Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Too bad Mozilla becomes more and more a really bad copycat from Google, just without the market share and revenue.

The problem is: there are not much viable alternatives around. While I like Palemoon quite much, the attitude of its developers just sucks.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Do you remember Intel in 2021? They were under pressure, because their own fabs were not as advanced as TSMC, where AMD lets manufacture most of their CPUs. So profits were down, and they introduced Pat Gelsinger as their new CEO.

Quickly after Gelsinger came into power Intel produced CPUs using new methods really quickly. Experts were really wondering how Intel managed to pull of that feat, because normally rebuilding your manufacturing process takes a lot of time due to its complexity.

So back then there were 2 explanations around, how Intel managed to do it, namely: a) they found some genius ways to really rebuild it quickly never heared about before, or b) Intel threw their QA out of the window.

Only Intel knows the truth. When Intel introduced the 13th and 14th generation of CPUs so it quickly became evident that these have much higher failure rates than the generations before.

The first people who noticed it were high end gamers, who are overclocking all of their CPUs. Intel's excuse then was like the iPhone 4: "You are holding it wrong", in other words the overclocking puts too much stress on the CPUs.

This explanation was sufficient enough until the tech press was able to reproduce the issues without overclocking. Intel then put the blame on mainboard manufacturers with the excuse, that these mainboards are automatically overclocking the CPUs. Again: hardware used out of specifications, so not our fault.

This worked again until somebody talked to cloud gaming companies. These companies are using Intel CPUs, but in very conservative server mainboards which definitely do not overclock anything.

Again the failure rate within these companies is unusually high. Since these companies usually are running Linux as Host OS they've got also quite a good transparency about hardware failures, because contrary to Windows Linux does not hide anything.

Such companies do consider servers, which are unable to run a week without crash, as broken. Since they are running very conservative setups in masses, and also have the telemetry to emphasize their opinion Intel's usual explanation does not work here any longer.

So some companies estimate that about 50% of the CPUs Intel delivered of the 13th and 14th generation are a failure. Since these are also B2B bulk purchase customers a storm might be brewing up headed towards Intel right now. At least its safe to say these are no good times to own Intel shares.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Fedi.Tips (@FediTips@social.growyourown.services)

p.p.s. Google announced today that they are shutting down their link shortener service goo.gl. From 2025, goo.gl shortened links will no longer work: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/ This is why link shorteners cause link rot, because...

social.growyourown.services

Note that this doesn't just mean that Google's link-shortener can't be used going forward. Every already-existing shortened link will be permanently broken.

Jonathan Corbet (@corbet@social.kernel.org)

Ah joy ... Google is turning off its URL shortener and breaking every link that ever used it: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/ A quick ...

social.kernel.org

A quick search on lore.kernel.org:

goo.gl/ - search results

...turns up about 19,000 messages with affected links. That's a lot of history that is going to become harder (or impossible) to find.

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Fedi.Tips (@FediTips@social.growyourown.services)

p.p.s. Google announced today that they are shutting down their link shortener service goo.gl. From 2025, goo.gl shortened links will no longer work: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/ This is why link shorteners cause link rot, because...

social.growyourown.services

Note that this doesn't just mean that Google's link-shortener can't be used going forward. Every already-existing shortened link will be permanently broken.

Jonathan Corbet (@corbet@social.kernel.org)

Ah joy ... Google is turning off its URL shortener and breaking every link that ever used it: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/ A quick ...

social.kernel.org

If it wasn't for @#$@#$ Twitter counting links in the old character limit, there wouldn't have been a need for link shorteners like tinyurl and bit.ly in the first place.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Tinyurl was the first well known url shortener and they are still around.

 

[Knutz Scorpio]

(sigh) Yet another instance of assholery leaving big gaping wounds in the internet.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Fedi.Tips (@FediTips@social.growyourown.services)

p.p.s. Google announced today that they are shutting down their link shortener service goo.gl. From 2025, goo.gl shortened links will no longer work: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/ This is why link shorteners cause link rot, because...

social.growyourown.services

Note that this doesn't just mean that Google's link-shortener can't be used going forward. Every already-existing shortened link will be permanently broken.

Jonathan Corbet (@corbet@social.kernel.org)

Ah joy ... Google is turning off its URL shortener and breaking every link that ever used it: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/ A quick ...

social.kernel.org

I have never liked URL shorteners because they are a massive security risk. It is close to impossible to know where one of those links will actually take you when you click on it, so I generally don't.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

China wants to create information superhighway between Earth and Moon to help space travellers

The project envisions being able to monitor and track moving targets as small as one metre in the cislunar space — the region between the Earth and the Moon — in addition to enabling 20 or more travellers to simultaneously communicate with the Blue Planet via video, audio, and images.

www.deccanherald.com

information superhighway

STOP! IT'S A MISTAKE!!!

 

[Noodles]

I have never liked URL shorteners because they are a massive security risk. It is close to impossible to know where one of those links will actually take you when you click on it, so I generally don't.

Yeah, Security risk, and nothing but privacy invading tracking.

Which is ironic because half the reason they get used is sloppy tracking URLs that are 5000 characters long.

Also, dead links if the service closes.

Half the reason I barely use Google products at all though is they just randomly close them like this. And Google is terrible for privacy. I bet a lot of the motivation behind closing this is that it wasn't gathering enough data from users.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Unintended consequence of all the major search engines integrating AI chatbots:

Reddit is now blocking all search engines but Google

Right now, Google is the only mainstream search engine that shows recent results when you search for posts on Reddit using the “site:reddit.com” trick, 404 Media reports. This leaves out Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other alternatives — and that’s likely because Google has struck a $60 million deal that lets the company train its AI models on content from Reddit.

“This is not at all related to our recent partnership with Google,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt says in a statement to The Verge. “We have been in discussions with multiple search engines. We have been unable to reach agreements with all of them, since some are unable or unwilling to make enforceable promises regarding their use of Reddit content, including their use for AI.”

It goes without saying that if "AI use" by search engines is a problem, except for when Google whom they've partnered with does it, then obviously it's entirely related to their recent partnership with Google.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Intel is firing about 15.000 employees and wants to to cut $10bn in costs in 2025.

Intel is laying off over 15,000 employees and will stop ‘non-essential work’

That’s a lot of layoffs.

www.theverge.com

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Intel needs some big class action lawsuit beatdown action for their last few CPU releases being close to 100% fatally defective, and no recall.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Intel needs some big class action lawsuit beatdown action for their last few CPU releases being close to 100% fatally defective, and no recall.

You know, the first couple of times it happened I thought it was great, being an AMD fan. But...yeah it's weird. What the heck are they doing? How are they missing these issues?

I'm worried about AMD starting to go down that path as they "pivot" to AI processors, although it looks like they might have been beaten to the punch and hard by Nvidia, so maybe they'll back away from that cliff.

 

[Noodles]

Man, sometimes it feels like we need to just, slow the fuck down a little bit on everything.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

You know, the first couple of times it happened I thought it was great, being an AMD fan. But...yeah it's weird. What the heck are they doing? How are they missing these issues?

AMD is doing great at the moment, selling CPUs for desktops, servers and laptops. They also delayed the launch of its new Ryzen 9000 officially due to - drumroll - unspecified quality issues. This is how you are building trust contrary to Intel.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-delays-its-ryzen-9000-launch-due-to-unspecified-quality-issue-new-launch-in-august-chipmaker-pulls-back-all-units-shipped-globally-for-quality-checks

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Sci-fi writer re-releases WordStar for DOS

Why would Sawyer—and Michael Chabon and Anne Rice and Arthur C. Clarke and James Gunn—keep using a DOS program, decades past its last update, with quite a few workarounds needed for modern systems? Because it's meant to help writers keep on writing. Like Vim or Emacs, it can be used with a system of keyboard commands entirely without a mouse; unlike Vim or Emacs, it is built for words and paragraphs, not code. Sawyer detailed this in an essay on his site, republished on Ars Technica in 2017. WordStar puts powerful commands near your strongest fingers and makes navigating text, bookmarking, and leaving unpublished notes for yourself far easier than WordPerfect, Word, or almost anything since.

If you download the entire 700-ish MB package, you can see all of this for yourself. Sawyer's README (included in full on the archive page) details the tweaks he recommends for getting WordStar running in DOSBox-X, like setting the screen to 80 columns and 25 lines of text, picking a good font, and switching CapsLock and Ctrl keys to make use of WordStar's home-row-oriented shortcuts. There's even a utility for converting WordStar files to something Word or other modern tools can read, handily named CONVERT.EXE.

 

[Noodles]

VIM just keeps you writing because you can't actually quit it once you enter it.

 

[Khamon]

VIM just keeps you writing because you can't actually quit it once you enter it.

Now we need a colon reaction. Stop that. Y'all know what I mean. nm go away1 kthxby

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

VIM just keeps you writing because you can't actually quit it once you enter it.

Ha ha ha ha ha. Vim jokes make me laugh because it IS esoteric in how it works.
":q!"
also "ZZ" saves and quits.
You can even print from within vim with ":ha", that's not even mentioned in the O'Rly pocket vi/vim guide. To do advanced stuff with vim, I'd have to search my big O'Rly vim book, or figure out how to search the vim help or google. I know vimtutor exists, but I've never actually sat down and done a full vimtutor session.

 

[Noodles]

But what if I am writing and I really want to use the phrase ":q!"?