Daily Tech News 11 June 2025

• The Bluesky bubble hurts liberals and their causes. Here's why that's a good thing. (Washington Post) (archive site)
  
  Bluesky was an interesting attempt at redesigning the core architecture of Twitter, but had no natural userbase until Trump won the 2024 election, whereupon the craziest people on Twitter departed en masse all at once and created Bluesky accounts.
  
  That gave the site a massive boost in user numbers but at the same time a massive headache, because suddenly its users were overwhelming screamingly insane leftists with all the problems that come with them.

  For roughly a decade, Twitter hosted what is lightheartedly called the "national conversation" on issues of the day, particularly social justice and public health. Twitter never had that many users, compared with Instagram or Facebook. But it had a big group of influential users - politicians, policymakers, journalists and academics, all of whom were engaged in a 24/7 conversation about politics and current events.

  Mostly leftists, often far left, but at least, at the time, paying lip service to civility and rationality. Those days are far behind us.
  
  That's what they're trying to regain, but the more they tighten their grip, the more star systems slip through their fingers.

  That was a boon to progressives, who wielded outsize influence on the platform because they were early adopters who outnumbered the conservatives. They were also better organized and better networked, and had the sympathy of Twitter's professional-class employees, who proved increasingly susceptible to liberals' demands for tighter moderation policies on things such as using male pronouns to refer to a transgender woman.

  Translation: Stalinists policing speech.

  It's not surprising that progressives want to return to the good old days. But it's not working, and I'm skeptical it ever will.

  Those were the days, my friend. Thought they would never end.

  Something similar has happened on Bluesky. The nasty fringe has become even nastier: A Bluesky technical adviser recently felt the need to clarify that "The 'let's tell anyone we don't like to kill themselves' crowd are not welcome here" because left-wing trolls kept urging people who disagreed with them to commit suicide. And without the leavening influence of their opponents, Bluesky discourse appears even more censorious and doctrinaire than what progressives were saying on old Twitter.

  Jesse Singal, call your office.
  
  Oh yeah, the key point: Bluesky activity is down 50% since November; it's in a death spiral and there's likely no way out.

• Nvidia's low-end RTX 5050 will be a laptop 4050 only much faster because it's a desktop chip but still using GDDR6 RAM unless it doesn't do any of that. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nothing announced officially yet. But it will at least not be significantly hampered by only having 8GB of RAM because it won't be fast enough to need more than that.
  
  
  
• Micron has started shipping HBM4 memory. (Serve the Home)
  
  This has up to 2TB per second of bandwidth per stack, with each stack providing 36GB of memory.
  
  Both of those numbers are what is currently described as "a lot". Nvidia's RTX 5090 has 32GB of RAM and 1.8TB per second of bandwidth across sixteen GDDR7 chips, so packing more of each into a single device is quite attractive to high-end hardware designers.
  
  Just... Expensive.
  
  
  
• News sites are getting crushed by Google's new AI tools. (WSJ) (archive site)
  
  I had to block a bunch of these today, not just Google but Amazon and Alibaba as well, incessantly spraying redundant and nonsensical requests at my servers.
  
  Time perhaps to take another look at Nepenthes, which is designed to derail AI web crawlers and fill them with garbage.
  
  
  
• Starbucks is rolling out a Microsoft Azure OpenAI assistant for baristas because their jobs are just so complicated. (CNBC)
  
  Fuck.

  "It's just another example of how innovation technology is coming into service of our partners and making sure that we're doing all we can to simplify the operations, make their jobs just a little bit easier, maybe a little bit more fun, so that they can do what they do best," Starbucks Chief Technology Officer Deb Hall Lefevre told CNBC.

  Nuke them all and let God sort them out.
  
  
  
• Xlibre, a fork of the X.org server without the discrimination, bigotry, and hatred. (The Register)
  
  This has upset the Stalinists infesting - well, pretty much everything including these days The Register - because they love discrimination, bigotry, and hatred.
  
  But Xlibre works and the main competitor - Wayland - kind of doesn't.
  
  
  
• Hang on, did the iPad just become a computer? (The Verge)
  
  Right, that's enough internet for today.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:43 AM

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