Daily Tech News 23 July 2023

• Gabe Bankman-Fried, brother of failed Ponzi schemer Sam, tried to buy the nation of Nauru as a prepper camp. (CNBC)
  
  "Nauru is not for sale", said Nauru, "at least, not at that price."
  
  (Nauru was briefly prosperous in the 70s and 80s thanks to phosphate mining by British and Australian companies, but the island is only eight square miles and the mining did a lot of damage. At one point Australia offered the much larger Curtis Island as compensation, but the deal would have made them Australian citizens and they declined.)
  
  
  

• The 16GB model of Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti is here. Don't buy it. (Extreme Tech)
  
  It averages 3% faster than the 8GB model but is 25% more expensive. Having 16GB of RAM means it will last a lot longer - current generation consoles also have 16GB of RAM so games are written with that in mind, and only having 8GB is already a problem.
  
  But the retail price overlaps that of the much better RTX 4070, which is also overpriced and underpowered but still a clear winner over the 4060 Ti.
  
  
  
• If you want to spend just a little bit of money upgrading a PC, the 1TB Intel 670p is now $36. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a QLC drive but has a DRAM cache on board, so it's fine for typical desktop use.
  
  It cost $154 when it first appeared in 2021.
  
  
  
• Hundreds of drones gracefully landed in Melbourne's Yarra River when a light show for a women's football game didn't go entirely as planned. (ABC)
  
  And, this being the Yarra River, immediately fossilised.
  
  
  
• Which would win, Apple's M2 CPU as found in the MacBook Air, or AMD's Z1 Extreme, aimed at low-power portable gaming devices. (Phoronix)
  
  The tests are run under Linux, and Linux is terrible on current Mac hardware, but these are pure CPU tests and it's shouldn't matter that much.
  
  That said, the AMD chip clobbers the Apple hardware.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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