Wednesday, February 17
Daily News Stuff 17 February 2021
Better Late Than Never
It was understandable to initially attribute Officer Sicknick's death to the violent protest, but not only is there no hard evidence connecting the two - he died of a stroke, not of injuries - the news reports that he was struck with a fire extinguisher and rushed to hospital were quite simply a fabrication.
Better Late Than Never
Tech News
- With Google Play Music shutting down I requested a backup of all my Google content.
Two weeks ago.
It was scheduled to run on the 5th.
It just started.
- Coco planned a stream to take her over the 1 million subscriber mark. Due to scheduling differences, she started out at 999,948. Which was good because the stream immediately got banned.
When she got things working again, the next few minutes were spent measuring YouTube's cache timeout, which is somewhere between five and ten minutes, whereupon the count jumped straight to 1,001,032.
It's been a busy week for YouTube, what with shadowbanning Hololive streams, banning Hololive streams, demonetising Hololive streams, and terminating Hololive accounts. But hey, here's a gold-coloured play button to thank you for making us millions of dollars.
Speaking of Google screwups, watching her second, half-hour long celebration stream in Chrome used over 2GB of RAM for that one tab.
- The Lenovo Thinkstation P620 is the perfect computer for the demanding livestreaming drug-dealing shitposting million-subscriber yakuza dragon. (AnandTech)
Yes, it supports up to 64 cores and 512GB of RAM - they tested it with 1TB of LRDIMMs but it wouldn't boot - but it also measures just 36 dBA at 30cm with the default fan profile, so it actually is suitable for livestreaming.
The base config is not even insanely expensive - currently $2099 with 12 cores, 16GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, and an entry-level Nvidia Quadro video card. The price includes a 1000W power supply and 10GbE built in.
- Pine64 has a next generation version of their Quartz64 board out. (Tom's Hardware)
It's more-or-less a Raspberry Pi 4 competitor, but has some extra features like SATA and a PCIe x4 slot.
- Samsung's new HBM2 chips run at 1.2TFLOPs. (Tom's Hardware)
Yes, they're memory chips. Yes, they have 1.2TFLOPs of compute built in.
- I hope they're not being made in Texas. (Tom's Hardware)
The Austin area fabs belonging to Samsung, NXP, and Infineon have been told by their electricity supplier to temporarily shut down because the entire state is frozen solid.
- Adata has changed the flash used on their XPG SX8200 Pro again. (Tom's Hardware)
Without mentioning the change or updating the model number. This is the third time they've done that - to just this one model of SSD.
- Amazon's attempt to avoid getting sued by the New York AG over working conditions does not seem to be going according to plan. (WHEC News)
I say this only because they have in fact been sued by the New York AG over working conditions.
- Parler came back online for a while, with existing accounts but not all the posts.
Ars Technica wrote the usual bit of techno-fascism, going upstream from them looking for someone they could potentially bully.
The site is still up, but now their DNS isn't resolving so you can't get to it.
- Reading up on the Raspberry Pi Pico, the magic beans are the two I/O controllers, which are sophisticated state machines that automatically sequence cycle-accurate I/O operations without specific, dedicated hardware or heavy CPU load. Each controller contains four state machines, so you have a lot of flexibility, and that's in addition to the dedicated serial ports (two each UART, SPI, and I2C), USB, and PWM.
This Hackaday article has some more details.
This is how the VGA output works. It doesn't have a built-in video controller, but the I/O controller is fast enough and flexible enough to handle that for you.
That will certainly endear it to retrocomputer hobbyists, because while classic chips like the Z80, 6502, and 6809 are readily available, suitable video chips are hard to come by. I wonder if someone will make a version that fits into a standard 40-pin DIP socket.
The Pi Pico is powered by the RP2040 microcontroller. I don't know if the chip is available to hobbyists yet, but it could be popular; it's a QFN56 package and should be relatively easy to work with.
There are a veritable swarm of third-party board on the way already though. (Raspberry Pi)
Two such chips, two SPI flash chips, a power supply, and a handful oftransistorsresistors and you'd have a really nice retrocomputer. And you can start right away with a regular Pi Pico.
Definitely Not Tech News
The only person to be deliberately killed during the January 6 protests was Ashli Babbitt. (Glenn Greenwald)It was understandable to initially attribute Officer Sicknick's death to the violent protest, but not only is there no hard evidence connecting the two - he died of a stroke, not of injuries - the news reports that he was struck with a fire extinguisher and rushed to hospital were quite simply a fabrication.
And that's not the only falsehood in wide circulation. Read the whole story. It's important.
YouTube Explains Itself Video of the Day
Disclaimer: We don't care. We don't have to.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:24 PM
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1
Yeah, YouTube has been on a tear hitting channels mid-stream. An interviewer on YouTube by the name of Eric Hunley not only had his stream banned but had his entire channel nuked mid-stream, no prior strikes. He's generally non-controversial in his topics and was interviewing a cryptocurreny wallet CEO when everything went splat. He posted the stream to Rumble. After several days he got his channel back, with 7 months worth of content nuked.
Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, February 18 2021 03:51 AM (mjO4F)
2
"I wonder if someone will make a version that fits into a standard 40-pin DIP socket."
If it's something typical like a 32-or-so QFN or QFP form factor, which I think it is, there are already off-the-shelf boards that can more or less do that. I bought several last year. 64-pin is doable but has to be wider, or you have to do a bit more work, like I've seen board-on-board stuff because the physical chip's a bit wide for 40-pin DIP sockets, so you have a breakout board sitting on another, narrower board, with wires connecting the two.
If it's something typical like a 32-or-so QFN or QFP form factor, which I think it is, there are already off-the-shelf boards that can more or less do that. I bought several last year. 64-pin is doable but has to be wider, or you have to do a bit more work, like I've seen board-on-board stuff because the physical chip's a bit wide for 40-pin DIP sockets, so you have a breakout board sitting on another, narrower board, with wires connecting the two.
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 18 2021 05:12 AM (2Mei2)
3
From the Hackaday article: "As the ESP8266 and ESP32 modules do, it uses external flash ROM to store programs, and can run code directly from the flash as if it were internal memory."
That's kinda weird, unless they're glossing over details, which they might be. Atmel/Microchip and STM's ARM MCUs have up to 1MB of flash in the chip itself, as I mentioned previously, and programs normally run in that. Based on what I've been reading abut STM's chips, it looks like they're set up so you can inject programs right into the MCU's onboard RAM from your PC, but I think that's mostly for debugging. Some of Adafruit's boards do something like that--they have the bootloader and CircuitPython on the MCU, and use an SPI flash for user programs--when you plug the board in, it looks to Windows like a regular thumb drive. Every time you save a program named "code.py" or "main.py", the bootloader automatically resets the CPU and runs the program. It's really neat--if you wanna play around with it, the M4 or M0 Express boards, at around $20 USD are good starting points. Adafruit's also branching out lately into other controllers, mostly ARM but not exclusively.
The homebrew one I built last year that I finally got working, I started with Adafruit's bootloader, so Windows thinks it's an M0 express. As I learn more I'm getting ready to start fiddling with their code so I can enable more functionality, and then I'll probably eventually make my own custom board just for the heck of it. (There's a guy on hackaday.io who did that; you can look for the M0 Fluff, and he event sent Adafruit a PR, so they included that board.)
That's kinda weird, unless they're glossing over details, which they might be. Atmel/Microchip and STM's ARM MCUs have up to 1MB of flash in the chip itself, as I mentioned previously, and programs normally run in that. Based on what I've been reading abut STM's chips, it looks like they're set up so you can inject programs right into the MCU's onboard RAM from your PC, but I think that's mostly for debugging. Some of Adafruit's boards do something like that--they have the bootloader and CircuitPython on the MCU, and use an SPI flash for user programs--when you plug the board in, it looks to Windows like a regular thumb drive. Every time you save a program named "code.py" or "main.py", the bootloader automatically resets the CPU and runs the program. It's really neat--if you wanna play around with it, the M4 or M0 Express boards, at around $20 USD are good starting points. Adafruit's also branching out lately into other controllers, mostly ARM but not exclusively.
The homebrew one I built last year that I finally got working, I started with Adafruit's bootloader, so Windows thinks it's an M0 express. As I learn more I'm getting ready to start fiddling with their code so I can enable more functionality, and then I'll probably eventually make my own custom board just for the heck of it. (There's a guy on hackaday.io who did that; you can look for the M0 Fluff, and he event sent Adafruit a PR, so they included that board.)
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 18 2021 05:21 AM (2Mei2)
4
Yeah, I tried to log into Parler yesterday and after finally convincing it that my password and E-mail were legit...which took an hour, it locked up on the captcha every time.
Also, YouTube has blocked its explanation of itself. Perhaps Bitchute could help them out.
Also, YouTube has blocked its explanation of itself. Perhaps Bitchute could help them out.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, February 18 2021 05:57 AM (5iiQK)
5
Alternate source for YouTube's explanation of itself.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 18 2021 09:18 AM (PiXy!)
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Wow...Gura was the first personality from Hololive to reach a million subscribers? That was unexpected....
I am actually partial to Subaru myself, for the little I have watched of the streams, do to no small part because listening to a collection of high pitched voice characters tends to get repetitive after a ll.
I am actually partial to Subaru myself, for the little I have watched of the streams, do to no small part because listening to a collection of high pitched voice characters tends to get repetitive after a ll.
Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, February 19 2021 11:47 AM (4i7w0)
7
They do have quite a collection of distinctive voices, like Subaru and Pekora and Coco, but when they all get together it sounds like a K-On school outing episode.
And yeah, Gura seems to have a huge following with a younger Western audience. Her growth has slowed down a little, but still adding 200k subscribers a month.
And yeah, Gura seems to have a huge following with a younger Western audience. Her growth has slowed down a little, but still adding 200k subscribers a month.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 19 2021 01:53 PM (PiXy!)
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