The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.

Sunday, March 31

Geek

Daily News Stuff 31 March 2019

Your Roommate Is A Cat Edition

Tech News



Social Media News

  • Today's high-tech leader calling for the abolition of civil rights is Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.  (Tech Crunch)

    Fuck you very much, Mr Zuckerberg.


Cat Anime Opening of the Day




Disclaimer: Do not feed your cat more than its own bodyweight each day.

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Saturday, March 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 March 2019

Thunderbolt And Lightning And USB Edition

Tech News 

  • Samsung's Galaxy S10+ goes under the microscope.  (AnandTech)

    Executive summary: The US version is great.  The international version, which has Samsung's own Exynos chip rather than the Snapdragon 855, is...  Pretty okay.  The international version suffers not only from inconsistent performance but also worse photography due to the differences between the image processing hardware on the two chips.

  • Sony also has a 10+.  (ZDNet)

    The Xperia 10+ has a 6.5" 21:9 2520x1080 display (LCD rather than OLED), 4GB RAM, 64GB flash, microSD slot, USB C, and a headphone jack.  The CPU is a mid-range Snapdragon 636 with four A73 and four A53 cores, putting it two generations behind the A76 found in 2019 flagship phones.

    On the other hand, it runs £349 compared to £899 for the cheapest Galaxy S10+.

    My Huawei tablet has an A72 CPU, which is equivalent in performance to the A73 but uses more power.  It's not slow, and I wouldn't hesitate to get this or another A73 powered device on that respect, unless you are running seriously heavy apps on your phone.

    Another possible upgrade for my ageing Xperia Z Ultra...

  • Apple cancelled its AirPower wireless charging pad because it couldn't make it work.  (Tech Crunch)

    Wireless charging is easy.  Fast, efficient wireless charging of multiple devices at once is hard, and what Apple found was that the AirPower could double as an electric wok.

  • The SR-71 had its own R2 astromech droid - and it may be relevant again should we fuck things up sufficiently.  (The Drive)

  • How not to create an open-source license, example 462.

    Another example.  Well-meaning idiots will get us all killed.

  • How to become a 10x programmer.

    Two ways: One, spend a huge amount of time and effort in memory training programs of dubious merit and on memorising API calls that might disappear entirely in six months; or two, create a little personal wiki where you record things you might need to look up again.  A notepad file.  Anything.

  • Oracle has sent out an advisory telling customers not to use Java for anything, ever.  (Bleeping Computer)

    That's not what they intended, but that's what they did, saying that critical security patches to Java 8, which is still very widely used, would require a paid license after the upcoming patch release in April.

Social Media News

  • What if we built a surveillance state and nobody came?  (TechDirt)

    Google and Facebook have built massive - and massively intrusive - surveillance systems to monitor everything their users do, for the single purpose of increasing the amount they can charge for ads.

    There's an increasing amount of data suggesting that all this, basically, doesn't work, that it's pointless and harmful and enormously expensive.


Try Incorporating These Into Your Next D&D Campaign of the Day



Your players will likely kill you, but totally worth it.


Was That "Insert Tab A Into Slot B" or "Insert Tab B Into Slot A" of the Day


http://ai.mee.nu/images/FailedToReadTheInstructions.jpg?size=720x&q=95

(Yes, fixed file uploads on HTTPS.  Just a one-line change.)


Disclaimer: I'm sorry, Beelzebub does not have a devil put aside for you.  You will have to take a number.

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Friday, March 29

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 March 2019

Censourious Basterds Edition

Tech News



Social Media News



Disclaimer: Try or try not.  There is no do.

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Thursday, March 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 March 2018

Fuck Skype And Fuck Google Hangouts Too Edition

Tech News

  • Cisco: We fixeded it!


    Testers were using Curl to exploit an open vulnerability in Cisco routers, so Cisco "fixed" it by blocking web requests that identified themselves as coming from Curl.  This is about as effective as trying to stop a pyroclastic flow with a paper sign saying "Volcanoes Keep Out".

  • PyCharm 2019.1 is out.

    New features include....  Nothing much, really.  But the previous version was already very good.

  • Samsung's Galaxy A70 is a mid-range phone with a microSD slot.  (AnandTech)

    Huge 6.7" 2400x1080 OLED display, unspecified mid-range CPU, 6GB or 8GB RAM and 128GB flash.


Social Media News



Disclaimer: This post is a volcano free zone.

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Wednesday, March 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 March 2019

Hinamatsuri Edition

Tech News


Anime Opening of the Day




Hinamatsuri.  I completely missed it when it aired last year, and it's really good.  One of those shows that you watch in one go and then Google the name plus "season 2".

Apparently there's plenty of manga remaining for another season, but Blu-Ray sales have been disappointing.

Re: Zero is getting a second season though, as is Re: Slime, and of course Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid.

Disclaimer: Snow sushi contains zero calories.

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Tuesday, March 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 March 2019

Still Banned Like It Was Yesterday Edition

Tech News

  • You probably can't scroll to the bottom of this page right now. I know why and will have it fixed tomorrow.

    Update: Hmm.  No, seems to just be Firefox.  Will fix anyway.

  • Swift 5.0 is out, available right away on MacOS and Ubuntu and approximately never on every other platform.

    I need to choose a language that can compile to a standalone binary for a small side project. Go would certainly work. Since I've never used it before I spent an hour yesterday learning it.

    Go sucks. The implementation may be fine, but the language design is 50 years of congealed bad ideas.

    Swift is a much better language - not great, but not something that would cause constant severe abdominal pain - but can't, so far as I know, produce standalone binaries.

    C and C++ are out because are you freaking kidding me.

    Julia is probably out, because while it's actually a fine language, the static compilation story is meh at best.

    Crystal might work, but it hasn't reached 1.0 yet. Same with Nim.

    Nuitka might actually work. The project is active, and since it compiles Python to standalone binaries I don't need to fuss about with a new language and new libraries.

    I shall try Nuitka.

  • CLion now supports remote toolchains over SSH so you can now sit at your Windows PC and build Linux apps.  But the CLion Python plugin doesn't.  PyCharm does, of course, but then it doesn't support all the other languages CLion adds (C, C++, Objective-C, Rust, Swift, and, for some reason, Fortran).

    http://ai.mee.nu/images/AChannelCloudFailure1.jpg?size=640x&q=95

  • Uber decides it isn't losing money fast enough, steps on the gas. (Tech Crunch)

  • I've switched from Chrome to Firefox for these posts. It works much better. I originally switched from Firefox to Chrome because Chrome coped better when I had many tabs open; now the situation has reversed. Also the latest versions of Chrome act weird with this editor which I have a replacement for but have yet to actually replace.

  • About a million Asus laptops have been compromised after Asus Live Updater got hacked. (Bleeping Computer)

    The nasty files fed to users by this channel were thus signed and supposedly verified by Asus.

    It looks like this was a targeted attack, and the malware was dormant for most users. Not clear yet who was behind it, or why, but for select users it would download a second set of malware and send data off to a remote server.

  • Final Fantasy apparently includes a species of rabbit that reproduces via parthenogenesis and this has made some people very angry (One Angry Gamer)

    [Imagine a picture of said rabbits here only the forced redirect to HTTPS that I'm testing here has broken uploading which is exactly why I'm testing it here before rolling it out to everyone.]

    http://ai.mee.nu/images/RunningBackups.jpg?size=640x&q=95


Social Media News


Elsewhere

  • After spending three years screwing up the stories of Trump's political rise, Russia's political meddling, and the blatantly nonsensical allegations of collusion between the two, the American mainstream news media has learned... Precisely nothing.

  • They're just not very bright.


  • Neither is this guy.




Don't Drop the Bunny of the Day



Disclaimer: Do not taunt happy fun bunny.

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Monday, March 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 March 2019

Sing Along Edition

Tech News

  • Well, that should free up some time.

    https://ai.mee.nu/images/Suspended.PNG?size=640x&q=95

    I've appealed the suspension, but a platform that suspends users over such things is a platform that is rapidly dying, probably of sepsis. Now I just need to get back to work and push the little daisies and make them come up.*

    Currently not suspended on Facebook, YouTube, Reddit.  Actually I am still suspended on YouTube but because I'm a paying Google Music subscriber and have bought a couple of videos on Google Play they accidentally gave me a new premium account and linked it to my Gmail.  Shrug.

    Twitter could offer a new feature where for a monthly fee they have potential suspensions reviewed by a human being who is slightly smarter than paint before they take effect, but they seem to be doubling down on the social media equivalent of necrotising fasciitis.

    * I don't think I ever really listened to that song before, just heard snippets of it on the radio back in the day.  I just looked on YouTube (status: not banned).  First, that was a guy?  Second, fuck, that is terrible.

  • Apple's future is cable TV only worse. (Tech Crunch)

    It's a bright sunshiny day for Cupertino.

  • PyPy 7.1 is out.

    This is mainly an update to its Unicode string handling, with improvements to both performance and memory usage. Python 3.6 support is still beta, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need.

  • Telegram now lets you delete any message you sent in the last 48 hours from both your device and the recipient's. (Bleeping Computer)

    There's no possible way that will be immediately and massively abused baby one more time.

  • New Zealand is... (One Angry Gamer)

    Seriously, their Prime Minister is a day tripper, possibly a one-way ticket.


  • A team of quantum mechanics working late at the local quantum garage has built a thing that does stuff. (Quanta)

    But they don't have the wings and they wonder why.

Social Media News

  • Discord also just banned oatmeal.  These people are retarded.



    And said "doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?"


Video of the Day



The internet is now drowning in a sea of schadenfreude, possibly even auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont.



Disclaimer: You can't always get what you want.

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Sunday, March 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 March 2019

Lazy Sunday (Not Me, Everyone Else) Edition

Tech News

Social Media News



Elsewhere



Disclaimer: Offer void where forbidden by the laws of logic, mathematics, or physics.

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Post contains 190 words, total size 2 kb.

Saturday, March 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 March 2019

Unedited Edition

Tech News



Pennsylvania 277777788888899


That's a scary thumbnail but it's a cool video.


Disclaimer: Don't enable optimisations when building Python 3.7.  Just don't.

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Friday, March 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 March 2019

Beep Beep I'm A Sheep Edition

Tech News

  • Ryzen motherboards are getting BIOS updates to support the upcoming Ryzen 3000 series chips and as a result new details of the design and configuration are leaking.  (TechPowerup)

    Highlights:

    • Infinity Fabric 2 at 100GB/s is twice as fast as Infinity Fabric 1, and that's apparently down to increased clocks and not wider channels.  And that means the latency is potentially halved, which will help mitigate the off-die memory controller.

    • The AM4 dual-die parts will have an IF link between the two dies as well as the necessary link from CPU die to I/O die.  That means 100GB/s between the CPUs in addition to the 100GB/s to the system.

      It's not entirely clear how this will work for Epyc and Threadripper, which can have up to 8 CPU chiplets.  Certainly there won't be 56 separate IF interconnects.  AMD are supporting additional NUMA layouts, so some chiplets will be directly connected, and others will need to hop via the I/O die.  (And in a two-socket system potentially CPU<->I/O<->I/O<->CPU, which is one more hop than the current Naples platform.)

  • Over 100,000 GitHub repos have security keys in them.  (ZDNet)

    This is disturbingly easy to do if you don't follow safe practices at all times.  Git will happily hoover up every single file in your project directory, and many IDEs will do so by default.

  • Julia, a rather nice language for scientific computing, now comes in interpreter flavour.

    This is mainly for interactive development and debugging, but might also make Julia attractive as an alternative to languages like Python and Ruby, sine a fully-supported JIT compiler is just a config flag away.

    There is also a static compiler, though it's an optional package.  If they can get that better supported and integrated it will make the Julia option that much more enticing.

  • Got a bunch of laptops and/or all-in-one dekstops with 5Gbps USB but only 1Gbps Ethernet?  Club 3D has you covered.  (AnandTech)

    They offer Type A and Type C versions delivering 2.5GBASE-T.  The effective throughput of USB 3.0 is only 3.2Gbps, so there's not much reason for going faster.  Also, 2.5GBASE-T works over standard Cat 5e and will probably work over short runs of older Cat 5, so it's a drop-in replacement for gigabit Ethernet.

    Now you just need a switch.  MicroTik, how's that pricing coming along?

  • Google's Stadia game streaming service may run aground on the rocks of reality.  (TechDirt)

  • Intel announced their 9th generation Core i9 H-series chips only they somehow managed to do it without saying what they were.  (Tom's Hardware)

    45W parts with 8 cores, actual specs to arrive eventually.  The Ryzen 2700E is also an 8 core 45W part and came out last September, so Intel is play catch up again.

  • Need 1TB of RAM in your iMac Pro?  Samsung has you covered.  (Serve the Home)

    Not sure if that configuration will actually work, but 256GB LRDIMMs are here.

  • VirtualBox and VMWare have new exploits.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Also Safari.  Updates inbound.

  • If a 1TB NVMe SSD for $100 doesn't do it for you how about 2TB for $200?  (Tech Report)

Social Media News

  • Facebook stored hundreds of millions of passwords in plain text.  (Krebs on Security)

    Don't worry though.  They were only accessible by 20,000 Facebook employees for 7 years who only accessed the data 9 million times.

    The article mentions that GitHub and Twitter have had the same problem: Passwords are stored securely in the authentication database, and encrypted over HTTPS, but if you keep a full log of the request stream on internal servers for operations or debugging, and you don't employ a secure password protocol like SRP then a minor log configuration error can store handily decrypted passwords all over your proxy servers.

    Now, most companies don't employ SRP, but most companies aren't running the single largest website in the world with billions in profits, and most companies don't have this sort of problem sitting undetected for seven years.


NSFW Sheeps of the Day



Complete Goddamn Movie of the Day

Is not available in your region.

(Dirty Pair: Project Eden is on YouTube; unsurprisingly it's blocked in the US and Canada.)



Disclaimer: Meow meow I'm a cow.

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