Daily Tech News 20 June 2022

• We know that Intel's high-end 12th generation (and also 11th, 10th, and 9th generation) desktop parts are big expensive power-hungry monsters, but what about their low-end chips? How does the $129 Core i3-12100 stack up? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Very nicely, as it turns out. It's a 4-core / 8-thread CPU with none of the new Efficiency cores to complicate things, running at a maximum speed of 4.3GHz. That's a lot slower than the 12900K at 5.2GHz, but it has a maximum power consumption of 89W vs. 241W on the 12900K.
  
  And while it's only a four-core chip, it's not slow. It comes close to matching my old Ryzen 1700 desktop - an eight core system. And easily beats the 11th-gen laptop I'm typing this on.
  
  If you want a desktop system that is cheap but fast enough to be practical, this - or the $199 six core i5-12400 if you need a little more oomph - is a good choice.

• Consciousness is computation. (GitHub)
  
  Yes, I know that the headline of the article disagrees, but the article is retarded.
  
  The entire argument presented is that consciousness can't be computation because consciousness involves qualia, where qualia are defined as whatever is left over when you take away every part of consciousness that can be explained by computation.
  
  Which is a bit like defining art as what is left when you subtract the paint, the brushwork, the canvas, and the frame from a painting. It sounds profound but doesn't actually mean anything.
  
  As Daniel Dennett noted many years ago, qualia don't exist. Philosophers refuse to admit this because even burger-flipping requires real-world skills.
  
  
  
• So if computers can be conscious, is Google's LaMDA an example? (ZDNet)
  
  Probably, but that doesn't mean a whole lot. You can be conscious but still dumber and less useful than a toaster, as the White House Press Corps proves daily.
  
  It's not sentient, which is a somewhat higher bar, but then neither are many of the people on Twitter much of the time. I don't know if it regresses into obviously sphexish behaviour, which is the definitive strike against claims of sentience, but then humans do that, and not just on Twitter either.
  
  
  
• Is the Samsung 980 Pro any good? (Serve the Home)
  
  Yes. It's not MLC (2-bit per cell) like previous pro models, but it is good.
  
  
  
• What's new in the Ada 2022 standard? (AdaCore)
  
  Not that much by the look of things. Ada is a very capable language already and doesn't need a whole lot of new stuff, so this is good.
  
  You can convince it, like JavaScript, that "5" + 3 = 53 but "5" - 3 = 2, but it induces enough pain along the way that you will hopefully reconsider.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:56 AM

| Access Comments