Daily Tech News 7 May 2023

• Those monthly unique reader numbers from the story on Vice's demise yesterday were thousands. I thought they had to be, but it didn't say so.
  
  So those sites are dying but not actually dead. Not yet.
  
  
  
• Same goes for OpenAI: Google and OpenAI are Walmarts besieged by fruit stands. (Tech Crunch)
  

  GPT-4 is like a Walmart. No one actually wants to go there, so the company makes damn sure there's no other option.

  But customers are starting to wonder, why am I walking through 50 aisles of junk to buy a few apples? Why am I hiring the services of the largest and most general-purpose AI model ever created if all I want to do is exert some intelligence in matching the language of this contract against a couple hundred other ones? At the risk of torturing the metaphor (to say nothing of the reader), if GPT-4 is the Walmart you go to for apples, what happens when a fruit stand opens in the parking lot?

  And the fruit stand's apples are free. And they don't call you a racist.
  
  OpenAI had its chance. It's done.
  
  
  

• OpenAI's regulatory woes are just beginning. (The Verge)
  
  This story has it exactly wrong, of course. OpenAI's only hope for fending off smaller and less retarded commercial rivals is to have the industry regulated within an inch of its life with layer upon layer of incomprehensible and infeasibly expensive red tape.
  
  Good plan, except that it's not the commercial rivals that are eating OpenAI's lunch, it's open source software.
  
  
  
• That article was about the EU's efforts, but the Biden Administration is all-in on regulatory capture too. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though like everything else they do, it will fail utterly.
  
  
  
• RedisRaft is a strongly consistent Redis cluster. (GitHub)
  
  Redis has had replication for a long time, but this is a full-on clustering solution. Once an update is confirmed, the data won't be lost unless more than half of the nodes in the cluster die at the same time.
  
  There are a few Redis commands that aren't supported, but the bulk of the functionality works just as with a single Redis node.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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