• It's the end of the social media era and we're all going to die.  (The Verge)
  
  More than anything else, social networks are being killed by the end of low interest rates.  They survived every kind of privacy scandal, they survived being run by outright communists.  But they can't make money when interest rates are at historically pretty normal levels.
  
  Which is why Reddit is murdering third-party application and Twitter is planning to become a shopping platform.
  
  
  
• Twitter has resurrected Tweetdeck.  (The Verge)
  
  Because you have to keep the platform alive long enough to transform it to something profitable.
  
  A necessity Reddit forgot.
  
  
  
• Instagram is launching its Twitter competitor, Threads, this week.  (The Verge)
  
  Because sometimes it's cheaper to kill your competitors than to buy them.
  
  
  
• Twitter's competitors soar after yet another bad Musk move.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Twitter competitor Spill (who?) has now gained 0.01% of Twitter's audience, including high-profile celebrities like Keke Palmer (who?) and Ava DeVernay (who?)  This weekend, the iconic musician from The Roots (who?), Questlove (who?), tweeted - that is, posted on Twitter, a link promoting his Spill profile. Lizzo (the fat chick) even took to Instagram (which is not Spill) and Twitter (also not Spill) to see if she could score a Spill invite.
  
  

• TSMC's CEO made 276 times as much money as an average worker in 2022.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And worth every penny.
  
  The average salary for TSMC employees was also four times the average income in Taiwan, so it's not like he's stiffing the help.
  
  
  
• West Taiwan meanwhile is planning to restrict exports of gallium and germanium.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Neither of which are all that rare, so all this will do is hand the market to other countries.
  
  
  
• AMD's next-gen Epyc chips will offer up to 128 Zen 5 or 192 Zen 5c cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  So one of the new chips will be as fast as two of AMD's fastest chips from a month ago.
  
  
  
• Apple plans to appeal to the US Supreme Court to undo a 9th Circuit ruling that punctured the company's lucrative protection racket.  (Reuters)
  
  You can't put an application on an iPhone without Apple's blessing.
  
  You can't get Apple's blessing without handing them 30% of your gross revenue.
  
  And you can't - or couldn't - mention alternate payment methods that bypassed Apple's sticky fingers.
  
  The 9th Circuit in the Epic v. Apple case ruled that Apple couldn't legally require that, which kills one of Apple's largest revenue streams.
  
  I'm hoping the Supremes shut them down, hard, but I don't know enough about the relevant law to make a prediction.

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, July 05 2023 05:34 PM (BzEjn)

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• Kotaku and Gizmodo writers are furious - though when are they not - after finding out that new corporate owners F/U Media - which also controls Jersey Belle, Leekspin, and Quarts - plans to replace them all with the new Ai-enabled office coffee machine.  (Futurism)
  
  "Frankly it produces better copy as well as better coffee," said F/U Media editorial director Brant Bronson.  
  
  Staff writers complained that coffee-based trials "had already led to a flood of error-prone, plagiarised, and poorly-written content due to badly implemented - and, some would argue, inherently unsuited AI models - that still have a strong tendency to make up facts."
  
  When questioned on this issue, Bronson agreed, but noted that in blind tests nobody was able to tell the difference.  "Except for the coffee.  Those guys made shit coffee."

• The dirty secret of why the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico declined to publish a blockbuster story of US government UFO secrets.  (Vanity Fair)
  
  It was garbage.
  
  Yes, even by their standards.
  
  
  
• Why do 50% of Americans have subtitles enabled on their TVs?  (Indie Wire)
  
  Yes, actors mumble, sound mixes are muddy, and televisions have speakers pointed down or even backwards rather than towards the audience, but that doesn't explain why this is twice as common among Gen Z as it is in Baby Boomers.  In fact, there is a strong inverse correlation with age through all generations.
  
  
  
• The first medicine for regrowing teeth is moving towards clinical trials in Japan.  (Mainichi)
  
  It's not for those who are missing a tooth here or there, though; it's for those who never grew a full set of adult teeth due to congenital conditions.  Humans actually have the ability to regrow teeth in rare circumstances but when it happens it usually doesn't work well and the resulting teeth need to be extracted anyway.  This work apparently triggers the same function but in a more controlled way.
  
  
  
• Building a toy programming language in 137 lines of Python.  (Miguel Grinberg)
  
  A good place to start if you are interested in that sort of thing.
  
  
  
• Building a simple Python-like programming language in a couple of thousand lines of Python.  (GitHub)
  
  Yes, it's a lot more code, but it's clean and readable and the result is not a toy.
  
  
  
• Writing a Ruby compiler in Ruby.  (Hokstad)
  
  If you want the real deal, a bottom-up (rather than top-down) implementation of a programming language that can compile itself, here it is.
  
  All the related source code is available on GitHub.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 03 2023 11:55 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Tuesday, July 04 2023 01:07 AM (jGwUX)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 04 2023 04:20 AM (obo9H)

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• So Twitter is having a partly self-inflicted hissy fit this weekend.  (The Verge)
  
  Allegedly because of site-scraping by the current plague of AI startups - which in my experience is entirely plausible - Twitter temporarily requires you to have an account to read the site, and has even put in place limits on how much you can read, post, reply, and like.  Which I've run into even though I have a paid account.
  
  The site scraping thing is a plague.  It is much cheaper and easier to grab content from a site than it is to deliver it: For one thing, if you are using a service like AWS or Google Cloud, inbound traffic is free while outbound traffic is very expensive.
  
  Multiple times I've been in a situation where 100 servers were all queueing up to steal content from a single server I've been running.  (In one case, it was over 2000 servers.)  I blocked them, but it takes time and there's often a site outage before I can do that.
  
  That said, the temporary rate limits have not been well thought out and if you use Twitter a lot today would be a good day to clean your house.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Apropos of nothing, I just went on to Amazon and bought the cheapest robot vacuum cleaner that had at least a four star rating. Which turned out to be an "Advwin" model - the usual Chinese no-name jumble of letters - for A$185. Call it $120.
  
  It's too dumb and cheap to spy on you - it navigates by bumping into things - but if you plop it down on an expanse of carpet it will reportedly vacuum it pretty well, and if you plop it down on an expanse of tile it will have a go at mopping that.  And it can find its way back to the charging station most of the time.
  
  Seems worth a try given that the fancy models cost anything up to A$2500.  I mean, sure, those can not only mop your floor, but empty the dirty water into the base station and then rinse out the mop, but I could just buy a dozen of these things and throw them out when they get too mucky.
  
  
  
• After the Netherlands announced it would stop selling even second-tier chipmaking tools to China, the Chinese embassy sent them a frowny face emoji.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There is only one company in the world - Dutch company ASML - that makes the most advanced equipment for producing silicon chips, and they're also a key supplier even for less-advanced devices.  So this not only prevents China from making chips on advanced processes of 7nm and below, it will over time cripple the country's ability to produce chips at 14nm.  It already has machines for that, since they were not previously restricted, but now it can no longer buy more, or procure replacement parts.
  
  That pushes them back to 28nm (the 20nm node sucked except for Intel's proprietary version) and 28nm when TSMC is ramping up 3nm is just not going to get you anywhere.
  
  The restrictions also hit flash memory and DRAM production as well as logic chips like microprocessors.
  
  Can China build its own chipmaking tools?  Sure.  In a decade or two.  Even if they steal the designs, which they probably already have, they don't currently have the factories to make the parts to make the machines to make these machines.
  
  
  
• Asus has shown off a variant of Nvidia's 4060 Ti graphics card with two M.2 slots.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This actually makes some sense because the 4060 Ti is a PCIe 4 x8 device, so it will leave half the lanes of your standard x16 motherboard slot unused.  So long as your CPU can handle the bifurcation (the term used for this) it doesn't require any extra logic, just running out the traces on the board to a pair of M.2 connectors.
  
  If your motherboard has a second slot and automatically splits the bandwidth into x8 for each, though, those M.2 slots will not work at all.
  
  
  
• When 2 is less than 1: AMD's Phoenix 2 mobile CPU is a smaller, cheaper, slower version of the Phoenix / 7840 chip shipping now.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's about 25% smaller than the existing 8 core chip, and has two Zen 4 cores and four smaller Zen 4C cores.
  
  This is similar to Intel's P (performance) and E (efficiency) cores, except where Intel's E cores are half the speed of the P cores, AMD's Zen 4C is about 80% as fast as Zen 4 - or about as fast as Zen 3.
  
  And Zen 3 is not slow.
  
  This chip is probably aimed at devices like the Steam Deck, but there's a good chance we'll see it in budget laptops as well.  It should do just fine.
  
  
  
• Taking a break from messing up Twitter, Elon Musk personally launched the ESA's Euclid space telescope on its way to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point a million miles away.  (CNN)
  
  Dude has more launch capacity than most continents.
  
  
  
• The Liberty Phone from Purism is a fairly decent $199 budget model running stock Linux rather than Google's increasingly locked-down Android.  (Liliputing)
  
  Only problem is it costs $2199.
  
  Exactly who they expect to buy this I do not know.  I can see people concerned with security and open standards spending $399 on a device like this - twice what an equivalent Android model would cost but worth it to some people because they can control exactly what their phone is doing.
  
  At this price though, it's toast.
  
  
  
• OLED panels can last more than 100 years - so long as you have blue-yellow colour blindness.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Blue is a bastard.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 03 2023 02:25 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 03 2023 09:10 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 03 2023 11:00 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 03 2023 06:07 PM (PiXy!)

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• A new Canadian law requires Google and Facebook - and apparently no-one else - to pay news organisations - almost all of which receive government funds - for the right to link to news articles without which the news organisations would have even fewer readers than they already do.
  
  Google and Facebook responded - and I quote - Canada who?  (Ars Technica)
  
  And have pulled all their links to Canadian news, which is almost all crap anyway because of the whole government funds issue.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Seagate's 8TB Barracuda sells for $100.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Compared to a Team MP34 or a Crucial P3, that's half the price, twice the capacity, and at best twenty times slower.
  
  It's getting to the point that hard drives are just backup devices, what tape drives used to be.  Not quite, but if SSD prices keep going down at this rate it won't be long.
  
  
  
• The LILYGO T-Deck is a sort-of Blackberry for $50.  (Liliputing)
  
  Except that it's about as fast as the original Blackberry from 1999, has neither a case nor a battery, and can't make phone calls (though neither could the original Blackberry models).
  
  It's an interesting little device for hobbyists though.
  
  
  
• Urtopia has announced a smart e-bike with ChatGPT integration.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Now even your bike can accuse you of racism.
  
  
  
• You now need a Twitter account to read Twitter.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Once upon a time the entire Twitter feed was public for everyone.
  
  What I think this is about is API access.  Twitter has locked down the API behind insane fees, but you could get around that by just reading the website.
  
  And the reason for locking down the API is probably AI training data.  Same deal with Reddit.
  
  The fundamental problem with this is that it's not Twitter's data - or Reddit's - and never was.  They understood this once, but have long since forgotten.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 01 2023 09:47 PM (obo9H)

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