Friday, December 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 December 2020

Meppy Derpmas Edition

Tech News

June

  • On June 1 the apatosaurus reached the ISS, Australia had no CDA 230 protections, transparency when moderating content was more important than getting it right - and the social networks did neither, and we got an eight-core Elbrus CPU.


  • On June 2 Sienna Cichlid reported for NPR, Intel produced a bunch of meh, and an image of an Angel became an Angel in itself.


  • On June 3 what was this, a console for ants, Italy tried to shut down Project Gutenberg for infringing on non-existent copyrights, and $90 tablets vs. $730 tablets.


  • On June 4 not much happened, though the Chuwi Larkbox was small and Big Navi was big.


  • On June 5 Sim Refinery was rediscovered, you wouldn't download a Mac, would you, and China, Russia, and Iran criticised America for not murdering protesters. Meanwhile, Instagram pretty much murdered its own API.


  • On June 6 apparently our two million hours was up and one of our high-end 7.6TB MLC PCIe enterprise SSDs suffered from sudden total existence failure, we got the good peanuts, giving China a kill switch for the internet seemed like a bad idea, TechDirt was drunk again, liquid helium was back in stock, and Mint dumped Snap.


  • On June 7 Brave didn't do what they were accused of, as it turned out, though they did do something slightly sus, Chromium ungoogled, C&C Remastered, the worst perfect website in the world, and where late the sweet bridge sang.


  • On June 8 Tiger Lake was on its way, and nobody outside Intel remembered which one that was, Sapphire Rapids was on its way and nobody including Intel knew which one that was, and FoundationDB was kind of stupid.


  • On June 9 your motherboard was simultaneously killing and not killing your shiny new Ryzen CPU, Cerebras sold two computers - for $5 million, Apple might or might not have been planning an Arm-based Mac, and MongoDB 4.4 was almost released.

    Oh, and I officially fell down the rabbit hole.



    I was watching for for the first Hololive link as I went through the year, it came earlier than I thought. Figures it was Miko.


  • On June 10 I had a fun morning when IBM Cloud - which hosts most of our core services at my day job - dropped dead worldwide due to a routing issue, Baldur's Gate II in your browser, Crystal 0.35 arrived, Lakefield - whichever one that was - had 64 EUs, and peanuts were out of stock.


  • On June 11 we compared Windows 2004 with Ubuntu 2004, it only took one packet to take down IBM's Cloud, and Twitter went full Karen.


  • On June 12 Itch.io released a good bundle for a bad cause, Sony announced their inverse penguin, Jim Keller told Intel to shove it, async was bad, and I forgot about that time we got hit with thousands of requests per second by Microsoft.


  • On June 13 Xbox bigger, PlayStation faster, Zoom bad, Huawei bad, HSBC migrated what to what, and Twitter accidentally did something good.


  • On June 14 always mount a scratch puppy, I fell down the fantasy console rabbit hole, and how to grow your project to 13,000 dependencies with one line of code.


  • On June 15 AMD's latest APUs continue to work just fine when the fan isn't even touching the chip, Reddit thought GitHub was stupid, and what, are you crazy?


  • On June 16 Amazon Prime on the Moon, eight of one, two thirds of a dozen of the other, and social distancing for TCP packets. Oh, and I forgot that Lagrange Points are a thing.


  • On June 17 Google lied through their fucking teeth, NBC were only pretending to be insane, 20% of people still trusted social networks, and Bootstrap 5 was on its way.


  • On June 18 Intel's Copper Lake - Cooper Lake? Really? Intel's Cowpie Lake platform arrived, Ryzen 4000 desktop parts would arrive this year and indeed sort of did, and Google decided that only they had the right to steal your data.


  • On June 19 content moderation at scale was impossible if you hired morons to do it, it was a fucking triangle, Twitter's user interface sucked, Mozilla offered a VPN tailored precisely for people who didn't need it, and Twitter went censorship Inception.

    It was at roughly this point during the year that I started to become irritated with the course of events.


  • On June 20 the server exploded an event that I am still recovering from, and CERN asked for $24 billion to see if they could accidentally destroy the Earth. As I said at the time, go for it.


  • On June 21 Wakfu season four was announced, cat sitting on keyboard crashes lightdm, and the case of the terrible, horrible, no good very bad MacBook.


  • On June 22 I remoted-mounted a CD-ROM from the other side of the planet, the Washington Post reported that Google Chrome was spyware with an online article containing over 150 ads and tracking cookies, Epic Games was trash, and what happened to the Oxford vaccine anyway?


  • On June 23 Apple did not mention Arm once, France dumped France's new hate speech laws, the New York Times threatened to doxx healthcare workers, Twitter screwed up but much less than usual, and we got a Foundation trailer from Apple. Filming had to be stopped due to plague, but is apparently under way again.


  • On June 24 the server that had the SSD suddenly vanish had more problems, Parler was meh but at least it existed, and everyone went full Kafka.


  • On June 25 Amazon announced an absurdly expensive platform for mobile apps, TikTok was spyware, Wirecard left $2 billion in the back of a taxi, the Perl guys pretended Perl 6 never happened, and GitHub renewed its focus on people who don't use GitHub.


  • On June 26 Twitter's kafkabot went insane, a very, very accurate emulator for 8-bit computers, embedding Javascript in favicons, and rumours surfaced of an Xbox Series S - that turned out to be 100% accurate.


  • On June 27 we dove head first into Brave New World, Telegram sowed the seeds of its downfall, and astronomers found a... thing.


  • On June 28 the Pico-8 was upgraded to 32 colours, Python got a case statement, maybe, TikTok and 52 other apps were spyware, and Mixer self-deceased.


  • On June 29 GitHub went down worldwide, Russia said very specifically that it had not suffered any accidents at any nuclear power stations when no-one was asking, and blame New York.


  • And on June 30 MongoDB indexing was a Swiss Army chainsaw, the modern web was awful, and Reddit went full Twitter.

Disclaimer: Half way there is half more than not any of the way there.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:03 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1311 words, total size 12 kb.

1 Link to June 26 seems broken.


I haven't followed tech news in years, so the retrospective has turned up a few things very relevant to my interests.  BlueMaxima's Flashpoint in particular.  (The developer behind Gemcraft had put up everything except Chasing Shadows up when I checked a few years ago.  So Chasing Shadows available again is new.  IIRC.)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, December 26 2020 03:51 AM (6y7dz)

2   I wish I knew where to go to for good tech news, but a lot of the sites that started out as decent tech news sites have gone full left-wing with tech sprinkles over the last ten years.

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Saturday, December 26 2020 12:50 PM (qZKPY)

3 I've had to prune out a few of my sources for that reason - Ars Technica, Axios, and TechDirt are a lost cause - and one other site for heading full tilt in the opposite direction.

There are a number of good YouTubers, but that's a far less time-efficient medium if you just want to keep up with events.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 26 2020 09:37 PM (PiXy!)

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




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