• AI makes shit up.  (PowerLine)

  Crawford H. "Chet" Taylor served as the 14th governor of South Dakota, from 1949 to 1951. Taylor was born on July 23, 1915, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and he grew up in nearby Flandreau. Taylor attended the University of South Dakota, where he earned a law degree.

  Of course, this is ChatGPT "hallucinating" again.  Chet Taylor not only was never elected governor of South Dakota, no such person ever existed.
  
  While Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is announcing incomprehensibly expensive AI supercomputers at Computex, the actual results of generative AI - in the field of language and information, where all the interest and the big money is right now - are frankly, shit.
  
  Things are looking much better when it comes to AI-generated art, because there the look of the thing is what matters.  Is that a period-accurate representation of 2nd century Rome in the background behind the topless gladiatrix?  Nobody cares, so long as it looks good.
  
  Well, one person cares.  We'll get to him.
  
  And Chet Taylor looks good too.  He's just not real.  And since ChatGPT can't sustain a hallucination long enough to form a coherent short story, just for a couple of paragraphs, so it's utterly valueless.
  
  Nvidia still has a valuation greater than AMD and Intel combined, but at least one corner of that market cap is built on sand.

• Computex - the world's largest computer industry show - is back after a three-year Bat Flu hiatus, and there's an absolute flood of announcements to catch up with.  (The Verge)
  
  Just kidding.  There ain't shit.
  
  
  
• Solana's founder sees potential for it to become the "Apple of crypto".  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I've mentioned before that my job involves practical applications of blockchains, and I've worked with Solana.
  
  It's crap.
  
  
  
• MediaTek's next high-end chip could contain four Cortex X4 cores and drop the low-power cores entirely.  (Notebook Check)
  
  If this comes to a laptop it could finally be worth checking out.  Earlier attempts at Arm-based PCs have been pretty sad affairs.
  
  
  
• A professor who was stitched up by the FBI has won the right to sue the government.  (NBC News)
  
  Xiaoxing Xi was arrested in 2015 on charges of fraud related to economic espionage, but the case folded like a damp tissue when it went to court thanks to the FBI basically just making shit up.
  
  As they do.
  
  
  
• What kind of idiot would buy a DRAMless PCIe 5 SSD?  (AnandTech)
  
  You'd only buy a PCIe 5 SSD if you needed the absolute best speed you can get, and most of the time you'd be better off with a regular PCIe 4 SSD with a DRAM cache than a more expensive PCIe 5 model without.
  
  
  

That Guy Video of the Day

He actually discusses the historicity of topless Roman gladiatrices in another video (spoiler: they were real, and spectacular).   Here he's just debunking the notion - nearly Jaynesian in its vapidity - that the ancient Greeks couldn't see the colour blue.



Well-researched and well-argued, including a deconstruction of an old RadioLab episode that I had assumed was largely accurate.  He is careful to address the argument rather than attacking the arguer except in the case of the BBC, who just made shit up and fully deserve it.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 30 2023 11:29 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 30 2023 11:33 PM (k3/O4)

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