Ambient Irony

Wednesday, August 16

Daily News Stuff 16 August 20203

Accidental Magnetism Edition

Top Story

Instagram's Twitter competitor, Threads, broke all records in the speed at which it reached 100 million users. How is it doing now, a couple of weeks later? Usage has plummeted, and Threads now has less than half the active daily users of Twitter. (The Guardian)

This is technically correct, since half a percent is indeed less than half.

While Twitter averages around 100 million active users each day, Threads is around 576,000.

Tech News

You don't hate Jira, you hate your manager. (Hacker News)

Everyone in the comments: No, we hate Jira.
China's chip production technology is five generations behind the rest of the world. (Tom's Hardware)

China's leading-edge production is 14nm, where Taiwan, Korea, and the US are all ramping up production at 3nm. But most of China's fab capacity is even further behind, at 28nm. And 28nm kind of sucks.

AMD was stuck at 28nm for years because TSMC and Samsung fumbled the transition to FINFETs - only Intel got that right. That almost bankrupted the company.
Need to pack 64TB of M.2 SSDs into a standard U.2 carrier with active cooling but without fans? Yes? What the hell are you doing? (AnandTech)

Anyway, Mac aftermarket stuff maker OWC has teamed up with fanless fan maker Frore to build, well, what I just said.

The interesting part here is the Frore AirJet, a piezoelectric device that uses tiny vibrating crystals to shoot air out one end at about a thousand miles an hour, keeping whatever it is attached to cool without making a lot of noise, or at least without a lot of noise that anyone other than a bat can hear.
The Verge's coverage of Elon Musk keeps getting creepier. (The Verge)

These people need an intervention. Or sedation. Or both.
It's time to rethink our relationships with streaming services. (The Verge)

I don't have a relationship with streaming services. What is wrong with you people?
Google Chrome will now use AI to automatically summarise articles for you so you don't need to read them. (The Verge)

<summary>The Verge is garbage.</summary>
The tech jobs market is as strong as it ever was. (Tech Crunch)

Now that hundreds of thousands of people have been laid off.
ISPs are complaining that new FCC rules requiring they tell customers what they are being charged are excessively onerous. (Ars Technica)

"How will we rip people off if we have to list all the applicable fees?" asked one executive. "That sounds ominously like work."

Also, Ars Technica has banned me for a month for very politely telling their Creative Director that he's a credulous idiot. So while I'm sure there's every kind of nonsense going on in the comments over there, I can't tell you exactly what kind.
Streaming site SportsBay has been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars to DISH Network. (TorrentFreak)

That's $2500 for a DMCA violation and, uh, over two million violations.

They had to count them all.

Disclaimer: Now they know how many DMCA violations it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:58 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 The Verge: We boil bunnies in bulk and pass the savings on to you!

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 16 2023 09:18 PM (obo9H)

2 Jira has two fundamental problems: Java and Managers. Java's crude memory management forces you to restart the app whenever your users do something new, and managers constantly insist on doing something new ("add these ten plugins, give my project thirteen custom fields, give each team its own separate workflow, let us paste 50,000-line debug logs into text fields, integrate with this third-party tool that injects 500 new tickets per minute from outside the firewall, and fix the speed, it's so slow!").

My personal favorite feature of Jira is rich-text processing of text fields, so that when someone blindly pastes a log file, it takes forever to render and ends up sprinkled with emoji.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, August 16 2023 10:37 PM (oJgNG)

3 "This is technically correct, since half a percent is indeed less than half."
Isn't this exactly why they call it The Grauniad?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 17 2023 12:07 AM (BMUHC)

4 " So while I'm sure there's every kind of nonsense going on in the comments over there, I can't tell you exactly what kind."
You could tell by signing out.
Better yet, once you do that, just delete your account.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 17 2023 12:23 AM (BMUHC)

5 Had to laugh because of one Jira comment where the commenter was saying that coding wasn't all that complicated. Once upon a time I worked on a reporting team and got two requests for a certain type of report. Both came with the same estimates. One had no hidden minefields, the other one did. The simple one took a couple of weeks to be production ready. The minefield special took about 8 months. Congratulations, I am now the team expert on this type of report. The next time a request of this type came through I was given the analysis work and management kept insisting I had to provide a time estimate on it. They couldn't understand why I kept refusing until I went through umpteen iterations of the same explanation - for a while I thought I was stuck in an explanation infinite loop.

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, August 17 2023 12:33 AM (JqCHh)

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