• Microsoft announced that it has saved $500 million by increasing reliance on AI and firing thousands of people but mostly by firing thousands of people.  (Yahoo)
  
  Thousands of people hardest hit.
  
  

• Jack Dorsey (one of the original Twitter founders) says his new secure app, Bitchat, has not been tested for security.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  At all.  I mean, why would you?  If it's secure you don't need to test it, and if it's not secure you don't want to test it.
  
  
  
• If you want a good small Android tablet, the Galaxy Z Fold 7 is not it.  (Liliputing)
  
  For one thing it costs $2000.
  
  
  
• The FTC's "click to cancel" rule - that would mandate subscriptions to be as easy to cancel as to set up in the first place - is temporarily dead.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The FTC has a rule that if a proposed regulation would have an impact of more than $100 million it must first go through a regulatory analysis process.
  
  The FTC deemed the impact less than $100 million and so skipped that process, but the Eighth Circuit disagreed, requiring the FTC to go back, if not to square one, then at least to square four.
  
  
  
• Proving lies: How mathematicians just poked a hole in zero-knowledge proofs.  (Quanta)
  
  Not a fatal hole, by my reading.  The underlying technique - called Fiat-Shamir transforms - has been proven to be secure if the random numbers used are truly random.  The trick here is that if you know how the random numbers are generated, a malicious program can use that information to "prove" things that aren't true.
  
  If you require that the program code be less complicated than your random number generator, though, this attack is foiled.
  
  
  
• Speaking of leaks, there are some in Zen 3 and Zen 4 chips.  (AMD)
  
  Severity is ranked as "medium" and BIOS updates are on their way.
  
  There are also two low-severity issues that leak data that technically should be leaked but which doesn't really matter.  Only the low-severity leaks affect older Zen 1 and Zen 2 chips.
  
  Apparently Zen 5 is unaffected.
  
  
  
• Also speaking of leaks, Qantas.  (The Register)
  
  Well, that's lovely.

Posted by: Frank at Friday, July 11 2025 02:02 AM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Jason at Friday, July 11 2025 04:56 AM (hfTJn)

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• Yesterday I noted that Twitter was taking steps to make its AI chatbot, Grok, "less politically correct".
  
  It looks instead of making it 5% more Hitler, they dialed it up to 500%.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  For a few hours it sounded like a cross between Heinrich Himmler and the Ayatollah Khamenei, or a moderate Democrat.
  
  Twitter has been cleaning up the mess and Grok is back to normal now, which for a chatbot means remarkably useless and only not dangerous because nobody trusts it for anything.

• What is AGI?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, it stands for "artificial general intelligence", but what it means depends on what the speaker needs it to mean.  None of the big AI companies are focused on true intelligence, but rather on whatever gimmick will keep investor dollars flowing.

  According to one definition reportedly agreed upon by Microsoft and OpenAI, the answer lies in economics: When AI generates $100 billion in profits. This arbitrary profit-based benchmark for AGI perfectly captures the definitional chaos plaguing the AI industry.

  
  
  
• IBM's new Power11 systems offer up to 256 cores, 2048 threads, and a lot of memory.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Don't ask how much.
  
  
  
• The New York Times told the truth for once and The Verge is frothing mad.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  I think the CDC needs to intervene at Verge HQ.
  
  
  
• Can an email travel more than 500 miles in 2025?  (Flak)
  
  Mostly, yes.  Not always, but mostly.

• Yesterday I noted that Twitter was taking steps to make its AI chatbot, Grok, "less politically correct".
  
  It looks instead of making it 5% more Hitler, they dialed it up to 500%.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  For a few hours it sounded like a cross between Heinrich Himmler and the Ayatollah Khamenei, or a moderate Democrat.
  
  Twitter has been cleaning up the mess and Grok is back to normal now, which for a chatbot means remarkably useless and only not dangerous because nobody trusts it for anything.

• What is AGI?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, it stands for "artificial general intelligence", but what it means depends on what the speaker needs it to mean.  None of the big AI companies are focused on true intelligence, but rather on whatever gimmick will keep investor dollars flowing.

  According to one definition reportedly agreed upon by Microsoft and OpenAI, the answer lies in economics: When AI generates $100 billion in profits. This arbitrary profit-based benchmark for AGI perfectly captures the definitional chaos plaguing the AI industry.

  
  
  
• IBM's new Power11 systems offer up to 256 cores, 2048 threads, and a lot of memory.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Don't ask how much.
  
  
  
• The New York Times told the truth for once and The Verge is frothing mad.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  I think the CDC needs to intervene at Verge HQ.
  
  
  
• Can an email travel more than 500 miles in 2025?  (Flak)
  
  Mostly, yes.  Not always, but mostly.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, July 09 2025 11:06 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 10 2025 10:01 PM (PiXy!)

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• Apple has file an appeal against the EU's latest half-billion-dollar fine for - and I quote - "having money the EU wants".  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Okay, so maybe I don't quote.  But when it comes to a fight between communists pretending to be politicians and communists pretending to be capitalists, I'll side with the pretend capitalists unless they're also French.

• Twitter has updated the chatbot Grok to be "less politically correct".  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Mostly it seems to be just as wrong but more argumentative.
  
  
  
• React is a fractal of caching with metastatic mutability.  (Plotke)
  
  What did you call me?
  
  
  
• What Microchip doesn't tell you about the VSC8512.  (Serd.es)
  
  A lot of things, apparently, but they don't matter unless you're trying to build a managed switch from scratch.
  
  Which the author in this case is.
  
  
  
• 13.5% of scientific papers from 2024 are written at least partly using AI.  (Phys.org)
  
  That low?
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, July 08 2025 10:35 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, July 09 2025 03:40 AM (KOtXO)

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• Why AI sucks.  (Dwarkesh)
  
  Because it doesn't learn.
  
  Specifically, current large language models are not designed to acquire and verify new facts and to discard old one that turned out to be incorrect, or to adopt new modes of though that streamline reasoning.
  
  They are trained, once, and then left to slowly rot until they are replaced.
  
  Interesting comments on this article too: Arguing about when AI will replace humanity and then admitting that nobody really knows anything and it will probably never happen.

• Why software teams slow down as they grow.  (Medium)
  
  Because everything does.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's new desktop CPU arrives this month.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No, you can't buy one.  But you will be able to buy mini-PCs built around it...  For around $3000.
  
  I don't expect it to set the world on fire.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Monday, July 07 2025 11:25 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, July 08 2025 12:12 AM (rcPLc)

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• The Nvidia RTX 5090 - the fastest graphics card available - can lose up to 25% performance if it doesn't have full PCIe 5.0 x16 bandwidth.  (WCCFTech)
  
  For example, running at half speed - with either a PCIe x8 slot or PCIe 4.0 - it loses...  Basically nothing.  Maybe 1%.
  
  At a quarter of the bandwidth - so PCIe 3.0 - it loses 10% of its performance.
  
  If you drop all the way back to PCIe 2.0 you finally see that 25% performance loss.
  
  Meaning that PCIe 5.0 doesn't improve performance unless you don't have all 16 lanes available, even on a 5090.
  
  And if you're using it for a workload that resides mostly on the card, like AI processing, you hardly need anything.  There's more variability between test runs than between a single lane and a full x16 slot.

• The OneXGPU Lite offers a Radeon 7600M GPU on a Thunderbolt 5 connection, which is...  Kind of pointless.  (Liliputing)
  
  The 7600M runs at about a quarter the speed of a 5090, so it would work just fine with Thunderbolt 4.  Or Thunderbolt 3, since it's exactly the same speed.
  
  
  
• Intel has a new network card.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The E610 offers two ports at up to 10Gb speeds and uses just 5W.
  
  
  
• Serving 200 million requests per day using CGI on an entry level server.  (Simon Willison)
  
  CGI may not be fast, but that's all relative.  It scales smoothly on whatever hardware you might throw at it, and hardware these days is fast.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 07 2025 02:39 AM (1zWbY)

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• AMD's Zen 6 CPUs could be really fast and have lots of cache.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Some of the rumours around Zen 6 - expected next year - appear to be solid: It will have 12 CPU cores per chiplet, up from 8 in all earlier models, and L3 cache will likewise scale by 50%.
  
  Speed is expected to pass the 6GHz mark, which seems reasonable.  Intel has already done that with its fastest models, and AMD is planning to move from TSMC's 4nm node to 2nm, which is notably faster.
  
  The one new rumour here is to do with the X3D models.  The X3D cache chips are also rumoured to be 50% larger, and it is possible to stack two of them on one CPU for up to 240MB of L3 cache on a single chiplet - up from 96MB currently.
  
  Also rumoured are the speeds for the smaller, slower Zen 6c cores: Up to 4.5GHz.  Since these have exactly the same performance per clock as full-size Zen 6, they will be quite respectable performers.
  
  Zen 6 will launch on the current-generation AM5 socket, so you can easily upgrade existing Zen 4 and Zen 5 systems.  Intel already abandoned Socket 1700 which supported its 12th, 13th, and 14th generation chips (which were basically all the same), and is expected to abandon its current Socket 1851 for yet another platform when it launches Nova Lake next year.  So forget any upgrades on that side.
  
  

Tech News

• Beeg cat means beeg error.  (arXiv)  (pdf)
  
  Adding useless cat facts when posing questions to so-called "reasoning" AIs instantly triples the error rate.
  
  
  
• Because it's Potemkin reasoning.  (The Register)
  
  And the peasants are revolting.
  
  
  
• The Playstation 5 Pro can't run AMD's latest FSR 4 upscaling.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Zero surprise there; neither can last year's AMD cards.  FSR 4 relies on eight-bit floating point hardware found only in the 9000-series cards.
  
  
  
• There is no safe amount of processed meat in your diet, according to idiots.  (CNN)
  
  Why, eating as little as one hot dog every single day could increase your risk of diabetes and cancer.
  
  At no point did CNN consider the possibility of eating more than zero but fewer than one hot dog per day.
  
  
  
• How Congress rejected King George, or, fascists are f***ing stupid.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  These people.
  
  
  
• Why does Valve produce so few video games itself now that it has taken over the PC gaming market, everyone loves it, and it makes billions of dollars per year in profit for doing almost nothing?  (Financial Times)  (archive site)
  
  You know, guys, I think you may have answered your own question.
  
  
  
• Two Bitcoin wallets have woken up from a 14 year nap.  (MarketWatch)
  
  When they were last used in 2011 they were worth a total of $15,600.  They just became active again, now valued at more than two billion dollars.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, July 05 2025 11:57 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, July 06 2025 03:55 AM (KOtXO)

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• The US government is planning to breed billions of flesh-eating flies, zap them with radiation, and dump them on Mexico.  (CBS)
  
  Take that, you smug-druggling bastiches!
  
  ...
  
  Actually, this has been going on for years in Panama.  These are New World Screwworm flies, and they are a major problem.  The project - which has been keeping them penned up in South America for decades - breeds huge numbers of sterile but otherwise healthy males, which then compete to breed with the females, which produces...  Nothing.
  
  But that's the point.  It has to be kept up continuously (and has been) but it has drastically reduced their numbers north of the canal for since the 1960s.  Until recently, when they swarmed and made a break for it.
  
  The fly-factory in Panama currently produces 117 million dead-inside flies per week; the plan is to increase the number of sexual zombies to 400 million per week to outcompete real men.  Real flies.  Real fly men.  You know what I mean.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill will make it harder for solar and wind renewable energy projects to get access to government funds: They will need to actually build something.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Inconceivable.
  
  It does make it easier for nuclear and geothermal projects to gain access to government funds: They will also need to build something.
  
  
  
• The Radeon 9070 GRE - a cut-down version with 12GB of RAM and 48 graphics cores instead of the 16GB and 64 cores on the 9070 XT - will be getting a release in Taiwan.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No official prices so far outside of Taiwan and West Taiwan.
  
  
  
• Samsung is delaying the construction of its new $44 billion chip factory in Texas because it has no customers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Better to figure that out before spending the $44 billion, yes.
  
  
  
• AI is very good on the A, much less so on the I.  (Nikkei)
  
  If you pass a letter to someone to give you a million dollars, and they just give it to you, that kind of sucks the joy out of life.
  
  
  
• The Stop Killing Games initiative has passed a million signatures in Europe thanks in no small part to efforts to kill the Stop Killing Games initiative.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Well, if it isn't the consequence of my own actions.
  
  

• At release, Nvidia's 5070 Ti was a little faster than AMD's competing 9070 XT but at a significantly higher cost.  In the months since, things have changed.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Now with a few months of driver updates behind it, the 9070 XT is faster overall - and the 5070 Ti is more expensive than ever.
  
  It's not a huge win for AMD, but given that their card is also 20% cheaper, there's not much reason to go with Nvidia in any but the highest price brackets which are completely unaffordable anyway.

• Microsoft's Copilot has joined ChatGPT in being humiliated in chess by the Atari 2600, which dates from the Cenozoic Era.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Copilot boasted of its skill at chess, but couldn't even keep track of the board, despite being explicitly fed that data.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is laying off 9000 employees, with the Xbox division being hit particularly hard.  (The Verge)
  
  That ranges from 10% of the people working on Candy Crush being laid off to the entire studio behind the game Perfect Dark being closed down.
  
  
  
• Interstellar apples are visiting the Solar System.  (LiveScience)

  A11pl3Z is most likely a large asteroid, or maybe a comet, potentially spanning up to 12 miles (20 kilometers). It is traveling toward the inner solar system at around 152,000 mph (245,000 km/h) and is approaching us from the part of the night sky where the bar of the Milky Way is located.

  If it hits something at that speed there's going to be juice everywhere.
  

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, July 04 2025 01:19 PM (QE7eq)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 04 2025 06:34 PM (PiXy!)

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Top Story

• Search engines like Google and Bing will be required to verify the age of users from Australia by the end of 2025, forcing them into safe mode if they are logged in and under the age of 18.  (Information Age)
  
  Which is stupid for many reasons, not least of which even under the law it doesn't work if you're not logged in.
  
  
  
• In more surprising but more welcome news, Chris Elston - "Billboard Chris" on Twitter - and Elon Musk won in separate cases against Australia's "eSafety Commissioner" Julie Inman Grant and some random crazy lady who goes by the name of Teddy Cook.  (MSN)

  In the post, Mr Elston, who goes by the name Billboard Chris on X, slammed the proposed appointment of Mr Cook, a biological female, to a World Health Organisation panel on healthcare delivery.

  The post reads: "This woman (yes, she's female) is part of a panel of 20 'experts' hired by the WHO to draft their policy on caring for 'trans people'. People who belong in psychiatric wards are writing the guidelines for people who belong in psychiatric wards."

  Speaking of random crazy women:

  Ms Grant labelled the remarks "degrading" and issued a takedown notice to X on March 22, threatening the company with a fine of up to $782,500 for any refusal to remove the post.

  Not only is the relevant law stupid - which is the ground state in these matters - but Australia's Administrative Review Tribunal ruled that Grant broke the law in forcing the content to be taken down.
  
  Elston and Musk sued separately to have the posts restored, and both won.

Tech News

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, July 02 2025 11:03 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Thursday, July 03 2025 03:27 AM (KOtXO)

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