Daily Tech News 1 April 2023

• Twitter open-sourced its recommendation algorithm, as it said it was going to do. (Twitter)
  
  I believe it was already leaked by a disgruntled former employee - pretty much all Twitter's former employees fit that category because they're communists - so nothing has really change except that it's official now.
  
  Reportedly this uses something on the order of a trillion CPU seconds per day - five billion iterations, each running across multiple CPU cores. That would require twelve million cores, at a minimum, or 62,500 dual 96-core Epyc Genoa servers. Call it 1500 racks stuffed full of the latest server equipment.
  
  The results speak for themselves though: Everybody turns it off and goes straight to the chronological feed because it's full of crap.

• ChatGPT has found a useful purpose: Hunting for security vulnerabilities in code libraries. (The Register)
  
  I've mentioned before that ChatGPT is a pure language model, and doesn't actually understand anything. But computer programs are pure language - everything about them is defined in terms of language, with no outside knowledge required. This is exactly what ChatGPT can do, and it turns out that it does it pretty well.
  
  Given the state of public code libraries it's like dynamiting fish in a barrel, but it actually reports on the specific problems rather than marking everything on NPM as SEO spam.
  
  Even though it is.
  
  
  
• Europol is dumb. (The Register)
  
  I swear I could hear my brain cells ditching work and getting drunk when I tried to read that article.
  
  
  
• Italy too. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Dumb.
  
  
  
• The 2023 Chuwi Corebook X has the Four Essential Keys. (Liliputing)
  
  And a 12th generation U-series CPU (that's last year's model, but last year's Corebook X had a 2020 CPU, so it's progress), a very nice 14" 2160x1440 screen, and up to 16GB of RAM though it's soldered in place and the 16GB model is out of stock.
  
  I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone actually buying it, but if they can put the Four Essential Keys in place on a small notebook why do the major manufacturers have so much trouble with it?
  
  
  
• AMD's low-end A620 motherboards are here for less horribly expensive systems. (WCCFTech)
  
  They still require more expensive DDR5 RAM, but that cost is going down - it's about 50% more than DDR4 now, rather than 100% - and it does offer better performance. Sometimes.
  
  
  
• The toy business is surprisingly complex when your CEO is a moron and your executives actively hate their customers. (The Verge)
  
  Brain cells getting drunk again. It's about Hasbro, who have systematically destroyed their two money-makers, Money the Gathering and Dingbats & Deviants.
  
  
  
• AI ethicists - some of the most useless people on the face of the Earth - have fired back at that preposterous open letter demanding a six-month pause on AI research saying that yes, AI will kill us all, probably tomorrow if it can fit that into its busy schedule, but research must continue because otherwise the AI ethicists won't get paid. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Microsoft to its credit recently fired all its AI ethicists.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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