Daily Tech News 31 December 2022

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• Guests have been lunched and dinnered and lunched again, late Christmas gifts exchanged, local sights seen, and everyone packed off back home again. There was a little difficulty on the food side of things because the two gluten-free restaurants I've actually tried here are both closed for the holidays, but we found a decent pizza place with gluten-free options.
  
  I can now sit around and relax for a few hours before I need to start fixing things so that the bugs introduced during the server move stop wriggling about and spoiling things for people.
  
  Meanwhile the year here in Australia is ending as it began: It's raining.
  
  
  
• The Lenovo YogaBook 9i is, as the name suggests, a new dual-screen 13" laptop. (Liliputing)
  
  Dammit, guys.
  
  I can see how this would be nice as a virtual coffee table book, if it has good enough screens. It is touch-sensitive and has pen support, so it might be nice if very much a niche product.
  
  
  
• The Bigme S6 is a 7.8" Android tablet with an 1872x1404 display, a mid-range 8 core CPU, 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. (Liliputing)
  
  The catch? Because there's always a catch.
  
  It's e-ink. It's a colour e-ink display, but while in black and white it's 300 dpi, in colour it's only 100 dpi. And at around 1fps it's not useful for much beyond reading books.

Tech News

• The specs for Nvidia's 4070 Ti have been officially confirmed but contain no surprises because it's the de-announced 4080 12GB model. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's some speculation that it might be cheaper than the original $899, but I wouldn't count on it.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the mobile 4090 is faster than a desktop 3090. (WCCFTech)
  
  And has a 150W TDP, one third that of the desktop edition.
  
  Which would make for a really nice desktop graphics card.
  
  
  
• AMD is closing its logistics hub in Hong Kong and moving the operation to Taiwan. (WCCFTech)
  
  Nvidia has done the same thing. It makes sense because both companies make their chips in Taiwan and many of the leading graphics card and motherboard makers are also based in Taiwan.
  
  
  
• It's the end of tech journalism as we know it - finally. (ZDNet)
  
  These idiots think that AI is going to replace programmers.
  
  I've seen the results.
  
  It's not pretty.
  
  Code actually needs to be correct. You can't just throw together something that looks cool and ship it... Well, people do exactly that which is how we got PHP, but you can't do that in fields with product liability laws.
  
  But journalism doesn't need to be correct, which we know because it isn't. So these termites can easily be replaced and will be, and not only will I not miss them, I'm not sure I will notice.
  
  
  
• The LG 27UP600-W is apparently $200 at Best Buy. (AnandTech)
  
  I have the more expensive model - the 850-W - which I believe is the same display panel but adds USB-C, speakers, and a fully adjustable stand (height, tilt, and pivot).
  
  If you don't need USB-C or the fancy stand, the display panel is very impressive - sharp and colourful with a 4K resolution and 95% of the DCI-P3 colour space - and a bargain at $200.

• On December 1 everything that went wrong with FTX (spoiler: they stole all the money), the Twitter/Apple war was cancelled due to lack of interest, Lastpass got hacked, Akamai accidentally murdered a botnet, and how to lose $5 billion without even trying.
  
  
  
  
• On December 2 Parler decided not to be bought by Kanye West, I got legs, safe code was no slower than unsafe, Apple's Catch 22, and the Kindle Scribe.
  
  
• On December 3 the hosting company took the server offline for routine maintenance which ended up lasting 24 hours, and I got the last backup up and running on a new server.
  
  
  
  
• On December 4 with the old server back I was able to bring all the latest goodies across so nothing was lost, MSN didn't fire all its human journalists and replace them with bots - though things would likely improve if more news outlets did that, the 13500 looked like a good CPU, and AMD had some X waiting in the wings.
  
  
• On December 5 Tesla launched the Semi although not in an orbit past Mars, Starlink got FCC approval for 7500 Gen 2 satellites, Scrum sucked, and don't try electronic surveillance on hackers because they'll just view it as a game.
  
  
  
  
• On December 6 Moore's Law was totally not dead, the Moon was haunted, the story of Dune II, and Lobachevsky.
  
  
• On December 7 I ordered a new server cluster to replace the old crap - not the latest hardware but I can get two 5950X systems for the price of one 7950X, ChatGPT was very impressive if you were easily impressed, TSMC threw another $28 billion at Arizona, and Sam Bankman-Fried was a master manipulator of gullible idiots.
  
  
  
  
• On December 8 Apple decided not to go full Stasi after all, JavaScript was trash, and Lenovo announced a bad small tablet.
  
  
• On December 9 tech journalists knew nothing, locating the stealth bomber by star positions in a photo and guessing that it as probably at an Air Force base but mostly the guessing part, and part two of the Twitter Files.
  
  
  
  
• On December 10 crypto fallout as people were fired and/or arrested everywhere, a 1300W power supply, a CPU that needs a 1300W power supply, and setting up the new cluster.
  
  
• On December 11 no honour among Ponzi schemers, JavaScript front ends were also trash, Fractal Design went to Ikea, and dark matter turned out to be mayonnaise.
  
  
  
  
• On December 12 NASA's Orion mission landed back on Earth, you can't get Unix workstations anymore, and the 13400 was also good but not as good as the 13500.
  
  
• On December 13 Sam Bankman-Fried finally shut up when he was arrested on charges of stealing $10 billion which is after all what he did, AMD's new graphics cards were okay, and AI researchers were basically teaching AI to lie.
  
  
  
  
• On December 14 Dwarf Fortress earned $6 million in a week, Steam-powered Teslas, don't wait for the next generation, China banned exports of home-grown CPUs that nobody wants, and Twitter dissolved its Trust and Safety Council.
  
  
• On December 15 ChatGPT bought Gizmodo as far as anyone could tell, SRAM scaling was dead, and another weird cool little router thingy.
  
  
  
  
• On December 16 portable quantum computers, IBM launched an attack on Oracle's price list, and Sanskrit scholars for the past 2500 years were apparently kind of dumb.
  
  
• On December 17 1000 dead cryptocurrencies at the bottom of the sea, government was the problem, a $8 Linux computer, and yet another almost-but-not-quite 8" tablet.
  
  
  
  
• On December 18 don't buy a graphics card, -108 diopters, and Minecraft got wormed.
  
  
• On December 19 Twitter's CEO hunt commenced, SpaceX launched three missions in 36 hours, and the Fools Golden Age of TV.
  
  
  
  
• On December 20 there was no new Mac Pro, there were no CPUs at all in Russia, eleven simple rules for estimating your next project, New York's right to repair legislation crawled into a hole to die, and January.
  
  
• On December 21 the founder of a crypto Ponzi scheme that imploded back in 2018 pleaded guilty to founding a crypto Ponzi scheme that imploded back in 2018, Amazon smuggled 10PB of data out of Ukraine hidden inside a 3D printer, Lenovo announced another bad small Android tablet, and February.
  
  
  
  
• On December 22 always lock the bathroom door, why current Intel-based laptops suck, the universal minicomputer simulator, and March.
  
  
• On December 23 Sam Bankman-Fried was released from jail on $250 million bail which nobody actually paid, AMD and Intel's new mid-range CPUs leaked, and April.
  
  
  
  
• On December 24 Zimbabwe banned the export of lithium which is the only thing the country actually exports apart from Ebola and poverty, TikTok was indeed spying on users, and May.
  
  
• On December 25 Rube Goldberg crypto Ponzi schemes, a "mediocre" SSD that can sustain 2GBps writes forever, a very fancy keyboard, and June.
  
  
  
  
• On December 26 tech journalism didn't know what to do, the Pitch Drop Experiment was secretly a ninja, don't trust CNET, editing your next major motion picture on an iPhone, and July.
  
  
• On December 27 Americans found ever more inventive ways to lose their money to obvious scams such as Congress, AI programming assistants made things worse, build your own CDN, Windows 7 at 5MHz, and August.
  
  
  
  
• On December 28 Muzzafuffabugga was the recycling center of the world, HP's very expensive Dragonfly Elite Folio G3 kind of sucked, and the world was allegedly awash in chips. I asked my industry source about that and he shook his head. Some chips - mostly the expensive ones - are easier to get now, but the cheap stuff that every electronic device depends on are very often still backordered for months. Oh, and September.
  
  
• On December 29 Barnes and Noble sold books, every planet showed up to the dance, SpaceX launched the first constellation of Starlink 2 satellites, and October.
  
  
  
  
• On December 30 I was totally out to lunch and also dinner but did get to November.
  
  
• And then, finally, on December 31 at the end of a very, very, very long year, there were still no good small Android tablets.