Daily Tech News 6 May 2023

• Vice Media is preparing for a fire sale to existing investors including George Soros, at a valuation of $400 million, down 93% from its 2017 high of $5.7 billion. (Variety)
  
  Expect things to get much, much worse at Vice, very quickly. I sometimes link to their Motherboard tech news site - formerly separate, now just a subsection of the main site. I doubt that will survive long, or if it does, that it will have any content worth reading.
  
  I might still link to it, but as a cautionary tale.
  
  There is something very, very interesting in that article though: A chart showing the readership numbers (unique visitors) of a lot of these "new media" companies.
  
  The numbers are miserable. Every company on that list is fucked.
  
  
  
  

• Crypto mining is racist, says the Biden White House. (Engadget)
  
  They want to add a federal excise on electricity use for crypto mining, because racism.
  
  
  
• New York Attorney General Letitia James wants to regulate the crypto industry, calling it "a wretched hive of scum and villainy". (Bloomberg)
  
  She's not wrong, she's just an asshole.
  
  Actual quote:

  "Millions of investors have lost hundreds of billions in the value of their cryptocurrency investments because of rampant fraud, including market manipulation, hacking, and opaque business practices," James said.

  Is she right? We checked crypto news site Web3 Is Going Great:
  
  WallStreetBets coin tanks 90% after insider dumps holding.
  Former OpenSea exec convicted of fraud and money laundering in NFT insider trading case.
  
  Both dated May 3. So as I noted above, she's not wrong. I don't expect the resultant laws to be anything but garbage though, because she is still an asshole.
  
  
  
• When "free forever" means "free for four months". (Zulip)
  
  Mattermost - a Slack competitor, which is to say, a chat board for businesses - had a free plan for its online service that they promised would be forever and now isn't, thanks to the strongest economy ever.
  
  So you should move to Zulip, which will be free forever.
  
  To be fair, they do explain architectural reasons why they are able to offer services more cheaply. Also, both platforms are open source and you can run them yourself. Mattermost is even bundled into GitLab, which is also free to download and run on your own servers. (But does eat 8GB of RAM these days.)
  
  
  
• Releasing 3B and 7B RedPajama-INCITE family of models including base, instruction-tuned & chat models. (Together)
  
  What does any of that mean?
  
  RedPajama is one of the flock of open source Large Language Models stemming from Facebook's release of its own LLaMA. It's very much like ChatGPT, but it doesn't constantly tell you you're racist unless you want it to.
  
  And you don't need to pay for it. It's free to download, and can run on any PC with a decent graphics card. Where by "decent" we don't mean a $1600 RTX 4090, but an RTX 2070, which you can find second-hand for under $200. And will also work to play games.
  
  
  
• Or an RTX 4060 Ti, which is due out soon. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though you might be better off with a 3060 Ti, or even a 3060, as Nvidia has taken the opportunity to cut memory bandwidth in half.
  
  
  
• Some clown edited 90,000 Wikipedia articles to replace "comprised of" with "composed of". (Hacker News)
  
  Surprisingly, he still can't get laid.
  
  
  
• Mojo is a compiled superset of Python. (The Register)
  
  Or rather, it will be some day. Right now it lacks a lot of core Python features, and if you try to use it as a faster Python rather than its own language, you will have a bad time.
  
  
  
• An overview of BlueSky's federation architecture. (BlueSkyWeb)
  
  This is drivel. The company is fucked.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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