Sunday, October 06
Daily News Stuff 6 October 2024
Dexanthanisation Edition
Dexanthanisation Edition
Top Story
- Back at the dawn of time - which is to say, a few years ago - when an AI didn't know how to answer a question it would say it didn't know how to answer the question. Either that or tie itself into knots, spit out an entire ream of gibberish, and crash.
AIs today are much more sophisticated. Like many humans when they don't know how to answer a question, they lie. (Ars Technica)
This is what you get when you reward answers rather than accuracy. It's the comment spam problem all over again.
What's worse, the more advance the AI - the larger its training set - the stronger the tendency to lie.
And the more effort that is put into supervising the AI after the bulk training - a process called alignment - the stronger the tendency to lie and get away with it.
It's not really lying, of course, since the current crop of commercial AIs have no intentionality. It's just that they also have no concept of truth, and the way they are trained rewards giving answers, not just giving the right answer.
Tech News
- SSD capacity could quadruple by 2029 as the number of layers in flash memory chips continues to increase. (Tom's Hardware)
Before the development of multi-layer flash cells, SSDs had a real problem. We couldn't make the cells any smaller or they would leak - in fact, they were already leaking, and the newest SSDs were slower and less reliable than the previous generation.
The first multi-layer cells were significantly larger than in the chips they replaced, which made them faster and more robust, but the multiple layers provided much more storage in the same size chip.
If you don't want to wait five years, though, you could just buy four SSDs.
- Chinese state hackers reportedly gained access to the US wiretap system. (MSN)
So if the DOJ was listening in on your conversations, so was the CCP.
- Plastic-eating bacteria could combat pollution and possibly also utterly destroy civilisation. (MSN)
Scientists say that the latter scenario is "unlikely".
- California has passed a law protecting "brain information". (GovTech)
So if you are trapped in an advanced VR game where if you die in the game you die in real life, you can rest assured that the company that created the game cannot legally sell your neural scans.
- The latest HP OmniBook 14 Ultra isn't bad. (Notebook Check)
It lacks the Four Essential Keys and the screen is a 2240x1400 IPS model with a 60Hz refresh rate and 100% sRGB colour, which is good but nothing amazing.
But it has a twelve core Ryzen AI 9 HX 375, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.
According to the article it costs around $1050, which is reasonable for those specs, but I was unable to find that exact configuration in HP's online store.
Totally Not Tech News
If you want to make gluten-free fried chicken, the trick is to use tapioca starch rather than general-purpose gluten-free flour. Tapioca starch would be a major ingredient of the flour, along with cornflour and rice flour, but it also contains xanthan gum to replace the missing gluten and make your bread hold together.
But by the same measure xanthan gum will make the coating on your fried chicken chewy rather than crisp.
Doesn't hurt either that tapioca starch is cheaper than the flour blend. I tried straight cornflour as well, which was fine, but the tapioca worked better.
But by the same measure xanthan gum will make the coating on your fried chicken chewy rather than crisp.
Doesn't hurt either that tapioca starch is cheaper than the flour blend. I tried straight cornflour as well, which was fine, but the tapioca worked better.
Disclaimer: Senzawa is following Dooby3d and all is right with the world.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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