• A group of investors led by Elon Musk has made a $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said "no thanks" and offered to buy Twitter, but neither decision is up to him.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile French president Emmanuel Macron said that Europe is not in the AI race.  (CNN)
  
  Ignoring the fact that increasingly Europe is not in the anything race.

• Meanwhile Microsoft asked the question "Is AI making us dumber?" and found that the answer is yes.  No.  What was the question again?  (404 Media)

  So, does this mean AI is making us dumb, is inherently bad, and should be abolished to save humanity's collective intelligence from being atrophied? That's an understandable response to evidence suggesting that AI tools are reducing critical thinking among nurses, teachers, and commodity traders, but the researchers' perspective is not that simple.  As they correctly point out, humanity has a long history of "offloading" cognitive tasks to new technologies as they emerge and that people are always worried these technologies will destroy human intelligence.

  In other words, yes.
  
  
  
  
• The Yao conjecture on the time taken to fill the last empty slot in a nearly full hash table turns out to be false.  (Quanta)
  
  For forty years that time has thought to be O(n).  It's actually just O((log n)2).
  
  Don't you feel much better knowing that?
  
  
  
• If you need a single-board computer with more memory and I/O than the Raspberry Pi, the ROCK 5T from Radxa is one.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's not a lot faster than the Raspberry Pi - it has the same four A76 cores, but also has four slower A55 cores that the Pi lacks.  But it has up to 32GB of RAM, dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, and two M.2 slots for storage as standard.
  
  It does start to get expensive though.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, February 11 2025 07:16 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 12 2025 11:01 AM (NEIix)

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