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Daily Tech News 14 June 2021

Tech News

• Early tech news today because it's a long weekend and I have to go out at the time I'd usually post (which is about an hour after the end of my work day).
  
  
  
• Clarke's Corollary to Hanlon's Razor states that Any sufficiently profound incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
  
  And the new owners of Freenode are acting as a test case. (Ned Batchelder)
  
  They claim that all the missteps since the takeover are mistakes and not deliberate attacks on their own users, but in the end it doesn't matter. If you're constantly under attack by your supposed allies, the reason why is of secondary importance. You have to ditch them.
  
  The Free Software Foundation, Linux, GN, and Python have joined BSD and other major projects in ditching Freenode. (FSF)
  
  Only real question is what took them so long.

Anime of the day is Revolutionary Girl Utena from 1997. Based on a manga by Chiho Saito, the TV series was largely created by former staff from Sailor Moon, led by writer and director Kunihiko Ikuhara. This led some Sailor Moon fans to look to Utena as the natural successor to that series.

Boy, were they in for a surprise. Well, not on the lesbian relationships angle, I guess; even the English dub couldn't erase all of that from Sailor Moon. Cousins my ass.

There's also a movie, created by the same staff, partly a retelling of the TV show and partly an ending, and it contains the same amount of weirdness as the 39-episode series condensed down to 90 minutes. Which even for me was a little too much.

The English language release was derailed because after the first 13 episode arc was released to positive reviews the remainder was held up for more than five years by a licensing dispute. It was years before I finally got around to watching it all from the beginning.



Tech News

• Turf invaders: Amelia Watson and Gawr Gura of Hololive did a watchalong of the Microsoft / Bethesda announcements at E3. Well, not the whole thing, it appears that the E3 stream ran for nine hours altogether, but the major announcements from the first 90 minutes or so.
  
  
  
  
  E3 livestream is here. It's age-restricted so I can't embed it - though the gremlin commentary above is not.
  
  Because of the risk of copyright strikes - Hololive has a lot of trouble with YouTube, from shadowbanned streams to accounts with a million subscribers being summarily deleted - they don't show any of the content. You watch the live stream in one tab and their commentary in another. Bit of a pain to watch later because you have to sync the streams by trial and error, but better than having your entire channel scrubbed.
  
  Or you can just watch the Hololive side and they seem to be baked.
  
  The funny thing is, a huge chunk of the audience of the E3 stream was also watching the Hololive commentary - something like 80% of the YouTube audience - and they were posting references to the commentary in the main chat. And the girls were roasting the game announcements.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 5800X vs Intel 11700K: Battle of the 8 core mainstream CPUs. Again. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Both are readily available now, and are pretty close on performance, but at least in Australia the 11700K is 20% cheaper. On the other hand, it uses twice as much power, and if you need to upgrade Intel provides you with nothing where AMD has a 16 core part available today.
  
  
  
• Be careful what you wish for: You might just get it. It's the 21st century. Where's my flying car? (MSN)
  
  Though with a single-seat model costing $300,000 to build and government red tape being thicker these days than molasses in Boston in January of 1919, it could well be the 22nd century before we actually see these things.
  
  
  
• There is apparently a movie called 2:22. I've never heard of it and the IMDB ratings give me little reason to look closer.
  
  But exactly as you'd expect, automated takedown notices of pirated copies targeted every web page with the digits 222 in the URL. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Medium articles? Linux distros? IRC chat logs? Dr Phil episodes? Japanese porn?
  
  They will put you on the list, kiddo.
  

A Prebuilt System That Doesn't Suck Video of the Day



This is a $1000 system built by Newegg. It's not perfect, but it turned on, played games, and didn't catch fire. That's what our expectations have been reduced to.

I might end up getting a Dell - not the model Steve panned previously, but something similar - because during their regular sales the entire system costs $500 over the current retail price of the graphics card it contains.


Hamster Duality Anime Music Video of the Day



It's Chaosprojects again, my go-to source for cool AMVs. He doesn't do a lot of flashy effects but he's a professional video editor and his timing is on point.


He also did this one:




And this one:



You might now recognise clips from Umaru-chan and Amaama to Inazuma in there. Plus a whole lot of Yuru Camp which we haven't covered yet.


Disclaimer: And several others that are likely to appear in future updates.