Aaron44126

Twitter now blocking all links to any content on Mastodon? That could be seen as anti-competitive. https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23512113/twitter-blocking-mastodon-links-elon-musk-elonjet Apparently the journalists that have been blocked (see above) are just suspended for seven days.

BIOS update 1.8.0. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=JG0V9 - Firmware updates to address security vulnerabilities including (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures - CVE) such as CVE-2022-3365 and CVE-2022-30339. ————— I am also seeing WHEA events. They seem to come in "bursts". The most recent I have is a batch of 15 which occurred within 20 seconds of each other, about two days ago. They don't occur often. I see a few bursts on December 13 and 14, but then I have a break all of the way back to December 2. (My system is powered on 24/7.) I haven't noticed any actual problems timed with these events, so I'm just going to ignore it.

BIOS update 1.18.0. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=XHMM6 - Firmware updates to address security vulnerabilities including (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures - CVE) such as CVE-2022-3365. [Edit] Updated, no issues so far.

On past systems, performance was slightly reduced when using dock power only. You can avoid it by attaching a 240W power adapter directly to the system in addition to the dock cable.

Musk bans live location sharing, says he’ll sue creator of plane-tracking bot https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/musk-bans-live-location-sharing-says-hell-sue-creator-of-plane-tracking-bot/ But more critically... Elon Musk starts banning critical journalists from Twitter https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23512004/elon-musk-starts-banning-critical-journalists-from-twitter Freedom of speech, right? [Edit] Hitting more mainstream, non-tech media as well. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1143291081/twitter-suspends-journalists-elon-musk-jet

I feel like 4000/5000 cards have had the same power limit (& roughly the same performance) going all of the way back to the Pascal cards in the Precision 7X30 line (2018), which I think was the first time that the 4000-level card hit 100W. Since then, there's been no reason to get the 5000 card, really, unless you need other capabilities that it provides. (Until this generation, they had different vRAM amounts at least...) Benchmarks have shown the performance difference otherwise to be pretty consistently less than 5% off. This is reflective of the "low" power limits that NVIDIA is putting on these power-hungry desktop GPU dies that they are shoving into laptops. Because they have the same power limit, they have the same performance, with the higher-end GPUs getting a very slight nudge up because they are able to run more cores at a lower clock speed (a little bit more efficient). Actually, I sort of suspect that the A3000 GPU would be competitive against the top-end cards as well, at least if you are not pushing vRAM above 12GB. NVIDIA says it supports up to 130W TGP so it should have the same power limit as the A4500 and A5500 in these systems (or at least in the Precision 7670). I'd love to see some benchmarks on this. Regarding undervolting, previously the pro/Quadro/RTX line has been locked down, but starting last year with the pro Ampere line, NVIDIA seems to be allowing undervolting in the pro GPUs using tools like MSI Afterburner. (I have not tried it yet, but other users did report being able to undervolt the GPUs in the Precision 7X60.)

Elon Musk offloads about $3.6 billion in Tesla stock. (Twice so far this year, he has said that he is done selling Tesla stock.) Up to around $23 billion since the Twitter purchase stuff started. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/12/elon-musk-offloads-another-3-6-billion-of-tesla-stock/

With 3080Ti, I got 399. I think the GPU power limit is going to be the main limiting factor in a test like this, if you're just comparing various Ampere GPUs... You'd definitely want a 17" system for best performance, but if you want to push the GPU power limit any higher than what you get in the 7770, you'd basically need a gaming-focused laptop 😕.

Twitter invents a new policy to explain the disappearance of @ElonJet (which is now unsuspended, though the operator’s main account is now suspended). https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/14/23509817/twitter-elonjets-ban-creator-jack-sweeney-links-trackers

It seems like U.S. authorities spent a few weeks gathering evidence and preparing the list of charges, and waited until they had a pretty overwhelming list before filing everything and asking authorities in the Bahamas to do the arrest (which they appear to have carried out without delay). What they have against him right now seems insurmountable. This guy is going to jail. Listened to this piece yesterday while running errands in the evening; the second half dives into his parents' connection to the whole thing a bit.

Elon Musk is apparently interested in not paying out the three months' severance that he promised employees facing termination. (Plus, issues just managing his legal team.) https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/musk-brings-spacex-lawyers-to-twitter-as-layoff-lawsuits-mount-report-says/

About the same as mine then. I wonder why the fan speed is so restricted... (I guess they are a bit larger than the older fans.)

Have you paid attention to the max fan RPM speed that you have observed? (Dell Fan Management can report the fan speed.) Mine seems to top out at around 3500 RPM, whereas in older Precision systems I have regularly observed mid/upper 4000's. I'm wondering if the other fan models are different.

Ha. Twitter account "@ElonJet" was taken down. This account tweeted updates about the location of Elon Musk's private plane (...I assume using publicly available flight tracking data?). https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/14/23508898/elonjet-twitter-ban-elon-musk-jet-tracker There was already some drama over this account... Before taking over Twitter, Elon Musk (supposedly) contacted the account operator and offered to pay to have the account taken down (paywall). After taking over Twitter, Elon Musk said that he will not ban the @ElonJet account, because, free speech. The account operator noticed that the account's visibility had been reduced, posted about that and somehow obtained an (alleged) internal screenshot of someone in Twitter's internal Slack asking for its visibility to be restricted. Perhaps in reaction to those posts, the account's visibility was restored to normal. (I saw an article about this a couple of days ago but can't find it right this moment...) ...And now, the account is dead. [Edit] Another article. Apparently the same guy has plane tracker accounts set up for other planes (Bill Gates, Russian oligarchs, Air Force One, ...) and those are still working. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/twitter-suspends-elonjet-plane-tracking-bot-after-musk-pledged-to-leave-it-up/

Normally using Ethernet. Ran on Wi-Fi overnight and woke up to find my system had crashed from a BSOD (Netwtw10.sys ... Wi-Fi driver). I have the current Wi-Fi driver installed, 22.170.2.1. Great...? This system has been normally quite solid for me, stability-wise. (I'll just go run an Ethernet cable to where I was sitting yesterday and do a more in-depth stability test after another Intel Wi-Fi driver is posted...) Also, I inspected the fans after about four months of use. Very dirty. Regular cleaning required.

The many lies of Sam Bankman-Fried https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/13/23507361/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-alameda-cftc-complaint-lies (Basically summing up the charges) The guy clearly got himself in a hole… and then kept digging it deeper 😕 [Edit] Denied bail, extradition hearing Feb 8. https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/13/23508217/sbf-sam-bankman-fried-ftx-bail-john-ray-congress-hearing

Twitter's "Trust and Safety Council" (established in 2016) has been disbanded. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/twitter-ditches-trust-and-safety-council-as-musk-tweets-fuel-harassment/

Didn't realize that we were looking at new MXM cards that don't support eDP at all. Hmm. Guessing these weren't really designed for laptops 😕

NPR picked it up pretty promptly yesterday. (Heard radio coverage on the situation through them this morning as well.) https://www.npr.org/2022/12/12/1142361088/bankman-fried-ceo-ftx-crypto-exchange-arrested-bahamas-charges-sdny I don't follow any sort of cable news, but I can actually see it on the front page at edition.cnn.com (and regular cnn.com as well). https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/13/business/sam-bankman-fried-charges/index.html

Apparently, Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested today. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/12/12/ftx-founder-sam-bankman-fried-arrested-bahamas-says/ https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23506483/sam-bankman-fried-arrest-us-extradition-ftx-crypto

This doesn’t make sense… eDP is still the standard used in modern/current laptops; all newer mobile GPUs support it. …That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was something about the eDP implementation in Precision M4800/M6800 that they don’t like.

Oh… Twitter Blue is back for real. ($8/mo if you sign up via web, not $7 like I posted earlier.) https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23506335/twitter-blue-verified-checkmarks-return-impersonation

Leaked email shows Musk threatened to sue Twitter employees who leak to media https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/leaked-email-shows-musk-threatened-to-sue-twitter-employees-who-leak-to-media/ (...as Musk himself leaks emails and documents from the previous management) Also a bit at the bottom there about the conservative response to the "Twitter files" posted by Musk; once actually looking into the details, there isn't really anything there that was not already general knowledge... Definitely not a "smoking gun". Also this one about Elon Musk's appearance on a Dave Chappelle show which has drawn some negative reactions. A video from the show was uploaded to Twitter, went viral, and then the account that posted it disappeared... (Talk about censorship?) https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23505354/elon-musk-dave-chappelle-booed-san-francisco-twitter ——— I mostly agree with @Etern4l's perspective on the social media echo chambers. Though I don't think that the end goal of social media companies is necessarily to divide users into opposing camps; that's merely a side-effect of their actual end goal, which is simply to maximize revenue. The "algorithm" is basically tuned to feed you whatever will keep you scrolling (...maximizing their ability to serve ad impressions, and thus derive a profit). Same thing goes for YouTube's "recommended next video" suggestions and so forth. They just want to keep you engaged on the platform for as long as possible. Eyeballs are money. End users are the product. (This is why I actively avoid any use of social media whenever possible. I think that this is a gross business model.) ...So, it follows that if you engage with left-wing content, you will start to see nothing but left-wing content. If you engage with right-wing content, you will start to see nothing but right-wing content. Their ability to track user behavior is highly sophisticated and refined at this point. You don't necessarily even have to click on something to "engage" with it; they pay attention even to how long you leave it up on the screen before scrolling past. (There is also tracking code that ends up many sites that results in data about what pages you look at making its way back to Facebook, Google, Amazon, or other advertising/tracking entities. They can tell what you're interested in based on sites that you visit, in many cases.) It follows that social media platforms are not a reliable source of "news" or "truth". This, of course, leads to echo chambers and extreme ideology becoming more entrenched, does not help foster reasonable discourse between people of differing opinions (everyone is so sure that they are right), and is causing all manner of societal issues today. The notion that the those people on "the other side" have an evil, secret hidden agenda is unrealistic. If this were true, it would be reasonably easy to turn up some hard facts beyond suppositions — for instance, leaked communications or internal documents confirming as much. No one could keep such a supposedly well-orchestrated evil plan so secret, especially with hundreds or thousands of individuals involved. (I know there are smaller scale unsavory/corruption leaks from time to time. These occur on both sides. I'm talking about the supposed-big picture plan.) And I want to be clear that in this paragraph, I am not trying to "defend" social media companies (as I rather despise them). But, as far as the law/constitution goes... "Freedom of speech" is something that people like to overextend. It sounds like it means that anyone should be able to say whatever they want on any platform or venue. But, in actuality, the first amendment simply puts limits on the government's ability to limit people's speech. It doesn't put limits on business' ability to do so. In fact, in recent years some state legislatures have tried to enact laws dictating how moderation on social media platforms should work, and courts have found these to be unconstitutional freedom of speech violations. Florida's law is largely blocked from taking effect by an appeals court while legal proceedings play out because it likely violates the first amendment (page 4), and the one from Texas is in a similar situation but the block came from the conservative-leaning Supreme Court. So, like it or not, it appears for now that social media companies have final say over what content is allowed or not (other than illegal content, for instance that espouses violence or human trafficking). ...And while the Texas and Florida laws were an effort to force social media companies to loosen up moderation, California and New York have introduced laws to make social media moderation more strict; these are rather new and it is not yet clear how they will shake out. ...And that's about as far as I care to venture into the "political" space. I won't follow up any further and will stick to posting interesting "what the heck" Twitter headlines that I run across. 🙂

Alright. I use Open Hardware Monitor for reading the CPU temperature, but the GPU temperature uses NVAPI directly, if you have an NVIDIA GPU. (Actually, I'm using a fork called Libre Hardware Monitor.) They would need to fix this and then I could incorporate a newer version of their library. Try this new dev build. https://1drv.ms/u/s!AsIwJHFk4EFdqNc2I45BxBqHhwaKIA Needs .NET 6 if you do not have it -- https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/6.0 (grab the "desktop runtime"). Before launching it, go to regedit, navigate to HKCU\SOFTWARE\Dell Fan Management, add a "DWORD" value named "DisableCpuTemperatures" and set it to 1. That will disable CPU temperature reading in Dell Fan Management and hopefully work around this stutter. ("Consistency mode" won't work properly with this setup because it needs to be able to see the CPU core temperatures.) It could be a Windows 11 issue? I have done very little testing on Windows 11. I'm not running it on any systems right now.

Very strange. I am also showing it unavailable on the U.S. site. Maybe it will come back. Or maybe sales have been slow enough that they decided to discontinue it early? You can always get an XPS 17 which is essentially the same thing, aside from the lack of a pro GPU.