• Intel's 13900K has a PassMark score.  (WCCFTech)
  
  PassMark - the benchmark used on CPUBenchmark.net - isn't a perfect benchmark, since there's no perfect benchmark except running your own application on the target hardware.  But I've found it to map very closely to the stuff I run, so it's the one I pay attention to.
  
  Score is 4833 single-threaded and 54,433 multi-threaded.  That's around the same multi-threaded score as the 24 core Threadripper 3960X, which uses 280W.
  
  On the other hand, the 3960X came out nearly three years ago, the 13900K uses up to 350W itself if you take off the limits, and the 13900K is also a 24 core CPU.
  
  On the third hand, the 13900K is 80% faster on single-threaded tasks on its Performance cores; it's the Efficiency cores that drag the overall score down.
  
  Still, if the difference between the cores doesn't matter to you, you're getting a workstation-class CPU from a couple of years ago in a standard desktop.

• Meanwhile the 7950X has been pushed to 6.5GHz on all cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  On liquid nitrogen, yes, so this is probably not something you'll be doing yourself.  And it set some benchmark records, but again, not something you'll see direct benefits from.
  
  What is interesting though is that it only used 270W to do it - something that high-end Intel desktop chips can do without overclocking at all.
  
  I mean, that's still a lot, but it suggests that a good water cooler should be able to  support a respectable all-core overclock on this beastie.
  
  
  
• Get3D generates 3D models from images.  (GitHub)
  
  It's another of the recent wave of AI-based image generation tools, though it takes a slightly different tack, analysing sets of images and trying to build a consistent 3D model from them.  The 2D tools - like Midjourney, which I've been playing with - don't actually have that kind of model of the shape of things, and will simply forget that a person's arms should be roughly the same length, for example, and end with hands.
  
  Since Midjourney (and similar tools) can take an image as reference, you could run the training data through Get3D, generate meshes, render them out into a scene, and then play that scene into the 2D generator to get a final product with consistent geometry, in that people don't suddenly have two heads.
  
  
  
• The new wave of JavaScript web frameworks and why they should all burn.  (Front End Mastery)
  
  "Inspired by PHP" is a label very much akin to "LD 50 1ng/kg".
  
  
  
• Nobody wants plant-based meat.  (The Guardian)
  
  A vegan friend mentioned that she tried these products a couple of times and couldn't stand the taste.  If you you're not vegan or vegetarian, traditionally plant-based meat - the kind where you have a cow eat the grass for you - is just as healthy and a lot cheaper.
  
  
  
• NASA's test launch for the Artemis Moon rocket has been scrubbed for the third time in a row.  (CNN)
  
  Unexpectedly.
  
  
  
• People can't even be bothered to steal Amazon's Rings of Power series.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  I might check it out at some point.  They actually did a pretty good job on Good Omens, and I have a Prime subscription for the free delivery (a big deal now that I'm 300 miles by road from the nearest warehouse).
  
  
  
• Meanwhile I'm watching Kumo Desu Ga, Nani Ka? a.k.a So I'm a Spider, So What?
  
  It's the usual power-trip wish-fulfilment story of a teenage shut-in transported to a world that works like a computer game where they get untold power, except that first, the main character is a girl - common in early "isekai" stories, less so now - and second, in the fantasy world, she's a spider.
  
  It works because being a spider, even a magical spider in a magical world, is pretty awful, and because she survives through intelligence and determination, not through luck or being handed the world on a plate.
  
  I hesitated to watch this one because I'd already read a thousand pages of the manga and I knew the anime took a different approach to the story.  But not to worry, while the approach is different, the story itself is intact.
  
  Some things that take a long time to surface in the manga are apparent right away in the anime, but that turns out not to spoil things because even then you still don't know everything that's going on.  My guess based on those thousand pages turned out to be dead wrong.

• The US wants to become a hydrogen production powerhouse.  (The Verge)
  
  Yeah, right.
  
  
  
• Why this won't work.  (Robert Zubrin)
  
  Repost, because people keep falling for this shit.
  
  It's solar freaking roadways except about a thousand times more expensive.

• Sundar Pichai to Google employees: Quit whining and get to work, you useless wankers.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  You've spent most of the past decade hiring and promoting useless wankers.  No sympathy.  Go down in flames.
  
  
  
• Well, fuck: The US government, not satisfied with wasting money on "clean hydrogen", wants to ruin open source software.  (Senate.Gov)
  
  Yes, the Log4j debacle could have been fixed at any time and saved the world billions of dollars if someone had just provided a few thousand dollars in funding, but the US government is one of the worst groups to get involved, and defining open source software as infrastructure is one of the worst ways to do it.
  
  
  
• Physisicsts have finally figured out how high-temperature superconductors work.  (Quanta)
  
  High temperature here means around -140C (-220F).  The original superconductors, which are well understood, functioned only at temperatures close to absolute zero - -273C / -459F - a temperature difficult and expensive to approach.  You really need liquid helium for that.  High temperature superconductors work in cheap and plentiful liquid nitrogen.
  
  Oh, the answer?  Super glue.
  
  

Posted by: EdH at Sunday, September 25 2022 01:29 AM (eAtU4)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Sunday, September 25 2022 01:32 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 25 2022 12:55 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 25 2022 01:02 PM (obo9H)

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Posted by: furball321 at Sunday, September 25 2022 07:33 AM (VZYxJ)

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, September 25 2022 05:28 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 25 2022 06:32 PM (PiXy!)

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• Nvidia's new graphics cards are two to four times faster than the previous generation - if you are using ray tracing and upscaling.  (PC Magazine)
  
  If you're not using ray tracing and upscaling, they're not.
  
  Except somehow in the case of Microsoft Flight Simulator, where they are - and somehow the RTX 4080 is the same speed as the much more expensive RTX 4090.
  
  
  
• Nvidia also explained why the new cards are so much more expensive than the previous generation: Because.  (PC Magazine)
  
  
  
• And to gamers who are saying that the 4080 is really just a renamed 4070 to justify the high pricing, Nvidia had this response: Nuh-uh.  (PC Magazine)
  
  Nvidia is handing a golden opportunity to AMD and Intel here.  Intel simply isn't in a position to take advantage of it, but AMD might be.
  
  We'll see what they have up their sleeves on November 3.

• Does green hydrogen cause brain damage?  (Robert Zubrin)
  
  A great takedown on just how stupid the green hydrogen idea is from an actual rocket scientist.
  
  
  
• Google is working on royalty-free high-end digital audio and video software to replace Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision.  (Protocol)
  
  Not because they want to benefit anyone, but because it's cheaper for them.
  
  Which is a far more trustworthy motivation.
  
  
  
• China has claimed without evidence that at least one US government agency is actually doing its job.  (CNBC)
  
  In this case they allege that the NSA hacked China's telecommunications networks, which is kind of the point, so probably isn't true.
  
  
  
• Another thing Nvidia announced during its big launch event is the Jetson Orin Nano.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is a robotics module with a six core Arm A78 CPU, up to 1024 GPU shaders, and a peak AI throughput of 40 trillion operations per second.  It's not quite the same as a Raspberry Pi because it's a module that needs to plug in to a carrier board; you can't use it directly by itself.  But it is a lot more powerful than the Raspberry Pi.
  
  Prices start as $199.
  
  
  
• Krea.ai is a directly of AI-generated art and the text prompts used to generate it.  (Krea.ai)
  
  A lot of it is awful because that's just the nature of AI-generated art - you have to fiddle with things a lot to get something good.This haunted playground is suitably and subtly creepy though.
  
  
  

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Saturday, September 24 2022 01:30 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 24 2022 04:55 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 24 2022 05:03 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 24 2022 05:05 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 24 2022 05:39 AM (PiXy!)

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• PayPal appears to be going on a banning spree in the UK.  (The Telegraph)
  
  Groups targeted include UsForThem, which advocates for keeping schools open, and the Daily Skeptic and the Free Speech Union, which advocate for, well, skepticism and free speech.
  
  The Daily Skeptic is asking for any donors in Texas to contact them.  (Daily Skeptic)
  
  Because with the recent Fifth Circuit decision, PayPal just lit up the Sue Me signal.

• Alongside three very expensive new consumer graphics cards, Nvidia just announced its extremely expensive new professional graphics card.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The RTX 6000 replaces the RTX A6000, which rather confusingly replaced the RTX 6000.  Someone might need to explain to Nvidia how numbers work.
  
  This is very similar to the new RTX 4090, but with 48GB of ECC RAM instead of 24GB of non-ECC, a 300W TDP down from 450W, and a conventional two-slot design instead of the massive four-slot boards being produced for the 4090.
  
  Unfortunately it's likely to cost around four times as much.
  
  
  
• An unpatched bug in a Python library has led to vulnerabilities in an estimated 350,000 projects.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The bug is in the tarfile library, which has an explicit warning about extracting tarfiles from untrusted sources, but doesn't prevent the risk.
  
  Researchers found that there are nearly 600,000 Python projects out there that use the tarfile module, which, I mean, why?  And only 40% of them have safety checks.
  
  
  
• Amazon's 2022 model of the Fire HD8 replaces the old, slow A53 cores with the new, slow A55 core.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It starts at $100 so you can't expect that much, and a 6 core 2GHz A55 is quite reasonable for light use - email, web browsing, reading ebooks, that sort of thing.
  
  The problem is that it still has a 2012-quality 1280x800 screen, and there's no better model available, the HDX range having been long since discontinued.
  
  If you want a small device with a good screen for reading books, the choice right now is either the Kindle Paperwhite, which is quite small and can't do anything but read books, or the iPad Mini, which is a decent device except that it's Apple and costs about four times as much as a small Android tablet.
  
  Lenovo's Legion Y700 exists, but is only sold officially in China, so it might as well not.
  
  
  
• The James Webb space telescope has captured a remarkably clear view of the rings of Neptune.  (NASA)
  
  It looks a bit weird because the Webb is an infrared telescope, not visible light.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 22 2022 10:54 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Thursday, September 22 2022 11:16 PM (YBLgY)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Friday, September 23 2022 08:14 AM (5iNRj)

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 23 2022 09:19 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 23 2022 05:13 PM (PiXy!)

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• Nvidia had its big announcement.  (AnandTech)
  
  Lots of stuff, but the most immediately interesting are the RTX 4080 and 4090.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 4090, launching October 12, has twice the performance of the 3090 Ti - from 40 TFLOPs to over 80 TFLOPs - while being 20% cheaper.  Which would be more impressive if the 3090 Ti hadn't been priced at $2000.
  
  The 4080 will arrive in November in two models, with 12GB of RAM and 40 TFLOPs at $900, and 16GB of RAM and 48 TFLOPs at $1200.  That's a significant difference; either the 16GB model should be called the 4080 Ti or the 12GB model should be the 4070 Ti.
  
  While the base 4080 has the same compute power as the 3090 Ti at less than half the price, it also has half the memory and half the memory bandwidth.  Nvidia is making up for that by increasing the on-chip cache from 6MB to 48MB (and 96MB on the 4090).
  
  AMD did that with the Radeon RX 6000 range, and it worked pretty well.  The options for doubling bandwidth over the 3090 Ti are pretty much restricted to HBM, which isn't exactly cheap.  On the other hand, moving from Samsung's 8nm process to TSMC's 4nm meant Nvidia had a huge number of transistors to play with - up from 28 billion on the 3090 Ti to 76 billion on the 4090 - so using five billion or so on cache was not a hard call to make.
  
  While $900 for the smaller RTX 4080 looks good compared to the $2000 3090 Ti, it doesn't look nearly so good when compared with the $700 RTX 3080, and gamers don't seem to be happy.  It's about 30% more expensive and offers about 30% more performance.
  
  Oh, an interesting point: They're PCIe 4.0.  Which means they'll work fine with my Bae case, though the standard 4090 might not fit.

• At least when it comes to raw calculation.  Nividia's selective game benchmarks paint a rosier picture.  (Press Start)
  
  The 4080 is nearly twice as fast as the 3080 Ti in Microsoft Flight Simulator and more than twice as fast in Cyberpunk 2077, for example.  Definitely a case of wait for the third-party benchmarks.
  
  That article also lists Australian prices for the three cards, and it's pretty painful reading: A$1659 for the 12GB 4080, A$2219 for the 16GB model, and A$2959 for the 4090.
  
  The 10GB RTX 3080 is available for A$1149 right now, and even the 3090 Ti is down to A$2399.
  
  
  
• AMD will be launching its own new lineup of graphics cards November 3.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It will be interesting to see how they set pricing.  Being second to market is not always a disadvantage.
  
  
  
• Star Citizen - a crowdfunded space game - has raised half a billion dollars.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Over the course of ten years.
  
  And it's still not in beta yet.
  
  On the other hand, it's apparently fun to play and fans are happy to keep throwing money at it.  They're not lying, they're not stealing, and as far as I know they're not pretending an ugly monkey JPEG is worth a quarter million dollars.
  
  
  
• Decentralised finance platform Wintermute, which I have never heard of, just lost $160 million.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And unlike Star Citizen they don't even have cool exploding spaceships to show for it.
  
  
  
• You can run arbitrary code on an x86 CPU without running any code.  (Dartmouth)  (PDF)
  
  The memory management and interrupt handling units form a Turing-complete environment even without executing a single instruction.
  
  
  
• QNAP has a couple of new small NASes.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Hardware looks good.  Software, well, it's QNAP.  Keep it away from the internet.
  
  
  
• Germany's broad data retention laws are illegal, says the EU.  (Reuters)
  
  And sometimes Europe just fights among itself.  Themselves?
  
  
  
• If you want to buy some floppy disks, time is running out.  (The Register)
  
  They haven't been made for a decade, and the one company still selling them in volume has about half a million new disks left in stock.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 21 2022 11:19 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 21 2022 11:23 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 22 2022 02:07 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 22 2022 09:08 AM (obo9H)

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• I managed to snag an Xbox Series X. The local electronics store - local to my old place in Sydney, that is - had it in stock a week after I handed in the keys, but only for in-store purchases. But the "notify me" button on the Microsoft store had changed to a "buy now" button when I checked today. The buy now button didn't work, but when I logged in and went back through the Xbox page I was able to add it to my cart and checked out.
  
  Since I am now moderately far from the madding crowd, I should have it in two weeks.
  
  
  
• I also managed to snag the cord for my new electric mower, something I somehow avoided for 15 years with the previous one. So into town I went for some pliers and electrical tape. I have pliers and electrical tape... Somewhere.  Easier to go into town.
  
  
  
• I've been hearing what sounded like ducks out the back of the house the past couple of weeks, but never caught sight of anything duck-like. Until today, walking back from the shops (which is quite a hike - there's a 400 foot elevation difference) I came across a herd of wild ducks crossing the street a couple of blocks from my house.
  
  So, yes. Ducks.
  
  
  
• Australian mining company Fortescue Metals Group plans to spend $6 billion on "Net Zero" investments by 2030 - including hydrogen. (Financial Times)
  
  Hydrogen is useless as a mainstream fuel. The energy density is terrible and it leaks through everything. Anyone pushing it as a fuel is trying to sell you something.

• Ethics schmethics: With sanctions set to be enforced preventing Nvidia selling high-end hardware to China the company has placed a rush order with TSMC to sell everything they can before the sanctions kick in. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China is littered with mid-range GPUs from shuttered mining operations, so surely they could just use those.
  
  
  
• Intel's Arc A770 graphics card is coming to retail. (Tom's Harwdware)
  
  Somewhere. Sometime. Really. Trust me.
  
  
  
• Society is to blame: Nvidia isn't the only cause of EVGA's problems; some of them were self inflicted by trying to do the right thing. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  EVGA was well-regarded for having far better warranty support than other graphics card makers, but that of course costs money. And as the chart in that article shows, graphics card makers don't make money anymore. Nvidia makes money.
  
  
  
• Do not read this article. (Substack)

  Whatever it is I’m doing here, you should not be part of it. Do not click the button below this paragraph, do not type in your email address to receive new posts straight to your inbox, and for the love of God, if you have any self-respect, do not even think about giving me any money. There is still time for you to do something else. You can still unchain yourself from this world that will soon, very soon, mean absolutely nothing.

  Stop fetishising psychosis, as a friend of mine likes to say.
  
  
  
• Adobe's $20 billion acquisition of design collaboration startup Figma is likely illegal under antitrust law, experts say. (Axios)
  
  Does "experts say" plus Axios count as a double negative, or just as emphasis?
  
  
  
• Earth has 20 quadrillion ants. (Washington Post)
  
  They counted. Had to kill them all first 'cause the little buggers wouldn't keep still.
• 
  
  But first they put a billion or so in each iPhone 14 Pro Max camera module.
  
  
  
  
  That's not good. Probably more expensive to repair than a cut power cord too.

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Tuesday, September 20 2022 11:51 PM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 20 2022 11:52 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 20 2022 11:53 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Any Mouse at Wednesday, September 21 2022 08:18 AM (c12yv)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 21 2022 12:14 PM (PiXy!)

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• The case for my new computer - the limited edition Hololive one - has shipped.
  
  I don't have any parts to go in it, but I'll sort that out in coming months.
  
  One thing: The case is laid out such that the graphics card is vertical, using a right-angle PCIe adaptor.  This is common in the kind of flashy show-off cases I don't usually buy, and by usually I mean ever.
  
  The PCIe adaptor is PCIe 4.  The CPU, motherboard, and graphics card I'll be buying will all support PCIe 5.  I think it will automatically fall back to PCIe 4.  If not I will be quite irked.
  
  
  
• Google and Facebook now control only 80% of all online advertising.  (The Economist via Archive.org)
  
  Down from 85% previously.  The main new competitor is TikTok, which is not an improvement.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Verge is the latest site to go in for an ah my eyes what where they thinking design makeover.  (The Verge)
  
  It's crap.
  
  
  
• If the polar ice caps melt we can just freeze them again.  (Phys.org)
  
  Would cost around $11 billion a year, which is a lot of money to you or me but compared with the insane cost of "Net Zero" is pocket change.
  
  
  
• Xroar is an emulator for all variants of the TRS-80 Color Computer.  (Vintage is the New Old)
  
  This was my first computer - the CoCo 2, anyway, which had a real keyboard.  16k of RAM, 16k of ROM, and a 6809 clocked at a zippy 895kHz.
  
  I don't really miss it because my second computer was an Amiga.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 19 2022 11:18 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 20 2022 02:50 AM (PiXy!)

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• What does the future of AI hold for us?  Well first of all replacing the subliterate cretins who write for The Atlantic.  (The Atlantic)

  I recently started fooling around with Sudowrite, a tool that uses the GPT-3 deep-learning language model to compose predictive text, but at a much more advanced scale than what you might find on your phone or laptop. Quickly, I figured out that I could copy-paste a passage by any writer into the program’s input window and the program would continue writing, sensibly and lyrically. I tried Kafka. I tried Shakespeare. I tried some Romantic poets. The machine could write like any of them. In many cases, I could not distinguish between a computer-generated text and an authorial one.

  I've read GPT-3 text.  It's bullshit.  No matter the subject, it reads like pomo litcrit, because there is no mind behind it.  Indeed the entire point of GPT-3 is style over substance.

  I was delighted at first, and then I was deflated. I was once a professor of Shakespeare; I had dedicated quite a chunk of my life to studying literary history. My knowledge of style and my ability to mimic it had been hard-earned. Now a computer could do all that, instantly and much better.

  Most people are not brave enough to admit they are so bad at their jobs they can be replaced by a chat bot.

  If you asked GPT-3 to continue, say, a Wordsworth poem, the computer’s vocabulary would never be one moment before or after appropriate usage for the poem’s era. This is a skill that no scholar alive has mastered.

  If that's a skill no scholar has mastered, how can you tell that GPT-3 is doing it?
  
  To those who know nothing, everything is magic.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Sony has showed off a new range of PCIe 5 SSDs for PCs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sony previously released its own SSDs specifically for the expandable storage for the PS5 (which has strict performance rules), and it looks like the company plans to keep making them.  Speeds of these models are up to 9500MBps, and capacities up to 4TB.
  
  
  
• AMD's Threadripper processors are twice as fast for developing large software project as Intel's best workstation chips.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Now, that's comparing a 64 core AMD chip to a 32 core Intel chip, so it's not unexpected.  But even the 32 core AMD chip is 50% faster than the 32 core Intel model.  The 64 core Threadripper has always been constrained by power and heat.
  
  
  
• If you click Show Password in Chrome or Edge and you have Enhanced Spell Check turned on - or in the case of Edge, the Spelling & Grammar add-on installed - your browser might send your password straight to Google or Microsoft.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Intel's NUC 12 Enthusiast is available for pre-order.  (Liliputing)
  
  This model has Intel's own Arc A770 dedicated graphics and a 330W power brick, so it's really, really not something anybody should be buying, particularly not at a starting price of $1699.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, it looks like the regular NUC 12 is also shipping.  It comes with an Alder Lake 1240P or 1260P CPU, slots for up to 64GB of DDR4 SODIMMs and an M.2 slot, two USB 4 ports and two HDMI ports supporting a total of four 4k displays, and four regular USB ports.
  
  These new chips are quite a bit faster than the 11th gen equivalents, at least for multi-threaded tasks.
  
  I'd much rather have a Ryzen 6800U, but I don't think there's a mainstream NUC with that CPU yet.
  
  
  
• Speaking of four 4k displays, HP's Pavilion Plus 14 can run two 4k screens via USB C and a third via HDMI.  That's nice to see given that some recent Dell models have been cut back and can only run one external monitor at 4k.
  
  The Framework laptop doesn't have a fixed port arrangement - it has four little modules that slot in with whatever mix of ports you want.  If you want four HDMI ports, you can do that.
  
  But the integrated graphics can only support four displays in total, including the laptop screen, so what happens if you have four monitors connected?  Answer: The fourth is disabled, until you close the lid of the laptop, when it is automatically enabled.
  
  That's pretty good.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 18 2022 10:40 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Kurt Duncan at Monday, September 19 2022 12:35 AM (y8o1E)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 19 2022 12:39 AM (BMUHC)

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