Daily Tech News 23 March 2024

• If I'm presented with two resumes for a new hire, one a recent Harvard graduate with a PhD in precisely the field I am hiring for, and the other a community college dropout whose only programming experience is putting together a popular Minecraft modpack, I'm hiring the Minecraft kid.
  
  Just saying.
  
  
  
• A quick and perhaps useful summary of the Apple antitrust case. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The one thing of note is this line describing Apple's response to the suit:

  And in regulating the behaviors that the DOJ claims are monopolistic, Apple's competitive advantage in the market would be diminished and iPhone customers negatively impacted in the process.

  Well, yeah.
  
  Diminishing competitive advantage in the market is the entire point of antitrust actions.
  
  And Apple claiming that following the law would negatively affect its customers has been the company's response to every interaction with regulators for the past decade at least.
  
  It's kind of boring, guys. At least come up with a new lie.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile The Verge barfed up this. (The Verge)
  
  There were some in yesterday's comment section arguing I was favoring the woke fascist idiots at the DOJ over the woke fascist idiots at Apple who at the end of the day at least produce something.
  
  But if you read even a small part of this pile of drivel - and I certainly wouldn't suggest reading more than that - I think we can all agree that the worst of the lot are the journalists reporting on this story.
  
  In this case we're dealing with Sarah Jeong, the journalistic equivalent of Cymothoa exigua.
  
  Don't look that up if you don't want nightmares.
  
  You should probably avoid looking up C. exigua as well.

• Micron has shown off samples of its new DDR5-8800 256GB MCR memory modules. (AnandTech)
  
  These use two sets of memory chips the same way other high-capacity modules do, but with a difference: The chips are interleaved so that bytes of data are read from both banks of chips at once, doubling the bandwidth.
  
  This is how a high-capacity server module can be as fast as the best overclocked desktop modules.
  
  Kind of neat, but not something that's likely to trickle down to the consumer space any time soon.
  
  It does give a single-socket 4th generation Epyc server nearly 900GB per second of memory bandwidth, though. That used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• The first nuclear fusion rocket engine is ready for delivery. (Interesting Engineering)
  
  I'm not sure how seriously to take this report, but the device does spray ionising radiation all over the place, so it's doing something.
  
  
  
• Users are complaining on Twitter that Instagram and Threads are restricting political content from recommendation results. (Ars Technica)
  
  This apparently is a new setting in the respective apps, which silently appeared and was silently turned on for everyone.
  
  On the other hand, Threads did specifically announce that they intended to do this.
  
  
  
• 34 nations met in Brussels to pledge to build more nuclear reactors. (Associated Press)
  
  This has upset all the right people.

  "Nuclear, all the evidence shows, is too slow to build. It's too expensive. Much more expensive than having peasants ploughing the fields by hand," said the remarkably named Lorelei Limousin of Greenpeace. "The government must focus on developing real solutions that work for people - like abandoning the poor to starve in the dark while I swan off to Majorca - not nuclear energy which has been established as safe and reliable for decades. Shit. One of you polish that up before it goes to press."

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:04 AM

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