Top Story

• You've got cancer! Part One: Carbon Health, an organisation with over 100 clinics in the US, is using GPT-4 to generate patient summaries from doctors' notes. (The Register)
  
  Though based on our experience with ChatGPT, it's just as likely to diagnose you with Dutch Elm Disease.
  
  "But I'm not even Dutch!"
  "You are now."
  
  
  
• You've got cancer! Part Two: Patients using Grail's new blood test for cancer turned out to have chosen poorly when over 400 of them received letters telling them they were already dead. (CBS)
  
  "Was that wrong?" said a company spokesman. "Should we not have done that?"

Tech News

• The SEC is asking for an emergency order to freeze Binance US's financial assets - worldwide. (CNBC)
  
  Yeah, that's going to create a mess if a judge approves it. Wouldn't be at all surprised if it took out one or two more of the smaller banks.
  
  
  
• Sam Altman-Fried says that OpenAI isn't planning on an IPO any time soon because - I'm paraphrasing here - the entire company is an elaborate scam. (Reuters)

  "We have a very strange structure. We have this cap to profit thing," he said.
  OpenAI started off as a non-profit organisation but later created a hybrid "capped-profit" company, that allowed it to raise external funds with a promise that the original non-profit operation still benefits.
  
  "Also, our product is total bullshit. Don't write that down."

  Wouldn't dream of it, Sam.
  
  
  
• Speaking of elaborate scams, Japan has earmarked $107 billion for hydrogen fuel projects. (AP)
  
  Hydrogen is a terrible fuel. Miserable energy density and expensive and troublesome to store and transport.
  
  Unless you turn it into natural gas. Natural gas works pretty well. But most hydrogen comes from natural gas, so that's worse than pointless.
  
  
  
• Millions of hard drives are shredded every year instead of being recycled. (BBC)
  
  Because hard drives are cheap and the class-action lawsuit when someone else ends up with all your customer data is expensive. It's simply not worth the risk for large corporations to recycle the drives.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:09 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 354 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Looks like your page has been dropping acid again.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, June 07 2023 07:35 PM (rglbH)

2 When our library is disposing of an old machine we sometimes wipe the hard drive(s).  With an old, whirling-rust drive of 250G this takes about 3 hours per pass.  Now, it's true, I can just turn it on, start the wipe, and go do other things, but to effectively destroy that same drive takes all of 30 seconds and costs virtually zero electricity.  And if you're a massive datacenter with hundreds or thousands of drives to dispose of per year I can't see the maths working any other way, really.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 07 2023 09:32 PM (obo9H)

3 Long ago and far away, a friend of mine was at the Stanford Research Institute, maintaining servers for a project that dealt in classified data of some variety. When it came time to dispose of hard drives, she called to ask what method was acceptable. After being transferred around multiple times, she finally found someone who could give an authoritative answer:

"It's really easy, just take the drives outside, wait for a tank to come by, and place them in front of the treads."

She explained that they didn't have any tanks at her office. Long pause, "...then what are you doing with that kind of data!?" She explained what SRI did, and he eventually agreed that magnetic scrubbing was acceptable if they had strong enough magnets.

"We have a cyclotron, will that do?"

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, June 07 2023 11:06 PM (oJgNG)

4 Here at "big expensive diesel engine sales and services", I dispose of them using the multi-ton Metal Muncher brand shear/punch/press machine out in our machine shop, very very satisfying and ain't no real easy way to put that puppy back together, not sure what those platters are made of on the old mechanicals but they shatter like safety glass.

Posted by: bob in houston at Thursday, June 08 2023 01:03 AM (YBLgY)

5 Disclaimer: Bats!  Bats in my face!

Now see? that's why Mr Thompson said not to pull over there, its bat country!

Posted by: bob in houston at Thursday, June 08 2023 01:09 AM (YBLgY)

6 In my limited experience, consumer drives reach an age of senescence, where they just run slower and slower, like a cheap QLC SSD that's exhausted its write cache and is now slowly dripping data onto the platter, with 100% activity time, and access times measured in seconds instgead of milliseconds.  I dunno why you'd wanna reuse something that worn out.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, June 08 2023 01:43 AM (BMUHC)

7 Back in the day, not that long ago, classified HDDs were melted down to liquid. Try to get data from that!

Posted by: Raster at Thursday, June 08 2023 07:20 AM (VAiJm)

8 When I worked in a SCIF back in 1994, we had ancient hard drives with enormous, I want to say 12" platters, that the techs would remove, and then we'd run a powerful magnet over them before dumping them into a metal shredder. I imagine there was no concern about any cache on those drives.
We had a stack to destroy every month or so that came from another office, and I have to hope they were replacing the ancient drives, not putting in fresh platters on some rotating cycle.

Posted by: David Eastman at Thursday, June 08 2023 08:19 AM (oHlLc)

9 Well, "modern" hard-drives (everything I've seen since around 2004 or slightly earlier) seem to do just fine with magnets being waved around them.  I'm pretty sure the medium needs really strong, local (like 0.01" or 0.001") magnetism to have any effect on the platters.  Hell, the newer stuff (HAMR etc) needs a heating element in the head to change anything.  I'd be satisfied with crushing (16lb hammers are cheap enough), shredding (metal shredders aren't too horribly expensive), or melting (toss into nearby volcano, like a good Hobbitses), as above, but the "waving a magnet around" method doesn't inspire confidence.  Though, I guess a cyclotron might be a good start.  7.62x54, 7.62x56, or 7.62x51 seem decent as well.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 08 2023 08:45 AM (obo9H)

10 the break in the formatting looks like it might be before the japan article

I dunno.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, June 08 2023 10:33 AM (r9O5h)

11 Sorry about the busted page.  Using this editor with Chrome it likes to insert random <div> elements inside BBCode, which ends up with overlapping tags.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 08 2023 04:38 PM (PiXy!)

12 Don't you just love tools that think they know what you want better than you do

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, June 08 2023 10:19 PM (rglbH)

13 I was noticing that the first paragraph of any new blog post didn't HAVE a div tag, unless I inserted a few lines before it and deleted them. Played hob with my blank line formatting.

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, June 09 2023 10:22 AM (BzEjn)

14 I'm going to experiment with new editors this weekend.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 09 2023 11:14 AM (PiXy!)

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