Daily Tech News 12 June 2023

• Making friends and influencing people, part one: After a remarkable performance by Reddit's CEO in an AMA (ask me anything) event, many of Reddit's largest communities - called subreddits - have reversed course on their plans for a two day outage in protest over recent changes the the platforms API and are now planning to go dark indefinitely. (The Verge)
  
  Whoops.
  
  Reports are that CEO Steve Huffman didn't answer a single question from developers, spending all his time whiffing paid softballs.
  
  Here's a list of all the subreddits going offline in protest. (Reddark)
  
  It's a lot. Most of the big default subreddits - which, to be fair, are all communist-ridden shitholes - the default subreddits that new users are subscribed to will be going private so that new users can't access them at all.
  
  Which actually improves the site, but I don't know if Reddit will see it that way.
  
  
  

• Making friends and influencing people, part two: Online mortgage company Better.com just laid off its entire real estate team - after forcing them to take a pay cut of 50% last November in order to keep their jobs. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Eighteen months ago the company made headlines when the CEO fired 900 employees in a Zoom meeting and then took a month's holiday.
  
  Better was in the news again in March last year when it accidentally processed severance pay for 3000 employees before actually telling anyone they were being laid off.
  
  Legally those two events don't count as notice, but as a practical matter, if you're surprised at being fired by Better, you really need to pay more attention.
  
  
  
• Making friends and influencing people, part three: What really went on in the Wuhan lab in the weeks before COVID. (The Sunday Times)
  
  The usual, you know. Splicing together deadly viruses that Chinese authorities had kept silent, and researching a vaccine for, uh, COVID.
  
  
  
• Betteridge's Law of Headlines, part one: Does the new Mojo programming language offer a faster superset of Python? (Slashdot)
  
  No.
  
  
  
• Betteridge's Law of Headlines, part two: Will tech layoffs trigger a wave of unionisation? (Slashdot)
  
  No.
  
  
  
• Everything new is old again: Inland's - Micro Center's house brand - new PCIe 5 TD510 SSD takes a solid state storage device with no moving parts and revolutionises the concept by adding moving parts. (Serve the Home)
  
  In this case, a tiny but very annoying fan that runs all the time. And is probably absolutely needed, because PCIe 5 SSDs run extremely hot and performance plummets by as much as 99% when they aren't properly cooled.
  
  It's fast. It's very fast - it can transfer over 10GB per second on sequential access, and 5GB per second on random writes, which is phenomenal. But once it fills its SLC cache, performance is worse than many competing PCIe 4 and even PCIe 3 drives, some of which are half the price.
  
  Basically if you're wondering if you need a PCIe 5 SSD, you don't. The few people who need them already have spreadsheets full of benchmarks.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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