Saturday, April 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 April 2021

How Much For Just The Propaganda Engine Edition

Top Story

  • Twitter's board unanimously adopted a poison pill measure against the takeover bid that could save the company.  (WCCFTech)

    We had to destroy Twitter in order to destroy it.


  • Twitter will never be a platform for "Free Speech".  (ZDNet)

    I was about to discard this item as trash, but then read a little further, and it is a fairly sound libertarian tirade against centralised social media in general:
    As with all other social media platforms, including Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Tik Tok, the structure of Twitter prohibits free speech.

    ...

    Like all who participate in social media, Elon Musk participates in the illusion that he has an identity online. For all intents and purposes, "Elon Musk" does not exist any more than any other entity. It is a name attached to a series of text snippets residing in a database constantly sorted and sifted by a platform owner at their sole discretion.

    People who have no identity have no "speech" because they are merely fulfilling the will of the platform. Because they have no speech, the notion of "free" speech is irrelevant.
    The error here is the notion that because the war cannot be won, that the battle is not worth fighting.

    Why would you turn down $43 billion in cash?

    Because it's not about the money.  It's about control.


Tech News

  • What happened at Atlassian?  Two things, neither one good.  (The Register)

    Intending to deactivate a single app, they deactivated the entire cluster.
    And intending merely to deactivate that app, they instead ran a secure erase procedure for regulatory compliance.

    And that scrubbed clean large parts of the data for 400 customers.

    They have backups, but the backups are designed to restore server nodes, or entire customer databases, not parts of the data into an otherwise operational platform.  So they're restoring the databases onto recovery nodes and then gluing the pieces back into the production nodes manually.

    I've done this kind of restore process before.  It's not fun.


  • TSMC is expecting 2nm chips to arrive in 2026.  (Tom's Hardware)

    With manufacturing beginning late 2025 - a year behind Intel's planned rollout of 18A.  Though TSMC has been rather better at sticking to its schedules than Intel this past decade or so.


  • Russia plans to be producing chips at 28nm by 2030.  (Tom's Hardware)

    That's not quite 20 years behind the rest of the world.


  • The latest Linux kernels aren't just an improvement for Intel's Alder Lake.  (Phoronix)

    AMD's Milan-X chips - which have 3D cache just like the 5800X3D - can also see performance gains of as much as 30% depending on the benchmark.


  • Vtuber Kaneko Lumi announced her "graduation" - retirement - from CyberLive a few weeks ago.  I was sorry to see her go; although there are too many vtubers for me to follow all the ones I find entertaining she seemed smart and talented.

    She also kept on streaming.

    Took me a while to figure out it wasn't just a delayed graduation; she'd gone independent while retaining the character.  That's unusual.  Coco and Aloe from Hololive both went independent but left their characters behind.  Suisei brought her character to Hololive, but was independent beforehand so she was free to do so.

    Now she and former teammate Amaris Yuri have joined Phase Connect, the same agency as Pipkin Pippa.  I hope they do well there, and without knowing the reasons behind this move I have great respect for CyberLive for allowing this to happen.  Until recently it was common not only for the character to remain the property of the original agency, but for all content to be erased upon graduation.


  • That new dinner set I ordered arrived today. It's rather more substantial than I had expected for a hundred bucks.


Disclaimer: Ouch.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:44 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 641 words, total size 5 kb.

1 My wife and I are of the opinion that a mishmash of thrift store finds makes for the best sort of dinner set.  I have a particular delight in using the pretentoius and silly "collectible" plates (limited editions, hopefully) as ordinary eating ware.  The notion of hanging plates with normal rockwell, or max parrish pictures on the wall makes me unreasonably irate and debasing them by eating off of them fills me with joy.  I'm not the mentally ill one here, I promise.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 17 2022 10:44 AM (obo9H)

2 I like to have the same basic design (same molds) but in multiple patterns, so that things match but aren't the same.  There are five different designs available of the set I just bought, and I'm planning to get one of each.

Also means that if I break something there's a replacement sitting at the bottom of the linen closet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 17 2022 05:05 PM (PiXy!)

3 Some years back, my sister persuaded my mother that the best thing they could buy me for Christmas was a new set of dishes (spoiler: it was not). She picked out the Royal Doulton/Gordon Ramsay Maze set in two colors, one of which was promptly discontinued. Fortunately I managed to buy an extra place setting before they ran out, so I got spares. ...which I needed, since it took about a week for me to chip one of the plates.

I would not be particularly unhappy if somehow that particular box got dropped during the move, and I had to switch back to my attractive and nearly indestructible Corelle Ware (from back when it was made by Corning, and did not have a reputation for spontaneously exploding).


-j

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, April 18 2022 12:35 AM (ZlYZd)

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




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