Daily Tech News 15 April 2022

• Slept in this morning. My year started with a blockchain meltdown requiring me to come back from a long-awaited holiday, and that delayed other work so that I've ended up working night and day ever since up to and including having to find a new place to live.
  
  Today I got to sleep a little. After this things get really busy.
  
  Should return to normal in July. I might be sleeping on the floor and working at the kitchen counter for a week or three in between.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk has launched a $43 billion all-cash hostile* takeover bid for Twitter. (Ace of Spades HQ)
  
  Twitter isn't worth that much. Under current management it's not worth 10% of that. But under new management that is not completely insane it could be.
  
  * It's not Musk that's hostile here. The current board and management team view Twitter as their private political playground, and the shareholders - never mind the users - can die in a fire if they don't like it.
  
  
  
• Buying Twitter is not a way to make money, says Elon Musk. (The Verge)
  
  Yeah, no shit Elon. Still glad you put the honey badger among the pigeons.
  
  
  
• The corrupt US government is trying to find a way to intervene to preserve its corrupt defender, by which I of course mean Twitter again. (Ace of Spades HQ)
  
  Fortunately for Elon Musk, both Twitter and the US federal government are as incompetent as they are corrupt.
  
  And of course all this kicked off half an hour after I posted yesterday's update.

• AMD's new Ryzen 7 5800X3D may in fact be the fastest gaming CPU around. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And that's a $449 CPU that drops into existing motherboards, competing with Intel's new factory-overclocked $739 Core i9-12900KS.
  
  Outside of games - which don't use more than 8 cores because that's what consoles have - chips like the 12 core Ryzen 9 5900X (currently as low as $379) and the 8+8 core 12900K soundly beat the 8 core 5800X3D on heavy multi-threaded workloads.
  
  It's a bit of a niche chip but it's not bad at general purpose stuff and it's not overpriced.
  
  
  
• Renesas - which if you're not familiar is a Japanese electronics giant formed after divisions of Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and NEC were spun off and merged - has introduced the first PCIe 6 chips. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Given how long the industry was stuck at PCIe 3, it's amazing how quickly these new generations have been adopted. I don't know if PCIe 6 will actually hit the desktop market any time soon, but I didn't think PCIe 5 would be here already and it is... Sort of.
  
  
  
• If you want to run the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 on an Alder Lake CPU, you probably want to manually upgrade the kernel. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is a bit of a nuisance, but upgrading from 5.15 to 5.16 brings on average a 14% performance improvement specifically on Alder Lake.
  
  
  
• An ounce of undo is equal to a pound of are you sure. (HTTPie)
  
  Particularly when all your are you sure prompts look exactly alike, whether you are deleting a single file or an entire disk drive.
  
  
  
• There was an incident with GitHub actions. (GitHub Status)
  
  Some people were just slightly concerned.
  
  

  Hey @github did you really mean to bill us for 30,000 YEARS of compute time in Actions usage? I don't think I can afford this $127 million bill. pic.twitter.com/0qzxz949ps

  — Matt Greensmith (@mgreensmith) April 13, 2022

  
  
  
  
• A free Windows 11 Toolbox script did bad things. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Very bad things.
  
  I thought I might have mentioned this one here, but now I don't think I did. I did mention a toolbox app for the Kindle Fire, but that's completely different.
  
  
  
• The Asus Zenbbook 14X OLED Space Edition is now available for pre-order. (Liliputing)
  
  It's close to the perfect small laptop: Core i9 12900H CPU, 32GB LPDDR5, a 1TB SSD, a 14" 2880x1600 90Hz touchscreen OLED display, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, USB-A, headphone jack, and microSD card, a physical privacy shutter over the webcam, and a pressure-sensitive pen. Oh, and a MIL-STD-810H chassis so you can just hose it out.
  
  All that and the Four Essential Keys.
  
  Around $2000. Perfection doesn't come cheap.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:00 AM

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