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Careful! The ATF Might Still Be After Your Pistol Brace
Careful! The ATF Might Still Be After Your Pistol Brace | thefirearmblog.com […]
Month: February 2025
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Increased Linux kernel timer frequency delivers big boost in AI workloads
At the weekend, a Google engineer proposed raising the default Linux kernel timer frequency from 250 Hz to 1,000 Hz. Linux-centric tech site Phoronix has quickly stepped up and assessed what the change might mean to users with a suite of A/B testing. Spoiler alert: The most notable benefits were seen in AI LLM acceleration. Elsewhere, the differences might be considered within the margin of error of system benchmarking. System power consumption changes seen in the comparison were also minimal.Let’s recap the patch statement shared by Google engineer Qais Yousef on Sunday before looking at some measured impacts. As mentioned, Yousef’s main thrust was to propose that the current Linux kernel default to a timer frequency of 1,000Hz. The reasoning behind the proposal was that Linux users would benefit from improved responsiveness and faster workload completion in general.Yousef also thought that moving to 1,000 Hz would banish the 250 Hz-related issues with “scheduler decisions such as imprecise time slices, delayed load balance, delayed stats updates, and other related complications,” reported Phoronix. Toward the end of his patch notes, the engineer openly pondered over system power consumption, assuming that “the faster TICK might still result in higher power.”Image […]
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RX 9070 XT leaked specs point to 4,096 shaders and 16GB VRAM — 3.1 GHz boost clocks and PCIe 5.0 support
We finally have more details on AMD’s soon-to-launch flagship RX 9070 XT, with a new leak alleging 4096 Stream Processors and 16GB of GDDR6 memory via HKEPC at X. The tipster’s shared GPU-Z screenshot corroborates previous rumors. Moreover, the leak includes a real-world benchmark of the RX 9070 XT; however, frame generation leaves little room for comparison. Thus, it’s best to approach this leak skeptically, as such images can be easily manipulated.AMD briefly went over RDNA 4 last month in Las Vegas, sharing not much beyond a handful of press slides. Nonetheless, we grabbed a few snippets of Navi 48, the GPU that powers AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 family. Eyeballing the die size gave us a figure of roughly 390mm2, slightly larger than GB203 on the RTX 5080. Later on, AMD confirmed that you should expect retail RDNA 4 availability by early March, with rumors of a dedicated launch event later this month.The screenshot depicts a C0 revision of the Navi 48 GPU, likely the RX 9070 XT, featuring 4,096 SPs (Streaming Processors), which equates to 64 Compute Units. Interestingly, GPU-Z mentions that the card is PCIe 5.0 compatible, similar to Nvidia’s RTX 50-series (Blackwell) GPUs, though AMD hasn’t officially confirmed this.Image […]
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NASA Taps Webb to Help Study 2032 Asteroid Threat
In all likelihood, asteroid 2024 YR4 will slip silently past the Earth. Based on the data we have so far, there’s an estimated chance of only 2.1% to 2.3% that it will collide with the planet on December 22nd, 2032. Under normal circumstances, if somebody told you there was a roughly 98% chance of something not happening, you probably wouldn’t give it a second thought. There’s certainly a case to be made that you should feel that way in regards to this particular event — frankly, it’s a lot more likely that some other terrible thing is going to happen to you in the next eight years than it is an asteroid is going to ruin your Christmas party.
That being said, when you consider the scale of the cosmos, a 2+% chance of getting hit is enough to raise some eyebrows. After all, it’s the highest likelihood of an asteroid impact that we’re currently aware of. It’s also troubling that the number has only gone up as further observations of 2024 YR4’s obit have been made; a few weeks ago, the impact probability was just 1%. Accordingly, NASA has recently announced they’ll be making time in the James Webb Space Telescope’s busy scientific schedule to observe the asteroid next month.
So keeping in mind that we’re still talking about an event that’s statistically unlikely to actually occur, let’s take a look at what we know about 2024 YR4, and how further study and analysis can give us a better idea of what kind of threat we’re dealing with.
An Unexpected Visitor
Officially, 2024 YR4 was discovered on December 27th, 2004 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), but by that time we had already dodged a potential impact. It turns out that the asteroid had come within 828,800 kilometers (515,000 miles), or around two times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, on December 25th without anyone realizing.
2024 YR4’s Orbit (Gray)
All of the observations of the asteroid made since its discovery have therefore been made while the object is moving away from the planet and back into deep space. This is a less than ideal situation when you consider that the asteroid is estimated to be between 40 to 90 meters (130 to 300 ft) in diameter.
With each passing day, it becomes more difficult to track and resolve 2024 YR4, and it’s currently estimated that observing it with ground-based telescopes will no longer be possible beyond April.
That is, until 2028. As you might have put together by now, 2024 YR4 is in such an orbit that it comes within close proximity of Earth every four years. If current orbital projections hold true, during the summer of 2028, the asteroid will be close enough again that we can observe it on the way towards us.
That will include a fly-by of Earth in early December before it swings back out of range. Hopefully by that time we’ll have collected enough data to know whether or not we’ll need to brace for impact the next time it swings by our neighborhood.
Deflect, or Evacuate?
As far as potentially dangerous Near Earth Objects (NEOs) go, 2024 YR4 is about as ideal as they get. While it did sneak up on us in 2024, now we know it’s on a fairly predictable schedule and there’s enough time that we could actually do something about it if the chance of impact gets high enough to take it more seriously. In 2028, we’ve even got a chance to deflect it as it zooms past Earth.
That would have been science fiction a few years ago, but after NASA’s successful DART demonstration mission, we now know it’s possible to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid simply by ramming a spacecraft into it at high velocity. The target asteroid in that test was much larger than 2024 YR4, with a diameter of 177 meters (581 ft). Yet the head-on impact of the 500 kg (1,100 lb) DART spacecraft was able to slow it down enough to make a noticeable change in its orbit.
Given how close 2024 YR4 would be passing by Earth, it’s not hard to imagine that a spacecraft with several times the mass of DART could be put on a collision course with the asteroid in 2028. Even if such an impact would not be enough to entirely prevent a collision with 2024 YR4, if applied carefully, it could certainly be sufficient to move the calculated point of impact.
Potential 2032 Impact Corridor
But would such a mission even be necessary? Current estimates put around half of the potential impact points for 2024 YR4 over the ocean. Even where the path of the asteroid does cross over land, most of it is sparsely populated. The biggest risks to human life would be in Nigeria and India, but the chances of a direct hit over either area is particularly remote, especially given the estimated blast radius of 50 km (31 miles).
Unless updated orbital data for 2024 YR4 indicates that it’s going to directly impact one of these densely populated areas, the most cost effective approach may be to simply move as many people out of the impact area as possible. While an evacuation of this scale would still be a monumental task, we’d at least have several years to implement the plan.
Bringing Out the Big Guns
While the chances are still excellent that 2024 YR4 will zip harmlessly past our Blue Marble in 2032, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that some big decisions might need to be made in the next few years. So how do we figure out how large of a threat this asteroid really is before it’s too late?
That’s where advanced space-bound observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) come in. While our instruments on Earth soon won’t be able to see 2024 YR4, the JWST will not only be able to keep its gaze on the asteroid for longer, but the infrared observatory is uniquely suited for capturing critical data about its size and shape.
Up to this point, the size of 2024 YR4 has been estimated based on its visible appearance, but that can be misleading. It could be that only part of the asteroid is reflective, which would give the impression that its smaller than it actually is. But the JWST doesn’t rely on visible light, and instead can use its IR instruments to detect the heat being given off by the asteroid’s rocky surface.
With definitive data about the asteroid’s size, shape, and rotation, astronomers will be able to better model how 2024 YR4 is moving through space. That’s going to be key to figuring out whether or not that 2.3% chance of impact is going to go up or down — and if it does go up, will help narrow down exactly where the asteroid is likely to hit. […]
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Data hoarders race to preserve data from rapidly disappearing U.S. federal websites
U.S. President Donald Trump has issued an executive order that has resulted in many government agencies taking down webpages and sites to comply. Because of this, data hoarders across the internet are racing to preserve them all before they’re taken offline, with MuckRock reporting that the End of Term Archive, which includes the Internet Archive, Stanford University, Common Crawl Foundation, University of North Texas, and Webrecorder, having already saved more than 500 terabytes from .gov domains.It’s reported that more than 8,000 government pages have been taken down, including the Department of Justice database detailing the criminal charges and convictions of January 6 rioters, LGBTQ+ rights and HIV-related information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool released by the Council on Environmental Quality, among others.Because of this, the r/DataHoarder Subreddit is rallying its over 832,000 members to help save the data in danger of being taken offline and deleted. u/didyousayboop shared on the Subreddit that the Archive Team, composed of volunteer digital archivists led by Jason Scott — the Free Range Archivist and Software Curator at the Internet Archive — is asking for help with its US Government project. This effort is focused on archiving all government content, especially data that is at risk of being removed because of the current administration’s efforts.We’ve also seen several threads in the r/DataHoarder asking for help backing up specific pages and websites. These include NOAA, USAID, the National Center for Education Statistics, the National HIV Curriculum, CDC Immunization Publications, and more. Someone was even asking for help downloading USAID’s videos on its YouTube channels, fearing that they would be next, after the USAID website went down.Aside from requests to backup data and volunteers acting on them, we’re also seeing others volunteering to host the archived site data for free on their domains.This is one of the biggest efforts we’ve seen in archiving, where a huge collection of storage geeks is putting out their best effort to download and preserve online historical data. If you want to join them and help save the information hosted on government servers, you can check out the instructions u/didyousayboop left on r/DataHoarder.Get Tom’s Hardware’s best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. […]
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TFB Behind the Gun #153: Spartan Hunting Thoughts w/ Rob Gearing
TFB Behind the Gun #153: Spartan Hunting Thoughts w/ Rob Gearing | thefirearmblog.com […]
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AMD’s beastly ‘Strix Halo’ Ryzen AI Max+ matches the RTX 4060 laptop in leaked 3DMark tests
A leaked benchmark of the Radeon 8060S, powering the graphics engine of AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 “Strix Halo” flagship is shown to match Nvidia’s dedicated RTX 4060 mobile GPU in a leaked 3DMark Time Spy result. A Chinese user at Baidu (via HXL), shared a couple of screenshots with what appears to be the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 flexing its muscles, beating AMD’s latest Radeon 890M iGPU by almost 3x. Since the tested sample is based on early engineering silicon, there is surely still some room for improvement. However, this leak should be viewed cautiously as the CPU OPN code and the integrated GPU don’t align.AMD extended its Ryzen AI 300 lineup with mainstream Krackan Point and flagship Strix Halo APUs last month at CES. Strix Halo, or Ryzen AI Max+ is a one-of-a-kind processor delivering (up to) 16 Zen 5 CPU cores bundled with 40 RDNA 3.5 Compute Units for workstation-grade laptops and high-end mini-PCs. Bear in mind, all this power is packaged on a single chip, featuring two CCDs and a massive I/O die beneath, bordered by (up to) 128GB of fast unified memory. For context, AMD’s marketing material positions the Radeon 8060S (the subject of this article) as an equivalent to Nvidia’s RTX 4070 laptop dGPU.It’s kind of pointless to compare laptops with different TGPs and thermal designs so it’s best not to read too much into these results. For the sake of comparison, we’ll look over the average Time Spy score of several relevant GPUs, obtained via 3DMark’s score explorer feature. Another screenshot shows that the laptop or mini-PC in question features 128GB (16GBx8) of LPDDR5-8532 memory, with 96GB allocated to the iGPU. Both screenshots inaccurately label the iGPU as the Radeon 8050S, however, the OPN code reveals it’s actually the Radeon 8060S with a 40 CU configuration. That’s probably due to the silicon’s premature nature.Swipe to scroll horizontallyGPUTime Spy ScoreTypevs Radeon 8060SRadeon 8060S (Add Salt)10106Integrated100.00%Radeon 890M3705Integrated36.66%Radeon 880M3568Integrated35.31%Radeon RX 7700S10218Dedicated101.11%RTX 4070 Laptop12517Dedicated123.86%RTX 4060 Laptop10549Dedicated104.38%In 3DMark’s Time Spy benchmark, the Radeon 8060S scores 10,106 points, almost matching Nvidia’s RTX 4060 laptop and AMD’s own RX 7700S. Against the Radeon 890M seen on Strix Point, the 8060S lands ahead by a gigantic 2.7x but that was kind of expected given the large difference in shader counts. Still, it loses to the RTX 4070 by almost 20% which is disappointing but you should wait for independent reviews to see how these Strix Halo APUs perform in real-world scenarios.You should see laptops and workstations equipped with these processors from partners across Q1 and Q2 this year, which is a rather vague timeframe. HP is readying the ZBook Ultra G1a workstation laptop and the HP Z2 Mini G1a mini-PC, while Asus has announced the ROG Flow Z13, with no definite release date provided for any system.Get Tom’s Hardware’s best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. […]
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Musk claims Grok 3 is ‘outperforming’ rivals, with full release imminent
Elon Musk has previously confirmed that Grok 3 will arrive soon. This AI model was trained at the Colossus Supercluster with its 100,000 GPUs. However, the billionaire narrowed down the timescale at the World Government Summit in Dubai, suggesting Grok 3 will be ready in two or three weeks, reports Reuters. Musk also claimed that Grok 3 will be more powerful than any AI out there, including the groundbreaking DeepSeek AI.“Grok 3 has very powerful reasoning capabilities, so in the tests that we’ve done thus far, Grok is outperforming anything that’s been released, that we’re aware of, so that’s a good sign,” said Musk during a video call where he was addressing the delegates at the international summit. He also said that it’s in the final stages of development and that it will be released in a week or two, reports the source.
LIVE: Elon Musk speaks at Dubai’s World Governments Summit – YouTube
Watch On
When Grok 3 finally arrives, we can compare it with other existing AI LLMs and see how effective Musk’s investment in the Colossus Supercluster is. After all, he had to beg for these GPUs while having dinner with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, so we’re interested if his begging and billions paid off.This is the second time that a member of the Trump administration has appeared at an international summit involving world leaders, with VP JD Vance proclaiming at the Paris AI Action Summit that the most powerful AI chips will be built in America. While it’s unclear if Musk appeared on screen as a representative of the White House or not, he is one of the heads of the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, which is tasked with streamlining the government and slashing federal spending.In related news, Musk has made a $100-billion offer for OpenAI as the ChatGPT maker is seeking to transition from being a non-profit to a for-profit organization. The latter is quick to reject this bid, though, especially as Musk has previously sued it to block the move. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that this move was Musk’s attempt to destabilize the company; the company also said that this offer clashes with Musk’s previous lawsuit.While Musk is leading a takeover attempt of OpenAI, his own AI company, xAI, is currently pushing for more funding. It has recently secured $6 billion, doubling its total capital raised and putting its valuation at $50 billion. This amount should be enough to secure 100,000 Nvidia GPUs, which is precisely what he plans for the Colossus Supercluster in Memphis.Get Tom’s Hardware’s best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. […]
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Presidents’ Day Sale: Get $60 off Beyerdynamic’s DT 1770 Pro MKI audiophile headphones — treat your ears to a new set of cans
With the lead-up to Presidents’ Day on Monday, the 17th of February 2025, many of our favorite retailers have been hosting sales or discounts on some of our favorite tech bits and pieces. Today’s deal is on a pair of headphones from Beyerdynamic that offer a balanced audiophile-grade soundscape perfect for a studio, hobbyist, or home user looking to up their sound game.Available directly from Beyerdynamic, you can save $60 off the usual list price of $429 and grab the Beyerdynamic DT 1770 Pro MKI for just $369. This takes them close to half the price of the recently updated MKII DT 1770 Pros. Yes, these are the last generation of the DT 1770 Pro, but not a great deal has changed with these terrific cans to easily justify an extra $300 for the MKII variant.Used everywhere, from producing music in professional studios to podcasts and content creation, the DT 1770 Pro is a well-engineered and durable product with plenty of long-established audio experience has gone into the design of the headphones. Using a well-built construction, the DT 1770 Pro uses closed-back ear cups for sound isolation. Housed in the cups are 45 mm dynamic Tesla neodymium drivers for powerful yet balanced audio reproduction.These comfortable headphones are sturdily constructed with a rugged headband made of spring steel and covered with soft padded leather. The headphones only weigh 388 grams in total (minus the cable). If any parts of the headphones should start to get worn – i.e., the memory foam earpads – Beyerdynamic offers spare parts for almost every aspect of these cans, so parts are easily replaceable for more longevity. […]
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Disaster Recovery Center in Richmond County Closing; Reopening at New Location
The Disaster Recovery Center (DRC) in Richmond County will close at its current location at 6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 14. It will reopen at 8 a.m., Tuesday, Feb. 18, and close at 5:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 28, at a new location.Richmond County DRC (current location)Hub for Community Innovation631 Chafee AvenueAugusta, GA 30904Richmond County DRC (new location)Diamond Lakes Branch Library101 Diamond Lakes WayHephzibah, GA 30815Hours: 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday; closed Saturday and Sunday.All other Disaster Recovery Centers are now closed permanently. However, survivors can meet with FEMA representatives at the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) Business Recovery Centers (BRCs) in Jeff Davis and Bulloch counties at these locations:Jeff Davis CountyJeff Davis County Recreation Department (beginning Feb. 13)83 Buford RdHazlehurst, GA 31539Hours: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday–Friday; 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday; closed Sunday.Bulloch County Statesboro-Bulloch County Library (beginning Feb. 18)124 S. Main St.Statesboro, GA 30458Hours: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday–Friday; 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday; closed Sunday.The Feb. 7 deadline for Georgia survivors of Tropical Storm Debby (Aug. 4–20) and Hurricane Helene (Sept. 24–Oct. 30) in the 63 counties designated for Individual Assistance to apply for FEMA disaster assistance has now passed. To check on the status of your application, go to DisasterAssistance.gov. You may also use the FEMA App for mobile devices or call toll-free 800-621-3362. The telephone line is open every day and help is available in most languages. You can also contact the Georgia Call Center at 678-547-2861 for assistance with your application or visit an SBA Business Recovery Center or Business Resource Assessment Center. […]