• Microsoft is planning an update to Windows 11 with a less terrible version of the start menu.  (Thurrott)
  
  Don't worry, all the other terrible features are still there.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, Teams is basically Skype.
  
  I installed the free app for work.  It's...  Not horrible.

• AMD is changing sockets for its next-generation server CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Two sockets, in fact.  The low-end SP8 supporting up to 96 Zen 6 cores or 128 Zen 6c cores, and the high-end SP7 supporting up to 256 Zen 6c cores.
  
  I don't know why SP7 is bigger than SP8.  It just is.
  
  No specific word on whether the current AM5 desktop socket will support the next generation of desktop CPUs, but probably.  AMD's own history suggests it will only change once DDR6 memory is available, which will be a couple of years yet.
  
  
  
• Google will pay Texas a $1.4 billion settlement over collecting Texans' data without permission.  (AP News)
  
  And they promise not to do it again, pinky swear.
  
  
  
• The Beelink Me Mini NAS is now available starting at $329 including a 2TB SSD.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has an Intel N150 CPU - not fast, but it gets the job done, 12GB of soldered RAM, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, three USB ports, HDMI, and six M.2 slots.
  
  Those slots mostly only support PCIe 3.0 x1, but even that is enough for a single SSD to flood both network ports.
  
  
  
• There's a new stupid TikTok trend that is actually less likely than others to leave children dead or in jail.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The same site that promoted cheque fraud and autoasphyxiation is now just teaching children to short out their school-supplied laptops.
  
  So that's nice.
  
  
  

Chemical Interlude

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, May 11 2025 06:48 PM (QE7eq)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 12 2025 01:32 AM (1zWbY)

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• A lithium deposit valued at $1.5 trillion has been discovered in Oregon.  (Earth)
  
  Well, that's Portland sorted out.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Mexico has sued Google over naming the Gulf of America the Gulf of America on American maps after the American government voted to name it the Gulf of America.  (The Guardian)
  
  Yes, that's sure to work.
  
  
  
• A Florida state bill requiring backdoors for minors' social media accounts has quietly died...  But not before passing the state Senate.  (Tech Crunch)

  Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation called the bill "dangerous and dumb."  Security professionals have long argued that it is impossible to create a secure backdoor that cannot also be maliciously abused, and encryption backdoors put user data at risk of data breaches.

  State legislatures tend to be dangerous and dumb.  Sometimes their worst instincts are restrained.  Sometimes you get California.
  
  
  
• What's new in Swift 6.2?  (Hacking with Swift)
  
  Things.  I haven't really looked at Swift since I tested it against the PyPy Python compiler and found it about 0% faster.
  
  
  
• AI use damages professional reputation.  (Ars Technica)
  
  As it should.

Posted by: furball at Saturday, May 10 2025 08:44 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: furball at Saturday, May 10 2025 08:45 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: furball at Saturday, May 10 2025 08:52 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 11 2025 12:19 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, May 11 2025 02:54 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: David Eastman at Sunday, May 11 2025 03:23 AM (aAyxl)

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• Who is winning the war between search engines and AI chat bots?  Search engines, and it's not even close.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In fact, if you add up all the search engines and all the AI services, 90% of the activity is Google search and everything else is just noise.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Alibaba has release new AI code that allows AI to act as a search engine without needing a search engine.  (VentureBeat)
  
  Called ZeroSearch, a 7-billion parameter version outperformed Google Search in undefined and indefensibly stupid scenarios.  It's the equivalent of claiming that you managed to condense the Encyclopaedia Britannica down to a bowl of alphabet soup.  I don't know what you actually did, but I know you're not worth talking to until you grow up.

• Zettlab's new NASes look nice but.  (Liliputing)
  
  Supporting up to eight hard drives and two M.2 SSDs, with an Intel 125H CPU, up to 96GB of RAM and two 10Gb Ethernet ports, the hardware specs are solid enough.
  
  Unfortunately it runs a custom AI-focused Linux distribution and must be cleansed from the Earth with fire.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Legion Tab 4 actually looks nice.  (Liliputing)
  
  The CPU has been bumped from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to the new Snapdragon 8 Elite, which has custom CPU cores rather than the regular Arm ones.  And pixel density for the 8.8" screen has been increased by nearly 20% to 3040x1904.  The older model already had a very fast CPU and a great screen, so these were not urgent updates, but are certainly not objectionable.
  
  The missing microSD slot on the Tab 3 also showed up, supporting up to 2TB of extra storage.
  
  Right now only available in China for around $450.
  
  
  
• What does Huawei's new HarmonyOS look like?  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's Android you idiots.
  
  
  
• Bill Gates is mad that CIA cut-out USAID got shut down.  (The Verge)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• China's Squeely is moving to take AV company Blookit private in a credit default swap on the Chicago Commodity Exchange.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Actually none of that is true but you didn't miss any useful information.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 10 2025 08:04 AM (1zWbY)

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• Apple vice president Eddy Cue says you may not need an iPhone ten years from now.  (The Verge)
  
  Not a huge stretch of the imagination, since I don't need an iPhone now and didn't need an iPhone ten years ago.
  
  On the other hand, possibly not the best message to send about a product that represents half your company's revenue.
  
  I did buy an iMac ten years ago.  Great hardware.  Solid operating system.  UI sucked.

• Europe has announced plans to spend $500 million over three years to make the continent a "magnet for scientists".  (The Register)
  
  Scientists are not ferromagnetic.
  
  
  
• The Beeling GTR9 Pro is another AMD Strix Halo mini-PC designed like a Mac Studio.  (Liliputing)
  
  16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, and up to 128GB of RAM on a 256-bit bus.  Mostly designed for running AI tasks locally because it can dedicate up to 96GB of RAM to the GPU, but makes a very nice computer for anything that needs a fast processor and solid graphics.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile if you need a 192-core Arm CPU with 12-channel memory you can now get one.  (Serve the Home)
  
  You probably don't need one, but it's nice that it exists. 
  
  
  
• Stripe has unveiled an "AI foundation model" for payments.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not a model for payments for AI services, but a model for payments using AI services.
  
  Cash or gold only.  No cards.  No cheques.  No credit.
  
  
  
• AI chatbots are juicing engagement instead of being useful, warns...  Instagram?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Isn't that the entire point of Instagram?
  
  
  
• JetBrains CLion is now free for non-commercial use.  (JetBrains)
  
  CLion supports C and C++ (and also Python), and joins WebStorm (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and RustRover (Rust) in its lineup of free IDEs for hobbyists.

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, May 08 2025 06:37 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, May 08 2025 11:58 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Tim Turner at Friday, May 09 2025 09:56 AM (As8gg)

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• Skype is dead.  Here's five alternatives.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  I wish it were dead.  I've received eight messages on it from work today.  The first of those at four minutes past midnight.

• Intel's 265K has been cut in price from $399 to $299.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While overall I would recommend AMD's platform, that does deliver 80% of the performance of Intel's current top-of-the-line chip for 50% of the price.  It's a little faster than AMD's 9900X and now 20% cheaper as well.
  
  If Intel wasn't planning a new socket next year cutting off any possibility of upgrades it might actually be worth recommending.  But they are so it's not.
  
  
  
• Under RDK, "Make America Healthy Again" means junk science like, uh, evolution.  (The Verge)  (archive site)

  "There's a sort of Darwin-esque notion that only the fittest survive," says Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist, virologist, and professor of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

  "Only the fittest survive" is tautological.  In evolution, fitness is defined by survival to reproduction.

  "But these viruses can kill anybody, so that's just wrong."  In the recent deaths, the first from measles in a decade, no underlying medication conditions have been reported.  Both of the Texas children were reportedly healthy before they contracted measles. They could have stayed that way.

  Measles doesn't just "kill anybody" as Offit knows perfectly well.  It was a major killer before the introduction of the vaccine, and we certainly shouldn't abandon that vaccine.
  
  But it kills children.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, May 08 2025 08:05 AM (rcPLc)

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• Microsoft has shut down Skype for good.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  I wish.  It's still bloody working.  I got a call from work fifteen minutes ago.

• Dimension 126 isn't a place.  (Quanta)
  
  Strangely worded headline.  Strangely worded article.
  
  126-dimensional spaces allow for certain strangely twisted shapes, that are possible only in spaces with dimensionality of the form 2n-2 - so 2, 6, 14, 30, 62 - but disproven in 2009 for spaces with 254 or more dimensions.
  
  That left only 126 dimensional space to have this property confirmed or denied, and now it has been proven true.
  
  
  
• Databricks is looking to acquire serverless Postgres company Neon in a deal valued at about $1 billion.  (Upstarts Media)
  
  Neon advertises its blazing speed with queries taking as little as ten milliseconds, which is miserably slow compared to running your own database and completely impossible if you are more than ten milliseconds away from one of their servers.
  
  
  
• Touchscreens are everywhere, but proper tactile interfaces have significant benefits.  But what if your touchscreen could form its own tactile buttons on demand?  (The Verge)
  
  LG is planning to show off exactly that next week, with a new automotive control interface featuring a touchscreen that changes shape instantly to create buttons and dials for physical controls.
  
  The demo is intriguing, though the unit displayed is rather bulky and it's not clear how much of that bulk is necessary.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 07 2025 08:37 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, May 07 2025 10:48 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 08 2025 12:43 AM (cRZ/R)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, May 08 2025 07:56 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: poojapathak at Thursday, May 08 2025 05:55 PM (aOYxD)

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• Intel may have sold off a majority of its Altera acquisition to balance the books, but it hasn't given up in other areas: The B770 GPU could be here as soon as Computex, which is in just (searches frantically) over two weeks.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This will likely be a mid-range 16GB card.  The existing B580 offers 12GB of RAM at $250, which is already a better bet in the current market than 8GB cards, except for the minor problem that there aren't any.
  
  
  
• And Intel's third-generation "Celestial" GPUs could be here by CES.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  That seems a bit ambitious, to be honest.  Expect this to take more like a year to reach retail even if things go well, and eighteen months if they need more than a simple tweak moving from test samples to production.

• Apples are selling twice as fast as any other type of orange: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is selling twice as fast as any other JRPG on Steam.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Expedition 33 is indeed a success, but it's a weird comparison since the J in JRPG means Japanese, and Expedition 33 is a French game created by French developers in France.
  
  
  
• Stalin didn't go far enough in his purges.  (Pluralistic)
  
  Jobs are bad!  Unions are good!  Dark humour is like food, not everyone gets it!
  
  I'm so old I remember when Cory Doctorow could write a coherent sentence.
  
  
  
• People are losing their loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies and mental illness but mostly mental illness.  (Rolling Stone)  (archive site)
  
  I thought mental illness was seen as a positive thing on the left, given how much time and effort they devote to wallowing in it.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  You have to understand, he is not just playing as a bunny in a fantasy world, he is playing as a negro bunny.  His words.
  
  
  
• Yasuke - the pseudohistorical star of Ubisoft's latest commercial catastrophe Assassin's Creed 14: The Assassining, was never a samurai and all the claims to the contrary were cooked up very recently by a single lunatic.  (AP News)
  
  The article doesn't mention that.  The article in fact is completely useless.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 05 2025 11:04 PM (rcPLc)

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• All the major browsers are set to lose their funding.  (Dan Fabulich)
  
  Google pays 80% of the budget for Safari and Mozilla, Edge is just Chrome, and Chrome actually is Chrome.  So with Google's illegal practices on multiple fronts coming to a head with the company losing two antitrust cases, the whole metastatic structure is set to implode.
  
  More than that, Google's payments to Apple, which are likely to end abruptly, cover 60% of the latter company's total R&D budget.
  
  
  
• Waah says Mozilla.  (The Verge)
  
  And nothing of value was lost.  Mozilla killed itself off as a realistic option years ago.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Nvidia's RTX 5060 Ti 8GB model loses up to 10 percent of performance when running with PCIe 4.0.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's accurate in itself, but the main story is don't even think about buying the 8GB model.
  
  For example, playing Dragon Age Veilguard - which nobody does; the game flopped hard - the 16GB card achieves a reasonable 57 fps at 1440p, dropping very slightly to 56.9 fps when using a PCIe 4.0 slot.  Fair enough and in line with other tests.  Even the 5090 only loses a couple of percentage points in performance with a PCIe 4.0 slot.
  
  With the 8GB model, performance drops to just 34 fps.  And with the 8GB model in a PCIe 4.0 slot, it can't even manage 5 fps.
  
  Most games cope better than that, but some games were even worse.  The new Indiana Jones game would not run at all on the 8GB version with the same settings used on the 16GB card, and Spider-Man 2 ran but crashed often enough on the 8GB card to make it a truly miserable experience.
  
  The two 5060 Ti models share a name, but the 16GB model is adequate, while the 8GB model is simply inadequate.
  
  
  
• How to use RegEdit to totally brick Windows instead of clicking a button when it's slow to reboot.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Do not do this.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• Apple is teaming up with Anthropic on a new vibe coding platform.  (Bloomberg)  (archive site)
  
  Vibe coding is a term where a developer has no idea how to program - let alone build a complete application - and also no idea about the problems inherent in the application domain.  So someone trying to launch, say, a map to guide mining of rare earth elements when you not only can't program but also have no idea what an element is.
  
  Apple's own vibe coding platform was quietly scuttled last year when it turned out to be completely worthless, so they're doing it again.

• Grand Theft Auto VI, the latest iteration in the Grand Theft Auto series, logically enough, in which the character does stuff - GTA 5 is actually quite fun in multiplayer because you can get up to all sorts of shenanigans - has had its release delayed to May 26.  (MSN)
  
  Of next year.
  
  13 years after GTA 5.
  
  
  
• Thunderbolts is Marvel's latest attempt at clawing its way into an existential void.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Exactly why they wish to that that is unclear, but they do.
  
  Marvel movies used to be dependably fun popcorn flicks.
  
  This has now been corrected.
  
  
  
• And nothing of value was lost: Firefox could die if funding from Google is cut off due to antitrust proceedings.  (The Verge)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Eric Schmidt - former CEO of Google - bought Relativity Space to put datacenters into orbit.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Does any of this make sense?  No.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, May 03 2025 07:01 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, May 04 2025 01:13 AM (rcPLc)

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• After years of ripping off developers by taking a cut of off-platform payments for transactions they had no part in, and then when courts ruled against them, more years of making things deliberately and systematically worse for everyone, a federal judge finally had enough and nuked Apple.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The ruling is crystal clear: Apple can not demand any cut of off-platform payments, nor can they add roadblocks for developers or for end users.
  
  That was just yesterday.  Spotify is already moving its payment processing away from Apple, and Patreon plans to do the same.

• Redis is open source again.  (Antirez)
  
  Redis tried shifting to a have-your-eat-and-cake-it-too license that nobody liked, and spawned a veritable forest of forks.
  
  It's back under AGPL now, which is fine for most uses.
  
  
  
• The House of Representatives has voted to nuke California.  (CBS)
  
  Starting with California's plan to ban new gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035, and proceeding until California stops being stupid.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is making accounts passwordless by default going forward, moving to newer and less secure methods.  (Microsoft)
  
  Like locally caching the passwords of remote machines and letting you log in if the local copy is right even if the remote one has changed.
  
  
  
• Polygon, a gaming news website that everyone forgot within a year of its creation, has been sold off to a content farm upstate.  (Kotaku)
  
  Polygon was bad from the beginning, and has been insufferable for years.  Pretty much everyone was laid off.
  
  Kotaku is next.
  
  
  
• Meta's Reality Labs lost $4.2 billion in its first quarter.  (CNBC)
  
  Doing what?!
  
  Reality Labs doesn't seem to do anything except bleed cache cash.
  
  
  
• Phase Connect has gathered in Clio Aite, Marimari_EN, and Sleepy into a new Invaders generation starting this weekend.
  
  Pippa can't stop winning.
  
  
  
• Also, ENReco stage 2 starts this weekend.
  
  Play

Posted by: nomal at Friday, May 02 2025 06:51 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: nomal at Friday, May 02 2025 06:55 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 03 2025 09:30 AM (1zWbY)

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