Daily Tech News 15 September 2022

• The EU has upheld the EU's 4.1 billion euro fine on Google. (Ars Technica)
  
  Google was hit with the fine for anticompetitive practices in the way it forces Android phone makers to bundle specific apps, to make Chrome the default browser, to make Google the default search engine, and in forbidding any company with an Android license from also forking the open source Android codebase.
  
  On the one hand, this smacks of opportunistic looting of a foreign corporation by a corrupt and decaying bureaucracy.
  
  On the other hand, Google should have stayed awake during the antitrust proceedings against Microsoft, or at least read the CliffsNotes.
  
  
  

• So what's happening at Patreon? Patreon lays off its entire security team. (PC Magazine)
  
  "Not the entire team", says Patreon.
  
  
  
• Patreon denies hosting child sexual abuse material. (PC Magazine)
  
  "It's lies and slander by counterrevolutionaries", says Patreon.
  
  
  
• 7 Patreon alternatives for rats fleeing a sinking ship. (PC Magazine)
  
  I think I might replace the as-good-as-deceased ZDNet with PC Magazine for my news roundups going forward. Some of this stuff was also at Vice and The Verge, but they presented Patreon's statements as fact rather than as mere statements.
  
  
  
• Don't buy the Dell Inspiron 27. (PC Magazine)
  
  I have two of these and they were my workhorse desktops from 2017 up until May of this year when they got packed into boxes.
  
  The original model had a 4k display, an 8 core Ryzen 1700, and Radeon RX 580 dedicated graphics. With all that they did tend to run a bit hot and one of them started overheating in the last few months, but I could probably fix that with a can of compressed air to blow out all the dust. (I did that before packing it in the box but haven't booted it up since then.)
  
  They've released annual refreshes since then but not one has offered a 4k screen and the graphics options have been mediocre. Though with a 1080p screen and a laptop CPU in a 27" case they probably don't have the same cooling problems.
  
  
  
• The Ryzen 7950X will hit 5.85GHz - on one core, in Antarctica. (WCCFTech)
  
  Base clock is 4.5GHz, all core boost clock is 5.1GHz, single core boost clock is 5.7GHz, and peak clock if thermals permit is 5.85GHz.
  
  That's stock, not overclocked, but unless you have amazing cooling you're unlikely to see anything over 5.7.
  
  
  
• Have I been trained is a search tool that lets you explore all the training data that went into this new crop of AI image generators. (Have I Been Trained)
  
  About 5.7 billion images.
  
  Midjourney doesn't know what Hololive is, though.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile ERNIE-ViLG, the Chinese version, doesn't know what Tiananmen Square is. (MIT Technology Review)
  
  And reports you for re-education for even trying.
  
  
  
• Superhuman AIs are going to kill us all. (Vice)
  
  Probably not, but the paper behind the article does have a point. When you measure anything by proxy, you are promoting the proxy at the expense of the thing you are trying to measure.
  
  Using college education as a proxy measure for success in life led to a flood of useless college degrees. And Google's Pagerank algorithm single-handled created the comment spam industry.
  
  Similarly, current approaches are training AIs to cheat.
  
  
  
• After legislation by Texas and Florida to force social networks to make their moderation rules public (among other things) was delayed by the courts, a third state has joined the fray: California. (The Verge)
  
  Be right back, making popcorn.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

| Access Comments