Ambient Irony

Wednesday, December 08

Daily News Stuff December 8 2021

So That Happened Edition

Top Story

Twitter has bought chat platform Quill. (Quill)

If you use Quill, you have three days to download your history before they turn the servers off. I'm not being snarky, they are literally doing that.
Can I export my teamâ€™s Direct Messages (DMs)?
No, we do not allow the export of Direct Messages.

If I donâ€™t export, will you delete my data?

Yes. On 1pm PST, Saturday, December 11th 2021 we will delete all user data, whether or not youâ€™ve exported it.
Well, thanks.
So, that happened.

Tech News

Amazon's US-East-1 datacenter suffered increased error rates today. (CRN)

This is in the same sense as "Jeffrey Epstein didn't increase his own error rates". AWS US-East-1 burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp.

With it went a few little sites like Netflix and Disney+ and, oh, Amazon itself. Tens of thousands of Adele fans waiting in virtual line for pre-release tickets were not impressed when the whole thing was rescheduled, and they weren't notified by email because email services relying on AWS were also down. (Fortune)

Coinbase, Binance, dYdX (which is a cool name for a derivatives trading platform I must admit) and blockchain gateway Infura all suffered outages, which makes you wonder just how decentralized this decentralized finance thingy really is. (Be In Crypto)

Alexa wouldn't talk to you, Kindles couldn't kindle, Roombas couldn't roomb, and Ring video doorbells couldn't burn down your house. (The Verge)

Within Amazon, not a creature was stirring, not even a wireless mouse. (Business Insider)

AWS is not just a product, it's Amazon's own computer system. With that down, the storefront went down, and all the inventory and logistics services went with it. Delivery drivers were paid and sent home because there was nothing they could do - there's no paper trail for this, not at Amazon's scale.

Instacart, Venmo, CashApp, Roku, McDonald's app and automated kiosks, Tinder, and Delta Air Lines all went off the air. (USA Today)

We only have one direct AWS dependency at work, and that's at US-West-2 a thousand miles away, but it went down for six hours anyway.

We have quite a few indirect dependencies, though, so my day was spent cleaning up after all of those services failed.

There is no cloud, there's just someone else's computer, and it's down.
Oh, QNAP. Not again. (Tom's Hardware)

Do not under any circumstances attach your network-attached storage to a network.
Western Digital's Blue SN570 is pretty good and pretty cheap. (Tom's Hardware)

It's a DRAMless TLC drive, which is a viable option if you're on a budget and not running Oracle databases. But if you look around you'll likely find the Samsung 970 EVO for only about 10% more, and it's worth the 10%.
Leaked benchmarks of AMD's new laptop chips puts the graphics performance just short of a GTX 1650. (WCCFTech)

Which is to day, pretty darn good for integrated graphics, more than double the performance of the current generation.
Notepad now has a dark mode. (Thurrott.com)

Its mother insists it's just a phase.
DARPA-funded researchers did not accidentally create the world's first warp bubble. (The Debrief)

The article is horseshit.
"To be clear, our finding is not a warp bubble analog, it is a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble,â€ White toldThe Debrief, quickly dispensing with the notion that this is anything other than the creation of an actual, real-world warp bubble. "Hence the significance.â€
Yeah. Funnily enough, the actual published research paper - of which White himself is the lead author - says nothing of the sort. It's full of words like "intriguing" and "correlation" and starkly short on "actual real-world warp bubbles".

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

Disclaimer: There's a time when all the world's asleep, except for sysadmins who are tearing their hair out because critical online services have gone offline for the seventeenth consecutive day.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:51 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 654 words, total size 7 kb.

1 "With it went a few little sites like Netflix and Disney+ and, oh, Amazon itself."
A possibly-previously-unseen benefit of their increasing use of contractors for delivery: I had three separate packages delivered yesterday. One of them was via USPS and had been in their system since the night before, but the other two were picked up by the system that day.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 09 2021 12:24 AM (Z0GF0)

2 Hey, remember when AMD skipped a number in their lineup, having the desktops go from 3000 to 5000 because of that goofiness where the APUs got numbers from one generation higher than they were? Well, neither do they, apparently--the article mentions 6000-series Zen 3 chips .
Nice job, marketing droids.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 09 2021 12:30 AM (Z0GF0)

3 AMD is nothing if not consistent in their inconsistency in naming and numb'ring stuff.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 09 2021 12:46 AM (LADmw)

4 Well, re-reading the article, I see WTFTech is claiming the 6000 series will be Zen 3+. I'm not going to bother checking if that's true or not, but I guess the current situation is better than when they used to just reissue the same GPU with an updated number--the 560 is now the 650, or whatever. They were pretty bad about that during the GCN era (and I think nVidia's done it too in the past.)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 09 2021 01:09 AM (Z0GF0)

5 It's not clear exactly how much plus there is in Zen 3+ but these chips do have RDNA2 graphics rather than Vega, so it is still a significant update.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 09 2021 03:06 AM (PiXy!)

6 "It's not clear exactly how much plus there is in Zen 3+ but these chips do have RDNA2 graphics rather than Vega, so it is still a significant update."
True, but "5x00G" or 5x05G or the like would've probably made more sense than 6000 anything.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 09 2021 03:26 AM (Z0GF0)

7 There already are 5x00G chips though.

Apparently AMD planned a full-range launch of Zen 3+ / Ryzen 6000 originally, but the parts without integrated graphics were cancelled, so it's now only a half launch.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 09 2021 03:54 AM (PiXy!)

8 Well, that's why I suggested something like 5x05. But they could also do something like 5x00GX, or 5x00G XT or something. AMD loves throwing Xs around.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 09 2021 06:21 AM (Z0GF0)

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