• Nvidia hates you and doesn't care if you know it.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  They are lying to you, and also don't care if you know it.
  
  They still want your money, but they get enough of that from the AI slop industry so they don't care all that much.
  
  But what they really hate is reviewers telling the truth, because if you know the truth you might not hand over your money.

• Do you need a 976TB direct-attach storage array?  Got $130,000 to drop on it?  HighPoint has you covered.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though to be fair, the standalone 8-bay NVMe storage array costs $1799.  The other $128,201 is for the eight 122TB SSDs.
  
  
  
• AI can't replace programmers.  (NMN)
  
  The companies replacing programmers with AI aren't.
  
  They're just running stealth layoff programs.
  
  
  
• Mozilla is killing Pocket and Fakespot.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  And Mozilla.
  
  
  
• Destructive malware in NPM went unnoticed for two years.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's called NPM.
  
  
  
• The HackberryPiCM5 is a Blackberry-like device built around a Raspberry Pi compute module.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's fairly chunky by modern standards at 0.7" thick, and at the moment you'll have to build it yourself because the completed models are out of stock.
  
  But you can build it yourself.
  
  Maybe.
  
  
  
• What are Jony Ive and Sam Altman building?  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Looking at the wreckage of the AI device market, they're building failure.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Friday, May 23 2025 07:44 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Frank at Friday, May 23 2025 07:44 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Tim Turner at Friday, May 23 2025 08:27 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 23 2025 08:30 PM (bg2DR)

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• OpenAI is buying Jony Ive's hardware company io - which has never shipped a product or even demonstrated a concept - for $6.5 billion.  (The Verge)

  "We gathered together the best hardware and software engineers, the best technologists, physicists, scientists, researchers and experts in product development and manufacturing," Ive and Altman said in a joint post.

  OpenAI makes no physical products.  OpenAI has never made a physical product.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Lobster programming language.  (Strlen)
  
  This doesn't appear to suck.  What's the catch?
  
  
  
• New bacteria have been discovered on the Chinese space station.  (Wired)
  
  Oh, good.
  
  
  
• The SEC has charged crypto company Unicoin and three of its top executives directly with fraud.  (Reuters)
  
  The Biden administration was openly hostile to blockchain companies while being remarkably opaque about what the rules were.  The Trump administration is friendlier, but does not seem to be turning a blind eye to abuse either.
  
  
  
• Spotify and Netflix will soon be unavailable in Quebec.  (CBC)
  
  Unexpectedly.
  
  
  
• The developer of popular Reddit app Apollo - who Reddit stabbed in both the front and the back with API restrictions and price increases - is joining former competitor Digg as an advisor.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Digg used to be the place to be, and Reddit was very much an also-ran, until Digg implemented a massively unpopular UI updated and drove out its entire userbase.
  
  Now Reddit is attempting a similar strategy.
  
  
  
• Fortnite is available on iOS again after a federal judge ordered the Apple executives involved in denying it to appear personally in court.  (9to5Mac)
  
  I have little interest in Fortnite or in iOS, but this is satisfying.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 23 2025 04:08 AM (boDq+)

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• AMD has officially announced the eagerly-awaited 9060 XT graphics card, arriving June 5 and starting at $299.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though that's for the 8GB model which you don't want to buy.  The 16GB model costs $349, which is well worth it given that it's reportedly faster than the competing 5060 Ti from Nvidia and the 16GB model of that card costs $429.
  
  And it also leaves the newly announced 5060 (non-Ti) dead in the water.  It also costs $299 for 8GB of RAM, but it's slower than the 5060 Ti.
  
  One shortcoming is that the 9060 XT only offers three display outputs.  That's a bit odd because almost everything offers four outputs, and professional cards can offer six.
  
  
  
• AMD also announced the Radeon AI Pro R9700, which is the Radeon 9070 XT with double the RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And probably more than double the price.

• AMD also also announced the Ryzen 9000 Threadripper and Threadripper Pro workstation CPUs, which are slightly faster than the Ryzen 7000 Threadripper and Threadripper Pro workstation CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And twice as fast as anything from Intel right now.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 5060 is also here.  Please don't look at it.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Nividia did everything possible to prevent anyone properly reviewing this card.  And it's not actually that bad, except for the fact that with only 8GB of RAM it can fail to run more demanding games at all.
  
  
  
• Google announced a whole slew of updates at its IO conference.  (The Verge)
  
  If you guessed that they were all AI slop, you win a prize.
  
  Not a real prize.  A fake prize.  More AI slop, actually.  Congratulations.
  
  
  
• Google is rolling out AI mode to everyone in the US.  Whether you like it or not.  (Engadget)
  
  Told you.
  
  
  
• If you are on the Adobe All Apps subscription plan in North America, from next month you will automatically be upgraded to the All Apps Plus AI Slop plan.  At a higher price.  (The Verge)
  
  What are you going to do, use Affinity?
  
  Oh god, don't switch to Affinity.  We'll give you a 70% discount!
  
  
  
• Microsoft is adding AI actions to Windows 11.  (The Verge)
  
  What are you going to do, stick with Windows 10?
  
  Oh.  Um.
  
  
  
• The Chicago Sun-Times printed a summer reading list.  Only problem is that two thirds of the books listed aren't real.  (Ars Technica)

  The creator of the list, Marco Buscaglia, confirmed to 404 Media that he used AI to generate the content.  "I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first.  This time, I did not and I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious.  No excuses," Buscaglia said.  "On me 100 percent and I'm completely embarrassed."

  No worries, Marco.  Your termination notice was also AI-generated.
  
  
  
• Asus announced a 3000W power supply for computers because why not.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You'll need a 15A 240V socket at a minimum for this beast.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, May 21 2025 10:52 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, May 22 2025 02:17 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 22 2025 09:59 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, May 22 2025 10:26 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, May 22 2025 11:54 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 22 2025 06:15 PM (PiXy!)

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• Intel has announced two and a half new graphics cards aimed at workstations: The Arc Pro B50 and B60.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The B50, priced at $299, has 16GB of RAM and a cut-down version of the B580 GPU.  It has 16 GPU cores rather than 20, and the 16GB of RAM is on a 12GHz 128-bit bus instead of having 12GB of RAM on a 19GHz 192-bit bus.
  
  So yes, it will run slower (unless you need more than 12GB of RAM, in which case the B580 will flounder), but on the other hand it uses only 70W of power, which is tiny.  The B580 specified 190W.
  
  At just 70W it can run on power just from the PCIe slot, and it's available in a half-height version to fit in awkward cases like the Hyte Y family (which can only fit a single full-height card).
  
  The other card, the Arc Pro B60, is a B580 with 24GB of RAM.  At full power (200W) it should perform within 10% of the B580.  In low power mode (120W) it will slow down by about 15%.  Priced around $500.
  
  
  
• Wait, you said two and a half.
  
  I did.
  
  The Intel Arc Pro Dual 48GB Turbo is the half.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Made by Maxsun, it's two B60s sharing a single card.  Very literally: The B60 uses a PCIe 5.0 x8 connection, so each of the chips on this card takes up one half of the slot.
  
  If you're playing games you'll get the same performance as a B580 or B60.  But if you're running AI, you can use all 48GB of RAM for a single task thanks to new software from Intel.
  
  And if you have a server you can combine four of these to assign 192GB of VRAM to a single task.

• Microsoft has produced a new command-line text editor for Windows.  (The Verge)
  
  It's called Edit.
  
  Uh...  Yeah, that's it.
  
  
  
• The judge in the Epic Games v. Apple case is mad again.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  After the recent decision demolishing Apple in every way imaginable and requiring the company to comply with the court's orders immediately, Epic Games resubmitted its game Fortnite to the App Store.
  
  Apple responded that it wouldn't do so until the case had gone through the appeals process.
  
  This rather irked Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who had already ruled against exactly this kind of shit from Apple, and she has now told them to either approve the game immediately or show up in court in handcuffs to explain themselves.  
  
  
  
• Klarna's revenue per employee has soared to nearly $1 million.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Profit per employee remains negative.
  
  
  
• Regeneron - which sounds like a company out of a Philip K. Dick movie - has announced it is buying defunct DNA testing outfit 23andMe for $256 million.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  But not 23andMe's health business, which has the even more unlikely name of Lemonaid.
  
  
  
• Looks like the artist formerly known as Gura is returning as Sameko Saba.
  
  Without an official announcement she already has over 200,000 followers on Twitter and YouTube in less than a day.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 20 2025 08:41 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 21 2025 04:45 AM (2irj9)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, May 22 2025 10:38 AM (ZLF73)

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• Why we're unlikely to get artificial general intelligence anytime soon.  (MSN)
  
  Because all the money - somehow - is working on artificial vapid idiots.

  "The technology we're building today is not sufficient to get there," said Nick Frosst, a founder of the AI startup Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered AI researcher of the last 50 years.  "What we are building now are things that take in words and predict the next most likely word, or they take in pixels and predict the next most likely pixel.  That's very different from what you and I do."

  This is of course true and makes me wonder how Nick has avoided being executed as a heretic.

  Opinions differ in part because scientists cannot even agree on a way of defining human intelligence, arguing endlessly over the merits and flaws of IQ tests and other benchmarks.  Comparing our own brains to machines is even more subjective.  This means that identifying AGI is essentially a matter of opinion.

  Correct.  But we are at least getting good at creating vapid idiots.
  
  I'm not sure why we are doing that, but we are good at it.

• Running the latest Nvidia RTX 5000 GPUs on a nearly 20 year old Intel Core 2 CPU turns out to deliver underwhelming results.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It does work.  That is, Windows runs and the graphics drivers load.  Doing anything useful is left as an exercise for the reader.
  
  
  
• Fancy - and very expensive - printer manufacturer Procolored delivered a free bonus with every printer: Malware.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  For months.
  
  
  
• Why did Amazon's flying delivery drones crash during testing?  (MSN)
  
  Because that's what testing is for.
  
  
  
• Tech startup Firecrawl is ready to pay $1 million to hire three AI agents as employees.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Nuke the entire site from orbit.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, May 20 2025 01:54 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, May 20 2025 10:55 PM (oJgNG)

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• Proton - the company behind secure email ProtonMail and also ProtonVPN - has said it will leave Switzerland if new legislation passes that would require all internet service to maintain IP logging.  (Tech Radar)
  
  Proton keeps only very short-term logs to keep the system running, and only provides customer information reluctantly and with a court order.  Proton's CEO says the new laws would violate privacy in ways already forbidden in the US and EU.
  
  
  
• So where would Proton go?  Well, not anywhere in the EU, which is planning legislation that would outlaw security entirely.  (Tech Radar)
  
  The proposed rules would mandate backdoors in all end-to-end secure protocols, affecting not just Proton's services, but every website and app in the world except for those that are already not secure.

• Introducing Pyrefly, a new tool that hacks type checking into Python after the fact.  (Facebook)
  
  Use a type-safe language in the first place.
  
  
  
• Like Seed7.  (Thomas Mertes)
  
  Probably not, because this is a language written by one guy in a cave with a box of scraps.
  
  But maybe, because it looks to be well-designed and well-documented.  It's a pretty conventional member of the Pascal family of languages - not at all a bad thing - with a pretty solid set of built-in types and structures.  If you have a passing familiarity with any language descended from Pascal you can read Seed7 code.
  
  
  
• No, the universe will not disintegrate in 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years.  You idiots.  (Azimuth)

  Thus, if the underlying space-time admits a everywhere time-like Killing field, the vacuum state is indeed stable and phenomena such as the spontaneous creation of particles do not occur.

  Fair enough.

  This condition of having an "everywhere time-like Killing field" says that a spacetime has time translation symmetry.  Ashtekar and Magnon also assume that spacetime is globally hyperbolic and that the wave equation for a massive spin-zero particle has a smooth solution given smooth initial data.  All this lets us define a concept of energy for solutions of this equation.  It also lets us split solutions into positive-frequency solutions, which correspond to particles, and negative-frequency ones, which correspond to antiparticles.  We can thus set up quantum field theory in way we’re used to on Minkowski spacetime, where there’s a well-defined vacuum which does not decay into particle-antiparticle pairs.

  I know several of those words.
  
  
  
• Stack Overflow just committed suicide.  (DevClass)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• I've said many times that Unicode is a semantic Superfund site.  It tries to express every human language ever - including some imaginary ones - using a single character set.  But since the same character is used in directly contradictory ways in different languages, the Unicode team ended up with multiple character codes for visually identical characters.
  
  Oh, not only is Unicode a complete semantic disaster, but both Unicode and the fonts used to display it are Turing-complete - the text is a programming language that executes itself.  (Stack Exchange)
  
  Which gives you an infinite attack surface for every program written using Unicode, which these days is all of them.  (Daniel Stenberg)
  
  SIXBIT or bust.
  
  
  
• Silicon Power's new CUDIMMs run at 9200MHz.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Albeit at 1.45v.  The standard voltage for DDR5 memory is 1.1v.
  
  And also only on Intel CPUs.  On Ryzen 8000 and 9000 CPUs they drop back to default speed, which is just 3200MHz.  On Ryzen 7000 CPUs they don't work at all.

Posted by: Tim Turner at Sunday, May 18 2025 09:53 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 19 2025 01:23 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: MP at Monday, May 19 2025 01:50 AM (B9Qbl)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, May 19 2025 09:41 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, May 19 2025 01:21 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Tim Turner at Tuesday, May 20 2025 12:09 AM (As8gg)

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• Facebook is arguing in court that the FTC has no case that Facebook has become terrible because Facebook was always terrible.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They might have a point there.

• Verizon is paying $9.6 billion and taking on $10 billion in debt to acquire Frontier.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Frontier previously bought Verizon's network operations in California, Florida, and Texas in 2016, and fucked everything up.
  
  
  
• Charter is buying Cox (the Communications cancel out) for $21.9 billion.  (Reuters)
  
  There will be no competition and we don't much care whether you like it.
  
  
  
• NASA has restored the primary roll thrusters on Voyager 1, twenty years after they were deemed unrepairable, and just before a long maintenance window on communications would have canceled out any such efforts.  (Space)
  
  The backup thrusters are also failing and without them the spacecraft could not continue pointing its antenna back at Earth.
  
  This was not considered an issue when the thrusters were sidelined in 2004 because honestly nobody thought the probes would keep working this long.
  
  
  
• MIT has formally requested arXiv take down one of its preprint papers, not because of any beef with the service, but because the paper is apparently garbage.  (MIT)
  
  They won't say what the problems are, but we'll know soon enough.  Preprint services provide access to scientific papers that have not yet been peer reviewed and published, so it's not unusual for there to be errors, and everyone understands that.  So taking down even the preprint suggests it's a bit embarrassing.
  
  
  
• The end of Windows 10 is nigh, but don't chuck your old PC yet even if it can't be upgraded to Windows 11 because Microsoft sucks; you can still run Linux or - the article doesn't mention this option - keep right on running Windows 10.  (The Register)
  
  Microsoft will stop updating Windows 10 itself, true.  But security updates for Windows Defender antivirus, and patches for the various version of Microsoft Office running on Windows 10, will continue through 2028.
  
  That's plenty of time for a PC to naturally implode all by itself.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is planning a new datacenter in Abu Dhabi that covers ten square miles and uses five gigawatts of power.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is four times larger than the company's new datacenter in Abilene, Texas.
  
  With any luck, that will also implode by 2028.
  
  
  
• Crypto company Coinbase has disclosed a data breach involving inside actors affecting up to a million users and expected to cost the company up to $400 million to offset customer losses.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The people behind the breach demanded $20 million in ransom to not release the data.  Coinbase told them to go fuck themselves.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, May 17 2025 07:17 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, May 18 2025 03:20 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, May 19 2025 06:43 AM (ZLF73)

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• Netflix will show ads created with generative AI mid-way through shows and movies.  (Ars Technica)
  
  No it won't.  Not to me anyway, because I already cancelled my subscription.
  
  Not over this, specifically, but because it's awful.
  
  

Tech News

• The launch of the first all-Australian orbital rocket has been delayed because the front fell off.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Play
  
  
  
• ChatGPT will soon record, transcript, and summarise your meetings.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  No it won't.  See the item on Netflix.
  
  
  
• Harvard Law paid $27 for a copy of the Magna Carta.  Turns out it's not a copy.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  Well, it is a copy, but it's a very authorised copy.  Authorised by Edward I in the year 1300, and subsequently lost in 1762, and likely worth over $20 million.
  
  
  
• I stubbed my toe on the coffee table I left sitting in the hallway after spending the night in a drunken stupor.  I blame Trump.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The Verge having another normal one I see.
  
  
  
• Google has agreed to release the Nextcloud app from permissions prison.  (Nextcloud)
  
  Some good news for a change.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 16 2025 08:11 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, May 17 2025 03:18 AM (KOtXO)

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• The Kids Online Safety Act is back and has the potential to change the internet - or to get struck down immediately over the obvious First and Fourth Amendment issues.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The bill has strong bipartisan and industry support, which means it is just astoundingly awful.

  "Apple is pleased to offer our support for the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Everyone has a part to play in keeping kids safe online, and we believe [this] legislation will have a meaningful impact on children’s online safety," Timothy Powderly, Apples senior director of Government Affairs, said in a statement.

  Everyone involved in the creation of that sentence should be summarily executed.

• Zotac has announced a new mini-PC based on AMD's Ryzen 390 CPU.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is slightly slower than the top-of-the-line 395, with 12 Zen 5 cores and 32 RDNA3 graphics cores, cut down from 16 and 40 respectively.
  
  Since the full chip is likely to be thermally limited in a mini-PC (read: it would overheat) this seems like a reasonable decision.  If the price is right.
  
  
  
• A California judge has slapped counsel in one case with $31,000 in fines after they presented a well-reasoned, tightly argued legal case citing a multitude of relevant decisions that didn't exist.  (The Verge)
  
  The judge fortunately took a minute to look them up.
  
  
  
• Uber has announced its newest invention: Buses.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  No, really.
  
  
  
• ArtificialCast is an AI powered tool for .Net that that type-cast and transform any value to any defined datatype, safely and automatically.  (GitHub)
  
  Yes, it's guaranteed to work 100% safely and automatically.  Correctly?  You're asking a bit much, bucko.

  ArtificialCast is a demonstration of what happens when overhyped AI ideas are implemented exactly as proposed - with no shortcuts, no mocking, and no jokes.

  It is fully functional.  It passes tests.  It integrates into modern .NET workflows.  And it is fundamentally unsafe.

  There's a lot of that going around.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, May 15 2025 10:23 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: vermindust at Thursday, May 15 2025 11:40 PM (p/9aS)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, May 16 2025 03:06 AM (KOtXO)

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• The Kosmos 482 space probe has landed safely - sort of - in the Indian Ocean.  (Space)
  
  Safe for everyone else, anyway.
  
  The probe was supposed to go to Venus, more than 50 years ago, but got slightly lost.
  
  
  

Tech News

• It's 2025.  Why are banks still getting authentication so wrong?  (Jamal Habash)
  
  Because they're banks.  Something that is bad and barely works but has known risks is preferable to something that is good and works well but has unknown risks.
  
  
  
• There's some sort of kerfuffle between Google and Nextcloud over app permissions.  (The Register)
  
  Google has denied the Android Nextcloud app the permission to even ask for permission to access any file on your device to sync with your Nextcloud server.  (Nextcloud lets you run your own little cloud storage service - and other services as well - on your own hardware under your control.)
  
  Google only allows permission to access media files.  But isn't that largely the point of managing files on an Android device?  They're great for accessing content and awful for anything else.
  
  
  
• House Republicans have tried to jam a ban on state-level AI regulations into the budget reconciliation bill.  (404 Media)
  
  Okay.  Works for me.
  
  
  
• The universe is now expected to decay in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
  000,000,000,000,000,000,00,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, much less than was previously calculated.  (Phys.org)
  
  Make sure you have clean underwear.
  
  
  
• Curious variants of Intel's B580 graphics card have been spotted in shipping manifests, including a model with dual GPU chips and 48GB of total VRAM.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  These might be announced soon, but are not expected to actually be available for some time, if at all.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude