• I've been trying to order an air fryer from Kmart recently - because they're dirt cheap and have free shipping - but they always seem to be out of stock of what I want.  I don't need a fancy model with three frying racks, and I don't want a tiny one that can just about handle a chicken nugget on a warm day.
  
  I ended up getting a mini convection oven from them instead, because it was even cheaper than an air fryer and a lot larger and more versatile.  Also dead easy to clean unless I cook something that splashes upwards into the fan, because it's almost all glass.
  
  Anyway, I was ordering the week's groceries and I checked to see if they had anything I could use to assist with my experiments on air frying in the mini oven - I had in mind a wire basket of some kind.  Though, I suppose I could just use a large sieve, which I already have.
  
  They didn't have wire baskets.  What they did have - both the supermarket chains I order from, in fact - is air fryers.
  
  So, one of those next week.
  
  
  
• I got Nuitka's onefile mode to work.  Well, sort of; it uses AppImage and I got AppImage to work.
  
  The problem was that it was missing an icon file, which it doesn't actually need for any reason whatsoever, and Nuitka was suppressing the error message from AppImage so you couldn't tell.
  
  Now instead it fails at runtime because jaraco.text can't find the Lorem ipsum file.  I have no use for jaraco.text or Lorem ipsum, but it breaks anyway.
  
  Also it takes 1.3 seconds to start up, because it actually unpacks into a temp directory and runs from there.  That's fine for a long-running web app like Mana (or Minx) but would suck for lightweight apps and tools like my little monitoring agent.
  
  On the other hand, the monitoring agent is under 200 lines of code, where Mana and Minx are 10k and 17k LOC respectively, so the agent and tools like that are much easier to simply move to Nim or Crystal - and in fact I have already done that.
  
  Overall this is a fiddly and imperfect way to bundle apps, but it does work, and once you figure out which modules are causing problems (Munch, Jaraco) you can write a build hook and that problem goes away.
  
  I could just rewrite 10k LOC in Nim or Crystal except that I'd also need to port several libraries for templates, text processing and the like that currently aren't available on those languages, so meh to that.
  
  Now I'm going to look at making Mana work with SQLite so it can be entirely self-contained for small instances.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, there are an estimated one trillion SQLite databases in use worldwide.  (SQLite)
  
  That's rather a lot.
  
  
  
• Sapphire has announced a passively cooled Radeon RX 5700 XT.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's intended for servers and compute workstations rather than gaming, though it does have the regular set of one HDMI and three DisplayPort outputs.  Power consumption is 180W, where the 5700 XT is usually rated at 225W, so performance will likely suffer by a few percent.
  
  Pricing is, unfortunately, on a need-to-know basis, and you don't need to know.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte has announced the Aorus Gen4 7000 SSD range that effectively maxes out PCIe 4.0.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Reads at 7GBps, writes up to 6.85GBps, and endurance rated at 0.4 DWPD for 5 years.
  
  Pricing is, and I quote, premium.
  
  
  
• TSMC is ramping up its ramp up of new fabs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're planning to spend up to $28 billion on new manufacturing facilities this year, up 60% from 2020.
  
  They'll also be entering risk production on 3nm this year - that is, the first potentially marketable chips on the new process, while they iron out the final bugs.  Full volume production for 3nm will begin in the second half of 2022.
  
  
  
• Intel and board partners are prepping a slew of Z590 motherboards to couple with Rocket Lake, whichever that is.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oh, right, that's the one that reduces the core count from ten to eight.  Got it.
  
  
  
• Sigmal is expleriemcing tegnical differcultes.  (Signal)
  
  Signal's staff are shoving servers into racks as fast as they can, but barely keeping up with the waves of users fleeing WhatsApp.
  
  Also, Chrome's spellcheck is weird.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile WhatsApp has postponed stealing your data and mass-banning users who refuse to comply until May.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  "You will be eaten last", a company spokesman added.
  
  
  
• Google wants to make it very clear that they own your data.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The Google Sync API was included in the Chromium codebase, allowing users of some third-party browsers to sign in to Google and retrieve their bookmarks, saved passwords, and other information.
  
  Google will put a stop to that, you mark my words.
  
  
  
• BugTraq is dead.  (ZDNet)
  
  It survived 27 years, which is three eternities in internet time, before being killed by a chain of corporate acquisitions by increasingly hostile companies.
  
  
  
• Google gave Minds a 24-hour warning to prevent free speech or removed from the Play Store.  (Russia Today)
  
  I have to go to fucking Russia Today to find this story.
  
  Minds have removed search, discovery, and comments from their app on both the  Apple and Google app store.  The full, unrestricted Android app can be downloaded from their own website.
  
  If you use an iPhone, well, that's your problem.
  
  
  
• Parler CEO John Matze has had to go into hiding along with his family.  (Russia Today again)
  
  Matze says he has been flooded with death threats, which seems more than plausible given the level of insanity today.  (Ultra Violet: Hide in your bunker until further notice.)
  
  Parler is suing Amazon for a whole bunch of stuff, from simple breach of contract to multiple violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act.  Amazon did all those things, but the question is whether Parler can get the courts to pay attention.
  
  
  
  Interestingly here, Amazon is trying to argue that CDA Section 230 protects them - Amazon - from breach of contract suits, which means they know they fucked up.  Their contract with Parler required 30 days' notice of material breaches warranting termination, and Amazon barely gave 30 hours.
  
  
  
• Just got a notification of a new Coco livestream that ended seven hours ago.  Good work, everyone.

Not At All Tech News

Cooking With Sous Vide and Also Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 17 2021 03:10 AM (eqaFC)

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• Was looking at software packaging options today.  I could write everything in Crystal or Nim and produce standalone and fairly portable binaries, but that would require writing everything in Crystal or Nim.
  
  I could use Nuitka - a Python-to-C compiler designed for 100% compatibility rather than maximum performance.  This seems to work, but it takes about 10 minutes to build Mana, and if I'm trying to build a single-file app, it doesn't actually build the single file.  That feature only arrived last month and is marked as experimental, so maybe for now it is what it is.
  
  Or PyInstaller, which takes your app, your Python interpreter, and all the libraries you're using, and squashes them all together.  This works, unless you are using the Munch library, in which case your app fails at runtime.
  
  Mana uses Munch everywhere.
  
  In this case though there's a GitHub issue with a detailed discussion and the necessary configuration to fix it.  It's something odd Munch does with imports that leaves it out of the build, even if you tell PyInstaller to include it.
  
  Next I'm going to see if it works with PyPy.  Just because.
  
  
  
• Samsung has announced the Galaxy S21 range.  (AnandTech)
  
  Better, faster, and for a welcome change also cheaper than the S20.  It has everything you'd expect including five rear cameras on the top-of-the-line S21 Ultra, and is based on the Snapdragon 888 with the new Arm X1 high-performance core.
  
  It also adds support for - but does not ship with - the S-Pen that comes with the Note and some Samsung tablets.
  
  Prices start at $799 and range up to $1379 for the S21 Ultra with 16GB of RAM and 512GB storage.
  
  
  
• Nvidia is considering manufacturing cards specifically for crypto miners again.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is understandable and provides them a welcome opportunity to shift excess stock of RTX 3000-series card- WHAT THE FUCKING HELL ARE YOU FUCKING FUCKS FUCKING THINKING?!
  
  
  
• A look a the Dell Poweredge R7525 server.  (Serve the Home)
  
  If you're overly familiar with Dell's product numbering scheme you might have just said wait, is that an AMD system?
  
  It is indeed an AMD system.  What's more, it's an AMD system that supports even the specialised high-end Epyc SKUs that are targeted mostly to supercomputer builders.
  
  It supports up to 128 cores, 24 NVMe SSDs, a total of 160 lanes of PCIe 4.0, and as much as 8TB of RAM in a standard 2U server.  It also has an industry-standard OCP module for networking, for up to dual 100GbE.
  
  
  
• Twitter can fight a land war with Uganda but Bitcoin scammers are given free rein.  (BleepingComputer)
  
  No, Elon Musk is not going to give you $58,000.  Robot catgirl maids, yes.  $58,000, no.
  
  
  
• The problem with getting Linux to run on Apple's M1 processor.  (ZDNet)
  
  In a word, no documentation.  Wait, that's two words.  Undocumented.  User mode is mostly standard - not entirely, but mostly - but the system side of it?  Good luck, pal.
  
  
  
• How to instantly corrupt your NTFS hard drive.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Several very simple ways of doing this are listed.  Don't try this at home.
  
  
  
• A worthy successor to Bill de Blasio.  (Al Jazeera)
  
  At least, as all this goes up in flames, we'll still be able to laugh at New York.
  
  
  

Laughing At New York Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 16 2021 01:20 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 16 2021 01:21 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 16 2021 01:36 AM (eqaFC)

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• Intel has named former CTO Pat Gelsinger as its new CEO.  (AnandTech)
  
  Gelsinger is well-respected in the industry and this may be a sign that Intel has finally chosen to unfuck itself.
  
  
  
• I've been playing with Minds some more.
  
  It seems to work best of the alternative platforms I've tried so far and I actually know some people on it.  Except they're mostly shitposters who are getting purged right now and my feed is more chaotic than insightful.  Though that's true of Twitter as well, and Minds has rather fewer fascists who want to see my children taken away.
  
  It does have a focus on independent creators monetizing content, which skews it away from what I personally want to do, but it's an entirely valid angle.
  
  Going to experiment with cross-posting these blog entries over there.
  
  Update: Well, that was a short-lived experiment.  They want my phone number and Ethereum wallet before I can post a blog entry.
  
  Major Limitations: The platform - not the software, which is open source, but the platform - locks you in.  You can't read it without an account, you can't embed content in third-party pages, you can't export your own data, and there is no public API.
  
  It's helpful for people fleeing the Twitter purge, but it's not a solution.
  
  It's also useful for me to see those problems and figure out solutions.
  
  I'll write a separate blog post this weekend comparing as many of the social media platforms as I can.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced their NUC 11 Phantom Canyon with Tiger Lake CPUs and Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Great timing on that one, guys.
  
  
  
• TSMC will start producing Intel Core i3 parts on their 5nm process later this year unless they won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel is outsourcing some of its production, they've announced that already.  They haven't mentioned CPUs in that so far, but it may well be true.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has announce their Cloud for Retail, bundling software and Azure services.  (ZDNet)
  
  Azure is the second largest cloud platform but it is far in the lead in the retail sector because nobody there trusts Amazon with their data.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm has acquired Nuvia for $1.4 billion.  (AnandTech)
  
  In public, Nuvia has been exceptionally vague on the tech they are working on, but they must have told somebody because they previously raised $300 million in VC funding - and they have the chief architect of Apple's processors through A13 on board.
  
  That Qualcomm spent over a billion dollars on them pretty much establishes that they're working on Arm cores and not RISC-V or any other architecture.
  
  
  
• iOS has extremely robust cryptography that it doesn't actually bother to use much of the time.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Android too, which should surprise no-one.
  
  
  
• Phison has announced new USB flash controllers.  (AnandTech)
  
  That is, chips that interface directly from USB to the flash storage, not USB to SATA or USB to NVMe.
  
  This is something I've been pushing for a while, because even 10Gb USB is twice as fast as SATA and can provide power over the same cable.  And they also have a 20Gb USB model.
  
  They are DRAMless designs so not suitable for high-end applications - but for that you'd want NVMe anyway, so probably not a problem.  
  
  Time for SATA to fade away and USB to take its place.
  
  
  
• Parler's new serverless architecture.  (Last Week in AWS)
  
  This is from a company that provides AWS services, so they are desperately dodging the only possible conclusion, which is don't trust Amazon for anything, ever - and other cloud providers aren't much better.
  
  
  
• The reality of the lizard people.  (Armed and Dangerous)
  
  Lizard people are real - they're just mental rather than biological reptiles.  Though sometimes it's hard to be certain of that.  (Content warning: Lizard person)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 15 2021 01:17 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 15 2021 01:20 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 15 2021 01:43 AM (LADmw)

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Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 15 2021 02:08 AM (eqaFC)

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Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 15 2021 03:57 AM (eqaFC)

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• Took a nap, came back to my desk, both my computers had rebooted for updates and Tohru was down to 8GB of usable RAM again.
  
  Restart, enter BIOS, exit BIOS, and Windows finds all the RAM again.
  
  Ugh.  Well, I'll be doing a full reinstall soon, so if it's Windows itself that will fix it.
  
  
  
• On the up side I've been having trouble with Multiplicity and with both machines freshly restarted there was no reason not to fiddle with it.  I couldn't break any running apps because there weren't any.
  
  Turns out there was nothing wrong with Multiplicity, but instead our new VPN client had rolled back some fixes I made to my hosts file, and while Multiplicity could discover Rally from Tohru it then got fed the wrong IP address.
  
  Now it's all working properly.
  
  
  
• AMD has launched Ryzen 5000 Mobile.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's their big day at Pretend CES so there were a few announcements.
  
  There are eight H-series variants and two U-series models, with either 6 cores / 12 threads or 8 cores / 16 threads.
  
  In addition there are three rebadged Ryzen 4000 models as was leaked previously, making up the low end.  However, all 13 parts have threading enabled, and all but one have at least six cores.
  
  There's supposedly another mobile APU range coming this year with RDNA2 rather than Vega graphics, but that wasn't announced today.
  
  
  
• Threadripper Pro is no longer just for big OEMs.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's not clear if it will be available at regular retail, but Supermicro, Asus, and Gigabyte have all announced motherboards.
  
  All support at least six PCIe 4.0 x16 slots and 1TB of RAM, including registered and load-reduced DIMMs and ECC.
  
  Serve the Home has more detail of the Supermicro offering.
  
  It includes remote management, 10Gb Ethernet, and four M.2 slots.
  
  
  
• Also Epyc.  (AnandTech)
  
  There was a demo of Zen 3 Epyc and a benchmark comparison against Intel - which AMD naturally won - but no dates, specs, or prices.
  
  
  
• The Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 has a Ryzen 5000 APU and an RTX 3000 GPU.  (AnandTech)
  
  Up to 32GB RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD, and a basic 1080p display or a 1440p 165Hz model with 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut.
  
  But it lacks the Four Essential Keys because we can't have nice things.  Also good chance finding one when it eventually ships.
  
  
  
• Oh yes - Nvidia announced RTX 3000 Mobile.  (AnandTech)
  
  There will be various models of 3060, 3070, and 3080, with 6GB RAM on the 3060 and 8GB on the 3070 and 3080.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the RTX 3060 Nvidia announced the RTX 3060.  (AnandTech)
  
  Where the 3060 Ti is 80% of a 3070 at 80% of the price, this is 80% of a 3060 Ti and 80% of the price.  Except for memory, where it is 150% of a 3060 Ti.
  
  Nvidia reduced this to a 192-bit bus to cut costs, but 6GB RAM isn't enough for modern games, so they had to double it.  That's not bad overall; $329 for the full RTX 3000 feature set and 12GB of RAM.
  
  If it costs $329 at retail, and if you can actually find it at retail.
  
  
  
• Apple has announced that it is racist.  (9to5Mac)
  
  It will be spending $100 million to tackle its problems with using child slaves to assemble its overpriced fashion access...  Wait, not, it's not doing any of that.  Fuck the child slaves.
  
  
  
• JuiceFS is a Posix-compliant filesystem built on top of, uh, built on top of Redis and S3-compatible object storage.  (GitHub)
  
  It's inherently a shared filesystem, and apparently performance isn't entirely awful.  But I use Redis and S3 storage in my day job and the notion of gluing them together like that is slightly horrifying.
  
  
  
• Beaker is a browser with a built-in peer-to-peer web server.  (Beaker Browser)
  
  That doesn't necessarily mean that your computer will get hacked and all your files deleted, but it does seem likely.
  
  
  
• Apple's App store is a trash fire on MacOS too.  (Wireguard Mailing List)
  
  Just making sure Mac users and developers don't feel left out of all the fun with inconsistent review policies, bizarre demands for a 30% cut of everything, and weeks-long delays for critical bugfixes.
  
  
  
• Fuck GoDaddy.  (Not the Bee)
  
  I've given GoDaddy some credit because when someone tried to hijack one of my domains all it took was one ticket for them to jump in and yank it back for me.  But this is abject shittery.
  
  
  
• Just look at these fuckbiscuits.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Twitter is getting ratioed to hell on Twitter.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 14 2021 12:27 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:32 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:35 AM (eqaFC)

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Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:43 AM (6y7dz)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 14 2021 01:45 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, January 14 2021 02:33 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, January 14 2021 02:56 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 14 2021 06:43 AM (eqaFC)

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Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, January 13 2021 03:02 PM (4i7w0)

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• In somewhat better news, I've found that both major supermarkets have surprisingly good store brand gluten free frozen satay chicken and rice for $3.  With actual real identifiable chicken.
  
  Chicken korma too, though that one's a little spicy for a korma.  The butter chicken has the same branding but is clearly made by someone else and is terrible.
  
  This matters to me because a lot of the gluten-free products I usually eat have been out of stock for months.  Fruit and vegetables and meat are naturally gluten-free but who has time to bother with such stuff?
  
  
  
• I bought an oven.  I was looking for an air fryer but the ones at Kmart are perpetually out of stock, and they had a 12L benchtop convection oven for $45 and I thought, why not give that a try?
  
  Well.  It arrived.
  
  It's basically a big bowl of heat-resistant glass with the heating element, fan, and controls all sitting on the (mostly also glass) lid.  Being almost entirely glass makes it dead easy to clean and it's surprisingly large.  My microwave is nominally, what, 25L?  And this one has much more usable room.
  
  Going to give it a try tomorrow and cook some chips (fries) or tater tots or something.
  
  
  
• Also joined Minds.
  
  Seems to be a nice clean design and the site works well.
  
  It's not like Twitter or even Facebook, more like, well, mee.nu.  And I already have one of those.
  
  Actually, to be fair, it's more modern and cleaner than mee.nu, offers global search, and lets you construct your own feed.  Discoverability still not great even so.
  
  Plus it's open source and there's an API maybe and you can run your own node oh fucking hell.
  
  
  • 3 Cassandra Nodes (Min 30gb RAM, 1TB SSD, 8 CPU)
  • 1 ElasticSearch Node (Min 16GB RAM, 250GB SSD, 8 CPU) #2 nodes are recommended for failover
  • 1 Docker Machine (Min 60gb RAM, 50GB SSD, 32 CPU)
  
  I do all my Mana testing on a 2 core VM with 4GB RAM, to run everything, including all my non-Mana development stuff.  Admittedly I'm moving to something large because it actually costs less, but those starting requirements are yikes.
  
  
  
• Intel at Virtual CES spoke about Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake, Jasper Lake, and Alder Lake.  (AnandTech)
  
  Then they took questions from the press.  Sort of.

  Intel has been teasing its next generation Rocket Lake desktop processors for several months now, with arrows pointing to PCIe 4.0 and we already know about the backported CPU and GPU cores.  There are big questions as to what this means for performance and power, and Intel answered exactly zero of our questions.

  
  
  
• Lulu is a firewall for MacOS that blocks unexpected outgoing connections.  (Objective-See)
  
  MacOS, which is the major problem app on Macs these days, still exempts itself and does whatever the fuck it wants though.
  
  
  
• Ubiquti has had a data breach at their cloud provider.  (The Verge)
  
  They don't know what data might have leaked, and I'm not sure what you can do via Ubiquiti's website, but if you use their products it would be a good time to check.
  
  
  
• The challenge of decentralising the web in 2021.  (Medium)
  
  Extra tricky when hosting providers act by bills of attainder and the default assumption of corruption of blood.
  
  
  
• Intel has added hardware-based ransomware detection to 11th generation CPUs.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Everything in that headline is a lie.  This is clearly software-based and detects load patterns and will probably cause problems all over the place.  But it's worth trying and they might eventually get it right, or at least to a point where it is worthwhile.
  
  
  
• A bipartisan group of Australian politicians is looking into whether American social media companies are breaking Australian law.  (ZDNet)
  
  Science Minister Karen Andrews:

  That is the absolute lack of transparency and the subjectivity that I am most concerned about. There needs to be fairness, it needs to be very clear that these rules are being applied in a consistent manner. And it's pretty obvious that at the moment they're not.

  Our current Acting Prime Minister:

  McCormack on Tuesday also declared "all lives matter" during a press conference.  He also said most of what his colleagues have said is true and that people on Twitter need to "toughen up".

  
  
  
• Germany and France have also taken note of the actions of the Bay Area Mafia.  (Fortune)
  
  Looking forward to years of multi-billion-dollar fines.  I'm totally against the European Union as a concept and as a real-world entity, but I'm fine with them as a boot kicking techno-fascists right in the wallet.

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, January 13 2021 07:33 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, January 13 2021 08:07 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 13 2021 11:44 AM (PiXy!)

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• Parler will be down for a while; apparently the major cloud providers have all refused to provide services.  So they're all either openly fascist or so risk-averse that they are bending to the fascists.
  
  They have all the data and will be back.
  
  Don't ever use cloud services, except for stuff you can afford to drop without notice.  Always have a backup on an entirely separate platform and preferably in a different country.
  
  One report said they were paying Amazon $300,000 per month.  That's a crazy amount of money, but Amazon is crazy expensive.
  
  
  
• The 2021 HP Envy 14 has the Four Essential Keys but nothing much else to recommend it.  (AnandTech)
  
  I mean, it's not garbage, but it has an Intel CPU and soldered-in RAM, so it's certainly not good great.  [Changed that slightly out of misplaced fairness.]
  
  
  
• If you cut and paste a link from the Edge URLbar, the result is target-dependent.  In Notepad++ it gives you just the link.  In the Minx editor, it gives you HTML, which is exactly what I don't want it to do.  Ugh.
  
  
  
• Testing the Threadripper Pro 3995WX.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  64 cores, eight memory channels, 128 lanes of PCIe.
  
  They plugged in an RTX 3090 and ran games on it, an it's about 8% slower than a 10900K (though it lags behind the 5900X by a wider margin).
  
  On tests that could take advantage of all those cores it was either the fastest or narrowly behind the regular Threadripper 3990X.  It's no faster in itself; it just supports more memory and I/O for applications that need that.
  
  Serve the Home also got their hands on one.
  
  
  
• I mean, you're not wrong.
  
  
  
  
  
• Member is a messaging platform that stores messages in Bitcoin Cash.  (Member.Cash)
  
  I don't know how well it works, but I'm looking into something not entirely dissimilar.
  
  Discussion on Hacker News notes that the front end of the example node is running on AWS and says:

  Ask Parler how that's working out.

  
  
  
• Oh yeah, fuck Stripe.  Hardly the first time they've done something awful.
  
  
  
• New Zealand's central bank got hacked.  (AP)
  
  The hackers didn't managed to do anything but probably gained access to confidential information.  But what's the point?  Who would want to hack New Zealand?  An angry sheep?
  
  
  
• That $2 trillion COVID relief omnibus shitbill contained a law requiring all US intelligence agencies to release their data on UFOs within 180 days.  (CNN)
  
  Probably the least stupid part of it.

First I Was Like What and Then I Was Like Oh Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 12 2021 12:44 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, January 12 2021 02:47 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, January 12 2021 04:10 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 12 2021 05:58 AM (6y7dz)

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• Yeah, about that, Jack.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Move Amazon over to the Fascist column. (Instapundit)
  
  Instapundit in turn links to Buzzfeed, which uses Facebook comments. which rather illustrates the problem here.
  
  Ah. Let's try this.
  
  

  Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products. We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies. This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out. #speakfreely

  -- John Matze 🇺🇸 John Sunday, January 10, 2021

  
  I'll have to see if there's a way to generate that embed from the URL.  This is a new feature; they didn't have embeds last time I looked.
  
  Update: There is a way to do it automatically, but automatic or manual it glitches slightly if you - oh, wait.  Yeah, fixed.
  
  
  
• I signed up with MeWe in the meantime.
  
  This is their privacy policy.
  
  It's pretty solid. It's about as good as it is possible to be and still maintain a functioning social media site. The site itself seems to work well and loads quickly, though it all looks a bit 2012-ish. But then so does Facebook.
  
  Don't seem to be able to read anything unless you're logged in, though.
  
  
  
• Walter Duranty has a YouTube channel.
  
  
  The article is paywalled, and it's a British paper that's actually bothered to report in this.  I haven't seen any coverage from the American mainstream media at all.  Australia's Sky News has good coverage of China, and we're currently in a low-key trade war with them so there's not a lot of positive sentiment for the commie bastards generally.
  
  Here's a longer article from last year about the wumao - China's fifty cent army.  (Medium)
  
  Because that's how much they're paid for each piece of propaganda they post.
  
  They should really talk to the New York Times again.  They would do it for free.
  
  
  
• There are engineering samples of Zen 3 desktop APUs floating around.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure that means much since you still can't get your hands on Zen 2 desktop APUs.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 3080 Max-Q could deliver 26% of the performance of a desktop 3080.  (NotebookCheck)
  
  That's...  Not great.  They've had to clock it wayyy down to get it into a laptop power envelope at all.
  
  Also - if leaked information is correct - some RTX 3070 mobile parts will be faster than some RTX 3080 mobile parts.  I'll wait for Nvidia to confirm that before I jump on their heads though.
  
  
  
• There are also reportedly Ryzen 5800 and 5900 - non-X - models on the way.  (WCCFTech)
  
  8 and 12 core 65W parts respectively.  Same disclaimer as above - wait, let me check.  Yep, same disclaimer as above.
  
  
  
• It's not just an American - or even Western - thing.  (The Lowdown)
  
  Interesting tale of how Alibaba buys smaller companies and destroys them through the usual mix of arrogance and incompetence.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk told his Twitter followers to drop Facebook for Signal.  (Digital Trends)
  
  
  Not sure what problem that really solves, but fuck Facebook, so okay.
  
  
  
• Fuck Discord.
  
  The UI is a disaster anyway.
  
  
  
• Fuck Mozilla.
  
  The Brendan Eich situation was bad enough, but now they've clearly aligned themselves with the fascists.
  
  
  
  
  
• But while I was looking for that tweet, I stumbled onto something that reminded me I was thinking too narrowly.
  
  
  My thinking was mostly that American Big Tech had told America they are not to be trusted.  But that's too narrow.  After all, I'm not American.
  
  American Big Tech has told the entire world they are not to be trusted.
  
  That's a completely different proposition.  Under the Biden Administration, there aren't going to be any rulings curtailing their depredations.  But every other country in the world will be taking note of this.
  
  Lots of interesting discussion on this point from Indian techies on Twitter.  Let a thousand social networks bloom.
  
  
  
• Section 230 ruined the internet.  (The Atlantic)
  
  Wait, what?
  
  It's actually an insightful and well-written piece.  It points out that Section 230 promotes centralised platforms at the expense of smaller ones, bad moderation at the expense of good, and uniformity of thought at the expense of individualism and free expression.

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