Daily Tech News 12 February 2024

• How Venus got its Zoozve back. (Sky and Telescope)
  
  Back in the dim, dusty reaches of two weeks ago, a cute and amusing story appeared on Twitter about how a children's poster of the Solar System came out with a moon of Venus mistakenly labelled Zoozve.
  
  Mistakenly because (a) Venus doesn't have any moons - not exactly, anyway - and because the designation of the asteroid so labelled is actually 2002VE 68. The creation of Zoozve was an accident of the artist's bad handwriting.
  
  But 2002VE 68 is not just any asteroid, but what is known as a quasi-moon; it doesn't orbit Venus the way the Moon orbits the Earth, but dances a intricate gavotte around both Venus and the Sun that is expected to last several hundred years before the partners part ways.
  
  It was the first such quasi-moon discovered; since 2002 another eight have been found, seven of them around Earth.
  
  And since all it had - until now - was a catalog number, it was eligible to be named if someone could (a) submit a formal proposal and (b) convince enough members of the relevant IAU committee to vote for it.
  
  So they did, and now the poster is retroactively correct.

• The future is hydrogen. (Inside EEVs)
  
  In five billion years when the Sun expands and swallows the Earth.
  
  In the meantime, not so much.
  
  
  
• Switzerland was not invaded by three million zombie toothbrushes. (Ars Technica)
  
  Darn.
  
  
  
• Zen 5 could have double the floating point performance of Zen 4. (WCCFTech)
  
  Zen 4 already squashes Zen 3 and Intel chips on any benchmark that can use AVX512 instructions, because while Zen 4 only implements a cut-down version of AVX512 that breaks 512-bit instructions into two 256-bit instructions, Zen 3 and Intel's consumer chips don't support it at all.
  
  Zen 3 because it just doesn't; Intel because the P cores do but the E cores don't, and that created such a headache that it was simpler to just burn the functionality out with a laser before the chips left the factory.
  
  How good it is we don't know yet. Intel's server chips that implement full AVX512 have to significantly reduce clock speeds when you are using those instructions because it burns power like mad. But AMD chips are more power-efficient than Intel - currently - so they might not feel as much heat.
  
  
  
• Palworld creator PocketPair is hiring. (WCCFTech)
  
  You do need to be able to program, though, so that leaves out most of the recent Big Tech castaways.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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