Daily Tech News 2 May 2023

• Geoffey Hinton, the quote godfather of AI unquote who previously boasted that his work would eradicate the need for radiologists has quit Google so that he can warn the world about the dangers of, well, Geoffrey Hinton. (Insane)
  
  What the dangers are, he has not actually specified. Radiologists are not notably a dying breed.
  
  
  
• What are notably a dying breed are crappy internet news sites like Waypoint. (Culture)
  
  BuzzFeed News is dead and that actually reported stories on occasion, so it's no surprise that Waypoint, a part of the sprawling Vice clusterfuck founded on the notion that games journalists spend too much time talking about games - and are basically all fascists anyway - is shutting down in a month with all hands reported lost.
  
  And there was much rejoicing.

• What's that, Lassie? I have two other cloud servers that I forgot about that just renewed for a year?
  
  SSDNodes. Cheap, not top-tier performance, but actually pretty reliable. One of them had been up for 632 days until I upgraded it to Ubuntu 22.04 just now.
  
  And when I say cheap, I mean less per year than DigitalOcean charges per month. Which is why I didn't notice the bill right away.
  
  The one flaw is that you can't do a custom install so getting ZFS and LXD working is a bit of a pain. Also they seem to run local storage and not redundant network storage so if your host node fails, your server goes down and so do your backups. Hence ZFS and LXD which make it easy to take snapshot backups and ship them off site.
  
  
  
• IBM is planning to replace 30% of administrative staff with AI over the next five years. (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Since at least 30% of administrative staff do absolutely nothing, this plan seems viable.
  
  
  
• If you want to fire 30% of your own administrative staff, MLC LLM, a chatbot based on Vicuna-7B-V1.1, which is in turn based on Meta's (that is, Facebook's) open-source LLaMA, is small enough to run on a phone if that phone is reasonably capable. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not hosted on a server and accessed from your phone, but the entire thing running on your phone with no other resources required.
  
  Or you could just find the 30% doing nothing and fire them and call it a day.
  
  
  
• The Asus Zenbook S13 OLED 2023 is available with 32GB of RAM. (The Verge)
  
  And it has one of those 2880x1800 OLED screens. They're ubiquitous, but they're actually good.
  
  CPU is an i7-1355U which only has two P cores (and eight E cores), so it's kind of meh but not terrible. No 4EK but you pays your money and you takes your chances.
  
  
  
• Beelink has two new NUCs with AMD's latest 7840HS and 7940HS CPUs. (Liliputing)
  
  These will have some of the best CPU and graphics performance of anything this size, but the pricing - they start at $1299 without memory, storage, or an operating system - is ridiculous.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:12 AM

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