• Behavioural scientists behaving badly: The work of a top researcher at Harvard Business School has come into question after accusations that she is - and I quote* - just making shit up.  (New York Times)
  
  This is particularly striking because her area of expertise - such as it is - is honesty.
  
  Only half of published medial research holds up when other researchers try to reproduce the results, and for psychology the number is closer to one third.  (The Atlantic)
  
  Part of that is a form of selection bias: Research that doesn't find a result often doesn't get published in the first place.
  
  But it can't help if the effect was never real in the first place because the research wasn't real.
  
  * Quotes may settle in shipping.

Tech News

• AI's bigger-is-better approach is running out of road.  (The Economist)
  
  OpenAI's GPT-3 cost nearly $5 million to train in 2020.  GPT-4 just over two years later cost more than $100 million.  Is OpenAI prepared to spend $2 billion on GPT-5?  Even if they are, is there enough high-quality data that they can spend that much with it automatically going to waste?
  
  The article suggests that AI companies will be forced to work smarter, not expensiver.  But even if they do that will mean instead of spending exponentially more money for incrementally better results, they'll need to work exponentially smarter for incrementally better results.
  
  That's an even worse tradeoff.  It's the Technological Nothingularity, where even with AI helping train new generations of AI, progress slows to a crawl indistinguishable from a dead stop, where the technology of tomorrow can be safely predicted by assuming that nothing ever changes.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT can't program in INTERCAL.  (Muppet Labs)
  
  That's okay.  Neither can anyone else.
  
  
  
• Midjourney 5.2 is here and seems to be pretty good.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It may not matter if your progress stalls, so long as you get to good before stalling it.  If you run out of fuel after arriving safely at your destination. meh, you can deal with it later.
  
  It was hard to get good results out of Midjourney 2.  It was vague not only on how many fingers people had and where they should be located, but hands and heads as well.  They latest version appears to produce much more coherent images.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 26 2023 01:33 AM (BMUHC)

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• LexisNexis is providing bulk personal records to ICE without so much as a hint of a warrant, specifically so that ICE can target people who have not actually committed any crimes.  (The Intercept)
  
  Ctrl-F precrime: No results.
  
  Ctrl-F fascism: No results.
  
  The Intercept?  More like the Internept.  Internot?  Something like that.  What good are you?

• Windows 11 is garbage.
  
  When I get back home, Tanya the Evil is getting a Windows 10 upgrade.
  
  
  
• Intel has made it official: There won't be a 14th generation desktop chip based on the Meteor Lake architecture this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There will however be a 14th generation desktop chip based on the Raptor Lake architecture, which is 13th generation, and a 14th generation laptop HX chip based on the Raptor Lake architecture, which is still 13th generation, a 1st generation laptop U/H Ultra chip based on the Meteor Lake architecture, which is 14th generation, and a 1st generation laptop U/H chip based on the Raptor Lake architecture, which as we mentioned earlier is 13th generation.
  
  All clear?
  
  Good.
  
  Don't buy anything.
  
  
  
• The 7840HS in the Beelink GTR7 makes for a potent NUC.  (Serve the Home)
  
  They tested it in light gaming such as League of Legends and logged no real improvement over the previous generation GTR6 with a 6900HX processor.
  
  Then they realised that the new model has been tested on 4k resolution instead of 1080p.
  
  
  
• Since I'm back in a big city for a few days I stopped at an electronics store to see if there exists a phone appreciably larger than my Samsung, um, A52 5G I think it is.  Not that I have 5G back home in West Wyalong* but I did in Sydney before the move.
  
  Well, I didn't; in fact I barely had any Gs at all.  I had five hypothetical Gs, but zero point one actual Gs.
  
  Anyway, no.
  
  No good small tablets either.  The sales guys - there were are group of them standing around chatting - paused when I said there were no good small tablets, and then unpaused when I added except for the iPad Mini which I don't want.
  
  I think I might have to get one, though.  I have my Samsung A7 Lite with me on this trip as well, and it's just a big bundle of meh.
  
  * May not contain any actual West Wyalong.
  
  
  
• Prism Project has announced its seventh generation of vtubers.  (Twitter)
  
  This comes a month after Gen 6, which came a month after Gen 5, which came 18 months after Gen 4, so it seems that someone at Sony finally woke up and remembered that they bought a vtuber agency a couple of years ago.  (The exact terms of the deal weren't made public, but day-to-day operations are handle by Sony now and the talents' music is released under the Sony label).
  
  The three new talents are all well-known indie vtubers, which is something Phase Connect also did with its "Phase Invaders" generations, and it's what Kawa Entertainment is all about.  Give them a home, let them keep their models and fanbases, and skim a little off the top in return for managing things like music and gameplay rights.
  
  
  
• So apart from Windows 11, Mrs Pixy, how's the new laptop?  (The HP Pavilion 14, non-Plus version.)
  
  It's okay.  The screen is definitely meh.  The CPU is significantly faster than my old laptop (six cores vs. four, so it should be), and it has 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD because such things are cheap if you can just find a laptop that is still upgradeable, which is the only reason I got this and not the much nicer but unupgradeable Plus.
  
  Keyboard I'm getting used to, but the screen is not as good as the old laptop even after the old laptop's screen went bad.  Battery life is far from spectacular as well.
  
  I brought along a little 65W GaN charger with three USB ports to keep the laptop, phone, and tablet topped up and chugging alone.  
  
  It can't do that.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 23 2023 11:38 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 23 2023 11:40 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, June 24 2023 12:32 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 24 2023 08:35 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mrs. Peel at Saturday, June 24 2023 08:46 AM (jrY13)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, June 24 2023 12:20 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, June 24 2023 01:33 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Brendan at Saturday, June 24 2023 03:00 PM (V8yYW)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 25 2023 11:39 PM (obo9H)

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• Journalists for Censorship is at it again: Spotify's podcast platform is going off the rails, except for Joe Rogan who is still drawing huge audiences and we can't stand it!!!!!  (The Verge)

  One problem is that none of these people — from former presidents to filmmakers to bestselling authors — were able to deliver sure-fire podcast hits. Even a podcast hosted by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen ended up putting people to sleep.

  This comes as a surprise?

  This cascading series of events says a lot about the unwieldy nature of Spotify’s podcast business, which is still driven mostly by the former host ofFear Factor. Not even a compilation video of Rogan saying the n-word nearly two dozen times got him kicked off the platform. It’s a lot of power for one creator to yield.

  JfC: WHY WON'T YOU CANCEL HIM?!
  Spotify: He actually makes us money.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Elemental's co-writers wanted it to open, honest, and not an actually good film like Zootopia.  (The Verge)
  
  I'm so old I remember when Pixar was a surefire hitmaker.  Now its just another third-rate cartoon studio.
  
  How did that happen?
  
  This is how:

  Honestly, what’s funny is we’re taking a breather from the strike lines to do this and a few other interviews, and we’re going back this afternoon.

  If you're a writer, you can't go on strike.  Writing is what you do.  It's in your blood.
  
  Corollary: If you can go on strike, you're not a writer, you're a janitor with a keyboard.  (No offense to janitors, but if they tried to do their jobs with a keyboard they'd be useless too.)
  
  
  
• Intel has discontinued the Arc A770 limited edition - the model with 16GB of VRAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The A750 with 8GB VRAM is nearly as fast and much cheaper, so unless you specifically wanted 16GB of RAM that's not a dealbreaker.
  
  
  
• Apple's 24-core workstation-class M2 Ultra CPU, found in the new Mac Pro (base price $7000) has shown up on the Passmark benchmark list.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's 1% faster than AMD's 7845HX, a 12-core laptop chip.
  
  The editor at Notebook Check seems to think this is a great achievement for Apple rather than an embarrassment.  I think that benchmark score is probably low, but taken at face value, AMD has six consumer-level chips faster than Apple's flagship CPU, and dozens of workstation and server parts.
  
  
  
• Feel good story of the day: Elon Musk triples down on making Twitter terrible for trans people.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Musk said that if you use the term "cis" as a slur, it will be treated as such, and your account will be suspended.
  
  They also complain about the Babylon Bee pointing out that "Rachel" Levine is a man.  The only thing missing is a reference to GamerGate and I'd have filled my Entitled Whiners bingo card.

Posted by: furball321 at Thursday, June 22 2023 07:31 PM (wHdE5)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 22 2023 09:17 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 23 2023 12:17 AM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 23 2023 04:06 AM (PiXy!)

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• A new LLM (large language model, the same sort of AI as ChatGPT) called phi-, with 1.3 billion tokens, scores over 50% on the HumanEval problem set.  (Twitter)
  
  GPT-4 scores 67% - but uses 1.7 trillion tokens.
  
  How did they achieve this miracle?  They trained phi-1 on textbooks rather than on the internet.
  
  And what does it means?  It means you can produce an AI that is smart enough to perform simple tasks and small enough to run on your laptop - and probably your phone.
  
  What else does it mean?  It means to score 85% on that test using the same approach as GPT-4 you'd need something like 2 quadrillion tokens, which would cost billions of dollars to train even if you could find that much data.  And then years to "align", that is, to get it to stop giving obviously wrong answers because you stuffed it full of nonsense.
  
  Garbage in, garbage out.
  
  phi-1 took four days to train.  (Arxiv)
  
  Also, speaking of garbage, don't use textbooks published after 2010 or so.

• Meanwhile over 100,000 ChatGPT accounts have been leaked to the Dark Web.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Probably by ChatGPT.
  
  
  
• Speaking of ChatGPT, it apparently knows 25 jokes.  (Twitter)
  
  Which admittedly is 23 more than the Babylon Bee.  (The Babylon Bee)
  
  If you ask ChatGPT to tell you a new joke, 90% of the time you will get a slightly mangled version of one of those 25.  And none of them are funny.
  
  
  
• Just days after saying that it would never remove moderators involved in the protest, Reddit has started removing moderators involved in the protest.  (The Verge)
  
  Moderators of r/midlyinteresting marked the subreddit as NSFW - which means children can't access it if they're particularly stupid, and more importantly, Reddit doesn't run ads.
  
  In a carefully-worded statement, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman-Fried said, "God damn you.  God damn you all to Hell."
  
  
  
• You can now 3D-print your own Selectric typeballs.  (GitHub)
  
  Want to type your new novel directly in Sindarin Elvish?  Now you can.
  
  
  
• Razer's new Blade 14 offers a Ryzen 7940HS, RTX 4070 graphics, user-upgradeable memory and storage, and a high-resolution 14" IPS display.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It lacks the Four Essential Keys and costs $2699.  And it weighs only two ounces less than the 16" Gigabyte Aero, which includes those keys and a second M.2 slot.

• Some say we'll end in Brave New World,
  Some say in 1984.
  I stand with corporate flag unfurled
  And push like hell for Brave New World.
  
  But if we had to end again,
  I think I know enough of life
  To see that coddling morons*
  Brings us to Harrison Bergeron.
  
  Complex systems won't survive the competence crisis.  (Palladium)
  
  The world grows more complex by the day, and we haven't had a dumber ruling class since 1913.  And that worked out just great for everyone, so nothing to worry about.

  America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

  Not just America, of course, but America is the exemplar here of past greatness rapidly corroding from within.  Many of the countries affected by this disease were never great, or their greatness was a century or more past.
  
  I mentioned Twilio yesterday, with their brilliant three word billboard - Ask your developer - the point being that even if you, the manager driving past, didn't know about Twilio, your technical staff did, replaced by some sesquipedalian drivel about reducing cost of acquisition, but that's just one tiny example of this, and to some degree it's an example of the brain rot that affects all large organisations.  Large organisations cannot innovate, which is why they acquire small ones.
  
  And then destroy them.
  
  What's the solution?  With businesses, you let them collapse into bankruptcy and sell of the pieces.  With countries, the traditional approach was war, but that is frowned upon these days.
  
  * No offense to the Horde, who are the good kind of moron.  Best I could do in two minutes.

• Don't buy an Nvidia H100 for gaming.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Technically it is a GPU, but (a) it costs north of $30,000, (b) it has no video outputs, and (c) it is actually slower for playing games than AMD's integrated graphics because the drivers don't know what to do with it.
  
  
  
• Towards Intersectional Moderation: An Alternative Model of Moderation Built on Care and Power as if Social Media Weren't Screwed up Enough Already.  (Arxiv)
  
  With Reddit imploding by the day, the developers and operators of the "fediverse", a loosely coupled network of independent nodes running software like Mastodon, are banding together to replace it with something infinitely worse.
  
  You might not have thought that possible.  
  
  You were wrong.
  
  
  
• A QNAP 16-bay NAS.  (Serve the Home)
  
  On the one hand, it supports 12 3.5", 4 2.5", and two M.2 drives, with up to 128GB of ECC RAM, at a price that is merely exorbitant and not actually insane.
  
  On the other hand, QNAP.
  
  
  
• Well, that's just terrifying.  (BBC)
  
  Do not read if you're subject to claustrophobia.
  
  
  
• Journalists for Censorship is at it again.  (The Verge)
  
  The reason they have their panties in a twist today is that Spotify is permitting Joe Rogan to interview people who are saying inconvenient things.  
  
  This cannot be allowed.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 21 2023 12:01 AM (BMUHC)

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• At least they're self-aware: Black Mirror's 'Joan is Awful' shits all over the future of streaming.  (The Verge)

  Right now in Hollywood, the screenwriters of the Writers Guild of America are on strike.

  I know this is true, but it hasn't affected my viewing habits one iota.

  And one reason they’re on strike is the fear that AI will take their jobs, churning out mediocre content quickly and cheaply that helps streamers’ bottom lines even if it doesn’t contribute much culturally speaking.

  So their jobs are churning out mediocre content quickly and cheaply that helps streamers’ bottom lines even if it doesn’t contribute much culturally speaking?
  
  I mean, yes.  True.  Just odd to hear them admit it.

  Disclosure: The Verge’s editorial staff is represented by the Writers Guild of America East.

  I would never have guessed.

• MSI is launching an RTX 4060 without RGB lighting.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm so old I remember when computer cases were opaque.
  
  
  
• There's always a bigger fish, and there's always a slimier lawyer.  (New York Times)
  
  Slime gets drunk and says things he shouldn't, career implodes, film at eleven.
  
  
  
• How to destroy your brand in eight words or less.  (Miguel Grinberg)
  
  Twilio - an API service for sending messages to people, which before Twilio was a confusing mess - replaced its iconic billboard that said simply Ask your developer with one that says How can I reduce acquisition costs by 65%? 
  
  Bleh.
  
  
  
• I've been rewatching series 5 of Doctor Who - new Doctor Who, not old Who, which is denoted by seasons and half of season 5 is lost anyway - and it mostly holds up well except for the two-part story in the middle, which was written by Chris Chibnall and is a slow and dreary mess where the characters play hot potato with the idiot ball.
  
  Chris Chibnall just happens to be the man who took over the show for series 11 and turned the entire thing into a slow and dreary mess where the characters play hot potato with the idiot ball.
  
  The warning signs were all there.
  
  
  
• Speaking of warning signs, the trailer for Netflix's live-action adaptation of One Piece doesn't look entirely terrible.  (YouTube)
  
  Cheesy as hell, yes, but so is the anime.  They seem to have embraced the cheese and kept the spirit, which is encouraging.
  
  If you don't have kids you might not have heard of One Piece, but it's an industry in itself.  The anime has run for over 1000 episodes (plus fifteen movies), and the manga has sold half a billion copies.
  
  Will I be watching it?  Probably not.  The anime has run for over 1000 episodes, and I think I've seen one of those.  But if Netflix can produce something that doesn't suck, even now, there might still be hope for us all.

Posted by: bob in houston at Monday, June 19 2023 11:41 PM (YBLgY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, June 20 2023 01:08 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Sex Crime Lawyer Prince George's County at Saturday, November 02 2024 04:05 PM (XK0Oh)

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• The Rot Economy: Big tech and the venture capital ecosystem that supports it have become a swirling cesspool of self-reinforcing mental illness.  (Where's Your Ed At)
  
  Well, I mean, yes.  Lurching from one fad to the next while squandering hundreds of billions of dollars.
  
  And it was only ten years ago that many of these companies actually did something, or at least tried to.
  
  
  
• Maybe they can both lose: Major subreddits are coming back to life now - with nothing but pictures of John Oliver.  (The Verge)
  
  A timely reminder that while Reddit may be run by vapid radical left narcissists, so are most of the communities built on the platform.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Another nail in OpenAI's coffin: Falcon LLM has been open-sourced.  (TII)
  
  It comes in two versions: Falcon-7B which needs 16GB of RAM to run and is suitable for hobbyists, and Falcon-40B which needs 100GB of RAM and is aimed at academic researchers and startups.  Both are available under the Apache open source license, making them free for individual and commercial use.
  
  Yes, these LLMs are still wildly overhyped, but they're not entirely useless, not when they're free and can run on a laptop - and when they're not intentionally crippled by ultra-woke marketing teams.
  
  The developer notes make it clear that Falcon was trained on wide set of data from the public internet, making it into a very well-informed digital schizophrenic.
  
  
  
• AI does not help programmers.  (CACM)
  
  Or more specifically, it helps bad programmers become mediocre programmers, but it can't go beyond that because Large Language Models do not distinguish right answers from wrong.
  
  In the example provided, ChatGPT corrects a bug in the sample code, but introduces a new bug.  When this is pointed out, ChatGPT fixes the specific case but not the general case.
  
  And when this is pointed out, ChatGPT coughs up what appears to be a hastily rewritten version of the author's own work, because the author turns out to be Betrand Meyer, creator of the Eiffel programming language and a leading expert in formal verification of computer programs.
  
  To be fair, most programmers aren't Betrand Meyer, but my opinion of the current state of AI tools in programming mirrors his.
  
  
  
• GPT-4 can pass MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science curriculum with a perfect score.  (HuggingFace)
  
  A remarkable result.
  
  
  
• No it fucking can't.  (Notion)
  
  The second paper highlights two problems with the first.
  
  One, 4% of the problems in the test set cannot be solved with the information provided, or in some cases, at all:

  Below you are given the delays for the different gates you were permitted to use in part D above. Compute the propagation delay of your circuit from D.

  That's the entire question.  There is no part D above, and yet the claim is that GPT-4 answered this question correctly.  There are many questions like this in the test set - this second paper links to a spreadsheet with the full list of questions, good and bad.
  
  Two, the answers provided by GPT-4 are scored by GPT-4.  If GPT-4 tells GPT-4 that GPT-4 got the question wrong, GPT-4 gets to try again, indefinitely.
  
  Supposedly the answers were verified manually, but if so, they did a pretty poor job because they missed all the wrong questions.
  
  Three - not included in the paper, but posted today on Twitter - the original code used to run the tests leaks the answers used for verification by GPT-4 to the GPT-4 instance answering the questions.
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Why EVs won't crash the electric grid.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  Yes, EVs will require massive upgrades to the electric grid, but the grid has grown at that rate before.
  
  Well, it hasn't, but it almost did.
  
  Once.  Fifty years ago.
  
  For a while.
  
  We're doomed.
  
  
  
• Putting a stick shift in an EV because...  (The Verge)
  
  There is no because.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 19 2023 01:40 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 19 2023 02:16 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, June 19 2023 02:24 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, June 19 2023 04:29 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: bob in houston at Wednesday, June 21 2023 12:12 AM (YBLgY)

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• Welcome news from unexpected places, part one: The EU, in its eternal quest to meddle in absolutely everything, is planning to force device manufacturers to make batteries replaceable.  (TechSpot)
  
  This follows legislation coming into effect next year to require all mobile phones to be chargeable over USB-C.
  
  Okay.  Sure.  I won't make fun of you for an entire day.
  
  
  
• Welcome new from unexpected places, part two: Facebook plans to continue releasing its AI code as open source, free for individual and commercial use.  (The Information)
  
  You need a subscription to read the whole thing, but you don't need to read the whole thing.
  
  This is a broadside aimed at Google and OpenAI.  Individual researchers have taken Facebook's existing AI code and already made it almost as good as ChatGPT at a tiny fraction of the cost.
  
  If you can't buy the competition, make their business model untenable by giving away their product.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Mistral AI's mega fundraise is a red flag.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Yes, indeed it is.  This is obviously a bubble and it will all come crash-
  
  For many concerned with inclusivity.
  
  Go stick your head in a pig.
  
  
  
• Feel good story of the day: High-tech AI-controlled vertical lettuce farms are going broke.  (Bloomberg)
  
  You have to understand that when they say "lettuce farms", they're not actually talking about lettuce farms, they mean...  Nope, sorry, they really do mean lettuce farms.

  In 2021, AeroFarms, an early vertical-farming pioneer based in Newark, New Jersey, had plans to go public through a blank-check merger that had an equity value around $1.2 billion. The growth potential seemed limitless.

  But as interest rates began to climb, investors started to scrutinize profitability in a way they hadn’t for years, and soon came to realise that they had set their money on fire.

  Yes, it's lettuce.  It literally grows on trees.
  
  What?
  
  Really?
  
  Okay, it figuratively grows on trees.
  
  
  

• Bytedance, parent company of Chinese spy agency TikTok, has bought $1 billion worth of high-end Nvidia GPUs so far this year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you were wondering why Nvidia doesn't care that the outrageous pricing and mediocre performance of its RTX 4000 series has turned away millions of gamers, this is your answer.  Margins on these high-end cards are much better; the company would need to sell millions of mid-range gaming cards to match what one customer spent on high-end cards in six months.
  
  
  

• More on why the AI bubble is a bubble.  (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  Key quote:

  Our analysis of this phenomenon also allowed us to compare what's actually happened with theoretical expectations. Theory tells us that computing needs to scale with at least the fourth power of the improvement in performance. In practice, the actual requirements have scaled with at least the ninth power.

  This ninth power means that to halve the error rate, you can expect to need more than 500 times the computational resources. That's a devastatingly high price.

  Companies like OpenAI don't want to fix this problem because it's the barrier that keeps smaller competitors at bay.  If there is a solution, it will come from people working on Facebook's open source code in the evening, not from OpenAI or Google, or even from Facebook.
  
  
  

• In 2026 Intel is expected to release 80 core mainstream desktop chips - 16 Performance cores and 64 Efficiency cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  That's not the story, but it's the most interesting point in the article.
  
  
  

Friends Don't Let Friends Do Reddit Video of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, June 17 2023 10:28 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, June 18 2023 05:43 AM (r9O5h)

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• Reddit won't and never would steal cookies out of the cookie jar, says Reddit, caught with its hand in the cookie jar. (The Verge)
  
  Specifically claiming that they would never take over subreddits, remove moderators, and force them to be public again, right after they did exactly that.
  
  
  
• Reddit CEO Steve Huffman-Fried says fuck the users, miserable maggots that they are, who needs them, where did all the money go? (The Verge)

  It costs us about $10 million in pure infrastructure costs to support these apps.

  Which is a lot, except for the minor detail that they want to charge $20 million per year to just one of those apps, and are arguing that they can't possibly reduce that price.
  
  200%+ ROI? That used to be a lot.
  
  
  

Tech News

• A $400 48-port 2.5Gb managed switch with 2x10Gb and 2x25Gb uplinks? Yes please. (Serve the Home)
  
  You can get 48-port Ethernet switches at a reasonable price, even from companies like Cisco, but they're all basic gigabit. The moment you go above that the price increases exponentially.
  
  
  
• Running Linux on a 1999 HP Jornada pocket PC. (Raymii)
  
  It doesn't have the Four Essential Keys though.
  
  
  
• Mercedes is adding ChatGPT to its infotainment system, for some reason. (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's the actual headline.
  
  
  
• The French recipient of Europe's largest ever seed funding round doesn't have a product. (The Register)
  
  And barely has employees, but is now valued at $250 million.
  
  For perspective, in the first three months of this year, US AI scams startups took in $25 billion in funding.
  
  
  
• Apple's new $7000 Mac Pro comes with two SATA ports for disk drives - although it doesn't come with any bays for disk drives, that will cost you another $400 for a third-party product - comes with two SATA ports like a $80 Intel motherboard except half the number of ports, except they don't work. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Turn your $7000 (base price) computer on and it will tell you your hard drive has been ejected.
  
  Apple says this will be fixed at some point.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, June 17 2023 05:59 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, June 17 2023 12:57 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, June 17 2023 12:58 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, June 18 2023 03:56 AM (2tHvf)

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• Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts.  (The Verge)
  
  It says a lot about the state of the internet when Reddit is one of the more valuable resources.
  
  
  
• Reddit admins - that is, Reddit's own employees rather than the volunteers who keep the communities alive - have taken over two major subreddits, r/AdviceAnimals and r/Tumblr, and brought them back out of the Shadow Realm.  (Twitter)
  
  The total disregard Reddit has shown for its users matches so exactly Digg's own self-immolation back in 2010 - the event that pushed the much smaller Reddit into the spotlight - that Digg should be able to sue for trademark infringement.

• Razer's new Blade 14 - which despite the name is a laptop - has upgradeable memory and storage.  (AnandTech)
  
  Up to 64GB of RAM, plus an AMD 7940HS, an RTX 4070, and a 14" 2560x1440 display.
  
  Still no Four Essential Keys, but it's a step in the right direction after last year's model with soldered RAM.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is selling spare parts for its Surface devices.  (Thurrott)
  
  Screens, keyboards, storage, and batteries are available to brave souls who want to repair their own devices, plus detailed repair guides and tool kits if you don't already have one of those 1001 screwdriver bits kits from Amazon.
  
  Just, looking at the price list, try not to break the screen on your Surface Studio.
  
  
  
• Scientists have for the first time created synthetic human embryos without going through all that tedious business with parents.  (The Guardian)
  
  Could we not?
  
  Just for one brief minute, could we not?
  
  
  
  
  
  
• A report from McKinsey finds that generative AI (like ChatGPT) could add $2.6 to $4.4 trillion per year to the global economy.  (VentureBeat)
  
  The authors caution that if the AI goes rogue and eradicates all life on earth the gains could be on the lower end of that range.
  
  
  
• Accenture plans to grow its AI workforce to 80,000 just months after firing 19,000 people who actually did things.  (The Register)

  "Over the next decade, AI will be a mega-trend, transforming industries, companies, and the way we live and work, as generative AI transforms 40 percent of all working hours," Paul Daugherty, group chief executive, Accenture Technology, predicted in a statement.

  If you own shares in Accenture, sell.  If you use their services, seek alternatives.  And if you work for them, keep your resume up to date at all times, but maybe fudge things a little and claim you were doing time in a Turkish prison for heroin trafficking.
  
  
  
  
• The Nokia T21 tablet is now available in the US for $240.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's a basic decent large Android tablet, with one neat trick: It supports Wacom drawing pens.  I don't know how well it supports the pens, or what drawing software is like on Android these days.
  
  I bought a Huion Kamvas Pro recently - like a Wacom Cintiq but much, much cheaper - but it's still in its box so I don't know yet how good it is.  Better than my artistic skills at least, I would hope.
  
  This tablet is cheaper again, but the Kamvas connects directly to a PC and comes with a pen, so there's no messing around.
  
  
  
• Twitter is being evicted from its Boulder office over unpaid rent.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Boulder is not yet San Francisco and there is still the possibility of another tenant showing up, so yes, that will happen.
  
  I would say that Twitter has no need for a Boulder office, but if, like Google, you want employees to show up in person at the office, you rather do need an office for them to show up at.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 16 2023 05:30 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 16 2023 08:10 AM (BMUHC)

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