Daily Tech News 29 August 2024

• OpenSea has been issued a Wells notice by the SEC. (MSN)
  
  To unpack:
  
  OpenSea is a leading marketplace for NFTs.
  
  NFTs are in effect digital baseball cards. They have no intrinsic value, but people put value on them largely based on their rarity.
  
  A Wells notice is issued by the SEC when they plan to sue a company for violating securities laws.
  
  So what the SEC is alleging here is that any collectible item without intrinsic value - baseball cards, Pokemon cards, MTG cards, US senators - is a security subject to the commission's regulations.
  
  Is there any law stating this? No.
  
  Didn't overturning Chevron clamp the wheels of federal agencies trying to issue this sort of sweeping ruling on their own authority? Yes.
  
  Aren't NFTs a scam anyway? Only mostly.
  
  
  

• Intel's latest Sapphire Rapids Xeon workstation CPUs are here. (Hot Hardware)
  
  The w7-2595X with 26 cores is only three times the price of AMD's 9950X and is actually faster in some benchmarks.
  
  You also need a more expensive motherboard and more expensive memory, but on the other hand the motherboards come with workstation-class features like 8 memory slots and 5 full-length PCIe slots.
  
  And it only uses 50% more power. That's actually... Not that bad.
  
  But given what it delivers it's only for people who truly need the workstation features, not for people looking to spend a little more for a little more performance.
  
  
  
• Second order effects of the replication crisis. (Nature)
  
  In which researchers search for the papers that cite papers that have been retracted.
  
  Recursively.

  He calls his tool a Feet of Clay Detector, referring to an analogy, originally from the Bible, about statues or edifices that collapse because of their weak clay foundations.

  Good.
  
  
  
• The second season of Amazon's half-billion-dollar train wreck The Rings of Power is going to be even worse than the first. (The Verge)
  
  That's not what they say, but it's there in what they so desperately avoid saying.
  
  
  
• Star Wars Outlaws is complete disaster of a game that will end with the studio being closed and everyone who worked on it looking for employment in the fast food industry. (The Verge)
  
  That's not what they say, but it's there in what they so desperately avoid saying.
  
  
  
• I have a longer story looking at recent successes and failures in the computer gaming world - and the desperate attempts of the press to cover for the failures and cut down the successes - but it will have to wait for the weekend.
  
  
  
• AMD will be providing a BIOS update that fixes a core-to-core communications latency problem with Zen 5. (WCCFTech)
  
  This is unlikely to fix gaming performance, though, because the problem only happens on the 12 and 16 core models, and they benchmark pretty consistently with the 6 and 8 core models for games.
  
  It will help with heavy synchronised workloads like databases, though, so great for servers.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:41 AM

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