There's a fresh co-ordinated release of stories based on Frances Haugen's insider info on The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, NBC, CNN, The Verge, Wired, Associated Press, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Atlantic and Reuters. Each one covers a new and perverse way Facebook's fucked up lately. Countless examples of how they'd say one thing to the government and media, but internally think the total opposite. Struggles moderating non-English content. Constant decisions to favour engagement over safety. Rank and file employees fed up with their bosses. I haven't read all the stories as there's just so damn many and to be honest, I don't really need further proof Facebook are a pack of bastards - that's a theory well proven now.
Tesla's market cap hit US$1 trillion overnight, one of the rare companies to ever reach that point (the FAAAMs are about it, if you exclude state owned oil/gas companies in dictatorships). Insane considering their lack of scale and tiny market share. There's a shitload of expected performance built-in to that trillion dollar valuation! What seemed to tip Tesla over the edge was hire car company Hertz's decision to buy 100,000 Model 3s (at RRP!) and make them available to rent across the US & Europe by the end of 2022. Meanwhile, the NTSB is pissed off with Tesla for not taking up any of its Autopilot safety recommendations and Tesla is fighting with the NHTSA to keep secret details it provided to an investigation regarding Autopilot-related fatalities.
Early reviews of the new MacBook Pros are out and it's all good news. The review I was hanging out for however is Anandtech's take on the M1 Max and M1 Pro. They confirm Apple's claims that the new SoCs are performance per watt beasts that "compete against the best desktop systems out there" and that "you'd have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max". The GPU is a stone cold killer too, with GPU optimised apps (Premiere/Resolve) seeing a massive boost. In native GPU benchmarks (GFXBench), the M1 Max is as fast as an RTX3080L. This doesn't translate into real-world gaming though as nothing uses Metal (think DirectX, but for Apple devices). Also, macOS Monterey is out if you're keen to upgrade on day one. I'll give it a crack over the weekend.
Despite writing a newsletter, I do not read many other newsletters. My brain only has space for one newsletter and it's The Sizzle. However, I've recently starting coughing up cash for The Terminal, a bi-weekly-ish newsletter by James Hennessy that writes about the tech stuff I wish I had the skill and time to tackle. Lately he's been interested in the bizarre world of NFTs (Neopets, Jack Dorsey, Web3!), how Facebook's BGP & DNS fuckup earlier this month exposed just how important yet also irrelevant they are, how smart glasses are fucking stupid and heaps more. Quality stories that I reckon compliment The Sizzle's content nicely.
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The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.