Daily Tech News 21 October 2022

• Elon Musk is planning to fire 75% of Twitter's workforce out of an enormous trebuchet directly into the Sun. (The Guardian)

  "It's inefficient in terms of orbital velocities," said Musk. "But I think they've earned it."

  Current Twitter management are busy hiding their own plans:

  On Thursday night, Bloomberg reported that an internal memo circulated by Twitter said there were "no plans for any company-wide layoffs, and definitely not 25%, and no, Patrice, your name is not at the top of the list, not that there is a list."

  Twitter currently has 7500 employees, mostly in the Trust and Safety, Safety and Trust, Trust in Safety, and It's Not Censorship When We Do It departments, all of which Musk plans to axe.

  But while Twitter's current management planned to lay off 25% of the staff by the end of next year, the new report revealed Musk wants to reduce Twitter's 7,500 employees down to a "skeleton staff" of around 2,000 people.

  The Golgafrinchans only needed to rid themselves of one third of their population. Douglas Adams was an optimist.
  
  
  
• Musk gutting Twitter would be a threat to us all - and by "us all" we mean the self-appointed gatekeepers of Truth whose salaries depend on keeping you miserable peasants in your place. (Bloomberg)

  That said, slashing 75% of staff isn't the kind of surgical strike aimed at tidying up a bloated workforce and getting a company through a few quarters of rough weather.

  Correct. This isn't short-term thinking. Twitter is completely dysfunctional, and jettisoning the majority of the staff and all of senior management is the first step toward fixing that.

  Such an attitude is bewildering. Musk, who will take the company private and own it outright, has a net worth of almost $200 billion. While only a fraction of that is liquid —most being tied up in shares of his companies —Twitter's $3.8 billion annual operating budget is something he could afford to bolster, not reduce. ... With Twitter, though, Musk moves from being a high-profile, extremely talkative leader of a couple of transportation companies to the overlord of an extremely powerful and highly effective tool for disseminating both facts and disinformation.

  The thesis here is that (a) Musk should spend billions of dollars of his own money keeping Twitter afloat and (b) keep on censoring the only people who could ever make the platform profitable.
  
  I suspect he'll pass on that offer.

• Why did I link to The Guardian for that top story? Because Twitter isn't the only American company in drastic need of a 75% headcount reduction. Check out this utterly delusional take from MSN or this demented blathering from Tech Crunch.
  
  Or don't. In fact, I'd recommend don't.
  
  
  
• Intel's 13th generation Raptor Lake CPUs are here. How are they? (AnandTech)
  
  The 13900K - a nominal 125W part - draws up to 350W. Yes, it's fast, but only if you don't care about power consumption, heat, and noise.
  
  
  
  Similar overall performance to AMD's 7950X, but it takes 275W to match the performance of the 7950X at 175W. If you match power levels, it's significantly slower at every level. Oh, and it suffers thermal throttling under load even with a huge 420mm water cooler.
  
  Still, if you want the best gaming performance and don't care about power, heat, noise, or cost, just get... Uh, just get AMD's previous generation 5800X3D.
  
  
  
• China is holding emergency talks after its high-end chip industry was taken out behind the barn and killed with an axe by (checks notes) the Biden Administration. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Huh.
  
  
  
• There's a buffer overflow in the SHA-3 hashing library in Python and PHP if you feed it... If you feed it 4GB of data in one go. (Nicky Mouha)
  
  So don't do that.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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