• 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)

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• 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)

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• 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.
  
  
  

• Twitter workers are now being expected to, well, work.  (Ace of Spades)
  
  A good roundup of events with plenty of juicy links and communists to mock, plus details of the Deep State's determination to get that damn Musk now that he's taken one of their prime propaganda tools away from them.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Amazon has started its own massive layoffs of useless communists.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  They're not going to stop supporting communist causes, they're just not going to keep them on their payroll.
  
  Which I suppose is something.  Let them all start vegan organic locally-sourced fair trade coffee shops in Portland.

• One $5000 AMD Epyc CPU outruns two $8000 Intel Xeons.  (Phoronix)
  
  True, it's a geometric mean of 200 benchmarks, both single and multi-threaded, and it doesn't fare quite so well when you only look at the multi-threaded workloads.  Still impressive, particularly when we note that this is a 32 core chip in a range that goes up to 96 cores.
  
  
  
• The Five Essential Keys.  (Starlabs)
  
  PgUp, PgDn, Home, End, and...  SysRq?
  
  Weird, but this is designed to be primarily a Linux laptop rather than Windows.
  
  Choice of an Intel 12900H or AMD 6800H - similar compute performance but the integrated graphics on the AMD chip are twice as fast, up to 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD, a 3840x2400 display (or a 2560x1600 165Hz screen, but since it doesn't have a dedicated GPU that's kind of pointless), two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, three USB-A, HDMI, microSD, and an audio jack.
  
  You can even customise the keyboard, but only if you choose the international layout which is kind of awful.
  
  
  
• The Australian Stock Exchange has cancelled its five year mission to boldly go where no stock exchange has gone before.  (The Block)
  
  The plan was to record all trades on the blockchain.  After five years of work they've scrapped the effort at a cost of A$250 million.
  
  I could have failed to deliver that project in half the time at a quarter the cost.  Call me next time, guys.
  
  
  
• Micron is cutting DRAM and flash memory production by 20%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It takes months for chips to go through the pipeline so this won't affect supply any time soon, but the supply chain may take the opportunity to increase prices.  Probably not a lot, though.  If the chips were selling well, Micron wouldn't be cutting production.
  
  
  
• Lenovo is releasing another large, high resolution table.  (Liliputing)
  
  The 11" Tab Extreme joins the Tab K10, Tab M10 FHD, Tab M10 FHD Plus, Tab M10 Plus, Tab P11 Plus, Tab P11 Pro, and Tab P12 Pro in Lenovo's range of full-size tablets with 1920x1200 or higher resolution displays.
  
  Their sole small high-resolution tablet available outside China, the M8 FHD, was quietly killed earlier this year.
  
  Not that I am still salty about that at all.

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Friday, November 18 2022 12:38 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 18 2022 01:20 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: David Eastman at Friday, November 18 2022 02:52 AM (D6Mju)

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 18 2022 04:47 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 18 2022 06:13 PM (PiXy!)

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• Tech industry job cuts are overblown.  (Protocol)

  Silicon Valley will likely see a culture shift after all the carnage at Twitter, Meta, and elsewhere, but it won’t be a long-term switch, according to Church and Crivello.
  
  Crivello predicted that engineers' lives would become 20% more intense for a year or so before going back to normal. It’s "just economics," he said.
  
  "Historically, there has been infinite demand for engineers and very little supply," Crivello said. "These companies have very little leverage."

  Well that's good to hear.  Thanks to the tireless journalists at Protocol for clearing that up.
  
  
  
• Tech news site Protocol is closing its doors and laying off its entire staff.  (CNN)
  
  Oh.

• Nvidia's RTX 4080 is here and overpriced.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you're looking to spend $1200 for the second-best video card, it makes sense to plunk down the extra $400 for the best video card.
  
  If you just want to play games pretty well, why not wait a month and get AMD's cheaper and (probably) faster 7900 XTX?
  
  
  
• FTX owes money to more than a million people.  (Vice)
  
  Take a number, kids.  You're in for a long wait before these leeches cough up a single dime.
  
  
  
• Disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried went to Twitter to announce that...  You have got to be shitting me.  (News.com.au)
  
  He's looking for investors so he can pay back the billions of dollars he stole from the first lot of investors.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Was FTX one huge money laundering scheme run by the Washington elite?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The only question is, is SBF going to get Epsteined or Maxwelled?
  
  
  
• NASA is planning a test launch of the Artemis 1 Moon rocket today.  (Space)
  
  Good luck.  Always good to see engineers breaking new ground like this.
  
  
  
• The Australian government is considering legislation banning ransomware payments.  (The Record)
  
  They've also organised a national task force - a joint operation by Australia's equivalents of the FBI and NSA - dedicated to hunting down the bastards and "making them eat their own intestines".

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 17 2022 12:51 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Thursday, November 17 2022 03:29 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: benzeen at Thursday, November 17 2022 03:32 AM (/p5qM)

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 18 2022 01:09 AM (LADmw)

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• So Pipkin Pippa, based rabbit vtuber and all-round chaos magnet, had a stream in which she created an entire imaginary vtuber agency using the NovelAI image generation tool - showing exactly the text prompts she used to get the results she wanted.  Helpful if you're new to NovelAI and kind of lost.
  
  
  
  Two days later all her creations had their own Twitter and YouTube accounts, a corporate presence, and a debut stream.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Humanity had a good run, but now we've been replaced by AI vtubers created as a joke by a cartoon rabbit.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Wednesday, November 16 2022 12:33 AM (tO+rb)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 16 2022 01:27 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: furball321 at Wednesday, November 16 2022 12:44 PM (VZYxJ)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 16 2022 01:55 PM (obo9H)

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• Recessions unmask fraud.  (The Economist)
  
  When the economy is bubbling merrily along, you can get away with fudging the books just a little to make it look like things are going better than they are.  At least for a while.
  
  But when the macroeconomic soup turns sour, and your financial papercuts turn into open wounds, it's much harder to hide.
  
  Hence FTX.
  
  
  
• Is Crypto.com next?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Since bank runs on marginal financial schemes are self-fulfilling prophecies, now that you ask the question, the answer is, probably, yes.
  
  
  
• FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried isn't who you think he is.  (CoinGeek)

  As Bankman-Fried seduces more wannabe traders into gambling on so-called digital currencies with the lure of free BTC, it’s worth remembering that all of these people have an agenda, and it usually involves you losing money to line their pockets.

  Okay, we know that.  So what?
  
  So that article is from February.

• Hell hath no fury like a bluecheck scorned.  (The Verge)
  
  Senator Ed Markey (Fascist-MA) got a Washington Post journalist to lie and violate Twitter's Terms of Service and he's mad as hell at, well, what he himself did.
  
  Elon Musk told him he's the punchline of a bad joke, which didn't exactly placate the senator, who is now threatening to Do Stuff.
  
  
  
• Apart from the 3700 full-time employees set adrift on an ice flow with a single axe, and a copy of How to Mince Friends and Rotisserie People, Twitter has cut loose around 4400 contractors.  (The Verge)
  
  Apparently that's 80% of their contract workforce.  Which means that the true total Twitter staff numbers were something like 13,000, and they still took more than a decade to get a beta version of an edit button.
  
  
  
• Crypto exchange Kraken has frozen accounts related to FTX and its evil twin Alameda Research.  (Coin Telegraph)
  
  FTX is registered in the Bahamas.  On the 10th, the Bahamian regulators froze the company's assets in the country.
  
  On the 11th, FTX said it was prioritising withdrawals by Bahamian customers under instructions of those regulators.
  
  On the 12th, the regulators said they had never issued any such instructions.
  
  As of the 13th, FTX is under criminal investigation for fraud, and not just for failing to follow regulations.

Posted by: Starry Knight at Tuesday, November 15 2022 06:30 AM (gXw+B)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 15 2022 10:11 AM (obo9H)

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Posted by: Mauser at Monday, November 14 2022 01:39 PM (BzEjn)

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• The third shoe has dropped at Twitter with more senior staff leaving the company.  (New York Post)
  
  Most notable is Yoel Roth, head of the Censorship and Intimidation department, and Chief Book Burner after the unceremonious departure of the toxic Vijaya Gadde.  Elon Musk had given Roth his support, but evidently the two did not see eye to eye on the mission.  Roth appeared to be a true believer in management by censorship, even if not quite as vapidly doctrinaire as his former boss.
  
  Roth was directly involved in the 2020 censoring of the New York Post's Laptop from Hell story, so they are not sad to see him gone. 
  
  Despite his obvious bias and general ill-intent, he did have some good points:

  In other tweets dating back to 2016 and 2017, Roth dubbed Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell a "personality-free bag of farts".

  Not inaccurate.
  
  Also out are Damien Kieran, the Chief Abusing Users' Personal Data for Fun and Profit Officer, and Lea Kissner, who filled the role of Chief Help Me I'm in Charge of Data Security at a Company Full of Communists Officer.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Bubbles.  (Oimo)
  
  You can move the thingies around.
  
  
  
• How to populate your shiny new Epyc Genoa server with RAM.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is more subtle than you might think, because a dual-socket Genoa server needs 24 memory modules to run at full speed - at least 384GB - and if you need less than that there are specific patterns that are most efficient at any given capacity.
  
  
  
• DevianTart has its own AI art generator, trained on years of Devians.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It has similar algorithms but a very different training set to Midjourney.  Some of the results I got were mediocre-to-terrible, but one in particular was awesome.
  
  
  
• The Surface Laptop 5 is here.  Grab a Surface Laptop 4 while you can.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This was my immediate thought when the new range was announced, and this review confirms it.  Performance is no better, features are mostly the same, battery life is significantly worse, and the old model is heavily discounted right now.