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DudeAsInCool

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Posts posted by DudeAsInCool

  1. tXNOTEQaOa0-HD-1710613469.jpg

    Sometimes Jimmy Fallon joins the Roots, who are The Tonight Show‘s house band, for a song performed on classroom instruments with famous guests. In 2019, Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey teamed up with them for an idiosyncratic performance of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Last night, Fallon and the Roots linked up with original Ghostbusters Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson as well as singer Ray Parker Jr. for his classic “Ghostbusters.”

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  2. Brynn Osborn

    During the final day of music curated by German Music Export and Initiative Musik, the moderator made a joke that the day’s event was about expanding the notions of German music beyond known institutions like Kraftwerk or Berghain. By the end of the afternoon, that seemed like an understatement. The day party at Shangri-La was not only the longest of the events (with artists Meagre Martin, Willow Parlo, LIE NING, Orbit, and ÄTNA) but also the most musically diverse — with indie rock, country-folk, R&B and pop, dreamy electronica, and pure operatic dance-pop chaos. 

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  3. Scowl (Laura Harvey/Stereogum)

    Twenty-three bands, 14 hours — we did it! Stereogum took over Cheer Up Charlie’s in Austin all day and night on Friday, starting at noon and going all the way until 2AM. Along with our buds at AdHoc, Partisan Records, and Topshelf Records, we brought some of the best of what’s next to two stages for a non-stop day of music and fun. It was a beautiful day in Texas, despite some wind and the threat of rain, which thankfully held off.

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  4. Fike-Weezer-1710599595.png

    After announcing their Blue Album anniversary tour this week, Weezer played through their debut Friday night at LA’s 500-capacity Lodge Room. The intimate club show was opened by Dogstar, the recently reunited band featuring Keanu Reeves on bass, who played their first show with Weezer back in 1992. It also featured a special guest during Weezer’s set.

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  5. An illustration of robots sitting on a logical block diagram.

    Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

    It seems like AI large language models (LLMs) are everywhere these days due to the rise of ChatGPT. Now, a software developer named Ishan Anand has managed to cram a precursor to ChatGPT called GPT-2—originally released in 2019 after some trepidation from OpenAI—into a working Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It's freely available and is designed to educate people about how LLMs work.

    "By using a spreadsheet anyone (even non-developers) can explore and play directly with how a 'real' transformer works under the hood with minimal abstractions to get in the way," writes Anand on the official website for the sheet, which he calls "Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need." It's a nod to the 2017 research paper "Attention is All You Need" that first described the Transformer architecture that has been foundational to how LLMs work.

    Anand packed GPT-2 into an XLSB Microsoft Excel binary file format, and it requires the latest version of Excel to run (but won't work on the web version). It's completely local and doesn't do any API calls to cloud AI services.

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  6. Jason Kempin/Getty Images

    In 2018, the country star and American Idol judge Luke Bryan opened Luke’s 32 Bridge Food + Drink, a six-level bar, restaurant and live music venue on Nashville’s Broadway Street. The Tennessee Alcohol and Beverage Commission is now investigating the bar after 22-year-old University of Missouri student Riley Strain went missing last week. Strain hasn’t been seen since he was kicked out of Luke’s 32 Bridge on the evening of March 8, and Tennessee officials are reportedly probing the bar for potentially overserving Strain. Today, Bryan’s bar shared a statement, claiming that its employees only served Strain one alcoholic drink and two waters.

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  7. 431212151_18423038689032387_797985733810

    Canadian electronic duo Blue Hawaii have been teasing their Feeling Celebrated LP for a while, which will follow 2019’s Open Reduction Internal Fixation. Last year, they shared “Summer For The Loners” and “Boom.” Today, they’re back with what the band says is the LP’s first single. “Diamond Shovel” is a dance track that interpolates Soft Cell’s classic “Tainted Love.” Hear it below.

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  8. Google's safe browsing warning is not subtle.

    Enlarge / Google's safe browsing warning is not subtle. (credit: Google)

    Google Chrome's "Safe Browsing" feature—the thing that pops up a giant red screen when you try to visit a malicious website—is getting real-time updates for all users. Google announced the change on the Google Security Blog. Real-time protection naturally means sending URL data to some far-off server, but Google says it will use "privacy-preserving URL protection" so it won't get a list of your entire browsing history. (Not that Chrome doesn't already have features that log your history or track you.)

    Safe Browsing basically boils down to checking your current website against a list of known bad sites. Google's old implementation happened locally, which had the benefit of not sending your entire browsing history to Google, but that meant downloading the list of bad sites at 30- to 60-minute intervals. There are a few problems with local downloads. First, Google says the majority of bad sites exist for "less than 10 minutes," so a 30-minute update time isn't going to catch them. Second, the list of all bad websites on the entire Internet is going to be very large and constantly growing, and Google already says that "not all devices have the resources necessary to maintain this growing list."

    If you really want to shut down malicious sites, what you want is real-time checking against a remote server. There are a lot of bad ways you could do this. One way would be to just send every URL to the remote server, and you'd basically double Internet website traffic for all of Chrome's 5 billion users. To cut down on those server requests, Chrome is instead going to download a list of known good sites, and that will cover the vast majority of web traffic. Only the small, unheard-of sites will be subject to a server check, and even then, Chrome will keep a cache of your recent small site checks, so you'll only check against the server the first time.

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  9. The M1 MacBook Air returns as a Walmart budget laptop.

    Enlarge / The M1 MacBook Air returns as a Walmart budget laptop. (credit: Walmart)

    Apple no longer sells the M1 MacBook Air as of earlier this month, discontinuing it and offering the M2 version of the Air as its entry-level model instead. But it looks like the M1 Air may live on, at least for a while—US retailer Walmart made a point of announcing today that it would carry and sell the M1 Air in its online store and at “select” retail locations for a much-lowered price of $699.

    This is lower than the $999 that Apple was asking for the laptop just a few weeks ago, and it's lower than the $759 that the M1 Air goes for in Apple’s refurbished store. These prices are all for the base configuration of the M1 Air, with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage. Walmart offers all three color finishes for the M1 Air—silver, gold, and space gray—but doesn’t directly sell any versions with more RAM or storage.

    This isn’t the Air config we’d recommend to most enthusiasts—for them, an M3 Air or a refurbished M2 model with more RAM and storage come with enough benefits to be worth the extra cost. But it is a surprisingly low price for what remains a solid entry-level laptop, especially given that Walmart doesn’t offer any other Macs in its stores (other Macs on Walmart’s website are available from third-party sellers).

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  10. Intel’s 6.2 GHz Core i9-14900KS is a reminder of why the MHz wars ended

    Enlarge (credit: Intel)

    PC enthusiasts who have been around the block a couple of times might remember the stretch from the '90s into the early 2000s when ever-increasing clock speeds were Intel's primary metric for increasing processor performance. AMD participated, too—it managed to beat Intel to 1 GHz in what was considered a major coup at the time—but Intel's Pentium 4 processors specifically prioritized boosting clock speeds at the cost of instructions-per-clock.

    Today, the company is ever so briefly revisiting those old days with the $689 Core i9-14900KS, its newest flagship desktop processor. The i9-14900KS can hit speeds of 6.2 GHz out of the box, a small push past the last-generation i9-13900KS and the i9-14900K that topped out at 6.0 GHz. Like other recent high-end Intel desktop chips, it also features Intel's "Adaptive Boost Technology," which will allow the chip to increase its power consumption and performance until it hits 100° Celsius.

    This kind of clock speed boosting is both impressive and impractical. On the one hand, Intel has managed to push clock speeds even higher without changing its architecture or manufacturing process, a culmination of years of iteration across the 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation processor families. On the impractical side, the i9-14900KS can use a ridiculous amount of power to achieve marginally faster performance, reminding us of the laws of physics that helped shut down the megahertz wars in the first place.

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  11. Asus' latest flagship is the Zenfone 11 Ultra. For lovers of small phones, this represents one of the stalwart small-phone manufacturers abandoning you. I'm sorry. The Zenfone 10 was a unique little 5.9-inch powerhouse, but the Zenfone 11 is just another big Android phone with the same 6.78-inch display as everyone else. Big displays are expensive, so of course, the price is bigger, too: $899 instead of the $699 price of the smaller phone.

    The whole phone looks a lot more generic than last year. Instead of the two big camera circles of the Zenfone 10, the back now has a square camera block that looks like every other phone. The front screen is flat, the sides are a flat metal band, and the only real identifying features are a few decorative lines on the rear panel.

    That big 6.78-inch display is a 2400×1080 OLED. Normally, it runs at 120 Hz, but Asus says it's capable of 144 Hz "for gaming only." It has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, 12GB or 16GB of RAM, and 256GB or 512GB of UFS4.0 storage. The 5500 mAh battery is a bit bigger than most phones, so that's something to cling to. The phone has 65 W wired charging and 15 W wireless charging, IP68 dust and water-resistance, and an in-screen fingerprint reader. There's a 3.5 mm headphone jack on the bottom of the phone.

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