Category Archives: News

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IBM announces dual-ISA processor: ARM and IBM Z code running natively on the same cores

Source: OSNews

Article note: This is very IBM. Dual-architecture parts with insane memory corner-turning hardware to keep them consistent, like they were doing with BlueGene Power CPU+Nvidia GPU on single memory machines a decade or two ago. Kind of weird that it's AArch64 and now Power since the Z and big Power lines already share a lot of functional units, but Arm is obviously the bigger platform at this point. And, of course, you can still run Cobol-on-MVS jobs that were written in the 70 as though it were native.

Built on a 2 nanometer technology node, the processor’s design will contain 11 high-performance cores operating at more than 5.7 GHz, AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, a dedicated on-chip data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and a large cache architecture for demanding enterprise workloads. The chip is architected to not contain separate Arm and IBM cores: each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z, or Arm and LinuxONE, instructions concurrently while prioritizing the platform’s established performance, security, encryption, and availability characteristics. IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms are capable of scaling to hundreds of cores and tens of terabytes of memory.

↫ IBM press release

IBM is still doing some amazing chip architecture design. ServeTheHome has more details of how this works:

A key choice here is that IBM implemented AArch64 in full hardware rather than through translation. This design uses a little-endian Arm implementation alongside big-endian z/Architecture, with AArch64 v9.3, SVE and SVE2 support, and 2,792 implemented AArch64 instructions. IBM also claims Arm SystemReady compliance, which matters for how much off-the-shelf Arm software this core can absorb. This is absolutely crazy technology. Arm software sees a native Arm processor. Arm runs unmodified, out-of-the-box, and onto a standard Arm platform. IBM said the 2792 AArch64 instructions are more than twice the Z instructions. IBM made a funny quip about “reduced” in RISC.

↫ Patrick Kennedy at ServeTheHome

This is bonkers technology. We can only dream of this ever serving a home.

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Haiku R1/beta6 released

Source: OSNews

Article note: BeOS/Haiku is always one of my favorite alternate timelines that you can actually experience. Beyond the fundamental neat of Be, the Haiku folks have been doing cool things informed by experiences of other platforms, and building amazing Be-ish package management schemes and whatnot. It doesn't sound like there are ton of changes to B6 since whatever Nightly I currently have in a VM to play with, but the sign of progress and confidence is great. I'm ever more tempted to try doing some real work on a Haiku box.

It’s always a special day on OSNews when Haiku has a new release. While OSNews was founded in 1997, it wasn’t until 2001, when Eugenia took over and relaunched the site, that we really got going. Eugenia came from BeNews, a popular BeOS news website, which shut down in the wake of Be, Inc’s infamous “focus shift” away from BeOS as a general purpose desktop operating system. BeOS continues to have a special place on OSNews ever since.

Today marks the release of Haiku R1/beta6, the first official Haiku release in two years. As such, this new beta covers a monumental amount of progress since beta5, progress I’ve reported on diligently. The highlights of this new beta include a port of Firefox (including branding) and many of its forks, much improve support for Qemu, a new memory allocated largely based on the one from OpenBSD, and improved support for various filesystems. Of course, there’s a massive list of performance improvements, memory management changes, as well as a truly massive number of new application ports.

It’s important to note, as I usually do, that while these Haiku beta releases serve as patches of calm in rough seas, Haiku is generally stable and capable enough that using the project’s nightly releases is usually a totally acceptable way of installing and running the operating system. If you’re not comfortable running nightly releases, however, and haven’t tried Haiku since the previous beta, you’re in for a massive overall improvement.

Everybody loves Haiku.

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Ring says its new encryption limits what it can give police

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Sooo, what's the completely privacy breaking loophole? Interception requests can hold the key after the next time a routine process silently and automatically queries the key from the user?
All Ring cameras will soon use TAKE encryption by default. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Ring has a new way to protect your videos. It's developed an encryption method called TAKE, short for Throw Away the Key Encryption, that the Amazon-owned company says will protect your videos without traditional end-to-end encryption. TAKE limits when and why Amazon's cloud can access those videos, while still providing features like smart alerts for people and packages, AI-powered video search, and video descriptions.

The feature is rolling out gradually starting in September, regardless of whether you have a subscription, and will become the default encryption for all Ring customers.

TAKE arrives during a year of intense scrutiny for R …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Digg v4 and lessons not learned

Source: adafruit industries blog

Article note: "All this has happened before, and all of this will happen again"

Digg basically became a front page for Reddit as it circled the drain

Digg was a high flying news aggregation site from the early web 2.0 era that still exists today, but really in name only. It serves as a cautionary too for why high profile websites tend not to make major changes overnight. A major update, Digg v4, introduced August 25, 2010, caused the site to implode over the course of about 6 weeks during the late summer of 2010. Contemporary tech CEOs would do well to read up on it lest they repeat history.

Digg went from concept to being worth $200 million in about three years and was more popular than Reddit, which is now a $15 billion company. One ill fated change wiped out 90% of its value and its user base in a matter of six weeks.

If you ask someone to define Digg in six words or less, here’s what they would likely say: The thing we used before Reddit.

Today, Reddit claims to be the front page of the Internet. Arguably, during Digg’s heyday, Yahoo was still the front page of the Internet, but Digg was the heir apparent.

See more on The Silicon Underground.

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Bill Gates: The turbulent AI era is here

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The "If the AI optimists(? maximalists?) are right and it's going to do all the labor" conversation is always bizarre, because all the answers are horrific. Plus, you can never tell if the ulterior motive is just spurring more FOMO investment in AI to keep the bubble going, or any sort of actual humanist interest. The Jackpot (Gibson, 2014) model of slow civilizational collapse from bad resource stewardship while the oligarchs fight over the remnants is not a win condition. The Iron Heel (London, 1908) model of "Mass poverty except a tiny band of ascendant extractive oligarchs." followed by "We get fully automated luxury communism by eventually violently reverting centuries of extractive, wealth concentrating tendencies" is not a win condition. The Diamond Age (Stephenson, 1995) model of "The low barrier to automated coercion and violence ruins everything for everyone" is not a win condition. We can't (to mix metaphors) put the torment nexus back in the bag, but the discussions (especially inside socially acceptable parameters) are never productive.
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Adafruit USB Type C CC Resistor Fixer

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is the (second, the spectrum of wildly differently capable visually-indistinguishable cables is worst) most ridiculous thing with USB-C as implemented. *I* am a rank amateur at PCB layout and can follow the fucking directions to put appropriate CC resistors in, but tons of products just ...aren't. At least this is a clever inline fix to make broken devices less annoying.
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Laser Layers for (Almost) Isotropicly Strong Prints

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: I watched this video a couple days ago, it's a super cool idea. Very localized and controlled heating to ensure new extrusion bonds to existing material without sloshing, by strapping some diode lasers to the side of the printhead. Getting the basics working is straightforward by modern desktop manufacturing standards, though I suspect it'd be fussy to properly automate across filaments (due to differing absorption, same reason laser marking and cutting on 3d printed parts is tricky). Looks like they're experiment with using it for surface finishes too, "Adding controlled, localized energy to a print" has a lot of potential in multiple directions.

If there’s one defining factor about 3D printing you have to account for when you’re making a design, it’s probably layer adhesion. Sure, there are a lot of factors to consider, but having the z-axis of your part dramatically weaker than x- and y- is a pretty big deal in a whole lot of applications. [I Changed a thing] changed a thing to fix that — namely, he changed his 3D printer by strapping a couple of lasers to it. That’s the kind of hack we like to see!

What the lasers are doing is a very simple idea: they’re pre-melting the last-laid-down-layer just under the nozzle so that molten plastic is meeting molten plastic to create a much stronger joint than you get when you extrude onto an already-cold layer. The second layer keeps the hotspot warmer longer, which also helps the bond. The resulting parts are not purely isotropic, but he’s getting breaking strain along the z-axis of ABS that’s up to 94% of what he’s measuring in the x direction, while PLA still rates at 77.9%. That’s compared to 60% and 41%, for un-lasered samples, respectively. If you watch the video, you’ll get all the details for the printing process and can see more test data.

These lasers look like a game-changer, but their mass might slow down the fast coreXY printers that are so popular these days. If you don’t want to slow down, remember that changing your layer patterns can boost a print’s strength on its own.

Thanks to [Josh Pensel] for the tip!

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Access to telemetry data: Automotive industry criticizes intelligence reform

Source: Hacker News

Article note: ...Then don't install spyware in your products and collect/retain the data in the first place?
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License Plate Reader Searches Should Require a Warrant

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Yup. Either it needs to be public data so _everyone_ can get in on the stalker behavior (Subject to FOIA, so the public can map cops and politicians and whatnot), or it needs to require a warrant.
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2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I'm going to laugh _so hard_ if the AI companies who pre-paid for RAM production capacity end up with Billions of dollars of RAM intended for data centers they end up not building for a whole host of reasons, and glut the market trying to dump it, losing most of those Billions. Less fun if a bunch of it is a HBM variant or something else complicated to re-direct into the consumer market.
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