Daily Tech News 12 June 2022

• Me: This bathroom has space next to the existing towel rail and a convenient power point, perfect for adding a heated towel rail.
  Also me: I wonder what this switch does. Doesn't seem to control the lights or exhaust fan.
  Also also me: These towels are unexpectedly warm and dry.
  
  If haven't figured out how to switch on the underfloor heating, and I haven't used the oven yet, but I think I've got everything else working.
  
  
  
• That billion dollars was probably sour anyway: After their cryptocurrency lost 99% of its value, the makers of crappy blockchain game Axie Infinity say it was never about the money. (Bloomberg)

  [Co-founder Jeffrey] Zirlin said he empathized with people who'd lost money—life-changing sums, in some instances. But he added that a crash that got rid of Axie profiteers could have its upside, too. "Sometimes having to flush out the people who are just in it for the money," he said, "that's just the system self-correcting. The suckers can starve in the dark, I've got mine. Don't print that."

  Zirlin may have added:

  "We have to be careful revealing our location, just like the president doesn't always have to reveal his location," he said. "We're kind of like heads of state, or superhero actors dodging restraining orders."

  Kind of like that, yeah.
  

• Bottom of the budget SSD market: The Teamgroup AX2 offers 2TB of SSD in a 2.5" SATA package for $130. (AnandTech)
  
  Not sure I'd recommend that particular model, though; warranty replacement seems iffy. Better to go with Samsung, or Micron/Crucial, who make their own flash chips and stand by their products. I bought some Corsair drives and they seem to be working fine so far.
  
  
  
• Top of the budget SSD market: The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus offers 1TB of SSD in an M.2 NVMe package for $130. (Serve the Home)
  
  Twice as expensive per gigabyte, but twelve times faster - 7000MB per second compared to 540MBps on the Team AX2 above.
  
  
  
• Reparaibility on Dell's new XPS 13 is kind of crap. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not only has soldered RAM, but a soldered SSD. Two USB-C ports and that's it. No options to expand or upgrade at all.
  
  
  
• More details on that new Tachyum CPU that runs both Intel and Arm code. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's an in-order VLIW design that uses software translation for non-native code and to provide pseudo out-of-order execution. This has been done before with mixed success, but nobody has thrown 128 cores running at 5.7GHz at the problem. Maybe they'll do better than previous attempts.
  
  The largest, fastest model has a TDP of 950W - which is rather a lot - but if you're willing to back off on the clock speeds a bit you can still get the full 128 cores at a 300W TDP.
  
  Peak performance of 96 DP TFLOPS and 12 FP8 PFLOPS puts it in the class of specialised AI accelerator cards, which is not bad at all for a general-purpose CPU.
  
  
  
• DNS is a database. dns.toys takes advantage of that. (DNS.Toys)
  
  Want to look up the time in a distant city, or the weather, or current exchange rates, but somehow the only tool you have available is DNS? Problem solved.
  
  
  
• GM needed a new part for the 2022 Tahoe. Setup time for injection molding would have delayed production by weeks so the company 3D-printed it. (CNet)
  
  Using a factory full of HP Multi Jet printers, which are not something I was aware existing, but given that I just threw out a 25 year old Laser Jet that still worked are probably a good investment.
  
  
  
• Yep is a new search engine that proposes to give most of the ad revenue back to content creators. (Yep)
  
  It seems to work.
  
  
  
• There's an unfixable security flaw in Apple's M1 processor. (Tech Crunch)
  
  And almost certainly in the M2, given the timing. It takes a long time to fix these issues in hardware, when they can't be resolved with a microcode update.
  
  There's no current exploit, but this is something that could make a security flaw in regular code much more serious.
  
  You can try it yourself if you really want to.
  
  
  
• So I want a laptop with at least an 8-core CPU - a 6800U, for example, or maybe Intel's i7-1280P, 32GB of RAM, a good selection of ports, dual M.2 slots, and a 2560x1600 screen, but still thin and light.
  
  GPD: Got you covered! (Liliputing)
  
  Uh, maybe not that thin and light. A screen larger than 10" is nice sometimes.
  
  
  
• Google, hiring only the best and brightest and complete nutcases (hat tip HungarianFalcon):
  
  

  This discussion between a Google engineer and their conversational AI model helped cause the engineer to believe the AI is becoming sentient, kick up an internal shitstorm and get suspended from his job. And it is absolutely insane. https://t.co/hGdwXMzQpX pic.twitter.com/6WXo0Tpvwp

  — Tom Gara (@tomgara) June 11, 2022

  
  
  It's a chat bot, you idiot.
  
  

  simply perfect pic.twitter.com/2hZWjrVZz7

  — Thomas Paine ✊🇺🇦 (@TomPaineToday) June 11, 2022

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posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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