• Elon Musk just decided to bring the worst people on the internet back to Twitter. (The Verge)
  
  People who weren't banned from Twitter:
  
  
• Chinese genocide apologists
• Hitler-worshiping Hindu nationalists
• Iran's terrorist leadership
• Antifa goons actively planning assaults
• Pedophiles
• People illegally distributing puberty blockers to children (who were also pedophiles, strange coincidence there)
• People running mass-reporting schemes (who were - yes - also pedophiles)

People who were banned:


• The New York Post for news stories inconvenient to Democrats
• James Lindsay and the Babylon Bee for accurately identifying an adult male
• Nick Rekieta for being the victim of a mass-reporting scheme
• Me for suggesting a certain politician "needs to resign, or be thrown in a volcano, whatever works"


And it's only with those people being reinstated that the news media, which is all - mainstream and technology together - intensely pro-censorship, is getting itself worked up.



• Hoping that particular politician will soon be out of office, but it's Melbourne and they're all insane down there.

Tech News

• Europe is threatening to frown at Twitter if Elon Musk closes all the company's European offices and tells the tiny-minded fascists of the EU to take a hike.  (Tech Crunch)

  For "appropriateness of the expertise and resources allocated" read: "Shuttering local offices and canning EU staff will be frowned upon - hard."

  That idiocy is Tech Crunch's own wording, but it's understandable because EU officials actually said this:

  For those platforms that the Commission will designate as very large online platforms, the risk management obligations also include a strong component on the appropriateness of the resources allocated to managing societal risks in the Union. Among other matters, the Commission will scrutinise the appropriateness of the expertise and resources allocated, as well as the way they organise their compliance function.

  The appropriate thing to do is for Musk to close down all operations in Europe and direct users at a US-based portal to pay their $8.
  
  It's not like Europe is going to create its own social network.
  
  
  
• Turning and turning in the widening gyre
  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
  Mere amnesty is loosed upon the world.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Twitter has announced it is granting amnesty to all accounts previously banned for reasons other than actually breaking the law or persistent spam.
  
  I strongly suspect that the records of the former Bureau of Censorship and Intimidation contain so much bullshit that they can't even begin to selectively undo the damage of the past four years.
  
  The mass reinstatements start next week; no indication yet how long it will take to complete.
  
  The usual suspects say that this is the three hundred and seventeenth sign of the Apocalypse which seems to be running seriously behind schedule at this point.

• The PlayStation 6 could launch in 2028.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The PlayStation 5 meanwhile will be in stock in retail stores no later than 2030.
  
  
  
• The FTC meanwhile is frowning at Microsoft's acquisition of Activision.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Which in my opinion is good news for Microsoft.
  
  
  
• Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time: IBM is suing Micro Focus for allegedly reverse-engineering CICS to create its own Enterprise Server product...  Close to 20 years ago.  (The Register)
  
  CICS was first released in 1969.  Micro Focus was founded in 1976, and while I couldn't find exactly when the first version of their Enterprise Server was released, it has been quite a while.  Not sure if this sort of suit has any de facto expiry on it the way trademarks do.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Saturday, November 26 2022 02:00 AM (5cxJU)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 26 2022 08:16 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 26 2022 08:16 AM (BMUHC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Why Twitter didn't go down, from a Twitter site reliability engineer.  (Substack)
  
  Because it's automated.
  
  The funny thing is, this guy worked on the distributed caching system, and the distributed cache is the most visibly unreliable component of the entire platform.
  
  
  
• Twitter is not only still not dead, but is planning to cast some advanced necromancy:
  
  
  
  
  This will be fun.

• Stable Diffusion 2.0 is here.  (Stability.ai)
  
  The new version of the AI image generation tool has all the same features, only 2.
  
  
  
• The US Navy has been found to have committed software piracy in a $600 million lawsuit.  (Gizmodo)
  
  And ordered to pay $150,000.
  
  Which is a pretty sweet deal, honestly.  Maybe someone remembered that they have an almost unlimited number of guided missiles.
  
  
  
• Amazon is planning to spend $1 billion a year producing bad movies.  (CNBC)
  
  The operative word bad wasn't in the press release for some reason.  I guess they just assumed we'd know.
  
  
  
• An in-depth look at the (current) low-end Ryzen 7000 models.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  They're by no means bad, but for a pure gaming setup you might be better off with Intel's 13600K than the Ryzen 7600X.
  
  For the stuff I do (software development and testing), the efficiency cores on Intel chips are a pain in the bum, and AMD's chips provide both better and more consistent multi-threaded performance.  For gaming or tasks like 3D rendering there's less difference between the two options.

• So you're building a PC and you just want a basically decent video card that doesn't cost three arms and a leg and require its own substation.  What about the new Radeon 6700 (non-XT).  Is that any good?  Yes.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's cheaper than Nvidia's RTX 3060, and if you're not playing with ray tracing turned on it's 25% faster.  If you are using ray tracing it's 10% slower, so there is a tradeoff to consider.
  
  
  
• Hololive EN and ID are streaming Minecraft again.  I've missed that.  Other games tend to be too distracting to have on while I work, but Minecraft is mostly building and chatting, or gathering resources and chatting, or dying horribly in the Nether and chatting.
  
  
  
• Twitter is still not dead.

• If you want to pack 768 cores and 24TB of RAM into a single 2U system, Gigabyte has what you need.  (Serve the Home)
  
  That's a four node blade system rather than a single shared-memory server, so you'd want to connect it with 800GbE and run some flavour of clustering.
  
  
  
• Bullshit projects, bullshit jobs, bullshit industries.  (Earthly)
  
  Been there, done that, currently wearing the t-shirt.
  
  
  
• HP is planning to lay off 6000 workers over the next 3 years.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  HP (this is just the consumer products company; the enterprise and engineering divisions are separate entities now) has over 50,000 employees, so over three years that would be less than normal staff turnover anyway.
  
  
  
• WSL is out of beta.  (Phoronix)
  
  I haven't done anything hugely taxing with it recently, but I use it every day, and it's very handy.  Greatly reduces the need to run a conventional Linux virtual machine.
  
  
  
• The bankruptcy proceedings for collapsed Ponzi scheme FTX have been moved from the Bahamas to Delaware.  (CNBC)
  
  It sounds like the Bahamian government was happy to wash its hands of the mess.
  
  
  
• A look inside how news sausages are made.  (Semafor)
  
  By gibbering imbeciles, it would appear:

  I can't imagine a US intelligence official would be wrong on this

  Thanks for WWIII fellas.
  
  
  
• Genesis, a sister company of Grayscale in the Digital Currency Group, is reportedly considering filing for bankruptcy.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The company supposedly has assets of $2.8 billion and a $35 million exposure from the current crypocalypse, so it would seem that somebody is lying about something.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, TSMC, one of those stodgy old fashioned companies that actually makes stuff, is looking to invest $32 billion in a 1nm chip factory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Better mark where you put it, guys, or you'll never find it again.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 24 2022 01:11 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 24 2022 03:18 AM (kbV78)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Why is the entire tech industry imploding at once?  (The Atlantic)
  
  Because you locked people into their homes while pumping trillions of dollars into the economy, and then hiked interest rates to combat the inevitable inflation, creating and then bursting a massive bubble.
  
  You idiots.
  
  
  

Tech News

• With Twitter ushering in a new era of free speech - not just Trump, but dozens of other prominent accounts having been reinstated - liberals are vowing to stay and fight.  (The Atlantic)
  
  You have to ask, if they label themselves the "resistance", what exactly they are resisting.  They seem extremely upset that one tech company is now run by a middle of the road vaguely libertarian guy who sees their histrionic antics for what they are.
  
  
  
• Tumblr is adding support for ActivityPub so that it can be part of the Fediverse.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  All this shit started when Tumblr banned porn.  Before then, the crazies were safely contained.  Now, Elon Musk has had to spend $44 billion to stop them burning civilisation to the ground.
  
  
  
• Samsung has stolen a lead over everyone else with 3nm chip production - but only 20% of the chips actually work.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Early production on a new process often has high failure rates, but a 20% yield is really bad.
  
  
  
• Is wine fake?  Well, yes, but also no.  (Asterisk)
  
  The article provides some details about a study I'd read of previously, that found that wine experts couldn't tell the difference between red and white wine in a blind tasting.  That's not quite true, as most things aren't.
  
  
  
• For example, Pfizer is not hiking the price of COVID vaccines by 400%.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's only 300%.
  
  
  
• Did Sam Bankman-Fried buy off the media?  (Reason)
  
  <shake shake>
  
  Signs point to yes.
  
  
  
• Trust us, we totally have $10 billion worth of Bitcoin, says Grayscale.  (WCCFTech)
  
  "Can we see it?"
  "No."
  
  They are currently trading at about half of their claimed value.
  
  
  
• Amazon Alexa is on track to earn $10 billion this year.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Except in the opposite direction.  I'm not sure how they've managed it but Amazon's Telescreen division is bleeding money eight times faster than Twitter was.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 23 2022 12:22 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Wednesday, November 23 2022 02:51 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 23 2022 03:14 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: onepearlb at Tuesday, January 31 2023 09:43 PM (X4iOR)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• CBS abandoned Twitter over safety concerns, apparently worried that someone might correct their mistakes.
  
  They lasted a day.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Meanwhile individual journalists are fleeing free speech for the comfort of the distributed platform Mastodon, which is going about as well as you might expect.
  
  
  
  
  The one thing crazier and more self-absorbed than journalists, it turns out, is people who run Fediverse nodes.
  
  
  

Tech News

• If computers keep getting faster, why do they sometimes feel like they're getting slower?
  
  Because they are.  (Dan Luu)
  
  Measuring the time from pressing a key to the matching character appearing on the screen, the fastest system on the list is...  The Apple IIe.
  
  
  
• Proof of Solvency: Using the blockchain to make sure that blockchain exchanges aren't Ponzi schemes.  (Vitalik.ca)
  
  Might not work, but the more friction you throw in the way of fraud, the better.
  
  
  
• Price cuts expand on the Ryzen 7000 range.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The leaked price of the upcoming 7900 is $429 against $549 MSRP for the faster 7900X, but the 7900X is now selling for $474, so if you want it you might as well buy it now.  (The 7900X can be configured to run at 65W just like the 7900 non-X.)
  
  
  
• You will never fix it later.  (Useless Devblog)
  
  This is not entirely true, though the counterexamples are most often when the thing you promised to fix later suddenly breaks down entirely.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 22 2022 03:11 AM (LADmw)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• After a poll that garnered fifteen million votes, Donald Trump's Twitter account has been reinstated.
  
  
  
  
  The usual suspects are, well, usual suspecting:
  
  
  
  
  Given that both Apple and Google carry Trump's own Truth Social app in their stores, I think the answer there might not be what Karen was looking for.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Oh no, there's another one.
  
  
  
  Guess I gotta buy it.  It's a great case, but not cheap, and these special editions run 50% over the price of the regular version.
  
  I'd be in trouble if they announced they were doing all of Hololive.
  
  
  
• Artifacts of range restriction: When predictive factors aren't.  (Towards Data Science)
  
  One example is particularly clear: Among employees of tech companies, technical skill is one of the weakest predictors of success.  That's because tech companies are trying to hire the top 5% by technical skill, and with that range restricted other factors are amplified.
  
  
  
• Nvidia is expected to launch its mobile 4000 series GPUs on January 3.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Leaked numbers indicate the mobile 4060 will be faster than the mobile 3070, and the mobile 4070 will be faster than the current top of the line mobile 3080 Ti.
  
  I wish they'd give them different names to the desktop cards, though.
  
  
  
• Looking for an 8 core NUC that can double as a four port 2.5Gb firewall/router?  This is one.  (Serve the Home)
  
  If you don't mind ordering from a random company on AliExpress and getting who knows what BIOS, it does seem to work.
  
  
  
• Funny how this suddenly became possible after the entire Twitter management team and three quarters of the stuff were terminated and locked out of the network.
  
  

• Twitter is dead.  (Ars Technica)
  
  
  
• Seriously, Twitter is dead.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
• Twitter is dead, no really you guys, follow us on Twitter for updates on this and other breaking stories.  (Unusual Whales)
  
  
  
• Wait, was this Musk's plan all along, to rid the company of thousands of expensive but useless employees?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well, someone wins a kewpie doll.
  
  
  
• Previously banned Twitter accounts are being reinstated.  (The Verge)
  
  Including the Babylon Bee and Jordan Peterson, who were both silenced for correctly identifying the sex of mental patients.

• Yoel Roth, former head of Twitter's Censorship and Intimidation department, should have been fired on Day One.  (New York Times)
  
  I was prepared to give him a chance - one chance.  I was wrong.
  
  Here he discusses why he quit after Musk also gave him a chance.  Short version: He loathes freedom of speech and wants to see it eradicated everywhere, because someone might say something bad.
  
  
  
• China's new home-grown CPUs could soon offer the same IPC (instructions per cycle) as AMD's Zen 3.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Missing from the story is the number of cycles per second, which is kind of important here.  You can get any IPC number you want if you can slow down the clock speed.  At its simplest, you can can internally double the clock speed - feed in a 1GHz clock and run the chip at 2Ghz - and sell it as a 1GHz part with amazing IPC.
  
  
  
• Good news: There's no shortage of the RTX 4080.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Bad news: That's because it's overpriced and nobody wants it.
  
  
  
• Google's new AI is racist.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because of course it is.
  
  
  
  
  Yeah, that's exactly what these language models do.  (And the AI image generation models as well.)  They don't understand anything.  They don't reason.  They just break down words (or images) to mathematics and recombine them in new ways.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Twitter is dead, by the way.  AI researchers are definitely not active there.
  
  
  
• Robot delivery service Nuro is laying off 20% of its staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They build robots to deliver stuff; they don't deliver robots.  Or maybe they do.
  
  
  
• Was the FTX "hack" actually the Bahamian government freezing their assets as part of a criminal investigation?  (MarketWatch)
  
  Maybe.  The appointed administrator says he has evidence that this is the case.  And he's the guy brought in to liquidate Enron so he knows a thing or two about reading cooked books.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 20 2022 02:06 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, November 20 2022 04:13 AM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Looks like Elon is getting his 75% staff cuts.  (ABC)  (No, the other one)
  
  He told staff to either commit to doing their jobs or quit now.  Sounds like many have chosen option B....  In a recession, with the entire tech industry either in a hiring freeze or actively laying off staff, and the crypto sector in particular having a complete shrieking meltdown.
  
  Janine, someone with your qualifications would have no trouble finding a top-flight job in either the food service or housekeeping industries.
  
  
  
• Alameda Research -  bankrupt sister company to the bankrupt FTX - had $14.6 billion in assets just six months ago.  (CoinDesk)
  
  Unfortunately most of this was imaginary, including billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies issued by FTX.
  
  Meanwhile FTX was spending billions of actual money on garbage.  (Semafor)
  
  Investing money in FTX was like giving a bottle of hundred year old brandy to an alcoholic.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Ticketmaster is probably glad that Twitter and FTX are eating the news cycle after having to cancel ticket sales for Taylor Swift's 2023 tour.  (ABC)
  
  They reportedly received 3.5 billion requests for tickets, which seems like a lot, but:

  "For example: based on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing) … that's a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years."

  Suffering from success, I guess.
  
  Oh, and after ignoring the growing FTX disaster for years, Congress now wants to investigate Ticketmaster.  Guess they didn't bribe the regulators.
  
  
  
• AMD is expected to release 65W non-X versions of the 7600, 7700, and 7900 at significantly lower prices than the X models.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Those are 6, 8, and 12 core parts respectively.  There was a 65W 12 core 5900 part, but it wasn't available in retail.  It will be interesting to see how the 7900 performs given that the 7900X is rated at 170W.
  
  
  
• Fred Brooks has passed away.  (Twitter)
  
  Brooks was the project manager for IBM's massively successful System/360 mainframes and OS/360 operating system, and wrote of his experiences in the classic The Mythical Man Month.
  
  His name is attached to Brooks' Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later, though he personally considered this an "outrageous oversimplification".  Not untrue, but an oversimplification.