Top Story

• In May, OpenAI, which has never made a profit, spent $6.5 billion to buy Jony Ive's company io, which has never made a product. The first device to ship from the partnership? Anyone's guess, they're out of ideas. (Tech Crunch) (archive site)

  The FT now says that OpenAI and Ive aim to create "a palm-sized device without a screen that can take audio and visual cues from the physical environment and respond to users' requests."

  A phone? I'm told those already exist.

  But unresolved issues around the device's "personality," how it handles privacy, and computing infrastructure might delay the launch.

  Good grief, they've created the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

  "Listen," said Ford, who was still engrossed in the sales brochure, "they make a big thing of the ship's cybernetics. A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature." "GPP feature?" said Arthur. "What's that?"
  
  "Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities."
  
  "Oh," said Arthur, "sounds ghastly."
  
  A voice behind them said, "It is." The voice was low and hopeless and accompanied by a slight clanking sound. They span round and saw an abject steel man standing hunched in the doorway.
  
  "What?" they said.
  
  "Ghastly," continued Marvin, "it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door," he said, stepping through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he mimicked the style of the sales brochure. "All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done."
  
  As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality to it. "Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!" it said.

Tech News

• Intel is reportedly planning to pack 12 graphics cores into its next-generation Panther Lake laptop chips. (WCCFTech)
  
  That will give them 50% more GPU hardware than the existing Lunar Lake series, which relies on fast on-package LPDDR5X memory to keep the graphics engine fed, and delivers close to AMD levels of graphics performance.
  
  Panther Lake will support regular DDR5 RAM so we'll see if this works or if it ends up hopelessly bandwidth-constrained.
  
  Reminder that this is the same chip that will only have four full-size CPU cores. Up to 16 in total, but the remainder will all be either E cores (efficiency, half as fast) or LP cores (low power, even slower).
  
  
  
• A fire has destroyed the South Korean government's cloud storage system. They don't have a backup. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  
  Government workers - 750,000 of them - were encouraged to store work documents on the government-run cloud service because... Nobody has ever made an adage of putting all your eggs in one basket, right?
  
  Just to be clear, this is for working documents for individual staff members; the usual fleet of government databases are stored separately and did not go up in smoke yet.
  
  
  
• How did Amazon become so rubbish, and how to fix it? (The Guardian)
  
  It's a Cory Doctorow article, so we know the answer won't be specific antitrust action against the purported monopoly, but communism for everyone.

  This flywheel is the direct product of a radical legal theory that has had the world in its grip since the late 1970s. From the 1890s until the Jimmy Carter administration, US corporations' power was blunted by antitrust law, which treated large companies as threats simply because they were large.

  That claim is partly true. The period from the 1930s to the 1970s was indeed marked by radical antitrust actions, leading Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to remark: The sole consistency that I can find [in U.S. merger law] is that in litigation under [the Clayton Act], the Government always wins.

  A rival - and frankly terrible – theory of antitrust law says that the only time a government should intervene against a monopolist is when it is sure that the monopolist is using its scale to raise prices or lower quality.

  This is obviously the correct approach and indeed the method used in prior decades was discarded because it was inconsistent, unproductive, and unconstitutional, things Mr Doctorow doesn't appear to consider a problem.
  
  
  
• Opera wants you to pay $20 per month for its new AI browser. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  No.
  
  See how easy this is, Cory?
  
  
  
• You know, maybe it is a bubble after all. (MSN)
  
  Ya think?
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

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