Daily Tech News 7 August 2022

• Amazon is acquiring Roomba maker iRobot for $1.7 billion. (Ars Technica)
  
  Given Amazon's habit of handing out Ring doorbell video footage without the tedious drudgery of asking or telling the owners, my inclination to buy a Roomba has abruptly evaporated. At least a doorbell is - by design - on the front of the house facing outwards, not roaming around inside.

• Twitter has confirmed that hackers collected email addresses and phone numbers of 5.4 million accounts. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The only reason Twitter has those phone numbers in the first place is that they would suspend your account to force you to hand it over.
  
  
  
• AMD has a new range of Ryzen 5000 embedded CPUs, including the first 10-core Ryzen model. (WCCFTech)
  
  I didn't think there was anything preventing a 10-core Ryzen chip, just no perceived market niche.
  
  These are just Ryzen 5000 parts, with lower clock speeds and fewer cores, but with long-term support for hardware manufacturers who need to be able to replace parts five or ten years from now.
  
  
  
• Netflix's The Sandman is "a dream adaptation of a classic". (The Verge)
  
  In other words, it's a self-indulgent mess of a TV series based on a self-indulgent mess of a comic series. Neil Gaiman is good when he's good, but when he's not, he's very much not.

• Why did you get a variable rate mortgage? Are you stupid or something?
  
  Long-term fixed-rate mortgages are almost unknown outside the US, and certainly don't exist in Australia. If you think about it, there's no way a bank would offer a long term fixed rate loan when interest rates are at historic lows, because they can only lose on the deal... Unless something is propping them up on the other end.
  
  
  
• Are blockchains / cryptocurrencies / NFTs / stablecoins / decentralised finance a scam?
  
  Mostly, yes. Not entirely, but it's the way to bet.
  
  
  
• You keep mentioning gluten-free stuff. Isn't that also a scam?
  
  Unless you have celiac disease, yes.
  
  If you do have celiac disease, gluten-free meals are the difference between living a relatively normal life and being a hermit subsisting on boiled rice and carrot sticks.
  
  
  
• Who is that vtuber you referred to obliquely the other day?
  
  If I referred to them obliquely it would only be a retired Hololive member, and there's only four of those (not counting Hitomi Chris, who no-one remembers): Aloe, Coco, Rushia, and most recently Sana. And the reason for the obliquity is that all four have other online personas kept separate from Hololive for privacy / contractual reasons. On my non-technical posts I will sometimes be less oblique - or a quick Google search will probably tell you more than you ever wanted to know.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:12 AM

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