Daily Tech News 29 August 2023

• Kias and Hyundais are too easy to steal, so cities are suing the manufacturers. (Vice)
  
  Already this year, lawsuits have been filed by Seattle (mayor: Democrat), Baltimore (mayor: Democrat), Cleveland (mayor: Democrat), New York (mayor: Comm... wait, Democrat), Chicago (mayor: Lizard Person), St. Louis (mayor: Democrat), and Columbus (mayor: Democrat).
  
  Wonder what the common factor might be that all these cars are getting stolen.
  
  And I think rather than adding engine immobilisers to budget cars, manufacturers should look into deploying rabid wolverines.
  
  
  

• Asus is not shutting down its Zenfone division, and the Zenfone 10 will not be the last model in the range. (Android Authority)
  
  So there's that.
  
  
  
• GitHub Copilot is great - unless you're trying to get something done. (Technically a Blog)
  
  Like so many other mis-designed tools, it adds noise more than it helps with the process. In fact, that's the quickest diagnosis for a mis-designed tool.
  
  
  
• That Snake game has gotten even smaller. (GitHub)
  
  Here's the entire binary in base-64 encoding:
  
  /cVMBKAPALgDAM0Qv9AHieblQJ MhyzgvdPeID+RgQNQE1SgEB5hr 2Pwp3znPd9jR+41BAvbxIOR0zTgtdM lXOA2ILXTMJq2TiCfr0A==
  
  It's playable; I've tried it. It's not very good, but it does only use 0.00000011% of the RAM on my budget laptop.
  
  
  
• Are your Python strings too slow? Stringzilla can chew through text data a hundred times faster than the built-in string type. (GitHub)
  
  It uses SIMD instructions so it won't work if you're running an original model Pentium, but it does support modern x86 and Arm CPUs, meaning anything from the last 12 years or so.
  
  Unless you're running Linux under VirtualBox on Windows 11, in which case it probably just goes splat like MongoDB 5.
  
  
  
• Intel presented more details on its upcoming 144 core server processors this week at the Hot Chips conference. (AnandTech)
  
  That's an advance over AMD's current 128 core chips... Except Intel's version uses efficiency cores - E cores - which run at roughly half the speed of full cores.
  
  The details of these E cores are interesting, at least; they look a lot like the fastest high-end cores from just a few years ago.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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