Daily Tech News 12 January 2023

• There's a lot of uranium and thorium around. If we used those elements for all our energy production (ignoring that hydro is also entirely viable in some locations), and we built efficient breeder reactors to reuse fuel, how long would the known reserves last?
  
  4.3 billion years. (What is Nuclear)
  
  About 700 million years after that, the Sun will expand to the point that everything on Earth dies in a blaze of, well, just a blaze really, and energy needs will become a moot point.
  
  That's the highest estimate I've seen and a lot longer than my own quick calculation which was "only" 5 million years. I'll check the math at some point when I'm not rolling around on the floor.
  
  
  
• The bankruptcy team now running collapsed crypto Ponzi scheme and left-wing campaign contribution laundering machine FTX has recovered about $5 billion worth of, well, things. (WCCFTech)
  
  Not including the bullshit self-created cryptocurrencies that were used to keep the whole scheme inflated at a valuation of $32 billion. That's about half the total customer funds that disappeared when the bubble popped.
  
  Customers and creditors are likely to see a decent amount of their money returned. Unsecured shareholders are just screwed though.

• Want a 480 core Linux server? Got a few hundred grand to spend? Inspur has you covered. (Serve the Home)
  
  It's a 6U rack-mount system so it's not small by modern standards, but we're not at a point yet where any 480 core server is exactly small. You can pack 480 cores into 2U if you don't mind them being divided across four modular servers, but they you can do the same with AMD and get 768 cores.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 7000X3D will be released on February 14. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'll definitely wait that long before building a new system; it will probably be March or April.
  
  Meanwhile the non-X parts are at retail and slightly cheaper than the X parts. In the case of the 7700, the price at my formerly local retailer is exactly the same as the 7700X.
  
  Since you can overclock the 7700 and get exactly the same performance as the 7700X, and you can reduce the power consumption of the 7700X and make it behave exactly like the 7700, it's not a surprise that the retail prices aren't hugely different.
  
  No Passmark scores up yet for these models. I'll keep an eye out for that one as it has historically tracked closely with the performance I measure with my own workloads.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is piloting a professional version of ChatGPT. (TechCrunch)
  
  "Professional" here means you pay for it and it doesn't just randomly stop working. Which, really, is what professional means in other contexts as well.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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