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Daily Tech News 16 June 2023

Top Story

• Reddit won't and never would steal cookies out of the cookie jar, says Reddit, caught with its hand in the cookie jar. (The Verge)
  
  Specifically claiming that they would never take over subreddits, remove moderators, and force them to be public again, right after they did exactly that.
  
  
  
• Reddit CEO Steve Huffman-Fried says fuck the users, miserable maggots that they are, who needs them, where did all the money go? (The Verge)

  It costs us about $10 million in pure infrastructure costs to support these apps.

  Which is a lot, except for the minor detail that they want to charge $20 million per year to just one of those apps, and are arguing that they can't possibly reduce that price.
  
  200%+ ROI? That used to be a lot.
  
  
  

Tech News

• A $400 48-port 2.5Gb managed switch with 2x10Gb and 2x25Gb uplinks? Yes please. (Serve the Home)
  
  You can get 48-port Ethernet switches at a reasonable price, even from companies like Cisco, but they're all basic gigabit. The moment you go above that the price increases exponentially.
  
  
  
• Running Linux on a 1999 HP Jornada pocket PC. (Raymii)
  
  It doesn't have the Four Essential Keys though.
  
  
  
• Mercedes is adding ChatGPT to its infotainment system, for some reason. (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's the actual headline.
  
  
  
• The French recipient of Europe's largest ever seed funding round doesn't have a product. (The Register)
  
  And barely has employees, but is now valued at $250 million.
  
  For perspective, in the first three months of this year, US AI scams startups took in $25 billion in funding.
  
  
  
• Apple's new $7000 Mac Pro comes with two SATA ports for disk drives - although it doesn't come with any bays for disk drives, that will cost you another $400 for a third-party product - comes with two SATA ports like a $80 Intel motherboard except half the number of ports, except they don't work. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Turn your $7000 (base price) computer on and it will tell you your hard drive has been ejected.
  
  Apple says this will be fixed at some point.

Meddling in the Affairs of Wizards Video of the Day




Nick Rekieta speaks to Ed Greenwood, who has been involved in the creation of Dungeons and Dragons since "as I said to Gary Gygax" years ago.

Greenwood is younger than I expected. He's been writing stories in his Forgotten Realms setting for longer than I've been alive, but he started as a child. Which is cheating.

He estimates that he owns 400,000 books. That's, uh, rather a lot. I was wondering if he misspoke but he later says that he spends thousands of dollars a month at his local bookstore, so it may be accurate. (The largest private library in the world has an estimated 1.5 million volumes, so he's up there.)

I own maybe 2% of that number and moving house almost killed me. My double garage is still packed solid with heavy boxes nearly a year later. I can't imagine shifting fifty times that.


Disclaimer: Do not meddle in the affairs of Windows, because it will fuck your shit up.