Daily Tech News 11 May 2022

• My hallway is choked with boxes. I cannot move. Send help and gluten-free pizza.
  
  
  
• ICE "now operates as a domestic surveillance agency". (Engadget)
  
  Interesting to see this sort of article coming from the mainstream - read liberal - tech press.
  
  ICE is illegally outsourcing to private companies illegal data collection operations on US citizens that would be illegal for the agency to conduct itself.
  
  Which makes sense from the never allow a crisis to go to waste perspective; if you deliberately fail to secure the border you create a perpetual reason to monitor the activities of private citizens under the guise of fixing the mess you created.
  
  
  
• Speaking of surveillance, that page generates 138 cookies across 34 domains. Do not click.

• So that story about YouTube banning vtubers again.
  
  What happened was this:
  
  1. Spammers with R18 avatars flooded the chat of multiple vtubers based in southeast Asia, including some from leading agencies Hololive and Nijisanji.
  2. YouTube didn't block the spam even though it's forbidden.
  3. YouTube didn't ban the bots even though R18 avatars are forbidden.
  4. Some of the streamers had chat visible within their stream, because chat logs are often lost after the stream ends.
  5. The spammers reported the vtubers for R18 content because the spammers R18 avatars were (just barely) visible.
  6. YouTube immediately banned the vtubers because they are retarded.
  
  The world leaders in applied AI.
  
  
  
• Oops.
  
  

  pic.twitter.com/hufVTdPs41

  — Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact) May 10, 2022

  
  
  
  
• Matter is a new standard for smart home and other IOT devices. How will the industry fuck it up? (The Verge)
  
  Shake shake.
  
  Ask again later.
  
  
  
• Free speech could doom India's minorities, writes an anonymous idiot. (ZDNet)

  "By 'free speech,' I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people," [Musk] recently tweeted.

  Sure. But what exactly is free speech?

  He just told you, you imbecile.
  
  

• AMD's new Radeon 6950 XT is here - the last card of the current generation. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At 4k resolution it falls in between Nvidia's 3090 and 3090 Ti; at 1440p and 1080p it's the fastest card around.
  
  Price-wise it falls in between Nvidia's 3080 and 3080 Ti, making it good value in a strange way. It's still a very expensive card, but it's not as overpriced as Nvidia's high end.
  
  If you want ray-tracing it mostly comes in behind the cheaper RTX 3080. If you want to run workstation graphics it's the fastest current card. If you want to run Blender it's not, because ray tracing again.
  
  

• Why tech workers on six-figure salaries still feel underpaid. (Toolbox)
  
  Well, partly it's the 80 hour weeks. Partly it's the insane housing prices of cities where high tech industries tend to concentrate.
  
  But partly also because even those salaries aren't keeping up with inflation.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:00 AM

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