• Karl Nehammer, chancellor of Austria, has proposed enshrining into the country's constitution the right to pay with cash.  (AP News)
  
  Nehammer did not kill himself.

• Threads says it will be adding search and web access "soon".  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, it launched without those.
  
  
  
• Researchers at MIT have invented an entirely new kind of battery using only cement, water, and carbon black.  (The Register)
  
  Plus: Safe and reliable, can power a house using only cheap, common materials.
  Minus: It's a cube twelve feet on a side weighing eighty tons.
  
  Just in case you thought I was joking about battery research yesterday, there's enough information in the article to run that calculation yourself.
  
  
  
• Cloud Provider CoreWeave (who?) has obtained a $2.3 billion debt facility to buy Nvidia H100 AI accelerator cards using its Nvidia H100 AI accelerator cards as collateral.  (AnandTech)
  
  Unfortunately CoreWeave is not publicly traded so you can't short them.
  
  
  
• GPT-4 is a room-temperature non-deterministic piece of garbage.  (GitHub)
  
  We know that GPT-4 can't give the same answer twice, even if the question is something with only one correct answer, like is 17077 a prime number.
  
  This article examines why, and comes to the conclusion that GPT-4 is poo.
  
  
  
• A look at the Red Hat source distribution brouhaha by someone who has been involved in open source since before there was a term for it.  (LPI)
  
  From John "maddog" Hall, the discussion edges into my previous comments on You can't beat free.
  
  
  
• A Snake game for DOS.  (GitHub)
  
  

  6800b81fb9a00fb80
  300cd10bfd0078d76
  fc0fafdd21cb382f7
  4f7880fe460bb0400
  241e7a0288cb24147
  402f7db29df39cf77
  d3d1fb8d4102f6f12
  0e474c8382d74c489
  7e004545380d882d7
  4c426ad938827ebc8

  That's it.  That's the entire binary file encoded as hexadecimal.  Without the encoding it's half that size.
  
  
  
• Now that Intel and Micron have given up on phase-change memory, what's next?  DapuStor's Xlenstor2 X2900P, maybe.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's SLC flash, which is very easy to make but nobody does.
  
  800GB is not a lot by current standards, but it has a 20 microsecond read latency, and an 8 microsecond write latency.  That write time is about six times faster than a good TLC SSD.
  
  Side-by-side with Intel's discontinued Optane drive it delivers exactly the same single-threaded random write performance, but only half the random reads.  Which is probably fine for many applications, since the critical thing is getting data safely written to permanent storage as quickly as possible.
  
  The other advantage of SLC is that it's much more robust than common TLC or QLC cache.  (SLC stores one bit per memory cell; MLC two; TLC three; and QLC four.)
  
  With this particular drive you can rewrite its entire contents 100 times per day, every day, for five years.  Solidigm's 61TB drive is rated for only 0.6 drive writes per day, though being 75 times bigger the amount of data you can safely write each day to a low-endurance QLC drive works out to half that of the high-endurance specialised SLC drive.
  
  
  
• It costs how much?  (Tech America)
  
  Not either of those drives, but an entirely different Solidigm model, an E1.S format 7.68TB drive for $217, which is insane.
  
  Only problem is you need specific server hardware or fiddly adapters to run an E1.S drive.
  
  
  
• But while I was looking up the price of E1.S adapters (turns out they can be found for as little as $20) I tripped over the Sabrent PC-P3X4.  (Extreme HW)
  
  It's a PCIe 3.0 x4 card that takes four PCIe 3.0 M.2 SSDs.  At around $140 it's more expensive than similar cards that take four PCIe 4.0 SSDs, but it has a very neat trick up its silicon sleeve.
  
  Those PCIe 4.0 cards use a full x16 slot - of which you likely have exactly one - and rely on CPU support for PCIe lane bifurcation to treat the x16 slot as if it were four x4 slots.  Not all CPUs support that, and not all motherboards enable it even if the CPU does support it.
  
  This Sabrent card has a PCIe switch chip on it, so it doesn't need that.  It works in any slot that can fit a x4 connector.  The switch provides four lanes to the slot and two to each drive.  That means individual drives max out at around 1.7GBps, which is merely extremely fast, but any two drives running simultaneously can max out the slot bandwidth.
  
  If you want to take advantage of cheap SSD prices to shove a whole lot of fast storage into a PC, this is perfect.

  As I was attempting to wrap up this review, I struggled to identify anything negative. Not that it is expected to have something bad to talk about, but there is almost always something about a product you wish were different. No tinkering in the BIOS is required. No software needs to be downloaded and installed. No drivers need to be installed or kept updated. Nothing here to annoy you or nag you to death about registering your product. I literally could not identify anything to complain about.

  
  
  
• Meanwhile, the most annoying thing of the day: Windows 11 updated itself on my new laptop and lost the touchpad driver.  This is something Windows 10 does too, and it's utter garbage.
  
  You either have to dig a USB mouse out of a drawer or remember keyboard shortcuts you haven't used since the last time Windows fucked this up and try to fumble your way through repeatedly removing and reinstalling the driver until Windows decides that yes, your laptop actually does have a touchpad, just as it did ten minutes ago before Windows decided to update itself.
  
  
  
• Least annoying thing of the day: I've had a couple of issues with my new HP laptop - though much less since I stopped messing around trying to get MongoDB 5 running inside VirtualBox - but the built-in tests accessed by pressing F2 during boot are great.
  
  There's a test for everything, including the touchpad.  Takes ten seconds to confirm there is nothing wrong with the hardware and it's just Windows being Windows.  I'd rather not need to run the tests, but it's the best built-in test suite I've seen in consumer hardware, and the Pavilion 14 is not a premium model either.
  
  
  
• Not annoying at all thing of the day: Pathfinder redemption codes on Humble Bundle.  I saw there was a new Pathfinder bundle up and realised that I hadn't redeemed the previous bundle, and sure enough the codes expired three days ago.
  
  So I thought, maybe, maybe they'll still work.
  
  They did.
  
  I checked for any other expired codes I might have, found some from two years ago, and tried those as well.
  
  They also worked.
  
  Thumbs up for Paizo.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 05 2023 12:48 PM (g7p4x)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 05 2023 12:58 PM (g7p4x)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, August 05 2023 03:50 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 06 2023 09:57 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 06 2023 02:23 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, August 07 2023 02:05 AM (B/ILD)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 07 2023 02:29 AM (PiXy!)

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• The Chinese researchers who filmed a video of LK-99 demonstrating superconductive magnetic levitation at room temperature have published their findings.  (Arxiv)  (PDF)
  
  They note that they measured cutoff temperatures ranging from 299K to 340K depending on the size and purity of the sample - so anywhere from 26C / 78F which is a warm spring day to 67C / 152F which is well above the temperature of any room you would want to find yourself in - but still well below the cutoff temperature measured in the original paper.
  
  
  
• A second paper from researchers familiar with the superconductive properties of thin-film lead-based heterophase crystalline structures sheds light on why results may have varied between teams attempting to replicate the discovery.  (Arxiv)  (PDF)
  
  In short, it's a tricky bastard.  It's not a single molecular compound but a complex structure made up of superconducting and non-superconducting crystals of varying sizes.  While it may be the genuine article, it may not be of any practical use until we find a consistent and cost-effective way to synthesize it in bulk.
  
  We see this sort of issue with battery research too:
  
  Plus: Stores 10x the energy of the best existing lithium-polymer batteries.
  Minus: Detonates instantly if you look at it.

• AMD has announced its W7600 low-end professional graphics card.  (Serve the Home)
  
  And also the even lower-end W7500, which only uses 70W of power and runs entirely off the power provided by the PCIe slot.
  
  While I say low-end, at 12 TFLOPS the W7500 is 20% faster than the previous-generation W6600, and the 20 TFLOPS W7600 is twice as fast.  All three cards have 8GB of RAM on a 128-bit bus.
  
  W7500 costs $429, W7600 $599, which is actually cheaper than the $649 W6600 as well.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile full specs have leaked for AMD's 7800 XT unprofessional GPU.  (WCCFTech)
  
  3840 shaders delivering up to 38 TFLOPS, and 16GB of RAM on a 256-bit bus.
  
  This is from a production model card from PowerColor, so those details are pretty reliable.
  
  Final MSRP has not leaked but is expected to be $549.
  
  
  
• LG's new 27" OLED monitor is ushering in a new age where they almost don't completely suck.  (The Verge)
  
  Don't buy an OLED monitor, yet.
  
  
  

• In a shock to everyone, the security of Microsoft's Azure cloud service turns out to be poop.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This is completely unprecedented and nothing like this has ever happened before.  (Firewall Times)
  
  
  

Tech News

• The internet con: How to seize the means of computation.  (Kickstarter)
  
  A Kickstarter?  For a book?  By Cory Doctorow?  Titled "The Internet Con"?
  
  You don't say.

  My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. Verso will publish it on September 5. It's a book that distills 20 years' experience, fighting for digital rights. It explains how the internet curdled - and how we'll get it back.

  So, looking around the internet, that would be twenty years of utter failure.
  
  
  
• Dime-store Bond villain Sam Altman-Fried says he will allow companies and governments use his privacy-eradicating crypto scam Worldcoin.  (Reuters)
  
  Sam is also CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
  
  
  
• Facebook has released its Audiocraft suite of AI-driven music tools as open source.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Much as I love dumping on Facebook - much as the company deserves it - it has been releasing a lot of AI research as open source rather than using it to steal all your personal information.
  
  Mostly because Facebook already has all your personal information.  Just as with Apple, which cracks down on privacy-damaging apps on its platform because nobody else is allowed to have all your personal data, Facebooks motives here are black as coal but I'll take a win where I can find it.
  
  
  
• Putting that Solidigm 60TB SSD to the test.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It works.  It's not a high-end SSD, but 60TB in a single 2.5" drive for around $5000 is a steal.  That's about the same capacity (after RAID) as my four second-hand Synology NAS boxes combined, and probably about as reliable.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, August 03 2023 09:04 PM (zx18t)

Posted by: FreeKnight at Thursday, August 03 2023 10:59 PM (gXw+B)

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• Google Assistant - which is apparently a thing - is getting a big reboot using generative AI.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Could we not?
  
  
  
• Facebook plans to use chatbots to boost its user numbers.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I can't wait until social networks are all just chatbots screaming at each other and we can get on with stuff.
  
  
  
• YouTube meanwhile is planning to use AI to summarise YouTube videos.  (The Verge)
  
  If it can make sense of Pippa's stream today - where she returned in spider form after celebrating reaching 250,000 subscribers by eating a tarantula - I'll be impressed.
  
  

• Remember that amazing new room-temperature superconductor announcement?  It might not be rubbish after all.  (In the Pipeline)
  
  Yes, the experimental data is imperfect, but the details provided are sufficient for both empirical testing and theoretical analysis.
  
  There's an unconfirmed report of an independent replication demonstrating the Meissner effect in a small sample of the material, and the video doesn't look like any cooling is involved at all.
  
  Separately, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory took a look at the structural data on the material - called LK-99 - and said:

  I present the calculated spin-polarized electronic structure in Fig. 3. Remarkably, I find an isolated set of flat bands crossing the Fermi level, with a maximum bandwidth of ∼130 meV (see Fig.4) that is separated from the rest of the valence manifold by 160 meV. Such a narrow bandwidth is particularly indicative of strongly correlated bands. . .unlike other correlated-d band superconductors, in this system the Cu-d bands are particularly flat – there is minimal band broadening from neighboring oxygen ions. If previous assumptions about band flatness driving superconductivity are correct, then this result would suggest a much more robust (higher temperature) superconducting phase exists in this system, even compared to well-established high-TC systems.

  Which is saying that on a purely theoretical basis this looks just like what we'd expect from a high-temperature superconductor.
  
  Lowe (the author of In the Pipeline) concludes:

  I am guardedly optimistic at this point. The Shenyang and Lawrence Berkeley calculations are very positive developments, and take this well out of the cold-fusion "we can offer no explanation" territory. ... This is by far the most believable shot at room-temperature-and-pressure superconductivity the world has seen so far, and the coming days and weeks are going to be extremely damned interesting.

  
  
  
• Testing graph databases and reporting the results as seventy pages of text and a handful of illegible microscopic scatter plots.  (Mihai)
  
  Well, that was a waste of time.
  
  
  
• Nim 2.0 is out.  (Nim)
  
  If you want a statically compiled, statically typed Python, this is your best bet.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's new AI image generate fits on a floppy disk and takes 4 minutes to train.  (Decrypt)
  
  And not one of those fancy 1.44MB floppies either, we're talking about an Apple II single-sided single-density jobbie.
  
  
  
• Facebook's ban on Canadian government propaganda - laughingly referred to as "news" - takes effect today.  (Engadget)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Twitter is suing "hate speech researchers" - which is to say fascists - for scaring off advertisers - which is to say mostly also fascists. (Ars Technica)

  Lawsuit comes as Musk and Yaccarino seize control of X's trust and safety team.

  Now? Only now you are doing this?
  
  Day one you should have fired them all. Every single one.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Twitter, they've made changes to the ads to get around AdBlockPlus.
  
  It sucks. And that's with supposedly reduced ads on a paid account.
  
  
  
• Apple asked users why they were turning off the "conversation awareness" feature on their AirPods.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Users: Because it sucks.
  
  
  
• Anker's new USB-C power adapter can fast-charge a 16" MacBook Pro.  (The Verge)
  
  It can put out 140W on one port for a large laptop while still having 100W left over to charge your phone and tablet.
  
  USB-C itself now supports charging at up to 240W - 48V at 5A - though I haven't seen anything using that full power yet.  The Framework Laptop 16 comes with a 180W USB-C charger, which is getting there, and hopefully dedicated chargers will soon disappear even for gaming laptops.
  
  
  
• The Galaxy Z Fold 5 is here, which is odd because it seems the Z Fold 4 only came out a week ago.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  As before, it's expensive and awkward, too narrow when folded up and too wide when unfolded.  You'd be better off in almost every way with a regular phone and a regular small tablet EXCEPT THERE ARE NO GOOD SMALL TABLETS SAMSUNG I'M LOOKING AT YOU.

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, August 02 2023 10:04 PM (JqCHh)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 02 2023 11:24 PM (zx18t)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 02 2023 11:25 PM (zx18t)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 02 2023 11:57 PM (BMUHC)

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• An FBI investigation into the US government agency that paid a contractor for an infamous piece of Israeli spyware used in unconstitutional warrantless surveillance has turned up the fact the culprit is the FBI.  (New York Times - archive site)
  
  If you guessed that at the start of the sentence you win some Kewpie mayonnaise.
  
  
  
• Massachusetts legislators are planning a tax of streaming services to fund 200 community access cable channels.  (Boston Globe - archive site)
  
  Nobody tell them about the internet.  They might cry.
  
  
  
• The US and Europe are growing alarmed that, having been denied access to the latest technologies for producing the most advanced chips, China is now using older technologies to produce less advanced chips.  (Time - archive site)
  
  Judging from this story the US and Europe are not very bright.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Dell is all-in on generative AI.  (The Verge)
  
  Oh, they're not planning to use it.  It's crap.
  
  But if you want to deploy your own crap generative AI, they are happy to sell you very expensive servers to run it on.
  
  
  
• Basic computer games has been translated.  (GitHub)
  
  The 1978 classic book Basic Computer Games has been translated into a dozen other languages.  Not French or Spanish, though, but C and Java and Python.
  
  Why?  I don't know why.  But there it is.
  
  
  
• Samsung is losing billions of dollars on DRAM and flash production.  (AnandTech)
  
  The company still managed to eke out a small profit thanks to its other divisions, but while cheap memory is great for consumers, it's not so great for memory companies.  
  
  Of which there are only about three left in the world because the last time this happened the rest of them went bankrupt.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 02 2023 12:05 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 02 2023 05:47 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 02 2023 05:48 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, August 04 2023 02:11 PM (BzEjn)

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• Sam Altman-Fried, CEO of OpenAI (corporate motto: In a world of Saurons, be a Saruman), has run into a snag with his new venture, Worldcoin: It is a transparent totalitarian takeover and existing governments don't appreciate anyone muscling in on their turf. (Tech Crunch)

  Worldcoin, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s bid to sew up the market for verifying humanness by convincing enough mobile meatsacks to have their eyeballs scanned in exchanged for crypto tokens (yes, really), only started its official global rollout this week but it’s already landed on the radar of European data protection authorities.
  
  Why should anyone feel the need to prove their humanness on the Internet? Well one reason is that by unleashing free power tools like ChatGPT Altman’s generative AI company is leading the charge to make it harder to distinguish between bot-generated and human digital activity. But don’t worry, he’s got an eyeball-scanning orb-plus-crypto-token to sell humanity on for that!

  Tech Crunch is sounding almost appropriately cynical here.
  
  The idea behind Worldcoin is they will pay their victims - I mean, their early adopters, a small amount of cryptocurrency to have their retinas scanned and recorded.
  
  A cryptocurrency they just made up.
  
  And of which they have reserved a huge chunk for themselves.
  
  And trust them, they would never permit all that critical biometric data to be misused in any way.
  
  It's basically a credit card fraud ring combined with a massive Ponzi scheme, only with venture capital funding.

Tech News

• The Biden Administration is planning to spend $100 million on products produced from "transformed climate pollution". (Energy.gov)
  
  You know what transforms "climate pollution"?
  
  Trees.
  
  On the plus side, $100 million is peanuts on the scale of things. A lot of peanuts, but still peanuts.
  
  
  
• Why do banks still use IBM mainframes? Because they work. (Ars Technica)
  
  That's it. That's the story.
  
  
  
• After one disastrous quarter, Intel has returned to profitability. (The Register)
  
  Good. They might not be my favourite company, but any company without adequate competition will turn rotten.
  
  
  
• Expect the Radeon 7700 and 7800 to be announced in three weeks. (Notebook Check)
  
  And to be priced at $449 and $549 respectively.
  
  The article gives price ranges of $399 to $449 for the 7700 and $499 to $549 for the 7800. But it also gives a price range of $579 to $649 for the 7900, and that has now been officially announced at $649.
  
  A $399 7700 would kill the 8GB 4060 Ti, and a $499 7800 would kill the 16GB version, so we shouldn't expect to see either.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 01 2023 05:37 AM (zx18t)

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• So, that new room-temperature superconductor announcement?  Maybe not, say other scientists.  (Science)
  
  And one of the tests supposed to illustrate its superconducting properties might just be demonstrating Lenz's law.  Superconductors respond in interesting ways to static magnetic fields, but regular conductors can respond in similar ways to changing magnetic fields, so the actually demonstrate superconductivity you have to keep your field static, which they kind of completely failed to do, at least in one particular video.
  
  It's not fraud or anything, since the paper describes exactly how to create the alleged miracle material, just possible bad research.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Elon Musk is the main reason why Tesla Model 3 owners are switching to other EV brands.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Terrible, terrible headline, because the actual story points out that of the Tesla customers who did sell their Model 3 and buy a different brand, 21.5% said it's because they're mindless Marxists angry that Twitter is no longer their own personal hugbox.
  
  
  
• Speaking of hugboxes Ars Technica managed to cover a Falcon Heavy launch of a 10 ton EchoStar satellite without the comment section turning into the Two Minute Hate in the first page.  (Ars Technica)
  
  There are a couple of such comments on page two but they got downvoted into oblivion.
  
  Good for you, Ars Technica.  Keep it up and we might be able to let play with the other children again.
  
  
  
• The latest Windows 11 update - currently only in the preview channel - breaks third-party apps that fix Windows 11's shitty start menu.  (PC World)
  
  If this makes its way to release I'll go ahead and reinstall this laptop with Windows 10 as planned.  Good litmus test of whether Microsoft cares at all about its paying customers.
  
  Windows 10 at least has the signal virtue that it's been abandoned except for security patches so Microsoft isn't actively trying to break it.
  
  
  
• Intel's 3nm node is on track for next year, says Intel.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  TSMC started first production of 3nm last year, as did Samsung, but their respective 5nm processes are still used for most leading-edge chips.  Apple's next iPhone - later this year - may or may not have a 3nm chip.
  
  Next year we should see lots more 3nm chips from all three manufacturers.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 30 2023 06:27 PM (obo9H)

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• As Threads "soars", Bluesky and Mastodon are adopting algorithmic feeds.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  You will eat the bugs.  You will live in the pod.  You will read what we tell you.  You will own nothing and we don't much care if you are happy.
  
  
  
• Soars straight into the ground: Most of the hundred million people who accidentally clicked over from Instagram to Threads have stopped using it.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The article notes that Threads' count of active users dropped by 75% in two weeks.  It doesn't mention that the amount of time the remaining users spend on the app also dropped by 75%.
  
  Facebook and Instagram executives called this a positive sign and "better than expected".  No, they really did.

• AMD has announced the Ryzen 7945HX3D, their first laptop chip with 3D v-cache.  (AnandTech)
  
  One to look out for if you're after a high-end gaming laptop.  I'd like to see a workstation version with the extra cache on both dies rather than just one.  Since a laptop chip is already power-constrained, adding the cache to both dies is unlikely to cause heat problems.
  
  
  
• Aziyo Biologics has issued a product recall after its bone matrix material was found to be infected with tuberculosis.  Again.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Have you guys ever considered not accidentally killing your customers?
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 30 2023 04:12 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, July 30 2023 05:17 AM (liVFZ)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, July 31 2023 09:01 PM (JqCHh)

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• Conservatives were bombarded with misinformation in the leadup to the 2020 election according to a study by Facebook "researchers" who rank MSNBC as more reliable than the CRC Handbook. (Forbes)
  
  Uh huh.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Facebook has lost $21 billion to date on its virtual reality push because its "researchers" totally have their finger on the public pulse. (CNBC)
  
  In the most recent quarter the company spent $4 billion on virtual reality compared to revenues of $276 million.
  
  What the fuck they are spending all that money on I have no idea because it looks like a tech demo from 1993.

• AMD has announced the Radeon 7900 Golden Rabbit Edition at $649. (WCCFTech)
  
  I ignored this at first because it looked like a China-only release, but it now has official US pricing.
  
  Compared to the 7900 XT this model cuts the core count by 10% and reduces RAM from 20GB to 16GB, but the 7900 XT launched at an MSRP of $899 so it's also a lot cheaper.
  
  AMD is still expected to launch a 16GB 7800 at $549 and a 12GB 7700 at $449 in the coming months.
  
  Ignoring the rabbits (which may not be an entirely safe thing to do) this means you can now build an AMD system with a 7900 CPU and a 7900 GPU.
  
  
  
• Congress is at it again with a bill that purports to protect children online but actually... Huh. (Congress.gov)
  
  I'll need to read the whole thing because a quick skim didn't find the usual privacy horrors we see with this sort of thing.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, the new legislation is upsetting all the right people. (The Verge)

  Digital rights advocates have also suggested that KOSA could prevent LGBTQIA+ teens from finding the resources they may need online without coming out to their parents due to the parental consent requirements of the bill.

  Sounds unexpectedly based.
  
  
  
• The 4TB Western Digitial SN850X has now dropped to $269 on Amazon. (Notebook Check)
  
  This is a solid SSD and that would have been an incredible price a year ago. The 4TB Team MP34 dipped as low as $160 a few weeks ago but that's half the speed of the SN850X.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk said that Twitter - that is, X - will be abandoning light mode and going dark only and The Verge had to run with the story in the five minutes it took for outraged users to swarm and the decision to be reversed. (The Verge)
  
  They do still plan to remove "dim" mode which nobody anywhere has ever used.

Not Tech News

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 29 2023 12:32 AM (zx18t)

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• You can't compete with free.  (The Verge)
  
  Neeva was a search engine startup founded by ex-Google engineers - back when Google still had engineers - to build a better search engine.
  
  The founders noted a fundamental problem with Google.  Being funded by advertising, and having a limited number of ads per page, there was a deep incentive not to push the best search results to the top.
  
  So Neeeva built their own search engine focusing on paying customers - and went broke, because people didn't want to pay for a better solution when the bad solution was free.
  
  How do we get out of this bind?
  
  I see two possible avenues, both generally applicable:
  
  One, an organisation that benefits from good search tools internally and is in competition with Google in other areas open-sources their work because first this gets lots of developers to contribute free work, and second it blows a hole in the competition's revenue stream.  Facebook has done this with its AI research, clearly aiming at wrecking OpenAI and accidentally doing some good in the process.
  
  Two, collaborative effort.  One company can't afford $10 billion to develop a better search engine, but millions of developers pooling their resources?  It's not Facebook's own AI research that has doomed OpenAI to extinction, but hobbyists frantically iterating on incomprehensibly sophisticated algorithms at 3AM so they can produce funny videos.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 28 2023 12:15 AM (zx18t)

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