Daily Tech News 26 December 2022

• Tech journalism doesn't know what to do with Mastodon. (Medium)
  
  Neither do you, bucko, because you're posting this on Medium.
  
  It's true that tech journalism is generally trash, of course, otherwise I wouldn't need to write these blog posts. The only things worse are mainstream journalism, Medium (don't click on any of the recommended articles), and of course Mastodon, which is infested with the kind of person who thought that Twitter didn't censor enough even before Elon Musk bought it.
  
  There's also a long thread at Hacker News of Mastodon fans saying it doesn't matter that Mastodon sucks because it's not a "product" and everyone else telling them that they are idiots.
  
  
  

• I ordered that fancy keyboard with all the accessories. The keyboard is on sale right now but the accessories aren't, so they ended up costing more than the keyboard (which includes a bunch of accessories itself).
  
  I ordered it with Cherry MX Red which I hope I like, but it comes with a set of five trial keyswitches and a tool to replace the switches if you don't like the ones it came with.
  
  They also sell just the keyboard if you don't need the LCD media dial, fancy numeric keypad, or either of the macro key options, but I bought everything.
  
  
  
• The Pitch Drop Experiment has been running for 86 years and so far no-one has seen it drop. (UQ)
  
  It has dropped, just no-one has seen it. Even with cameras monitoring it 24/7.
  
  Sneaky bastard.
  
  
  
• Building a website like it's 1999 and you really hate people. (LocalGhost)
  
  Sounds like Mastodon.
  
  
  
• Why you can trust CNET: We totally wouldn't point you to a site selling off cheap unauthorised Microsoft Office licenses at a 91% discount because that would almost certainly be a scam. (CNET)
  
  Except of course they did and it is. The licenses are real but are supposed to be confined to Bosnia-Herzegovina or some such former communist shithole, which is why they're so cheap. Microsoft probably won't revoke them. Probably.
  
  
  
• It's the year of iPad on the desktop for people who don't have jobs to do. (9to5Mac)
  
  You can run DaVince Resolve - a video editing thingy - on an iPad now.
  
  The announcement gushes:

  Get the same color correction and editing tools used on Hollywood films on iPad

  
  The most powerful iPads have 16GB of RAM.
  
  For 6K editing the recommended hardware configuration for DaVinci Resolve is an 18 core CPU, at least 64GB of RAM, and a video card with 20GB of VRAM.
  
  Also a keyboard and a mouse.
  
  And a 30" monitor.

• On July 1 Apple's senior legal executive in charge of preventing insider trading of Apple stock was convicted on charges of insider trading of Apple stock, Dell's new Inspiron 16 Plus, and the first reviews of the Ryzen 5800X3D.
  
  
• On July 2 GPU prices were down 57% since January from insane to merely horrifying, game consoles were still out of stock everywhere except the Nintendo Switch, China saw its own shadow and announced five more years of Zero COVID, OpenSea sent out emails telling users not to trust emails from OpenSea, and Arm announced new things.
  
  
• On July 3 there were no Synology boxes available which I believe is a conspiracy to force people to buy QNAP devices so that all their data can be stolen, Meta's crypto project was toast, EVGA included a free 1600W power supply with every 3090 Ti, and the 13900K was faster than the 12900K.
  
  
• On July 4 I finally got one of the LG UP850-W monitors I bought six months earlier out of its box and it turned out to be really good, bug bounty company HackerOne had a weasel problem, Amazon piled up half a billion dollars and set it on fire, and don't Kubernetes.
  
  
• On July 5 interest rates went up again for the third straight month (now eight straight months), in a novel twist private information on a billion people was stolen from China, the Xiaomi 12S came with a 1" 50MP Leica camera, and Google did something dumb.
  
  
• On July 6 the EU declared war on Apple, take off every Zig, a serious QNAP NAS for when you want your data seriously hacked, and Intel's 4nm process was on track to start production this year (which means consumer products by mid-2023).
  
  
• On July 7 interns, can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em, unless you're the Shanghai police in which case you probably can, Drobo filed for bankruptcy which was a surprise because everyone thought they went bankrupt years ago, the UK declared war on Apple as well, and fuck systemd, the Lenovo of Linux.
  
  
• On July 8 Sony was deleting movies that customers had "bought", Google's "Democratic AI" was a communist, Florida once again had giant calamitous snails that spewed parasitic brain worms but they lost their election bids so everything turned out well, Twitter was removing a million spam accounts a day according to Twitter, and QNAP again.
  
  
• On July 9 Elon Musk broke off the engagement, the HP Pavilion Plus 14 was everything I wanted except it maxes out at 16GB of RAM and I now have one sitting on the floor in the music room - I think that's the music room, might be the electronics lab, and Intel announced new NUC laptop kits only these ones suck.
  
  
• On July 10 Twitter did a 540 or maybe a 900 and went from suing to stop Elon Musk's takeover to suing to force him to complete the takeover, ASRock's DeskMeet was a mini-ITX system with four memory slots - a surprisingly rare configuration, all the hard problems in philosophy solved, and do not dumb here.
  
  
• On July 11 Twitter was lying, Elasticsearch was the QNAP of databases, and Netflix told its staff to shut up and sing.
  
  
• On July 12 Sri Lanka's economy imploded due to the people in charge being irredeemable leftist fuckwits, a book of tiny things, and you will always have more problems than engineers - unless you can solve your problems by shooting them.
  
  
  
  
• On July 13 European energy prices were expected to pass through the ionosphere on their way to Mars, North Korea hacked Axie Infinity, yet another otherwise good small Android tablet ruined by saving $3 on the LCD panel, and a bad motherboard.
  
  
• On July 14 Delutaya, Kson, and Namie, Google stopped hiring people until it could figure out why pink-haired communists made bad engineers, and the entire section on Russia in the Chinese edition of Wikipedia turned out to be an elaborate work of fiction.
  
  
  
  
• On July 15 Intel demanded billions of dollars from Congress, why you can't dig Switzerland, something went wrong at Twitter, something went wrong at OpenSea, and waiting for Windows 12.
  
  
• On July 16 don't attack your own customers you idiots, 10% of the top million websites were dead, and Log4j we will have with us always.
  
  
• On July 17 Intel's new graphics cards were a thing that existed, there were no measurable health benefits to drinking alcohol for those under 29 which means more for us 29-year-olds, how to set up Windows 11 without an online login, and a quintuple indirect Hello World.
  
  
• On July 18 wretched hives of scum and villainy, the rise of the Steam-powered Tesla, leaked clock speeds for AMD's new server chips turned out rather to understate matters, and Intel's high-end graphics cards competed evenly with AMD and Nvidia's low-end.
  
  
• On July 19 Denmark banned Chromebooks, Google was fined 21 trillion rubles - about $35, and the US Senate did nothing.
  
  
• On July 20 an Italian court got absolutely everything wrong, 22TB was the new 20TB, and how to build your own (software) X for all values of X.
  
  
• On July 21 sonnets were surprisingly difficult, Neopets was hacked - a shock to everyone who thought Neopets closed down around 2005, Ford fired 8000 workers to fund its EV program, a Threadripper Pro server motherboard from ASRock, Minecraft said fuck the blockchain anyway, and tech journalists were useless - and still are of course, but they were then as well.
  
  
  
  
• On July 22 the FBI was reading Twitter, YouTube was deleting pretty much everything, Samsung was spending $200 billion - in Texas, and reality wasn't real.
  
  
• On July 23 trees - those are called trees, SpaceX broke its 2021 launch record with five months left in the year, Google fired one of its idiots, and the 13700K was a 12900K.
  
  
• On July 24 15 years of Alzheimer's research turned out to have been based on fraudulent images in an early paper, quasicrystals with two time dimensions, and just stop fucking monkeys you sickos.
  
  
• On July 25 a couple of pretty good SSDs, Apple fanboys can be safely ignored, and Sony took down its own website for copyright infringement.
  
  
• On July 26 will there be a new Nvidia Titan, you couldn't create full-custom Lego minifigs in Australia and now you can't do it at all, Instagram wanted to be banned from government-owned devices, and Intel found a customer.
  
  
• On July 27 trees did not exit, social networks were dead, and Google only made $16 billion in profits in a single quarter.
  
  
• On July 28 Facebook's profits were down 36%, TikTok swore it had never heard of this "China" person, and Intel talked some more about Sapphire Rapids which is still not here.
  
  
• On July 29 Congress gave $52 billion of your money to some of the richest companies in the world - and stole $228 billion for itself at the same time, Intel made a loss after years of deliberately fucking things up, Nirvana Finance - another so-called "stablecoin" - got evaporated, and Instagram decided it didn't want to get banned from government devices.
  
  
  
  
• On July 30 Intel didn't cancel its graphics cards not that it would have made any difference, AMD doubled its Minecraft performance, the Steam Deck shipped all pre-orders early, and Intel's top-of-the-line 12900KS was mostly slower than AMD's 5800X3D.
  
  
  
  
• On July 31 Orbital Departures, CERN was absolutely technically not planning to open a portal to Hell, the all-new Dell XPS 13 Plus was dogshit, and TSMC completed primary construction of its huge new factory - in Arizona.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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