Daily Tech News 5 September 2021

• [Not pure tech news, but I do branch out into the infectious cancer that is social media from time to time, so please bear with me — Pixy.]
  
  Rolling Stone, the best time to delete your account was right before you posted this. The second best time is now, except you're apparently all passed out in the bathroom.
  
  

  Gunshot victims left waiting as horse dewormer overdoses overwhelm Oklahoma hospitals, doctor says https://t.co/ke654AV6o1 pic.twitter.com/Is4nAsSOyA

  — Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) September 3, 2021

  
  
  Shall we make a list?
  
  
1. "Doctor says."
   
   
2. Calling ivermectin a "horse dewormer" when it is one of the premier drugs for treating parasitic illness in humans.
   
   
3. Photo that shows people rugged up for winter in an area where recent daytime temperatures have been in the high 90s.
   
   
4. An apparent - and yet somehow entirely unreported - epidemic of gun violence in rural Oklahoma.
   
   
   

• The story was of course circulated by the usual "intellectuals" and "epidemiologists" and "news organisations".
  
  

  ⚠️IVERMECTIN & ER—patients taking the horse de-wormer drug, ivermectin, based on #COVID19 misinfo are causing emergency room back ups. Also Oklahoma Center for Poison and Drug Info receiving more calls from people becoming ill after taking ivermectin. 🧵 https://t.co/79DsYoaTsF pic.twitter.com/n8juecvjgR

  — Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) September 4, 2021

  
  
  
  
• So what is the basis in truth for these claims?
  
  Turns out, there isn't any. Every single word is a lie.
  
  

  Jackie 2.0 https://t.co/4K1IgfDrkU pic.twitter.com/IHoSgt0NLa

  — James Lindsay, has cool dreams (@ConceptualJames) September 4, 2021

  
  
  There are ZERO cases of ivermectin overdose being treated in the eastern Oklahoma hospital system, and NOBODY has been turned away from emergency care.
  
  
  
• So, Rolling Stone, seeking to avoid another humiliation, immediately retracted their fairy tale, right?
  
  Nope.
  
  

  Further update: As of at least 3:48pm today, the article has added at least two paragraphs doubling down on the claims that E.R.s are overwhelmed, but not using Ivermectin O.D.s as the cause. My wife @flippanna
  is an editor and is going over the changes line-by-line.

  — Rick Simmons (@buttonfly42) September 5, 2021

  
  
  I did see one person back down when presented with these facts. They were not of the American left, though.
  
  
  

• The Ryzen 5300G may be the best APU you can't buy. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not the fastest, but the best value for money, except that we don't know how much it costs because you can't buy it so the whole article is kind of guesswork.
  
  If you don't need sixteen cores and a 24GB graphics card, if you just want to check email, write your new novel, watch YouTube, play Minecraft - a modern quad core CPU with solid integrated graphics for $150 is likely all you need. If this does cost $150, which we don't know, because, well.
  
  Intel has quad core desktop parts with integrated graphics, but their desktop parts have the graphics engine scaled way down from the laptop parts, and lag well behind AMD. On GTA V for example, at 1080p low quality, the 5300G manages 80 fps, while the more expensive Core i5-11600K gets 52.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile AMD's next-generation Rembrandt APUs have already entered mass production. (WCCFTech)
  
  If that seems early, you need to understand that it takes months for a complex chip to make its way through the factory. There are dozens of processing steps and they're not fast.
  
  These chips support DDR5 (though not PCIe 5.0) and should deliver twice the graphics performance of AMD's current fastest APUs - well, other than their actual fastest APUs which power the Xbox and PlayStation. Something like 60% of the performance of the Xbox Series S.
  
  
  
• Spying on children is bad. Don't do that. (The Atlantic)
  
  When you've crossed the line so far that even The Atlantic - I refer to it as Fascist Quarterly - even The Atlantic notices, you might want to pause, take a deep breath, and quit your job and go take up potato farming because you're a miserable excuse for a human being where you are now.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare: Threat, menace, or just turning HEAD requests into GETs? (KMitov)
  
  A normal web request is an HTTP GET - it says "give me this page" and the server sends the page.
  
  There's another request type called HEAD - yes, I know - which says "just let me know if you have this page, but don't send it to me".
  
  So if you accidentally turn HEADs into GETs, the load on the server and network utilisation will jump dramatically as every check for the existence of a web page suddenly has to deliver the entire page.
  
  Cloudflare - which is designed to protect websites from being overloaded by their users - misconfigured several hundred servers to do exactly that, in effect DDOSing their own customers.
  
  
  
• I bought a 1TB microSD card for the new laptop. And, since I was on Amazon, some cutlery as well. Been that kind of day, whatever that kind of day is.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:49 AM

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