Daily Tech News 26 May 2023

• An idea so bad even the crazies at Ars Technica are calling it out: Google Search has started rolling out "ChatGPT-style" generative AI results. (Ars Technica)
  
  The only thing we want from a search engine is to report accurately on what has been said on the web relating to our search term.
  
  The most notable thing about ChatGPT and its relatives is that it will simply make shit up, including quotes that were never said and scientific papers that were never published.
  
  This is going to be a disaster.
  
  It's opt-in for now.
  
  For now.
  
  
  
• JPMorgan says hold my Bud Light as plans leak for a ChatGPT-based investment advice service. (CNBC)
  
  To be fair, the company hasn't officially announced anything; this could just be a case of staking a claim on a trademark to make sure nobody else nabs it.
  
  To continue being fair, on the scale of dumb ideas this is a polar ice cap to Google's iceberg.
  
  Either one entirely capable of sinking the Titanic, mind you.
  
  
  
  

• Acer's new Swift Edge 16 is a laptop. (Liliputing)
  
  It has the latest Ryzen 7840U - the lower-power variant of the 7840HS - with 8 Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RDNA3 GPU cores.
  
  The screen is a 16" 120Hz 3200x2000 OLED model covering 100% of DCI-P3 colour and reaching 400 nits brightness, all of which sounds good. It has two USB 4 ports, two USB 3 ports, HDMI, microSD, and a headphone jack, plus a 1440p webcam (commonly these are 1080p or even just 720p) and the latest WiFi 7.
  
  The Four Essential Keys are present in the form of a three-column numeric keypad, which is not perfect but something I can live with. Price starts at $1299 with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, and there's a second M.2 slot for expansion.
  
  Memory is soldered (LPDDR4 according to the article, which I suspect is wrong), but at least there's a 32GB model on the way though pricing for that is not mentioned.
  
  The other point of note is that it weighs 1.23kg, which is actually lighter than my current 14" laptop. Could be worth checking out. There are plenty of more powerful 16" laptops with better keyboard layouts, but they are also anything between 50% and 100% heavier than this one.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's 2TB SN850X is available for $135. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a good drive. It's TLC, has a DRAM cache, and supports PCIe 4 with a top transfer rate over 7GB per second. It's a little more expensive than other models in the current market, but even so costs less than the cheapest, nastiest 2TB drives from just one year ago.
  
  
  
• Final Cut Pro is here for the iPad. It sucks. (9to5Mac)
  
  Not because Final Cut Pro is bad. Not because the iPad hardware isn't capable of running it. But because Apple has deliberately crippled iOS to such a degree that it is useless for any remotely serious task.
  
  For example, if you edit your video in Final Cut Pro, start exporting the final compressed version, and then switch over to play some Flappy Bird while that runs, your export will simply die, because iOS won't do that.
  
  Can. iOS is Unix. Just won't.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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