Daily Tech News 11 December 2022

• Inside the frantic texts of the illegal crypto trading cartel as one of their more obvious Ponzi schemes imploded and threatened to take other, better camouflaged schemes with it. (New York Times / MSN)

  Stop now, don't cause more damage. The more damage you do now, the more jail time.

  While I may have elaborated on the headline, that is a verbatim quote of a text from Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao to disgraced Democrat campaign finance launderer Sam Bankman-Fried.
  
  
  
• Crypto exchange Kraken has laid off 30% of its employees - 1100 people. (Kraken)
  
  What were they doing with nearly 4000 employees in the first place?
  
  
  
• All the crypto doom and gloom you could possibly want is on tap at Web 3 Is Going Great.

• Breaking up with JavaScript front ends, or, how not to communicate anything, painfully. (Triskweline)
  
  A PowerPoint presentation in web form that leads to a demo app that doesn't demo anything like what the slides say it does - particularly when the same demo app is linked from two slides supposedly demonstrating entirely different things - rather muddies a fundamentally sound point that JavaScript front ends are dogshit.
  
  
  
• Twitter Blue is relaunching tomorrow. (WCCFTech)
  
  $8 per month via the web. $11 per month if you're stupid enough to sign up in the iOS app.
  
  I'll sign up. Not because I want to be verified (I don't) or want the clout (I don't), but because it's worth it just to annoy all the right people.
  
  
  
• Fractal Design goes Danish modern. (Guru3d)
  
  In black or white, with a choice of mesh or tempered glass side panels, and walnut or oak front panels.
  
  It actually doesn't look terrible.
  
  
  
• What's going on in Alzheimer's research. (Quanta)
  
  A long article examining the situation as scientists move away from the amyloid plaque model that seems now to have been overstated at best - and outright fraudulent at worst - after frittering away twenty years and two billion dollars.
  
  
  
• Where - and what - is dark matter? (Big Think)
  
  Dark matter is what you get when you map out the visible matter of galaxies and compare it with the total mass based on how fast the galaxies rotate. We can't see dark matter - it's dark - but we know there's something there because what we can see doesn't add up to enough mass to stop galaxies from flying apart.
  
  This article examines the possibility that dark matter is truly dark, that it only interacts via gravity. If this is true, then we have no other way to measure it.
  
  At least with neutrinos (which only interact via the weak force) we have a convenient local source running 24/7 (that shiny yellow thing you see in the sky now and then) and the little buggers hit our detectors buried at the bottom of salt mines so that we can learn something about them.
  
  In the "nightmare scenario" considered here (physicists mostly have nightmares about grant applications, but this is one of the exceptions) no particle collision experiment - whether the naturally occurring variety using the Sun as a convenient lab partner or the artificial variety using Switzerland - will ever provide any information about the nature of dark matter.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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