Daily Tech News 27 April 2021

• Basecamp, long a thought leader in woke bullshit in the tech industry, has woken up and smelled the brokeness. (Hey)
  
  They've announced just a few small changes:
  
  
• Political discussions on work accounts are banned.
• No more woke benefits. You get paid. It's your money, spend it however you want.
• No more committees.
• No worrying about the past.
• No more peer reviews. Your manager is expected to manage.
• The world is big enough to look after itself. Or not. We're a business, we're here to make money.

The usual suspects are up in arms. Sane people are cautiously pessimistic.

• Is AMD selling defective Xbox CPUs as desktop systems? (WCCFTech)
  
  Looks like it. With the ongoing chip shortage it makes no sense to throw out an Xbox CPU just because the graphics core isn't up to scratch; just disable the graphics and you have a solid (if previous generation) eight core processor.
  
  The system in question appears to use GDDR6 memory, which means that it's not a mainstream Ryzen part, but a custom chip from either the recent Xbox or PlayStation lineups.
  
  
  
• TSMC is on track to deliver 4nm and 3nm chips next year. (AnandTech)
  
  Compared to current 7nm parts (Apple is shipping 5nm parts from TSMC, but no-one else is yet) these will use half the power and be as little as one-third the size. They'll also be faster - up to 30% - but that's a bit more complicated; it's measured at optimum power usage, rather than maximum performance.
  
  So it's meaningful for mobile phones at the low end, and servers with hundreds of cores at the high end, but not so much for desktop systems, which focus on a different part of the performance-per-watt curve.
  
  While shortages are expected to continue into next year, TSMC is planning to pump $30 billion a year over the next three years for updates and expansion.
  
  
  
• All your Mac are belong to us. (Objective-See)
  
  A bug introduced in MacOS 10.15 lets hackers slide malware right past all of Apple's multi-layered protection schemes and simply take over your Mac.
  
  Your Mac. My Mac is still running 10.14, because every release - both major releases and point releases - since then has been a bug-ridden pile of crap.
  
  It's a long article. If you have the time and you want to see how security guys earn their keep, it's worth reading through it, and just imagine that any words you don't understand are witchcraft. You won't be far wrong.
  
  
  
• A laser-toting robot can zap 100,000 weeds per hour. (Freethink)
  
  Downside: It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. To get that speed it uses high-powered carbon-dioxide lasers, not cheap solid-state ones.
  
  I for one welcome our new weed-zapping overlords.
  
  
  
• Canada is offline after a beaver gnawed through the phone cord. (Gizmodo)
  
  Or maybe only part of Canada. Does Canada have parts? I'm hazy on the details. It's Canada.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:43 AM

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