• 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.

• 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)

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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)

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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)

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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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• Google promised better search - now it's telling us to put glue on pizza. (The Verge)
  
  AI - the LLM version of AI, which is all that makes the news these days - requires human input to learn. It only takes a few iterations of training AI on AI output for it to turn completely to shit.
  
  Yes, even more than usual.
  
  Which is why OpenAI and Google made deals with Reddit to train their respective AI engines on that vast trove of human-generated data.
  
  Only problem is, Reddit is Reddit:

  Imagine this: you've carved out an evening to unwind and decide to make a homemade pizza. You assemble your pie, throw it in the oven, and are excited to start eating. But once you get ready to take a bite of your oily creation, you run into a problem - the cheese falls right off. Frustrated, you turn to Google for a solution.
  
  

  "Add some glue," Google answers. "Mix about 1/8 cup of Elmer's glue in with the sauce. Non-toxic glue will work."

  Google will literally tell you to do this, because it found that answer in a ten year old Reddit thread.
  
  Obviously it's a joke. Obviously it's a bad idea. But AI doesn't know those things, because AI doesn't know anything except, statistically, which words are likely to be found together.

  Look, Google didn't promise this would be perfect, and it even slaps a "Generative AI is experimental" label at the bottom of the AI answers. But it’s clear these tools aren’t ready to accurately provide information at scale.

  They work just fine if you don't care about the answers. They work just fine if an answer that looks right, is right.
  
  That's why AI is advancing rapidly in image generation (and in producing astoundingly mediocre music) but is absolute garbage at anything that requires a factual answer.
  
  It's not a bug. It's baked in to the design.
  
  
  

• TSMC is planning its A16 node - 1.6nm - for 2026. (AnandTech)
  
  Compared to current 5nm chips (and my new laptop is still 7nm) this process will reduce power consumption by 60 to 70%, or conversely deliver about three times the performance at the same power consumption.
  
  
  
• In an industry constantly producing overpriced products that nobody wants Apple is second to none. (WCCFTech)
  
  This time with a foldable laptop.
  
  ...
  
  I mean, yes, but here the whole laptop is screen - no keyboard - and it's the screen that folds.
  
  How do you type on that, you ask? Simple, you clip a keyboard over the screen.
  
  Which makes the entire venture pointless.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which MSI has announced a motherboard that uses CAMM2 memory. (WCCFTech)
  
  This appears to be limited to a single module instead of the usual four, but that's okay because CAMM2 modules cost about twice as much as regular memory.
  
  CAMM2 is designed to be compact and to provide dual channel memory from a single module. Perfect for laptops, pointless for desktops.
  
  
  
• AI engineers make an average of $100,000 more than real ones. (Quartz)
  
  Plus nothing they write is expected to work.
  
  
  
• Germany has too many solar panels operating when it's sunny, pushing energy prices into the negative. (Business Insider)
  
  The plan is to turn half the panels over so that they operate when it's dark.
  
  
  
• Samsung requires independent repair shops not only to report all details of their customers in order to obtain parts for repair, but even to immediately disassemble customer devices if they contain any non-Samsung parts. (404 Media)
  
  Well, fuck Samsung then.
  
  
  
• In completely unrelated news, repair site iFixit has ended its partnership with Samsung to support repairing your own devices. (The Verge)
  
  Because Samsung shipped repair parts glued together.
  
  Literally.

  Most importantly, Samsung has only ever shipped batteries to iFixit that are preglued to an entire phone screen - making consumers pay over $160 even if they just want to replace a worn-out battery pack. That’s something Samsung doesn’t do with other vendors, according to Wiens. Meanwhile, iFixit’s iPhone and Pixel batteries cost more like $50.

  Well, fuck Samsung then.
  
  
  
• Google says that companies should stop sending "phishing" emails to employees to make sure they aren't clicking on random links - because the test is too realistic. (PC Magazine)

  In Linton's view, simulated phishing tests are like forcing workers to quickly evacuate a building during a fire drill - except that real smoke and fire are being blown through the premises. "Once outside, if you took too long you're scolded for responding inappropriately and told you need to train better for next time. Is this an effective way to instill confidence and practice fire evacuation?"

  Well, yes. In an occupation where fires are an everyday event, that's precisely the type of training you will receive.
  
  
  
• Spotify is going to break every Car Thing device it has ever sold. (The Verge)
  
  Yes, Spotify is still in operation.
  
  Yes, you will still pay for your monthly description.
  
  Yes, they are trashing the device you bought directly from them.
  
  No, you don't get a refund.
  
  
  
• Note sure what's going on at The Verge, but credit where it's due: Some good straight tech reporting today.
  
  
  

Well, Fuck Samsung Then Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 25 2024 01:25 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 25 2024 08:48 AM (PiXy!)

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• You can now install the next big update of Windows 11 early so you can find all the bugs and lose all your data.  (The Verge)
  
  I remember a time when I would download beta releases and try them out.
  
  ...
  
  No, actually, I don't.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Edge will begin blocking screenshots at work.  (PC World)
  
  So you can't take screenshots when you want to, but Windows will take screenshots when you don't want it to.  Got it.

• Boeing's Starliner's test launch is now on hold indefinitely.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Better than having the door fall off at 30,000 miles altitude, I guess.
  
  
  
• Governments may be bypassing WhatsApp's encryption and using the data to...  Stop terrorists.  (The Intercept)
  
  Rather telling that it's the latter point that seems to be The Intercept's primary concern.
  
  
  
• Meta's new AI council is comprised entirely of white men.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Also, all but one of them suffers from scoliosis.
  
  
  
• Whiny idiots with stupid names want the world to change for their benefit.  (The Guardian)
  
  Bah.  (Waves paw.)
  
  
  
• US lawmakers are working on a bill that will make it easier to pass regulations to make it illegal to export AI models which will achieve absolutely nothing.  (Reuters)
  
  Yay.
  
  
  
• Sustainable jet fuel is a pipe dream.  (The Guardian)
  
  Surprise!
  
  
  
• Amazon is planning to give Alexa an AI overhaul and a monthly subscription fee, then scrap it entirely and take up day drinking.  (CNBC)
  
  The company hasn't announce the final steps in this plan yet.
  
  
  

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