Daily Tech News 25 September 2021

• Update your Chrome browser. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Update your Exchange server.
  
  Update your VMWare vCenter.
  
  Update your iOS.
  
  Update your IOS. That's Cisco rather than Apple.
  
  Update your SonicWall security devices. Again.
  
  Update your, uh, European Union. Or not, that one's definitely non-critical.
  

• China has banned cryptocurrencies. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, except for one, controlled by China.
  
  Be interesting to see what happens with video card prices. Hard drive prices are on their way back down after the Chia mining craze fizzled out, but video cards are in short supply even without the miners.
  
  Anyway, I have an RTX 3060 now - albeit a laptop 3060 - which should do for a while.
  
  
  
• A teenager on TikTok invalidated the garbage research of thousands of garbage scientists. (The Verge)
  
  

  Analyzing N=300 Prolific study. Very generic title & description. Survey questions mostly about social comparisons & money
  
  91% of respondents are female, 7% are male. Don't think I've miscoded anything, and no unusual survey restrictions.
  
  How does that happen?

  — Sebastian Deri (@SebastianDeri) August 6, 2021

  How it happened is you're lazy and stupid and your research is worthless.
  
  
  
• Your face is not a bar code. (UCLA)
  
  
  
• Your butthole on the other hand... (The Guardian)
  
  
  
• A look at the Asus Zenbook 13. (Hot Hardware)
  
  This one has a Ryzen 5800U, an OLED display covering 100% of DCI-P3, albeit only at 1080p, the four essential keys, two USB-C, one USB-A, HDMI, microSD... No headphone jack and soldered RAM, but oh well.
  
  
  
• Using Nim instead of Python for data processing. (Benjamin D Lee)
  
  Nim is essentially a statically typed and statically compiled Python. I say essentially because the languages are just very similar, not actually compatible.
  
  There is a Python JIT compiler - it's called PyPy and it works very well - and in this case it's already nine times faster than Python, but Nim is three times faster again.

posted by Pixy Misa at 02:51 AM

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