• The FTX crypto derivatives exchange which was valued at $32 billion five minutes ago is now basically fucked.  (MSN)

  "FTX is fine. Assets are fine," said FTX CEO whatsisname just before leaping out of a ground floor window.

  Penthouse apartments in Central Park West are a bit of an ask when your net worth is measured in belly button lint.
  
  Do you people want regulators?   Because that's how you get regulators.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Sequoia Capital wrote down its $210 million investment in FTX to, let's see...  Zero.

  "Fuck this shit, we're out," said a Sequoia executive on conditions of anonymity.

  
  
  

• I mean, they were slightly more verbose in their tweet, but that's the gist.
  
  
  
  
  If only someone had pointed out that this is all basically either (a) a deliberate scam because the people running it are crooks or (b) an inadvertent scam because the people running it are idiots.
  
  Sometimes both at the same time.
  
  
  
• The contagion is spreading to other crypto bullshit, wiping who knows how much value off of totally imaginary nonsense.  (Axios)
  
  Oh no, my ugly monkey JPEGs.
  
  
  
• Crypto exchange Binance which had offered to buy out and salvage the sinking, on fire, plague-riddled, rat infested FTX, has fled for the hills.  (CoinDesk)
  
  They said something that sounded very much like "fuck this shit, we're out" but the line was bad and we couldn't be sure.
  
  
  
• Proving that these crypto boys are pipsqueaks when it comes to fucking shit up Amazon has lost $1 trillion in market cap in less than 12 months.  (Gizmodo)
  
  The top five US companies have lost an aggregate $4 trillion this year.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti may arrive on January 5.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For those of you keeping track, this is the 4080 12GB edition that Nvidia unceremoniously disowner after it peed on the carpet in front of all the guests.
  
  
  
• IBM has announced its new 433 qubit quantum computer codenamed Osprey.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In theory the capacity of a quantum computer doubles with each additional qubit because it extends into parallel universes like a season opening of Rick & Morty, so that is a lot.  Still.  Or used to be.  Sometimes both at the same time.
  
  
  
• Installing Windows on innocent Android devices that did nothing to deserve this.  (Liliputing)
  
  Today's victims: The Steam Deck and Microsoft's Surface Duo 2.
  
  
  
• In France, all large parking lots must now be covered in solar panels and/or snakes.  (Electrek)
  
  The bill was rushed through voting and there's a smudge so nobody is entirely sure.
  
  
  
• The desk legs I wanted from Ikea are back in stock and it turns out that small items only incur a $29 delivery fee.  Even if you buy like 15 of them.
  
  So while the world disintegrates around me I'll at least have legs for a desk that I won't order until February because I want to get everything at once because shipping furniture is too damn expensive.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 10 2022 10:39 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Starry Knight at Friday, November 11 2022 06:22 AM (gXw+B)

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• The US government's incompetence on crypto finance regulations could drive the industry out of the country to...  Some other even more incompetent country, probably.  (Ars Technica)
  
  What will America do without its ugly monkey JPEGs and "stablecoins" that lose 95% of their value overnight.

• What's more unstable than crypto stablecoins?  Crypto stablecoin derivatives.  (CryptoSlate)
  
  Crypto derivative trading platform FTX's CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, saw 93% of his $16 billion wealth disappear in a single day.
  
  Oops.
  
  Yeah, this industry would totally be a loss if it moved elsewhere.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, the IRS raided a house in Gainesville last November and found $3.36 billion hidden in a popcorn tin.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The money was originally stolen from dark web drug bazaar Silk Road ten years ago when Bitcoin was worth about $2, not $20,000 like it is today.  A bit like a petty thief swiping a painting from the local fence only to find out it's an original Rembrandt lost since WWII.
  
  
  
• A California ballot initiative to tax rich tech bros to fund EV chargers that the state doesn't have the grid capacity to power in the first place is somehow failing.  (AP News)
  
  No is currently at 57%.
  
  
  
• Disney+ now has 152 million subscribers.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It looked like a failure early on, but with 152 million paid subscribers totaling about a billion dollars a month, that's at least a reasonable success.
  
  
  
• Intel's new NUC 13 Extreme has a Core i9 13900K, a 750W power supply, and room for a triple slot graphics card.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure how this is a NUC and not just a prebuilt PC made with nonstandard parts.
  
  
  
• The Dragonfly 44 galaxy is 99.99% dark matter.  (Quanta)
  
  We don't know what dark matter is, but we can tell it's there because we can't see it.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 09 2022 10:05 PM (obo9H)

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• Someone on Gab said something mean about Joe Biden. This is clearly a Russian Plot. (The New York Times / Archive.is)
  
  Yeah, that's it. That's the story.
  
  These people can't lose hard enough today.

• Some guy on Reddit found a PDP-8 and an LGP-30 in his grandparents' basement. (Reddit)
  
  The LGP-30, dating from 1956, is the star in the Story of Mel:

  A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming
made the bald and unvarnished statement:

Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.
Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly” software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term "software” sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.

  I didn't know any of these very, very early computers still existed in the wild.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm has a new Arm CPU.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
• Arm wants to kill it.  (The Register)
  
  Arm's lawsuit against Qualcomm appears self-defeating.  Don't declare war on your own customers unless...  There is no unless.  Don't do that.
  
  
  
• Do you need a PC the size of a box of 3.5" floppies, with three HDMI ports, three USB ports, and dual Ethernet ports?  The Gateway Mini PC T8-Pro is exactly that.  (Liliputing)
  
  Though it has as much in common with the original Gateway computer company as a thing does with another thing that it has nothing in common with except the name licensed out for a bit of extra cash.
  
  
  
• The Overton Window as arbitrage opportunity.  (Under Orion)
  
  Find out what risks people are not permitted to speak of, and hedge against those risks.  If speaking of the looming energy crisis is taboo, buy energy stocks.  And make out like a bandit.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 08 2022 10:14 PM (obo9H)

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• Massive tech industry layoffs and the whiny illiterates who report on them.  (Mashable)
  
  Facebook is set to lay off around 12,000 employees.  Peloton has already fired 4000.  Microsoft removed a relatively modest 1000.  Snapchat fired around 1200 - 20% of its total staff.  Shopify is reducing by 10%, around 1000 workers.
  
  Amazon is planning to hire 1500 new employees....  To work in its warehouses over Christmas.
  
  About the only bright point is Australia's largest tech company, Atlassian, which is looking to hire 1000 people.  That's one for every 50 tech workers laid off in the US.
  
  Thunderdome time.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Speaking of Amazon, the company just added 98 million songs to the free music library bundled with your Prime subscription which has to be losing them money in my case now that I've moved to New House City and every single package has to travel hundreds of miles and everyone is angry.  (Inc)
  
  Because they also reduced the free music service to shuffle play only.  Which the announcement said very clearly, but still is a change and also breaks Alexa.
  
  
  
• Twitter has asked 30 of the workers it just fired to come back according to a Bloomberg story based on "two people familiar with the matter".  (Reuters)
  
  They literally know nothing.
  
  
  
• Tired of SSDs that can only transfer 12GB per second?  Samsung's 8th generation 236-layer V-NAND is just what you need.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In theory PCIe 5 SSDs can reach around 14GB per second, but existing flash memory chips have held them back to just 12GBps, or on some cases a molasses-like 10GBps.
  
  Which used to be a lot.  Like, three months ago.
  
  
  

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Tuesday, November 08 2022 01:41 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: David Eastman at Tuesday, November 08 2022 04:00 AM (D6Mju)

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Posted by: normal at Monday, November 07 2022 01:14 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, November 07 2022 02:13 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, November 07 2022 02:15 PM (BzEjn)

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• 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. Alphabet’s Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta all oppose the bill.

  That's why.

• 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• Twitter layoffs leave whole teams gutted albeit not literally but that would probably be an environmental hazard.  (The Verge)
  
  Half the company has been told not to bother coming back to work on Monday.  Sadly for the idiots who thought they had a legal case under the WARN act, it turns out the richest man in the world has access to lawyers.  The actual terminations take effect at the start of February, but people are locked out of Twitter's offices and computer network effective immediately.
  
  Which is the only way to handle it when half your employees are mentally-impaired anarcho-communists.

  The areas of Twitter impacted the most by Musk’s cuts include its product trust and safety, policy, communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility, and even certain core engineering teams, according to tweets by laid-off employees and people familiar with the matter. More company leaders, including Arnaud Weber, VP of consumer product engineering, and Tony Haile, a senior director of product overseeing Twitter’s work with news publishers, have also been laid off following Musk’s firings of Twitter’s senior leadership last week.

  A lot of those teams sound like they could be removed entirely without anyone noticing - and apparently the curation department was.  That's the team that - among other things - edits the trending topics list whenever the peasants start getting ideas above their station.
  
  
  
• Latest kitchen toy is a slow cooker, which I am really liking so far.  Since I often have to work late, the ability to put dinner on at lunchtime and then eat it whenever is really convenient.  It also smells great.
  
  Doing pork medallions with baby potatoes and honey mustard sauce today.

• The Censorship and Intimidation team survived this round with only 15% cuts and is busy whistling past the Democrats' electoral graveyard and frantically cancelling the truth.
  
  
  
  
  Unfortunately for C&I there's another dozen levels of that quote tweet cascade branching out in all directions.
  
  
  
• Web3 is not the web.  (CNBC)
  
  And it's probably not 3 either.
  
  This from the guy who invented it.  The web, that is.  Not 3.  Probably.
  
  
  
• Vietnam is increasing its control over social media in the country.  (Reuters)
  
  Content ruled "inconvenient" or "true but embarrassing" must be removed by the networks within 24 hours or face...  Punji sticks, huh?  Guess a leopard never changes its hammer and sickle.
  
  
  
• Dell Australia is facing legal action from the country's consumer protection agency over bullshit monitor prices.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you advertise a sale price in Australia, the price you show as before the discount must be the regularly advertised price.  It's illegal to inflate it to make the discount look bigger...  Which is what Dell allegedly did here.
  
  
  
• The executives behind the painfully obvious MoviePass scam are facing criminal charges for fraud.  (The Verge)
  
  Investors claim they were totally fooled by the company's business plan of losing money on every sale but making it up in volume.
  
  
  
• HBO has cancelled Westworld.  (The Hollywood Reporter)
  
  This came as a shock to everyone except people who had watched recent seasons or paid any attention whatsoever to the ratings and reviews, which were utterly dire.

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, November 05 2022 11:45 AM (oJgNG)

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• The fifth shoe of the launch season has dropped with AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX.  (Tom's Hadware)
  
  The XTX has 96 compute units, up from 80 on the 6950 XT, but each compute unit has twice as many shaders as before, so the raw compute power has increase by 2.4x.
  
  But not everything has increased by the same amount, and AMD estimates real-world performance will improve by 50% to 70%.  This is similar to what we saw when Nvidia did the same trick moving from the 2080 to 3080.
  
  Performance per watt is also up by 50%, so power requirements have only increased very slightly - 355W vs. 450W for the RTX 4090.
  
  The RX 7900 XTX with 24GB of RAM is priced at $999, and the RX 7900 XT with 20GB RAM is $899.  Might as well just go for the faster card with that little price difference.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Why are AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs and motherboards so expensive?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because they cost a lot of money.  And because AMD wants to make a profit, where it looks like Intel is eating a loss on some of their desktop parts.
  
  
  
• Let a thousand arbitration demands bloom: I fought the PayPal and I won.  (Singal Minded)
  
  The trick - same as with Patreon - is that PayPal's user agreement forces you to accept arbitration and not take them to court, but PayPal agrees to cover all costs of arbitration.
  
  So just do exactly what they tell you to do, and demand that arbitration.
  
  
  
• The Asus ProArt PA32DC is a professional 4K OLED monitor.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That covers 111% of the DCI-P3 colour space.
  
  I have a new laptop with an OLED screen, but it's still sitting in a box.  I need to do something about that.
  
  
  
• They remade Bee and Puppycat.
  
  It's worse.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, November 05 2022 08:56 AM (obo9H)

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