Top Story

• Elon Musk has withdrawn Twitter from the European Union's "voluntary" program to control online "disinformation". (Tech Crunch)
  
  The media, and the bureaucrats, who believe they have the sole right to spread disinformation, are taking this about about as well as can be expected, with Thierry Breton, head of the European Union's Josef Goebbels Memorial Happy Fun Time Administration, issuing unveiled threats.
  
  What they're really upset about is that Twitter isn't playing the game:

  The pan-EU law, which entered into force back in November, requires VLOPs like Twitter to assess and mitigate systemic risks to civic discourse and electoral processes, such as disinformation.
  
  The deadline for VLOPs’ compliance with obligations in the DSA is three months from now.
  
  A request for comment emailed to Twitter’s press office returned an automated reply containing a poop emoji.

  (My italics.)
  
  You don't have to follow the rules. You're entirely expected to cheat. But you have to play the game.
  
  
  

Tech News

• ChatGPT, Ace Attorney. (Volokh Conspiracy)
  
  A lawyer needed to file a motion to dismiss. Being busy, lazy, or probably both, he assigned the actual work of drafting the motion to another lawyer at his firm.
  
  Likewise busy, lazy, or probably both, the second lawyer handed the task to ChatGPT.
  
  Being a pathological liar in a box, ChatGPT invented multiple entirely imaginary cases as precedent.
  
  The judge is not amused.
  
  This is just the start of it. Expect a lot more of this until OpenAI becomes a penny stock and everyone goes back to looking up stuff on paper.
  
  
  
• The "Hot Pixel" attack can leak data from almost any CPU at a rate of 100mbps. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Note the lower case m. We're talking millibits - so about one letter or digit per minute.
  
  And it only works under perfect conditions, and requires access to run arbitrary code on the machine in question, so it's very likely you have more pressing concerns.
  
  
  
• Fancy a bit of light housekeeping? Here's your chance. (The Guardian)
  
  The US government is giving away excess lighthouses made redundant by GPS, though you have to be a federal, state, or local government entity or an approved registered non-profit to qualify for a freebie.
  
  If nobody on the list wants the lighthouses they will go to public auction.
  
  
  
• Amazon office workers are planning to go on strike over, uh, over having to work in an office. (CNN)
  
  Thanks, said Amazon in a short note, though we weren't planning to announce the next round of layoffs just yet.
  
  
  
• Where's that story where the paid staff at a mostly-volunteer help line unionised and were all fired and replaced with ChatGPT?
  
  Oh, here we go. (Gizmodo)
  
  Right under an ad proclaiming that ChatGPT is revolutionising customer service. Yes indeedy.
  
  You'd need to have a kidney of stone not to laugh.
  
  Attention kids: ChatGPT ain't gonna put plumbers out of work, and you won't have $160k in student debt.
  
  
  
• Sales of the newly launched RTX 4060 Ti and Radeon 7600 graphics card are even more miserable than the miserable sales of other miserable graphics cards in this miserable generation. (Notebook Check)
  
  Part of the problem is inflation, particularly that official inflation figures are a lie, and that where gamers expect graphics cards to get cheaper with each passing year, for once the costs to manufacture the cards have increased sharply.
  
  And part of it is that Nvidia is coming off three years of government lockdowns, crypto mining crazes, and money printer go brrr where they could sell everything as fast as they could make it, and now that the economy has predictably gone splut nobody is in the mood anymore.
  
  Nvidia doesn't care because it's happily selling high end cards at the price of a new car to the tech scam du jour, which is to say, AI. 
  
  And all AMD needs to do is be slightly cheaper than Nvidia.  AMD created the chips for both the Xbox Series S / X and PlayStation 5 anyway, so they have that entire segment of the market locked up.
  
  Gamers for whom money is no object, and professionals for whom time is money, have already bought high-end cards. Those who need to watch their budgets are buying last year's models on clearance. Nvidia's RTX 3060 12GB model (not the cut-down 8GB model), and AMD's Radeon 6700, 6700 XT, and 6800 are all good options.
  
  And there's also Intel, which seems to have cleaned up its early driver mess, and is offering the Arc A750 at very attractive prices.  If Intel can just make a decent card at a decent price with its upcoming "Battlemage" and "Celestial" cards, it might stand a chance of gaining significant marketshare.  But those aren't expected to start showing up until at least the end of the year, and more likely next year.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:45 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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