HackerNews Summary (2023-05-07 10AM)

Source: Pixel phones are sold with bootloader unlocking disabled – fitzsim’s development log

Summary
A software developer has called on Google to make the “OEM unlocking” toggle in the factory ‘un-grey’ before shipping Store.Google.com devices to customers, following a frustrating experience with their purchase of a Google Pixel 7 Pro.

Fact

📱 Google sold an unlocked Google Pixel 7 Pro with “OEM unlocking” greyed out, meaning that, without an internet connection, the owner would not have been able to install a different operating system, like GrapheneOS, on the device.

Source: Why the Ferrari F355 Sounds So Good

Summary
The distinct exhaust sound of the Ferrari F355 is due to the evenly spaced intervals between exhaust pulses, caused by its flat-plane V-8 crankshaft. This produces a higher-pitched noise, allowing higher revs. Cross-plane V-8s, on the other hand, produce a burbling sound, but can’t reach the same revs as flat-plane V-8s due to their heavier crankshafts.

Fact

🎶 The dominant sound of the F355 is the exhaust, with a distinct tone due to its flat-plane V-8 crankshaft that fires evenly between cylinder banks, producing a higher-pitched noise.

🔊 Unlike flat-plane V-8s, cross-plane V-8s have pairs of crankpins offset by 90 degrees, creating an uneven firing order that gives them a burbling sound, but with a heavier crankshaft than flat-plane V-8s, they can’t reach the same revs.

🚗 Unique among all flat-plane V-8s, except the LT6 from the new Corvette Z06, the F355’s V-8 sound is distinctive from tonally similar Ferraris due to unique mechanical factors.

Source: Cory Doctorow Explains Why Big Tech Is Making the Internet Terrible

Summary
Cory Doctorow praises Elon Musk for drawing attention to the issues of decay and abuses in digital platforms. Doctorow describes Musk’s tendency to disrupt the status quo as a positive force for change.

Fact

👥 Digital platforms are a type of rentier intermediary, leveraging resources to eliminate competition

💸 Digital platforms can use predatory pricing to eliminate competitors from the market

🌐 Digital platforms have a high-speed flexibility, allowing the business logic to change quickly

💰 Amazon’s Jeff Bezos can change prices for different customers or times of day with a click of a mouse on his digital grocery platforms

Source: So many bad takes — What is there to learn from the Prime Video microservices to monolith story

Summary
The Prime Video team’s success in reducing costs and scaling up the audio/video monitoring service by 90% was misrepresented as a microservice to monolith transformation, when it was actually a microservice refactoring. This reflects the trend of microservices being over-sold as a solution for everything, and a return to monoliths, although a serverless first approach using Step Functions and Lambda is often preferable for intermittent and small-scale enterprise workloads.

Fact
💻 The Prime Video team used a serverless first approach, building a prototype using Step Functions and Lambda calls, before reusing most of the code to create a long running microservice horizontally scaled using ECS and invoked via a lambda function.

Source: AMD promises its new laptop chips will crush the Apple M2 – and it’s got receipts

Summary
AMD has launched its new Ryzen 7040U series of laptop processors with up to 8 Zen 4 cores and integrated Radeon 780M graphics. The flagship Ryzen 7 7840U impressively uses only 15W of power and offers 9% better 3D rendering, 14% better responsiveness and 72% better multiprocessing when compared to Apple’s M2 chip.

Fact

💻 The flagship Ryzen 7 7840U uses just 15W of power, which is almost half that of the base TDP of the competing Intel Core i7-1360P.

🎮 The new processors have impressive RDNA 3 iGPU performance, with up to 139% better performance than Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics, giving a glimpse at the future of gaming laptops with low-power processors and impressive integrated graphics.

👍 These processors are a step towards leaving discrete graphics cards in the past, with AMD committing to integrated graphics and purpose-building these chips for the best ultrabooks around.

Source: x86 Windows Single Board Computer Server

Summary
The LattePanda Sigma is a compact and powerful single board computer with a 13th Intel Core i5-1340P processor, 16GB RAM, and Intel Iris Xe Graphics. It has versatile interfaces, including dual Thunderbolt 4 Ports, two M.2 M Slots, a COM port, dual 2.5G Ethernet ports, SATA DATA, and SATA power. The LattePanda Sigma can run multiple operating systems and supports up to 4 4K displays simultaneously, making it suitable for various scenarios such as home automation, media server, edge computing, AI inference, and single board server.

Fact

💻 The LattePanda Sigma features a 13th Intel Core i5-1340P processor, 16GB RAM, and Intel Iris Xe Graphics, allowing for smooth video processing and game playing.

🔌 The dual Thunderbolt 4 ports provide lightning-fast data transfer speeds and charging capabilities and can connect to a graphics dock, high-speed SSD, up to 8K Monitor, and Thunderbolt bridge.

💾 It has two M.2 M slots, one PCIe 4.0×4 capable of connecting up to 8TB of NVMe SSD storage, and M.2 B Key supporting Wi-Fi modules and 4G/5G modules.

🖥️ The LattePanda Sigma supports up to 4 4K displays simultaneously, significantly enhancing the visual experience and making multi-tasking a breeze.

🖥️ It can run multiple operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, allowing you to choose the most suitable OS for your project.

Source: ChatGPT cannot build a simple working site from scratch

Summary
🤔 chatGpt struggled to complete a task to build a website for randomly assigning team members after a few rounds of debugging and mistakes.

Facts

🐍 chatGpt instructed you to install Python and Flask to start building the website.

🔄 Despite feedback and debugging, chatGpt was stuck in a loop and could not complete the task.

🤷 It’s unclear if you did anything wrong since chatGpt was responsible for completing the task.

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