He's coming.
This matters. This is important. Why did you say six months?
Why did you say five minutes?
Monday, October 14
Requiem For A Butterfly Edition
Top Story
- SpaceX's Starship test completes with a remarkable "chopstick" booster catch. (The Verge)
The most successful Starship test so far, with both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship itself performing flawlessly.
I'm linking The Verge for this one because the story is reported completely straight - just the facts, ma'am - and the comments are cheerfully ripping apart The Verge's usual two minute hate pieces.
- Meanwhile Elon Musk is planning to sue the Combat Camel Corps over blatant First Amendment violations. (MSN)
The CCC - wait, I'm told that stands for California Coastal Commission - and specifically Gretchen Newsom - were stupid enough to say that they rejected the SpaceX application for additional launch slots at Vandenburg because of what Musk posted on Twitter.
Tech News
- Turns out 23andMe is a genetic robot vacuum cleaner. (SFGate)
If you used the service - or if anyone in your family did - you should probably log in and delete your data.
This won't do anything but it might work in your favour in the resulting class action lawsuits.
CEO Anne Wojcicki says she's open to takeover offers. Or people who want to buy the company. Either one.
- Unidentified drones swarmed Langley Air Force Base, and the Pentagon is "stumped". (MSN)
The drones circled the base for seventeen days.
- The average LLM (AI) jailbreak attempt takes 42 seconds. (SC World)
20% of attacks succeed, and of those, 90% leak confidential information.
- A detailed review of the Terramaster F8 Plus. (Liliputing)
This is an 8 bay M.2 NAS with 10Gb Ethernet and an 8 core CPU. It's only slightly larger than an external 3.5" hard drive, and can store up to 64TB of data and hold up to 32GB of RAM for running applications (it ships with 16GB as standard, but it uses a regular SO-DIMM slot.)
There's also cheaper F8 Nonplus, with a 4 core CPU and shipping with 8GB of RAM. That should be fine if you just need the server functions and don't want to run apps on it.
- Gotta catch 'em all, but I'm out of disk space: A Game Freak leak has dumped company info and a terabyte of Pokemons. (Notebook Check)
Game Freak is the company developing the Pokemon games, though the franchise is owned by the Pokemon Company and Nintendo. Anyway, the Skitty is definitely out of the bag now.
- The Beelink SER9 is the fastest mini-PC you can get right now. (WCCFTech)
It has more than twice the CPU performance and three to four times the graphics performance of my Beelink SER5. But I have three of those and the SER9 costs more than three times as much if you already have memory and SSDs you can reuse.
The Ryzen 370 used in the SER9 only supports LPDDR5X memory, not regular SO-DIMMS, so you can't install your own unless you have a desoldering station and a very steady hand. It does have two M.2 slots though.
But if you don't need three computers and just want something small and quiet that gets the job done, it does.
Bling Bang Bang Videos of the Day
Bae and Ina.
Ina famously sent Bae the music for this at 2AM and Bae never managed to get back to sleep.
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Sunday, October 13
Doubling Down On Dumb Edition
Top Story
- After being sued by hosting company WP Engine for libel and extortion, it would appear that Automattic, the commercial arm of WordPress, has chosen to respond with outright theft. (MSN)
One thing Automattic accused WP Engine of was not contributing back to the project. WP Engine developed and maintained the WordPress plugin ACF - Advanced Custom Fields, which has two million users.
So Automattic stole it. (Twitter)
They took the project, changed the name, and assigned themselves ownership, dragging all two million users along with it.
They said they were forced to do that because WP Engine could not properly manage and maintain the project. WP Engine could not manage and maintain the project because Automattic blocked them.
WP Engine's lawyers who were already looking at replacing their Porsches with Ferraris are now thinking maybe a Bugatti Chiron would be nice.
Tech News
- California has rejected SpaceX's application to launch additional missions from the state, with some officials opening themselves up to a massive First Amendment lawsuit. (LA Times / MSN)
Oops.
Well, more business for Florida I guess.
- Boeing will lay off 10% of its employees, about 17,000 people. (MSN)
This comes as no surprise to anyone, but is unlikely to affect the people who should be affected.
- Instagram and Threads moderation is out of control. (The Verge)
Did your post get deleted? Too bad, so sad.Moderation is a perennial problem on social media, but based on social media posts and The Verge staff's own experiences, Meta is currently banning and restricting users on a hair trigger. One of my colleagues was locked out of her account briefly this week after joking that she "wanted to die" because of a heatwave.
Simple solution: Don't use Instagram or Threads. Twitter doesn't do this.
Others, like Jorge Caballero, say the automated system has added fact checks with mistakes to material it detects as political, as well as throttling posts with factual information for events like hurricanes. Some have dubbed their situation "crackergate," as recent posts mentioning saltines or the words "cracker jacks" have been instantly removed.
- The Verge is having yet another normal day. (The Verge)
Geeze, lady. Take a couple of valium. Or down a fifth of bourbon. Not both, but one or the other.
- The San Francisco Chronicle has put in place an AI resource nobody asked for to answer questions nobody is asking about the political candidate nobody voted for. (San Francisco Chronicle) (archive site)
It's unintentional self-parody all the way down.
- Do you need 384 cores and 3TB of RAM in a single 1U server? ASRock has a motherboard for you. (Serve the Home)
No price attached but these are generally cheaper than you would think - much cheaper than the CPUs that plug into them.
- We keep pushing products that nobody wants, and for some reason people aren't buying them. (The Register)
It's a meh year for desktop PCs, and a lousy year for Windows. There are a couple of bright spots in the laptop market, with AMD's Ryzen 370 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series, but not enough to lift PC sales out of the doldrums.
Except for limited edition Hyte PC cases, which are reportedly doing gangbusters.
Ban my account so I never come back. D-8.
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Saturday, October 12
Fruitcake Edition
Top Story
- One of the two quartz mines in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, is in the process of reopening after the area was devastated by Hurricane Helene ten days ago. (Tom's Hardware)
Faster than I had expected.
Chip fabrication depends on ultra-pure silicon. To make the ingots of ultra-pure silicon, you need crucibles to melt the silicon in, that are of even higher purity. That's where these two quartz mines come in.
Chipmakers have a supply of pre-made silicon because they're not idiots, and the silicon makers likely have a supply of crucibles, but a closure lasting more than a couple of months could have started causing problems.
Tech News
- Vietnam is planning to build six chip fabs, with the first one online by 2030. (Tom's Hardware)
Vietnam is nominally communist, but then so are the current governments of the US, the UK, Canada, France, and Australia.
- Leaked benchmarks indicate that AMD's Ryzen 9800X3D is up to 13% faster than the current Ryzen 7800X3D. (WCCFTech)
Which is kind of meh, but it's a meh year for computer hardware.
- If you're thinking you'll just buy a 7800X3D instead, well, good luck with that. (WCCFTech)
It's in short supply and prices on Newegg have jumped from around $399 to $699. Though that's because Newegg themselves are out of stock and the best marketplace offer - from China - is wildly expensive.
My local store actually has the 7800X3D on sale right now, so your mileage may vary.
- TikTok executives knew about the site's effect on teenagers. (NPR)
It turned them into giggling idiots drawn ineluctably to every new trend, no matter how absurd it might be.
...
Yes.
- Ecovacs robot vacuum cleaners have been hacked to shout slurs at their owners. (Vice)
This is the same company under fire in Australia for collecting audio and video recordings and keeping them even after the customers deleted the files.
- We're not mad at you, Goldmusk, just disappointed. (The Verge)
The Verge having another totally normal day.
- We are mad at you, Goldmusk. (Ars Technica)
Ars Technica is having a just spectacularly normal day.
- Got a shipping notice and a UPS tracking number for my Calliope Mori Limited Edition Hyte Y40 PC case.
Soon. Soon I will have them all!
- But it might take a while to build systems in all the cases I now have.
Apropos of Nothing Video of the Day
Apropos of Moo Deng Video of the Day
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Friday, October 11
Dank And Stary Night Edition
Top Story
- Terrorist supporters have claimed responsibility for the DDOS and hack of the Internet Archive. (Gizmodo)
Maybe it's true. Maybe they're lying. There are many powerful groups that would love to scrub the internet's memory forever.
But they're publicly boasting of this on Twitter from a verified account, so they've made themselves easy targets for law enforcement.
- The core archive is unaffected. (Twitter)
The site is down temporarily while the staff scrub the front-end servers and upgrade security, but it will be back.
Tech News
- Tesla has announced its new Robotaxi, the gloriously art deco Robovan, and the new Tesla Robot. (Tesla)
A good old-fashioned future.
- AMD very graciously allowed Intel to be relevant for an entire week before stomping on them with a 192 core server CPU that is 20% cheaper than Intel's 128 core model. (Tom's Hardware)
AMD's new lineup includes Zen 5 models with up to 128 cores, and Zen 5c models (functionally identical cores but lower clock speeds) up to 192 cores.
That article has lots of benchmarks; WCCFTech has the price list.
If you need high clock speeds rather than just the maximum possible number of cores, the 9575F offers 64 cores running at 5GHz. The 192 core 9965 "only" runs at 3.7GHz.
In theory you could put one of each in the same server. (I think?) Not sure how much the Linux kernel would appreciate that though.
- Intel meanwhile has announced its new Arrow Lake desktop CPUs - the 245K, 265K, and 285K. (Tom's Hardware)
The 285K will be slightly slower than the existing 14900K for gaming, but use less power. Unfortunately it is expected to be up to 20% slower than AMD's best gaming chips like the 7800X3D, which uses much less power.
Expected to be at retain on the 24th, so not much in the way of benchmarks until then, except for the one leaked result on CPUBenchmark.
- Intel claims the new chips provide parity performance at half the power. (PC World)
Which is very interesting because the claimed power consumption hasn't changed with respect to 13th or 14th generation parts, neither the base TDP nor the maximum turbo power.
Which means that either Intel was lying before, or is lying now, or both.
- Just to make sure they rain on all of Intel's parades AMD's 9800X3D is expected to have an all-core clock 400MHz faster than the existing 7800X3D. (VideoCardz)
That would salvage the lackluster launch of the 9000 series. It's not at all a bad CPU, but it shines at heavy server-oriented workloads rather than typical productivity apps or gaming.
With that clock speed boost the 9800X3D should easily be the fastest CPU available for games.
- Maybe when the DOJ's antitrust team has finished beating up Google it could take a look at Adobe. Adobe no longer offers perpetual licenses for its low-end Elements products. (Notebook Check)
You can "buy" the 2025 editions right now, but the software will drop dead three years after it is installed.
- What's better than Ethernet? Ultra Ethernet. AMD has shown off its first Ultra Ethernet cards. (Tom's Hardware)
These run at 400Gbps and offload a lot of the networking stack to a dedicated CPU on the card.
- Serve the Home got hold of the new AMD Epyc CPUs and a 400Gb Ethernet card and put them to the test. (Serve the Home)
I'm not sure how many homes need to be served with a 384 core server with 800Gbps of total network bandwidth, but here you go.
- There's a vulnerability in 64 different Qualcomm chipsets. (WCCFTech)
This only affects about two billion people, so you don't need to worry.
And no, there are no details.
- Three executives in charge of Amazon's Just Walk Out project - cashierless brick-and-mortar stores - just walked out. (Tech Crunch)
It is a thing.
- Amazon dreams of AI agents that do the shopping for you. (Wired)
Burn in Hell, Amazon.
- The latest Windows 11 update leaves 9GB of trash behind. (PC World)
Trash that it is impossible to delete short of reinstalling Windows entirely.
That's nearly 50 cents worth of storage at today's SSD prices.
- The world must Act Now (TM) or We Are Doomed (TM). (Dawn)
More doomed than the last eleven times we were doomed?
- Redbox went bankrupt. But the Redboxen remain. (MSN)
They weigh 900 pounds and there are 24,000 of them scattered across the country, typically wired directly into power so you can't even unplug them. Walgreens says that just sitting there the boxen are costing the company $184,000 a month.
And they're typically anchored in concrete to prevent theft, so you can't just yank them out.
- London is gone. (The Register)
Blown into the North Sea. The BBC is predicting 13,508 mph winds, and overnight lows of 400C in Nottingham.
Conditions are expected to return to reality this weekend.
- Automattic is doing open source dirty. (Hey)
This is the personal site of DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails. I might have some philosophical differences with the design of Rails, but to my knowledge DHH never blackmailed or libeled anyone.
- The Fifth Circuit has upheld a lower court's finding of contributory copyright infringement against ISP Grande, but tossed the calculation of damages. (TorrentFreak)
The ISP was found liable because it did not act on infringement notices, but the calculation of the damages at $47 million was found to be incorrect and excessive. Where a CD was copied, the jury calculated the full damages on each song individually, which was deemed incorrect.
The damage calculation heads back to the lower court while the fundamental matter of law likely goes to the Supreme Court, as the entire industry has an interest in how this turns out.
- The Amelia Watson Limited Edition Hyte Y40 PC case is discounted to $199 through October 28. (Twitter)
I already got mine, but that's okay.
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Thursday, October 10
The Closes Are Walling In Edition
Top Story
- The Internet Archive has been hacked and credentials for 31 million users stolen. (Bleeping Computer)
The passwords are encrypted with Bcrypt, which is pretty robust, but if you shared a password between the archive and some other site, it's time to change it and also to stop doing that.
Tech News
- Turkey has banned Discord because, well, Turkey. (Reuters)
If you let a turkey into your house, it's going to do turkey things.
- 80% of developers will need to "upskill" by 2027 to keep pace with the growing demands of goat vomit. (IT Professional)
Wait, my mistake. It says here "generative AI".
- The walls are closing in on (throws dart) ELON MUSK. (The Verge)
Sure, he's worth a quarter of a trillion dollars, but we've got him for sure this time.
- Why GOV.UK's Exit this Page doesn't use escape. (Beeps)
Sounds like nonsense at first, but it's actually a useful function and the reasoning is sound.
- Are Intel's new CPUs just bad for multi-threaded performance? (CPU Benchmark)
The eight core laptop 288V runs like a four year old AMD 5800U - also with eight cores, and the 24 core desktop 285K runs like a two year old 12 core AMD 7900. In both cases the AMD chips use half the power.
The Intel chips have great single-threaded performance but multi-threaded test results so far are meh at best.
Disclaimer: It do be like that sometimes. D-11.
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Wednesday, October 09
Lasagna Code Edition
Top Story
- Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in AI. (Tech Crunch)
Real AI, not this modern crap.
Hinton invented the technique of back propagation in 1978, and Hopfield invented the Hopfield network in 1982, which is (says Wikipedia) a form of recurrent neural network, or a spin glass system, that can serve as a content-addressable memory.
The key trick for winning the Nobel Prize continues to be not dying before the committee recognises your work. Hinton is 76; Hopfield is 91.
- Speaking of Wikipedia the site really seems to have fucked the goat this time. (The Publica)
Downplaying over a thousand documented cases of child sexual abuse that have led to the arrest and conviction of 36 people so far.
No, Wikipedia, I don't think I will be donating to your fund drive.
Tech News
- AI image processing effortlessly transforms your precious memories into flavourless pap. (The Verge)
If even The Verge noticed this, it must be bad.
- Roblox is inflating its player numbers, says an investor newsletter aimed at short-sellers. (The Verge)
Gold is shiny, says an investor newsletter aimed and gold collectors.
Roblox called bullshit on this, citing its public earnings figures. However user numbers are calculated, revenue has increased 22% over the past year.
Not At All Tech News
As Tsunderia and Prism Project already have.
As with Prism, the company is releasing the virtual models and streaming and social media accounts to the individual talents, who are planning to continue on independently.
Speaking of vtubers, my pre-order of the Murasaki Shion Pop Up Parade figure from Amazon Japan (or rather, their marketplace) got cancelled, and now there aren't any. But it's still available to pre-order from Amazon US, and the shipping to Australia is dirt cheap (these things don't weigh very much), so I just put the order in again.
Amane Kanata is already shipping in Japan, so I ordered her and the Pop Up Parade Frieren figure, who can hide among all the Hololive girls.
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Tuesday, October 08
Top Story
- Artist* Jason Allen has requested judicial review of the US Copyright Office's decision to deny him copyright on his* piece Théâtre D'opéra Spatial. (Ars Technica)
At issue is that Allen did not paint the image, neither in a traditional physical medium, nor in a digital one. It was generated using Midjourney."Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" is a wholly original image expressing his idea, Allen said, and to produce that human expression, he dedicated more than 100 hours to refining Midjourney text prompts through an iterative process that he estimates took more than 600 prompts. Allen told Ars that through this process, he crafted his own prompt language after determining "which parts of his instructions were effective and which were not," as well as which parts were "not even considered."
If it took you ten minutes to try each prompt, I would have to wonder what you were doing in between.The Copyright Office has said that Allen's prompts are copyrightable, but only Midjourney was responsible for the output derived from the prompts. Walsh told Ars that if Allen had used any non-AI tool to transform the final image a little, even just applying a filter, he would be "good to go" to register his work and sue anyone who "verbatim copies" it.
Surprisingly, and the EFF concurs, the Copyright Office has this pretty much right.
* For some value of this term.
Tech News
- Bad news for Google, good news for Android users everywhere: The judge in the Epic vs. Google case has issued his final ruling, requiring Google to make third-party app stores (like Epic's) available via the Google Play Store. (The Verge)
No more monkey business like Google attempted with Samsung to make it all but impossible to sideload apps. The app stores must be installable from the Play Store itself.
In addition, Google can no longer require app developers to use its own payment services, or restrict how developers communicate with their customers how to install and pay for their software.
No such decision has been reached against Apple as yet - at least, not in the US. Things are not looking great for Apple in the EU.
- If you want a Lego model of an AMD Epyc server CPU - the current 4th generation model with 12 CPU dies - this is now a thing that exists. (Tom's Hardware)
It's not a working model, but it is a model.
- Asus' new "Nitropath" memory slots help your RAM run faster on partly-populated motherboards. (Tom's Hardware)
Up to 400MHz faster, which could increase overall performance of your computer by... 2%. If you're lucky.
Not without value, but not a big deal.
- How a Clinton-era law opened up US secrets to China. (Tech Crunch)
Yeah, who could have ever predicted that mandating back doors would lead to adversaries focusing their attention on those back doors?
- Speaking of which, Okta. (HackRead)
Okta is a "security" company that lets other companies outsource logins to their applications.
Okta is a constant target for hackers as a result. And they were successful. Again.
Buy Me Some Radioactive Peanuts and Cracker Jack Video of the Day
I don't care if I never get back.
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Monday, October 07
For Whom The Vacuum Vacuums Edition
Top Story
- Insecure "Deebot" vacuum cleaners made by Chinese company Ecovacs are recording you and taking pictures and measuring every corner of your house and sending the data back to the manufacturer. (ABC) (no, the other one)
But you agreed to this when you were silly enough to buy one of their products.The Chinese home robotics company, which sells a range of popular Deebot models in Australia, said its users are "willingly participating" in a product improvement program.
But I can use the app to delete my data, right?When users opt into this program through the Ecovacs smartphone app, they are not told what data will be collected, only that it will "help us strengthen the improvement of product functions and attached quality".
It also states that voice recordings, videos and photos that are deleted via the app may continue to be held and used by Ecovacs.
But at least the data doesn't go any further, right?Cybersecurity researcher Dennis Giese reported the problems to the company last year after he found a series of basic errors putting Ecovacs customers' privacy at risk.
But... Lerian Jihad time."If their robots are broken like that," he asked, "how does their back-end [server] look?
"Even if the company's not malicious, they might be the victim themselves of corporate espionage or nation state actors."
Tech News
- Intel's new Core Ultra 9 285K desktop CPU - expected to arrive this week - sets a new single-threaded performance record. (WCCFTech)
It scores 5268 on Passmark (my preferred benchmark for mainstream CPUs), about 10% ahead of competing chips from AMD and Apple.
On the multi-threaded version of the test, though, things are not so rosy.
There the 24 core (8P, 16E) 285K comes in behind AMD's Ryzen 7 7900, which has 12 cores, is two years old, and uses between half and one third the power of the Intel chip.
That might be a hiccup, but the 285K has only 8 full-size cores, without hyper-threading. (Intel has removed hyper-threading in this generation.) The Ryzen chip has 12 full-size cores with hyper-threading.
- React on the server is not PHP all over again. (Christoffer Artmann)
No, it's not.
- It's worse. (Infrequently Noted)
And here's why.
- After shutting down its cashierless stores - where you can walk in, pick out what you want, and just leave - Amazon is looking to sell the technology to other companies. (CNBC)
I hear this is already big in California.
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Sunday, October 06
Dexanthanisation Edition
Top Story
- Back at the dawn of time - which is to say, a few years ago - when an AI didn't know how to answer a question it would say it didn't know how to answer the question. Either that or tie itself into knots, spit out an entire ream of gibberish, and crash.
AIs today are much more sophisticated. Like many humans when they don't know how to answer a question, they lie. (Ars Technica)
This is what you get when you reward answers rather than accuracy. It's the comment spam problem all over again.
What's worse, the more advance the AI - the larger its training set - the stronger the tendency to lie.
And the more effort that is put into supervising the AI after the bulk training - a process called alignment - the stronger the tendency to lie and get away with it.
It's not really lying, of course, since the current crop of commercial AIs have no intentionality. It's just that they also have no concept of truth, and the way they are trained rewards giving answers, not just giving the right answer.
Tech News
- SSD capacity could quadruple by 2029 as the number of layers in flash memory chips continues to increase. (Tom's Hardware)
Before the development of multi-layer flash cells, SSDs had a real problem. We couldn't make the cells any smaller or they would leak - in fact, they were already leaking, and the newest SSDs were slower and less reliable than the previous generation.
The first multi-layer cells were significantly larger than in the chips they replaced, which made them faster and more robust, but the multiple layers provided much more storage in the same size chip.
If you don't want to wait five years, though, you could just buy four SSDs.
- Chinese state hackers reportedly gained access to the US wiretap system. (MSN)
So if the DOJ was listening in on your conversations, so was the CCP.
- Plastic-eating bacteria could combat pollution and possibly also utterly destroy civilisation. (MSN)
Scientists say that the latter scenario is "unlikely".
- California has passed a law protecting "brain information". (GovTech)
So if you are trapped in an advanced VR game where if you die in the game you die in real life, you can rest assured that the company that created the game cannot legally sell your neural scans.
- The latest HP OmniBook 14 Ultra isn't bad. (Notebook Check)
It lacks the Four Essential Keys and the screen is a 2240x1400 IPS model with a 60Hz refresh rate and 100% sRGB colour, which is good but nothing amazing.
But it has a twelve core Ryzen AI 9 HX 375, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.
According to the article it costs around $1050, which is reasonable for those specs, but I was unable to find that exact configuration in HP's online store.
Totally Not Tech News
But by the same measure xanthan gum will make the coating on your fried chicken chewy rather than crisp.
Doesn't hurt either that tapioca starch is cheaper than the flour blend. I tried straight cornflour as well, which was fine, but the tapioca worked better.
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Saturday, October 05
The Magic Word Is Tapioca Edition
Top Story
- 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.
Pixy Is Reading
The anime makes it through the end of volume five of the manga, out of thirteen volumes published so far. It's completely faithful to the material, with only minor changes where the anime could handle things better - where the details of how things moved or sounded were the key to a scene. The manga had to spell it out, where the anime could show you.
Volume six explains a couple of things that happen earlier, not in the retcon sense, but in the the-author-obviously-had-that-in-mind-all-along sense.
Still solid. Not Frieren or Apothecary Diaries level, but well worth the time.
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