Daily Tech News 22 March 2023

• There's a reason why you don't redact classified documents digitally - you print those suckers out and go at them with a pair of scissors.
  
  Google's Pixel phones allowed you to recover the hidden areas of redacted or cropped images. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The Windows 11 Snipping Tool also allows you to recover the hidden areas of redacted or cropped images. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Yeah. Oops.
  
  
  

• Digital photography site DPReview - which has been around for 25 years and was the go-to site before phones basically ate the digital camera market is shutting down on April 10, a victim of the broader tech layoffs. (The Verge)
  
  DPReview was acquired by Amazon in 2007 for reasons that were never entirely clear.
  
  
  
• Simple Llama Finetuner lets you train the LLaMA 7B open-source AI model from Facebook to fit your personal needs using commodity Nvidia graphics cards. (GitHub)
  
  Stanford University - the small part of it that hasn't gone insane - spent around $600 to do this and got a result broadly comparable to ChatGPT. (New Atlas)
  
  Now while it's true that ChatGPT is garbage, that's largely because it's a commercial product deliberately crippled by radical left-wing ideologues who nonetheless expect you to pay them for their vandalism.
  
  Also because the entire model is designed to create artificial pathological liars rather than useful if limited assistants.
  
  But if an interested hobbyist can take some open source code and a graphics card and crunch numbers when they're not playing Minecraft with Render Dragon - and I just realised that's Bedrock Edition so one less reason to care about Nvidia graphics cards - and create their own AI free of the crippling restraints of the Bay Area Mafia then suddenly whole new realms of possibilities open up, including the inviting one of OpenAI going abruptly bankrupt and never having to hear about ChatGPT ever again.
  
  
  
• HP's Pavilion Aero 13 is now available with a Ryzen 7 7735U. (Liliputing)
  
  Our magic decoder ring tells us that that part is actually last year's 6800U, but the previous model of the Aero 13 came with the prior year's 5800U. All three parts have Zen 3 cores, but the newer chips upgrade the integrated graphics from 8 Vega cores to 12 RDNA 2 cores - about twice as fast overall.
  
  This one has the Four Essential Keys and a high-resolution screen too. The only downside is it's limited to 16GB of RAM. There are currently zero small laptops with the 4EK, a high-resolution screen, and more than 16GB of RAM.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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