Friday, May 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 May 2022

Seventeenth Time's The Charm Edition

Top Story

  • It's the Night of the Blunt Knives at Twitter.  (The Verge)

    CEO Parag Agrawal is clearing the decks of the most competent senior executives ahead of Elon Musk's takeover so that...  I got nothing.

    The tweets are weird.  "You're great.  The best in your field.  A perfect fit for the role.  Also, fired."


Tech News

  • The EU wants to do a thing.  (Some Stupid EU Site)

    If you can read the article and tell me what they want to do, you win a kewpie doll.
    • Strengthen the support offered to children in vulnerable situations by the Safer Internet Centres in Member States to address the digital divide.

    • Expand the role of BIK Youth Ambassadors and BIK Youth Panels - young people working with the Commission to implement the strategy - to support peer-to-peer activities at national and local level.

    • Start mapping the existing research on the neurologic impact on children of methods used for commercial purposes.

  • Horrifying things, kewpie dolls.


  • Google announced stuff?  (ZDNet)

    Anything good?

    No.  Well, they seem to have fixed some things they recently broke in YouTube, but no.


  • An engineering sample for what is probably AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7800X runs at up to 5.2GHz.  (Tom's Hardware)

    That's about 10% faster than the current 5800X, and Zen 4 is expected to be 25% faster than Zen 3 at the same speed.  And right now I'm on a Zen 1 that is underclocked because it overheats, so this new chip would be quite a bit faster.


  • If you're looking to build a Threadripper workstation, there aren't any.  (Tom's Hardware)

    AMD can sell everything it makes into the server market at higher margins, so it's not really looking for extra niches where it can sell a few thousand - or tens of thousands - of chips.  So it's a good thing that the 16 core Ryzen 7000 will likely be as fast as most Threadripper 3000 chips.


  • BBC Basic for SDL is BBC Basic only for SDL (a cross-platform graphics and sound library.  (BBCBasic)

    It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Raspberry Pi, and in your browser, and gives you up to 256MB for your Basic code which is just slightly more than was available on the BBC Micro.


  • If you're not an Ubuntu fan, Fedora 36 is now out.  (The Register)

    I got started on Red Hat Linux and used it for years, all the way through to CentOS 6, before giving up because of the eternities it took to release CentOS 7 and 8.


  • Getting utilities connected at my new house before I move in and learned something that I hadn't thought of.  It has a gas cooktop and gas hot water.

    It doesn't have gas.

    Specifically, the town doesn't have gas.  Have to get it delivered in bottles.

    Universal fibre internet, yes.  Gas, no.  Guess I'll take that trade.


Disclaimer: Some look at things that never were, and say, what the fuck?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:23 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 500 words, total size 4 kb.

1 I mean, not having gas isn't too weird, I guess. But why would they install gas-powered appliances? Especially a water heater...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Saturday, May 14 2022 06:16 AM (pbxNc)

2 "The pandemic further highlighted that not all children have equal and safe access to digital technologies."

Typical socailist gobbldygook, no-one has "equal" anything, but I guess that's a good excuse to fuck everyone, right?  And "safe":  The internet was once compared to a superhighway, which is also not a place for children.  Once you idiots figure out how to make 90-year-old technology "safe" for children, we can start talking about 40-year-old technology.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, May 14 2022 09:53 AM (obo9H)

3 There was the "hey, let's teach four year olds how to program" idjits.

'Digital technologies' is a super huge category.

And what does one mean by access to a technology?

If someone hands you a technical artifact, you don't understand the fundamental principles, and you are not provided with the fundamental principles, and you are just given a list of instructions on what buttons to push, do you really have access to it?

Okay, in this case, the damned lawyers and politicians probably only know how to press buttons themselves.

To my thinking, knowing little about the components, theory of operation, fundamental principles, etc., is a level of access much like not having the actual artifact. And, getting those principles down well is a pretty significant depth of learning. Some people with engineering degrees can be properly said to have real access to a broad area of technology. It is somewhat difficult for a child to really have that degree of depth.

My feeling, there are a lot of manager types who are super idiots. They all 'youngsters are digital natives', ignoring that hanging around Education majors, and watching youtube on a smartphone, does not actually automatically result in knowing the fundamental principles of the software and digital hardware that the smartphone is made out of. These super idiots are the ones who come up with the ideas of 'programming camp for four year olds', handwaving about new technology to meet political demands, and whatever this crap is.

Look, if I give a sophisticated WWII era analog counter-battery radar to some young kid, is that going to do the kid any good? There are two uses for tech and children. One, is in teaching basic principles to children, and helping them build a foundation for more. This is mentoring, needs tech people, and massive bureaucratic stuff is useless to harmful. Two, as a format for containing other instruction material, or entertainment, or whatever. And, digital is not that much of a better format, especially once you involve idiots and massive bureaucracies. As a format for instruction material, it is not that useful for young children, unless it hides the fundamental principles, etc., from them.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, May 14 2022 12:35 PM (r9O5h)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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