• Had a fun start to the weekend when our cloud provider at work decided to migrate twenty-five of our servers to new hardware.  On a Friday afternoon.  5AM Saturday for me.
  
  Yes, we have everything set up with redundant servers.  Doesn't help much when 25 of them reboot all at once.
  
  
  
• The creator of dystopian science-fiction TV series Black Mirror used ChatGPT to write the script for an episode.
  
  It was shit.  (Gizmodo)
  
  All it did was smush together the scripts for other episodes.
  
  What you need to do to be a successful Hollywood writer is smush together the scripts for other episodes while stealing an idea from somewhere else.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The CEO of Reddit has accused the creator of Reddit app Apollo of larceny, pettifoggery, mopery, dopery, and intimate relationships with barn animals, but says he's open to discussion with other developers.  (The Verge)
  
  The other developers aren't buying it and are shutting down their apps as well.
  
  
  
• Why is Apple finally producing a 15" MacBook Air?  Because sales of the more expensive MacBook Pro are in the toilet.  (The Verge)
  
  All the major laptop makers are seeing sales declines in the 20-30% range, but Apple is closer to 40%.
  
  
  
• Speaking of major laptops HP's ZBook Fury 16 G9 is one.  (Notebook Check)
  
  At 2.6kg this is no lightweight - HP's own ZBook Studio 16 weighs in at 1.8kg - but apart from the 16" 3840x2400 screen, the high-end Intel CPU (12th or 13th gen), and Nvidia workstation graphics, it also offers four SO-DIMM slots and four two M.2 slots.*  So you can upgrade it to 128GB (and probably 192GB) of RAM and 32TB 16TB of SSD, which is enough even for me.
  
  Four Essential Keys are sort of there in the shape of a full numeric keypad, and it has two Thunderbolt ports, mini Displayport, HDMI, wired Ethernet (just gigabit, sadly), a full-size SD card slot, two USB-A ports, a headphone jack, and a smartcard reader for corporate security stuff.
  
  Price starts at $1500 with a 12th gen Intel CPU and goes up to around $6000 with every available option. 
  
  * The review says four, and they have the laptop and opened it up to take a look, but they're wrong.
  
  
  
• We don't trade with ants.  (World Spirit Sock Puppet)
  
  But we do with bees.
  
  
  
• MSI's Spatium M450 1TB M.2 SSD is available for $37.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Is it any good?  Only a year ago it was considered reasonable value at $115.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  For less than forty dollars you get two trillion working transistors.  I'm not sure how much you can complain that it's a PCIe 4 device that barely runs faster than PCIe 3.  It's a technological marvel.
  
  In fact, at that price it could start starting to force the fake SSDs out of the market.  You can't make much money selling knockoff Rolexes if the real deal cost ten bucks.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, June 10 2023 10:42 PM (rglbH)

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