Daily Tech News 18 August 2024

• Alexandre de Moraes, flamboyantly psychotic president of Brazil's Superior Electoral Court, threatened in a series of secret orders to start arresting Twitter's employees in Brazil if they didn't enforce content bans over which they had no control.
  
  Twitter published the secret orders and shut down its office in Brazil.
  
  Of course, Twitter is a social network, so it is still available in Brazil. Just beyond the reach of the courts.
  
  Take note, Terry Britain.

• Asus is preparing next-generation X870 motherboards to go with the new Ryzen 9000 CPUs. (WCCFTech)
  
  Do you need to upgrade your X670 board?
  
  No. The chipsets are identical. The motherboards might have slightly different sets of features - for example, USB 4 is required on X870 boards but optional on X670 - but existing motherboards will work just fine with the new CPUs.
  
  
  
• Drivers who purchased hydrogen-fueled cars are suing Toyota over their own stupidity. (Yahoo)
  
  There are only 54 locations offering hydrogen refueling in California, out of the 200 the state has promised. Why people are suing Toyota rather than the state I do not know.

  When he first bought his Toyota Mirai in 2022, Ryan Kiskis was a happy man. He loved the idea of applying cutting edge hydrogen fuel cell technology to environmental consciousness.
  "It's a great car," he said. "My background is an engineer, I'm a huge automotive fan, and I felt the the world was finally catching up with what we have to do" to cut greenhouse gases.

  Hydrogen is a lousy fuel. Any engineer should understand that, meaning Mr Kiskis is a lousy engineer.

  Then reality crashed in.He soon learned that hydrogen refueling stations are scarce and reliably unreliable.

  After he bought the car?

  He learned that the state of California, which is funding the station buildout, is far behind schedule - 200 stations were supposed to be up and running by 2025, but only 54 exist.

  Well, that project is doing better than the high-speed rail at least.

  And since Kiskis bought his car, the price of hydrogen has more than doubled, currently the equivalent of $15 a gallon of gasoline.

  You would need a heart of stone not to laugh.

  With fueling so expensive and stations so undependable, Kiskis - who lives in Pacific Palisades and works at Google in Playa Vista

  Of course he works for Google.

  drives a gasoline Jeep for everything but short trips around the neighborhood."I"ve got a great car that sits in the driveway," he said.

  With any luck it will get stolen.
  
  
  
• Why you should just use Postgres, written by someone who doesn't know anything about the alternatives to Postgres. (McCue)
  
  Using Postgres is not a bad recommendation, but the author of the article says this about MongoDB:

  This is because this sort of database is basically a giant distributed hash map. The only operations that work without needing to scan the entire database are lookups by partition key and scans that make use of a sort key.

  It's hardly possible to be more wrong. MongoDB's indexing is remarkably flexible, letting you define indexes on arrays and sub-objects, including fields that don't even exist at the time the index is created.
  
  
  
• Citizen scientists working with NASA have discovered an object moving at a million miles an hour. (NASA)
  
  They don't know what it is, but when the police catch up it's losing its license forever.
  
  
  
• Authors are suing Nvidia over the use of copyrighted materials in training AI. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Nividia's defense, as far as I can tell, is that the authors are using uncopyrighted words and facts which means that Nvidia can do whatever the fuck it wants.
  
  
  
• Speaking of doing whatever the fuck it wants Google was threatening reviewers if they didn't favour the new Pixel phones over everything else in the universe. (The Verge)
  
  Caught red-handed, the company said the language used in the threats "missed the mark".
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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