It's been a long while since I wrote one of these, and well, to say things are depressing is very much an understatement. It's been over eight years since we first went online, and the world has literally changed several times over. Presidential elections, a global pandemic, war in Europe, and well, we've been here through it all. It's a testament to our staying power that SN has remained online through it all, as a volunteer and community driven project.That's not to say it's all been good news though ...About two years ago, I de-facto resigned from the project after internal conflicts, and SoylentNews has slowly been rotting to death. To say the state of the backend is bad is very much an understatement. I found the SN emails were on spam blocklists, and well, I won't even talk about the state of the software ATM. It's holding together mostly out of the sheer amount of overengineering, and good intentions. The last major overhaul was I did when the site was migrated to rehash 7 years ago ... yeah it's been awhile ...At this point, I think we need to talk about where we're going, because its either going to be long slow painful death, an execution, or an attempted comeback tour. This is your host NCommander, and today, we're going to look towards the future ...Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
upstart writes:Nearly $2bn (£1.75bn) has been spent on virtual land in the past 12 months, as people and companies race to get a foothold in the metaverse:
upstart writes:Chemists have long conceptualized tiny machines that could fabricate drugs, plastics, and other polymers that are hard to build with bigger tools:
Ometecuhtli writes:https://reason.com/2022/11/04/this-court-case-could-make-it-a-crime-to-be-a-journalist-in-texas/It has been five years since police in Laredo, Texas, mocked and jeered at Priscilla Villarreal, a local journalist often critical of cops, as she stood in the Webb County Jail while they booked her on felony charges. Her crime: asking the government questions.That may seem like a relatively obvious violation of the First Amendment. Yet perhaps more fraught is that, after all this time, the federal courts have still not been able to reach a consensus on that question. Over the years, judges in the 5th Circuit have ping-ponged back and forth over whether jailing a journalist for doing journalism does, in fact, plainly infringe on her free speech rights. [...][...] At the core of Villarreal's misfortune is a Texas law that allows the state to prosecute someone who obtains nonpublic information from a government official if he or she does so "with intent to obtain a benefit." Villarreal operates her popular news-sharing operation on Facebook, where her page, Lagordiloca News, has amassed 200,000 followers as of this writing.So to jail Villarreal, police alleged that she ran afoul of that law when she retrieved information from Laredo Police Department Officer Barbara Goodman and proceeded to publish those two aforementioned stories, because she potentially benefited by gaining more Facebook followers. Missing from that analysis is that every journalist, reporter, or media pundit has an "intent to benefit" when she or he publishes a story, whether it is to attract viewers, readers, or subscribers. Soliciting information from government officials—who, as Villarreal's case exemplifies, sometimes feed reporters information—is called a "scoop," and it's not new.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
Twitter Slashes Nearly Half its Workforce as Musk Admits 'Massive Drop' in Revenueupstart writes:Twitter slashes nearly half its workforce as Musk admits 'massive drop' in revenue:
upstart writes:We have covered similar stories recently also involving the Python repository but I have chosen this one because it goes into considerable detail to explain exactly how the malware works and the tricks that the writers had to employ in an effort to avoid detection. I will admit that I would have missed some of them! See the linked source for all the dirty details.Phylum Discovers Dozens More PyPI Packages Attempting to Deliver W4SP Stealer in Ongoing Supply-Chain Attack:
takyon writes:AMD has announced its first chiplet-based desktop GPUs using the RDNA 3 microarchitecture. These GPUs combine a single graphics die made on TSMC's N5 process node with up to 6 memory cache dies (MCDs) housing AMD's second generation of Infinity Cache (L3 cache) and GDDR6 memory controllers. The MCDs are made on TSMC's cheaper N6 process, which is a denser "7nm" node.The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX has a performance target of +70% over AMD's previous flagship, the 6950 XT. AMD claims that performance-per-Watt has improved by 54% between RDNA 2 and RDNA 3. The 7900 XTX includes 24 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, matching the VRAM capacity of Nvidia's RTX 4090, and 96 MB of Infinity Cache, which is less than the 128 MB used in the 6900/6950 XT.The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT has 84 compute units (CUs), while the 7900 XTX has 96 CUs. The 7900 XT drops an MCD, lowering VRAM capacity to 20 GB and Infinity Cache to 80 MB. The total board power is also lower, 300 Watts vs. 355 Watts for the XTX.Both GPUs support DisplayPort 2.1 and AV1 hardware decoding/encoding at up to 8K60. AMD's reference cards use a 2.5-slot design, smaller than some of the designs seen for the RTX 4090.The 7900 XTX has an MSRP of $999, and the 7900 XT has an MSRP of $899. The GPUs will be available starting on December 13th.See also: AMD Unveils FSR 3 With Fluid Motion Frame Technology, Double The FPS In Games Versus FSR 2 & Launch in 2023Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.