Daily Tech News 16 March 2023

• Banks are still fucked. (The Verge)
  
  1. Pin interest rates at record lows to boost the economy through wasteful spending.
  2. Crash the economy anyway by locking everyone into their homes.
  3. Boost the economy by printing trillions of dollars and flinging it to the four winds.
  4. Hike interest rates to combat the inevitable inflation that you predicted was impossible.*
  5. Bail out the banks that fail due to having all their money stuck in long-term low-yield bonds.
  6. You are here.
  7. Either cut interest rates to save the banks and send inflation soaring, or hike interest rates to fight inflation and set off a new round of bank failures.
  
  * This works by taking money from the middle class, who would otherwise be tempted to spend it, and basically just keeping it. It doesn't work very well.
  
  
  

• Rembrandt and Phoenix could be coming to AM5. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AM5 is AMD's current desktop platform, and Rembrandt and Phoenix are last year's and this year's laptop chips respectively.
  
  This would be a great move: These chips are low power and have better integrated graphics than anything else available, enough to run older games at 60 fps without needing a graphics card. Ideal for a small multi-purpose NAS, for example.
  
  
  
• CISA says there's a critical security flaw in Cold Fusion. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Cold Fusion still exists?
  
  
  
• Dell's latest Inspiron 14 costs $500 and probably isn't something anyone should buy. (Liliputing)
  
  It runs an Arm 8cx Gen 2 CPU - which is the exact same chip as the 8cx Gen 1, and that sucked. (The 8cx Gen 3 is actually good.)
  
  It comes with 8GB of RAM - not enough for anything but light use - and 256GB of SSD, which isn't completely hopeless but certainly is not a lot.
  
  It also lacks the Four Essential Keys, but nobody is going to be editing large codebases on this thing so those aren't as essential as they might be.
  
  I'm still looking for a laptop that isn't crippled by bad design choices. As far as I can tell, there aren't any.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:08 AM

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