Daily Tech News 27 May 2023

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman-Fried shares his optimistic vision of our AI future. (Tech Crunch)
  
  He explains that European-style regulation, which extracts huge fines from large American tech companies because there are no* large European tech companies for some strange reason, for any reason or none at all, is bad, while US-style regulation which simply crushes his smaller and less dementedly woke competitors is good.
  
  * There is one - Dutch company ASML, which is perhaps the single most important company in the world today.
  
  
  
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman-Fried raises $115 million for a crypto company that scans people's eyeballs. (Ars Technica)
  
  I am a meat popsicle.

• Why have air conditioning when we could all live like termites? (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, apart from the fact that you're talk about demolishing every human dwelling in the world and rebuilding from scratch, apart from the infrastructure problems of such dense living spaces - not to mention the psychological and sociological ones, apart from the fact that termite mounds are found in very few and specific locations in the world for a very good reason, apart from the fact that the one example presented is located in a city at an altitude of a mile where nobody needs AC in the first place, apart from the fact that in any cold climate the people on the outer edge of the building - you know, the only part that has windows - would all freeze to death when winter arrives - termite mounds not notably common in Norway, for example, apart from all that, the square-cube law would mean that twice a day you'd have hurricane-speed winds blasting through the insides of your incomprehensibly expensive new megastructures.
  
  Apart from that, sure. Eat the bugs and live like them too. I'll be over here. In my house. Eating steak. Or chicken nuggets anyway, given the price of a good steak.
  
  
  
• Electric truck maker Nikola is at risk of being deleted from NASDAQ mostly because it hasn't made any electric trucks. (Tech Crunch)
  
  It has faked some videos of electric trucks, though, so maybe Disney will buy it.
  
  
  
• IMEC - the global body that tries to manage the semiconductor industry the way an ailurophobe manages thirty to fifty feral cats - has laid out plans to reach the 2A node by 2036. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  2A - two Angstroms - is 0.2 nanometres. Which is slightly smaller than a single silicon atom.
  
  It might seem impossible to construct silicon chips with features smaller than silicon itself, and you'd be correct, except for the fact that these are not engineering numbers but marketing numbers, which is to say, lies.
  
  And that would mean the whole plan is nonsense except for the fact that the current mainstream production nodes - 7nm and 5nm - are also marketing numbers.
  
  So, yeah, chips are going to keep getting larger and smaller and more complicated at a rapid pace for at least another decade.
  
  
  
• Am I the asshole unethical one? (Daily Nous)
  
  An ethics professor - I've made my opinions on the field of ethics clear before - made it very clear to his class that if they cheated on their exam, they would fail.
  
  Then he posted a sample exam with obviously incorrect answers to a known cheating site. We're talking about 2 + 2 = banana kind of answers.
  
  Then his students cheated.
  
  At least he didn't have to fail them for cheating, because they failed in the old-fashioned way of getting zero on the test.
  
  I think they have a bright future as ethicists.
  
  
  
• Don't buy HP printers. (The Verge)
  
  HP offers a "Plus" program where - if you sign up within seven days of buying your new printer - you get "free" ink for "six months".
  
  Oh and also HP locks your printer to prevent you ever buying non-HP ink cartridges, even if you later cancel your subscription, even though HP inkjet printers are certified as not locking out third-party ink cartridges.
  
  Epson and Brother both sell inkjet printers with ink tanks that - this is complicated, so bear with me - you fill with ink.
  
  
  
• "China's" "home-grown" "Powerstar" CPU is a painted-over Intel 10th generation Core i3. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not in the sense that China stole Intel's design and made the chips itself while claiming credit for the design effort, since Intel's 10th generation chips were made on a 14nm process and China does have 14nm production capability, but in the sense that these are made by Intel and then literally painted over with new part numbers.
  
  Which is one way to do it, I guess.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in Real China TSMC is preparing a 6x reticle size CoWoS-L super carrier interposer for extreme SiP processors. (AnandTech)
  
  You know how a few years ago AMD launched its new Zen CPUs, and rather than making an 8-core chip for desktops and a 16-core chip for workstations and a 32-core chip for servers (which they couldn't do because they didn't have any money), they made a single 8-core design that you could use one or two or four of according to your need?
  
  That's what this is about. Only six times bigger.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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