Posts by chuckufarley

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

So there is...

...A rich man in America that can't tell the difference between what he can do and what he should do? Who knew?

Hunters International cyber-gang extorts Chinese mega-bank's London HQ

So why does...

...A communist country need banks? For the same reason capitalist countries do: So they can be evil and blame others for it.

Microsoft hosts a security summit but no press, public allowed

Having a private...

...Party has got to be less expensive and less trouble than actually making their software secure. In the short term anyway. Sooner or later people will realize that having all of their eggs in Microsoft's basket is the best way to get screwed. Don't get me wrong. My windows install is there in lonely little VM. Once a month is boots up, installs updates, then shuts down again. It there just in case I need it. Otherwise I stick with my FLOSS software because at least I can trust it to get updates and be open with world about security.

Tenstorrent's Blackhole chips boast 768 RISC-V cores and almost as many FLOPS

It's the AI song and dance...

...and it's getting pretty old. Now if I could get a RISC-V box with enough threads, PCIe lanes, and 10Gbs NICs for my storage server that would be another story. I would pay actual money for that. As it is Tenstorrent will only see my cash if I am a customer of their customer's customer.

Cerebras gives waferscale chips inferencing twist, claims 1,800 token per sec generation rates

So how many...

...coal fire power plants does it take to run one of these?

Gamers who find Ryzen 9000s disappointingly slow are testing it wrong, says AMD

Software Optimization...

...Is the future. Someday all workloads will be optimized on the fly for the platform on which they are running. We are not there yet. True benchmarks shouldn't be optimized at all in this day and age. Not for a GPU, CPU, OS, or anything else. This is the only way to be fair. However brands want their names in lights so we will see things like this from time to time.

This is just an iteration in the evolution of both software and hardware. In the future the most successful software will be that which can self optimize to the largest number of hardware stacks.

Gentoo Linux to drop Itanium support as Funtoo fork enters 'Hobby Mode'

I used Funtoo for a few years...

...But it became another chore because Mr. Robbins did not commit to keeping things stable. Features were introduced and a while later removed, the "Wolf Pack Philosophy" was a bad social experiment, and I had bug reports that languished for years. Literally years. The distro was fickle because the leadership was fickle. I don't miss it to be honest. I miss what it might have been.

In the end I think the only thing that made Funtoo superior to Gentoo was the use of the Debian kernel to make installing and maintenance easier. Even that had problems though because you can have kernel level support for a feature but with out up to date user space utilities it doesn't mean much. RIP Funtoo and what it what it could have been.

Intel: Our balance sheet is a smoking ruin, but we think our new chips work

Meh...

...and I mean it.

Japan stops measuring train crowding by ease of newspaper readership

Because Science!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bigger-cities-do-more-with-less/

I think it should be...

...based on the odds of any two passengers of a given train having the same MAC addresses for the WiFi NIC's on their portable devices. It would avoid the need to expand or switch the metric for the foreseeable future.

Ransomware infection cuts off blood supply to 250+ hospitals

When in Rome...

...Send those that don't act like Romans to become gladiators. It's good for them.

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

What's worse than...

...Being of one of the most trusted companies in IT?

Being a single point of failure.

Luckily for me I don't have to fix any of it. Then again, this might be a good time to do some moon lighting over the weekend. I bet there will be plenty of places desperate for extra boots on the ground.

Honey, I shrunk the LLM! A beginner's guide to quantization – and testing it

So does quantization...

...destroy the baked in guardrails of the models?

CISA broke into a US federal agency, and no one noticed for a full 5 months

Re: Seems like a complete shit show but...

https://www.illumos.org/

Solaris is still Solaris, but Illumos is also Solaris.

Was it the Fish and Wildlife service?

https://xkcd.com/2958/

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 to receive support right up to end of Unix epoch

No, I haven't. Then again, it's subscription model aimed at CentOS 7 and 8 installs in a business environment. So maybe not much see in screen shots?

Just wanted to say...

...Snapper works with LVM thin volumes. Mint uses it. So maybe it could work with openSuse?

One small...

...Leap for Leap!

The upgrade of my desktop system went smooth and painless from 15.5 to 15.6 and the openSuse KDE plasma uses just 1.5GB of RAM after a fresh boot. That's even less than their XFCE suite.

Linux geeks cheer as Arm wrestles x86

Re: What are the odds...

We don't always need massive pipelines and FLOPS and TOPS. Sometimes we just need PCIe lanes and enough threads to saturate a 10 Gbps network link.

What are the odds...

...Of a UEFI based mini-ITX storage board with a BMC running Arm? Or any UEFI based board to slot into a standard PC chassis with an Arm CPU?

From RAGs to riches: A practical guide to making your local AI chatbot smarter

This RAG seems to have potential...

...but a lot of it seems to come from the UI in front of the model. Does it support whitelisting sites? Could there be limitation/side effect of unexpected or unsupported file formats? Do different RAG implementations have compatibility issues? Lastly, can it be effectively outside of a chatbot setting?

Gates-backed nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it'll have fuel

Why is the dirty word of nuclear energy...

...Thorium? We know it works, we know it produces orders of magnitude less waste, we know it's not easy for it to lead to the proliferation of weapons, we know it's easier and safer to mine, we know it doesn't need to be enriched, we know we can build reactors that do not melt down, and we know the US has 12% of the world's supply right under our feet.

With all that, there hasn't been a working thorium reactor in the US since Oak Ridge National Laboratory shut down the MSRE reactor in 1969.

Nvidia execs cash out shares as GPU giant skyrockets

It's all about power...

...And if your expensive hardware needs more power than your company can buy there is little point in buying it unless you become your own power company as well. AI and Cloud providers will find there is little difference between their compute clusters in multi-acre buildings and a young teen living in a one room apartment trying to play games and run the AC at the same time. Circuit breakers will trip and things will fall down.

This will drive up the cost of generating you own power and very soon the additional cost will pop the AI bubble. Then only the richest of the rich will be able to use AI at scale.

This is because:

1.) No hardware manufacturers are focused on selling billions of efficient co-processors instead of hundreds of thousands of inefficient co-processors. Nvidia has a command line utility to mange their GPU's called nvidia-smi and you in most cases you can lower the maximum Watts pulled by the card by using the -pl= switch. So if your card pulls 200W by default and you use nvidia-smi -pl=150 you lower you power consumption by 25% and only lose about 10% performance. If they designed the GPU's to fit into a lower power profile they would sell more because A.) the would be cheaper to make and B.) companies could use more at the same time.

2.) The AI Rush is just like the Gold Rush. In San Fransisco during the Gold Rush of the mid-1800's people were paying $1 per egg. That price wasn't seen again in the US for about 175 years!

It makes me glad I never invested in tulips.

The definition of an AI PC is now even muddier, helping no-one – not even AIs

I do agree that we need...

...a definitive definition of an "AI PC" but...

Maybe we need to work on these AI things a bit more?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzXDCj-qKTE

NYSE technical error sends stocks tumbling

Re: I can see it now

Musk wasn't affected. It was Warren Buffett. It seems to be fixed now and trading has resumed, but Berkshire Hathaway's price dropped from over $600,000 per share down to a measly $187.00 a share.

It's all fun and games...

...Until a coding error bankrupts one of the richest men on the planet.

China creates $47B chiptech investment fund

China announces huge splash of cash...

...I wonder how much they haven't announced.

Manjaro 24 is Arch Linux for the rest of us

So is it more stable than Arch?

I like a Linux that needs rebooting less than Windows.

Read AI about it... OpenAI does deal with News Corp

Selling your soul...

...has never been so cheap.

Ransomware crooks now SIM swap executives' kids to pressure their parents

My Mamma always said...

..."Evil is as Evil Does."

Aristotle said "I have gained this from the Love of Wisdom: That I do of my own free will what others only do because they fear the Law."

Leon C. Megginson said: "It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.”

So maybe it's time to change the way we deal with Evil?

Dating apps kiss'n'tell all sorts of sensitive personal info

Repost!

Who can you trust...

...When it comes to your privacy? Yourself.

"Two men can keep a secret if one of them is dead." -- by Unkown.

"You can trust everyone but the question is: What can you trust them to do?" -- by chuckufarley.

The lesson here isn't that Google wants you to think it's being good and trustworthy because anyone with an ounce of sense knows they just want to make money, which is why they had an IPO. The real lesson is that trust is based on patterns of behavior. I trust my neighbor to play loud music every weeknight for 8 to 9 P.M. If they didn't do it I would know something was not right. When someone says "Trust me with your valuables," then I know that the chances of them being trustworthy are very low.

AI Catholic 'priest' defrocked after recommending Gatorade baptism

Mathew 22:37-40...

...Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Down with the False Profits. Up with the Dividends.

Kaspersky hits back at claims its AI helped Russia develop military drone systems

Well at least...

...They have never been accused of using their antivirus software to spread malware, right? Right??? Please tell me I am right.

Not a Genius move: Resurrecting war hero Alan Turing as your 'chief AI officer'

Text-to-Speech bot...

...Can impersonate a wide variety of people with the current state of the art. Yet just because they can doesn't mean they should. Corporate profits seem to always Trump good taste.

UnitedHealth CEO: 'Decision to pay ransom was mine'

Too pissed to read much...

...but:

UnitedHealth CEO: 'Decision to pay ransom was mine'

Fuck you too, Charlie! I hope you wind up living in a card board box giving blow jobs for hot dog money!

Samsung shows off battery tech it says will see you gone in nine minutes

Re: So why does everyone...

Maybe your neighbor still bought a Tesla after the X free speech clown show, but mine did not. I think if you look at the demographics of those that used to buy Teslas and those who are buying them now you will find some interesting signs of people voting with their wallets.

So why does everyone...

...equate a Musk-y reality check with a decline in demand for EV's? I would love an EV! I just can't afford one because living in a city like Chicago I have to pay as much for parking as I do for the car. Just because people have stopped buying Teslas because Elon has picked the wrong horse in the race to test the limits of free speech doesn't mean we don't want them. We just want them to be affordable and not finance wing nuts that take things out of context for a living.

House passes bill banning Uncle Sam from snooping on citizens via data brokers

Enacting a law in one thing...

...Enforcing the law is another.

Google is wrong to put AI search features behind paywall, says HPC leader

So this is different from...

...Google making me log in to get good search results?

I think a wall is a wall is a wall. Screw Google. They are building the future they deserve and it won't be the future they want.

Engine cover flies from Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 during takeoff

Re: Bolts for Boeing

They are not Imperial Fasteners, they are Freedom Fasteners. This might seem like an oxymoron but entropy is. Boeing is just doing it's part to help it along.

I just flew in from Detroit...

...and boy are my government inspectors tired!

Happy 20th birthday Gmail, you're mostly grown up – now fix the spam

I still use my Gmail...

...But I don't really use it use it, you know?

There is no real way to stop all all of the spam. I am not going to take the time to make all spam as spam and it's been weeks since I deleted all the unwanted messages so I'll have to set aside an hour soon or it will turn into an all day project before I know it.

Cloud server host Vultr rips user data licensing clause from ToS amid web 'confusion'

Legal boilerplate...

...is quite the euphemism. If the company can't read it's own ToS from an end user perspective and be happy with it then things like this will happen over and over again. It only takes one bad company to ruin the internet for everyone. Looking at you, Google.

Truck-to-truck worm could infect – and disrupt – entire US commercial fleet

There is nothing like...

...feeling secure. Too bad so many things will never be secure.

DARPA tasks Northrop Grumman with drafting lunar train blueprints

Randall Munroe Strikes Again!

https://xkcd.com/2909/

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

Re: Meanwhile over at twitch.tv...

We are not talking about people playing a sim game. We are talking about people watching others play a sim game about checking out groceries and stocking shelves. And sitting through ads or paying money to skip the ads.

Meanwhile over at twitch.tv...

...Of the newest games to capture the attention of viewers is called Supermarket Simulator, and in it you check groceries and stock shelves. So yeah, maybe the masses deserve what they get.

We asked Intel to define 'AI PC'. Its reply: 'Anything with our latest CPUs'

So about those NPU's...

...Intel talks about them a lot. But for the past few years most GPU's on the market have had Tensors cores built in. They are specifically designed to run the neural networks inside of AI models. So I would argue any gamer with Tensor cores in their GPU already has an AI PC. Welcome to the future.

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

It's the little things...

...like turning off security features to make the kernel smaller (how many distros used in IoT turn off apparmor?), or not locking down TCP port 23 (telnet), or even warning users that are trying to use ssh over an unencrypted connection (all implementations ever).

The low hanging fruit here is really low. Yet a neophyte or an overworked admin either won't know or care.

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

And after all that Zuck...

...did in 2016 to get him elected in the first place. With friends like Trump who needs enemas?