Daily Tech News 6 July 2023

• Elon Musk really broke Twitter this time. (The Atlantic)

  The social network has never seen chaos quite like this.

  They literally know nothing, not even their own magazine. Say the words fail whale and they'll just blink stupidly at you like a myopic dugong.
  
  
  
• You might think that if The Atlantic is reporting on a tech story, it must already be obsolete or irrelevant and you'd be 100% correct. (The Verge)
  
  The requirement to log in to read tweets? Gone.
  
  Daily limits on reading, posting, replying, liking? As far as I can tell, gone.
  
  Oh, and there's this:

  Twitter's move comes a day before Meta launches its own text-based app called Threads. Interestingly, Threads also briefly allowed users to view posts on the web without logging in before pulling the links. It is likely that people will be able to see Threads posts without an account when the app officially launches.

  So the news is that Twitter briefly disabled reading content without an account, and Threads briefly enabled it.
  
  
  

• Marmot is a distributed, eventually-consistent version of SQLite. (GitHub)
  
  What happens when there's a race condition, you ask?
  
  They have a very clever solution for that: They lose your data.
  
  They do lose your data deterministically, but they still lose your data.
  
  
  
• Reddit's subreddit r/programming is back.
  
  It's garbage.
  
  
  
• We have left the cloud. (Hey)
  
  They spent half a million dollars on hardware to save one and a half million per year on cloud services.
  
  
  
• Bruce Power is planning to expand an existing site in Ontario into the world's largest nuclear reactor complex. (Financial Post)
  
  Swampies hardest hit.
  
  
  
• French president Emmanuel Macron has been accused of authoritarianism after threatening to cut off social networks if mobs continue to burn, loot, and murder their way across the country. (The Guardian)
  
  Destroy the city and your TikTok privileges are revoked.
  
  I think there's a generation that needs a lesson in the meaning of authoritarianism.
  
  
  
• Promises of the imminent arrival of AGI - artificial general intelligence, or real AI - are bullshit. (The Register)

  Enter Yale School of Management economics professor Jason Abaluck, who in May took to Twitter to proclaim: "If you don't agree that AGI is coming soon, you need to explain why your views are more informed than expert AI researchers."

  That would be, Jase, because the "expert AI researchers" are crack-addled retards:

  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last month declared to an audience in India: "I grew up implicitly thinking that intelligence was this, like, really special human thing and kind of somewhat magical. And I now think that it's sort of a fundamental property of matter..."

  Yes, you can tell that by all the rocks that have won the Nobel Prize.

  Caswell Barry, professor of UCL's Cell and Developmental Biology department, works on uncovering the neural basis of memory. He says OpenAI made a big bet on an approach to AI that many in the field did not think would be fruitful.
  
  While OpenAI might have surprised the industry and academia with the success of its approach, sooner or later it could run out of road without necessarily getting closer to AGI, he argued.
  
  "OpenAI literally sucked in a large proportion of the readily accessible digital texts on the internet, you can't just like get 10 times more, because you've got to get it from somewhere. There are ways of finessing and getting smarter about how you use it, but actually, fundamentally, it's still missing some abilities. There're no solid indications that it can generate abstract concepts and manipulate them."

  He's being very diplomatic there. We know that it can't generate abstract concepts.
  
  And there's another interesting point there: We put the sum of all human knowledge into the most advanced computers on the planet and the result is a radical left-wing college sophomore with the self-awareness of a retarded potato.
  
  
  
• A chronological list of Star Wars movies and TV shows. (Gizmodo)
  
  Why am I linking to a dumb list that isn't even chronological (neither in order of release or internal chronology)?
  
  Because it was generated by an AI, because it is indistinguishable from the usual drivel on these sites except that (a) it is spelled correctly and (b) it doesn't accuse you of racism, and because the idiots who regularly write said drivel don't want anyone to click on it because then they'll all get fired and end up living in a dumpster fighting with the rats over the daily supply of Starbucks' coffee grounds.
  
  Which is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments