Daily Tech News 7 June 2025

• Move fast and blow up rockets: SpaceX is already preparing Starship Flight 10 for testing. (WCCFTech)
  
  No launch date has been set just yet, but just over a week after Flight 9 suffered an attitude control failure, SuperHeavy Booster 16 underwent a static test fire in preparation for flight with the latest Starship module.

• Is the MSI X870E Tomahawk WiFi the high-end AMD motherboard to get? Probably. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not the one I got, just the one I probably should have got. It's still not perfect due to the limited number of PCIe lanes available with AMD's chipsets - Intel is better on this - but it has fewer constraints than the Gigabyte board I have.
  
  Specifically on my board if you use M.2 slots 2 and 3 it cuts the main PCIe slot from x16 to x8 - not the end of the world, but inconvenient - and if you use M.2 slot 4 it turns off the secondary PCIe slot entirely. The MSI doesn't do that, though if you use both M.2 slot 2 and the USB4 ports, both run at PCIe 5.0 x2.
  
  I bought an M.2 RAID card because it adds four slots - effectively three, because it needs to go in the secondary PCIe slot so I can't use M.2 slot four - and it cost half as much as a new motherboard. But with the added cost of the MSI board over the Gigabyte models is half of that, and worth it if you don't want to worry about things not working.
  
  
  
• The little-known tax code change that led to mass tech industry layoffs unless it had nothing to do with any of that. (Quartz)
  
  The change - proposed in 2017 during Trump's first term and taking effect in 2022 - made it so that companies could not immediately write off R&D expenses but had to depreciate them over a period of years... Like most things.
  
  The link between the tech layoffs of recent years and the changes to the tax code seems to be entirely unsupported.
  
  
  
• Vibe Coding ain't shit. (ShiftMag)
  
  Let's say you have a great idea for a new app. You pay some guys in Uzbekistan to develop it for you. You put it up on the AppStore.
  
  It looks great. Everyone's happy. And then within a week it gets hacked and all your customers lot only lose their data but the contents of their bank accounts, you're facing a class action lawsuit, the guys in Uzbekistan have disappeared, and you have no idea what happened.
  
  That's Vibe Coding.
  
  Treat it like you're a twelve-year-old girl and the people promoting it are offering candy from the back of a van.
  
  
  
• The SiPeed NanoCluster is a cluster only nano. (Liliputing)
  
  It supports up to seven compute modules - SiPeed's own or the Raspberry Pi CM4 or CM5 (equivalent to the Raspberry Pi models 4 and 5 respectively, reasonably enough). The cluster itself only costs $45, and equipped with seven eight-core, 8GB AI-optimised blades it still comes out to under $1200 and uses less than 65W of power.
  
  This is meant more for robotics and automation than to compete with commercial AI racks, which cost a thousand times as much and use a thousand times as much power.
  
  
  
• Solving a mysterious murder from 14th-century England with advanced mapping except not. (Ars Technica)
  
  The guilty parties were identified and convicted in 1337, so the mapping project just... Translated the verdict from Latin?
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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