• Mark Muppetly, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, continues his spiraling descent into psychosis: WordPress.org just belongs to me.  (The Verge)
  
  WordPress.org is not non-profit organisation managing the open-source WordPress code.

  "I happily provide WordPress.org services to literally every other host," Mullenweg says. There is "no requirement to give back. WordPress will be open-source forever and ever, and so there will never be any legal requirement to give back." But WordPress does still "request" that companies contribute something. "It's better for WordPress if they give back."

  WP Engine's lawyers are reportedly looking at replacing their Porsches with Ferraris.
  
  
  
• 159 Automattic employees (the commercial side of WordPress) have taken the hint and the available severance offer and walked out.  (The Register)
  
  They are not going down with the ship.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Melk Murgatroyd decided to join in a Hacker News thread on the WP Engine suit and...  Potentially libel the party suing him.  (Hacker News)
  
  This seems unwise.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Having crashed the stock price by 90% through years of abject mismanagement, the Guillemot family and Tencent are looking to buy Ubisoft.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yves Guillemot is CEO of Ubisoft and behind the decisions that have ruined the company.
  
  Sounds like an amazing plan:
  
  1. Destroy your own company.
  2. Stock price crashes.
  3. Buy it for pennies on the dollar.
  4. Spend years fighting shareholder lawsuits.
  5. Price continues to decline.
  6. Lose everything.
  
  
  
• Civilization VII recommends 32GB of RAM, a 16 core CPU, and an RTX 4070 to play at 4K resolution.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Civ VI recommended 8GB of RAM.
  
  
  
• After getting smacked down by the courts last year, the SEC is going after the Ripple blockchain yet again.  (CNBC)
  
  It's the usual thing: The SEC says that everything and anything is a security without ever issuing any written regulations.
  
  They just show up out of the blue with a lawsuit, and if you win, they just do it again the next year.
  
  
  
• The Pilet 5 is a big clunky PDA that you can't buy.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's kind of cool in an industrial retro way.  It's a case, screen, keyboard, and battery that fits a Raspberry Pi 5.  
  
  According to the developer the hardware includes a laser pointer that "has the power to destroy planets, just like the death star" though this feature is not confirmed by the official specs.
  
  
  
• TSMC's 2nm node - called, reasonably enough, N2, is 25% more efficient than the current N3E process.  (Notebook Check)
  
  But also twice as expensive per wafer as the mainstream N5 and N4 processes.
  
  Expect leading-edge devices to cost more when N2 chips start shipping next year.
  
  
  
• As expected, the Ars Technica commentariat is shrieking with rage that a judge has chosen to uphold the Constitution with an injunction against California's ban on inconvenient satire and the site itself has pinned the blame on Emmanuel Goldmusk.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Plus ca change, plus la orange.
  
  
  
• Ars also offered its own take on the WordPress debacle that is so hilariously one-sided that its own commenters are roasting the site.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Good.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 06 2024 01:08 AM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 06 2024 01:09 AM (pnaK4)

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• A federal judge has issued a temporary injunction blocking California's new law against "AI deepfakes" noting that the law is overbroad and subjective.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The judge is, as the kids would say, based.

  While a well-founded fear of a digitally manipulated media landscape may be justified, this fear does not give legislators unbridled license to bulldoze over the longstanding tradition of critique, parody, and satire protected by the First Amendment. YouTube videos, Facebook posts, and X tweets are the newspaper advertisements and political cartoons of today, and the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to speak regardless of the new medium these critiques may take.
  
  ...
  
  California’s interest and the hardship the State faces are minimal when measured against the gravity of First Amendment values at stake and the ongoing constitutional violations that Plaintiff and other similarly situated content creators experience while having their speech chilled.

  Indeed.
  
  
  
• Amelia Watson Hyte Y40 Limited Edition PC Case Status: Acquired
  
  Sitting in the front hall right now.
  
  
  
• Calliope Mori Hyte Y40 Limited Edition PC Case Status: Order confirmed
  
  Hyte confirmed that the order was processed before things fell apart, and they've fixed it.  I've now received the confirmation email and the order is showing in my account on their site.
  
  I'm not sure that I want to go through all that again for the Dokibird case.  It ended up costing me an extra $200 to air freight a PC case to the other side of the world, and a regular Hyte Y40 only costs $130.

• Cloudflare has blocked a 3.8Tbps DDOS attack, the largest on record.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Everything is awesome.
  
  The attack was using a wide range of compromised devices, notable Asus and Microtik routers.
  
  
  
• Conservatives on social networks are censored more than liberals.  (Nature)
  
  But it's their own fault, say the researchers, for sharing unapproved information.
  
  
  
• What happens to all of 23andMe's DNA when it goes bankrupt as seems likely?  (NPR)
  
  It all goes in the jar.
  
  Don't ask.
  
  
  
• The Magic the Gathering community is undergoing yet another incredibly stupid and very public meltdown.  (The Verge)
  
  At least in the old days, if someone thought you were cheating at cards they would just shoot you.
  
  
  
• What goes around: After Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, went nuclear on WordPress hosting provider WP Engine, blocking the company's access to the open source WordPress components and updating the WordPress dashboard to include posts targeting WP Engine, WP Engine has fired back with a lawsuit accusing Mullenweg and WordPress owner Automattic of extortion and libel.  (MSN)
  
  I hate WordPress.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 04 2024 09:53 PM (pnaK4)

2 They want $90 for a doubleshot PBT set of keycaps?  Well.
I mean, the price isn't outrageous considering the materials and that it's probably going to be a relatively-small batch order, says the guy who's already bought even more expensive keycaps.   But you can buy generic DS PBTs for under $20 on Amazon.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 04 2024 09:58 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 04 2024 10:02 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, October 05 2024 03:34 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Saturday, October 05 2024 05:20 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Saturday, October 05 2024 05:21 AM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 05 2024 05:39 AM (LADmw)

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• Eric Adams' phone pleads the Fifth.  (The Verge)
  
  The FBI obtained two of the New York mayor's phones under a warrant served almost a year ago, but they still haven't managed to access any data.
  
  Adams changed the password after the warrant was served - to prevent staff from deleting information that was required for the investigation, he says - and then promptly forgot it.
  
  
  
• The Amelia Watson Hyte Y40 PC limited edition PC case is winging its way toward me as we speak.  Or as I write and you read.  Or trucking its way.
  
  The shipment of Calliope Mori Hyte Y40 limited edition PC cases to Australia disappeared into the Nether, so I broke down and finally ordered it directly from the US, exorbitant shipping and all.
  
  The site took my money and then promptly crashed, because of course it did.

• The TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus is an 8 slot M.2 NAS with 10Gb Ethernet.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It competes with Asus' Flashtor models, which come in 6 and 12 slot versions, but has more oomph.  The 8 core N305 CPU is more than twice as fast as the older 4 core model in the Asus unit.
  
  It's a bit fiddly to install and the operating system is meh, but it can deliver a steady 9Gbps over the network.
  
  
  
• If you run a Zimbra server which you probably don't it's time you patched it.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Nasty exploit in the wild.
  
  
  
• The modern economy rests on a single road in North Carolina.  (Twitter)
  
  The Spruce Pine quartz mine - the source of the purest natural quartz in the world - supplies critical materials used in every single leading-edge chip manufacturing plant.
  
  
  
• That road is gone.  (Axios)
  
  It's not known when the mine might reopen.

  "This is second order of priority," The Quartz Corp said in a statement. "Our top priority remains the health and safety of our employees and their families."

  
  
  
• Cerebras - maker of the world's largest AI chips - is filing for an IPO.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A single Cerebras chip is the size of a dinner plate and contains 900,000 cores.

Posted by: I still can't thing of anything at Thursday, October 03 2024 11:27 PM (VXvaX)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 04 2024 07:32 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: furball at Friday, October 04 2024 10:14 AM (As8gg)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 04 2024 10:21 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 04 2024 10:25 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: I still can't thing of anything at Saturday, October 05 2024 10:09 AM (kCw2o)

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• After Broadcom bought VMWare, there were numerous stories of smaller customers being pushed to the wayside.  Broadcom's general approach to marketing products is to have 600 customers and ignore everyone else.
  
  Broadcom now seems to be experimenting with pushing everyone to the wayside.  (The Register)
  
  Court filings in a suit from AT&T say that Broadcom sought to increase prices by 1050% while also blocking its reseller channel from doing business with AT&T at all.
  
  AT&T says that the proposed pricing makes the payoff time for moving from VMWare to literally anything else short enough that they see it as an investment rather than an expense.

• A Chicago lab scooped up $83 million in federal payments for fake COVID tests.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The DOJ gave the lab owner a deal where he pled guilty to a single count of wire fraud.
  
  I wonder who he knows.
  
  
  
• AMD's Epyc 8004 embedded server family is here.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I'm not sure what makes these specifically embedded, as they're socketed and work just fine in conventional rackmount servers.
  
  These are lower-end and cheaper than the 9004 series, with 6 memory channels and 96 lanes of PCIe 5.0.
  
  The processors are only available configured with Zen 4c cores, which are slower and use less power than Zen 4.  Not a lot slower in a server CPU; these are clocked at 3GHz where Zen 4 chips run at up to 3.6GHz.
  
  Prices start at $409 for an 8 core chip, and range through $855 for 24 cores, up to $4950 for 64 cores.
  
  The 24 core model looks good if your needs lean more towards memory capacity or I/O bandwidth than CPU performance, since it would be slower than a 16 core desktop chip.
  
  Even the 64 core version only draws 200W, which is another advantage.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Copilot can now read your screen and talk to you.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not if you uninstall it.

• An 81 year old Montana man has been sentenced to six months in prison and three years probation, and ordered to pay $24,000 after he cloned and bred a race of giant sheep. (ABC)
  
  He used genes from the Marco Polo variety of sheep found in central Asia, which weigh up to 300 pounds and have horns up to five feet long, which he crossed with existing Bighorn sheep to create an even larger hybrid population he called the Montana Mountain King.
  
  As for the giant sheep, they've been ordered to be killed and their meat donated to create a race of giant pigs.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AMD has increased the performance of the Ryzen 9600X and 9700X models by increasing the TDP. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These currently run at 65W by default, but with a new BIOS update will be configurable to run at 105W, with the 60% extra power giving that 10% extra performance.
  
  You could do the same thing with overclocking, of course, so the only real change is that this is fully supported under warranty.
  
  
  
• AMD has also released two small language models. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are just like large language models, only small. With 135 million tokens, they will run on any functioning graphics card; you don't need an RTX 4090.
  
  
  
• Star Wars Outlaws has sold a million copies. (WCCFTech)
  
  For a major game release, that's not good. Dwarf Fortress has sold a million copies, but that has two developers, not hundreds.
  
  Ubisoft needs to sell at least four million copies of this game to break even on the development costs, never mind the licensing costs. That won't happen.
  
  Their next big title, Assassin's Creed Shadows, is looking to be an even bigger failure. The company's shareholders are rioting.
  
  
  
• Google has won a lawsuit against scammers who filed false DMCA takedown requests to remove their competitors from the search index. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Filing a false DMCA request is perjury, which is a felony, but I'm not aware of anyone ever being charged with that crime in such a case.
  
  Here Google was awarded a default judgement because the scammers never responded.
  
  
  
• Epic Games is suing Google, again, and also Samsung. (The Verge)
  
  Epic Games got a court order forcing Google to allow third-party app stores on Android devices.
  
  So Google and Samsung collaborated to introduce new security features that effectively prevent users from installing unauthorised applications, while not providing any means for applications to become authorised.
  
  Again, I don't like Epic, but Google and Samsung need to be smacked down hard here.
  
  
  

Not At All Tech News

Posted by: madrocketsci at Wednesday, October 02 2024 12:04 AM (hRoyQ)

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• California governor Gavin Newsome has vetoed SB 1047, the "AI safety" bill that did nothing for AI or safety.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well, good, I guess.
  
  
  
• He has however signed into law 18 other bills involving AI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  These range from common sense regulations on the use of AI when interacting with customers, to blatant violations of the First Amendment.
  
  Mostly the latter.

• MSI has confirmed that CUDIMMs work with AMD as well as Intel processors.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are memory modules with clock regenerator chips onboard, allowing them to run stably at higher speeds - up to 9.6GHz currently, with even faster speeds promised.
  
  The problem is that they are otherwise still standard DDR5 modules, so to hit those speeds they have to run at much higher than normal voltages.
  
  
  
• Kia's online dealer portal could be used to steal with the click of a button.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This has reportedly been fixed but who the hell thought that was a good idea?
  
  
  
• Are software developers gaining from the miracle of generative AI?  No.  (CIO)
  
  Productivity has not improved, bugs have not been reduced, and developer burnout is as bad as ever.
  
  If anything, unfamiliar AI-generated code is making the situation worse.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's 2024 Legion Y700 tablet is here.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is the only good small Android tablet on the market.  And when I say "on the market" I mean not on the market, because it is almost impossible to buy outside of China.
  
  Why?  I have no idea.
  
  Anyway, this model appears to remove the microSD card.  The previous update removed the headphone jack.
  
  Why?  Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• After Unity committed suicide with its overbearing and larcenous new licensing terms, open-source competitor Godot had its moment in the sun.
  
  It just committed suicide in a very messy and public way.
  
  Godot's community manager went psychotically woke on Twitter, not just affirming LGBTQIA+ bullshit over everything else, but blocking users and hiding replies from anyone who dared to question this in even the most polite terms.
  
  Hundreds of people.  It just keeps going.
  
  And the CEO of Godot has gone into hiding.

Posted by: madrocketsci at Monday, September 30 2024 09:44 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 01 2024 12:03 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Tuesday, October 01 2024 03:35 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 01 2024 06:00 AM (rcPLc)

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• In the ongoing legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games over Apple's theft of 30% of everything, Apple was ordered to produce a million documents relating to changes to the App Store.
  
  Apple asked for an extension to that deadline, following its habit of dragging out unfavourable cases forever.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The judge was not having it.

  As Epic constantly points out, this document production is all downside for Apple because it relates to Apple’s alleged lack of compliance with the Court’s injunction. It is not in Apple’s interest to do any of this quickly. This is a classic moral hazard, and the way Apple announced out of the blue four days before the substantial completion deadline that it would not make that deadline because of a document count that it had surely been aware of for weeks hardly creates the impression that Apple is behaving responsibly.
  
  Apple’s request for an extension of time is DENIED. The deadline for the substantial completion of document production is Monday, September 30. It’s up to Apple to figure out how to meet that deadline, but Monday is indeed the deadline.

  Good to see.  I have no particular love for Epic Games, but Apple acts like a classic monopolist, constantly skirting the edge of open illegality.

• SpaceX's rescue mission for the stranded Boeing Starliner astronauts is on its way to the ISS.  (AP)
  
  This is SpaceX's 15th crewed mission.
  
  
  
• A bug in Nvidia's Container Toolkit leaves AI cloud servers exposed to hackers.  (The Register)
  
  This doesn't affect desktop users at all, or people running their own server hardware.  Only cloud users and operators with Nvidia cards.
  
  
  
• The CWWK X86-P5 is a mini-PC with up to an 8 core N305 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and four M.2 SSDs.  (Liliputing)
  
  The N305 (and the other option, the four core N100) don't have a lot of PCIe lanes so those four SSDs all run at PCIe 3.0 x1 - a maximum speed of 1GB per second each.
  
  But this is designed to run as a simple NAS, and the two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports combine to about 0.5GB per second, so that bandwidth is unlikely to be the limiting factor.
  
  Apart from that there are two HDMI ports and two USB ports.  A pretty spartan selection but just fine for a mini-NAS.
  
  
  
• Can addressing gut issues treat long COVID in children?  (Ars Technica)
  
  At least as well as it does for Morgellons disease.
  
  
  
• How does Discord store trillions of messages?  ScyllaDB.  (Discord)
  
  They previously used Cassandra, which is written in Java, and which I have used myself.  ScyllaDB is compatible but written in C++, and they have found it to be far more robust on this scale than Cassandra.
  
  They've also cut the number of database servers needed in half, now having 72 servers each with 9TB of storage.  Which is a lot of servers, but not a lot of disk; you could easily fit that much storage in a single 2U rackmount system.  And it would only cost about $100k - a lot for you or me, but nothing for even a modestly successful company.
  
  So if you are stuck with a Cassandra database and it is causing you pain, ScyllaDB might be the way out.

Pixy Was Watching

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 29 2024 06:39 PM (bg2DR)

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• What is going on in the WordPress war, from a former WP Engine employee.  (Josh Collinsworth)
  
  Matt Mullenweg is a co-founder of WordPress, and now heads up both WordPress.org, the open-source foundation that creates the WordPress application, and WordPress.com, the company that commercialises blog hosting.
  
  WP Engine is a competitor that also offers blog hosting, and has done for nearly fifteen years.  This is entirely legal because WordPress is open source.
  
  So Matt, fed up with a competitor existing at all, has used his position as head of the open-source project to benefit his position has head of the commercial operation by carpet-bombing that competitor:

  Matt had a problem with the landlords, so he carpet bombed the neighborhood.  He didn’t like Alderaan’s leaders, and so he fired the Death Star.  And now it doesn’t really matter what his original point was; he’s made himself the bad guy.

  And I do mean carpet-bombing:

  That post, crucially, went up on WordPress.org, which on its own seems questionable. WordPress.org is ostensibly the website for the nonprofit foundation; it’s supposed to exist topreventany one for-profit company from having too much power over the WordPress ecosystem. It’s supposed to be agnostic.

  Not only was that boundary ignored, but since the post was published as WordPress news, it was then syndicated to each and every WordPress admin dashboard in the world.

  Now, the WordPress software is garbage - not as much as it used to be, but still terrible - but until recently they weren't notably a garbage organisation.
  
  Now they've fixed that, and there are growing calls for Mullenweg to be tossed overboard before he sinks the ship.

• Speaking of garbage companies, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tried to raise $7 trillion to build new chip fabs and datacenters.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's trillion, with a TR.
  
  This calls to mind nothing more than this Sagan quote:

  But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

  
  
  
• There's a bug in some X670E motherboards where if you do something and something, something bad happens.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The end result is that PCIe 5.0 SSDs can end up running as PCIe 1.0 - one sixteenth the speed.
  
  Curiously this does not affect PCIe 4.0 SSDs at all; they work just fine at PCIe 4.0 speed.
  
  
  
• Meta stored 600 million Facebook and Instagram passwords in plain text.  (Apple Insider)
  
  This is not good.
  
  But it should be clarified that this is not the password database.  It's a logging database used by Facebook engineers that should not have been receiving passwords at all.
  
  
  
• Nvidia could release a 24GB version of the upcoming RTX 5080.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Common memory chips used in graphics cards are 2GB each, but new chips are coming out that are 3GB, so that any graphics card vendor can release versions of cards with 50% more memory.
  
  
  
• Why I won't be buying a Lunar Lake laptop.  (CPU Benchmark)
  
  My current Asus laptop isn't perfect.  The screen is amazing, it has one DIMM slot so I could upgrade it to 40GB, and it basically keeps trucking along.  But when I'm doing a big code build it really starts to grind.
  
  It was cheap and gets the job done, but I wouldn't mind something even better.
  
  Luna Lake is not that.
  
  It has a maximum of 32GB of RAM - soldered directly to the CPU, with no possibility of upgrades.
  
  But worse, it is not really any faster or more efficient than my existing laptop, which uses an AMD Ryzen 7730U, which in turn is a renamed Ryzen 5800U, which came out nearly four years ago.
  
  Intel is only really competing with itself here.
  
  
  
• In case you missed it, Ace has a great writeup on the slow-motion multi-track woke train wreck spilling hazardous flaming toxic waste all over the video game industry.  (Ace of Spades)
  
  He highlights Ubisoft's failed Star Wars Outlaws and upcoming failure Assassin's Creed Shadows, Rocksteady's disastrous Suicide Squad game, Bioware's godawful Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and Sony's future wreck Ghost of Yotei, a spinoff of the universally acclaimed Ghost of Tsushima, and mentions in passing Sony's now deceased $400 million money pit, Concord.
  
  The only one really missing there is Fairgame$, Sony's contribution as a multi-billion-dollar corporation to the anarcho-communist "eat the rich" genre.
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, September 28 2024 11:40 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 29 2024 01:06 AM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, September 29 2024 12:16 PM (nk1Z+)

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• The Chief Technology Officer, Chief Research Officer, and VP of Research have all left OpenAI this week as Doc Sam "Snake Oil" Altman tightens his grip on the company.  (Ars Technica)
  
   The core issue is the change of OpenAI's status from a public benefit company to slush fund for the select few to loot.  Altman himself is looking at a $10 billion payday at current valuation.
  
  This is likely a disaster for the company and its shareholders.
  
  
  
• As for the researchers fleeing the oncoming catastrophe they are likely to do just fine.
  
  Google is paying $2.7 billion to rehire an early employee who built an AI chatbot years before ChatGPT.  (MSN)
  
  Specifically, he left Google and founded his own company, and Google has paid $2.7 billion to license that company's technology with the proviso that he return to work at Google.
  
  The amounts of money being flushed down the drain on this are insane.

• Wordpress has declared war on Wordpress hosting company WP Engine.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Wordpress itself is open source and anyone can download it and use it, or offer it as a commercial service to their customers.
  
  Apparently the entire fuss is over the use of the letters W and P.  Wordpress chief Matt Mullenweg is accusing WP Engine of everything short of serial genocide over those two letters.
  
  
  
• HP is adding AI to its printers.  (Ars Technica)
  
  We're already not buying your printers, guys.  You can stop making them worse.
  
  
  
• Speaking of HP the HP EliteBook X G1a actually looks good.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It has a Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 375 CPU, a 2880x1800 14" OLED display, and almost the four essential keys (Home shares a key with F12).
  
  No pricing yet.
  
  
  
• Why Volvo changed its "EV or bust" strategy.  (The Verge)
  
  Because the customers said "okay, bust it is".
  
  
  
• There's a five alarm fire vulnerability in every version of Linux unless there isn't.  (HackRead)
  
  If you're a sysadmin you might want to drink heavily in preparation for actual useful details on October 6.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 27 2024 09:07 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 27 2024 10:54 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 27 2024 11:04 PM (pnaK4)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, September 28 2024 09:26 AM (nk1Z+)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 29 2024 12:59 AM (pnaK4)

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• Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman-Fried's right-hand woman in the FTX kerfuffle, has been sentenced to two years in prison for her part in the fuffling and ordered to pay $11 billion in restitution.  (Ars Technica)
  
  That restitution order confused me, because that's the entire amount under management by FTX at the time it collapsed, and (thanks to the continuing rise in  Bitcoin prices) all the customers have already been made whole, with interest.
  
  Ellison certainly doesn't have $11 billion, and there is little prospect of her ever having $11 billion.
  
  What it means, rather, is that if Ellison has squirreled away a few million from the collapse, the court has already laid claim to it.
  
  
  

Tech News 

• Facebooks current smart glasses have everything you might want in a pair of smart glasses, except a display.  The company's new glasses codenamed Orion, do.  (The Verge)
  
  They're rather chunkier than the current model, but they're still at the prototype stage, and they look like you're wearing ugly glasses rather your head being eaten by a robot crab.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new 990 Evo Plus SSDs are 45% faster than the existing 990 Evo models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because the existing models were slow.  "Only" 5GB per second.
  
  
  
• Intel's Lunar Lake is here and it's not terrible.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Battery life is solid, and performance is not terrible.  It is just an eight-core chip though, and on heavy workloads like video editing and 3d rendering AMD's current twelve-core chips leave it in the dust, completing tasks around 60% faster.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD the company's 9900X3D desktop chip is expected next month.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's a pretty fast follow-up to the launch of the mainstream versions of Zen 5, but sales of those have been slow.  They're not bad chips, but AMD is competing with itself as well as Intel.
  
  An eight core 9700X is the same price as the previous generation's twelve core 7900X, while being significantly slower.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 26 2024 10:04 PM (pnaK4)

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