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Daily Tech News 3 June 2021

Top Story

• Amazon warehouse injury rates are 80% higher than those of their competitors. (BBC)
  
  Amazon was at a loss to explain these numbers.
  
  
  
• Amazon has stopped testing job applicants for marijuana use and is pushing for legalisation. (NPR)
  
  This is, like, totally unrelated, man.

Anime of the day is Inari, Konkon, Koi Iroha from 2015, which is just an absolute little gem of a series. It follows the story of Inari, who rescues a dog at a Shinto shrine one day and then discovers that it wasn't a dog, and ends up blessed with divine power that she never sought and would generally rather not have.

The only problem I have with it is that they compressed ten volumes of manga down to a ten-episode TV series, skipping a lot of the content entirely. It could have done with a 24 or 26 episode run, and some parts feel a little rushed.



Tech News

• The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is here. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In short, it's fast, though not much faster than the existing 3080, overpriced, though you probably won't be able to find one anyway, and HOLY CRAP THE 3070 IS EXPENSIVE.
  
  It's currently going for around $2000 here in Australia, where the competing Radeon 6700 XT is around $1150. That's still about a 60% markup over what it's supposed to cost, but the 3070 is marked up about 160%.
  
  
  
• Windows 10+ or whatever it's called is being announced on June 24. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Can they just fix the various settings panels so that they all work the same way? Some were released with Windows 10, while others haven't changed since NT 3.51.
  
  
  
• Micron is shipping 1α memory. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is 40% smaller and uses 15% less power than their existing 1Z chips.
  
  Those numbers - 1α and 1Z - are because they gave up entirely on claiming they were working at a size in nanometres. It's really all somewhere around 20nm with various clever tricks applied on top of that.
  
  
  
• Prosus (who?) is buying Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion. (Wall Street Jorunal)
  
  Stack Overflow used to be just massively popular with programmers; it was the first place you went when you needed help with a coding issue. In recent years it has suffered something of a problem of entrenched opinion; if you ask a question it will instantly be closed and you will be chastised for not looking up an answer provided a decade ago that no longer even compiles.
  
  
  
• There will never be a Python 4. (Tech Republic)
  
  Good, because they seriously fucked up the release of Python 3.
  
  Also, there kind of is a Python 4. It's called Nim.
  
  It's not perfect, but Nim is written entirely in Nim, which shows a certain degree of commitment by its maintainers. And it's a lot faster than Python.
  
  
  
• Will AMD come to the yellow, carp-shaped courtesy phone? (Phoronix)
  
  AMD's recent GPUs have all been codenamed as $colour / $fish - the first one being Sienna Cichlid. I haven't seen any mention of Yellow Carp before - it just showed up in a Linux Kernel update - so it looks like they have yet another part on the way.
  
  
  
• The FBI says that the Russia-based REvil group is behind the hack on steak-and-bacon supplier JBS. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I don't trust anything the FBI says; if they told me not to eat plutonium-based paint chips I wouldn't even bother to put down the bowl while I googled "plutonium paint chip danger debunked".
  
  But yeah, probably Russian hackers. This one looks like their kind of short-term thinking; China plans things much better.
  
  
  
• Huawei has launched their new operating system for mobile devices, Harmony OS. (Thurrott.com)
  
  This is totally a new and independent system and not just Android hurriedly papered over to look like iOS despite the fact that the preview release still identified itself as Android in dozens of places.
  
  
  
• If you use Alibaba's UC Browser, you might want to not do that. (Forbes)
  
  They're tracking everything you do. They promised explicitly not to do that, and then they did it.
  
  Who do they think they are, Google?
  
  Actually, the tracking outlined in the article is at a level American Big Tech only dreams it could get away with. It's already been yanked from Apple's App Store, and apparently after that article was written, from the Google Play Store as well.
  
  This would be totally unconnected with the recent crackdown on Alibaba by the Chinese government and the almost total disappearance of Jack Ma after he was totally not forced to resign as chairman.
  
  He's fine. He's just been playing golf. Since November.
  
  
  
• Can you play Metro Exodus EE at 8K? (Tweaktown)
  
  Short answer: No.
  
  Long answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooo.
  
  Unless 10 FPS with dips down to 7 is your jam. It does better with DLSS enabled, but DLSS simply means that you're no longer running at 8K; it's rendering at some lower resolution and upscaling.
  
  
  

Further Deponent Sayeth Not Video of the Day



The New York Times is squirming like a millipede in pancake batter, and it's glorious.


How Did He Even Get That Clip Video of the Day



I have no idea who decided that Nene was a seal, or indeed what any of this means, and I watch something from Hololive pretty much every day.

But I do know where that clip at the beginning came from: Nene accidentally streamed on Kiara's channel (Kiara is the chicken) after an earlier collab. And that stream got cut short and immediately disappeared. But on the internet everything is forever, except for the opening credits of Nuku Nuku.


Did I Already Do Little Witch Academia Anime Music Video of the Day



Probably, but I haven't posted this particular video recently. Most of the insanity herein - from about 1:20 onwards - comes from a single very special episode. It's not all like that, but the joy of LWA is that when it needs go crazy it goes all the way crazy. Smash references to Evangelion, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and Castle of Cagliostro together in a single scene? Sure, why not!


Disclaimer: Look, it's my grandmother's recipe. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.