Daily Tech News 3 June 2023

• YouTube has announced that it will stop removing videos about the widespread fraud within the US election system that the company claims without evidence are false. (The Verge)
  
  The article asserts that the obvious and widespread fraud does not exist six times in five paragraphs, not counting the same assertion in the headline and subhed.
  
  The comments are even worse, filled with Russiagate dead-enders and people who have long since forgotten that there were widespread violent riots following Trump's election in 2016, assuming they ever knew.
  
  As to why YouTube is making this tiny step in the right direction? It's not clear. They are still left-wing and authoritarian, and nothing they say can be trusted.
  
  They unfortunately also host almost every small video channel I care about.

• Maybe reality is setting in with the global recession and they need the viewers, even nasty right-wing ones.
  
  The valuation of design software company Canva has been marked down by 67.6%, and buy-now-pay-more-later company Klarna by 85%. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Reddit meanwhile is down by 41% since last year.
  
  All of these are private companies so there's no public share price to track, just individual investors prepared to actualise their losses for tax reasons.
  
  
  
• AMD's Epyc Rome (2nd generation) server chips could hang after 1044 days of uptime. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's some kind of timer overflow that prevents the individual CPU cores from waking up after being put into low-power sleep mode.
  
  The solution is to either keep them so busy they never sleep, reboot the server once every three years, or turn off sleep mode... Which requires a reboot anyway.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Yoga Book 9i is a rather neat laptop with dual 13" 2880x1800 OLED displays, a detachable keyboard, and pen support. (Notebook Check)
  
  It can lie completely flat on a desk and you can use it with a pen, or you can clip on the keyboard and use it like a normal laptop, or you can stand it upright to use both screens side by side or one above the other with the keyboard detached.
  
  Only problem is, for the same price you could buy a regular laptop, an external 4k monitor, a decent graphics tablet, a good Android tablet, and whatever keyboard you prefer, and still have change left over. (I know this because those are all things I've bought in the past two years and I just added them up.)
  
  
  
• The Beelink EQ12 Pro almost doesn't suck. (Serve the Home)
  
  This is a NUC - a palm-sized computer - that uses Intel's N305 CPU, which has 8 E cores and no P cores at all.
  
  Which means it is an Atom chip, though Intel prefers not to use that name anymore because for many, many years, their Atom CPU range completely sucked.
  
  This one doesn't completely suck: Compared to the 2017 Dell Ryzen 1700 system I used until I moved house last year it is 15% faster in single-threaded performance, though 30% slower in multi-threaded performance.
  
  That AMD chip was 65W and the N305 uses just 15W, so I'll cut it some slack.
  
  And compared to the 2015 Atom N3050, the new N305 is more than four times faster single-threaded and 15 times faster multi-threaded.
  
  Unfortunately the overall system still sucks, hamstrung by the other problem with Atom chips: Their limited I/O. It supports just a single memory module, and while it has an NVMe slot (again, just one), it only supports one lane of PCIe 3, so it's 1/16th the speed of the latest models, or more reasonably, 1/8th the speed of a decent and not insanely expensive SSD.
  
  Given the pricing there are likely better options. If it were passively cooled thanks to the Atom design's low power consumption things might be different - but Atom's power consumption has never been that low. It has not just one fan, but two.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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