Saturday, October 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 October 2021

Kill It With Fire Edition

Top Story

  • Do not use Node.js, under any circumstances, for anything.  (Reddit)

    Yet another massive package compromise because the entire ecosystem is built and managed by morons.  (Not the good kind either.)

    I don't know who it was or why they decided we needed something worse than PHP, but that's what we have.


Tech News

  • Apple's new M1 Max has the GPU compute power of an RTX 3060.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Benchmarks on GPU acceleration in Adobe Premiere Pro are in line with the raw specs listed by Apple, rather than with the synthetic OpenGL benchmarks that put it closer to an RTX 3080.

    It's still very, very good for integrated graphics.

    The M1 Max is a huge chip - three times the size of AMD's 8 core laptop chips despite being built on the smaller 5nm process.  What I think they've done is undervolted it to keep power consumption low, and that is constraining GPU performance (though not CPU performance, since the chip is 80% GPU).

    In a desktop system with twice the power budget it might perform quite a bit better.  Not twice as fast, but better.


  • Intel's discrete GPUs will be available at retail in Q1 2022.  (AnandTech)

    Finally, we'll have a source of graphics cards not restricted by the limited space available TSMC and Samsung's production lines.
    The fundamental building block of Alchemist is the Xe Core. For manufacturing, Intel is turning to TSMC’s N6 process to do it.
    Well, crap.


  • The ASRock X570S Riptide has PCIe slots.  (AnandTech)

    Specifically, six of them.  Most ATX motherboards these days only have three.  With the built-in hardware on those boards you can get away with just one, for a GPU, but if you then add a 10Gb Ethernet card, and one of the slots shares lanes with an M.2 slot, you suddenly run out.

    This board gives you one x16 slot, one x4, one x2, and three x1.  Which is fine; a PCIe 4 x1 slot is enough for 10Gb Ethernet and nearly enough for dual 10Gb.  Plus two M.2 slots, built-in 2.5Gb Ethernet, and the other usual stuff.


  • The Polygon blockchain paid a security researcher $2 million for finding a bug and then not stealing $600 million.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Not crime pays sometimes.


  • DDR5 will be 60% more expensive than DDR4, at least initially.  (WCCFTech)

    Not unexpected, and previous memory generation shifts have been worse.


  • Working in tech kind of sucks.  (ZDNet)

    On the other hand, these people are idiots:
    So pervasive were the feelings of burnout amongst data engineers that 78% said they wished their job came with a therapist to help them manage stress

  • Intel's future depends on making everyone else's chips.  (Ars Technica)

    No it doesn't.


  • Safari is the new Internet Explorer.  (The Register)

    Chrome supports 94% of the 2021 web compatibility suite.  Firefox manages 91%.  Safari just 71%.

    At my day job the UI team curses Safari constantly.  But it's the only browser available on iOS.  No matter what you install, it's just Safari with a coat of paint over it.


Disclaimer: Never eat stale watermelon.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:24 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 520 words, total size 5 kb.

1 The tech worker thing:  they'll probably largely be replaced by low-paid H1Bs or remote workers, rather than the company improving conditions.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 24 2021 02:23 AM (Z0GF0)

2 Rick C., I think you're on to something.
1999:  'merican workers are being replaced by H1Bs because they work cheap! 2022:  'merican workers are being replaced by H1Bs because they're not crybaby drama queens!

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 24 2021 07:26 AM (obo9H)

3 Yep.  Working in the tech industry can be very stressful, but that's is obviously not something a therapist can fix.  I don't know how the survey was worded so maybe that answer wasn't as dumb as it sounds, but it sounds pretty dumb.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, October 24 2021 08:44 AM (PiXy!)

4 I finally read that Arse Technica babble about intel.  I mean, there are problems (the author once heard the term "Moore's Law" and definitely thinks he might know what it probably means, and his grasp of economics is dazzling in the same way that a laser pointer to the eye is), but the author bio really cuts to the chase:
"Tim De Chant covers technology, policy, and energy at Ars. He has written for Wired, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, and he teaches science writing at MIT. De Chant received his PhD in environmental science from the UC-Berkeley."

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 24 2021 09:10 AM (obo9H)

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




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