Daily Tech News 26 October 2023

• Pixy's First Rule of Rare Firmware Bugs That Take out All Your CPUs One by One: They only happen between 2AM and 4AM.
  
  
  
• Twitter competitor Pebble is shutting down on Wednesday. (ZDNet)
  
  It had 20,000 users.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  In the early 70s.

• The Biden Administration is set to unveil a "sweeping" executive order on AI next week. (Washington Post) (archive site)
  
  As an executive order, it can only affect the federal government, and the problem I see is that the order is unlikely to go far enough in curbing government use of AI bullshit.
  
  
  
• In which academics reap what they have sown. (The Verge)
  
  The story tries to pin the blame on conservatives, even though nobody in the story is to the right of Mao. A typical AWFL college student goes off the deep end and files Title IX complaints - and this is her mistake - against every lecturer she ever had contact with.
  
  No. Single out the weakest animal from the pack and take it down. If you charge in they're going to see you coming and stomp you.
  
  
  
• Boeing has now lost more than $2 billion - which used to be a lot - on two new Air Force jets. (CNN)
  
  As in, two planes, not two new jet fighter programs.
  
  Air Force One A and One B - I guess - were supposed to total $3.9 billion. Since the contract was signed during the Trump Administration, it's fixed-price, not cost-plus, so Boeing gets to eat the loss.
  
  Which of course means that they pass that loss on to customers, rather than the government passing the overrun on to taxpayers in the more traditional way.
  
  
  
• Where ae all the laid-off workers from Big Tech going? (Dev Interrupted)
  
  They're writing RPG IV for Mutual of Omaha.
  
  I mean, not all of them, but there were a lot of boring companies that actually do stuff that were looking for programmers, and if you move from California to Nebraska you can take a hell of a pay cut and still have more left over at the end of the month.
  
  
  
• Team's Cardea Z540 is a 12GBps PCIe 5 SSD. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While PCIe 5 is in the "I still don't need it" category, it's only about twice the price of PCIe 3 storage and more than three times as fast. It might even make a noticeable difference in some things.
  
  Maybe.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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