Daily Tech News 20 April 2023

• Substack has been doing well as a not-exactly-a-social-network that lets writers connect directly with their audience - and get paid for it.
  
  The company recently released a new feature called Notes... Which is a social network. It's a Twitter clone.
  
  Does this mean Substack is going to turn into a crab?
  
  Maybe, says Tom Knighton, and that would kill Substack.
  
  Maybe not, says Holly Math Nerd, but it will be a constant battle against all the other crabs in the bucket who demand that you be one of them.
  
  Substack has a revenue model that works for them; they're not dependent on advertising. They're not the size of Twitter, let alone Facebook, and never will be, but it works for them. The longer they can hold out against carcinisation the better, but we are all crabs in the end.

• Snapchat now offers a free AI chatbot to all users. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Nobody knows why they did this, but they do.
  
  
  
• Google employees begged the company not to release Bard, its AI chatbot, calling it "worse than useless" and "a pathological liar" and "barely smarter than an AI ethicist pulling down $500k in salary and shares and producing no work of any value to anyone". (The Verge)
  
  Google took the hint and fired the complainers and released Bard, which to be fair is in fact worse than useless, a pathological liar, and barely smarter than an AI ethicist, but at the end of the day, still has a job.
  
  
  
• The integrated graphics in the new Ryzen 7000 chips are about as fast as a Radeon RX 570. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is a few years old now - my 2017 Dell desktop had a slightly faster RX 580 - but is very, very good for integrated graphics in a laptop.
  
  The upcoming AMD Framework 13 model will have this chip.
  
  (This is different to the high-end 16-core laptop chips from AMD, which are repackaged desktop chips and come with much slower integrated graphics but are usually paired with something fast and expensive.)
  
  
  
• Speaking of fast and expensive Intel is preparing cooling solutions for future 2000W chips. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Might I suggest winter in Montana? That should do the trick.
  
  
  
• m=2, n=4 (Medium)
  
  There is one (positive integer) solution for m^n = n^m, and that's it. The article explains how we know that's the only solution.
  
  
  
• Major retailers are walking back their plans for the Metaverse after realising what everyone else already knew: It's complete shit. (Modern Retail)
  
  Facebook's tech demos look like they were produced in the 90s. It's a very 90s idea, really - skeuomorphism gone mad - and it should have stayed there.
  
  
  
• Why everyone has their wires crossed. (Quanta)
  
  In human beings, the left side of the body is wired up to the right side of the brain, and vice versa. This is odd, but it's also true of chimps and orangutans, horses, pigs, cows, sloths, duck-billed platypuses, whales, birds, lizards, fish, lobsters, crabs (those bastards), and many types of worm.
  
  Every animal with bilateral symmetry and something resembling a brain.
  
  Why?
  
  It makes the wiring easier.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:37 AM

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