Kaz

On 17/04/2024 at 21:26, Snakecharmed said:

Out of the options on that list, I would not consider Roku because of their anti-consumer business practices. TCL seems to have the best TV in the class by far, but I don't trust Chinese electronics that can connect to the Internet, so I'd make sure it functions as a dumb TV. I mean, I'd block a Sony, Samsung, or LG as well, but I'd be even less willing to let a Chinese brand phone home.

TCL and Roku are the same company in all but brand name.  They partnered so Roku does the software platform.  TCL's TV's are less expensive because their data policy is basically: We collect all data.  We will sell your data, we will buy your data for a more complete profile.

Discord has always been a spy program.  From the beginning they emphasized how secure their end to end encryption is.  Yet at the same time they tell everyone what you are doing and track your program use.  You can tell them not to tell everyone, but they never stop tracking your program use. 

Blame Warthunder, it's been responsible for 9 leaked documents in 2023 alone.  Officials have talked about how discord has flown under the radar.  So there's a demand for access to messages.  It's a national security demand.  Suddenly we have this. 

Has intel fixed the drivers for a380?  My only experience was horrible, it couldn't play youtube videos without freezing up. 

5 hours ago, iamjanco said:

Fairly recent news, perhaps relevant to the discussion; mostly applicable to higher end Intel Xeon processors:

That software engineer worked really hard.  I almost feel bad that it came out in the way that it did.  What he did was along the lines of a firmware update.  Using hardware in ways that are more applicable to the software's needs. 

Did they engineer their hardware to do this from the beginning?  Maybe...

3 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

I recall this being covered somewhere before, I think JayzTwoCents , not related to these issues but more so the fact that mobo partners blatantly skirting Intel specifications to get ahead in benchmarks etc but introducing blatant temperature related issues. 

 

So yeah, this is not ideal. 

Gamer's Nexus has mentioned this is a problem.  In the drive for highest/best performance, mobo partners go ham on processor settings.  That's why they stress that they run stuff to spec.  It's funny that it takes 4 companies to point it out.

Quote

Nvidia's latest 552.12 driver patch notes reveal that the GPU manufacturer is aware of stability issues plaguing many Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh gamers. Nvidia specifies that users experiencing crashes with a 13th or 14th Gen CPU should consult Intel for their troubles.

Specifically, Nvidia's patch notes state that if 13th/14th Gen CPU owners are experiencing "...stability issues/out of video memory error messages/crash to desktop while the game is compiling shaders..." to consult two sites consisting of an Intel community page and a tutorial from Rad Game Tools on how to reduce CPU power limits to Intel's default specifications.

Tom's Hardware

Nvidia cards + Unreal engine compiling shaders on intel 13th/th14 gen processors with uncapped power limits is causing trouble.  That must have been really fun to troubleshoot.  I've heard of companies pointing fingers before, but man those motherboard partners really screwed up! (J/k).

If you're an nvidia gamer with a new intel processor you might want to enable intel's default power limit, or at least cap it.

After 2 failed attempts to learn programing, I have finally found a learning platform that I like and am taking the plunge.

I wanted to take a minute and hype "Py4e.com".   Charles R Severance is a professor who put this program together because he believes everyone should learn to program, not just career programmers.  The ability to tell a computer to do exactly what you want it to is such a useful skill.  It's a free, no cost course, that I am incredibly impressed with.  His course includes lectures, reading material, exercises (writing actual programs), and quizzes.  He also works through the assignments, which I have found interesting as he has suggestions that I didn't think of when solving them.  He even has a sense of humor!  I have paid money for college courses that are not as good as this. 

Py4E sure trumps my trade school attempt where they handed me a text book and told me to read, for 4 hours, every day.  I didn't write one program or learn any specific language, just the concepts of programming.  Yeah, I didn't finish that course...  I also tried learning Python on Alison.com 3 years ago and was bored to tears by the end of the first chapter.  I did 2 chapters and told myself I would do more the next day, I never returned.  Professor Severance's course is the first one that actually feels fun, and the only course that has me writing programs.

If only I'd found this 10 years ago. 

Quote

On Friday, a lone Microsoft developer rocked the world when he revealed a backdoor had been intentionally planted in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility available on almost all installations of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The person or people behind this project likely spent years on it. They were likely very close to seeing the backdoor update merged into Debian and Red Hat, the two biggest distributions of Linux, when an eagle-eyed software developer spotted something fishy.

What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world

ARSTECHNICA.COM

---

Malicious updates made to a ubiquitous tool were a few weeks away from going mainstream.

It was implemented on some unstable builds, (Like Kali experimental) so if you have an unstable Linux build, make sure it has been updated.  This is a few days old, but since it hasn't been mentioned I thought I'd bring it up. 

On 20/08/2022 at 12:36, ENTERPRISE said:

A pat of on the back of the network infrastructure team! 

 

These attacks are always going to grow in strength as time moves one, but so do the defences. That being said these attacks are non AI, imagine once someone properly harnesses that one and uses it, that could be a different story. 

In my security + class they talked about how a company setup a large (many servers) honey pot that was infected incredibly fast, I think within 12 seconds the entire system had been compromised.  Within 24 hours the servers were compromised hundreds of time.  It was used as a warning about connecting unpatched systems to the internet.  A well designed web crawler doesn't need AI to infect things.

I would love to know how they successfully defend a DDOS attack while still allowing standard users to connect.  How do they identify attacker traffic from regular traffic?  It's very likely Google is already using AI to help do that.  What is going to be really scary is when AI blows a hole in all these hardware back doors.  Tech debt is a real problem and bot nets are only getting larger.  Hardware backdoors are an incredibly short sighted idea.  This is an old video, but still an awesome watch about how they have found back doors that were intentionally baked into the CPU.   The guy works for intel now, go figure. 

Google kept this open while they developed market share.  Now they will use that market share to stifle competition.  They no longer need 3rd party cookies to collect their data.  The manifest v3 change is a lot more than just 3rd party cookies

This is good news, the 40 series was overpriced because they were still trying to sell leftover 30 stock.

Article title makes it seem like they are selling their firmware updates.  Some of their monitors just won't support updates.  That may have been a sales decision.  They have the same panel.  Overclockers like us love getting stuff we can flash different firmware on and receive more features.

This isn't pitchfork worthy news.  Up until last year, none of the monitors I owned could update their firmware. 

I remember when video games were sold as complete games, rather than having day one updates.  Those were the days.

This might be the first real feature of Windows 11 over 10!

I generally don't use upscaling or frame generation if I don't need it, but it may be a way to keep older games relevent on new hardware.

I'm curious how AI is actually learning this stuff.  If it doesn't know right from wrong, good from bad, how does it know what improvements are desired and what isn't?  It must be an interesting algorithim if they plan to impliment it on thousands of games at once.

There's some talk about different processing units in the article, but it's something I didn't understand.  Can anyone explain it better?  The only thing I know is, Nvidia GPUs are good with AI, AMD and Intel, not so much. 

I've always wondered what is physically different with AI compute as opposed to rasterization.  The fundamental concept still leads to a 1 or 0, so why is it hardware that's different and not software?  Maybe we'll start to see software/firmware bridge the gap that hardware was doing.

This is interesting.  Intel may not have licensing rights on Nvidia technology, but if they are building it for them they are in a prime position to leverage Nvidia for their own gains.

Sort of like China stealing technology.  "We'll make it, just give us your designs".  Intel can't copy the product verbatim, but they can still benefit from the R&D, which is no small cost.

It's also interesting because it has similarities to Nvidia and AMD board partners.  Seems to me that EVGA dropped out because they didn't want to compete with Nvidia.  The ability to set the price they sell their components for, set the MSRP, and the ability to compete in the same market was too much to bear.

It may indeed be time to buy Intel stock.  It will be interesting to see just how many keys to their kingdom Nvidia is handing to Intel.

It's still a bit early for Intel graphics cards though.  I suspect it will take Intel 3 generations to smooth out the bumps.  That is if they stick with it.  Rumor has it their 3.5 billion investment may be axed before it can pay off.

Yeah it sounds more like someone bought the 4090, then returned their borked card instead of the 4090.  The old swaparoo.

Seems more like a 1 off scenerio than something to get worked up over.

$700 for a 7900xt is not bad.  I had a 7900xt, it had an intermittent display port so I sent it back and picked up the XTX instead.

I can honestly say the 7900xt was enough card for me, and I overspent upgrading to the xtx.

They are both really nice graphics cards.

I was just investigating if one of my add-ons was causing the news/latest problem, when I stumbled across this post.  Thanks, that fixed it.

That's a really obscure setting for such a main feature of the site.

This will be a fun topic to follow.

Material science has some real potential.   It is a game changer.  My friend who works in AI development (they are working with bees and plant germination), says the problem with AI is no one understands how it generated the answers.  It's a black box that people don't understand.  For stuff where the answer can be checked it's amazing.

Chat GPT can generate an answer, but it's also known to lie and make up sources.  It's real goal is to understand languages, but can a statistician ever know if it actually understands?  It can tell you the probability or likelyhood that a certain word will be next.  It doesn't actually know what it's saying.  But hey, if I listen to enough smart people talk I can always just repeat the answer....  The problem is, unless they release their dataset (which they won't because they web crawled it without permission), we don't know how smart those people are when it regurtitates, or just plain makes up answers.

https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf

I was trying to copy article 99 to add an excerpt but it doesn't like copying.  It's a blatant example of openAI ripping off an NYtimes article.  It's bad, like I wouldn't have even tried to pull that off in middle school because any teacher would have called it plagurism.

Statisticians are scary.  In business stastics we learned how data can be manipulated to show just about anything.  Most of AI development is just statistics.  Where those statistics comes from matters.  What people are trying to show matters.  (I wouldn't trust AMD, Intel, or Nvidia marketing statistics to tell me how good a product is. There's too much variamce between that and independent reviews.

OpenAI reached a little hard by not getting authorization to use company datasets  They did it the good old fashioned piracy way, just take it.

My approach would be to use wireshark to figure out what ports are needed, and nmap to see if those ports are actually open.  Chances are they aren't and your ISP router is still in play.

Setting the pfsense to demilitarized from your ISP router is a reasonable solution, that should eliminate the isp router as a problem.

In my previous experiences with this, the ISP router was still in play and the ports from it had to be forwarded as well.

The monitor I wanted, but probably shouldn't buy... (My wallet is thanking me.)  I'm also hesitant with oled, though I think qdOLED is supposed to be better with burn in. 

On 30/11/2023 at 19:46, Sir Beregond said:

I like MX Reds 

 

What I don't like are MX Blues that are loud just to be loud.

 

I'd be willing to try a non-linear switch again, but I don't want loud clicky nonsense.

I love MX blues.  My first experience typing was with typewriters, blues audiable click always reminds me of a typewriter.

I tried MX browns, they are alright but without orings the bottom out sound makes them arguably as loud as blues, and the sound isn't rewarding

When my 2nd keyboard died I went back to blues.  I'd like to see what holy pandas and topre switches are about, but there's little point in trying them when I already love blues.

Gigabytes 32" 3840x2160 is a good monitor, but I returned them for the 27" version.  At my viewing distance the image quality is noticeable.  I can't imagine wanting to go bigger for anything less in terms of resolution.  I deeply regretted buying 32" 1440p monitors.  I'm holding out on OLED, burn in is a concern to me and I recently found out LG's OLED doesn't play well with text.

Glossy glass monitors look a lot better than plastic matte finishes. I wish I could still buy glossy IPS screens.  I'd pay extra for that. 

Update on the situation.  I've now had Gigabyte M32U monitors for about a week.

On 03/09/2023 at 17:28, pioneerisloud said:

I wonder why you're experiencing so much eye strain with the 32's.  32" and 1440p is relatively large pixel pitch, kind of like a 27" 1080p panel.  With that said, have you tried messing with the scaling options in Windows yet?

I was using text scaling, then I tried windows scaling (apparently they are different).  While there were some gains/benefits, I ultimately decided the monitors weren't working out for me. 

I am now using 2x Gigabyte M32U (32" 4K 144hz) monitors, and I'm debating returning them and getting Gigabyte M27U (27" 4K 150/160hz overclocked) monitors.  The smaller screen size might be preferable to me for a sharper image/text clarity.  I'll probably fire up cleartext and see how that goes for the next week or so before making a decision.  From what I read, the LG monitors don't play well with clear text, it was designed for sRGB/BGR, not rWbg.  The gigabyte panels should be fine, but the LG panels are unsupported.  With the prevalence of LG OLED panels hitting the market, it will be interesting to see if windows adds support for rWbg.

Interesting sidenote, my 27" Yamakasi 2560x1440 monitor felt like it had a sharper/crisper image than the Gigabyte 32" 4K monitor.  The 4K monitors have higher PPI, but the Yamakasi had a glass finish, as opposed to the mat finish on new monitors.  I miss the days when monitors had glass. 

On 05/09/2023 at 00:00, Snakecharmed said:

I feel like more info might be needed. What model monitors do you have now, how long have you had them, and do they have a reputation for poor text clarity?

 

I wouldn't rule out physiological changes as a possible cause of the eyestrain either. I'd actually consider that a primary culprit with how you described having prolonged blurry vision and eye irritation.

The 32" monitors I was using are LG 32GQ850-B.  I question how much of the issue is a text issue, vs a screen/panel lighting issue.  Before finally purchasing new monitors, I noticed that watching video for 10 minutes would bother my eyes.  The final straw was when I was looking at my blue windows login screen and realized, my eyes are bothered.  That was within 30 seconds of firing up my computer.  Since the monitor swap, I do still have some eye trouble, but it is significantly reduced.  I feel like I can recover in this situation, vs before when things were only getting worse.

For now, I'll be avoiding LG panels due to the unsupported rWbg, which includes companies like Corsair who use LG panels.  I'm extremely disappointed that all the new OLED panels fall into this category, especially considering they are the only panels that still use glass. 

On 11/09/2023 at 13:53, UltraMega said:

I'd be surprised if this was more than just an updated VR headset/hardware refresh. It's my understanding that Alyx was Valve's push to give legs to the VR market and it failed massively for them to the point that they dropped any other VR projects they had planned. Clearly Alyx is a great game, but it's just one game and it wasn't enough to bring VR into focus. 

 

However you feel about VR, it hasn't really found any good footing in the market still to this day. IMO Sony is the only company to achieve modest success with VR in terms of bringing it to the market in an effective way. VR is too segmented on PC and until that changes, I don't think it will ever get very far. 

Simulators are where VR really shines.  Condor 2 (glider simulator), is pretty damn realistic to flying an actual glider.  Condor 2 translates to real flight extremely well, to the point that I would say any potential glider pilot should spend time on the simulator.  My instructor likes to say "Airplanes make poor classrooms, and classrooms make poor airplanes."  Simulators are extremely nice because you can pause and talk though everything going on, while still getting the airplane experience.  The only thing missing is the g force effect and the resistance feel of of holding open the air brakes.  (Also that first flight has a hard realization that the plane is always falling and has no engine, first real flight is unnerving.)

On 27/09/2023 at 15:10, UltraMega said:

You guys remember lan centers? VR seems like it would be a great thing to have a modern lan center kind of thing for. VR might even sell a whole lot better if people had a way to try it before they bought it. I would pay $10 an hour or whatever to try VR in a lan center if there were any. 

My local mall had one, but their pricing was more in line with $50 for 30 minutes.  I'm a bit too frugal to justify that, but my personal hardware is such that I could easily add VR.  I've been waiting for valve to come out with a new headset.  The index has held it's value on the used market, and paying full price for 4 year old equipment computer equipment doesn't entice me.  The Oculus Rift S is fairly cheap in the used market, but I don't want to deal with facebook/meta.  When I last looked into VR, there were quite a few VR headsets on the market, but the actual implementation/support they get is questionable. 

After spending the evening reading reviews.  Gigabyte M32U is the leading choice.