• Humanity is at risk from an AI "race to the bottom".  (The Guardian)
  
  What's the risk?

  A handful of tech companies are jeopardising humanity’s future through unrestrained AI development and must stop their "race to the bottom", according to the scientist behind an influential letter calling for a pause in building powerful systems.

  What's the risk?

  "We're witnessing a race to the bottom that must be stopped," Tegmark told the Guardian. "We urgently need AI safety standards, so that this transforms into a race to the top. AI promises many incredible benefits, but the reckless and unchecked development of increasingly powerful systems, with no oversight, puts our economy, our society, and our lives at risk. Regulation is critical to safe innovation, so that a handful of AI corporations don't jeopardise our shared future."

  What's the risk?

  In a policy document published this week, 23 AI experts, including two modern "godfathers" of the technology, said governments must be allowed to halt development of exceptionally powerful models.

  What's the risk?

  The paper, whose authors include Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio – two winners of the ACM Turing award, the "Nobel prize for computing" – argues that powerful models must be licensed by governments and, if necessary, have their development halted.

  What's the risk?

  The unrestrained development of artificial general intelligence, the term for a system that can carry out a wide range of tasks at or above human levels of intelligence, is a key concern among those calling for tighter regulation.

  None of these companies are working on AGI.  All of them are dumping huge amounts of money into glorified typeahead systems that understand nothing.

• OpenAI is forming a team to study catastrophic risks relating to AI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What is the risk?

  ... including nuclear threats.

  I have a surefire mitigation for that.
  
  If you even think of giving AI access to nuclear weapons, we will shoot you.
  
  
  
• Writing a simple virtual machine in less than 125 lines of C.  (Andre Inc)
  
  Which isn't bad, because my current test framework for opcode performance is double that.
  
  But it's a really simple virtual machine.  The only mathematical operation available is addition, for example.
  

Posted by: Frank at Friday, October 27 2023 07:25 PM (0001W)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 27 2023 08:49 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 27 2023 11:09 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 28 2023 06:22 AM (obo9H)

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• Pixy's First Rule of Rare Firmware Bugs That Take out All Your CPUs One by One: They only happen between 2AM and 4AM.
  
  
  
• Twitter competitor Pebble is shutting down on Wednesday.  (ZDNet)
  
  It had 20,000 users.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  In the early 70s.

• The Biden Administration is set to unveil a "sweeping" executive order on AI next week.  (Washington Post)  (archive site)
  
  As an executive order, it can only affect the federal government, and the problem I see is that the order is unlikely to go far enough in curbing government use of AI bullshit.
  
  
  
• In which academics reap what they have sown.  (The Verge)
  
  The story tries to pin the blame on conservatives, even though nobody in the story is to the right of Mao.  A typical AWFL college student goes off the deep end and files Title IX complaints - and this is her mistake - against every lecturer she ever had contact with.
  
  No.   Single out the weakest animal from the pack and take it down.  If you charge in they're going to see you coming and stomp you.
  
  
  
• Boeing has now lost more than $2 billion - which used to be a lot - on two new Air Force jets.  (CNN)
  
  As in, two planes, not two new jet fighter programs.
  
  Air Force One A and One B - I guess - were supposed to total $3.9 billion.  Since the contract was signed during the Trump Administration, it's fixed-price, not cost-plus, so Boeing gets to eat the loss.
  
  Which of course means that they pass that loss on to customers, rather than the government passing the overrun on to taxpayers in the more traditional way.
  
  
  
• Where ae all the laid-off workers from Big Tech going?  (Dev Interrupted)
  
  They're writing RPG IV for Mutual of Omaha.
  
  I mean, not all of them, but there were a lot of boring companies that actually do stuff that were looking for programmers, and if you move from California to Nebraska you can take a hell of a pay cut and still have more left over at the end of the month.
  
  
  
• Team's Cardea Z540 is a 12GBps PCIe 5 SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While PCIe 5 is in the "I still don't need it" category, it's only about twice the price of PCIe 3 storage and more than three times as fast.  It might even make a noticeable difference in some things.
  
  Maybe.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 26 2023 11:43 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 27 2023 08:08 AM (obo9H)

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• Qualcomm has shown off its new Snapdragon X Elite - an Arm CPU for laptops that might not suck.  (AnandTech)
  
  To be specific, an Arm CPU for laptops that might not suck and doesn't come from Apple.
  
  The benchmarks on offer aren't very detailed, but they do show it beating Apple's M2 in single and multi-threaded workloads - the single-threaded win being significant because previously Apple had the fastest Arm core around.
  
  It also beats Intel's 13800H on multi-threaded tests while using much less power, and beats AMD's integrated graphics by 80% - and AMD's integrated graphics are pretty good.
  
  Products are expected "mid-2024".
  
  
  
• Apple is announcing its M3 chips next week, which is a bit of a spoiler.  But they'll need to increase single-threaded performance by around 12% to match Qualcomm.

• A look at the Beelink SER7, a smaller, cheaper version of Beelink's GTR7.  (Serve the Home)
  
  That is, a mini-PC with a Ryzen 7840HS.  All the bits are where they should be, though the custom power connector is a definite minus.  (It can also be powered via USB-C, so it's not fatal.)
  
  
  
• Okta's little security incident has wiped $2 billion of its market cap since Friday.  (CNBC)
  
  Okta has not been having a good year.  If you put all your eggs in one basket, that had better be a pretty robust basket.
  
  
  
• Oregon State University warned students and staff to avoid all robots.  (NBC)
  
  Good advice generally, though this was related to a bomb threat - that turned out to be a "prank".
  
  The sort of prank that is likely to get you bed and breakfast at a federal facility for an extended duration.
  
  
  
• Microsoft truly seems to believe that the reason people don't love them is because they're just not annoying enough.  (Neowin)
  
  They now try to force you to take a quiz before you can install Chrome on a new Windows system.  Not sure if that applies to other browsers like Brave or Vivaldi.
  
  Curiously, the response Just fuck off already is not among the listed options.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 26 2023 08:22 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Eros at Thursday, October 26 2023 06:00 PM (cWcLg)

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• Researchers at the University of Chicago have come up with two filters - named Glaze and Nightshade - that prevent AI systems from learning from human art for at least, oh, a day.  (MIT)
  
  The filters change the images in ways invisible to the human eye that trick the AI into producing incongruous results.
  
  The problem with this should be obvious: If the filter is invisible to the human eye, you can run the infected filter through an second filter than removes invisible nonsense and makes the image safe to plagiarise again.
  
  It's copy protection, and it doesn't work.

• Graphics card maker Colorful is preparing a single-slot version of the 4060 Ti.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is welcome, given that most graphics cards - even low-end ones - now take up three PCIe slots.  In terms of width, that is; they only plug in to one slot on the motherboard.
  
  
  
• Apple could be releasing a refreshed iMac next week.  Or not.  (9to5Mac)
  
  The current iMac looks great, is reasonably fast, and has a brilliant screen, but is limited to just 16GB of RAM.  If they improve on that, great.  If not, it will be DOA again as far as I'm concerned.
  
  
  
• 1Password had a "security incident" related to the recent Okta breach.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which is exactly what you'd expect to happen when a password manager outsources its customer support login management to a third party.
  
  However, apart from that 1Password seems to be run by people who know what they are doing; the hackers were detected before they could do anything, and it is impossible - at least in theory - for them to have accessed password data anyway. since 1Password doesn't have your password.
  
  
  
• COBOL on Wheelchair is a framework for writing web applications in COBOL.  (GitHub)
  
  I mean, sure, why not.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 24 2023 11:27 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, October 25 2023 05:38 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 25 2023 06:03 AM (obo9H)

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• Meta (Facebook) has revealed the details of its internal serverless platform - similar to Amazon's Lambda  - that "processes trillions of function calls per day on more than 100,000 servers spread across tens of datacenter regions."  (Engineer Codex)
  
  Does anyone see the problem with this?  Anyone?  Yes, the girl at the back?
  
  Correct.  That's fucking stupid.

• Nvidia might be bringing out a 4080 Super model sooner rather than later now that the 4090 has been banned from export to China.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Hang on.  Wait a minute.  Where exactly are the 4090s - the boards not the chips - being manufactured?
  
  
  
• Intel's real 14th generation chips have shown up in benchmark databases and the results are good, bad, and irrelevant.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In single-core tests it's 6% faster than the 13th gen equivalent, which is...  Meh.
  
  In multi-core tests it's 25% slower, despite having two extra cores.  Which is terrible, but is certain to be fixed before launch date so it doesn't matter.
  
  Looks like an unexciting release on the CPU side; any interesting news will come from the integrated graphics.  Or not at all.
  
  
  
• Everything new is old again: Ruffle is a Flash emulator written in Rust - and compiled to Web Assembly.  (Ruffle)
  
  Which means you can add it to a web page and it will Just Work (TM).
  
  Except that it doesn't have full support for all Flash functionality yet, so while Ruffle will work your Flash game might not.
  
  Still if you happen to have 160,000 Flash games just lying around it offers a new way to share them.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 23 2023 11:24 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 24 2023 10:26 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, October 25 2023 11:44 AM (sZ6tC)

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Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 22 2023 07:20 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, October 22 2023 08:30 PM (ItHi2)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 22 2023 11:32 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 23 2023 07:53 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Monday, October 23 2023 04:00 PM (obo9H)

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• Instagram has apologised for accidentally labelling terrorists as terrorists.  (Ars Technica)

  Not everyone has accepted Meta's apology. Director of Amnesty Tech—a branch of Amnesty International that advocates for tech companies to put human terrorist rights first—Rasha Abdul-Rahim, said on X Twitter that Meta Instagram apologizing is "not good enough."

  "You're not allowed to tell the truth", said Abdul-Rahim.  "You have to lie, and you have to tell the lies we feed you."
  
  
  

Tech News

• Zotac's ZBox Pico PI430AJ uses Frore's piezoelectric Airjet cooling system.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are often called solid state, but they do have moving parts.  They're nearly silent because they vibrate too fast for you to hear - the only sound is the moving air.
  
  The catch?  This device has a 7W CPU and would run fine without a fan anyway.  Though a quick look at the benchmark results suggests it might be thermally limited, so it's possible the fan does help.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new HBM3E memory is big and fast.  (AnandTech)
  
  A single package - not exactly a chip, but a stack of 12 silicon dies - holds 36GB, runs at 9.8GHz, and is 1024 bits wide, giving a bandwidth of 1.2TB per second.
  
  
  
• Mediatek is no longer a second-tier manufacturer of chips for cheap phones.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The company used to be synonymous with budget devices, but its Dimensity 9300 is just a hair slower - 1.7% - than Apple's best mobile chips in multi-core tests.  The difference is wider in single-core benchmarks, where Apple still holds a convincing lead.
  
  I'd like to see chips like these in NUCs.  Windows Arm devices have been pretty underwhelming so far, mostly using chips that are badly out of date by the time the products hit the market.
  
  
  
• Reddit is considering blocking search engines and other web spiders - particularly those used by AI companies - though exactly how it plans to do that is an open question.  (The Verge)
  
  Google and Microsoft are big targets with lots of money that you can sue if they breach their own terms of service related to web indexing.  If you flag them in your robots.txt file - which they promise to obey - and they ignore it, that's grounds for a great big settlement.
  
  AI companies are much smaller and less scrupulous, and if your content is still public there's no simple way to block them.  Instagram has been doing this for years, and people still scrape its content.
  
  And the AI companies need Reddit far more than Reddit needs them.  You can only train AIs on AI content for a very short time before it all turns to sheep.

• AMD's Threadripper and Threadripper Pro 7000 CPUs are finally here, for users for whom time is money.  (AnandTech)
  
  These chips ain't cheap: Prices start at $1499 for the 24-core 7960X, and zoom up to $10k once you get to the 96-core 7995WX.
  
  But for comparison, a 24-core Intel Xeon W7-2495X costs $2199, and that's at the top of Intel's high-end desktop range.  The 7960X is cheaper, faster, and at the bottom of AMD's comparable range.  It's $100 more expensive than the previous 3960X, but it's a lot more than $100 faster.
  
  The regular Threadripper models provide four memory channels (up to 1TB total RAM), 48 PCIe 5 and 32 PCIe 4 lanes, and up to 64 cores.
  
  Threadripper Pro provides eight memory channels (up to 2TB total), 128 PCIe 5 lanes, and up to 96 cores.
  
  Also, similarly to Intel with its Xeon 2400 and 3400 chips, you can plug a Threadripper Pro into a Threadripper motherboard.  You probably wouldn't want to, since Threadripper already goes up to 64 cores (where the Xeon 2400 maxes out at just 24), but you can.
  
  Available wherever extremely expensive computer components are sold.

• Facebook and Instagram are censoring terrorist propaganda.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Apparently this is a bad thing now that the terrorists are Arabs who murder babies rather than grandmothers from Iowa who went for a stroll on a bad day.
  
  
  
• Apple has censored John Stewart.  (The Verge)
  
  Apparently his views were not aligned with corporate on the topics of AI and China, which Apple views as good but aren't.
  
  
  
• The worst person in the world just made a good point: New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing three crypto companies on allegations of defrauding customers of over a billion dollars.  (The Verge)
  
  Guess I'll make pocorn.
  
  
  
• TSMC says it's N3P process is equivalent to Intel's 18A.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  180nm was probably the last process node where the numbers meant something real, and that was forever ago.

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, October 21 2023 03:01 PM (sZ6tC)

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• Binance US no longer supports withdrawals in US dollars.  (Coindesk)
  
  If you want to get your money out, you can convert it to some kind of "stablecoin" (a cryptocurrency pinned 1:1 to the US dollar), transfer that to another service, and then withdraw the money there.
  
  Binance blames this on its banking partners, who in turn blame it on the SEC, which blames it on Binance.
  
  And there's actually some truth in all of that.
  
  
  
• Probably not Real USD though, because despite the name that is suddenly worth 53 cents.  (Web3 Is Going Great)
  
  So weird how that keeps happening.

• In less than two years, a billion computers will be officially orphaned.  (PC Magazine)
  
  70% of the world's PCs still run Windows 10, and most of those can't officially upgrade.  Not that Windows 11 is an upgrade so much as an endless sequence of annoyances.
  
  But while it is relegating a billion perfectly functional computers to landfill, Microsoft is use 20% recycled plastic in its latest mice.  So there's that.
  
  
  
• After being sold by Epic Games and picked up by Songtradr (who?) Bandcamp's entire union bargaining team was laid off.  (404 Media)
  
  So weird how that keeps happening.
  
  
  
• What's inside Apple's $129 Thunderbolt cable that makes it cost so much.  Rather a lot, as it turns out.  (Twitter)
  
  USB-C cables and Thunderbolt cables look the same on the outside, but inside they are very different, and this Twitter thread runs the cables through a CT scanner to see what's going on.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 20 2023 02:19 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, October 21 2023 01:36 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 21 2023 04:38 PM (PiXy!)

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• Under new regulations China will no longer be able to buy Nvidia's cut-down A800 an H800 AI cards or AMD's MI300 models, and China's own GPU companies will lose access to advanced processes at TSMC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  However, Iran can now buy and sell missiles because our leaders totally have their eyes on what is most important, which is to say, their bank accounts.
  
  
  

• Intel's 14th gen desktop chips get put to the test and...  Eh.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're fast, but (a) for gaming they are still slower than AMD's 7800X3D, (b) for productivity they're still slower than AMD's 7950X, (c) you still have the problem with having two entirely different core designs in one chip, and (d) power consumption is insane.
  
  On the Y-Cruncher benchmark, the 7950X3D uses 99W while the 14900K uses 262W, and the 7950X3D is faster.
  
  
  
• Corsair's 4TB MP600 Core XT is selling for $160.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a DRAMless QLC drive, so not even slightly high-end, but 4TB for $160 is pretty good if you just want fast storage for video files or games.
  
  
  
• Twitter is running a trial charging $1 per year to new users for full access.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Don't cough up the buck and the site is read-only.
  
  This only applies to New Zealand and the Philippines right now, but signs are they want to take it worldwide to filter out the bots and general idiocy.
  
  At worst, make the idiots a profit center.
  
  
  
• How to hack Switzerland's new e-voting system.  (Schneier on Security)
  
  You still need to hack your targets' computers, but once you've done that, the carefully designed voting protocol does nothing to protect anyone.
  
  The solution is paper.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 18 2023 09:53 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, October 18 2023 11:54 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 19 2023 12:21 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, October 19 2023 08:41 AM (2tHvf)

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