Posts by Johannesburgel12

Bill Gates says not to worry about AI gobbling up energy, tech will adapt

How about not reporting on EVERY stupid thing some billionaire says?

Hong Kong's Furi Labs shakes up smartphone scene with dash of Debian

Re: Why low-end?

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is the worst example for the "SoC Linux driver situation" since it has actual up-stream Linux drivers. It's the design that's used in high-end Windows for ARM laptops like the Thinkpad X13s.

Re: "but has an Android layer"?

Furilabs shares some people with the Droidian project. Furi OS is basically a fork of Droidian, which ships Waydroid.

Starlink stuffs the internet into a backpack by invitation only

It might sound nice, but like half the mobile phone operators in the world have signed up for 5G via satellite already. SpaceX is trying to cash in on a smaller terminal before normal phones can do the same.

Sodium ion batteries: Yet another innovation poised to be dominated by China

Re: Move along here, nothing to see

Others can manufacture these batteries too, but this is all about cost, and cost is about scale. While Northvolt is producing its first cells and companies in Japan and "the West" still have to convince investors and governments about the viability of their products, the Chinese have already ramped up to tens of megawatthours of installed SiB grid storage.

This means their supply logistics are also already up to scale, and development and shipment of their first generation of products based on SiB has already been completed. They can sell their products to other countries right now.

UK data watchdog wants six figures from N Ireland cops after 2023 data leak

So the people responsible will keep their jobs, the whole police force will be punished by losing a bit of funding to some other branch of government thatbthe government will then transfer right back to make uo for the missing funding, and the officers affected won't get a penny out of this? Is that correct?

Big Tech is not much help when fighting a junta, and FOSS doesn't ride to the rescue

Technology can never fix societal issues.

The junta is already taking extreme measures to prevent people from communicating with each other. No matter how easy technology gets to use, once it proves itself worthy the junta will just clamp down on it too. Mesh network nodes are even easier to detect and localize than devices using the normal services over the normal internet.

The junta has killed thousands of people and sentenced others to decades of prison. Expecting FOSS software to do something against that is a bit much.

Dublin debauchery derails Portal to NYC in six days flat

There have been similar projects over the last two decades and enough of them went downhill in a similar way (e.g. Shia LeBouf's "He will not divide us"). So the fault is completely in the organisers.

Qualcomm warms bed for Linux on Arm PCs

As mentioned in the article, they have been doing this for several older generations. Mainly through Linaro. But there is quite some room for improvements, and I'm happy their roadmap seems to be addressing most of it.

Starlink geofence appears to have some gaping holes

Starlink only has a tenth of the user base it was counting on. These are all paying customers. Disconnecting this many people doesn't make any fiscal sense for the company, on the contrary.

NASA plasma propulsion project promises Mars in a flash

Repost?

The exact same press release was published back in 2020:

https://www.nasa.gov/general/pulsed-plasma-rocket-shielded-fast-transits-for-humans-to-mars/

The only difference is in the amount if thrust.

Huawei's woes really were just a flesh wound – profits just soared 564 percent

A significant portion of Chinese researchers and engineers has learned their skills in the West. Claiming all they've learned was to steal other people's work basically means our superior universities, research centers and companies are doing a horrible job. Which in your opinion they aren't, if they were they wouldn't produce anything worth stealing.

Both can't be true at the same time.

NASA's Psyche hits 25 Mbps from 140 million miles away – enough for Ultra HD Netflix

Re: Weather conditions are for Earth

What you describe is exactly what ESA has been doing for close to 10 years with EDRS.

Because laser beams are not perfectly coherent. The larger the distance, the larger the area over which the light spreads at the receiving end and the signal gets weaker if the area of the receiving anntenna (the optics) remain tge same. You would need larger and larger optics at the receiver the farther the probe is away to keep the signal strength at the same level, which at some point obviously becomes impractical.

It's exactly the same as with radio links, both rely on the same electromagnetic waves.

Re: Weather conditions are for Earth

ESA, DARPA and Starlink have been using laser links in space for years.

Crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried spared a second trial

So the trial everybody was actually waiting for, the one which would have brought the President of the Bahamas, US politicians etc. to the witness stand, now doesn't happen? I'm shocked!

Beijing demands government apps must shed their bureaucratic skins

Re: App Popularity Contest?

> Or even less frequently, get divorced or change your name - but those don't need to be "apps" they could be just one function in a larger app or only available via a web interface but not via some convenient "government app" that only serves more common needs.

This is the exact intent of the regulation. OP needs to calm down.

Google teases AlphaCode 2 – a code-generating AI revamped with Gemini

Yep, the numbers are horribly bad

It generates a million random answers that are then cut down to a single one, and that one is wrong 57% of the time even in an artificial programing contest situation. Repeated ten times over it might cough up something correct, but who chooses which of those ten attempts is correct? Humans.

This proves Gemini does NOT have the reasoning skills people are trying to attribute to it. It still sucks extremely hard at generating answers, there's no reasoning or understanding there, just randomness. The improvement is in the step that filters out the one answer that's most likely to fool a human into believing it is correct. And even then the human has to do the actual work in the end by running the model several times and filtering out the one answer that is, by sheer luck and the law of large numbers, actually correct.

Creating a single AI-generated image needs as much power as charging your smartphone

They ran all tests on a single A100-80 on AWS. Those chips can go up to at most 500 Watts, assuming AWS stil runs the air-cooled variant (hardly any cloud provider has liquid cooling) it's more like 400 Watts peak. Even factoring in all the other components in the server, the PuE etc. it takes at least 4 hours to consume 3 kWh.

Aren't these image generation models much faster?

Also the A100-80 is not the king of inference.

Nostalgia for XP sells out Microsoft's 2023 'Windows Ugly Sweater'

Re: Of course sold out

You should go out more. Plenty of places in the world look like this. I actually took a very similar image in Bulgaria about ten years ago.

Re: Of course sold out

> I happen to live on the Palouse where the original image was shot. Microsoft bought and paid for the entire field of WHEAT, then spray painted it green for effect.

Troll harder.

China's Loongson debuts processor that 'matches Intel silicon circa 2020'

Re: Fake benchmarks though

Designing such a chip is not the issue. Just look at all those startups designing AI accelerators, they build ginormous chips that easily rival current-gen western designs.

The main issue is actually producing the design. If you can only get a 38 Watt chip to 3 GHz with liquid nitrogen, there are some very serious limitations in your production process. Everybody else has been producing 3+ GHz designs with way larger nodes than 12/14 nm.

Datacenter architect creates bonkers designs to illustrate the craft, and quirks, of building bit barns

This guy has been spamming LinkedIn with his AI "creations" for weeks. He didn't design any of those, it's just output of DALL-E 4 and Stable Diffusion.

Not mentioning that in the article is a serious journalistic integrity issue.

Data-destroying defect found after OpenZFS 2.2.0 release

Re: Checksums

ZFS always checksums everything. If a scrub doesn't detect any errors, that means the data gets corrupted before the checksum is calculated.

Re: ZFS here we go again

Any filesystem without full checksums (metadata+data) is out. Sorry, that's technology from the last millennium. There has been some work on checksums in ext4 and XFS, but it's only half-way supported.

That only leaves BTRFS from your list, which doesn't just still have lots of issues with corruption in any mode (not just RAID5/6), but also still handles a surprisingly long list of normal issues like a full filesystem very poorly. I can't even count the number of times I had to temporarily add a second device to a file system just ro get out of ENOSPC.

ZFS on the other hand only has one single issue: it doesn't support removable devices very well.

It's a shame Linux doesn't have a single, decent in-tree file system.

Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store

After ten years I finally ditched Ubuntu for Debian Unstable and Flatpak on all my machines. Things haven't been so quiet for ages, and the laptops also have considerably better batter life on Debian.

Musk's broadband satellite kingdom Starlink now cash flow positive – or so he claims

Looks like what's even thougher than competing with Spacex is getting people to aign up for it. Revenue stands at 10 percent of what they thought it would be by now. The customer base doesn't seem to grow as fast as the number of launched satellites. The full constellation is expected to cost 5 billion a year just ro maintain. Quite likely Musk is trying to produce some good news about "break-even" or even slightly "cash-positive" quarters before the costs increase too much.

Help, Android 14 ate my Pixel! Bug causes endless reboots, loss of storage access

It's mind-boggling how long these constant hardware and software issues with Google devices have been going on. Even the old Nexus line was riddled with problems, hardly any of my Nexus phones or tablets made it past the two year mark.

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

All Windows in ARM devices have been using UEFI and ACPI since Windowa 8/RT. The FOSS ecosystem is severly lagging behind in this area. It works on Ampere servers, but I still can't boot Linux via UEFI on my Thinkpad X13s. It's quite absurd, UEFI boots into GRUB using an UEFI stub and the Linux kernel that gets booted then has to be fed with a devicetree file.

Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks

Old people telling young people to work more to save the country seems to be some kind of viral trend right now. In Germany those idiots demanded a mandatory "year for society" (for lack of a translation) for everybody turning 18.

At least they demanded only a single year and not 20 to 50.

Martin Goetz, recipient of the first software patent, logs off at 93

> While some in the software industry today might regard patents as somewhat burdensome [..]

Is this a joke?

'Recession-resilient' Tesla misses Q3 expectations, slows Mexico expansion

It's completely crazy to read that Tesla still doesn't seem to have its own financing options and is relying on external providers or even credit card debt. Literally every larger car manufacturer out there has its own bank(s). The Volkswagen Bank has a higher revenue than the car manufacturing branch.

If Elon had any sense, or listened to the people around him (who have no doubt pointed this out) he wouldn't just focus on a stupid online payment service. He would add a proper bank to his empire that handles credits for Tesla car buyers, online payments and much more. This bank would then have hundreds of thousands of customers from day one (Tesla buyers), people who all have to use his "everything app" (when does that one even start to make n appearance?) to manage their credits and might then be inclined to use it for payments, stock trading etc.

The man has zero creativity. There is just always SO much potential that stays behind.

Tachyum says someone will build 50 exaFLOPS super with its as-yet unfinished chips

It's always the same with these companies. The closer they come to a product (if ever), the more the product looks like something everybody else is doing as well. But the established companies can iterate much faster and don't make rookie mistakes. And the potential customers look at the cost of porting everything over to the new architecture, relate that with the advantages and then stay with the established manufacturers.

Tachyum also burned a lot of trust and goodwill just through their needlessly aggressive and stupid marketing. It has gotten a bit better, but there have been times when they sent out a new press release with overly arrogant statements about their competitors every couple of days, while they had absolutely zero to show.

After a clean and inclusive Ubuntu-based desktop? Elementary, dear user

I was about to post this too. Several Distros have and have had speech synthesis in the installer.

Kaluma squeezes JavaScript onto the Raspberry Pi Pico

> The other thing is, it's had billions of dollars of investment to make it very, very, very fast and very efficient, and it runs everywhere.

Billions of dollars have been invested to make specific runtimes fast. JerryScript is not one of them. It's a pure interpreter without any JIT or anything, so this is among the slowest ways to execute JavaScript at all. And I'm not even talking about design decisions that are particularly stupid on microcontrollers, like the lack of integer datatypes.

5G satellite briefly becomes brightest object in night sky

The trend towards "data-only" mobile radio links has been going on for many years already. It took forever to get Voice over 4G (VoLTE) rolled out, handsets had to fall back on 3G for standard voice calls all the time. 5G doesn't even have a standard voice protocol. Since the satellite doesn't also support a 4G fallback, there is no other way than to use a third-party voice protocol.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Old cores

The Cortex-A76 is a five year old design that has been surpassed by five (!) generations of ARM Cores (A77, A78, A710, A715, A720) in the meantime. It seems strange to me to start a new design in ~2021 based on that old core. Economic constraints don't seem to make sense, we're talking about literally cents and the more modern designs on a more modern manufacturing process would actually produce smaller chips with a lower power draw.

But I've never really understood why they have to create their own chip designs to begin with. There have always been enough designs on the market. And don't try to make this about Open Source or Open Hardware, the Raspberry Pi's still have considerably worse upstream support than many other boards and their company policy also actively prevents everybody else from making clones.

AWS is running a 96-core, 192-thread, custom Xeon server

Re: Really??????

240 cores in 16 sockets, yes... but you probably know that. Ampere can do 256 with just 2.

Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips

Re: Marketing strikes again

That's just the major versions. AVX512 alone has 20 optional subvariants, and Intel already announced right now that AVX10.1 will be followed by AVX10.2.

Re: Great...

You know AVX512 alone has 20 optional extensions that are not implemented by every Intel CPU, right?