Daily Tech News 24 April 2023

• Don't let them eat cake: The mental patients recently stripped of their little blue warning labels contrived a campaign to block every paid subscriber to Twitter. (Mashable)
  
  The article quotes Dril, a guy famous for once saying something mildly amusing about corncobs.
  
  Seriously, that's the kind of academic wizardry we're dealing with here. They got one tiny bit of unearned recognition and they'll burn down the planet before they allow anyone else to have what they did.
  
  Since none of them ever says anything worthwhile, all this achieves is making it slightly more involved to mock them the way they deserve.
  
  And there's a very simple solution to all this: Make the Block button a paid feature. Then everyone will be happy.
  
  Twitter took a slightly different tack: Handing out blue checks to leading proponents of the "Block the Blue" effort. That works too.

• SSDs in laptops and desktops cost too much. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  SSD prices are in free fall but manufacturers still have inventory or long-term orders for miserable little 256GB devices, so even in the competitive PC market it will take some time for the backlog to clear out.
  
  At least with almost every Windows laptop you can take a backup, swap the SSD yourself, and restore. With a MacBook you're just fucked.
  
  
  
• And here's a handy... Well, not handy, exactly, but anyway here's a guide on doing just that. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Particularly if your laptop dates from 2013.
  
  
  
• Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake chips will have an L4 cache. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And faster integrated graphics. Intel last had an L4 cache with, I think, Broadwell, their 5th generation CPUs.
  
  (Though these generations start after a couple of dozen earlier generations, so they don't mean all that much.)
  
  
  
• Lenovo's new Tab M8 Gen 4 is garbage. (Liliputing)
  
  As I said yesterday, the small tablet market consists of the iPad Mini and a bunch of suck, and this is the suck. It's actually worse than their Tab M8 Gen 3.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 has a 17" ultrawide main screen - quite a good one - plus an 8" tablet screen to the right of the main keyboard. (Thurrott)
  
  This is almost an interesting idea. It lacks the Four Essential Keys bit that smaller screen is touch and pen-enabled so you can program it with whatever buttons you might need.
  
  Only problem there is it's basically one of Lenovo's small tablets built into a laptop, and Lenovo's small tablets are a bunch of suck.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT can beat Google search, says, uh, an AI ethicist. (ZDNet)
  
  Rather than training AI to answer questions - which it can't do - why not train it to filter out all the AI-generated shit polluting search results?
  
  I presume the answer is money. The less time you spend crawling through search results trying to find something that isn't shit, the less ads you see.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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