Technology Random Access Thoughts

[Rothman]

I've long wondered about these really strict and lawyeristic interpretations of the sabbath.  Isn't the idea of the sabbath supposed to be to have a day of the week where you rest?  All this rules lawyering and getting rid of modern conveniences because they're "work" strikes me as a lot less restful than just having a day off while not observing the sabbath.  By eliminating work according to religious law, they're creating work by any secular definition of the word.

I don't know a whole lot about Judaism (never lived anywhere with a lot of Jews), but from what I understand, rules-lawyering religious laws is a time-honored tradition that a lot of practitioners find extremely fun.

Given the number of times I've been in some sort of meeting where some idiot asks a question that is guaranteed to generate more busywork and my reaction was, "Why would you even ask that?" I'd imagine that if I were on some sort of Judaic council back in the day and someone asked "But what about light switches on the Sabbath?" that my reaction would have been similar.  Shoot, I have sort of had that reaction during stupid discussions within my own religion, come to think of it.

[kphoger]

I'm not Jewish, but my outsider's understanding is that there's a much finer line these days, compared to several thousand years ago, between using a tool to do work and not using a tool to do work.

It's pretty easy to understand that lighting a fire could be considered 'work'—but then what about simply lighting the pilot light on a stovetop burner?  Does that count as lighting a fire?  What if you have an electric stove instead of a gas stove?

Same thing with elevators.  It's easy to understand how manually operating a hoist by winch and pulleys could be considered "work"—but what if the elevator mechanism is driven by an animal instead, or by water?  What if it's operated by someone else, but you have a physically pull a rope to call him?  What if it's electrically powered with no other human operator?  Is your pressing buttons equivalent to operating machinery?

It's easy to see how, as technology has progressed since the sixth Century BC (the time of the Babylonian exile, which is when such detailed interpretation of the Mosaic Law began to take off, as the Jewish religion was no longer centered around a temple and the associated sacrificial system), applying ancient religious ethical law has become a more and more difficult thing to do.  If the point of the Sabbath laws is to have a mandatory day off from working, that still leaves open the question of what counts as working—and that question becomes thornier and thornier, the further and further removed our technology gets from that of the ancient Middle East.

[elsmere241]

Given the number of times I've been in some sort of meeting where some idiot asks a question that is guaranteed to generate more busywork and my reaction was, "Why would you even ask that?" I'd imagine that if I were on some sort of Judaic council back in the day and someone asked "But what about light switches on the Sabbath?" that my reaction would have been similar.  Shoot, I have sort of had that reaction during stupid discussions within my own religion, come to think of it.

And don't get me started on Fast Sunday.

Yes, some interpretations of the Sabbath (not just Jewish or even Latter-day Saint) have left me a little curious too.  I do remember when the series Brooklyn Bridge was on TV starting in 1991.  Initially it was aired on Friday night.  Many Jews complained that they couldn't watch the show because of the Sabbath.  CBS moved it, but it wound up bouncing around the schedule until it was cancelled a couple of years later.

[Rothman]

Given the number of times I've been in some sort of meeting where some idiot asks a question that is guaranteed to generate more busywork and my reaction was, "Why would you even ask that?" I'd imagine that if I were on some sort of Judaic council back in the day and someone asked "But what about light switches on the Sabbath?" that my reaction would have been similar.  Shoot, I have sort of had that reaction during stupid discussions within my own religion, come to think of it.

And don't get me started on Fast Sunday.

You fast for 24 hours or no Celestial Kingdom for you!

[TheCatalyst31]

I've long wondered about these really strict and lawyeristic interpretations of the sabbath.  Isn't the idea of the sabbath supposed to be to have a day of the week where you rest?  All this rules lawyering and getting rid of modern conveniences because they're "work" strikes me as a lot less restful than just having a day off while not observing the sabbath.  By eliminating work according to religious law, they're creating work by any secular definition of the word.

I don't know a whole lot about Judaism (never lived anywhere with a lot of Jews), but from what I understand, rules-lawyering religious laws is a time-honored tradition that a lot of practitioners find extremely fun.

My partner is Jewish (though she doesn't practice the faith), and I can confirm this. I grew up Catholic, and they have their own history of rules-lawyering, so we occasionally compare notes.

[ZLoth]

It's been about a year since I rebuilt my TrueNAS server and got myself a decent non-gaming laptop. I'm still boggled by the price increase for the memory. My laptop had 16GB of memory and an open slot, so I added a second 16GB chip for $44+tax. That same memory chip now goes for $241. As for that TrueNAS memory, I got 2×32GB ECC Server memory for $288. That same memory now goes for $1,639.

Thank goodness I have my RAM needs covered. My primary desktop, TrueNAS server, and my mother's desktop all have 64GB of memory, while my personal laptop and my secondary desktop have 32GB of memory. And, I have no upgrades planned for quite a while.

[Scott5114]

It's been about a year since I rebuilt my TrueNAS server and got myself a decent non-gaming laptop. I'm still boggled by the price increase for the memory. My laptop had 16GB of memory and an open slot, so I added a second 16GB chip for $44+tax. That same memory chip now goes for $241. As for that TrueNAS memory, I got 2×32GB ECC Server memory for $288. That same memory now goes for $1,639.

Thank goodness I have my RAM needs covered. My primary desktop, TrueNAS server, and my mother's desktop all have 64GB of memory, while my personal laptop and my secondary desktop have 32GB of memory. And, I have no upgrades planned for quite a while.

Three companies — Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron — have diverted meaningful amounts of manufacturing supply away from making the RAM you find in laptops and smartphones toward making the high-bandwidth memory that powers GPUs, jacking up the price of consumer electronics in the process.

To explain: An AI data center is full of servers, which are in turn full of (for the most part) NVIDIA GPUs. Each NVIDIA GB300 has two B300 GPUs, the two of which have 576GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM, or HBM3e to be specific), and a CPU, which has 480GB of lower-power LPDDR5X RAM (the kind usually used in cellphones and other mobile devices). These systems tend to be sold in an NVL72 rack with 18 compute trays, bringing us to 36 GB300s, for a total of 20.7 terabytes of HBM and 17 terabytes of LPDDR5X RAM, and that's before you get to the RAM associated with the high-speed networking gear and other associated components.

Because HBM takes up more space on a wafer — the slice of semiconductor material that is etched using photolithography (read: molten tin) and then cut into separate dies (individual chips) — and generally has much higher margins (the actual product its more expensive to make, but thanks to the triopoly of Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, they can charge whatever they like, predominantly to NVIDIA), memory manufacturers are dedicating more space on their manufacturing lines to it than to regular consumer RAM, which allows (thanks to said triopoly) said manufacturers to charge effectively whatever they want for consumer RAM.

To simplify, the AI GPUs in AI data centers require hundreds of gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory, the CPUs attached to them require the same RAM as your smartphone, and the companies making all of this RAM are making huge profits by jacking up the price because of supply chain constraints that they themselves have created. That's why Micron had 84.9% gross margins in the last quarter. The RAM triopoly controls more than 90% of the world's memory, and can set prices at whatever rate they want.

These three companies were all fined over $100 million by the Department of justice back in 2002 for price-fixing, with Micron avoiding the fine by turning in its co-conspirators. Five years later in 2007, a Supreme Court judgment and resulting precedent (Bell Atlantic V. Twombly) drastically raised the bar for not simply winning an antitrust case, but even getting one to trial: the Twombly Test/Rule was designed to raise the bar to civil legislation, so that defendants aren't forced to comply with discovery in frivolous cases, which can be incredibly expensive.

While this seems reasonable at first glance, it makes it significantly harder to litigate any kind of antitrust action, because the market signals — whether they be pricing, or difficulties in new competitors bringing their products to market — tend to be the starting pistol on any action. The damning evidence — loose-lipped executives talking about their nefarious plans — tends to be something that shows up once the trial has progressed to the discovery stages.

This precedent would kill a 2019 class action case against SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron that alleged they had colluded to tighten the supply of the world's DRAM, because despite statements from company representatives made at public events, their collective participation in certain industry groups, and observable pricing trends, the precedent set by Twombly meant that the plaintiffs required more than circumstantial evidence to bring something to trial.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that while I am not accusing Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron of price-fixing, a recent lawsuit is accusing them of exactly that. The suit claims the alleged anti-consumer behavior started in 2022, when the companies began shifting production from SDRAM to HBM — something that, at that point, they made "no economic sense" except as a means to hike prices.

"This plan has thus far succeeded, as consumer purchasers of conventional DRAM and devices incorporating it have paid supracompetitive prices and have otherwise suffered the impacts of a distorted market crippled by the behavior of DRAM oligopolists," the filing states. 

[ZLoth]

And, your point being.....

As far as I'm concerned, it's either "make do with what you have" or "BOHICA and pay through the nose". You know that, I know that. It goes beyond the computers and hitting consumer electronics. While I had no crystal ball, at least I'm able to ride this situation out for quite a while.

[Scott5114]

And, your point being.....

The RAM manufacturers are fucking crooks.

[ZLoth]

And, your point being.....

The RAM manufacturers are fucking crooks.

The appropriate response is to not play their game of highway robbery.

[Scott5114]

And, your point being.....

The RAM manufacturers are fucking crooks.

The appropriate response is to not play their game of highway robbery.

I think we should jail their executives, personally.

[kphoger]

I think we should jail their executives, personally.

Are there impersonal ways of jailing people?  Locking someone up seems pretty personal.

[Scott5114]

I think we should jail their executives, personally.

Are there impersonal ways of jailing people?  Locking someone up seems pretty personal.

I mean, I guess you could jail everyone who works for the company, whether they did anything wrong or not. That'd be pretty impersonal.

[vdeane]

I got an email yesterday from my web host saying that my website's database is being upgraded from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 11.8.  I'm a little concerned that this might break the PHP for the photo gallery and the Perl scripts I use for adding images.

[ZLoth]

From The Guardian:

Hello from the outside: heat domes impeding radio and other signals in US midwest
Higher temperatures can cause radio, TV and microwave signals to travel hundreds of miles farther, upsetting communications

It was 3am in north-east Indiana's Huntington county when the outdoor emergency alarm went off on 1 July.

The only issue? There wasn't a storm, tornado or any other emergency weather event forecast or present anywhere for hundreds of miles.

"It happened right in the middle of the night. I woke up at around 5am and saw on our Facebook page multiple comments [of people writing], 'Hey, our siren went off last night.' I thought, 'That's weird,'" recalled Thomas Fuller, Huntington county's deputy director for emergency management.

"When there's an activation, it's usually by the Huntington county dispatch center. But this siren activated all by itself due to the radio signals all the way from Iowa."

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Sigh.... DXing is nothing new. I remember picking up a Las Vegas station who was the Dodgers affiliate in the early evenings in my car, and the signal was mostly clear in Sacramento. This was 10+ years ago.

[ZLoth]

From Make Use Of:

Why US phones have smaller batteries than the rest of the world — and it's not the one you think

One of the most interesting factoids about smartphones is that battery capacity varies significantly depending on where you are based. You may not be aware, but smartphones in the US are often limited to around 5,000 mAh (although this is slowly changing)and are usually made with lithium-ion rather than the newer, denser Silicon-carbon technology.

If you look beyond the US market, the picture changes dramatically across all price points. The biggest battery on a commercial phone? The Realme P4 Power, which is sold in India, has a 10,001 mAh battery. Yes, really! I've tried it, and this reminds me of the Nokia Communicator of old, i.e., it's unbeatable.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

[vdeane]

From The Guardian:

Hello from the outside: heat domes impeding radio and other signals in US midwest
Higher temperatures can cause radio, TV and microwave signals to travel hundreds of miles farther, upsetting communications

It was 3am in north-east Indiana's Huntington county when the outdoor emergency alarm went off on 1 July.

The only issue? There wasn't a storm, tornado or any other emergency weather event forecast or present anywhere for hundreds of miles.

"It happened right in the middle of the night. I woke up at around 5am and saw on our Facebook page multiple comments [of people writing], 'Hey, our siren went off last night.' I thought, 'That's weird,'" recalled Thomas Fuller, Huntington county's deputy director for emergency management.

"When there's an activation, it's usually by the Huntington county dispatch center. But this siren activated all by itself due to the radio signals all the way from Iowa."

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Sigh.... DXing is nothing new. I remember picking up a Las Vegas station who was the Dodgers affiliate in the early evenings in my car, and the signal was mostly clear in Sacramento. This was 10+ years ago.

Huh.  I have noticed that my radio reception gets worse in the summer, but I had assumed that was due to reception radius shrinking, not expanding!

[ZLoth]

Updated post below.

[Scott5114]

Is anyone else having the YouTube app on Android randomly kick them out of full-screen mode mid-video? I'm not sure if it's glitching or if it's doing it on purpose to show me the ads in the sidebar. I've noticed the sidebar ad is different every time...

The fact that I can't tell is causing a voice in my head to say "Maybe you shouldn't be using YouTube anymore," but I've been watching a guy's videos on there for like 10 years and it's not his fault YouTube sucks. (He's actually quite kind and sets up the ad breaks on his videos to be at the very beginning and the very end so they don't interfere with the video content.)

[ZLoth]

Is anyone else having the YouTube app on Android randomly kick them out of full-screen mode mid-video? I'm not sure if it's glitching or if it's doing it on purpose to show me the ads in the sidebar. I've noticed the sidebar ad is different every time...

No, but my Android on my Pixel phone recently started playing a short whenever I started the app. I just cleared the cache and data from YouTube, so we'll see what happens.

[TheCatalyst31]

The fact that I can't tell is causing a voice in my head to say "Maybe you shouldn't be using YouTube anymore," but I've been watching a guy's videos on there for like 10 years and it's not his fault YouTube sucks. (He's actually quite kind and sets up the ad breaks on his videos to be at the very beginning and the very end so they don't interfere with the video content.)

Unfortunately, there isn't a very good alternative to YouTube unless you want to give up on watching small creators' videos entirely. There are some YouTubers I follow who have a place you can pay to watch their content without the ads (Nebula, Patreon, etc.), but they're far from the majority.

[ZLoth]

From BGR:

Android Auto And Apple CarPlay Are Finally Coming To Boats In 2026

For quite some time, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay have been an excellent companion for road trips, helping everyone navigate busy highways and byways, but what you couldn't do, at least until now that is, is use the platform to navigate the high seas. Thanks to a partnership between boat makers Crest Marine and its subsidiary Balise Pontoons and Savvy Navy, a leading marine navigation app, factory-based water navigation systems will be included with select vessels. More specifically, those water navigation systems will also be equipped with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, an industry first.

Read More: https://www.bgr.com/2235730/android-auto-apple-carplay-coming-to-boats/

FULL ARTICLE HERE

[ZLoth]

When I purchase a new car, one of the options that I want to have is Android Auto. This will allow you to use your car screen as a bigger screen for navigation and for controlling the music. However, with my current employment situation and the fact that I have stated multiple times that I will not purchase a new car until my mortgage is paid off, which is 2034. Having two perfectly working, if at least 10 years old, vehicles which are both paid off helps add to that position.

Having said that, one of the things that I've tried out a week or so ago is OpenHeadunit. If you have an older and unused Android phone or tablet, you can spend $4 to turn that Android device into a Android Auto screen. I tried it with an Amazon tablet, and it works OK, but I was only able to get it hooked up via USB cable, not WiFi. That's a problem if I went on a long trip. WiFi didn't connect, but I blame it more on user error and partially on that the Amazon Echo tablet that I was using is a bit old.. Also, the tablet was a bit too large to fit into my phone holder in my vehicle. It was at least worth a try.

After my failed attempt with reutilizing an Android tablet as a headunit, I turned to Amazon for a cheap headunit screen, and found one for $45+Tax. This one worked much better than the OpenHeadUnit. Whilke it took a few minutes to set up with my phone, I was able to configure it with my phone and then set it up so that the headunit connects via my phone's WiFi while the Bluetooth connects to myvehicle's audio with Bluetooth. (The unit also has Aux output as well as a FM Transmitter if your vehicle lacks Bluetooth). It's nice to have a map view while driving while a mini-player is playing my audiobooks, and it certainly beats a kit where you are taking apart your car's dashboard... no thank you!

[kurumi]

Long ago: "a software update! Cool, I can't wait to try out those new features!"

Now: "a software update. Wonder what will break, or get moved for no reason, or go behind a paywall, or start requiring invasive tracking, or..."

[kphoger]

Now: "a software update. Wonder what will break, or get moved for no reason, or go behind a paywall, or start requiring invasive tracking, or...

...can I just opt out of all future updates?"