• Apple's App Store is an ad-ridden mockery of its former self.  (Business Insider)
  
  If you're working on a good an useful app, you have to jump through flaming hoops to get it in the App Store.
  
  If you're producing worthless garbage that makes Apple money, no problem at all.
  
  
  
• The same Ikea desk legs that were out of stock before are out of stock again.  Should have ordered them when I had the chance, even if I'm not planning to put those desks in place right away.
  
  That only affects the main office; the desks in at least four of the other five rooms use different legs that are still in stock and which I am going to order right now before those also disappear.
  
  Ordering the legs for ten desks gives me a delivery fee of $29.  One small desktop, $599.  That's why I didn't place an order sooner.
  
  
  
• Speaking of ordering stuff, I bought some books.  I buy books all the time - every time there's a Humble Book Bundle that isn't rubbish I'll throw some money at it, so I average about 100 new books a month.
  
  But those are digital.  I stopped buying paper books a few years ago because (a) I mostly read on my tablet and (b) my old house was completely and utterly out of room.
  
  Now I have room.  Lots of.  Have to buy all the books before they stop printing them.

• If you've been around the Web for a long time this page should give you an attack of nostalgia, and possibly epilepsy.  (NeoCities)
  
  
  
• MineCity 2000 converts SimCity 2000 save files into Minecraft maps.  (GitHub)
  
  That's one way to do it, I guess.  
  
  Where is that video of the Hololive fan Minecraft server?  They did it the hard way.
  
  
  
• Mastodon privacy: Who actually holds your data?  (Privado)
  
  The answer makes sense: The server you log in to holds details like your email address and password, all servers hold your public data, and any server hosting a user you send a private message holds that private message.
  
  Which means the admin of any server hosting a user you send a private message can read that private message.  No end-to-end encryption.
  
  There are reasons for that, and the former staff of Twitter were little better than a random nobody running an anonymous Mastodon node, but it's something to be aware of.
  
  
  
• Apple looks set to fall short by 20 million units on iPhone sales this quarter.  (Reuters)
  
  Due to the global recession that dare not speak its name and the ongoing higher-order fuckery in China.  Not sure how much each element is contributing, but neither is good.
  
  
  
• Snap - as in Snapchat - has told its employees to show up at the office or consider themselves ex.  (CNN)
  
  Four days a week, at least.
  
  And since the company has already announced layoffs of 20% of its staff, I expect that threat of being exed is perceived as real.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fried says he couldn't possibly have been using his technical skills to steal billions of dollars from customers because he doesn't have any.  (Coin Telegraph)
  
  Technical skills, that is.  Well, customers too at this point.
  
  Who the fucking fuck thought it was a good idea to give this sociopathic retard ten billion dollars in the first place?  And why hasn't anyone been arrested yet?
  
  
  
• Distributed crypto exchange Serum, formerly backed by FTX, is toast.  (The Block)
  
  "Here's the code.  Build your own exchange.  We're done with this bullshit." said lead developer - I swear we are not making this up - Mango Max.
  
  
  
• Amazon has announced a "Zero ETL" integration between Aurora and Redshift.  (The Register)
  
  This is what we in the olden days used to call an integration.  ETL stands for extract, transform, load, meaning you dump the data out of one application, painstakingly convert the file format, and load it into the new one.  
  
  Which is not an integration at all.
  
  
  
• Why streaming service subscription rates keep going up.  (The Verge)
  
  Because they spend billions of dollars on crap nobody watches.

Posted by: David Eastman at Thursday, December 01 2022 04:04 AM (D6Mju)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, December 01 2022 09:08 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 01 2022 05:36 PM (PiXy!)

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• In a rare win for sanity and freedom Britain is abandoning legislation that would have banned "legal but harmful" speech online.  (Reuters)
  
  The proposed law was so twisted that it included criminal charges for executives of social platforms for the entirely legal speech of other people.
  
  This unsurprisingly provoked some pushback from said social platforms.
  
  The government - the nominally conservative government - is planning to return with more of the same but with a tasty won't somebody think of the children sauce on top.
  
  
  
• I think everything I want from Ikea is in stock right now.  I could just set fire to my credit card and order a houseful of furniture in one go.
  
  Probably best not to.  Would save on delivery fees but leave my living room filled with flat packs when I've only just got it free of boxes.
  
  Going to end up with 90 feet of desk space.
  
  

• The Merriam-Webster Word of the year is gaslighting.  (Merriam-Webster)
  
  In other news, monkey pox has been renamed piss party pox to remove the stigma associated with fucking monkeys.
  
  
  
  
  
• Mice use calculus.  (Quanta)
  
  Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
  
  
  
• Candian crypto exchange Coinsquare has suffered a breach of customer data.  (CoinDesk)
  
  Customer funds are safe with the encryption keys stored offline.  
  
  They say.
  
  
  
• Epson has ditched laser printers for inkjets, saying inkjets are better for the environment.  (The Register)
  
  While I view such claims with suspicion on general principle, Epson does make the Ecotank line of inkjets, which have ink tanks, that you simply fill up with a bottle of ink when you need to.  It's hard to improve on that unless you can synthesize ink directly from the air.

Posted by: three-humped camel at Wednesday, November 30 2022 01:14 AM (x8H4m)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 30 2022 01:46 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, November 30 2022 03:10 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Any Mouse at Wednesday, November 30 2022 03:26 PM (FMxtE)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 30 2022 06:51 PM (PiXy!)

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• Private data for 5.4 million Twitter users has been leaked online.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Twitter had a bug - fixed back in January - that let you look up a phone number or email address and get the corresponding account, if one existed.  Patient hackers crawled their way through millions of numbers and addresses - probably stolen from somewhere else - to match them up, and then offered it all up for sale for $30k.
  
  Now it's apparently available for free.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The CBC tried to get Libs of TikTok banned from Shopify (it's a Canadian company).
  
  The CEO told them, very politely - he's Canadian - to shove it.
  
  
  
  
  And then blocked them.
  
  
  
• When they said the compiler could make monkeys fly out of your butt, they meant it.  (PKH)
  
  Integer overflow in C is undefined behaviour.  That means that if you put a check in your code to catch that a value has overflowed and fix the problem, the compiler is entirely within the C standard if it removes your check and then crashes when the value overflows.
  
  Use a real language.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 29 2022 10:08 AM (kbV78)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 29 2022 10:46 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 29 2022 12:40 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 29 2022 12:49 PM (PiXy!)

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• Elon Musk just decided to bring the worst people on the internet back to Twitter. (The Verge)
  
  People who weren't banned from Twitter:
  
  
• Chinese genocide apologists
• Hitler-worshiping Hindu nationalists
• Iran's terrorist leadership
• Antifa goons actively planning assaults
• Pedophiles
• People illegally distributing puberty blockers to children (who were also pedophiles, strange coincidence there)
• People running mass-reporting schemes (who were - yes - also pedophiles)

People who were banned:


• The New York Post for news stories inconvenient to Democrats
• James Lindsay and the Babylon Bee for accurately identifying an adult male
• Nick Rekieta for being the victim of a mass-reporting scheme
• Me for suggesting a certain politician "needs to resign, or be thrown in a volcano, whatever works"


And it's only with those people being reinstated that the news media, which is all - mainstream and technology together - intensely pro-censorship, is getting itself worked up.



• Hoping that particular politician will soon be out of office, but it's Melbourne and they're all insane down there.

Tech News

• Europe is threatening to frown at Twitter if Elon Musk closes all the company's European offices and tells the tiny-minded fascists of the EU to take a hike.  (Tech Crunch)

  For "appropriateness of the expertise and resources allocated" read: "Shuttering local offices and canning EU staff will be frowned upon - hard."

  That idiocy is Tech Crunch's own wording, but it's understandable because EU officials actually said this:

  For those platforms that the Commission will designate as very large online platforms, the risk management obligations also include a strong component on the appropriateness of the resources allocated to managing societal risks in the Union. Among other matters, the Commission will scrutinise the appropriateness of the expertise and resources allocated, as well as the way they organise their compliance function.

  The appropriate thing to do is for Musk to close down all operations in Europe and direct users at a US-based portal to pay their $8.
  
  It's not like Europe is going to create its own social network.
  
  
  
• Turning and turning in the widening gyre
  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
  Mere amnesty is loosed upon the world.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Twitter has announced it is granting amnesty to all accounts previously banned for reasons other than actually breaking the law or persistent spam.
  
  I strongly suspect that the records of the former Bureau of Censorship and Intimidation contain so much bullshit that they can't even begin to selectively undo the damage of the past four years.
  
  The mass reinstatements start next week; no indication yet how long it will take to complete.
  
  The usual suspects say that this is the three hundred and seventeenth sign of the Apocalypse which seems to be running seriously behind schedule at this point.

• The PlayStation 6 could launch in 2028.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The PlayStation 5 meanwhile will be in stock in retail stores no later than 2030.
  
  
  
• The FTC meanwhile is frowning at Microsoft's acquisition of Activision.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Which in my opinion is good news for Microsoft.
  
  
  
• Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time: IBM is suing Micro Focus for allegedly reverse-engineering CICS to create its own Enterprise Server product...  Close to 20 years ago.  (The Register)
  
  CICS was first released in 1969.  Micro Focus was founded in 1976, and while I couldn't find exactly when the first version of their Enterprise Server was released, it has been quite a while.  Not sure if this sort of suit has any de facto expiry on it the way trademarks do.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Saturday, November 26 2022 02:00 AM (5cxJU)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 26 2022 08:16 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 26 2022 08:16 AM (BMUHC)

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• Why Twitter didn't go down, from a Twitter site reliability engineer.  (Substack)
  
  Because it's automated.
  
  The funny thing is, this guy worked on the distributed caching system, and the distributed cache is the most visibly unreliable component of the entire platform.
  
  
  
• Twitter is not only still not dead, but is planning to cast some advanced necromancy:
  
  
  
  
  This will be fun.

• Stable Diffusion 2.0 is here.  (Stability.ai)
  
  The new version of the AI image generation tool has all the same features, only 2.
  
  
  
• The US Navy has been found to have committed software piracy in a $600 million lawsuit.  (Gizmodo)
  
  And ordered to pay $150,000.
  
  Which is a pretty sweet deal, honestly.  Maybe someone remembered that they have an almost unlimited number of guided missiles.
  
  
  
• Amazon is planning to spend $1 billion a year producing bad movies.  (CNBC)
  
  The operative word bad wasn't in the press release for some reason.  I guess they just assumed we'd know.
  
  
  
• An in-depth look at the (current) low-end Ryzen 7000 models.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  They're by no means bad, but for a pure gaming setup you might be better off with Intel's 13600K than the Ryzen 7600X.
  
  For the stuff I do (software development and testing), the efficiency cores on Intel chips are a pain in the bum, and AMD's chips provide both better and more consistent multi-threaded performance.  For gaming or tasks like 3D rendering there's less difference between the two options.

• So you're building a PC and you just want a basically decent video card that doesn't cost three arms and a leg and require its own substation.  What about the new Radeon 6700 (non-XT).  Is that any good?  Yes.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's cheaper than Nvidia's RTX 3060, and if you're not playing with ray tracing turned on it's 25% faster.  If you are using ray tracing it's 10% slower, so there is a tradeoff to consider.
  
  
  
• Hololive EN and ID are streaming Minecraft again.  I've missed that.  Other games tend to be too distracting to have on while I work, but Minecraft is mostly building and chatting, or gathering resources and chatting, or dying horribly in the Nether and chatting.
  
  
  
• Twitter is still not dead.

• If you want to pack 768 cores and 24TB of RAM into a single 2U system, Gigabyte has what you need.  (Serve the Home)
  
  That's a four node blade system rather than a single shared-memory server, so you'd want to connect it with 800GbE and run some flavour of clustering.
  
  
  
• Bullshit projects, bullshit jobs, bullshit industries.  (Earthly)
  
  Been there, done that, currently wearing the t-shirt.
  
  
  
• HP is planning to lay off 6000 workers over the next 3 years.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  HP (this is just the consumer products company; the enterprise and engineering divisions are separate entities now) has over 50,000 employees, so over three years that would be less than normal staff turnover anyway.
  
  
  
• WSL is out of beta.  (Phoronix)
  
  I haven't done anything hugely taxing with it recently, but I use it every day, and it's very handy.  Greatly reduces the need to run a conventional Linux virtual machine.
  
  
  
• The bankruptcy proceedings for collapsed Ponzi scheme FTX have been moved from the Bahamas to Delaware.  (CNBC)
  
  It sounds like the Bahamian government was happy to wash its hands of the mess.
  
  
  
• A look inside how news sausages are made.  (Semafor)
  
  By gibbering imbeciles, it would appear:

  I can't imagine a US intelligence official would be wrong on this

  Thanks for WWIII fellas.
  
  
  
• Genesis, a sister company of Grayscale in the Digital Currency Group, is reportedly considering filing for bankruptcy.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The company supposedly has assets of $2.8 billion and a $35 million exposure from the current crypocalypse, so it would seem that somebody is lying about something.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, TSMC, one of those stodgy old fashioned companies that actually makes stuff, is looking to invest $32 billion in a 1nm chip factory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Better mark where you put it, guys, or you'll never find it again.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 24 2022 01:11 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 24 2022 03:18 AM (kbV78)

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• Why is the entire tech industry imploding at once?  (The Atlantic)
  
  Because you locked people into their homes while pumping trillions of dollars into the economy, and then hiked interest rates to combat the inevitable inflation, creating and then bursting a massive bubble.
  
  You idiots.
  
  
  

Tech News

• With Twitter ushering in a new era of free speech - not just Trump, but dozens of other prominent accounts having been reinstated - liberals are vowing to stay and fight.  (The Atlantic)
  
  You have to ask, if they label themselves the "resistance", what exactly they are resisting.  They seem extremely upset that one tech company is now run by a middle of the road vaguely libertarian guy who sees their histrionic antics for what they are.
  
  
  
• Tumblr is adding support for ActivityPub so that it can be part of the Fediverse.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  All this shit started when Tumblr banned porn.  Before then, the crazies were safely contained.  Now, Elon Musk has had to spend $44 billion to stop them burning civilisation to the ground.
  
  
  
• Samsung has stolen a lead over everyone else with 3nm chip production - but only 20% of the chips actually work.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Early production on a new process often has high failure rates, but a 20% yield is really bad.
  
  
  
• Is wine fake?  Well, yes, but also no.  (Asterisk)
  
  The article provides some details about a study I'd read of previously, that found that wine experts couldn't tell the difference between red and white wine in a blind tasting.  That's not quite true, as most things aren't.
  
  
  
• For example, Pfizer is not hiking the price of COVID vaccines by 400%.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's only 300%.
  
  
  
• Did Sam Bankman-Fried buy off the media?  (Reason)
  
  <shake shake>
  
  Signs point to yes.
  
  
  
• Trust us, we totally have $10 billion worth of Bitcoin, says Grayscale.  (WCCFTech)
  
  "Can we see it?"
  "No."
  
  They are currently trading at about half of their claimed value.
  
  
  
• Amazon Alexa is on track to earn $10 billion this year.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Except in the opposite direction.  I'm not sure how they've managed it but Amazon's Telescreen division is bleeding money eight times faster than Twitter was.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 23 2022 12:22 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Wednesday, November 23 2022 02:51 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 23 2022 03:14 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: onepearlb at Tuesday, January 31 2023 09:43 PM (X4iOR)

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