Daily Tech News 21 June 2024

• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. (Ludicity)
  
  Man has opinions. The opinions are mostly correct though.

  I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders.

  Usually both. Usually both.

  And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.

  Indeed.
  
  
  
• A rant about front-end development. (Frank M Taylor)
  
  Another man of conviction.

  There's a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn't possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air.

  Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.

  Server-side rendering means it's rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.

  Lua is actually pretty good at this.

  Do you have any idea how frustrating it is that that in order to explain my sadness to my therapist I must first explain like 5 different technologies and by the time I'm finished she's sad just hearing it, the session's over, and I didn't even get to what was making me upset? Technology has made my anger a recursive function.

  You don't need a therapist, Frank. You need a weekend blowing up abandoned vehicles with a punt gun.

• If you meet a developer over the age of thirty-five, and they're not constantly angry, they are either:
  
  1. Working in a very narrow technical field like x-ray diffraction crystallography that hasn't been poisoned by the latest fads
  2. Heavily medicated, or
  3. Dangerously incompetent
  
  
  
• Western Digital has announced a 4TB model of its Blue SN5000 SSDs. (AnandTech)
  
  One catch. Two catches. Three:
  
  1. It's QLC where the smaller sizes in that range are TLC, so it's potentially slower and has lower endurance per GB.
  2. It's DRAMless, which is not a good combination with QLC flash.
  3. At the MSRP, the SN850X is not much more expensive and much faster.
  
  
  
• A $99 OCuLink GPU dock from laptops and mini-PCs from Minisforum. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You didn't need a power supply, right? Or a case?
  
  
  
• Writing a video game like it's 1987. (GitHub)
  
  Not a very sophisticated video game - it's Minesweeper rather than Minecraft - but it's 300k and runs on modern systems.
  
  
  
• The Commerce Department has banned the sale of Kaspersky software in the US, because Russia. (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm not saying they're wrong, just that their analysis of the problem is perhaps incomplete.
  
  
  
• With eight speakers, the Lenovo Tab Plus is a tablet with eight speakers. (Liliputing)
  
  Apart from that, it's large, heavy, and misshapen.
  
  
  
• A statewide 911 outage in Massachusetts was caused by a malfunctioning firewall. (Ars Technica)
  
  It took two hours to find the one guy who knew how to fix it, and then thirty seconds to fix.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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