• The Blue Cheka lost their glittering little symbols of false legitimacy today, and there was a great weeping and a gnashing of teeth.  (The Verge)
  
  But I don't have any teeth.
  
  TEETH WILL BE PROVIDED.
  
  
  
• Can ActivityPub save the internet?  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, the same way NNTP did.

• Speaking of a great weeping and a gnashing of teeth Buzzfeed News is shutting down and firing 180 staff.  (Variety)
  
  So, first, Buzzfeed News by itself had 180 staff?
  
  Second, whatever you think of Buzzfeed, they actually published the Steele Dossier when everyone else was hiding it from view.
  
  
  
• Is Intel's slowest CPU any good?  (AnandTech)
  
  Yes, actually.
  
  The 13100F only has four cores and costs around $100 but it is faster than the eight core Ryzen 1700 I was using until last year.
  
  Faster than the laptop I am typing this on, faster than the Xeon E-2136 I use as a development environment, and not much slower than a 1240P laptop.
  
  
  
• Speaking of 1240P laptops, I'm thinking of buying an Acer Aspire 7.
  
  It doesn't have a high-resolution screen, just 1080p.
  
  The Four Essential Keys aren't in my preferred layout.
  
  But it has a decent CPU (last year's i5-1240P, if you hadn't guessed), dedicated graphics (just a GTX 1650, but plenty for playing Minecraft on the go), charges over either a dedicated port or Thunderbolt / USB-C, and has easily replaceable DDR4 RAM which I already have 128GB of sitting around.  Apart from the Thunderbolt port it has three USB-A ports, HDMI, and a headphone jack - and wired Ethernet, which is becoming a rarity these days.  No microSD slot but I can get by without that.
  
  It's a bit on the big and heavy side - it's a 15" model and the same size and weight as the 16" Gigabyte Aero I like -  but it also has the advantage of being around one fifth the price of the Aero.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Oh, right, the reason that came up is because (a) my current laptop has 16GB of RAM and 16GB simply isn't enough.  32GB is a good minimum; 64GB if I want to run Linux VMs locally for testing.
  
  Which I do, because I currently pay ($TOO_MUCH) per month for a dedicated development server in Sydney.  It runs pretty well, and has six cores, 32GB of RAM, and 800GB of SSD, which is all I could ask for.
  
  But it's a virtualised dedicated server and as such can't run VMs itself, only containers.  Since I already have RAM and an SSD for upgrades the laptop could take over and pay for itself in six months, while at the same time being a (mostly) better laptop than my current laptop.
  
  
  
• The RTX 4070 isn't selling so Nvidia is making less of them.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There's more money to be made selling high-end cards at $30,00 a pop to AI nuts.
  
  The GPU market is AMD's to scoop up at this point but they haven't released any new cards since the 7900 XT.
  
  
  
• The Asus Ally handheld game console should squish the Steam Deck in terms of performance.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It has 8 Zen 4 CPU cores vs. 4 Zen 2 cores on the Steam Deck, and 6 RDNA3 graphics cores vs. 4 RDNA2 cores.  (RDNA3 is about 30% faster than RDNA2 for a given core count.)
  
  Price and launch date have yet to be announced.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 21 2023 09:31 PM (obo9H)

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