Daily Tech News 8 April 2023

• Arkansas wants to force people to provide ID before they can use social media. (Arkansas Times)
  
  The Arkansas House argued that this will not violate privacy because the social networks have already violated privacy so badly that no new information will be shared which yeeees, that's true, but it's still a bad idea to enshrine an awful situation in law.
  
  
  

• I haven't bought any new computers since... Wait. I've only bought one laptop, two tablets, and a Kindle Paperwhite since the beginning of last year, but I've now bought six PC cases.
  
  The two Hyte Y60 Hololive special editions, the two discontinued Silverstone mini NAS cases before the last of them disappeared (the few remaining units of the black version now cost more than three times what I paid), and now the two limited edition NZXT H510i My Hero Academia models.
  
  Which listed for a crazy A$369 - each - but I paid that in total for both with free shipping. Which Amazon seems to have fixed since yesterday.
  
  I had the idea that I could then get the regular H510i in various colours to build more matching systems - not that I need more more matching systems, since between the cases I have and the two good laptops I now have a computer for every room that needs a computer - but in any case the H510i has been discontinued and the only model available is the black/red one which actually matches the special editions best and is discounted oh wait the H510 which is basically the same is available in the other two colours and also discounted.
  
  Not with free shipping but the discount is more than the shipping cost and the three regular colours combined, with shipping, cost less than the list price of one special edition without shipping.
  
  Looks like (a) I'll be good for PC cases for a while and (b) I'll be assembling the systems myself rather than getting them prebuilt.
  
  
  
• Designing for colour blindness. (The Verge)
  
  Green for good / red for bad make great status indicators - for 96% of people and just 92% of men. Even if you make those colours your default, take the extra time to provide an option for colour blind users, like making the fault indicator blink.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Slim 7i laptop has a great 2880x1800 120Hz OLED display paired with a bundle of meh. (Liliputing)
  
  Last year's HP Pavilion Plus 14 has basically the same screen (90Hz rather than 120Hz) but is otherwise superior.
  
  
  
• TSMC is gearing up to launch its 2nm process... In 2025. (WCCFTech)
  
  3nm will ship this year, with Apple being the first customer as usual. Apple's overpriced toys paid for TSMC's massive expansion which made advanced fabrication available to everyone - a year behind Apple, most of the time, but that means Apple gets to work the bugs out.
  
  AMD's Zen 5 chips, due next year, will use TSMC's 3nm process node.
  
  
  
• Team has launched 48GB DDR5-8000 and 96GB DDR5-6800 memory kits. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Good like getting your system to run stably at that speed though. Overclockers do not have high opinions of Intel's memory controller at speeds like that (and I don't think AMD's memory controller goes that high at all).
  
  You're better off getting the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, turning on PBO (automatic overclocking), and leaving it alone. With 96MB of L3 cache it's less sensitive to memory speeds, runs faster than the best Intel chips, and uses one third the power.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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