Daily Tech News 21 November 2023

• Elon Musk went nuclear on Media Matters. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The article tries do pretend this didn't happen, because as the saying goes You don't hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don't.
  
  Media Matters ran a shock exposé showing that Twitter ran ads against extremist content, leading to a flight of major advertisers.
  
  But Twitter was watching while they did this.
  
  What they did was create a new account and:
  
  1. Follow every Nazi meme account they could found (which was not many).
  2. Follow the major advertising brands they wanted to scare away from Twitter.
  3. Sit there hitting refresh over and over until they got the screenshot they wanted.
  
  Only problem with that is that Twitter logged everything they did and can show that the only account in the world that saw those ads on those tweets was Media Matters, because they spent an entire day setting things up to get that result.
  
  Does Tech Crunch tell you that? No.
  
  Does The Register tell you that? No.
  
  Does Ars Technica tell you that? No.
  
  They're all-in on censorship.
  
  
  
• Oh, and the Texas Attorney General has announced a criminal investigation into Media Matters conduct. (MSN)
  
  You don't hate journalists enough - but maybe Ken Paxton does.

• To be fair Ars Technica already filled its weekly quota of one article not hating Elon Musk. (Ars Technica)
  
  Yes, the Starship flight was a good test. It might be too much to say it was a success, but it achieved the stated goals. If your kid comes home with a 90 on their math exam, you shouldn't complain that they weren't able to answer the bonus question which was actually a copy-paste of the Goldbach Conjecture.
  
  
  
• How many Jacaranda trees are there in Sydney? 1539. (Observable)
  
  They specifically mean the central business district, not the metropolitan area, where there are far, far more of these purple fuckers.
  
  
  
• The DOJ is trying to shake down Binance for $4 billion. (Bloomberg)
  
  What did Binance do? Apparently it sent customers' money where the customers asked for it to be sent, rather than stealing it the way FTX did.
  
  
  
• Airliners flying over the Middle East are experiencing advanced Denial of Service attacks on GPS guidance systems and nobody knows what to do. (Vice)
  
  I can think of a couple of things.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Threadripper 7000 range is here. (AnandTech)
  
  I'd like to get excited about these, but the price is simply too high - a 32-core chip is four times the price of a 16-core desktop chip - and for many task the performance barely improves.
  
  If you do 3d rendering for a living, then one of these systems will dramatically improve your workflow and earn back the cost in no time. Otherwise make sure to find a benchmark that matches your workflow and decide whether it's worth it for you.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has hired Sam Altman and Greg Brockman after they were fired from OpenAI. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I have ceased to care about any of this nonsense.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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