Month: April 2023

Enlarge (credit: STEFANI REYNOLDS / Contributor | AFP)

After a weekend where many Twitter users waited to witness the moment when their legacy verified badges disappeared, the official Twitter handle of The New York Times became one of the first accounts to lose its verified status. While many legacy accounts still have their badges, the speedy removal of the badge from one of the platform’s most influential organizations was seemingly personally directed by Elon Musk, The Washington Post reported.

In response to a meme joking about the Times’ decision not to pay $1,000 a month to keep the gold check mark that Twitter sells to verify businesses, Musk tweeted on Saturday, “Oh ok, we’ll take it off then.” On Sunday, Musk deleted a tweet that said legacy verified accounts would be given “a few weeks grace” before the check marks vanish “unless they tell they won’t pay now, in which we will remove it.”

Making an example out of revoking the Times’ verified status seemed personal to Musk. In several tweets, Musk mocked the Times—which the Post noted is Twitter’s 24th most followed account—calling its news articles “propaganda” that “isn’t even interesting” and describing its Twitter feed as “diarrhea” that’s “unreadable.” He also tweeted that the Times was being “hypocritical” because the news organization is “super aggressive about forcing everyone to pay their subscription” fees. (Two years ago, the Times increased its digital subscription price for the first time, CNN reported, raising it to $17 a month.)

Enlarge / AMD's AM5 processor socket. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you're trying to build a low-end to midrange gaming PC or workstation with inexpensive but modern parts, it's been hard to recommend AMD's Ryzen 7000-series processors. That's partly because Intel's CPUs have offered more cores for similar money, but motherboards with AMD's socket AM5 have remained stubbornly expensive, and their lack of support for DDR4 memory means you'll pay more to get DDR5 RAM.

That may change somewhat thanks to the new entry-level AMD A620 chipset, which the company quietly announced last week. AMD says they should bring the prices of AM5-based motherboards down to around $85, not far north of what low-end Intel-based H610 and B660 motherboards cost, though they'll still require DDR5 (for the DDR5-6000 that AMD recommends for optimal Ryzen performance, the price premium is still not quite double what you'll pay for the same amount of DDR4-3200).

How the A620 chipset stacks up to higher-end X670 and B650 options. Note the lack of CPU overclocking and PCIe 5.0 support. (credit: AMD)

Compared to X670 and B650-based motherboards, A620 chipsets will have more limited connectivity. There's no PCI Express 5.0 support at all for either graphics cards or SSDs—not a huge blow since no GPUs and few SSDs support PCIe 5.0 at this point anyway, but a step back for future-proofing. The processor will still provide enough PCIe 4.0 lanes for a GPU and a single SSD, but the chipset only supports PCIe 3.0 speeds for additional SSDs. The chipset also supports fewer USB ports overall and no 20Gbps USB ports.

Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe kicked off with the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in February. And now we have the official full trailer for the first TV series in Phase Five, Secret Invasion, which focuses on Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury. The trailer dropped during ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball.

(Spoilers for 2019's Captain Marvel below.)

The six-episode series is a "crossover event" that Marvel President Kevin Feige expects to tie into future films in the MCU, most notably The Marvels, slated for a November 2023 release. It's based on the 2008 comic book storyline, although the series will have fewer characters, focusing primarily on Fury and the Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), a Fury ally after the events of Captain Marvel. But it will explore similar themes of political paranoia, per Feige, and the series creators also drew inspiration from the TV series Homeland and The Americans.