rewrite.
-
Please-don't-call-it-gambling site Kalshi faces criminal charges in Arizon because guess what? (Tech Crunch)
You'll never guess.
Oh, you guessed.
-
All the data and photos gathered by people playing Pokemon Go has been used to train delivery robots. (Popular Science)
We already knew this, right? The developer of Pokemon Go, Niantic, wasn't created to develop games. It was founded as a geospatial services company. And they put millions of players to work harvesting data.
Musical Interlude
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Tuesday, March 17
Not Even We Know What DLSS Stands For Edition
Top Story
- Nvidia held its keynote address at its annual GPU Technology Conference, where it showed off a preview of its new DLSS 5 software, two months after DLSS 4.5 was released at CES. (Tom's Hardware)
DLSS 5 goes all-in on AI, changing game graphics into the AI developer's idea of game graphics. It's... Not great.
It uses face detection to overlay what it things faces should look like on your game's graphics, adding twenty years to the age of characters while leaving their clothes untouched and sometimes leaving random items looking like they've just been dragged backwards through an industrial recycling facility.
And it achieves all this in real time using the power of your own graphics card... Assuming you have dual RTX 5090s, which you don't.
Tech News
- Encyclopedia Britannica has sued OpenAI for "stealing our shit". (Engadget)
They may not have used precisely those words.
- "Investors" on Polymarket have threatened to murder an Israeli reporter for reporting stories that ran against their "investments". (Times of Israel)
They "invested" in predicting that an Iranian missile would be intercepted; instead it crashed in empty land outside Jerusalem so that they lost their "investments".
Yes, they are gamblers trying to nobble a horse, only the horse is a person and the nobbling would be fatal.
- The cast of Firefly are looking for funds to reboot the series in animated form. (Hollywood Reporter)
Uh... Maybe? It was a great series cut off far too early, and it's probably been too long for them to reprise their roles in a live action series. Also one of the characters is canonically dead.
But animated? Anything can happen in an animated series.
- Micron has begun volume production of 36GB HBM4 modules, 28Gbps PCIe 6.0 SSDs, and 192GB SOCAMM2 laptop memory modules. (WCCFTech)
You can't have any. Not unless your name is Nvidia.
- Dell has introduced its new Pro Max desktop with an Nvidia GB300 CPU and 696GB of LPDDR5X memory. (Notebook Check)
They did not list a price, for obvious reasons.
Musical Interlude
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Monday, March 16
Lunchables Edition
Top Story
- The Big Three memory makers are publicly saying they expect the AI bubble to pop - or at least fizzle - by 2028, which is why they're slow-walking expansion plans in the face of unprecedented demand. (WCCFTech)
That does mean that if you need memory now you're kind of screwed.
It also means that Taiwan's Nanya and West Taiwan's CXMT - the fourth and fifth largest memory manufacturers - are making hay while the sun shines.
Tech News
- North Korea's latest scam is placing remote workers with tech companies. (NBC)
They've actually been doing this for a while. They fake their ID, phone a friend for interviews, send the money to the government, and steal secrets if they get a chance.
- Electric vehicle sales are booming in countries where a hundred miles is a long distance and nobody has children. (Electrek)
Less so in places with a future.
- Myrient, the 385TB archive of retro games that was dying of exorbitant hosting fees, has been saved. (Tom's Hardware)
The entire archive has been backed up and volunteers are working on a new website and torrent server.
I took a look myself, but I don't have 385TB of space available and it was hard to know where to start with a partial archive.
- Britain is investing $2.5 billion in nuclear power to protect itself from future energy price shocks. (GB News)
Not fission which exists and actually works, but fusion which doesn't. Except on an inconveniently abrupt scale.
- What good is a glass worm? (Aikido)
Glassworm, an attack that injects vulnerabilities into open-source projects by slipping invisible Unicode characters into sensitive places, is back.
Unicode merges all human languages, ever, into a single character set. Its creators never bothered to ask if this was a good idea.
Musical Interlude
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Sunday, March 15
Wiffly Waffly Edition
Top Story
- Montana's Governor Greg Gianforte has signed into law the state's Right to Compute Act, the first legislation of its kind. (Western MT News)
Before you celebrate, the bill is the worst kind of waffly bullshit, forbidding the government from infringing on fundamental rights unless it really wants to.
I think they've spent too much time next door to Canada and the government needs to institute a hundred-mile decommunised zone.
Still doing better than Australia where our government threatened at one point to legislate against inconvenient arithmetic.
- Whether you have a right or not you can't do much computed on a MacBook Pro 14 with an M5 Max CPU. (Notebook Check)
It looks great on paper but it throttles down to less than half power within two seconds. If you want the high-end processor the only viable option is the 16 inch model.
Tech News
- Studies show that productivity gains from AI for typical office workers amount to as little as 16 minutes per week. (Nerds.XYZ)
I'm not a typical office worker, but I get more out of it just from using it as a better search engine. Watching Grok and ChatGPT discard dozens of useless results from Google before finding the right answer is... I don't know. Satisfying, in a strange way.
- Latency numbers every programmer should know but most don't. (GitHub)
Interesting that from the original version in 2012 to this 2020 update, the quoted SSD latency improved by a factor of 10 - from 150 microseconds to 16. And disk seeks from 10 milliseconds to 2, which has got to be measuring cache effects, because that would mean the disk would be spinning at 30,000 rpm.
- Just how much responsibility do AI chatbots and the companies that create them hold for psychotic people acting psychotically? (Tech Crunch)
I'm torn between bankrupting the companies and bankrupting the lawyers bringing these suits.
Both is good.
- Elon Musk plans to launch the Terafab project - his own chip manufacturing facility - next week. (WCCFTech)
Of course it's going to take years before anything can come online even if he can secure the required tools from ASML, which is a single source for top-end chip manufacturing equipment.
He has said that he plans to reach production in excess of 100 billion chips per year, though exactly what chips and in what time frame he has not yet specified.
- ASRock's new H610M Combo II motherboard is just like the earlier H610M combo only worse. A lot worse. (WCCFTech)
The H610M Combo featured two slots for DDR4 memory and four slots for DDR5, though you could only have one or the other.
The Combo II cuts that down to one slot for DDR5 and two slots for DDR5, which is kind of broken. If you have DDR5 you don't need the DDR4 slot, and if you don't you're stuck with a quarter of the bandwidth.
Musical Interlude
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Saturday, March 14
Pyrex Family Saturday Edition
Top Story
- Two more long-lost Doctor Who episodes have been rediscovered decades after they first aired. (BBC)
The two episodes are from the sprawling 12-episode story The Dalek Master Plan that aired in Britain in 1965 - and never aired anywhere else because Australian censors deemed it too violent and that made it unprofitable to resell in smaller markets.
And then the BBC, in the long tradition of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, wiped the tapes to reuse them, deeming the tapes themselves more valuable than their contents.
Which left little hope because most of the episodes rediscovered over the years have been from the archives of channels elsewhere in the world that "accidentally" held on to copies for decades after their rights expired.
These two episodes were left to a film archiving foundation as part of a "ramshackle" private collection.
In a nice touch, one of the actors who appeared as the Doctor's companion in the story - Peter Purves, now 87 - was invited to the screening, but only told that it was for an interview. To be fair, they did interview him afterwards.
- Yes, it's a quiet news day.
Tech News
- The CEO of Adobe will be stepping down after 18 years of delighting investors and pissing off customers. (CNBC)
Mostly because lately he's been pissing off customers and investors in equal measure.
- Italian prosecutors want to proceed to trial against Amazon on charges of tax evasion even after the company settled with the Italian revenue agency. (Reuters)
Tread carefully. Amazon does have space lasers, even if not quite so many as Twitter.
- No, you can't phone a friend. (BBC)
Not when you're a witness in a case in Britain's High Court.
And not when you claim that the number called by the smart glasses you were wearing at the time was for a taxi driver.
- Before quantum computing arrives, this startup wants enterprises already running on it. (Tech Crunch)
Congratulations, Tech Crunch. This level of incoherence is worthy of The Verge.
- A study conducted by a studio creating a game with AI-powered NPCs claims 96% of players enjoy AI-powered NPCs. (WCCFTech)
Well, first, Mandy Rice Davies applies.
And second, NPCs are AI-powered by definition.
- Nvide claims future GPUs will bring a million-fold performance increase in path-tracing. (WCCFTech)
Mostly by not performing path tracing. And the comparison is against ten year old hardware that also didn't perform path tracing.
Musical Interlude
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Friday, March 13
Animeoia Edition
Top Story
- Reducing Europe's nuclear energy sector was fucking stupid, says... Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. (Reuters)
Yeah, Ursula.
We know.
Everybody knows.
Everybody knew the entire time.
They only people pushing this idiocy were Europe's enemies, like the environmentalist lobby.
Tech News
- Why cats always land on their feet. (New York Times)
Because landing on someone else's feet would be gauche.
- Perplexity AI has announced Perplexity Computer, a service where you pay $200 per month to run AI tasks on your own hardware. (Perplexity)
It's not a bubble.
It's worse.
- Crimson Desert is a new single-player computer game that... Might not suck? (WCCFTech)
People who were in on the early tests are raving about it, and the recommended specs are a welcome return to normalcy. You do need 150GB of storage - SSD mandatory - but apart from that a five year old Ryzen 5 5600, 16GB of RAM, and a mid-range Radeon 6700 XT should be fine. And that's the recommended hardware; the minimum spec lists a Ryzen 2600X processor from 2018, and a Radeon 5500 XT, a low-end graphics card from 2019.
Nice change from games like Borderlands 4 which perform poorly even with a 9800 X3D and an RTX 5090.
It's also coming to the PlayStation 5 but there's a small problem there: It's a 150GB game and the maximum capacity of the BDXL disks the PlayStation uses is 100GB. There's a 48GB day-one download you need to install before it will run.
Musical Interlude
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