Daily Tech News 20 June 2023

• Some say we'll end in Brave New World,
  Some say in 1984.
  I stand with corporate flag unfurled
  And push like hell for Brave New World.
  
  But if we had to end again,
  I think I know enough of life
  To see that coddling morons*
  Brings us to Harrison Bergeron.
  
  Complex systems won't survive the competence crisis. (Palladium)
  
  The world grows more complex by the day, and we haven't had a dumber ruling class since 1913. And that worked out just great for everyone, so nothing to worry about.

  America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America's complex systems are slowly collapsing.

  Not just America, of course, but America is the exemplar here of past greatness rapidly corroding from within. Many of the countries affected by this disease were never great, or their greatness was a century or more past.
  
  I mentioned Twilio yesterday, with their brilliant three word billboard - Ask your developer - the point being that even if you, the manager driving past, didn't know about Twilio, your technical staff did, replaced by some sesquipedalian drivel about reducing cost of acquisition, but that's just one tiny example of this, and to some degree it's an example of the brain rot that affects all large organisations. Large organisations cannot innovate, which is why they acquire small ones.
  
  And then destroy them.
  
  What's the solution? With businesses, you let them collapse into bankruptcy and sell off the pieces. With countries, the traditional approach was war, but that is frowned upon these days.
  
  * No offense to the Horde, who are the good kind of moron. Best I could do in two minutes.

• Don't buy an Nvidia H100 for gaming. (WCCFTech)
  
  Technically it is a GPU, but (a) it costs north of $30,000, (b) it has no video outputs, and (c) it is actually slower for playing games than AMD's integrated graphics because the drivers don't know what to do with it.
  
  
  
• Towards Intersectional Moderation: An Alternative Model of Moderation Built on Care and Power as if Social Media Weren't Screwed up Enough Already. (Arxiv)
  
  With Reddit imploding by the day, the developers and operators of the "fediverse", a loosely coupled network of independent nodes running software like Mastodon, are banding together to replace it with something infinitely worse.
  
  You might not have thought that possible.
  
  You were wrong.
  
  
  
• A QNAP 16-bay NAS. (Serve the Home)
  
  On the one hand, it supports 12 3.5", 4 2.5", and two M.2 drives, with up to 128GB of ECC RAM, at a price that is merely exorbitant and not actually insane.
  
  On the other hand, QNAP.
  
  
  
• Well, that's just terrifying. (BBC)
  
  Do not read if you're subject to claustrophobia.
  
  
  
• Journalists for Censorship is at it again. (The Verge)
  
  The reason they have their panties in a twist today is that Spotify is permitting Joe Rogan to interview people who are saying inconvenient things.
  
  This cannot be allowed.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:10 AM

| Access Comments