Ambient Irony

Sunday, May 26

Daily News Stuff 26 May 2024

Curtainsed Edition

Top Story

Financial technology startup Synapse, which provided banking services to around 100 other financial technology startups with around 10 million total customers, est mort. (Tech Crunch)

Synapse filed for Chapter 11 protection last month to sort out its financial situation without impacting customers, but that failed when the buyer it had lined up walked away.

That left no alternative but liquidation, leaving all of Synapse's customers without banking services, and all of their customers without access to their money.

It's a mess.

Synapse customer Mainvest is also going into liquidation as a result of this, and is probably not the only one.

Do you people want regulatory capture? Because this is how you get regulatory capture.

Tech News

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is 10% slower than Apple's M2 on single-threaded benchmarks - but twice as fast on multi-threaded tests. (Tom's Hardware)

The X Elite has twelve full-size cores, while the base model M2 has four full-size and four low-power cores, so that tracks.

And also signals that the X Elite is finally the real deal, a genuinely powerful and efficient Arm processor for PCs that aren't completely locked down.

Qualcomm has been working with the Linux Kernel team since last October on support for the X Elite.

Which is good, because Windows 11 Sky Captain Edition sounds like a non-starter.
Britain's NHS covered up infected blood donations that led to 3000 deaths over the course of twenty years. (UPI)

There's a lot of that going around.

In the US Isaac Asimov died of HIV contracted from a blood transfusion. That was also covered up to not cause panic.
Recycled concrete can be used in place of lime in steel production. (New Atlas)

And as a bonus, the concrete - crushed and with the sand and gravel removed - is heated by the process to the point that it reverts to cement, ready to be reused.

So far it's only been tested at a small scale - a few kilograms - but industrial trials processing thirty tons an hour are set to begin this month.

No word on how energy-efficient it is, but given how much concrete is used every day and the problem of getting rid of it afterwards, this might be useful even if it's less energy efficient than just making it anew.
Search functions in ChatGPT, Copilot, and DuckDuckGo - which I actually use - all fell over yesterday when the Bing API broke. (The Verge)

Oops.

For a few hours I had to use Google.
The Pironman 5 is a gamer case for the Raspberry Pi 5. (Liliputing)

It's a great case - adding M.2 support and full-size HDMI ports, as well as cooling fans - but it costs as much as the Pi 5 itself.
The Ecoflow Powerstream sounds like a good way to get electrocuted, but apparently is not. (The Verge)

It's an inverter that takes a feed from solar cells and pushes that into a wall socket so that you draw less power from the grid.

It does have an automated cutoff so if grid power is shut off for any reason your wires don't stay live. Which makes it completely useless as backup power... Just like the professionally installed solar cells on my roof which work exactly the same way, just without the murderous wrong-way power plug.