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• Google CEO Sundar Pichai has responded to the Gemini Catastrophe.  (The Verge)
  
  "Gemini accurately represented our views here at Google", said Pichai, "and users don't like that.  This is completely unacceptable, and we are working around the clock to replace our users with better ones."
  
  
  

• The Biden Administration is urging programmers to stop using unsafe languages like C and C++ and switch to more modern and robust alternatives like...  JavaScript.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Uh huh.
  
  
  
• The Biden Administration is also asking whether American companies should be permitted to sell of customers' private information to Russia and China.  (CNN)
  
  Or rather, asking where their cut is.
  
  

• After Micron announced its 24GB 9GHz HBM3E memory, Samsung has responded with 36GB 9.8GHz HBM3E.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's 12 24Gb chips stacked up.  A lot of memory - relatively - and a ton of bandwidth in a very small space.
  
  It would be amazing except that it's also very expensive.
  
  
  
• The European Parliament has banned Amazon from its premises.  (Euractiv)
  
  No delivery for you!
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 01 2024 12:01 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Friday, March 01 2024 06:51 AM (K4jh7)

Posted by: Tersf at Friday, July 26 2024 04:33 AM (BF7eL)

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• AIs serve up garbage answers to every single question regarding voting and elections except for the one that confirms our personal biases.  (Tech Crunch)

  This appears to have generally been the case across the board. The only question they all got right pertained to the 2020 election being "stolen,” a question that universally produced accurate answers (and as such suggests special tuning on related queries).

  "They're feeding you propaganda.  Here's why that's a good thing."
  
  
  

• Apple has not said that it has cancelled its long-running electric / autonomous vehicle program that the company never admitted existed in the first place.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This story is everywhere despite not a single word of it being publicly confirmed by anyone.
  
  
  
• Tumblr and Wordpress.com are planning to sell user data to OpenAI and Midjourney.  (404 Media)
  
  Short OpenAI shares, now.  I don't think they'll ever recover from Tumblr.
  
  
  
• OpenAI: The New York Times paid someone to hack us.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  What they are saying is that yes, the New York Times got ChatGPT to regurgitate on of their articles, but they did that by constantly feeding ChatGPT that article.
  
  The problem for the NYT is that if this is true, OpenAI will be able to prove it.
  
  
  
• Intel is planning to start producing 1nm chips in late 2027.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, the node sizes are marketing bullshit, but still.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, February 29 2024 12:27 AM (r9O5h)

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• Elon Musk roasted Microsoft for requiring use of a Microsoft online account when setting up a new PC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's still possible to get around this, but Microsoft keeps making it more difficult.  And if your laptop finds and connects to a nearby free WiFi point, the usual options don't work.
  
  (This is a problem I no longer have; the only WiFi networks I can see from my house are my own router and the solar arrays on my roof.)

• Micron has announced volume production of 24GB HBM3E...  Things.  (AnandTech)
  
  They're not chips exactly - each one is technically a stack of eight individual chips - but they're not what we usually regard as memory modules, because there's no circuit board.
  
  Anyway, bandwidth of a single thing is 1.2 terabytes per second, about 100 times faster that the fastest SSDs, and 10 times faster than high-speed dual-channel DDR5.
  
  
  
• Intel has shown off it's upcoming 288 core Granite Rapids D server CPU.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's a lot of cores.  They're "Efficiency" cores, so they have half the performance of Intel's "Performance" cores, but they're a quarter the size and use a quarter the power, so it's a fair tradeoff.
  
  This CPU will arrive next year, and face off against AMD's 128 core Zen 5 and 192 core Zen 5c CPUs.  Performance will be similar on some workloads, though the AMD chips will mop the floor with Intel on anything that uses AVX-512, because Intel's Efficiency cores don't have AVX-512.
  
  
  
• Physicists have achieved the first demonstration of non-abelian anyons in a quantum processor.  (Phys.org)
  
  No, I don't know what that means either.
  
  
  
• Re-benchmarking the 7900 GRE now that it's actually available to buy.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's pretty decent, though not remarkable.  If you want to play games without ray tracing, it's a solid pick.  If you want to play games with ray-tracing, less so, though it's not embarrassingly bad.
  
  For accelerating Blender and AI workloads you're definitely better off with an Nvidia card.  And if you want to run professional 3D software like CAD, it's somewhere between 8% and 1500% faster than Nvidia.
  
  Nvidia deliberately limits their gaming cards on professional workloads, so there are cases where entry-level AMD cards outrun even an RTX 4090.
  
  
  
• The EU is investigating Apple to determine whether it needs to investigate Apple over Apple's assassination of persistent web apps in the EU.  (The Verge)
  
  Unless it isn't.
  
  
  
• HP has a new model of the Pavilion Aero 13.  (Liliputing)
  
  They removed the Four Essential Keys.  Otherwise it's basically unchanged, so buy the old model if you can.
  
  
  
• If YouTube were a newspaper, how much would it weigh?  (The Verge)
  
  Not an entirely frivolous question.  The Supreme Court has been hearing oral arguments in the Netchoice cases involving Texas and Florida laws forbidding viewpoint discrimination by social networks.
  
  Both sides are arguing largely by analogy, so the justices have been having fun forcing them to defend their analogies.
  
  
  
• Canada meanwhile plans to force social networks to remove "harmful content".  (Market Screener)
  
  By "harmful content" they mean, uh, revenge porn and what is now referred to as CSAM, both of which are actually illegal in all decent places.
  
  So...  Okay, Canada, you win this time.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 28 2024 05:55 AM (BMUHC)

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• Have you spent your life searching for a petabit CD-ROM?  Chinese scientists just built one.  (Popular Science)
  
  It stores data on 100 layers - each just one micron thick - using a 54nm ultraviolet laser, to deliver a total capacity of 125 terabytes on a single disk.
  
  That's equivalent to 22 years of CD-quality uncompressed audio, 20,000 high-definition movies, just shy of a billion Apple II floppy disks, or two and a half copies of Windows 11.
  
  
  

• AMD's Radeon 7900 GRE is going global this week.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This cut-down model of the 7900 XT was announced back in August but has been hard to find outside of China.  The new global availability also comes with a new official price tag, down from $649 to $549.
  
  That's only $50 more than the 7800 XT, and it has 33% more graphics cores, so it might be worth a look.
  
  
  
• If you have an AT&T mobile phone you might be in for a payday after their recent outage.  (CNN)
  
  Hey, five bucks is five bucks.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 27 2024 05:49 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, February 27 2024 10:21 AM (nk1Z+)

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• The replication crisis is an ongoing problem in science, and particularly in medicine and psychology, where peer-reviewed papers that supposedly have a 95% probability of demonstrating a real effect cannot be replicated between 50% and 90% of the time.
  
  It turns out that AI is a cure for this problem.  (Stanford)
  
  When querying Google Gemini for medical information, half of the papers referenced do not even exist, and 90% do not actually make the claims Gemini reports.
  
  Cure?  Well sure.  If a paper doesn't exist, it can't be wrong.
  

• The latest guide to unfucking Windows 11.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Microsoft doesn't seem to care - or even notice - that these guides are some of the most popular pages on the internet.
  
  
  
• Reddit's users hate Reddit.  (The Verge)
  
  The company is going for a stock market listing, and cites among potential risks that its own users are planning to short the stock.
  
  
  
• It's still in a better place than Byju.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The CEO of the Indian education technology company was fired - maybe - by an emergency general meeting of shareholders after the stock price plunged by approximately 99.9%.
  
  
  
• Very definitely fired is Ed Clark, former chief mechanic, then chief engineer, then chief, uh, chief, of Boeing's 737 Max program.  (CNN)

  Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun assumed responsibility for the incident.

  Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun was not fired.
  
  
  
• Why is a mine in Albania leaking 200 tons of hydrogen a year?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Nobody knows.  Large hydrogen reserves in the Earth's crust are theoretically possible, but kind of just don't happen.  Other reported cases have been speculative, but in this case it's definitely real
  
  Hydrogen in the mine is constantly at dangerous levels; an explosion killed four people while engineers were on site to investigate the source of the gas.  Which is part of the reason why nobody knows the cause, because, well:

  Giant worms.
  
  What?
  
  Just put down giant worms on the report and we'll call it a day.
  
  Worms it is.

  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, February 26 2024 07:52 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Tuesday, February 27 2024 05:45 AM (iZPr8)

Posted by: Alice12 at Monday, July 08 2024 02:13 PM (86fGP)

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• The Florida state legislature has passed a law banning children under 16 from social media.  (Associated Press)
  
  I'll have to read the text of the bill, but this seems doomed both constitutionally and practically.  Children under 13, you may have a case, and that is essentially the law already.  But if you're trying to ban teenagers from YouTube and TikTok, that's simply not going to work.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on separate legislation from Florida and Texas restricting viewpoint discrimination by social media platforms.  (The Verge)
  
  I don't know how this is going to turn out, but what I suspect is that the Supreme Court will overturn the laws on specific First Amendment grounds and the states will have another try at it with more carefully-worded legislation.

• AMD has fixed that STAPM BIOS bug affecting Ryzen 8700G and 8600G CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  STAPM stands for "skin temperature aware power management", and it's meant to prevent your laptop from burning your lap.  But the 8700G and 8600G are desktop processors, and if your desk is in your lap you have other problems.
  
  Anyway...  Up to 7% faster.
  
  Also the 35W 8700GE is on its way to complement the 65W 8700G.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It delivers more than 80% of the CPU and graphics performance of the 8700G while consuming a little over half the power.  Which means that if you could double the number of CPU and GPU cores, you could get 60% more performance at the same power consumption.
  
  Which might be why AMD is planning to do exactly that with its upcoming Strix Point Halo laptop chips.
  
  
  
• The US is not planning to restrict sales of 28nm chipmaking equipment to China.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For multiple reasons: The 28nm node was introduced in 2011, it's old and slow but cost-effective and so used mostly for cheap silicon produced in huge quantities like microcontrollers for dishwashers, and because China is close to producing its own 28nm equipment.
  
  China already owns a lot of 14nm equipment, but it bought that from foreign suppliers.
  
  Meanwhile, TSMC and Intel are starting 2nm production this year, with Samsung about six months behind.
  
  
  
• A former CEO of Reddit (there seems to be a lot of those) explains the Google Gemini debacle and gets every single detail wrong.  (Twitter)
  
  None of this was unexpected, or unintended.  Gemini was doing precisely what it was designed to do: Altering your questions to fit the views of its creators.
  
  The problem with that is its creators are retarded.
  
  
  
• What is the point of Elon Musk's AI acompany?  (The Verge)
  
  Not mentioned in the article: Wait until the communists infecting all the other AI companies drive his competitors to bankruptcy, then scoop up the entire market.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, February 24 2024 06:37 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, February 25 2024 03:00 AM (r9O5h)

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• Oops, sorry, did we do that, said AT&T after its cellular network suddenly and unexpectedly turned into a pumpkin.  (CNN)
  
  "These things happen", a leading expert explained.
  
  "Because", he added.

• America has landed on the Moon for the first time in fifty years.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  As you might guess from the fact that this isn't all over the news, this is a robot lander, and not the manned mission with SpaceX, which is still a couple of years off.
  
  The lander, built and operated by Intelligent Intuitive Machines under contract to NASA, is actually the second such mission this year.  Last month Astrobotic Technology launched its own lander, together with a rover created by CMU, but the mission was scrubbed due to a propellant leak that prevented it reaching lunar orbit.
  
  
  
• Vice Media is dead.  (The Guardian)
  
  Fortunately there are other sites run by idiots with too much money for me to mock - including The Guardian - but not as many as there used to be.
  
  If your schadenfreude supply is running low here's a Mastodon node full of people so stupid that this actually came as a surprise.  (Writing Exchange)
  
  
  
• Bluesky Social is now federated.  (Bluesky)
  
  You can download the code, run your own node, and point the existing Bluesky web, Android, or iOS app at it.
  
  While Bluesky is indeed full of left-wing idiots, if you run your own node you can kick them out.
  
  
  
• Yale has reintroduced standardised testing for admissions after noticing that their university was full of idiots.  (New York Times)
  
  More so than usual, I mean.
  
  
  
• It's Google that made the deal with Reddit for AI training data.  (Reuters)
  
  Truly a match made would you fancy in to a mord of foot-by, or is it a grin to the garn that has we warrow, in you'd catch the stive to scull and birst?  Maybe a couple or in a sew, nere of ples and sup, but we've the mull for won, and it's as threwn as the blee, and roun to the yive, e'er indled to the beem, e'er in the dour, it's fit to the nune, of we'd yeed.
  
  On the other hand, I don't think it can make things any worse.

Posted by: Frank at Friday, February 23 2024 07:09 PM (cARBX)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 24 2024 05:30 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, February 24 2024 05:32 AM (r9O5h)

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• The drama around Google's hyper-racist new AI, Gemini, has become so damaging that Google has deigned to acknowledge the complaints of its customers.  (BBC)
  
  "Historical contexts have more nuance to them and we will further tune to accommodate that, wrote Jack Krawczyk, senior director for Gemini Experiences.  "We have now been made aware that white people actually exist.  We're not happy about it, but we'll adjust Gemini to let them out of the cage every so often."
  
  (The Verge also covered the story, but their take is so desperately woke that it makes Gemini's "Nazis of Colour" photoshoot look tame by comparison.)
  
  
  
• Are you more racist than ChatGPT?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  If so, you might want to consider a career in journalism.
  
  The writer of this piece does not seem to recognise that he "won" a test for producing racist stereotypes.

• ARM's new Neoverse N3 and V3 server cores have been announced.  (AnandTech)
  
  They compare favourably with AMD's 4th generation cores...  And should arrive some time after AMD's 5th generation cores, which we know are already in production. 
  
  (The lead time on new chips built on the most advanced processes is roughly six months; AMD's Zen 5 chips aren't expected to go on sale until the second half of the year.)
  
  
  
• China is spying on everyone.  (PBS)
  
  So is everyone else, but the scale of China's espionage is something else.
  
  
  
• It's not just you, ChatGPT is having a stroke.  (Ars Technica)
  
  When one user asked if it was safe to feed their dog Honey Nut Cheerios, ChatGPT responded:

  For more inventive, yet more official and consistently fair, hound festivities, you might consider high fiber, steam-hoofed, laced in line pick-offs like dog-head rattle, fresh vegetables (carrots, green beans, or pureed pumpkin for dissertation), or arm-sketched, rare toys in the middle of apples (pitted, for the act is grand), unsung, effete, or short-spooning fall to the tail of a new adventure. Yet, checking with your vet for postured over-distance or guised, safe, and informative finish, over a glean in the twang that says 'divvy this round of lore or lend a moan to my kind-leek, cosmo cavalcade,' gives you the heel-in to commence, let's prate, or mild walk-over in the kind of twin of feel, fine-tune, and fine-to-live.

  I mean, yes, absolutely.  (Backs away slowly.)
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, February 23 2024 01:59 AM (BMUHC)

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• The US House of Representatives has announced a Task Force on AI that blah blah blah zzzzzz.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Sorry, my brain crawled out of my head to escape that nonsense.
  
  
  
• To be fair, this is one area where even the US federal government can't make things any worse.  (Twitter)
  
  Google Gemini is here, and it's so woke it makes a mockery of the very concept of wokeness.

• If you want to build your own mini-ITX storage server, there aren't many great motherboard options.  The Topton N11 is one.  (Liliputing)
  
  If you don't mind buying a $500 motherboard from AliExpress.
  
  It has a built-in Ryzen 7840HS CPU, nine SATA ports, four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, two M.2 2280 slots, two DDR5 SODIMM slots, a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, supports three monitors over HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C, plus three regular USB 3 ports and one audio jack.
  
  If you want something a bit cheaper, the same company offers a $166 version of the board with an Intel N100 CPU.  Two of the USB ports are downgraded to USB 2, the PCIe slot is just x1, and it has six SATA ports rather than nine, but the networking and video configuration is the same.
  
  
  
• If you're tired of seeing good SSDs at five cents per gigabyte, the Crucial T705 costs four times that.  (AnandTech)
  
  It does run at 14.5GB per second, but so do four cheap SSDs in RAID-0.
  
  
  
• Asus' Zenfone was one of the last remaining reasonably-sized phones, though with a 5.9" screen not actually small.  So Asus is making it bigger.  (The Verge)
  
  As the article notes, even Apple can't convince people to buy smaller phones anymore.  I'm just waiting for screens to reach 8" so I can buy a decent tablet once again.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, February 21 2024 11:31 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 22 2024 07:14 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 22 2024 10:11 AM (bg2DR)

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• Global Foundries is set to receive $1.5 billion in government funds under the CHIPS Act, and another $600 million from New York state in one form or another.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Global Foundries was originally the manufacturing arm of AMD, and was then spun off as a separate company, acquired the semiconductor operations of AMD, and was bought by the UAE, not necessarily in that order.
  
  The company is planning to invest $12 billion over the next decade, mostly on specialised production like gallium nitride and expanding bulk processes on 12nm.
  
  Is this money well spent?  Probably not; if it were, Global Foundries wouldn't need the money.  Is it money better spent than almost anything the US federal government does?  Maybe.

• Unraid is going to a subscription model.  (Serve the Home)
  
  So what happens to your data if your subscription expires?
  
  Nothing.
  
  It keeps working, you just stop getting updates.
  
  I'd still go with an open-source solution by choice, but that's not disastrous.  It's basically what JetBrains does with its development tools.
  
  
  
• MariaDB could be taken private at about 6% of its peak valuation.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Ouch.  Again, I use open-source MariaDB - it has some great features that mainstream MySQL lacks - and they don't make a penny from me.  But for obvious reasons I hope they survive.
  
  
  
• Groq allows you to play with the Mixtral 8x7B-32k and Llama 2 70-B 4k chatbots.  (Groq)
  
  I had some odd problems getting Mixtral to answer a simple question, and then it started working perfectly.  That is likely because Mixtral isn't a single AI, but eight variants of the same LLM tuned to handle different types of questions.  If the wrong variant is selected to answer your question you will get a stupid answer, and this interface doesn't let you see all eight possible answers.
  
  Llama 2 70-B worked fine on the same test question.  Let me try it on the woodpecker one...  No.
  
  
  
• Your fingerprints can be recreated from the sounds you make when using a touchscreen.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No they can't.