Daily Tech News 12 April 2025

• Never get involved in a land war in Asia: Adobe tried to promote its services to artists on Bluesky. They promptly deleted their posts after realising that everyone on Bluesky is insane. (PetaPixel)
  
  I could have told you that, Adobe.
  
  Also, you suck. Just... Less than Bluesky. Like you're diptheria and they're anthrax.

• The Pentagon is cancelling $5.1 billion in IT contracts with the big IT contractors. (Reuters) (archive site)
  
  These contracts are almost always vastly overpriced and incredibly unproductive.
  
  
  
• If you're a racist, Marxist, screaming lunatic, South of Midnight might just be the game for you. (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  The game is doing better than Dustborn, but not a whole lot. And it looks good and sounds good, it's just written by people who should not be permitted with 500 yards of a keyboard.
  
  And yes, Sweet Baby Inc was deeply involved in this one, with utterly predictable results.
  
  It's also apparently quite short, but I won't knock it for that. Not every game needs to last 80 hours. Gris is only a few hours long and it's a masterpiece.
  
  
  
• You don't need websockets if you're not doing anything that needs websockets. (Hunter Lovell)
  
  Uh, thanks?
  
  Cool Shuba Duck though.
  
  
  
• xAI is not using illegal generators to power its datacenter. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  xAI has 420MW of generator capacity, but only 40% of it has long-term permits. The rest of it is using a short-term rule that allows a temporary generator to operate for 364 days without that permit.
  
  I think the company will likely be able to get those permits if it needs them later this year, so the article is a nothingburger.
  
  
  
• Ubisoft cancelled online services for its game The Crew. And removed the game from users' libraries. And deactivated physical copies. And issued nothing even slightly resembling refunds.
  
  And now that it's facing lawsuits the company is pointing out that customers don't own what they buy. (TechSpot)
  
  Ubisoft seems to have violated specific laws in California in all of this. Of course that's true of everyone on the planet and most people not on the planet, but it doesn't particularly help the company's defense.
  
  
  
• I wasn't particularly planning to spend any more money on my new PC but I accidentally bought a QNAP QM2-4P-384.
  
  The motherboard I have supports up to four M.2 slots, though two share bandwidth with the PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, reducing it to x8, and one shares bandwidth the the PCIe 4.0 x4 slot, reducing it to PCIe 4.0 xnothing.
  
  You can get cheap four-slot M.2 cards but they require a full x16 slot to work, because they are wired up logically as just four four-lane devices and rely on the CPU figuring that out. If you have a graphics card in your x16 slot, or you have M.2 cards sharing its bandwidth, they're basically useless.
  
  You can also get more expensive four-slot (or even eight-slot) M.2 cards that will work even if you only have a single PCIe lane left over, because they have hardware onboard to split up whatever PCIe you have and divide it among the M.2 slots on the card. But those are full-height cards and the Hyte Y40 and Y60 cases only have full-height space for the graphics card.
  
  But the QNAP QM2-4P-384 is a half-height card because it's built for smaller NAS devices - though it also works on PCs. It's PCIe 3.0 x8 which is not something my motherboard has, but with the onboard chip it will still work just fine.
  
  So now I can have 28TB or even 32TB of internal SSD (if I use that fourth motherboard slot).
  
  And then another 16TB of SSD in my external storage array. Oh, and four SATA SSDs in my PC. And four 3.5" hard drives (or again SATA SSDs) in the storage array.
  
  So I'll probably run out of money before I run out of space to put drives.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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