Daily Tech News 28 June 2023

• Who is the new Mac Pro for? Apparently, nobody. (The Verge)
  
  The previous Mac Pro was a serious computer for serious people - except that it was a Mac, anyway. It supported multiple video cards and up to 1.5TB of RAM.
  
  The new Mac Pro is limited to 192GB of RAM, the same amount you can add to a $100 Intel 13100F. And it supports no graphics cards. It has slots for graphics cards, but if you install one, it won't work.
  
  If you ask professional Mac users if they want a Mac Pro, the answer is no. For almost all of them the 96GB available on the MacBook Pro is enough, and for the few remaining there's the 192GB on a maxed-out Mac Studio. The Mac Studio doesn't have any PCIe slots, but you can't use the PCIe slots in the Mac Pro anyway.

• After it stopped providing source code distributions for its Linux releases in order to kill its free competitors, RedHat explained that it didn't stop providing source code distributions for its Linux releases in order to kill its free competitors, it stopped providing source code distributions for its Linux releases and the painful lingering deaths of its free competitors are purely a coincidence. (Phoronix)
  
  RedHat still provides source code - it is legally obligated to do so, because it doesn't own most of the software in its version of Linux. It just provides it as individual updates in thousands of different places, making it painfully difficult to precisely reproduce RedHat Linux.
  
  This comes after IBM - owner of RedHat - bought its best known free competitor, CentOS, and murdered it. I mean, had it coincidentally die of natural causes at the bottom of a staircase with a knife in its back at IBM's country estate at midnight.
  
  
  
• Seagate's Firecuda 540 SSDs are 50% faster than their 530 model at twice the price. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which means that you could simply buy two 530s, run them in RAID-0, and have twice as much storage that is 33% faster.
  
  There really isn't much use for PCIe 5 SSDs until they get a lot cheaper.
  
  
  
• Samsung is planning to ship 2nm chips in 2025, and 1.4nm in 2027. (AnandTech)
  
  Intel is planning to ship earlier, but Intel got stuck on 14nm for seventeen years (approximately) so we'll see what happens.
  
  
  
• GitHub's CEO says AI and software development are now inextricably linked, like peanut butter and typhoid. (Tech Crunch)

  In an interview after his talk, Dohmke expanded on this a bit when I asked him if he believes every developer will be using AI in the near future. "I think the obvious answer to that one is that the FOMO in companies is already so big that they are looking at the competition and asking themselves if their competitor has already adapted [GitHub] Copilot — and that means that that competitor has — and doesn't really matter if it's 20%, 30% or 40% — that competitor has an advantage."

  All your competitors are jumping off our bridge! It doesn't really matter if it's a 20 foot, 30 foot, or 40 foot drop, that competitor is going to go splat before you do!

  On top of that, he believes there is really no disadvantage for developers to use a tool like GitHub Copilot. "It's just so natural. There's really no reason to not use new improved GitHub Copilot, now with activated charcoal" he said. "I think new improved GitHub Copilot now with activated charcoal is becoming part of the standard toolset that every developer will be using. Ultimately, developers not using it will exist, the same way Cobalt developers still exist."

  Yes, the article says Cobalt.
  
  These people literally know nothing.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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