Daily Tech News 8 January 2023

• If you've never had kidney stones and a migraine at the same time, well, it's certainly an experience.
  
  
  
• There seems to be little point in that Razer Edge Android gaming tablet I mentioned before unless you play some specific graphics-intensive Android-only game very heavily. If you want a general gaming device a Nintendo Switch seems like a better bet, and if you want a large small Android device when there's a dearth of good small tablets, the Motorola Edge 20 Fusion is nearly as large (6.7" vs. 6.8"), still has a FHD+ OLED display, is significantly cheaper, has a 108MP camera, and at the end of the day is also a phone.
  
  
  
• Asus showed off some WiFi 7 routers at CES and they're not obviously garbage. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There are a lot of high-end wireless routers that promise 5Gbps of bandwidth but only offer 1Gb Ethernet, so you can't ever make full use of it.
  
  These two models have theoretical total wireless bandwidth over 20Gbps, but have two and three 10Gb Ethernet ports respectively, so they could in theory actually deliver what they promise.
  
  Price not stated but as usual with new standards is unlikely to be cheap for the first year or two.

• The founder of Creative Labs - the company behind the Sound Blaster card - has passed away aged 67. (The Verge)
  
  That's pretty young but it was apparently natural causes.
  
  
  
• Running Twitter on one server. (Tristan Hume)
  
  This is mostly a thought experiment on how you could deliver some sort of feed at Twitter scales (data volumes and active users) with just one server.
  
  It does have the usual bootstrapping problem in that it would only work even in theory once all the core data was in memory so you could never, ever reboot that server.
  
  But it does highlight just how fast modern hardware is, if software is suitably optimised.
  
  
  
• And Asus has just the server. (Serve the Home)
  
  Two Epyc Genoa CPUs for up to 192 cores, 24 NVMe drive bays, and 9 PCIe 5.0 expansion slots. Only 24 DIMM slots though so you're limited to 3TB of RAM.
  
  
  
• GPT-4 will be here soon and won't change the world. (Nostalgebraist)
  
  The author gives a number of reasons for believing this, but it boils down to what I said yesterday: It's a language model, not a world model. It does stuff with language. It knows nothing other than language.
  
  Would you hire a genius writer for your corporate communications if they provably could not tell fact from fiction? Even if you did, you'd have to hire a second person to babysit them.
  
  That's where we are.
  
  
  
• A big roundup of product announcements at CES. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  OLED monitors, PCIe 5 SSDs, weird laptops, and weirder PC cases.
  
  Nothing really compelling, though I'll look into the new range of monitors when they ship to customers. There's a good range of ultra-wide and ultra-high resolution displays coming this year in both OLED and LCD, but it remains to be seen whether they're worthwhile when you can get two good 4K monitors for $400.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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