I was hoping to write today that Artemis 1 is on its way to the moon and you can follow its journey on NASA's website, but that is not the case. NASA scrubbed the launch 40 minutes before the deadline and will try again on September 2nd or 5th. Whilst fueling up this beast, the "flow of liquid hydrogen into the engine's compartment wasn't working as it should, and the propellant wasn't at the proper temperature range". They also spotted "a problem with a vent valve, and an incoming rainstorm and chances of lightning strikes also posed risks". It just wasn't meant to happen. According to Arstechnica, four refueling tests prior to yesterday all failed, making the argument that "NASA probably should have completed a full wet dress rehearsal before rolling the rocket out for a launch".
AMD has formally launched its Ryzen 7000 series desktop CPUs. These use the same 5nm TSMC process as Apple's M1 range of chips and sport an all-new Zen 4 architecture. AMD reckons this will improve IPC performance by 13%, which when coupled with up to 5.7GHz single thread clock speeds (i.e: boost mode) it'll see an overall 29% performance in single threaded operations compared to the previous generation Ryzen. The flagship Ryzen 9 7950X (16-cores, US$699 RRP) will likely be the fastest CPU on the market (sucking down ~170-230W). There's a new socket (AM5) and PCIe Gen5 and DDR5 are part of the package now. Official release date is September 27th, so we will get more detailed reviews then.
The eSafety Commissioner has issued legal notices to Apple, Meta (and WhatsApp), Microsoft (and Skype), Snap and Omegle as an "information gathering process" to see if they're meeting the Basic Online Safety Expectations formed as part of the Online Safety Act. These expectations will likely be turned into mandatory codes. If the tech companies don't respond within 28 days they "could" face fines of up to $555,000 per day. The press release says that one of the "key safety risks for child sexual exploitation and abuse" is "livestreaming, anonymity, and end-to-end encryption". They're coming for our right to be anonymous on the internet and for end-to-end encryption with the usual "protect the children!" mantra.
The iHeart Podcast Network is one of the biggest podcast advertising networks in the world and they've released a report with stats on how effective their ads have been in Australia between April 2021 and June 2022 that surprised me. Their conversion rate (i.e: the amount of listeners hearing doing something based on the ad) is 2.4%. According to the report the industry average is 1.17%. That's way lower than I expected, but the report says that rates is "higher than social and digital channels, including Google Search, Facebook, Twitter and more". I assume this is because podcast ads can't as easily be scrolled past or blocked with a script.
📻 Tiny Anthem - The M Machine
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