Daily Tech News 20 December 2021

• Facebook earned the title of the worst (tech) company of 2021. (WCCFTech)
  
  The survey was conducted by Yahoo Finance which apparently still exists. Whatever the value of the survey, you can immediately tell that the article is worthless garbage because it prominently features prefab "whistleblower" Frances Haugen.
  
  Which is not to say that Facebook doesn't suck, of course.

• DDR5 vs. DDR4: Is it time to upgrade your RAM? No. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Short and sweet.
  
  
  
• A new AI algorithm can predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, the structure of proteins. (Medium)
  
  Conventional protein folding algorithms are painfully slow. The new algorithm guesses - and gets it right 90% of the time.
  
  
  
• exa is a modern replacement for ls. (The Exa Website)
  
  Burn the witch.
  
  It's written in Rust. Which I guess is better than Node.js.
  
  
  
• Rails 7 is here. (Ruby on Rails)
  
  Okay.
  
  Better than Node.js. Or PHP.
  
  
  
• Fakku - which started out as a pirate site - filed a DMCA takedown notice against TorrentFreak - which reports on pirate sites. (TorrentFreak)

• On January 1, Farmville joined the bleedin' dawn chorus invisible, Microsoft got breached in the SolarWinds fiasco, I grabbed two SSDNodes servers that I never ended up using but at least they were cheap, a new California law made it legal to punch GrubHub in the face, and we had a Non Non Biyori trailer.
  
  
  
• On January 2, the EU pledged "up to" €145 billion to develop next-gen CPUs which so far has resulted in absolutely nothing, my main PC audibly went splut, a backdoor was found in Zyxel enterprise network security hardware, and I made an observation:

  If you keep pumping money into the economy, you're going to get inflation. Somewhere. If it's not grocery prices, it's something else.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On January 3, I deployed ZFS at SSDNodes - at about one third the speed of my new server, don't get a TRENDnet 5GbE USB adaptor, ZipFly generated Zip files on the fly, my main PC went splut again - I suspected my new washing machine causing power spikes but it stopped happening by itself, and Ollie was built different.
  
  
  
• On January 4, DDR4-5100 was 1% faster than DDR4-4400, URL shorteners tracked everyone, Facebook was bad, and Apple decided not to ban amphetamines.
  
  
  
  
  
• On January 5, Sydney went into lockdown for the first time over 5 cases of Bat Flu, there were no video cards anywhere, Linus said fuck Intel, there was a new PlayStation game, Ether hit $1000, and China had vanished Alibaba CEO Jack Ma.
  
  
  
• On January 6, Jim Keller was named CEO of Tenstorrent, DOXBox-X was DOSBox but more X, Google deadpooled Android Things, Telegram let you triangulate idiots, and a Transpacific Tunnel Hurrah.
  
  
  
  (As I edit this I'm listening to Gura, Amelia, Sana, Fauna, Kronii, and Mumei all playing Minecraft together. That's more than the total membership of Hololive EN in January.)
  
  
  
• On January 7, Adata, Gigabyte, and MSI were preparing for DDR5-8400 which is still nowhere to be found, AMD's Epyc 7543 kicked Intel to the kerb, Sonnet had a neat eGPU, Hugo Gernsback was naming ASRock motherboards, Microsoft added a newsfeed that everyone hates, and fuck Apple.
  
  
  
• On January 8, the SolarWinds debacle unsealed sealed court records, some lunatic got Windows running on an M1 Mac Mini, Facebook removed the likes count, and Blockchain Stalin was at it again.
  
  
  
• On January 9, the purge accelerated, fuck Google, Apple, Reddit, and Twitter, albeit not necessarily in that order, and when you have a spare moment also Facebook, Shopify, Twitch, Discord, Instagram, YouTube, and CampaignMonitor, Twitter banned the account of Sci-Hub because they were being sued in India, GNAP was the next generation of OAuth and entirely uninteroperable, half the memory in my main PC vanished - another problem that somehow resolved itself, and I added a new YouTube tag.
  
  
  
• On January 10, I added a Parler embed tag - waste of time that was, things aged poorly, YouTube influencers were getting paid for genocide apologetics, there were Zen 3 desktop APUs (I just checked and there still are), Chinese corporations bought smaller companies and destroyed their value through incompetence just like western ones, why I'm not going back to Firefox, ever, the tech independence movement kicked off - my new server is located in Australia at an Australian hosting provider - and Section 230 ruined the internet.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On January 11, the Chinese Embassy in US was boasting about how the mass murder of undesirables improved life for the few who remained, Parler was down for a while, HP's Envy 14 had the four essential keys but was otherwise meh, the Threadripper Pro 3995WX got put through its paces, that was a lot of ads, and New Zealand's central bank got hacked and nobody even noticed.
  
  
  
• On January 12, I discovered satay chicken, bought an oven, and joined Minds, decentralising the web got harder than ever, the Australian government made the social networks very upset, and Germany and France looked askance at American big tech's growing fascism.
  
  
  
• On January 13, Uganda very sensibly banned all social media ahead of an election, AMD launched Zen 3 mobile parts which were mostly Zen 2, Threadripper Pro reached retail, we couldn't have nice things, Nvidia announced the RTX 3060 of which I now have two, Apple fucked child slaves or something like that, Beaker was a dessert topping and a floor wax, Twitter got upset with Uganda and everyone laughed at them, and fuck Godaddy.
  
  
  
• On January 14, Pat Gelsinger returned to the CEO role at Intel, Minds didn't entirely suck, TSMC was not going to be producing i3 CPUs for Intel, Microsoft announced Azure for Retail, banking on the fact that retailers loathe Amazon, the security of iOS was hampered by the fact that it wasn't turned on, and Parler redeployed to a new serverless architecture.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On January 15, Samsung announced the Galaxy S21, Twitter got involved in a land war in Africa, Apple's new M1 processor had no documentation, Elon Musk was not giving you $58,000 and how to instantly corrupt an NTFS filesystem.
  
  
  
• On January 16, I managed to compile some code, there were a trillion SQLite databases, SSDs maxed out PCIe 4.0, TSMC ramped up its ramp up, Sigmal was expleriemcing tegnical differcultes, WhatsApp postponed stealing customer data, Google kept that right on schedule, BugTraq died, Google stomped on the Minds app, and fascists were busy speaking out against fascism, by which they meant anyone who disagreed with them.
  
  
  
• On January 17, Intel cancelled Optane for consumers, Google "accidentally" killed smaller competitors, FreeBSD continued working to eliminate GPL code - in favour of more open licenses, NASA finally tested the SLS booster, and the beatings would continue until morale improved.
  
  
  
• On January 18, Pixy had never seen such fuckery, I had no groceries, got video embeds working for Rumble and Lbry, still more ways to instantly corrupt an NTFS filesystem, Google set out to ban third-party cookies and replace them with something only Google could control, we couldn't have nice things again, the strings command had an RCE, and Apple got sued by crazies seeking to force it to ban Telegram.
  
  Also Hololive stars Gura and Marine hit 2 million and 1 million subscribers respectively. That was a long time ago; they are now at 3.6 and 1.7 million.
  
  
  
  
  
  Korone is also at 1.7 million.
  
  
  
• On January 19, I got purged by Twitter - three times, Intel announced its Panther Canyon NUCs (which have since been denounced), and Facebook and Google were making secret deals in smoke-filled rooms.
  
  
  
• On January 20, well.

  January 20, 2021 -
  The press goes back to sleep
  After four years
  Of moral outrage
  At being forced
  To pretend
  To do their jobs.
  
  Now again they can bask
  In the warm praise
  Of government apparatchiks
  For asking pre-screened questions
  Regarding the color
  Of the paint
  On the presidential plane.
  
  --
  
  Some months later
  When everything has gone
  Quite predictably
  To Hell
  The question on every journalist's lips
  Is how could the public
  Have got all of this
  So wrong?

  Plus YouTube chat leaked memory like a firehose through a used Kleenex, Samsung announced the 870 EVO range, it turned out that Alibaba CEO Jack Ma might still be partly alive, MeWe added 2.5 million users in a week, Elastic went full fuckbiscuit, a review of the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 (I was just looking at this the other day - I could actually afford one), and Brave added IPFS.
  
  
  
• On January 21, Intel started rehiring retirees, Minisforum had a dual network NUC, the Pi Pico cost four bucks and like everything else this year went immediately out of stock, Microsoft continued its trend of being the least sucky big tech company while still sucking, cats and Linux didn't mix, IBM handed out free RHEL licenses to make up for the murdered CentOS, and trust in the media was at a historical low and simultaneously at its highest point for the year.
  
  
  
• On January 22, Intel said it was on track with its 7nm process - for 2023, running Elite on a Pi Pico, Amazon told Elastic to get forked, and Twitter was sued for enabling child sex trafficking.
  
  
  
• On January 23, Facebook shut down the page of the British Socialist Workers Party and Twitter started suspending Antifa accounts now that they were deemed surplus to requirements, SpaceX lobbed 143 satellites into polar orbit, oh, and PayPal sucked. Just generally sucked.



• On January 24, everything about the Pi Pico, RTX 3060s cost more than 3060 Tis, Pip dropped Python 2, the Code of Cancer people were at it again, Softbank ran into minor difficulties with its sale of Arm to Nvidia, and ClF3.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On January 25, PGM indexes were magic, SonicWall ate its own dogfood and discovered that this was a bad idea, the Tucows download site closed its doors after 27 years, Facebook had no friends, and YouTube marked Haachama's entire channel as safe for children.
  
  Update: Madeleine from Tucows reached out to me to note that while the venerable Tucows download site had closed, the company itself is still very much alive.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On January 26, Stasis mom had it going on, installing an RTX 3090 into an M.2 slot, CollapseOS ran on anything, MeWe's free speech policy needed a little work, and the zombie apocalypse had to be rescheduled.
  
  
  
• On January 27, Reddit broke the hedge funds at least for a while, once again we couldn't have nice things, ASRock announced a new mini-PC that you couldn't get, and Google banned the SubStation Alpha subtitle file format from the Play Store.
  
  
  
• On January 28, fuck Discord, Jen Psaki was a gender essentialist, Intel's DG1 video cards were useless, all other video cards were out of stock, and AMD announced record sales despite none of its products being purchasable anywhere.
  
  
  
• On January 29, we refused to live in our pods and eat our bugs, Personium kept all your data in one safe place so anyone who wanted to steal it only needed to find one exploit, fuck Facebook, port 69 got blocked, Apple escalated its war with Facebook, Google and Apple purged unfavourable app reviews - which were being left on the Robinhood app after they put restrictions on their customers and then blatantly lied about it.
  
  
  
  
  
• On January 30, 11 million IOPs on consumer SSDs, Microsoft Edge hadn't been ruined yet, Reddit saved AMC theaters, Robinhood relented and allowed its customers to buy one single share in GameStop, and SQLite had a WAL.
  
  
  
• And on January 31, the Asus PWS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi had a chipset fan, the Intel DG1 was as I mentioned previously completely useless, HTMX looked interesting, and the Excel formula language was Turing-complete.

posted by Pixy Misa at 02:00 AM

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