• The US federal government, having been denied a stay of an injunction forbidding them to violate the First Amendment, has appealed for an immediate administrative stay to the Fifth Circuit.  (Legal Insurrection)
  
  Their argument is, in part...  Well, in full really, that the interests of the government will suffer irreparable harm if it is not allowed to freely violate the law and the rights of the people it allegedly serves.
  
  The appeal does not bother to dispute that the government is violating the First Amendment.  It just says they really really want to do that and if you don't let them they'll tell Mom.
  
  Mom in this case being the Supreme Court, and the arguments being strikingly similar to those employed by Harvard prior to it getting slapped in the face six-to-three.

• Instagram's Threads has 100 million "users".  (Top Story)
  
  The scare quotes because it has less than 100 million messages, total.  As I said before, it's just Instagram without the pictures.
  
  Oh, and it fell over today.  No mention of that in the article, because that would also be awkward for the narrative.  (Musk bad, free speech bad, walled gardens good.)
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Tumblr is trying to attract the crazies fleeing from Twitter now that that site no longer coddles them to their satisfaction.  (The Verge)
  
  Or rather, re-attract.  All this mess started in the great Tumblr Containment Breach of 2018.  Tumblr at the time was owned by Verizon, which felt that porn, and particularly the creepy fetish porn that was all over Tumblr at the time, was not good for the brand.
  
  So they banned it and the fetishists and furries - and worse - decamped and infected every other site on the internet.
  
  Tumblr, if you want to do something useful, take them back.
  
  

• The 4TB Team MP34 is now $160 on Amazon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I have one of these in my new laptop.  Seems to work just fine, though I haven't done anything crazy with it yet.
  
  Specs-wise it's a TLC PCIe 3.0 drive with onboard DRAM.  Not the fastest SSD in the world but there's also nothing actively wrong with it, and the price is great.
  
  
  
• Mandy Rice-Davies applies: Google's head of AI products, Demis Hassabis, says the company's efforts in the AI field aren't utterly doomed in the face of staggering internal incompetence and increasing open-source competition.  (The Verge)
  
  This goes back to a leaked memo written by Google AI engineers saying that the company's efforts were indeed doomed and Google and OpenAI "had no moat" - there was nothing to stop open-source projects eating their lunch.
  
  As for Miss Rice-Davies, not only does she have her own Wikipedia entry, but so does the expression Mandy Rice-Davies applies.
  
  
  
• Intel's 14700K is an odd beast.  (Notebook Check)
  
  If the leaked details are correct, Intel have done the best they could without a new desktop chip to launch this year: Launched a new desktop chip.
  
  The 13700K is the same silicon as the 13900K, but with 8 efficiency cores compared to 16 on the higher-end model.
  
  The 14700K is the same silicon again, but it has 12 efficiency cores.  If it keeps the same price as the 13700K, and fits into the same motherboards (which it should), it could be a good deal even though it's not a new design.
  
  
  
• Evernote is laying off its US staff and merging all operations into its EU office.  (Thurrott)
  
  If you use Evernote, don't panic, but back up all your data in case they Influx you.

• I was wandering around Amazon today checking to see if there were any compelling Prime Day deals, which is a dangerous thing to do.  Fire TV devices are half price and there are some nice discounts on Arduino kits, but (a) I already have computers everywhere and I'm not sure I want to pay for a spy device, not even half price, and (b) Arduino is cool but underpowered for what I have in mind, and the Pi Pico was not on sale.
  
  But while I was doing that I tripped over something else: All the Hololive Pop Up Parade figures are currently available to order without paying scalper prices to sellers you've never heard of.  The only one that's not in stock is Korone, which was selling for as much a A$200 earlier.  These retail for around A$80 if you can find one locally ($40-$50 in the US), but prices go up fast if you miss out on the initial production run.
  
  But they just announced a reissue of the Korone figure and you can pre-order the second run from Amazon US right now for $33.99.  Which even with the current terrible exchange rate is a lot less than A$200.
  
  So that's another seven eight ten eleven figures ordered / pre-ordered: Fubuki, Mio, Korone, Okayu, Pekora, Miko, Marine, Subaru, Aqua, and Sora, plus the Gura and Kiara figures that I bought previously.  I checked to see if there was a Subaru figure because I was watching her stream earlier, and it turns out that one comes out next week, so I pre-ordered that as well, and then found that I'd missed Aqua and Sora and had to buy those too.  And now Ayame too, though that one doesn't ship for months yet.
  
  I was able to ignore these when they weren't available except from scalpers, but I'd be annoyed if I had the opportunity and missed it.
  
  What I need all these figures for I don't know, but I have very little in the way of purely decorative items in the new house, so they'll at least add some colour.
  
  And no, I'm not planning to get the Figmas or the Nendoroids, or that 1/7 scale figure of Choco-sensei.  Happy to complete one set.  (Though if Hyte keeps issuing Hololive-themed cases, I can always use more computers.)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, July 13 2023 06:11 AM (2tHvf)

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