Monthly Archives: October 2024

Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Aw crap, they succeeded in entering the "value extraction" phase.
Pink text reading “reddit” with also pink portions of the Reddit alien’s head occupying the bottom right and top left corners of the image, the top one upside down, all on a black background.
Image: The Verge

Reddit just turned a profit for the first time. As part of its third-quarter earnings results released on Tuesday, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, along with $348.4 million in revenue — a 68 percent increase year over year.

The company hasn’t been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10 million last quarter, and is now finally in the green.

Reddit also grew to 97.2 million daily users over the past few months, marking a 47 percent increase from the same time last year. That number exceeded 100 million users on some days during the quarter, Reddit says.

Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to...

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Strava was used to locate the most powerful people

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The same kind of stunt made the news in 2018, and it's pretty obvious that automatically posting your location data somewhere public means anyone who wants to can track you, not just nation-states squeezing it out of your cell phone provider. And, the Ukrainians just used the same trick to assassinate a Russian general. But, as ever, most people aren't going to think about electronic privacy.
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Linus Torvalds: AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality

Source: Boing Boing

Article note: That seems about right, there are a handful of nifty and potentially useful things coming out of this AI Hype cycle. But most of it is useless gimmicks and executive FOMO.
Torvalds giving hardware vendor NVidia the finger at a 2012 talk.

The creator and lead maintaner of Linux says AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality. Linus speaks for a lot of us, I think! That it's marketed as "AI" in the first place is a good example of what he's talking about. — Read the rest

The post Linus Torvalds: AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Mac Desktop DynaComp DCF-803 Recap

DynaComp DCF-803 PSU, as used in Apple Centris 610/Quadra 660AV/ PowerMac 6100 Systems

Since finally being rid of my PhD work, I’ve been hitting a bunch of projects that have been on my TODO list for ages.
The oldest so far is this PSU which has been sitting for …decades… in my parts pile with some compatible machines, and I’ve always intended to try rebuilding it. It died with a “ticking” symptom some time in the mid-00s.

I finally got around to it this week, and it wasn’t a bad job. About $10 of parts, a few hours of work, and it’s back in action. Rebuild details below.

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Pull Your Xbox Clock Capacitor

If you have an OG Xbox sitting on a shelf somewhere, this is your reminder to pull the clock capacitor and clean up whatever corrosive goo it has already vomited out.
I was talking old video games with a student in one of my labs this week and it reminded me that this is one of the many projects I’ve been meaning to get to but haven’t had time for for the last several years.

Photo highlighting the leaked clock capacitor in an OG Xbox.

Microsoft used some cheap 2.5V 1F early super caps which will inevitably fail and spray electrolyte on your motherboard, because they made some cost-cutting choices about the RTC, so now everyone with an old Xbox has to fix it.

iFixit has their usual helpful guide for pulling it apart, and the ConsoleMods wiki has the details on the clock cap situation. I didn’t even bother replacing the one in mine, I don’t pull my old Xbox out enough for it to matter.
Remove dead cap, clean residue thoroughly, move on. It’s a quick job.

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McDonald’s busted ice cream machines can now be fixed — legally

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Right to Repair is good for everyone except for rentseeking parasites.
A photo showing someone holding an ice cream at McDonald’s
Photo by Gerald Matzka/picture alliance via Getty Images

McDonald’s always-broken ice cream machines might finally get easier to fix. That’s because the US Copyright Office granted an exemption allowing third parties to diagnose and repair commercial equipment — including the ones that make your McFlurries.

Now, franchise owners will be able to break through the digital locks that have blocked them from repairing McDonald’s ice cream machines for years. According to the Copyright Office, the exemption will allow people to diagnose, perform maintenance, and repair “retail-level commercial food preparation equipment.” McDonald’s ice cream machines have become so notorious for breaking that someone even created a tool to track broken machines.

The decision is part of the Copyright Office’s final...

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NetGuard – rootless Android outbound per-app OSS firewall, like LittleSnitch

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This looks like a promising way to limit mobile suck. Less automatic than system-wide ad-blocking - which at this point I'd go back to a flipphone before I'd tolerate a smartphone without - but able to cut off classes of problem that are currently hard to manage.
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Arm cancels Qualcomm’s license to use its chip design standards

Source: Engadget

Article note: Surely this spat will end well for everyone involved and not be useless expensive posturing that slows down developments that are in both parties interest.

Arm has taken its feud with Qualcomm to the next level, two years after filing a lawsuit against its former close partner. According to Bloomberg, the British semiconductor company has canceled the architecture license allowing Qualcomm to use its intellectual property and standards for chip design. As the news organization notes, Qualcomm, like many other chipmakers, uses Arm's computer code that chips need to run software, such as operating systems. Arm has reportedly sent Qualcomm a 60-day notice of cancelation — if they don't get to an agreement by then, it could have a huge impact on both companies' finances and on Qualcomm's operations. 

The SoftBank-backed chipmaker sued Qualcomm in 2022 after the latter purchased a company called Nuvia, which is one of its other licensees. Arm argued that the US company didn't obtain the necessary permits to transfer Nuvia's licenses. As such, Nuvia breached their contract and it had terminated its licenses, Arm explained in its lawsuit. Qualcomm has been using Nuvia-developed technology in the chips designed for AI PCs, such as those from Microsoft and HP. But Arm wants the company to stop using Nuvia-developed tech and to destroy any Arm-based technology developed prior to the acquisition. 

Qualcomm will have to stop selling most of the chips that account for its $39 billion in revenue, Bloomberg says, if the companies don't resolve the issue within the next 60 days. It seems the US chipmaker believes this is a tactic by Arm to threaten its business and to get higher royalties, because its spokesperson told Bloomberg and the Financial Times: "This is more of the same from Arm — more unfounded threats designed to strong-arm a longtime partner, interfere with our performance-leading CPUs, and increase royalty rates regardless of the broad rights under our architecture license." Qualcomm also accused Arm of attempting to disrupt the legal process, called its grounds for licensing termination "completely baseless" and said that it's confident its "rights under its agreement with Arm will be affirmed."

Meanwhile, an Arm spokesperson told us: "Following Qualcomm’s repeated material breaches of Arm’s license agreement, Arm is left with no choice but to take formal action requiring Qualcomm to remedy its breach or face termination of the agreement. This is necessary to protect the unparalleled ecosystem that Arm and its highly valued partners have built over more than 30 years. Arm is fully prepared for the trial in December and remains confident that the Court will find in Arm’s favor."

Update, October 23, 2024, 11:33PM ET: This story has been updated to add Arm's statement.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/arm-cancels-qualcomms-license-to-use-its-chip-design-standards-123031968.html?src=rss
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3D-Printed Active Electronics

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Ugh, the MIT hype machine is ridiculous even by modern academic standards. The finding is that copper doped PLA filament exhibits PTC (positive temperature coefficient; resistance increases with temperature) properties, and they can make a resettable fuse. Which is neat but not terribly surprising since one of the common species of commercial PTC devices for use as resettable fuses is made from conductive particles in a polymer substrate. The suggestion of active electronics is pure bullshit clickbait.
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Don Norman: ‘Apple has fallen prey to the most disastrous part of design ‘

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Every time I deal with a recent Apple product (...or really most recent devices, but Apple is the worst. Most of the other makers of phones and tablets just copy some of their bad ideas.), I angrily think about what I know about discoverability and affordances from Design of Everyday Things (Norman) and Humane Interface (Raskin) who were pivotal in Apple's reputation for design. I'm very much not surprised to hear he disapproves of their recent design ethos.
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