• Create, along with a number of add-ons
  
• Chipped, which alone adds about seven thousand new decorative blocks - and seven new workstations for creating and modifying them
• Chisels and Bits, which lets you use a chisel to carve Minecraft blocks into any shape you fancy
• Domum Ornamentum, which lets you take two Minecraft blocks (including blocks from other mods) and a pattern, and create a new block combining them
  
  

Dimensions

• The Aether (with add-ons)
• The Bumblezone
• The Everbright
• The Everdawn
• The Feywild
• The Twilight Forest
• The Undergarden

• Bugs Aplenty
• Cane's Wonderful Spiders
• Creeper Overhaul
• Critters and Companions
• Enderman Overhaul
• Exotic Birds
• Grimoire of Gaia, which includes a number of hostile mobs so they are set to only start showing up after 28 days in game
• More Mob Variants, which includes all the new wolf types coming in 1.21
• Nether Depths
• Nether Overhaul
• Productive Bees
• Unusual Fish
• What the Gecko

• Villages and villagers have received a major upgrade combining about thirty different mods and resource packs - though they're still kind of dumb because the AI upgrade I tried made the game crash
• Food and drink are completely overhauled, with Aquaculture, Croptopia, Farmer's Delight giving a huge range of crops and cooking options, and the Let's Do series bringing wine, beer, spirits, tea and coffee, and candlelit dinners
  
• New measures to protect and enhance your pets - plus a lot of new pets to find
  
• Easier travel with Small Ships, Immersive Aircraft, and from Tameable Beasts several new steeds to ride - some of which can fly

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, June 02 2024 01:21 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 02 2024 04:02 AM (BMUHC)

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• Xbox is was down.  (Reddit)
  
  Pixy, your Xbox and Xbox 360 are sitting in a box in the garage, and your Xbox Series X is sitting in its original box in the closet because you still haven't opened it.  What do you care?
  
  I can't log in to Minecraft.
  
  I have Minecraft installed.  I have my own server.  I can't play it because a service I don't use and don't care about is down.

  You may not be able to sign-in to your Xbox profile, may be disconnected while signed in, or have other related problems. Features that require sign-in like most games, apps and social activity won't be available.

  This apparently includes offline single-player games that you have already installed on your console.  And Minecraft.
  
  
  
• Live Nation has confirmed earlier reports of a data breach.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The company itself wasn't hacked, but:

  A spokesperson for Ticketmaster, who would not provide their name but responded from the company’s media email address, told TechCrunch that its stolen database was hosted on Snowflake, a Boston-based cloud storage and analytics company.

  I hate cloud storage.

  Snowflake said in a post on Friday that it had informed a "limited number of customers who we believe may have been impacted" by attacks "targeting some of our customers' accounts." Snowflake did not describe the nature of the attacks, or if data had been stolen from customer accounts.

  The problem there is that when Snowflake says "a limited number of customers", they mean "a handful of the largest corporations in America", not "a small number of individual people".
  
  And just one of Snowflakes customers had half a billion customers of its own.
  
  As always with security, it's only as strong as the Post-it note on the intern's desk at your cloud storage provider.
  
  
  

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, June 02 2024 01:18 AM (ZLF73)

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• Fracking wastewater from Pennsylvania alone could provide 40% of domestic lithium requirements for the US.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The Marcellus Shale formation in Pennsylvania contains enough natural gas to meet all domestic requirements for 18 years all by itself, and is also rich in lithium.  So rich that the wastewater from fracking efforts is just loaded with the stuff.
  
  The Ars commentariat is outraged at the thought that extracting critical energy resources could provide other critical resources for free.  There's not enough lithium in the world for that lot.

• The Framework 13 laptop has a new higher-resolution screen option.  Oh, and a new Intel CPU.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The CPU is the Intel Meteor Lake series, the 1th generation since Intel renumbered everything.  It's...  Okay.  It uses less power and has improved graphics compared to 12th, 13th, and 14th generation Intel chips.
  
  The screen is a 120Hz 2880x1920 model with rounded corners.  The corners are because it's not a custom panel made for Framework, but a 13" 3:2 ratio model that just happened to be available and fit almost perfectly.
  
  Still no Four Essential Keys.
  
  
  
• Twitch has terminated all members of its Safety Advisory Council.  (CNBC)
  
  Awesome.
  
  
  
• Spotify will be providing full refunds to all purchasers of its soon to be defunct Car Thing.  (Engadget)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• A group of filmmakers is still trying to force Reddit to cough up the IP addresses of people discussing Bittorrent.  District Court Judge James Donato just upheld all previous decisions telling them to take a long walk off a sinking pier.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• Google claims that it never said putting glue on pizzas and eating rocks was a good idea, and also that customers are satisfied with their new glue-and-rock pizzas so shut up about it already.  (The Verge)

  User feedback shows that with AI Overviews, people have higher satisfaction with their search results, and they’re asking longer, more complex questions that they know Google can now help with. They use AI Overviews as a jumping off point to visit web content, and we see that the clicks to webpages are higher quality - people are more likely to stay on that page, because we’ve done a better job of finding the right info and helpful webpages for them.

  Also that it's your fault:

  One area we identified was our ability to interpret nonsensical queries and satirical content. Let’s take a look at an example: "How many rocks should I eat?" Prior to these screenshots going viral, practically no one asked Google that question.

  You're a bunch of troublemakers, you people, using a search engine for search like that.
  
  
  
• I found out why all the "RPG" dance clips on YouTube are only 24 seconds long.
  
  That's the only good part of the song.

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, May 31 2024 07:53 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: David Eastman at Saturday, June 01 2024 01:20 AM (rmrII)

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• Google has confirmed that leaked technical details of its search engine are genuine.  (The Verge)
  
  Experts believe this is likely to make Google Search worse, though they were unable to explain how this is possible.

• Arm has announced its latest mobile CPU cores.  (AnandTech)
  
  Of note, the X925 is claimed to be 36% faster than Arm's fastest cores from last year, when built on the latest 3nm process (where last year's cores would have been 5nm).
  
  That's a pretty decent gain, but my phone is five generations behind in CPU cores and works just fine.
  
  
  
• Leaked tests of the upcoming Ryzen 9000 show it faster than a 13900K but slower than a 14900K on single-threaded tests - 18.5% faster than Ryzen 7000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While Intel holds the absolute speed record (for now), it did that by pushing 400W of power into eight fast cores.  The new Ryzen cores may be very slightly slower, but a Ryzen CPU with sixteen fast cores uses half the power of an Intel CPU with just eight.
  
  
  
• Oh my God, you can't just say that: Construction of Intel's new 1nm fab in Germany has been delayed by "too much black soil".  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That is, the site selected turns out to be first-rate farmland, and Germany has soil conservation laws that require all that soil to be...  Something expensive and inconvenient.  I don't know what exactly.
  
  
  
• Afnic has announced IBDNS, a DNS server that doesn't work.  (Afnic)
  
  Flaky DNS servers are a curse (there's a major Australian website that tries to force people onto its IPv6 address even if they're not connected to IPv6) so they've created one that is deliberately and controllably insane.
  
  
  
• Cheap at half the price: The Khadas Mind.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's decent hardware, but you can get the same specs for half the price if you sacrifice 5% of the build quality.
  
  
  

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Thursday, May 30 2024 08:14 AM (kZpSS)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, May 30 2024 12:04 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, May 30 2024 01:45 PM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, May 30 2024 02:55 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 30 2024 04:59 PM (PiXy!)

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• Elon Musk's xAI has raised $6 billion in funding from people hoping to cash out before the bubble bursts.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Okay.  It's still garbage, but it's competition for the communists running OpenAI and Google.
  
  

• Stop making brightly coloured toys, say anti-waste reasearchers.  (The Guardian)
  
  If everything is grey and nobody buys anything, we will all lead happier, more fulfilling lives.
  
  Somehow.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 5 could be launching in August and on sale in October.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
• Or they could be available in retail stores by July.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Those stories were posted twelve hours apart.
  
  
  
• Big Data is dead.  (Mother Duck)
  
  A decade ago, all the noise that now surrounds AI was about Big Data - querying petabytes of garbage to get bytes of gold.
  
  Turns out there was no gold, and in most cases, not even any petabytes.  The typical large company has 100GB of analytical data, with some going up to a terabyte or so, which will fit easily on a cheap consumer SSD that can deliver a million IOPS.
  
  
  
• Medical research into ultra-processed food has tripled since 2020.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Has it found anything?
  
  Well, no.
  
  
  
• Specs have leaked for Motorola's next-gen G85 phone.  (Notebook Check)
  
  I have a Moto G54, one step down in the previous generation.  Great phone.  Does everything I need.  Cost about $120.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 29 2024 12:57 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, May 29 2024 01:18 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, May 29 2024 01:23 PM (bg2DR)

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• Widespread power failure at one of the two data centers where I have servers.  In fact, it was so widespread that it took out servers I have with two different providers.
  
  Yes, they have battery backup and generators.
  
  No, those didn't work.  At all.
  
  But at least this time they didn't explode and set off the sprinkler system leaving the company with weeks of cleanup work.
  
  
  
• Families of the victims in the Uvalde shooting, and the remoras with legs they call lawyers, are suing Activision and Facebook.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They blame Call of Duty for turning a psychopath into, well, a psychopath.
  
  The Call of Duty series has sold around half a billion copies over the past twenty years.  If it were the problem, we would know.

• The Unreal Engine license requires programmers to use inclusive language in their code.  (Bounding into Comics)
  
  In particular, the license takes aim at using genders where none are specifically required by the context, and to avoid vernacular that might be unclear to those not familiar with English.
  
  That's going to go down well with the speakers of gendered languages like French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, whose languages Unreal owner Epic Games just collectively mega-aggressed.
  
  
  
• Is the RTX 4060 really better than the RTX 3060.  Yes.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not worth upgrading, perhaps, but there are very few cases where the 3060 is objectively better.
  
  
  
• Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is coming - and it can run in 2GB of RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's because it strips out all the crap that nobody wants.  It doesn't even have the TPM requirement that Microsoft declared an absolute minimum for Windows 11 compatibility.
  
  Which is why you're not allowed to buy it.
  
  
  
• One in nine US children are being diagnosed as children.  (NPR)

  Dr. Max Wiznitzer, a professor of pediatric neurology at Case Western Reserve University, says he suspects some parents may be reluctant to put their kids on ADHD medication out of misguided concerns. "There's the myth that it's addictive, which it's not." He says studies have shown people treated with ADHD have no increased risk of drug abuse.

  Really?  Let's ask another expert.

  The hypotheses underlying the procedure might be called into question; the ... intervention might be considered very audacious; but such arguments occupy a secondary position because it can be affirmed now that [this is] not prejudicial to either physical or psychic life of the patient, and also that recovery or improvement may be obtained frequently in this way.

  Oh, my mistake.  The second quote was talking about lobotomies.
  
  
  
• ICQ is shutting down after 28 years.  (The Verge)
  
  I don't think I ever used it.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 28 2024 02:33 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 28 2024 02:36 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Wednesday, May 29 2024 01:47 PM (iavKJ)

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Posted by: David Eastman at Monday, May 27 2024 02:32 PM (rmrII)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 27 2024 04:36 PM (rcPLc)

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• Financial technology startup Synapse, which provided banking services to around 100 other financial technology startups with around 10 million total customers, est mort.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Synapse filed for Chapter 11 protection last month to sort out its financial situation without impacting customers, but that failed when the buyer it had lined up walked away.
  
  That left no alternative but liquidation, leaving all of Synapse's customers without banking services, and all of their customers without access to their money.
  
  It's a mess.
  
  Synapse customer Mainvest is also going into liquidation as a result of this, and is probably not the only one.
  
  Do you people want regulatory capture?  Because this is how you get regulatory capture.

• Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is 10% slower than Apple's M2 on single-threaded benchmarks - but twice as fast on multi-threaded tests.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The X Elite has twelve full-size cores, while the base model M2 has four full-size and four low-power cores, so that tracks.  
  
  And also signals that the X Elite is finally the real deal, a genuinely powerful and efficient Arm processor for PCs that aren't completely locked down.
  
  Qualcomm has been working with the Linux Kernel team since last October on support for the X Elite.
  
  Which is good, because Windows 11 Sky Captain Edition sounds like a non-starter.
  
  
  
• Britain's NHS covered up infected blood donations that led to 3000 deaths over the course of twenty years.  (UPI)
  
  There's a lot of that going around.
  
  In the US Isaac Asimov died of HIV contracted from a blood transfusion.  That was also covered up to not cause panic.
  
  
  
• Recycled concrete can be used in place of lime in steel production.  (New Atlas)
  
  And as a bonus, the concrete - crushed and with the sand and gravel removed - is heated by the process to the point that it reverts to cement, ready to be reused.
  
  So far it's only been tested at a small scale - a few kilograms - but industrial trials processing thirty tons an hour are set to begin this month.
  
  No word on how energy-efficient it is, but given how much concrete is used every day and the problem of getting rid of it afterwards, this might be useful even if it's less energy efficient than just making it anew.
  
  
  
• Search functions in ChatGPT, Copilot, and DuckDuckGo - which I actually use - all fell over yesterday when the Bing API broke.  (The Verge)
  
  Oops.
  
  For a few hours I had to use Google.
  
  
  
• The Pironman 5 is a gamer case for the Raspberry Pi 5.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's a great case - adding M.2 support and full-size HDMI ports, as well as cooling fans - but it costs as much as the Pi 5 itself.
  
  
  
• The Ecoflow Powerstream sounds like a good way to get electrocuted, but apparently is not.  (The Verge)
  
  It's an inverter that takes a feed from solar cells and pushes that into a wall socket so that you draw less power from the grid.
  
  It does have an automated cutoff so if grid power is shut off for any reason your wires don't stay live.  Which makes it completely useless as backup power...  Just like the professionally installed solar cells on my roof which work exactly the same way, just without the murderous wrong-way power plug.

• Google is frantically adding filters to its AI search to remove the very stupidest answers.  (The Verge)
  
  So it will no longer tell you to put glue on pizza or eat at least one small rock per day but answers that are merely obviously wrong will get through just fine.
  
  
  
• A udm=14 a day keeps the insanity at bay.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Adding &udm=14 to the end of a Google search URL turns off the AI response.
  
  For now.

• Google has threatened to stop funding news outlets if California goes ahead with its plan to create a new tax on digital advertising.  (Axios)
  
  I've lost count of all the stupid things California is doing.
  
  I've also lost count of all the stupid things Google is doing.
  
  Let them fight.
  
  
  
• OpenAI has rescinded its perpetual gag order on staff leaving the company.  (CNBC)
  
  If former staff said anything OpenAI - at its sole discretion - found disagreeable, they lost access to their already vested shares.
  
  This was almost certainly illegal, so OpenAI dropping the clause doesn't really change things that much.
  
  
  
• The UK Environment Agency admitted to "burying" FOIA requests.  (The Guardian)
  
  Seems to be a lot of burying going around.
  
  
  
• AI models could violate antitrust laws, babbled FTC chair Lina Khan.  (The Hill)
  
  Don't look at me.  I tried and couldn't translate what she said into anything that made sense.

Posted by: madrocketsci at Sunday, May 26 2024 02:03 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 26 2024 03:54 AM (BMUHC)

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