Daily Tech News 27 December 2022

• Americans lost $10 billion to Indian call centre scams in 2022. (Deccan Herald)
  
  To put that into perspective, that's as much as they lost to civil asset forfeiture or to a single major crypto scam, or about 5% of the pork Congress added into the CHIPS Act which was 95% pork to begin with.
  
  
  

• I accidentally ordered a Yamaha hifi system. That is, I was checking out the post-Christmas sales, saw the hifi (which I wanted to buy earlier but was out of stock), saw it wasn't just on sale but on clearance, and hit the buy button without further thought because these days you don't know if something like that will ever come back in stock.
  
  I have an old Yamaha micro hifi but the CD player doesn't work well, and it has a twin cassette deck that I don't need at all, and also it's buried at the bottom of the garage along with everything else. I probably want three of these micro hifi systems around the house, and good ones are getting scarce. The best model like this that I can find in Australia looks to be the Denon D-M41, but that's about twice as much as the Yamaha.
  
  
  
• Do AI assistants help programmers? No. (The Register)
  
  That is, they help programmers write code, but the code sucks. Programmers using AI assistance are significantly more likely to introduce both obvious and subtle bugs into their code. And also less likely to notice because they don't understand the code they just "wrote".
  
  
  
• Build your own CDN. (GitHub)
  
  Ctrl-F Node.js. No matches.
  
  Okay then.
  
  Uses Nginx and Lua which is a fine and sensible choice though Nginx can be fiddly to configure if you're doing anything complicated.
  
  I might do this next year, because it can be amazingly cost-effective with the right hosting provider - about 40x cheaper than something like Amazon Cloudfront.
  
  
  
• Running Windows 7 on a 5MHz CPU. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, not running, exactly; more like crawling Windows 7. It takes 28 minutes to boot.

• On August 1 the HP Pavilion Plus 14 was the new best small laptop except for the memory and the price, Intel's 13th gen laptop chips were expected before the end of the year and they'd better bloody hurry, cosy Moon holes, and Anonymous hacks Russia.
  
  
  
  
• On August 2 the CHIPS Act wasn't a $50 billion cash grab - by the time Congress was done it was a $280 billion cahs grab, it was the right time to buy a 6900 XT, twelve was enough, Winamp returned to whip the llama's ass some more, and China's 7nm chips weren't.
  
  
• On August 3 Axie Infinity was a garbage company even before they lost $600 million overnight, eleven executives at crypto company Forsage where charged with fraud, and an advanced quantum-safe cryptography scheme got hacked in an hour.
  
  
• On August 4 GitLab announced it was going to delete projects that didn't have bugs constantly needing fixing, and Robinhood fired a quarter of its staff, which is 25% of what it needed to do.
  
  
• On August 5 AMD's Ryzen 7000 range was expected to have very high clock speeds - and does, and to overclock poorly - and does, chips suddenly got expensive, GitLab said maybe not, and Namie got into the Zenless Zone Zero closed beta and immediately banned live on stream.
  
  
• On August 6 two crypto developers faked an entire ecosystem to sucker people into putting their money into yet another fucking Ponzi scheme, that's no moon, and South Korea launched its lunar orbiter.
  
  
• On August 7 Amazon decided to by poop-spying company iRobot, hackers stole details of 5.4 million Twitter accounts, and Namie got unbanned from the Zenless Zone Zero closed beta.
  
  
• On August 8 EVGA cut prices on the 3090 Ti, JavaScript sucked, STFU mode, and build your own Windows tablet.
  
  
  
  
• On August 9 Threadripper Pro 5000 hit retail, using DALL-E for blog thumbnails, and in an unprecented move crypto lender Hodlnaut stole all its users' money.
  
  
• On August 10 AppLoving (who) offered to buy Unity for $17 billion, and PyPI, Twilio, Cloudflare, and Intel's SGX all had containment breaches.
  
  
• On August 11 Intel's A750 graphics card was a thing that existed, LG's 97" OLED TV double as a 97" speaker, and AMD grew revenue by 70% year-on-year albeit mostly by buying FPGA company Xilinx.
  
  
• On August 12 what this country needs is a good $15 llama, Redis explained - the Swiss Army chainsaw of database-sort-of-things, the CDC said forget all that stuff we told you, and Intel's $3.5 billion graphics gamble.
  
  
• On August 13 smile, you're on Candid Doorbell, Epson sucked, a website called ShitExpress - which did exactly what you think - got hacked, and Node.js still sucked.
  
  
• On August 14 running Android without Google, what to expect in Ryzen 7000 motherboards, and you could pet the dog in Holocure.
  
  
• On August 15 I ordered the Bae case - still hoping to order the Kronii case from the same distributor, how to make electric vehicles even worse, Canada and Germany signed a deal to invade Belgium and generate electricity from trillion of potatoes, and Apple broke every single security measure in MacOS all at once.
  
  
• On August 16 Android 13 was here and we didn't care, Linux 6.0 was here and we didn't care - much, Russia announced a model of its new space station, and New Jersey decided to stomp law enforcement and medical ethics into the dirt.
  
  
• On August 17 AMD announced an announcement for Ryzen 7000, DotNET 6 hit Ubuntu, MailChimp pooped the bed, and American Airlines signed a deal to buy 20 imaginary aircraft.
  
  
• On August 18 ZDNet pooped the bed, Loupedeck had some nice control surfaces at reasonable prices - not cheap but priced at hundreds where professional models often cost thousands, TSMC was about to start producing 3nm chips, do not eat bugs, and it was time to unplug your router, set it on fire, and fling it out the nearest window.
  
  
• On August 19 Samsung announced 32Gb DDR5 chips for early 2023, Gigabyte announced PCIe 5 SSDs for who knows when, Apple's M2 vs. AMD's 6850U under Linux, all Linux versions where the same, and Snap cancelled Pixy.
  
  
• On August 20 I flew my last flight between Sydney and New House City, building an actual display into those classic 80s Lego display bricks, an ocean of Pi Picos, and roundups of Raptor Lake and Ryzen motherboards.
  
  
• On August 21 Google was the pancreatic cancer in the body politic, Ethereum was moving to Eth2 which didn't actually fix anything, and artists united against hands.
  
  
• On August 22 the only thing less capable of human understanding than the AI systems run by Big Tech was the humans employed by Big Tech, and the first big Holocure update was announced. It looks like the next update will bring us HoloJP Gen 2 and 3 and be out late next month. I played a lot of Holocure when I was constantly travelling and had no energy for anything more complicated.
  
  
• On August 23 the Metaverse sucked, donuts were back in stock, the Biren BR1000 hit 1 PFLOPs, and don't copy and paste encryption schemes like Hyundai did.
  
  
• On August 24 I got internet access, Twitter's security was a disaster, Apple offered a 162 page guide to replace your MacBook battery, perfluorocubane was wrid, and Intel was going to go chiplets on its 14th gen desktop parts which now won't exist at all.
  
  
• On August 25 Chattanooga launche 25Gbps community internet, 14kb was the new 15kb, and put your GitLab server behind a VPN.
  
  
• On August 26 Starlink V2 would offer service direct to mobile phones - and Teslas, Mark Zuckerberg admitted to the FBI's election interference, Sony hiked prices, Microsoft didn't, and HP had some nice but overpriced computers.
  
  
• On August 27 the Twilio hack was a targeted attack affecting 130 companies, the adventure game Malasombra came out - for the NES, and an edit button on Twitter.
  
  
  
  
• On August 28 we watched The Saga of Tanya the Evil, the FBI said of course they interfere in elections, everyone knows that, Walmart offered a 30TB SSD of $39, Nvidia announced a new high-end Arm chip for robotics, and nobody was happy in the ongoing Twitter/Elon lawsuit.
  
  
• On August 29 freezing in the dark turned out to be unpopular, Ryzen 7000 launched, and a new remote execution vulnerability was found in the GameBoy Colour.
  
  
• On August 30 California's new age verification law was crap, an animated map of the Berlin subway, Austria decided to defenestrate its own internet, and OpenSea's transaction volume was down 99% in three months.
  
  
• On August 31 it was chip shortage all the way down, the OptiFi DeFi protocol lost $661,000 when it accidentally stopped existing, and Amelia Watson from Hololive reviewed the best tech toys from the 90s/early 2000s.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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