Ambient Irony

Monday, June 12

Daily News Stuff 12 June 2023

Land Rights for Gay Whales Edition

Top Story

Making friends and influencing people, part one: After a remarkable performance by Reddit's CEO in an AMA (ask me anything) event, many of Reddit's largest communities - called subreddits - have reversed course on their plans for a two day outage in protest over recent changes the the platforms API and are now planning to go dark indefinitely. (The Verge)

Whoops.

Reports are that CEO Steve Huffman didn't answer a single question from developers, spending all his time whiffing paid softballs.

Here's a list of all the subreddits going offline in protest. (Reddark)

It's a lot. Most of the big default subreddits - which, to be fair, are all communist-ridden shitholes - the default subreddits that new users are subscribed to will be going private so that new users can't access them at all.

Which actually improves the site, but I don't know if Reddit will see it that way.

Tech News

Making friends and influencing people, part two: Online mortgage company Better.com just laid off its entire real estate - after forcing them to take a pay cut of 50% last November in order to keep their jobs. (Tech Crunch)

Eighteen months ago the company made headlines when the CEO fired 900 employees in a Zoom meeting and then took a month's holiday.

Better was in the news again in March last year when it accidentally processed severance pay for 3000 employees before actually telling anyone they were being laid off.

Legally those two events don't count as notice, but as a practical matter, if you're surprised at being fired by Better, you really need to pay more attention.
Making friends and influencing people, part three: What really went on in the Wuhan lab in the weeks before COVID. (The Sunday Times)

The usual, you know. Splicing together deadly viruses that Chinese authorities had kept silent, and researching a vaccine for, uh, COVID.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines, part one: Does the new Mojo programming language offer a faster superset of Python? (Slashdot)

No.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines, part two: Will tech layoffs trigger a wave of unionisation? (Slashdot)

No.
Everything new is old again: Inland's - Micro Center's house brand - new PCIe 5 TD510 SSD takes a solid state storage device with no moving parts and revolutionises the concept by adding moving parts. (Serve the Home)

In this case, a tiny but very annoying fan that runs all the time. And is probably absolutely needed, because PCIe 5 SSDs run extremely hot and performance plummets by as much as 99% when they aren't properly cooled.

It's fast. It's very fast - it can transfer over 10GB per second on sequential access, and 5GB per second on random writes, which is phenomenal. But once it fills its SLC cache, performance is worse than many competing PCIe 4 and even PCIe 3 drives, some of which are half the price.

Basically if you're wondering if you need a PCIe 5 SSD, you don't. The few people who need them already have spreadsheets full of benchmarks.

Disclaimer: And therefore never send to know for whom the gene splices; it splices for thee.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:21 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 535 words, total size 5 kb.

1 By making their subreddits private, the moderators who are complaining about, among other things, lack of decent moderation tools, are being flooded with tens of thousands of add requests. Which they're not processing.

If I were to complain about Reddit, it would be about the increasingly poor performance of the website itself. It's a bloated mess even before the infinite scrolling kicks in.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, June 12 2023 06:32 PM (oJgNG)

2 The teeny tiny blades on the fan on that Inland SSD are pretty funny. No wonder it has to spin so fast--it's all hub!
Can't make the fan wider, probably, because the way a lot of motherboards place their drive sockets, there's probably no room for it. SSDs probably would be the second-biggest beneficiaries after CPU/GPUs of that new solid-state cooling airjet thing.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 13 2023 12:03 AM (BMUHC)

3 Aside from the CPU and GPU coolers, if you are adding moving parts to what is effectively a solid state device, then you are doing it wrong. Getting rid of the South Bridge fans years ago was a wise move. Bringing them back just to support PCIe5 was a fools errand.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Tuesday, June 13 2023 04:21 AM (doHQa)

4 Look, man, making an SSD faster than you need generates a lot of excess heat, and that's gotta go somewhere if you want the thing to perform properly.
/s

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 13 2023 05:16 AM (BMUHC)

5 Annoying, one of the subreddits I read, r/embedded, is private-only, which means that in the interim, if I want to read it, I have to sign in, which means dragging the flash drive with my password manager out of the other room, sigh.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 13 2023 05:17 AM (BMUHC)

Can't make the fan wider, probably, because the way a lot of motherboards place their drive sockets, there's probably no room for it. SSDs probably would be the second-biggest beneficiaries after CPU/GPUs of that new solid-state cooling airjet thing.

The AirJet is pretty neat. For those who haven't seen it, it's a little flat thing that attaches to your chip and blasts air out one end using dozens of tiny piezoelectric elements. Problem is it can only cool about 10W, but that's about what a PCIe 5 SSD uses.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 13 2023 08:12 AM (PiXy!)

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