Daily Tech News 18 March 2023

• Silicon Valley Bank went broke, but not because it was woke. (The Verge)
  
  Actually, from the sounds of what the article says supposedly in SVB's defense, it's because it was woke, the clients were woke, the investors were woke, and the state and federal governments were woke.
  
  Poor fuckers never stood a chance.
  
  The article does have a good point in that ESG isn't as harmful as it might be, because it's all a scam anyway. Nobody actually puts serious money into woke causes, they just say the words to keep the money coming in, and then skim their take off the top with the iron-clad defense that they wore the juice.
  
  
  
• Oh, yeah, about that: Even after being bailed out, SVB is out of money and has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Everything is going swimmingly. Wearing concrete boots.
  
  

• Midjourney v5 is here and it's actually a big improvement. (Ars Technica)
  
  It still has heavy censorship on prompts - worse than ChatGPT - but it can now draw hands with four fingers and a thumb, and not folded backwards, eighteen inches long, or attached directly to the elbow, at least some of the time.
  
  When I tried it last year it was still at v2, so the improvement has been rapid. But the censorship has only gotten worse, and it's not just porn that it refuses to create, but anything containing any of a very long list of words. Which they don't tell you.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 has a Cortex X2. (AnandTech)
  
  So this midrange chip is in line with high-end chips from a year ago. Which isn't bad.
  
  
  
• AMD's 7040HS laptops are delayed until next month. (AnandTech)
  
  I'm hoping to find one with the 14" OLED panel that's becoming increasingly common, 32GB of RAM, and the Four Essential Keys. There is nothing like that at the moment - you can get the 14" OLED and 32GB, or 14" OLED and 4EK, or a 16" laptop with 32GB and the 4EK, but not the combination I want.
  
  
  
• Intel could be shipping 2nm desktop CPUs in the first half of 2024. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or not. The original plan was 4nm chips in H2 this year and 2nm in H2 next year, but signs are there won't be any new Intel desktop CPUs this year.
  
  
  
• Intel's Emerald Rapids server chips are coming to replace the disappointing Sapphire Rapids. (WCCFTech)
  
  Two Sapphire Rapids chips are usually slower than a single AMD Epyc CPU, cost more, and use more power. With Emerald Rapids, it's likely that two Intel chips will be slightly faster than one AMD chip - while costing more and using more power - except that AMD is increasing core counts from 96 to 128 this year.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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