Daily Tech News 16 April 2023

• Future ChatGPT versions could replace a majority of work people do today says Ben Goertzel, an idiot. (ZDNet)

  "You don't need to be incredibly creative and innovative or make big leaps to do most people's jobs, as it turns out," said Goertzel.

  Perhaps not, but if you're a pathological liar, people tend to notice.
  
  And that's what ChatGPT is. It's inherent in the design, because it's a language model, not a fact model.

  "Tools like Grammarly decrease the need for human copy editors," Goertzel said. "They don't entirely eliminate [the job] but they decrease that need. Automatic tools [can be used for] writing journalistic articles. They've been writing ... sports score summaries and weather reports for a long time."

  Seeing some of the crap that passes for journalism, you could replace the whole lot with a short Perl script and get better results.

• Sales of hard drives have dropped by 35% in the past year maybe. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Maybe not, because half the numbers in the chart provided are obviously wrong, but sales do appear to be down.
  
  
  
• Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, says UFOs may be probes sent down by an alien mothership to study mankind and steal our women and/or cows. (Politico)
  
  Or maybe not, because that is stupid.
  
  
  
• Kotlin 2 is here, with static extensions, collection literals, name-based destructuring, context receivers, and explicit fields. (Jetbrains)
  
  I have no idea what any of those things are.
  
  
  
• The perfect-ish notebook at an imperfect price: The 2023 Gigabyte Aero 16. (IT Pro)
  
  Let's take a quick look at the specs:
  
  16" 3840x2400 (16:10) 60Hz OLED screen
  Intel Core i7 13900H (6P + 8E cores)
  Nvidia RTX 4070 with 8GB VRAM
  32GB RAM upgradeable to 64GB
  1TB SSD upgradeable to 16GB (two M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots)
  Two Thunderbolt 4 ports
  One additional USB-C port
  One USB-A port
  HDMI
  micro SD
  Combo audio jack
  Dedicated 240W power connector (it can also charge more slowly via USB-C)
  The Four Essential Keys exactly where they should be
  
  And it weighs in at a svelte 1.9kg. Or maybe 2.1kg, depending on whether you read Gigabyte's specs or the review.
  
  There's just one small oint in the flyment: That model costs $2299 in the US - not cheap, but not unreasonable for a high-end laptop - but A$4999 down under.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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