Daily Tech News 25 August 2021

• The increasingly aptly named Hot Chips conference is on again, and though I haven't had time to do more than scan the headlines, a couple of talks stood out.
  
  The Cerebras CS-2 is the largest - and probably the most expensive - computer chip in the world. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Clocking in at 70 square inches - where one square inch is already very large - it features 850,000 cores and 40GB of cache built with 2.6 trillion transistors.
  
  Its TDP is a very modest 15kW, as much as an entire rack full of regular servers.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Esperanto ET-SoC-1 has a mere 1092 cores and measures slightly less than one square inch. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's 1088 minions and 4 maxions in their terminology, all sharing the open-source RISC-V architecture. The entire chip uses around 20W in its default configuration.
  
  
  

• If you control language, you control thought. (Zyppy)
  
  Google employees think antitrust issues are absurd because Google forbids any meaningful discussion of antitrust issues.
  
  This is spectacularly unhealthy.
  
  
  
• Google has said staff have no right to protest the company's choice of clients. (Bloomberg)
  
  Which as a matter of employment law is not entirely correct given Google's base of operations.
  
  
  
• A hacker stole over 600,000 private photos and videos from iCloud without Apple noticing. (LA Times)
  
  By the highly sophisticated trick of pretending to be from Apple tech support.
  
  
  
• And fake OpenSea support staff are stealing NFTs. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Never trust anyone with anything.
  
  
  
• If you need to break into a Windows 10 computer and don't have a Razer gaming mouse a SteelSeries keyboard will do the trick nicely. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I actually have one of these. It's the size of a '54 Caddy Coupe DeVille and has literally dozens of programmable keys. Unfortunately it's kind of mushy to type on and I'm using a Dell Bluetooth model instead.
  
  
  
• If you unlock the bootloader on the incredibly expensive Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3, all the cameras stop working. (XDA Developers)
  
  Right to repair? Never heard of it.
  
  
  
• Another day, another generation: Hololive Indonesia has opened auditions for a third generation of talents. (Twitter)
  
  Something I didn't know early on is that all of the Indonesian girls are mutli-lingual, speaking at a minimum Indonesian, English, and Japanese. Iofi from Gen 1 also speaks Korean and German, and Risu of course speaks fluent Squirrel.
  
  Meanwhile YouTube is still unsubscribing tens of thousands of people daily from HoloEN Gen 2, thanks to their infallible fucking algorithm. Might as well just send up the puffs of smoke and make it Pope.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:33 AM

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