Ambient Irony

Sunday, November 06

Daily News Stuff 6 November 2022

Slow Cooking In Hyperspace Edition

Top Story

The White House - note how they say "the White House" or "the Biden team" because Biden himself is out there telling Pennsylvania he's planning to destroy its major industries - is pushing to get its antitrust legislation through the lame duck session of Congress before the Republicans show up with the orange sauce. (Bloomberg / Yahoo News)

Why do they think the bill still has a chance?
Advocates have criticized the White House for failing to prioritize the legislation, which major tech companies have spent more than $100 million to defeat. Alphabetâ€™s Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta all oppose the bill.
That's why.

Tech News

A look at the Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero Gold Ultimate Edition 2.1 Pro. (Tom's Hardware)

It's an expensive board but it has every possible feature except 10Gb Ethernet. I'm considering it for my new system. It's more than I really want to spend, but all the alternatives are missing something I want.
Intel wants to rent you your next server CPU. (Tom's Hardware)

Sapphire Rapids has a lot of special-purpose accelerator hardware built in, but the plan is to have it disabled and to charge a license fee to enable it. This is a long-time IBM strategy, but with AMD eating Intel's lunch in the commodity server space, Intel is handing them a chance to eat their dinner as well.
A team at BYU has developed a new molten salt mini-reactor that can fit in a standard shipping container. (BYU)

And a side benefit of the design is that it generates molybdenum-99, used in specialised medical imaging, which sells for $30 million per gram.

Which used to be a lot.
While everyone's attention has been distracted by the carnage at Twitter other tech companies have been quietly sharpening the knives themselves. (Tech Crunch)

Lyft fired 13% of its staff, Stripe 14%, Opendoor 18%, and Chime 12%.

Meanwhile Apple and Amazon have quietly instituted hiring freezes.

Looks like the commies defenestrated from Twit Central aren't going to have a soft landing anywhere.

Disclaimer: We're hiring. But not commies.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:46 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 355 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Yes, but look at all these openings in the helicopter tourism industry! Guys, it pays really well, and the benefits are . . . *carefully reads disclaimer* . . . a shortage of commies?! That's insane! How can you have a shortage of commies?

Posted by: normal at Sunday, November 06 2022 08:14 PM (obo9H)

2 A guy on a forum I read says there's one possible upside to this rent-a-cpu-feature thing: right now, at the high end, there is a dizzying array of CPUs available. He showed a table with about 15 suffixes, based on what features are in the silicon or not. According to him, being able to cut that dizzying matrix down to a relatively few models, and then buy the additional features he wants may make his job easier--but apparently he is high up in IT for some really large organization. Probably won't be as good for smaller companies.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 07 2022 01:23 AM (BMUHC)

3 Re: commies. I saw an article (didn't read, just saw headline) yesterday saying Atlassian's ready to snap 'em up.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 07 2022 01:24 AM (BMUHC)

4 I doubt Atlassian would want a bunch of new high-priced Silicon Valley employees; maybe they'll just hire the ones in third-world countries that can be trained to cut-and-paste knowledgebase articles into customer support tickets.

Related, it sounds like Facebook will be releasing a few thousand as well, which, combined with all the other cuts and freezes, could do "interesting" things to the SV job market. Kind of glad I'm not there any more and living somewhere a lot cheaper...

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, November 07 2022 07:39 AM (oJgNG)

5 The feds are actually pushing, IIRC, Air Mobility right now.

Targeting people moving in big cities.

Anyway, my start up has pressing need to recruit ethical AI researchers, and several other areas that Musk has let go for some reason.

If you know anyone with certain affinities from Twitter, Google, Apple or Amazon, please direct them to Saint Rafal of Warsaw Aviation.

Saint Rafal of Warsaw Aviation, where we most strongly wish to preserve the life of every human.

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Monday, November 07 2022 10:34 AM (r9O5h)

I doubt Atlassian would want a bunch of new high-priced Silicon Valley employees; maybe they'll just hire the ones in third-world countries that can be trained to cut-and-paste knowledgebase articles into customer support tickets.

The Aussie dollar is in the toilet right now, making it very cheap to hire tech staff in Australia if your customers are based in the US and Europe. Atlassian is doing a hiring push Australia-wide - about 50% of their staff works remotely so they're not limited to a couple of big expensive cities.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 07 2022 01:35 PM (PiXy!)

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