Daily Tech News 17 September 2022

• It seems like only yesterday that I mentioned Texas House Bill 20, legislation that attempted to designate large social networks as "common carriers" just like phone companies, severely limiting the companies' ability to engage in viewpoint discrimination. That legislation, and a similar bill in Florida, had been blocked at the district court level.
  
  Which injunction has just been overturned by the Fifth Circuit, nay, not so much overturned as nuked from orbit. (The Volokh Conspiracy)

  A Texas statute named House Bill 20 generally prohibits large social media platforms from censoring speech based on the viewpoint of its speaker.
  
  The platforms urge us to hold that the statute is facially unconstitutional and hence cannot be applied to anyone at any time and under any circumstances.
  
  In urging such sweeping relief, the platforms offer a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment. That Amendment, of course, protects every persons right to "the freedom of speech." But the platforms argue that buried somewhere in the person's enumerated right to free speech lies a corporation's unenumerated right to muzzle speech.
  
  The implications of the platforms' argument are staggering. On the platforms' view, email providers, mobile phone companies, and banks could cancel the accounts of anyone who sends an email, makes a phone call, or spends money in support of a disfavored political party, candidate, or business. What's worse, the platforms argue that a business can acquire a dominant market position by holding itself out as open to everyone—as Twitter did in championing itself as "the free speech wing of the free speech party." Blue Br. at 6 & n.4. Then, having cemented itself as the monopolist of "the modern public square," Packingham v. North Carolina, 137 S. Ct. 1730, 1737 (2017), Twitter unapologetically argues that it could turn around and ban all pro-LGBT speech for no other reason than its employees want to pick on members of that community, Oral Arg. at 22:39–22:52.
  
  Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say. Because the district court held otherwise, we reverse its injunction and remand for further proceedings.

  Since the entire purpose of Twitter post-2018 - at least as its senior executives would have it - is to engage in viewpoint discrimination to protect leftists from reality, this is potentially devastating to the platform.
  
  It would also affect Facebook, of course, and comments on platforms such as YouTube and Instagram, but those platforms at least have other functions, whether you consider them worthwhile or not.
  
  Expect Twitter to become even more frantic in its efforts to be taken over by its most hated enemy, because if HB 20 or the similar Florida legislation survives the court challenges, Elon Musk is the only thing that stands between them and oblivion.
  
  
  

• EVGA - the largest of Nvidia's video card partners - is so sick of dealing with the GPU company's bullshit that they've exited the marked entirely. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is no small thing because video cards make up 80% of EVGA's revenue. Though not necessarily 80% of its profits - low margins, or right now, negative margins, being a major point of contention leading to the breakup.
  
  EVGA has said it has no plans to switch to making AMD cards instead. All warrantees for existing cards will continue to be honoured.
  
  
  
  
  
• On the other hand GPU mining of Ethereum is now toast. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This should help with the availability of next generation cards, though not sp much with Nvidia's financials, because they sold a lot of cards to miners over the last two years.
  
  
  
• The 7900X is 30% faster than the 5900X. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In both single and multi-threaded tests. This Geekbench which is not a great benchmark, but when comparing two almost identical CPUs it's a pretty good indication of what to expect.
  
  This also puts the 12 core 7900X well ahead of the 16 core 5950X. In fact, it would put the 7900X around the same level as the 28 core Xeon Gold 6348, which sells for close to $3000.
  
  This also puts it ahead of Intel's 12900K in both single and multi-threaded tests. (WCCFTech)
  
  Though of course Intel has the 13900K coming soon, which will offer significantly better multi-threaded performance because it has an extra 8 Efficiency cores.
  
  The WCCFTech article has a score for the 7950X as well, which puts it at 31% faster than the 7900X. Perfect scaling would be around 35% (extra cores and a small clock speed boost) so that is quite good.
  
  I'm looking forward to seeing more detailed benchmarks later this month, because I'm planning to build either a 7900X or 7950X system before Christmas.
  
  
  
• Caddy vs. Nginx benchmarks. (Tyblog)
  
  Caddy fares better than I expected; indeed, there's no real reason to use Nginx if Caddy has the functionality you need.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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