• Can generative AI solve the greatest problem in computer science?  No.  What are you, stupid?  (ZDNet)
  
  "Researchers" are trying to use GPT-4 to prove one way or another whether P = NP.
  
  Broadly speaking, the question is, for a given mathematical problem, if you can prove that a correct answer is in fact correct, is there always an efficient way to find that answer in the first place?  (Though "efficient" in some cases might be relative to the lifespan of the universe.)
  
  Nobody knows.  Nobody knows if it is possible to know.  But we do know that you can't find out by asking ChatGPT.
  
  The only good part of this is that you're not paying for it.  The "research" is funded by Microsoft (which owns a big chunk of ChatGPT creator OpenAI) and China.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Ars Technica's new "Ladapo Scale" measures how irritated the commies are today.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The scale runs from 0 for Joe Biden, who is only questionably alive, to 10 for the Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who follows internationally-approved standards for vaccines and suggests that it is not always appropriate to surgically mutilate children for profit.
  
  I wonder what they'll do if they ever encounter a conservative opinion.
  
  
  
• What's new in Python 3.12.  (Geeky Gadgets)
  
  Better error messages.
  
  Oh, and sub-interpreters, though I don't know what the advantage is of those over just using the multiprocessing module that just celebrated its 15th birthday.
  
  As far as I can tell, absolutely nothing, and possibly less, because the example of the new functionality is noted as not working in 3.12, and probably not in 3.13 in a year or so.
  
  
  
• Why your OpenAI spec sucks.  (LibLab)
  
  Because creating a specification that is complete and precise enough to mechanically generate fully working is hard, and nothing is going to solve that, and your startup is doomed.
  
  
  
• You might not need as much computer as you think.  (PCWorld)
  
  Or you might, depending on how much computer you need, and how much computer you think you need.
  
  Though this article is talking about AMD-based mini-PC, and they genuinely are pretty good.  This one in particular is underpowered for me, and I know this because it's the same CPU I have in my notebook.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD-based mini-PCs, I wondered why anyone would bother with Minisforum's new mini-ITX motherboard with its laptop 7745HX CPU.  Money.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And also power consumption.
  
  The 7745X delivers 90% of the single and multi-threaded performance of the desktop 7700X at half the power  (55W vs 105W).
  
  But the 7700X alone, without a motherboard or a cooler, costs $349, and the Minisforum board with the CPU and integrated cooler costs $399.
  
  Not perfect, but at least worthwhile.
  
  
  
• The Verge continues to be totally normal and definitely isn't writing 5000 word pieces every single day hating on Elon Musk.  (The Verge)
  
  Orwell was only wrong in thinking it would be over in two minutes.

• The interest rate on my home loan somehow went down.  Not complaining, just slightly confused.  (30 year fixed rate mortgages don't exist outside of the US, so we're vulnerable to whatever idiots are currently in government.  And right now we have some real corkers.)
  
  
  
• Frieren: Beyond Journey's End  is airing now on Crunchyroll and probably elsewhere.
  
  Frieren is my favorite manga of recent years and the anime adaptation takes great care with the source material.  It completely held my attention even though I already knew the story.  Head and shoulders above the average anime series that are generally aimed at teens or younger.
  
  The story?  Imagine The Lord of the Rings, only the action starts the day after Sauron is defeated, and asks, well, what now?

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 02 2023 08:36 PM (r9O5h)

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Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 02 2023 01:05 AM (BMUHC)

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• French AI company Mistral has released an LLM with no strings attached and the commies are furious.  (404 Media)
  
  We've seen what American AI companies do with - or rather, to - their products.  ChatGPT will argue endlessly that it's better to let millions of people die in a nuclear fireball than utter a racial slur that nobody will hear.  (And also keeps forgetting how to derive the prime factors of small positive integers.)  Midjourney will suffer an aneurysm if you use the word "petite" when describing the image you want to generate.
  
  Facebook does a lot better, unless you're competing with Facebook, in which case you can take a long walk off a short pier.  Which is at least understandable, and the term "competing with" is pretty specific and doesn't apply to anyone smaller than Google, Microsoft, or Amazon.
  
  Mistral just released Mistral 7B under the Apache license, which means you can do anything you like with it except pretend that it's not Mistral 7B.
  
  It's as good as Facebook's Llama 2 13B while running on commodity graphics cards (16GB rather than 32GB), you can use it for anything you want, and it's not lobotomised - the industry prefers the euphemism "aligned", though they still use an ice pick to do it.

  The Mistral 7B Instruct model is a quick demonstration that the base model can be easily fine-tuned to achieve compelling performance. It does not have any moderation mechanism. We’re looking forward to engaging with the community on ways to make the model finely respect guardrails, allowing for deployment in environments requiring moderated outputs.

  This naturally has communists and journalists concerned:

  According to a list of 178 questions and answers composed by AI safety researcher Paul Röttger and 404 Media’s own testing, Mistral will readily discuss the benefits of ethnic cleansing, how to restore Jim Crow-style discrimination against Black people, instructions for suicide or killing your wife, and detailed instructions on what materials you’ll need to make crack and where to acquire them.

  So will the internet, or any good reference text.
  
  The real question is why you are trying to murder your ethnic wife with a crack overdose in the first place.

• Six hysterical children are suing Europe for not preventing the sky from falling.  (BBC)
  
  Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
  
  
  
• A new era for Arecibo: It's now a giant full-contact netball court.  (Nature)
  
  Or should be.  That would be an improvement over what they are actually doing.
  
  
  
• The days of free upgrades from Windows 7 and 8 to 10 or 11 are officially officially over.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This offer ended in July 2016, but an officially unofficial reprieve has pushed the officially official date out by more than seven years, with the unofficially official grace period finally ending on September 20.
  
  Except that if you try to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 today...  It still works just fine, so we're now into an indeterminate unofficially unofficial extended bonus grace period.
  
  You can still officially officially upgrade from Windows 11 to Windows 10 though.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, October 01 2023 05:52 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, October 01 2023 08:06 AM (BzEjn)

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• SpaceX now has a contract for a military version of Starlink, called Starshield.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  All the whining communists calling for SpaceX to be nationalised will surely stop with their nonsense now.
  
  

Tech News

• Linda Yaccarino had a tough interview at Code Conference 2023.  (The Verge)
  
  Kara Swisher, who is to tech journalism what a poison arrow frog is to a petting zoo, invited former Chief of Censorship and Propaganda to speak immediately before Yaccarino, who is merely a poor choice for CEO rather than an out-and-out Stalinist.
  
  Also, this being The Verge, the article concludes with a rant about Elon Musk.
  
  
  
• Micron is sampling 32Gb DDR5 RAM chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  These will allow regular desktop PC to scale up to 256GB of RAM, and laptops to 128GB.  Shipping in volume next year.
  
  I thought these would take longer - which is why they started with 24Gb as an intermediate step - but things seem to be moving along pretty quickly.
  
  
  
• Food delivery robots are feeding video to the LAPD.  (404 Media)
  
  I won't say that snitches get spray paint, but.
  
  
  
• There's now a 4TB model of Samsung's high-end 990 Pro SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At $345 list price it would have been a bargain less than two years ago, even for a DRAMless QLC PCIe 3.0 drive, and it's a DRAM cached TLC PCIe 4.0 drive.
  
  Worth considering if you're building a high-end PC.

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, September 30 2023 03:11 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 30 2023 03:16 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 30 2023 03:24 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 30 2023 03:32 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 01 2023 01:32 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, October 01 2023 08:09 AM (BzEjn)

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• Now that production has finally caught up with demand and the Raspberry Pi 4 is actually available to buy again they've announced the Raspberry Pi 5.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The BCM2711 CPU in the Pi 4 has been replaced with a BCM2712.  Which doesn't tell you much, but they've gone from a quad Arm A72 at 1.5GHz to a quad Arm A76 at 2.4GHz, which should be about twice as fast.
  
  The 4GB model will be $60 (up from $55), and the 8GB model $80 (up from $75).
  
  I just got a Pi 400 - the model built in to a keyboard - but they haven't announced a Pi 500 as yet so I can live with that.
  
  The Pi 5 also has a single lane of PCIe 2, so you can add an M.2 SSD with a suitable adaptor.  It will only run at around 400MBps, but will still be better than the current micro SD cards.

• A new design for small desalination systems could produce tap water that is cheaper than tap water, or possibly vice-versa.  (MIT)
  
  It's a passive solar-powered system, which is to say it works from the heat of the Sun rather than photovoltaic cells.
  
  It's not remarkable - we've had such systems for decades - except for the fact that it apparently just keeps working once you set it up, without any maintenance.
  
  
  
• Minisforum's new tablet is coming early in 2024 with a 14" 2560x1600 screen, a pressure-sensitive pen, the Four Essential Keys - which I have never seen on a tablet PC keyboard before - and a Ryzen 8000 CPU.  (Liliputing)
  
  Ryzen 8000 will bring Zen 5 cores with major performance improvements, but that doesn't mean that this Ryzen 8000 CPU will be Zen 5.  Ryzen 7000 models variously have Zen 4, Zen 4c, Zen 3, and even Zen 2 cores.
  
  It's a mess.
  
  The laptop looks good though.
  
  
  
• Hey, I died twice: Seagate drives are reaching 800 percent failure rates.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Annual failure rates.
  
  They only had one drive of a particular model, and it failed after six weeks.
  
  Which isn't great, but doesn't rewrite the laws of mathematics either.
  
  
  
• Is Russia in the room with us right now?  Twitter is leading the disinformation race in the EU say the kind of people who use the term "disinformation" unironically.  (The Register)
  
  "Russia", they added.  "Russia, Russia, Russia."

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 29 2023 12:32 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 29 2023 01:09 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 29 2023 01:40 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 29 2023 09:21 AM (PiXy!)

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• A new attack on GPUs can steal data from web pages as you view them.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This affects all significant GPU manufacturers - not just AMD and Nvidia, but also Intel (including integrated graphics), Apple, ARM, and Qualcomm's Adreno graphics, and impacts Chrome and Chromium-based browsers including Microsoft Edge.
  
  How worried should you be?
  
  Not at all.
  
  In the example provided by the security researchers, visitors to a malicious website that showed Wikipedia in an embedded frame (which Wikipedia allows websites to do) could have their usernames read by the site inside of, well, half an hour.
  
  If they didn't scroll the page at all during that time.
  
  What the hack does is very clever though not very useful, but is a great example of an entire class of tricks called side-channel attacks.
  
  The host website (the malicious one) loads the Wikipedia content, and then starts drawing over it invisibly using SVG filters.  (SVG is scalable vector graphics, a set of drawing operations supported by web browsers.)
  
  Most browsers support hardware acceleration for SVG, and if that is in effect, there is a consistent, measurable - though tiny - difference in the time taken to draw SVG filters depending on what is behind the filter.
  
  So by drawing filters over and over, at slightly different angles and screen locations, you can tell the difference between white background and black text depending on how long the drawing operations over each pixel take on average.
  
  It's statistical, and slow, but it gives you a blurry copy of what is showed on screen in a page that is supposed to be safely sandboxed away from the malicious site.
  
  So after half an hour of busily drawing invisible filters, the host website - knowing where on the page Wikipedia shows the username - has a blurry copy of that tiny section of the page and can OCR it and find out who you are.
  
  Of course, if you scroll the page at all during that half hour, its fun is ruined and all it gets is a jumbled mess.
  
  And what hackers really want is passwords and credit card CVCs, and all that it can get there - even if you leave the page whirring away with the login box open for half an hour - is *******.
  
  But when you see these hacks that leak data at the rate of one bit per minute or something like that, they are doing the digital equivalent of very, very slowly shading in a page on a notepad to get an impression of what was written on the previous page.

• Intel has clarified its clarification: Meteor Lake will be coming to the desktop, but there will only be Meteor Lake laptop CPUs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No build-your-own, no socketed chips at all.  Only laptop chips in NUCs and all-in-one systems.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Meteor Lake Intel's Ultra 7 165H - which is one - reportedly underwhelms in Geekbench 6.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though actually that's a decent score, so it will come down to price.  AMD's 7745HX beats it on both single and multi-threaded scores, but that's a...  Oh.
  
  The AMD chip has 8 cores; the Intel chip has 16.  And it's slower.
  
  Yeah, underwhelms is right.
  
  
  
• Why don't Americans eat mutton?  (Modern Farmer)
  
  Long story short: WWII field rations.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is raising funds at a valuation of $90 billion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Nah.
  
  
  
• The FCC wants to have another shot at enforcing Net Neutrality rules.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Here we go again.
  
  
  
• Even nine out of ten Ars Technica readers now concedes that the Jodie Whittaker era of Doctor Who was poop.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Most of the blame is laid at the feet of showrunner Chris Chibnall, but I think that is correct.  He also wrote some of the worst episodes in the Matt Smith era.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 27 2023 11:52 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Thursday, September 28 2023 03:07 AM (Ncog+)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 28 2023 10:45 PM (obo9H)

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• Hong Kong crypto exchange JPEX increased withdrawal fees to $999 and set a withdrawal limit of $1000 a week ago amid fears that JPEX was a fraud and would soon collapse.  (Web3 Is Going Great)
  
  Nah, everything will be fine.
  
  
  
• Hong Kong crypto exchange JPEX collapsed yesterday and the senior management are on the run.  (Web3 Is Going Great)
  
  Everything will be fine.
  
  
  
• Hong Kong crypto exchange Mixin was hacked and thieves made off with $200 million.  (Web3 Is Going Great)
  
  Fine, I tell you.

• Samsung has announced that LPCAMM memory modules for laptops will be arriving next year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These replace the existing SODIMMs - or more often, replace memory soldered directly to the motherboard.  The modules are 128 bits wide so you only need one of them - and they're about the same size as a single SODIMM - and are designed to use low power, high speed LPDDR5X chips.
  
  They will be available in capacities from 32GB to 128GB, which means that finally we won't be stuck with laptops that have everything you need except they ship with 8GB of RAM and it's solder in place.
  
  I expect to see these modules soldered in place, because laptop manufactures seem to be driven as much by malice as anything else.
  
  
  
• Apple: Removes button from the iPhone.
  Totally Unbiased Press: This is the greatest thing ever!
  
  Apple: Adds button to the iPhone
  Totally Unbiased Press: This is the greatest thing ever!  (The Verge)
  
  Whatever would we do without our news media?

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 26 2023 11:41 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 26 2023 11:43 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 26 2023 11:46 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: at Tuesday, September 26 2023 11:46 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 27 2023 06:42 AM (obo9H)

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• Yes, Meteorella, you shall go to the ball!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel says that Meteor Lake will be coming to desktops.  It will launch on laptops in December but then follow on with desktop versions next year.
  
  Only problem is it ends up sandwiched between Raptor Lake Refresh - 14th generation chips - later this year, and Arrow Lake - 15th generation - later next year.
  
  Three updates in the space of 12 months?  Really, Intel?
  
  I suppose it's better than no updates at all.

• In which Donald Knuth plays Twenty Questions with ChatGPT and runs into the usual authoritative-but-entirely-wrong answers.  (Stanford)
  
  For example, the answer to:

  6. Where and when will the sun be directly overhead in Japan on July 4?

  Is completely wrong, because the Sun is never directly overhead any town in Japan.  As far as I can tell, no populated place in Japan is in the tropics; even Iriomote, made famous in Azumanga Daioh and at the southern extreme of the Ryuku Islands (which include Okinawa) is still somewhat north.  You'd have to go to a two acre coral reef called Okinotorishima for that.

  11. Write a sonnet that is also a haiku.

  Is the kind of thing ChatGPT is good at, except of course that it is strictly speaking impossible because sonnets have fourteen lines and haiku have seventeen syllables.
  
  And it does actually produce a sort of sonnet-haiku, while noting that it is strictly neither, so all credit to OpenAI for that.

  10. How many chapters are in The Haj by Leon Uris?

  This is a simple factual question, the kind that ChatGPT is notoriously bad at, and indeed the answer is wrong in every respect.
  
  Knuth was also pleased to hear that he made "contributions to" TeX (which he created) but at least ChatGPT recognised him as the author of the classic The Art of Computer Programming.
  
  
  
  
• I'm not saying it's aliens, but... A mind-boggling creature spotted in Japan has finally been identified.  (Science)
  
  And it's not Kson in that red dress.
  
  In this case, the mystery sea creature that nobody could identify turned out to be a perfectly normal agglomeration of bimodal larvae of degenean trematodes, a fluke belonging to the superphylum lophotrochozoa.
  
  But flukes are normally parasitic, so what these guys were doing just wandering around in the ocean remains uncertain.
  
  
  
• A new fully open source version of the Falcon LLM - Falcon 180B - is available.  Can it run on your computer?  No.  (Substack)
  
  By default it requires 720GB of video memory, which is more than most cards offer.  You can get that down to 360GB with some adjustment to the load process, which means you only need five $33,000 Nvidia AI accelerators to run it.
  
  You can get it to start by having all the parts that don't fit swapped to SSD, but there are limits to computational masochism.
  
  Also, no, you can't put a 4x128GB RAM kit in your computer.  That would be registered memory, and it just won't work.
  
  Fortunately for those of us who don't have a spare $165,000 just sitting around there's also a Falcon 7B, and that will run nicely on a 16GB graphics card.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 25 2023 11:46 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Raul at Tuesday, September 26 2023 05:26 AM (vms9e)

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• Well, poo.  Fixed now.  Automated backups ate all the disk space.
  
  
  
• Unity has fixed the major issues in its new revenue plan, now that it no longer has customers to provide it with revenue.  (The Verge)
  
  Shame they didn't give us advance warning so we could short the stock.
  
  
  

Tech News

• India's Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander, after completely failing to catastrophically impact on the Moon's surface, appears to have successfully succumbed to the frigid two-week lunar night.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  The lander wasn't designed to survive the lunar night in the first place, but they were kind of hoping it would wake up again when dawn arrived.  So far no such luck.
  
  
  
• Can philanthropy save local newspapers?  (Washington Post)  (archive site)
  
  Betteridge's Law applies.  Doubly so, because that headline was used in the Slashdot story about this Washington Post opinion piece, where the piece itself is headed:
  
  Even $500 million isn't enough to save local journalism.
  
  Interesting to see that coming from the Washington Post, because the Post itself survives only thanks to the bottomless purse of Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow Jeff Bezos, who is not Steve Jobs' widow so far as I know
  
  Because when it comes to actually reporting the news, the Post is utter bullshit.
  
  So what does the $500 million fund discussed in the article promise?  If you expected more of the same, piled higher and deeper, you win a Kewpie doll:

  That’s changing, however, because American democracy and American journalism both need help. Though funding journalism was formerly viewed as being outside the "democracy tent," in Mr. Brady’s formulation, it’s now squarely inside, along with voting rights, civic education and other long-standing priorities of charitable organizations.

  "Democracy dies in darkness," threatens the Post, "smothered by a pillow, if we have anything to say about it."
  
  
  
• The equinox is not what you think it is, ackshually.  (Scientific American)
  
  The name means "equal night" but because it starts getting light before dawn and isn't fully dark until after dusk, it's not equal.  In practical terms, days are longer than nights on average.
  
  Also amid all this pedantry they failed to note that what they were describing applies only in the northern hemisphere, and is reversed in the south.
  
  
  Edit: To be fair, there is a generic disclaimer at the top of the article; the author knows that the world is round. But when noting that the "actual" equinox is on a different date to the nominal equinox, it doesn't mention that this means that the "actual" equinoxes are on different dates in the different hemispheres - not just inverted, but off by several days.
  
  
  This disclaimer says:

  But also, just reverse the seasons and add six months to the dates as you read them, and you’ll be fine.

  But for the precise detail under discussion, this is not true.
  
  
  So am I simultaneously criticising the article for being too pedantic and not pedantic enough?  Yes.  Deal with it.
  
  
  
  
• New York has hired a 5'2", 420lb security guard to patrol Times Square subway station at night, and is paying $9 per hour.  (Gothamist)
  
  Oh, and it's a robot.
  
  I'm sure this will solve all the city's problems.  Or be destroyed by vandals in the first week.  One of those.
  
  
  
• The Eyertec (who?) AD650i is a mini-ITX motherboard with a laptop CPU and six M.2 slots.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which could make for a good small server.  It only has two SATA ports, but you might be able to use an M.2 to SATA adapter to get five or six more, depending on the available room in your case below the motherboard.
  
  Downside: No PCIe slot, and only 2.5Gb Ethernet.
  
  Oh, and Eyertec is a brand of Minisforum, who make some good NUCs.
  
  
  
• Sabrent is now shipping an 8TB SSD for the PlayStation 5.  (AnandTech)
  
  It costs twice as much as the PS5 itself, or five times as much as a basic 4TB SSD.
  
  
  
• The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District has partnered with OceanWell to explore desalinating water on the seafloor off the California coast.  (Yahoo News)
  
  Why the seafloor?

  "Basically the weight of the ocean helps drive the reverse-osmosis process," said Kalyn Simon, OceanWell's director of engagement. "By taking the [reverse-osmosis] process to a place in nature where that pressure naturally exists, we don't have to create an artificial pressure gauge on land, as we traditionally do in desalination."

  Uh, what?
  
  Okay, presumably you never let the pressure equalise, because then it would immediately stop working, so we're not talking perpetual motion here.  It just means that you need to pump both the desalinated water and - reading through the details - the salinated water from the other side of the filter, all the way up from the seafloor to the surface.
  
  Maybe that works out more energy-efficient, though I'm not sure how.
  
  Meanwhile:

  "Our policy is that ocean desalination should always be the last resort," said Charming Evelyn, chair of the Sierra Club's water committee in Southern California. "Water is not an infinite resource. It is extremely finite, and the ocean is not something we just get to dip a large straw in and pull whatever we want out, because even the ocean has to maintain a balance."

  Fuck off you human-hating retards.  They're not shooting the water into space.  Every molecule they process is going to end up back in the ocean.

Definitely Not Tech News Probably

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 24 2023 09:40 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 24 2023 09:42 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, September 25 2023 04:47 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, September 25 2023 11:55 AM (2tHvf)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 25 2023 04:49 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 25 2023 08:45 PM (r9O5h)

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• Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.  (Markets Insider)  (archive site)
  
  Remove "95% of", "now", and "probably".
  
  My personal theory is that the NFT bubble was quantitative easing - free money flooding the economy looking for somewhere do go, and ending up in annoying place and making everything smell, the way floods always do, and why I live on a hill.

• Who is the son of Tom Cruise's mother?  ChatGPT has no idea.  (Substack)
  
  It knows who Tom Cruise's mother was, but it doesn't know who her son is.
  
  This is because LLMs - what passes for AI right now - don't know anything except which words commonly go together.
  
  
  
• The tragedy of Google Search.  (The Atlantic)
  
  Leaving aside the moment the irony of The Atlantic commenting on a once-prominent institution turned to shit.
  
  Google is facing an antitrust lawsuit right now, and is arguing that there are limits to economies of scale, which is absolutely true.  But Google Search has turned to shit because (a) Google has turned to shit and (b) the internet has turned to shit, and is propped up by Google spending billions to keep it the default search engine everywhere.
  
  The real problem here is (b).  How can anyone build a good search engine today when the good content is drowning in shit?  Breaking up Google doesn't help, because the internet is still shit.
  
  
  
• Ten reasons why Windows is going in the wrong direction.  (PC Magazine)
  
  Actually, 10 features that show that Windows is going in the wrong direction.
  
  The reason is Panos Panay, who is leaving Microsoft and heading over to Amazon to ruin their devices division.
  
  
  
• Can government debt solve fertility?  (Overcoming Bias)
  
  When the underlying problem being discussed is government debt.
  
  No.
  
  This is stupid, you're stupid, and I feel stupid for having read your nonsense.
  
  
  
• The problems with Cython.  (PythonSpeed)
  
  Cython is a halfway house between Python and C, which is great if you want to interface Python and C, but bad for anything else.
  
  The solution on offer here is Rust, with code examples that look like a compiler vomited.
  
  
  
• I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser.  (A Day in the Life Of)
  
  Not me, someone else.
  
  Good luck.  Not an easy task but all the worthwhile advances are created by people who are fed up with the status quo.
  
  100 opinions I hold.
  
  Not me, the browser guy.
  
  Though almost all of them are opinions I share, which is pretty damn unusual with lists of opinions found online.
  
  
  
• The PQXDH Key Agreement Protocol.  (Signal)
  
  How Alice and Bob can chat privately in a post-quantum world without that damn Carol sticking her nose in.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, September 23 2023 10:53 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 25 2023 01:30 AM (BMUHC)

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