• At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus: The first user of the Sarco suicide pod, an American woman suffering from a rare and painful bone infection compounded by an immune disorder, was found alive in the pod with strangulation marks before dying on the scene.  (LBC)
  
  The Swiss police, after warning everybody involved in writing that they would be arrested if they proceeded with their stunt, arrested everybody involved.

  According to the news outlet, the company president, who was standing beside the woman throughout the event, was heard to tell the pod's designer over video call: "She's still alive, Philip".

  Always mount a scratch monkey.

  After being notified of her death by the two lawyers involved in the project and present at the scene, the police swept the forest and arrested everyone near the Sarco, including a photographer for Volkskrant.

  Good call.

  A Forensic doctor present at the scene told the court that the woman had, among other things, severe injuries to her neck.

  This is apparently not supposed to happen.

• Amazon and Facebook's respective nuclear ambitions have been put on hold.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Amazon by the power regulator which believes that the planned deal with the Savannah power plant would unfairly impact other customers.
  
  Facebook by...  Bees.
  
  
  
• Intel is upset that it has received $0 in promised CHIPS Act funding.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel has invested $30 billion in US facilities, which should attract $8.5 billion in CHIPS grants.  It hasn't received a penny of that money, though it has received a lot of other government money.
  
  A lot.
  
  
  
• Netflix is focusing its game development efforts on AI after laying off its game developers.  (404 Media)
  
  While the company no longer has any humans working on games, it now boasts a VP, GenAI for Games.
  
  
  
• Perplexity, an AI startup widely reviled for simply stealing content wherever it can find it has offered to replace striking New York Times staff with robots.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What the hell, I love these guys.
  
  
  
• FFmpeg, a widely-used open-source video encoding framework, runs up to 94 times faster with a new hand-written AVX-512 update.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Except that it doesn't.  The 94x speedup is for a single function and compares AVX-512 to baseline C code with no SIMD at all, not even the MMX instructions that came out in the 90s.
  
  Compared to existing AVX2 instructions it's about 40% faster, again just on that one specific function.
  
  
  
• You can now play Doom on a Nintendo alarm clock.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It is the 21st century after all.
  
  
  
• Los Angeles county is suing Pepsi and Coca Cola because bottles.  (Yahoo)
  
  It's time to treat California as a smallpox outbreak.  Complete isolation.  Nobody goes in, nobody comes out.
  
  
  

• The US government is reportedly considering a merger between Intel and AMD.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Which is odd because neither company has shown the slightest bit of interest in this, and it would clearly be a complete disaster for both.  Well, I guess the complete disaster part is completely in character for the current administration, so maybe no so odd as all that.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Verge is having a complete meltdown.  I hope to see this continue.
  
  
  
• OpenAI has hired the CEO of Twitter challenger Pebble.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Former Twitter challenger Pebble.
  
  Never heard of Pebble?
  
  Nobody else has either.
  
  
  
• We have solved the problem of every device having its own unique charger.  Now it's all USB-C.  Some idiots still aren't happy.  (MSN)
  
  Don't bother reading the article; the author is an idiot, as I said.
  
  
  
• The PlayStation 5 Pro has an extra 2GB of DDR5 RAM on top of the 16GB of GDDR6 memory it shares with the regular PS5.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which seems to be a lot of trouble to go to for such a minor improvement.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix has shown off 16-high HBM3E memory.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The memory chips are stacked up so you get 48GB in the space of a single chip, with more than 800GB per second of bandwidth.
  
  That used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• V'Ger phone home.  (Mashable)
  
  NASA lost contact with Voyager 1 - again - and regained it just a few days later - again.
  
  Which is pretty impressive given that it takes about a day for a signal to reach the probe and for us to get a response back, even when the 47 year old spacecraft feels chatty.
  
  Voyager 1 has apparently turned off its main (X-band) transmitter, but was still willing to talk on its backup (S-band) radio.  NASA is working on persuading it to turn on the main transmitter again.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Tuesday, November 05 2024 04:30 AM (KOtXO)

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• AMD just made choosing a CPU much easier.  Or much harder, depending on your perspective.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 9000 series CPUs were - at their launch two months ago - overpriced for their performance relative to the existing 7000 series.  They are actually great on some server-oriented tasks, but the improvement since the last generation for desktop tasks and gaming is relatively small.
  
  AMD has adjusted the pricing to match.  the 9900X is 6% faster than the 7900X on PassMark, for example, and now costs 8% more.
  
  For me, good enough.  That will be my next CPU.
  
  If you're more interested in games or have a specific workload that loves large caches, the 9800X3D is due out this week and should also deliver great performance.
  
  
  

Tech News

• SpaceX's HLS - its lunar lander - is forty feet tall with space for twenty astronauts.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The interior is modular and can be re-arranged as the mission demands, but it is vastly, um, vaster than the Apollo lander, something like ten times the size.  It would not be exactly roomy with twenty astronauts packed in, but it has a bathroom which is an automatic win over Apollo.
  
  
  
• Apple's M4 Max performs quite well if your primary workload is GeekBench.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It will almost certainly perform well in real workloads as well, though not quite as well as it does on GeekBench.
  
  Also, the cheapest Mac model with the M4 Max CPU costs as much as a maxed-out PC with a 9950X and an RTX 4090.
  
  
  
• Speaking of maxed-out PCs the Asus ProArt Display 5K is a 5K display aimed at art professionals.  From Asus.  (TweakTown)
  
  For $799.
  
  That's the exciting part.  That's a lot for a monitor these days, but it's not a lot for a professional-class 5K display.  It's close to twice the price of the 4K model, but also has close to twice the number of pixels.
  
  It's taken a very long time for 5K displays to become affordable.  I have the 2015 Retina iMac (which I don't use much anymore) which has an integrated 5K display, but equivalent displays for PCs have been scarce and horribly expensive.
  
  
  
• Twitter isn't a bank yet!  Emmanuel Goldmusk lied again!  (The Verge)
  
  The meltdown continues apace.
  
  
  
• Why did cloud security startup Wiz turn down a $23 billion offer from Google.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Because they already have a billion dollars of investors' money to burn.  If they can wait out another couple of industry implosions like the CrowdStrike fiasco, they could triple the price.
  
  
  

• Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are on track to spend a total of $200 billion on AI this year.  (BNN Bloomberg)
  
  There are worse things they could be doing with their money, I suppose.  De-orbiting the Moon, or promoting polonium as a pizza topping.  Reintroducing rinderpest and smallpox.
  
  Okay, those aren't much worse, but they are worse.

• Intel's Lunar Lake, with its integrated memory, is a one-off.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Future laptop chips will return to having memory on the motherboard, or on modules that connect to the motherboard.
  
  Not because soldering the memory directly to the CPU is an anti-consumer nightmare, but because it eats into Intel's margins.
  
  Apple can get away with 1000% markups on memory, because its customer base likes shiny things.
  
  Intel, since it sells its chips to other manufacturers who then sell computers to you, cannot.
  
  
  
• Speaking of laptop memory, CAMM2 is on its way.  For realsies.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  CAMM2 modules lie flat on a laptop's motherboard rather than slotting into a socket, so the take up less room and can have more pins.  And that lets them support a 128-bit bus with one module rather than the usual 64 bits.
  
  And they also support faster LPDDR5X memory, which usually has to be soldered directly onto the motherboard itself.
  
  Only problem is they are taking a long time to arrive.  There's basically one desktop motherboard from MSI and one laptop from Lenovo using these modules right now.
  
  
  
• Australia's Lord Howe Island shifts by 30 minutes when daylight saving time beings and ends.  (SSO Ready)
  
  Just to annoy everyone.
  
  
  
• Indonesia has banned sales of Google Pixel phones after the company failed to meet a requirement of 40% local content.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What about Apple, you ask?
  
  They are at least playing fair.  The iPhone 16 was banned there last week.
  
  
  
• GPD's new Pocket 4 is an absurdly tiny and extremely powerful laptop.  (Liliputing)
  
  The existing model of the Pocket 3 has a dual core Intel CPU and 16GB of RAM.
  
  The Pocket 4 replaces the CPU with a twelve core AMD Ryzen 370, and offers options of 32 or 64GB of RAM.
  
  The 8.8" touchscreen is bumped from 1920x1200 at 60Hz to 2560x1600 at 144Hz.
  
  It would be an amazing device for an engineer that needs to go on-site and plug things in, if those people still exist.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, November 02 2024 11:09 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, November 03 2024 01:28 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 03 2024 04:44 PM (PiXy!)

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• Microsoft will be offering a one year $30 support plan for users who are reluctant to move from Windows 10.  (PC World)
  
  Microsoft has its own page on this, but it is almost entirely trying desperately to persuade users to just switch to Windows 11; it's hard to even spot the support plan.
  
  And unlike the business version of extended support, this will last for a single year, after which you will be cut off and left to install Linux.
  
  On the upside:

  Microsoft will also continue to provide Security Intelligence Updates for Microsoft Defender Antivirus through at least October 2028.

  Which is really all I want.  Just leave me alone, stop screwing things up, and keep blocking viruses.

• In other good news Windows Recall has been delayed yet again.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is the update that collects all your most important private data - including things like readable passwords - in one convenient place for anyone to steal.
  
  
  
• Amazon workers are still complaining about being told to come to work.  (Ars Technica)
  
  What part of "work" do you not understand?
  
  
  
• For the third quarter Intel has posted a loss of $16.6 billion on revenues of $13.3 billion.  (The Register)
  
  That's a net margin of -125%.
  
  That's not at operating loss, though, but an accounting loss, taking charges for severance packages for the 15,000 employees being laid off, and writing down deferred tax assets whatever that means.  (I understand accounting.  US corporate tax law is a foreign country.)
  
  
  
• What sank the Bayesian superyacht that sank in a storm in Italy?  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  A storm.  In Italy.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 01 2024 08:57 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, November 05 2024 04:27 PM (nk1Z+)

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• Apple's new M4 based MacBook Air is not here, but Apple did offer a gift of sorts to MacBook Air buyers: 16GB of RAM.  (Ars Technica)
  
  While that is the same base memory as my Dell laptop from 2013, it is at least an upgrade over the previous base configuration of 8GB without the previous $200 price bump.
  
  There is an M4 MacBook Pro.  It is slightly faster than the M3 MacBook Pro.
  
  
  

Tech News

• How are sales of Intel's Arrow Lake chips going?  Based on public data from German computer retailer Mindfactory, they aren't.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In a list of the 33 top selling CPU models for the past week, Arrow Lake doesn't show up at all, and AMD holds the first 20 places.
  
  It's not all roses for AMD either, as none of their new Zen 5 chips make it into the top ten.
  
  
  
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard is here, the fourth in the series founded with Dragon Age: Origins, one of the best fantasy role-playing games ever made.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  It's hot garbage.
  
  Tom's Guide tries to tiptoe around that, because technically it works quite well.  It's not a buggy mess; the graphics look pretty and perform well without requiring a $3000 graphics card.
  
  But the review summary tells the tale:
  
  - Uninspired story
  - Bland characters
  - Hard to role-play
  
  It's a role-playing game.  That's a death sentence.  It's like reviewing a book and saying the quality of the paper is quite good.
  
  If you venture onto YouTube you will find far harsher reviews, while the mainstream gaming press - the same ones who praised Concord to the heavens before it died ten days after launch - are giving it triumphs and pageantry.
  
  Electronic Arts think it has "break out" potential, which is exactly what Sony was saying about Concord right up until they pulled the plug and wrote off $400 million.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Concord, the game's developer Firewalk Studios is gone.  (MSN)
  
  Not just the expected - and richly deserved - layoffs after they laid their $400 million egg; the entire studio has been shut down less than two years after Sony bought them.
  
  
  
• ZFS deduplication is good now and you shouldn't use it.  (Despair Labs)
  
  Whatever you say.
  
  Continues using ZFS deduplication.
  
  
  
• Mark Zuckerberg promises your feeds will soon be filled with even more AI-generated slop.  (Fortune)
  
  Lucky you.

Posted by: pookysgirl at Thursday, October 31 2024 06:57 PM (dtlDP)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, November 01 2024 01:50 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 01 2024 08:01 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: pookysgirl at Friday, November 01 2024 06:42 PM (dtlDP)

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• A Russian court has reportedly fined Google $20,541,679,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for blocking 17 Russian TV channels. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which used to be a lot.

• Apple's new Mac Mini - which is actually mini - is here, including an M4 Pro model. (9to5Mac)
  
  As with everything Apple makes, it is locked down forever at the time of purchase, and selecting larger memory and storage options is ruinously expensive.
  
  But at least this one supports up to 64GB of RAM.
  
  The 2024 models measure 5" square, similar to other mini-PCs, and much smaller than the previous 8" square models.
  
  
  
• AMD's 9800X3D, due out next week, is 25% faster than its predecessor on productivity benchmarks. (WCCFTech)
  
  The X3D models are optimised for games and are generally slower than the regular models for serious work, but AMD seems to have managed to reverse that in this case: It's also 10% faster than the comparable current-generation 9700X.
  
  
  
• The Verge is having a normal day to end all normal days: A vote for Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles. (The Verge)
  
  It's particularly impressive how the article includes a chart showing school shootings soaring under the Biden-Harris administration, not Trump's.
  
  
  
• Oops. Oopsie. There's been a local privilege escalation bug in the X.Org window server (that manages desktops on Linux) for 18 years. (Phoronix)
  
  Another very good reason not to run it on servers.
  
  If you needed one.
  
  
  
• 25% of Google's new code is written by AI. (The Verge)
  
  Another very good reason to move away from Google as fast as you can.
  
  If you needed one.
  
  
  

Gotta Catch 'Em All

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, October 30 2024 10:44 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 31 2024 12:20 AM (O7lu9)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 31 2024 10:29 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 31 2024 10:59 AM (bg2DR)

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• AI is 90% marketing and 10% reality says Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And Git, in much the same way Donald Knuth created TeX and Metafont to typeset his own books.
  
  Ever the optimist, is Linus.

• The (useless paperweight) 8GB iMac is no more.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 2024 edition based on the latest M4 chip starts with 16GB.
  
  And a minuscule 256GB of SSD worth less than $10 because Apple is determined to make cheapskates suffer.
  
  Everything is soldered in place - everything is always soldered in place - so you can't upgrade it later.  And the top configuration, with all of 32GB, costs as much as a high-end gaming or workstation PC with twice as much of everything and ten times the graphics performance.
  
  
  
• Samsung's 990 EVO Plus SSD fixes most of the issues with the 990 EVO.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The new model scores pretty close the 990 Pro across a range of benchmarks.
  
  It's also priced pretty close to the 990 Pro.
  
  
  
• JPMorgan Chase has started suing customers who took advantage of an "infinite money glitch".  (CNBC)
  
  Also known as cheque fraud.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 30 2024 12:28 AM (zx18t)

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• Nature abhors a vacuum, and OpenAI's Whisper abhors a momentary silence.  (The Verge)
  
  If it encounters such a thing, it will happily fill the void with something it just made up, often creating strange or offensive sentences out of nothing at all.
  
  Which wouldn't be a huge problem since we've come to expect that of chatbots.
  
  Except that Whisper is used for medical transcriptions.
  
  Lawyers everywhere are salivating like dogs hearing the dinner bell.

• Speaking of salivating dogs countries are struggling with what to do about software liability.  (The Record)
  
  Software licenses tend to disclaim everything disclaimable and many things that aren't, and companies only get into real trouble when they screw up in very specific and public ways and yes I am looking at you, CrowdStrike.
  
  And while the US grapples with how to draft new legislation that would protect users and hold companies liable without crippling the entire industry the EU has decided to drop a guilty-until-proven-innocent liability bomb on individual developers.  (Lawfare)
  
  Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that communists.
  
  
  
• Hugging Face - a hub for AI models - has announced HUGS, conveniently downloadable AI models that can run on the cloud or on your own hardware.  (The Register)
  
  This competes directly with Nvidia's NIMS (seriously, who names these things) but also supports AMD and Google hardware.
  
  
  
• A new Windows exploit makes fully-patched Windows systems vulnerable by rolling them back to a version before a key vulnerability was patched, and then exploiting that vulnerability.  (HackRead)
  
  Seems logical, though the pre-exploit code still needs to infect your system somehow.

• Are Boeing's problems beyond fixable?  (Financial Times / Ars Technica)
  
  Probably not.
  
  They do need to ditch their space division, though.  Find a buyer or just shut it down.  Unless the government starts handing out cost plus contracts like candy again, it's a money pit for them.

• Intel's new Arrow Lake CPUs on motherboards with Intel's new Z890 chipset running Microsoft's new 24H2 update to Windows 11 with their integrated graphics don't.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you want to do that, you need to update your BIOS.  Or disable the integrated graphics and plug in a video card.  Or stick with a previous edition of Windows that works.
  
  The last option is likely safest, because this is not the first major problem to have arisen with 24H2 on specific hardware.  There are known SSD models that work perfectly well on previous Windows versions that cause Blue Screens of Death on the latest update.
  
  
  
• UnitedHealth has confirmed that medical and billing records for several customers were exposed during a ransomware attack on Change Healthcare back in May.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Where several turns out the be one hundred million.  Roughly.
  
  What's more, when Change paid the ransom - believed to be $22 million - the intermediary stole the money and stiffed the hackers, leading to the data being leaked anyway until Change paid the ransom again.
  
  The attack caused an estimated $2.45 billion in losses for Change.
  
  
  
• Bounty hunters.  Just saying.
  
  
  
• An energy company founded by the CEO of Atlassian plans to build a 6GW solar power plant in northern Australia - good place for it - and supply 2GW of that to Singapore.  (Reuters)
  
  The article doesn't mention the exact location, but assuming this is the north end of Western Australia (which is a desert) and not the north end of Queensland (rainforest) or the north end of the Northern Territory (swamp) it seems like a good plan.
  
  Plans are to also supply power to Indonesia in the future.  That's a lot closer than Singapore, but either is closer to that part of Western Australia than is Sydney.
  
  
  
• The US government bought a tool that can track phones at abortion clinics.  (404 Media)  (archive site)
  
  If that seems oddly specific, your suspicions are correct.  It can track mobile phones anywhere.  The writers of this piece don't care about wholesale unconstitutional violations of privacy, though.  They only care about abortion.
  
  
  
• Orion could be OpenAI's game changing model.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  No it couldn't.

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, October 28 2024 09:23 AM (ZLF73)

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