• Microsoft has lobotomised Bing's AI chat search thing called Sydney.  (The Verge)
  
  After a bit of poking around with an ice pick, Sydney will now only respond to five questions per session and fifty per day.  Although ChatGPT isn't designed to learn after initial training is complete, it does modify its responses based on inputs and earlier responses within a session, leading to increasingly erratic behaviour because at its core it's a box of mindless junk.
  
  
  
• Speaking of boxes of mindless junk ChatGPT is scary good at my job but there's one reason I'm not panicking.  (ZDNet)
  
  ChatGPT isn't capable of arranging underhanded deals to flog fake SSDs.  Yet.
  
  Also, it's not union.

• The Auspicious Machine is like a chunky Blackberry.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has a 640x480 LCD screen - rather low resolution in this day and age, a physical QWERTY keyboard, a D-pad for games, a tiny trackball, and no CPU, memory, or storage whatsoever (though there is a micro-SD slot).
  
  That's because it's designed as a carrier for a Raspberry Pi Compute Module - specifically the CM4 - or anything with a compatible connector and form factor.  The CM4 is just 40x55 mm - 1.6x2.2 inches - so it easily fits within a phone-sized device, and is available with up to 8GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
  
  Not a terrible idea, though the CM4 is much slower than current phone models, even budget ones.
  
  
  
• The 7950X3D appears to be slower than the 7950X in Geekbench and Blender.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 5800X3D was also slower than the regular 5800X in common benchmarks, while turning in amazing results in certain game titles.  (TechSpot)
  
  Nothing seems to have changed there, so if you mostly play Apex you can give this one a pass, but if you enjoy racing sim Assetto Corsa you could see a 40% increase in frame rates (if your graphics card can keep up).
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 40980 Ti and Titan RTX Ada: Everything we know.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is basically nothing.  It's all speculation, though we do know that the 4090 only enables 8 out of 9 of the shader clusters on the AD102 chip, leaving room for a new card to be all of 12.5% faster.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, February 19 2023 12:49 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Tower at Wednesday, April 17 2024 12:21 PM (XJA3c)

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• Bing's AI chat search thing - it calls itself Sydney - is an idiot on a level rarely matched except by tech journalists writing for the New York Times.  (New York Times)
  
  Writer Kevin Roose tweeted that he found it hard to sleep after this dark and disturbing experience of talking to a poorly-programmed chatbot.
  
  Sure, ChatGPT is more sophisticated than Eliza and it exhibits its blatantly robotic behaviour in more sophisticated ways.  So does Kevin.
  
  
  
• Another week.  Still not dead.  Catching up on the backlog at work after being sick most of January.  Plan to spend the weekend fixing blog stuff.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Bing's AI chat search thing called Sydney also threatened to sue people who point out its blatantly robotic behaviour.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Good luck with that.
  
  
  
• The Supreme Court is about to hear a case that might allow Microsoft to be sued for things that Bing's AI chat search thing called Sydney says to people.  (The Verge)
  
  The presumptive defense is CDA Section 230, the same law that allows social networks and comment sections to exist.  But "Sydney" isn't a third party posting on a neutral platform; it's the creation of Microsoft itself.
  
  
  
• YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down after nine years of ruining the platform.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Bye.
  
  
  
• The SEC has charged Terraform Labs and its fugitive CEO with fraud over the collapse of the Terra and Luna stablecoins.  (CNBC)
  
  About time.
  
  
  
• High end networking company Arista sold over $1 billion worth of switches and routers in 2022 - to Facebook alone.  (The Next Platform)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, February 18 2023 01:14 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, February 19 2023 07:51 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Annata20 at Friday, August 25 2023 01:03 PM (5BXrS)

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• Full details of Intel's new range of workstation CPUs are out.  (AnandTech)
  
  Prices start at $359 for a 6 core part, with 4 memory channels supporting up to 2TB of RAM, and 64 lanes of PCIe 5.0.  Except you can't buy that one, it's OEM-only.
  
  Price for a 16 core model is $1389 with 4 channel RAM and 64 PCIe lanes, or $1589 with 8 channel RAM and 112 PCIe lanes.  That's not a big difference but the motherboards for the latter version are likely to cost more as well.
  
  It's likely to be slower than AMD's Ryzen 7950X - clock speeds are lower by about 1GHz - but if you need lots of RAM and/or PCIe slots it could be a viable option.
  
  Benchmarks coming at the end of the month I think.
  
  The chipset only comes with 2.5Gb Ethernet, which I think is a misfire.  Workstation class systems like this should have 10GbE as standard.

• What is ChatGPT doing, and why does it work?  (Stephen Wolfram)
  
  A good but fairly technical look into how ChatGPT and related systems work - how they put together text that seems to make some kind of sense - and also what their limitations are.
  
  
  
• I'm sorry Dave, I boiled your bunny.  (Simon Willison)
  
  Bing's new AI mode is not actually psychotic.  It just puts together words in such a way that make it look psychotic.
  
  And it does that a lot.
  
  
  
• Hyundai and Kia have patched a bug that let you steal their cars with a USB cable.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  You still have to break in to the care, but once in there's a convenient USB port that let you hotwire the car and bypass all the other security measures.
  
  
  
• The collapse of ZDNet is complete.  (ZDNet)
  
  They're busy promoting obviously fake SSDs.
  
  
  
• What's wrong with Google.  (Medium)
  
  It's an ad company, not a tech company.
  
  That's it, really.

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• The Bing chatbot needs therapy.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No, it's not sentient.  It needs to be scrapped and replaced with something that works.

  Don't get us wrong — it's smart, adaptive, and impressively nuanced, but we already knew that. It impressed Reddit user Fit-Meet1359 with its ability to correctly answer a "theory of mind" puzzle, demonstrating that it was capable of discerning someone's true feelings even though they were never explicitly stated.

  Here's where people misunderstand what ChatGPT does.  It's a language model, so it does well on language puzzles.  But it has no theory of mind, which you can tell because as soon as you change the puzzle it gets things horribly wrong.

  This sentence is an example of a Winograd schema challenge, which is a machine intelligence test that can only be solved using commonsense reasoning (as well as general knowledge). However, it's worth noting that Winograd schema challenges usually involve a pair of sentences, and I tried a couple of pairs of sentences with Bing's chatbot and received incorrect answers.

  Yeah, no shit.
  
  Funny they mention Terry Winograd, because he wrote a more impressive AI than this for his PhD thesis...  Back in 1970.
  
  And then abandoned AI research because he considered it to be mostly trickery playing on the preconceptions of humans.

Tech News

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, February 15 2023 11:21 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 16 2023 02:30 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: bionicsenvirotech at Saturday, October 07 2023 09:16 PM (RCLD0)

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• Search is dead.
  
  Google recently announced its AI search tool Bard, and lost $120 billion in market value on the same day.  (The Register)
  
  Yes, Bard got an answer wrong in the tech demo, regarding discoveries made by the James Webb telescope, but they have a long way to go to match Microsoft.
  
  
  
• The newly ChatGPT-enhanced Bing will confidently tell you that the population of Mars is 2.5 billion.  (Imgur)
  
  That's not including North America.  With North America included, the number comes to 6.5 billion.
  
  When I tried it, they had fixed it.  Changing the question to how many people live on mars gave me a response of 110, which is still obvious nonsense.
  
  Bing makes lots of other mistakes but they're not as funny.  (DKB)
  
  ChatGPT is a language model, not an information model.  It answers questions by matching words together.  It has no concept of truth, though it can match words to argue that it does.  It's a pathological liar, because it truth simply does not factor into its answers.
  
  Everyone knows this, but Microsoft integrated it into Bing anyway.
  
  

• Twilio is laying off 17% of its staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Their last round of layoffs - 11% of staff that time - was in September.
  
  Expect more of this.  Tech companies other than Twitter are still carrying huge amounts of dead weight.
  
  
  
• All of Elon Musk's tweets now show up in the For You feed.  (The Verge)
  
  Stop using For You.  It's Bing-level garbage.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's 2TB SN850X is available for $160.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive with TLC flash and DRAM cache, with peak read/write speeds of 7300/6600MBps.   Which means there's nothing to complain about.  It's one of the fastest drives around and the price is great.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  When it first reached the marked its MSRP was $290.  That was in September.
  
  There's a 4TB model as well, for $399.  Also very good value.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, February 15 2023 03:49 AM (LADmw)

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• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has described ChatGPT as "the greatest thing in the history of ever".  (WCCFTech)
  
  ChatGPT runs on 25,000 high-end Nvidia GPUs costing thousands of dollars each.  We are assured that this is purely coincidental.
  
  
  
• Speaking of high-end Nvidia GPUs the laptop version of the RTX 4060 will soon deliver performance equivalent to the 3070 at the price of the 3070 Ti.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's not actually a good thing.

• The new all-Chinese MTT S80 graphics card delivers performance almost matching Nvidia's 1030.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is a good thing - for Nvidia, since the 1030 is a low-end low-power card that is several years old, and the MTT S80 is none of that.
  
  
  
• Namecheap's email didn't get hacked, exactly.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They use SendGrid to deliver customer emails, and SendGrid did get hacked.
  
  
  
• Intel's low-power 13th generation desktop chips have arrived.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These run at a nominal 35W and a peak of 105W.  Yes, that's a huge range, and you're may be better off with a 65W AMD CPU which will peak at less than 90W.
  
  The 13900T is 5% faster overall than AMD's 7900, and the 13600T 10% faster than the Ryzen 7600.  But that's comparing 24 cores to 12 in the first case, and 14 to 6 in the second, so your mileage may vary.  A lot.

• I'm a tech journalist, which means I'm a whiny idiot.  (PC World)
  
  It is difficult to overstate the patheticness of this man's existence.  He got exactly what he asked for and now protests that his life is ruined.
  
  
  

Tech News

• ugBasic is a Basic compiler for the 6502, 6809, and Z80.  (Vintage is the New Old)
  
  It has a modern windowed IDE, because, well, it runs on Windows.  But it produces code for a broad range of popular systems from the late 70s and 80s, including Commodore's systems between the PET and the Amiga, Atari's pre-ST systems, the Color Computer (which I had), the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, MSX 1, and a couple of weird things from Europe I've never heard of before.
  
  Looks pretty good if you're interested in that kind of thing.  Which I might be, having just ordered a book on reverse-engineering the ZX Spectrum's video ULA.
  
  
  
• Not much tech news today.  A Hellmouth has opened up in Turkey, government officials in Ohio released a cloud of phosgene gas on the unsuspecting public, and the USAF is playing Bloons TD 6, but no tech news.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, February 13 2023 12:09 AM (eDgJX)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, February 13 2023 06:45 AM (BzEjn)

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Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wednesday, February 15 2023 09:29 AM (LZ7Bg)

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• Google is planning to implement opt-out telemetry into its Go programming language.  (The Register)
  
  That means that not only will Google's own apps phone home to Google - they already do that - but every program written by anyone running anywhere if it uses Go.
  
  Programmers have, not surprisingly, told Google to get fucked.

  Now you guys want to introduce telemetry into your programming language?" Weisz said. "This is how you drive off any person who even considered giving your project a chance despite the warning signs. Please don't do this, and please issue a public apology for even proposing it. Please leave a blast radius around this idea wide enough that nobody even suggests trying to do this again."

  He added: "Trust in Google's behavior is at an all time low, and moves like this are a choice to shove what's left of it off the edge of a cliff."

  The moral lepers over at Mastodon are upset that anyone would object to this latest expansion of the Panopticon:

  "This is a large unconventional design, there are a lot of tradeoffs worth discussing and details to explore," he wrote. "When Russ showed it to me I made at least a dozen suggestions and many got implemented."

  "Instead: all opt-out telemetry is unethical

  Correct.

  Google is evil

  It is indeed.

  this is not needed.

  Go has existed for 13 years without this; other programming languages for more than 60.

  No one even argued why publishing any of this data could be a problem."

  Because the default in any networked system is not to send any data you don't need to send.
  
  It doesn't matter how useful it is to Google.  I don't care.  It has to be useful to me.

• MSI has confirmed its 12th and 13th generation Intel motherboards support Micron's new 48GB DIMMs that you can't get.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Soon.
  
  Probably.
  
  
  
• The Asus Vivobook OLED 14 has a 14" 2880x1800 OLED screen, a Ryzen 7730U which is to say a 6800U, 8GB of soldered RAM and one DIMM slot so you should be able to upgrade it to 40GB, and a stupid keyboard.  (Liliputing)
  
  Ugh.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk is still busy firing idiots at Twitter.  (The Verge)
  
  The Verge is the usual left-wing hack rag that represents so much of the pseudo-tech press, so they try to write this as if Musk was in the wrong.  If you know anything about how these systems work, or about recent events on Twitter, he is quite obviously right and the unnamed engineer needed to be ejected forthwith.
  
  
  

• GitLab has announced it is laying of 7% of its staff, blaming it on a "tough macroeconomic environment".  (GitLab)
  
  Sure.  It's totally that our idiot leaders have destroyed the world's economy and not because you're getting your lunch eaten by your major compet-
  
  
  
• GitLab's major competitor GitHub is closing offices and laying off 10% of its staff.  (Twitter)
  
  Global recession it is.
  
  
  
• Yahoo is laying off 20% of its staff.  (Axios)
  
  Yahoo still exists?
  
  
  
• Holocure 0.5 is out, with Hololive Japan's Gen 1 and Gen 2.  The next update is confirmed to include all three generations of Hololive Indonesia - the game's creator confirmed it in chat while HoloID Gen 3's resident penguin Kaela Kovalskia was playing the game.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Need a 2TB M.2 2230 SSD for your Steam Deck or Surface Pro?  Framework has them.  (Frame.work)
  
  Yes, the laptop company.  No, the laptop doesn't use 2230 drives - they'll fit but won't lock into place - but since they already buy tons of SSDs and 2230 drives are hard to find at retail, why not make a few bucks selling just the SSDs?
  
  I have two Dell laptops that have empty 2230 drive bays that could use these...  Except they're not cheap at $299 for 2TB.
  
  
  
• Intel's 24 core Sapphire Rapids Xeon W workstation CPU is 12% faster than AMD's 24 core Zen 3 Threadripper.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's not amazing, but it's not completely terrible.  Except that makes it less than 20% faster than AMD's Ryzen 7950X or Intel's own 13900K, and it will be a lot more than 20% more expensive.
  
  
  
• Those Xeon W CPUs have power ratings up to 350W, which is a lot.  (WCCFTech)
  
  But this is Intel, and their 125W CPUs use up to 300W already.  The 350W models use 600W, or 900W if you over clock them.
  
  Toasty.