Sunday, May 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 May 2022

Always Has Been Edition

Top Story

  • Starting to get cooler weather in Sydney - overnight lows around 8C at my old place.  I checked what it was up at the new place, and it was nudging 0C.  So when I move in a couple of weeks it will be straight into winter.


  • We have always been at war with West Taiwan: Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter could face national security scrutiny because Saudia Arabia is rolling its existing 5.2% stake into the private company rather than taking the cash.  (Ars Technica)

    Saudi Arabia is no friend of free speech and regulators are worried that this might lead to bias and censorship on the revived platform.

    Stop laughing.
    Reuters noted that "China blocked Twitter in 2009 but many Chinese officials have been active on the social media platform. Some of them have complained that the company's efforts to restrict misinformation have targeted them unfairly."
    Well, I guess you can laugh a bit.

    Dumb as the article itself is, the comments are downright Orwellian - in the useful idiot sense, rather than the dire warning sense.  The regressive left is panicked over the possibility that their bubble might get punctureed.

Tech News

  • Recycling of plastic doesn't work, particularly when you don't do it.  (Nasdaq)

    California's Attorney General has launched an attack on the petrochemical industry, blaming them for the failure of California's recycling program...  Which doesn't recycle much of anything.

    As reported previously, if you put plastic out for recycling in the US, it most likely gets shipped overseas - because that's cheaper - and dumped in a river rather than processed - because that's cheaper.  It's far better for the environment to dispose of it in a regular landfill.

    Recycling aluminium actually works - you can tell, because they pay you for it rather than charging you to take it away.


  • How to back up your Gmail account.  (ZDNet)

    1. Install a local email program.
    2. Use it.


  • Crypto miners: Menace or just studying algebra?  New mining software bypasses the hash rate limiter on Nvidia graphics cards.  (Tom's Hardware)

    With the ongoing slump in crypto prices this probably won't make graphics cards disappear from the shelves again.  It will probably be something else that causes that.


  • The upcoming Threadripper 7000 range will bring up to 96 Zen 4 cores sometime late next year.  (WCCFTech)

    It's not clear why AMD is delaying workstation chips for a year after server and desktop parts come out, particularly when this release will be close to twice as fast as Threadripper 5000.


  • VPN installations have spiked by 1500% in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine.  (Washington Post / MSN)

    The Russian government is trying to stamp out use of VPNs but even China can't keep up with that task and Russia is having even less luck, so an increasing number of Russians are able to access accurate and unbiased reporting from sources like the BBC, CNN, and the New York Times.


Disclaimer: I said stop laughing!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:41 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 504 words, total size 4 kb.

1 Every single reply to someone I make on Twitter who isn't a mutual, and half of the replies to those who are, gets "Deboosted" behind the "Show offensive content" barrier. It doesn't matter WHAT you actually tweet. Congratulate someone on their recent wedding? Blocked.

The quickest way to check is to reply to something, then right click on the date of the tweet you replied to and open it in a private window (i.e. no login information). You will see immediately if your reply is screened.

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, May 08 2022 06:30 PM (gVjvf)

2 Deboosting everyone right now,  actually makes a lot of sense.

Thing about a lot of AI approaches, you can accidentally tune them to do stuff, and not realize. 

And, if you leave the AI running, and open to audit, they you are providing the new management with evidence of bias, even if only accidental.

A significantly dumber deboosting rule is more defensible as less biased, and is less effective as information warfare.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 09 2022 01:37 AM (r9O5h)

3 Well, they're not deboosting everyone, or there would be no replies above the barrier.

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, May 09 2022 08:44 AM (gVjvf)

4 If you had a more or less static list of reasonably safe users, you can implement a dumb rule by deboosting all replies, except when one party is on the safe list. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, May 10 2022 01:48 AM (r9O5h)

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




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