Daily Tech News 18 September 2022

• What does the future of AI hold for us? Well first of all replacing the subliterate cretins who write for The Atlantic. (The Atlantic)

  I recently started fooling around with Sudowrite, a tool that uses the GPT-3 deep-learning language model to compose predictive text, but at a much more advanced scale than what you might find on your phone or laptop. Quickly, I figured out that I could copy-paste a passage by any writer into the program's input window and the program would continue writing, sensibly and lyrically. I tried Kafka. I tried Shakespeare. I tried some Romantic poets. The machine could write like any of them. In many cases, I could not distinguish between a computer-generated text and an authorial one.

  I've read GPT-3 text. It's bullshit. No matter the subject, it reads like pomo litcrit, because there is no mind behind it. Indeed the entire point of GPT-3 is style over substance.

  I was delighted at first, and then I was deflated. I was once a professor of Shakespeare; I had dedicated quite a chunk of my life to studying literary history. My knowledge of style and my ability to mimic it had been hard-earned. Now a computer could do all that, instantly and much better.

  Most people are not brave enough to admit they are so bad at their jobs they can be replaced by a chat bot.

  If you asked GPT-3 to continue, say, a Wordsworth poem, the computer's vocabulary would never be one moment before or after appropriate usage for the poem's era. This is a skill that no scholar alive has mastered.

  If that's a skill no scholar has mastered, how can you tell that GPT-3 is doing it?
  
  To those who know nothing, everything is magic.
  
  
  

• Sony has showed off a new range of PCIe 5 SSDs for PCs. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sony previously released its own SSDs specifically for the expandable storage for the PS5 (which has strict performance rules), and it looks like the company plans to keep making them. Speeds of these models are up to 9500MBps, and capacities up to 4TB.
  
  
  
• AMD's Threadripper processors are twice as fast for developing large software project as Intel's best workstation chips. (WCCFTech)
  
  Now, that's comparing a 64 core AMD chip to a 32 core Intel chip, so it's not unexpected. But even the 32 core AMD chip is 50% faster than the 32 core Intel model. The 64 core Threadripper has always been constrained by power and heat.
  
  
  
• If you click Show Password in Chrome or Edge and you have Enhanced Spell Check turned on - or in the case of Edge, the Spelling & Grammar add-on installed - your browser might send your password straight to Google or Microsoft. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Intel's NUC 12 Enthusiast is available for pre-order. (Liliputing)
  
  This model has Intel's own Arc A770 dedicated graphics and a 330W power brick, so it's really, really not something anybody should be buying, particularly not at a starting price of $1699.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, it looks like the regular NUC 12 is also shipping. It comes with an Alder Lake 1240P or 1260P CPU, slots for up to 64GB of DDR4 SODIMMs and an M.2 slot, two USB 4 ports and two HDMI ports supporting a total of four 4k displays, 2.5Gb Ethernet, and four regular USB ports.
  
  These new chips are quite a bit faster than the 11th gen equivalents, at least for multi-threaded tasks.
  
  I'd much rather have a Ryzen 6800U, but I don't think there's a mainstream NUC with that CPU yet.
  
  
  
• Speaking of four 4k displays, HP's Pavilion Plus 14 can run two 4k screens via USB C and a third via HDMI. That's nice to see given that some recent Dell models have been cut back and can only run one external monitor at 4k.
  
  The Framework laptop doesn't have a fixed port arrangement - it has four little modules that slot in with whatever mix of ports you want. If you want four HDMI ports, you can do that.
  
  But the integrated graphics can only support four displays in total, including the laptop screen, so what happens if you have four monitors connected? Answer: The fourth is disabled, until you close the lid of the laptop, when it is automatically enabled.
  
  That's pretty good.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments