• Is the Supreme Court going to gut CDA Section 230 like a fish?  Probably not.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The court heard oral arguments in Gonzales v. Google today, and will hear arguments in another case also hinging on Section 230 today.
  
  Both cases involve recommendation algorithms promoting terrorist content - not the modern type of "stochastic" terrorism like unbowdlerised editions of Roald Dahl, but the real kind with guns and bombs and random body parts strewn all over the landscape.
  
  The question at hand is whether actively recommending and promoting such content has the same protection as merely failing to remove it.  The tenor of the questioning from the justices - and not just the liberal whack jobs - suggests that the court is disinclined to strike down the law.

• Airtable, a software startup developing code for codeless coding whatever the fuck that means, suddenly has a lot fewer coders after laying off 20% of its staff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  "We have plenty of money from the last investment round", said Airtable spokesman Bob "Bob" Bobson, "but with the fuckwits running the planet these days were unlikely to see any more."
  
  This article is actually two months old - I don't remember if I saw it at the time - but tripping over it today I found a link to Layoffs.FYI which is pure automated schadenfreude.
  
  Polygon laid off 20% of its staff today?  Guys, your entire blockchain got derailed by a game about growing flowers.
  
  Digital Ocean laid off 11% last week?  Well, that actually sucks; they provide a good service and I haven't heard of them being insanely woke or any other variety of asshole.
  
  GoDaddy laid off 500 staff?  Was that before or after you discovered that hackers had free roam of your hosting platform for several years?
  
  Dell is laying off 6650 employees - which seems like a lot but apparently represents just 5% of its workforce.
  
  
  
• Best of hands: A Pentagon email server was apparently connected to the internet without a password.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm not even sure how you do that.  Email servers are normally connected to the internet without a password - passwords apply to individual user accounts, not to the server itself.  But apparently they managed:

  The exposed server was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure government cloud for Department of Defense customers, which uses servers that are physically separated from other commercial customers and as such can be used to share sensitive but unclassified government data. The exposed server was part of an internal mailbox system storing about three terabytes of internal military emails, many pertaining to U.S. Special Operations Command, or USSOCOM, the U.S. military unit tasked with conducting special military operations.

  But a misconfiguration left the server without a password, allowing anyone on the internet access to the sensitive mailbox data inside using only a web browser, just by knowing its IP address.

  Again, I don't know how this is even possible.  It takes real talent to screw up this bad.
  
  
  

• Got $15,000 of someone else's money burning a hole in your pocket and a hankering for some obsolescent hardware?  Dell has you covered with the Precision 7865 workstation.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Inside and outside it looks like crap to be honest, but it works well.  The 64 core AMD Threadripper Pro 5995WX has not actually yet been superseded (though the latest Epyc server CPUs are faster) and the Ampere-based A6000 graphics card is still as fast as a 4070 Ti.
  
  Plus, although the look the review provides at the cooling solution raised questions, it gets the job done and fan noise only hits 45 dB at maximum speed under the FurMark stress test.
  
  It uses more power than a regular desktop PC, but not that much more - and actually less than a system based on Intel's 6GHz 13900KS limited edition.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, February 22 2023 10:38 PM (obo9H)

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• How AI will make the Semantic Web possible.  (The AI Maze)
  
  It won't.  It will do the opposite - fill the web with plausible garbage to a degree that makes search engines utterly useless.
  
  In fact, this is already happening.
  
  R2-D2 was always an oddity because speech synthesis is a much simpler problem than speech recognition.  And comprehension is a harder problem than just taking dictation.
  
  In short, we're doomed.
  
  

Tech News

• Clarkesworld - a science fiction magazine - has temporary halted submissions due to AI spam.  (Twitter)
  
  This is the 25th and a half century after all.
  
  
  
• Resist this, ya bastard: COE2-2hexyl is a broad-spectrum antibiotic that doesn't seem to trigger the evolution of resistance in bacteria.  (Lancet)
  
  It cures infections in mice, so it seems to work, and it's designed to make multiple simultaneous attacks on the bacterial cell membrane so unless it runs into a microscopic Rasputin its victims, even those that survive, aren't likely to give rise to a more resistant new generation.

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, February 21 2023 10:48 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 22 2023 01:31 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, February 22 2023 04:54 AM (LADmw)

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• AMD's new 7745HX laptop CPU looks pretty good.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 8 core chip - a separate family with 12 and 16 core versions will come later - is as fast as Intel's 14 core 12900HK from last year, 12% faster than Apple's 12 core M2 Max, and 32% faster than the previous generation 6900HX.
  
  It can't keep up with Intel's new (and power hungry) 24 core 13900HX, but you wouldn't really expect it to.  That's the job of the upcoming 12 and 16 core parts.
  
  Will anyone make a laptop based on this chip that isn't horribly flawed in multiple ways?
  
  <shake shake>
  
  Signs point to "fat chance".

• Need a motherboard for your new Intel workstation CPU which you don't have because they're not out yet?
  
  ASRock has the W790 WS.
  Asus has the Pro WS W790 Ace at the low end, and the Pro WS W790E Sage SE at the high end.
  
  The ASRock and the Ace are designed more for the W-2400 range, with four channel RAM and only five PCIe slots, while the Sage is designed specifically for the more expensive W-3400 range of chips.
  
  Couple of things worth knowing: The two families of CPUs use the same socket and the same chipset, and any chip will work in any of these motherboards.  If you use a W-2400 chip in the Sage only half the DIMM slots will work, and only four of the seven PCIe slots.  On the other hand, if you put a W-3400 in the other boards, everything on the board will work, but half the memory channels and 3/7ths of the PCIe lanes on the CPU won't be wired up to anything.
  
  Overall it's a good deal; you can start with a $359 6 core CPU and scale up to a 56 core CPU without changing motherboards.
  
  The other thing is that memory.  AMD Threadripper motherboards let you use either desktop or server memory - not both at the same time, but whichever one makes sense for you.  These motherboards use DDR5 server RAM only, and a quick look around regular retailers like Amazon, Newegg, and Micro Center didn't find much of that available.  Zero, in fact.
  
  It exists, but going to Kingston directly didn't really help except for telling me they have a four module per customer limit.  That Sage motherboard has eight memory channels.
  
  
  
• Is Nvidia doing it again?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Leaked model numbers from Gigabyte indicate three different models of the RTX 4070 - with 10GB, 12GB, or 16GB of RAM.  That necessarily means different bus widths, and likely different performance levels.
  
  The 4070 Ti is a 12GB card already, so a 16GB card seems a bit odd here, but there's already the example of the 3060 which has more RAM than the 3060 Ti, 3070, 3070 Ti, and the regular version of the 3080.
  
  
  
• How to keep your Twitter secure without giving Elon Musk any money.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Follow the instructions on Twitter.  Seriously.  That's what these idiots are bitching about.

Posted by: Trichologist Manchester at Monday, February 20 2023 09:44 PM (qtJ4H)

Posted by: Crypto Pump Signals Telegram at Monday, February 20 2023 09:45 PM (qtJ4H)

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• Mostly quiet on the tech news front right now.
  
  Microsoft gave Bing the Rosemary Kennedy treatment so there's no more fun there.  D&D is still slowly circling the drain, but nobody wants to flush it down.  Daily crypto disasters but measured in single-digit millions rather than double-digit billions.
  
  Probably a good thing on the whole.
  
  

• The world is suddenly swimming in cobalt, which is a bad idea because it's a toxic heavy metal. (The Economist)
  
  Mostly thanks to the global don't-call-it-a-recession, not due to any new discoveries or technical advances.
  
  
  
• Micron's new 24Gb RAM chips have been picked up by Corsair to produce 24GB and 48GB modules.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not official yet, but prices have leaked and the cost per gigabyte is exactly in line with existing 32GB modules.  I was actually expecting a hefty premium for these.
  
  
  
• Need a couple of terabits per second of IO bandwidth in your desktop PC?  ASRock has you covered.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Except they don't.  That number comes from ASRock's own website but it's off by a factor of four.  Half a terabit, sure.  One terabit if you count both directions, I guess.  Two terabits, two cards.
  
  Apparently this quad M.2 PCIe 5.0 adaptor card will come bundled with their motherboard for the new Intel workstation CPUs, so I'll be looking for more details on that as well.

• 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)

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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.

Posted by: Peg Legge Peg umair at Sunday, August 06 2023 08:02 PM (q1c3m)

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Posted by: Ralphs at Wednesday, February 19 2025 01:11 AM (PhuiT)

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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.