Daily Tech News 22 January 2025

• OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle are teaming up to spend half a trillion dollars to build a Stargate. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is significantly more than it would cost to just dig one up in the Egyptian desert. Or even Antarctica.
  
  Wait. It turns out that "Stargate" is just the name of a project to build more AI datacenters.
  
  So who is going to build all the nuclear reactors to power this thing? The ZPM is all out of juice.

• The founder of IMDB is stepping down from the role of CEO after 35 years. (Tech Crunch)
  
  If you do the math, then yes, that means IMDB is older than the web. It started on Usenet on the rec.arts.movies newsgroup during the late Cretaceous.
  
  
  
• Decentralised social media is the only alternative to the tech oligarchy. (404 Media)
  
  This is not untrue so far as it goes. There are just a couple of problems with the statement:
  
  First, this complaint arises out of a lack of censorship.
  
  Second, we already have this. It's called Usenet. It still exists.
  
  Third, almost all the direct accusations leveled against individuals made by the author are lies and potentially actionable.
  
  Fourth, the decentralised platforms built recently like Mastodon and Bluesky are oppressive shitholes run by people who are sad that they were born too late to serve as Stasi informants.
  
  Fifth, the author himself is an unreformed Stalinist loon who despises everything that is right and good in the world:

  A legion of the worst people on Earth have spent years building admittedly resilient alternative social media sites after being deplatformed from or rage quitting sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Places like Rumble, Gab, Truth Social, Odysee, and Patriots.Win are full of the worst America has to offer, but people on these websites have been successful in seeding (often false, often hateful) narratives that filter up the power chain and often end up getting repeated by Donald Trump or on more widely viewed right wing media like Fox News

  So it's a choice of light censorship by a coterie of partially reformed billionaires or totalitarian oppression by the left.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's 5000 series GPUs are out of stock. (WCCFTech)
  
  They haven't launched yet - that doesn't happen until the 30th - but they're out of stock.
  
  
  
• AMD's 9900X3D and 9950X3D run games at about the same speed as the 9800X3D. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which should come as no surprise, because they are just versions of the 9800X3D with more than eight cores, and very few games use more than eight cores. (Because both the Xbox and PlayStation have eight cores.)

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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