Daily Tech News 19 October 2024

• Show me the man and I'll show you the fine: Terry Britain might be gone, but his replacement is no better and may be worse: The EU is now considering fining other companies Elon Musk is a shareholder of, for supposed crimes of Twitter. (MSN)
  
  And this is why when you are forced to choose between a company run by sociopathic leftists who bleed their customers dry but aren't actually killing people, and a government, you side with the company every time.
  
  Lesson learned. No matter how bad a government is, they can always get worse, and you can't just choose not to do business with them.
  
  

• Case in point: The lights are out in Cuba. (NPR)
  
  The communist dictatorship that has destroyed the once prosperous island promises they will come back on at some point in the future, probably.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's lead over other AI companies has largely evaporated. (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Using the same benchmarks across multiple open source vendors - including the almost-open-source Llama 3.1 405B from Meta , it's much of a muchness: They all suck.
  
  
  
• Sam Altman's other scam, Worldcoin, has rebranded itself to World and announced a new version of its Orb. (Coin Telegraph)
  
  The Orb is a device that devours a victim's soul. It's now clear exactly who this is being marketed to.
  
  
  
• Bluesky is not a good alternative to Twitter. (Twitter)
  
  It's "open" and "federated"... And run by the same censorship maximalist leftist mafia that destroyed Twitter before Elon Musk rescued it.
  
  
  
• Unknown 9 Awakening, the latest big game from Bandai Namco, was released two days ago and oh it's dead. (Forbes)
  
  It had an all-time peak of 285 players and is now down to 86.
  
  And it exhibits the same problems that killed Concord, albeit on a smaller scale and hopefully Bamco spent less than $400 million on this one.
  
  Also in its favour, it's a single-player game so it doesn't cost a million dollars a day to keep it alive. So it can be safely left to bleed out and then decompose.
  
  
  
• WP Engine has filed for an injunction against WordPress.org to regain access to the open source repository. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is a cut-and-dried breach of license by WordPress, and WP Engine should win easily.
  
  If they don't, WordPress gets forked.
  
  
  
• The Space Force has awarded a $733 million launch contract to SpaceX. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is for eight missions - probably satellites or X37-B launches - starting in 2026.
  
  
  
• Google has been granted an administrative stay on much of the decision against it under the Epic lawsuit, by the same judge who issued the ruling. (The Verge)
  
  Not stayed is a ruling requiring Google and its partners to allow users to install third-party app stores. Notably Google recently worked with Samsung to introduce new security features that prevented this.
  
  
  
• My Calliope Mori Hyte Y40 Limited Edition PC case has arrived in Sydney en route to Casa del Pixy. Since this case has never been available for purchase locally, and Hyte's own international ordering system was broken when I tried it (twice), it might be the only one in the country.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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