• 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)

Posted by: Tower at Wednesday, April 17 2024 12:21 PM (XJA3c)

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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.

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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.

• I'm a tech journalist, which means I'm a whiny idiot.  (PC World)
  
  It is difficult to overstate the patheticness of this man's existence.  He got exactly what he asked for and now protests that his life is ruined.
  
  
  

Tech News

• ugBasic is a Basic compiler for the 6502, 6809, and Z80.  (Vintage is the New Old)
  
  It has a modern windowed IDE, because, well, it runs on Windows.  But it produces code for a broad range of popular systems from the late 70s and 80s, including Commodore's systems between the PET and the Amiga, Atari's pre-ST systems, the Color Computer (which I had), the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, MSX 1, and a couple of weird things from Europe I've never heard of before.
  
  Looks pretty good if you're interested in that kind of thing.  Which I might be, having just ordered a book on reverse-engineering the ZX Spectrum's video ULA.
  
  
  
• Not much tech news today.  A Hellmouth has opened up in Turkey, government officials in Ohio released a cloud of phosgene gas on the unsuspecting public, and the USAF is playing Bloons TD 6, but no tech news.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, February 13 2023 12:09 AM (eDgJX)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, February 13 2023 06:45 AM (BzEjn)

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• GitLab has announced it is laying of 7% of its staff, blaming it on a "tough macroeconomic environment".  (GitLab)
  
  Sure.  It's totally that our idiot leaders have destroyed the world's economy and not because you're getting your lunch eaten by your major compet-
  
  
  
• GitLab's major competitor GitHub is closing offices and laying off 10% of its staff.  (Twitter)
  
  Global recession it is.
  
  
  
• Yahoo is laying off 20% of its staff.  (Axios)
  
  Yahoo still exists?
  
  
  
• Holocure 0.5 is out, with Hololive Japan's Gen 1 and Gen 2.  The next update is confirmed to include all three generations of Hololive Indonesia - the game's creator confirmed it in chat while HoloID Gen 3's resident penguin Kaela Kovalskia was playing the game.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Need a 2TB M.2 2230 SSD for your Steam Deck or Surface Pro?  Framework has them.  (Frame.work)
  
  Yes, the laptop company.  No, the laptop doesn't use 2230 drives - they'll fit but won't lock into place - but since they already buy tons of SSDs and 2230 drives are hard to find at retail, why not make a few bucks selling just the SSDs?
  
  I have two Dell laptops that have empty 2230 drive bays that could use these...  Except they're not cheap at $299 for 2TB.
  
  
  
• Intel's 24 core Sapphire Rapids Xeon W workstation CPU is 12% faster than AMD's 24 core Zen 3 Threadripper.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's not amazing, but it's not completely terrible.  Except that makes it less than 20% faster than AMD's Ryzen 7950X or Intel's own 13900K, and it will be a lot more than 20% more expensive.
  
  
  
• Those Xeon W CPUs have power ratings up to 350W, which is a lot.  (WCCFTech)
  
  But this is Intel, and their 125W CPUs use up to 300W already.  The 350W models use 600W, or 900W if you over clock them.
  
  Toasty.
  
  
  

• Google and Microsoft have discovered this thing called the "web" and decided it needs to die.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Google had a good try at this previously with its PageRank algorithm, which ranked websites based on the number of incoming links, which created an epidemic of comment spam and fake websites that persists to this day.
  
  What Google and Microsoft plan to do now is to cut out not just the middleman but the creators themselves.  Rather than search engines taking you to the websites that contain the original content, the tech companies will use AI to rewrite the content - since expression can be copyrighted but facts cannot - poorly - because that's what AI currently does.
  
  If you've tried searching for rare subjects recently you'd have noticed that search engines have been going down hill, overwhelmed by the crap epidemic that they themselves spawned.
  
  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,
  Time to just burn it down and walk away.
  
  
  

Tech News

• ASRock's new 4x4 NUC uses a Ryzen 7000 - sort of.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is why I said previously not to buy anything without your secret decoder ring.  This NUC uses AMD's Ryzen 7735U.  The first 7 means it's a 2023 model.  The second 7 means it's fairly high end.  The 5 at the end is stupid, inconsistent, and in this case irrelevant.
  
  And the 3 means it's a Ryzen 6800U and all the other numbers are lies.
  
  The Ryzen 6800U is a great CPU and you shouldn't hesitate to buy it.  The Ryzen 7740U if and when it shows up should be even better, but not hugely so.
  
  
  
• I've noted multiple times that Apple is increasingly locking down its hardware so that it cannot be upgraded, or increasingly, even repaired.
  
  But they haven't yet gone so far as encrypting the batteries.
  
  
  
  If you buy a OnePlus tablet and the battery fails, you need to take it to your nearest authorised OnePlus service center - which doesn't exist.
  
  Also, batteries always fail.  They have a limited lifespan due to the chemical reactions involved, so they need to be easy to replace.
  
  Which is why manufacturers make this as difficult as possible.
  
  
  
• If you want to build your own retrocomputer based on a new old chip like the eZ80 or the 65C265, you quickly run into a problem: The CPUs are still in production and readily available (though they cost more than newer, faster designs like the RP2040) but the video chips from the day like the MC6845 were discontinued decades ago.
  
  There are still sources - the chips were churned out by the millions during the 80s and they just don't die - but there's an alternative (short of using an FPGA): EVE.
  
  It's designed for controlling LCD interfaces in embedded devices, but it has a completely generic interface with with a QSPI host bus, RGB digital output and HSYNC/RSYNC pins.  Add a few resistors and you can get 64, 512, or 4096 colours out and plug it into anything with a VGA input - becoming rarer but also still readily available.
  
  The range starts with 256kB of on-chip RAM and a maximum resolution of 480x320, and a price of $4.  With 1MB RAM and a resolution of 1280x800 it only increases to $5.90, but that's probably overkill for a retrocomputer.
  
  It includes onboard fonts in multiple sizes, starting at 8x8 and going up to a huge 36x49, and a sound generator that handles basic MIDI music.  It seems to only have a single voice but can also play back 8-bit PCM or uLAW audio if you need something fancier.
  
  Seems like a handy thing to have around.

Posted by: Jojo at Thursday, February 09 2023 08:56 PM (9M5WY)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 10 2023 08:04 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Annata20 at Friday, August 25 2023 01:05 PM (5BXrS)

Posted by: jeffreestar at Friday, March 08 2024 12:06 PM (3MHjG)

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• If you have a Wyze brand security system, it's going to go offline for two hours starting at midnight Pacific Time.  (The Verge)
  
  They're doing app maintenance, and in the process every single product they make will lose connectivity.
  
  Never buy anything that needs to be connected to the internet via a service provided by a single company.

• Big Data is dead.  (Mother Duck)
  
  There was a movement early this millennium toward sophisticated solutions for managing big data - datasets too large to fit on a single machine.  The article notes that depending on your platform this might not have been that large at the time: The original virtual server offering from Amazon came in a single size with just 2GB of RAM. 
  
  Today you can get an EC2 instance with 24TB of RAM and 448 CPU cores.  Sure, it costs $150,000 per month, but...  Actually that's kind of a lot.  Still probably cheaper than staffing up an entire team of engineers to manage your big data platform.
  
  
  
• The Razor Blade 16 is terribly expensive but not terrible.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It has a 3840x2400 screen, an Intel 13950HX (8P plus 16E cores), 32GB of RAM, a mobile RTX 4090 with 16GB of VRAM (basically a 4080), and dual 1TB SSDs.
  
  It lacks the Four Essential Keys and costs over $4000.  On the other hand it's very fast, surprisingly quiet, and has an adequate amount of memory and storage.
  
  
  
• The desktop RTX 4070 and 4060 are expected by the middle of the year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  As always, it comes down to price.  The current generation of video cards are all overpriced, except perhaps Intel's A750 at $250.
  
  
  
• AMD's Ryzen 7040 laptop chips don't have PCIe 5.0.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is not in any way a surprise.  There's little point to PCIe 5.0 anywhere right now, and all it would do on a laptop is decrease battery life.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, February 09 2023 11:29 AM (r9O5h)

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