Daily Tech News 14 August 2023

• Stack Overflow is introducing its own AI question answering system because somehow getting the answer wrong 77% of the time is appealing to the company's CEO. (ZDNet)
  
  You jump off bridges when it's bridge-jumping time, and apparently right now it's garbage AI time.
  
  Stack Overflow plans to fix the problem of generative AI giving plausible but unsound answers by, according to the article, waving its hands around. It wants an expert system, but Large Language Models are the exact opposite of expert systems.
  
  CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar also believes AI will solve the cultural problems at Stack Overflow, to wit, that the platforms top users are a bunch of autistic narcissists who actively attack anyone asking questions, where the entire point of the platform is for people to ask questions.
  
  The New Stack reached out to the moderators at Stack Overflow for comment on being replaced not merely by an AI but by an AI that has already been tested and proven not to work.
  
  The moderators had not responded at time of publication because they are all on strike.
  
  I swear I am not making this up.

• Apple plans to retire 8GB laptop models with its next generation M3 range, replacing them with 12GB. (WCCFTech)
  
  Adding a whole $5 to the cost of the system to be very slightly less pathetic. Good work.
  
  
  
• TSMC is discovering that building a chip factory in Arizona was a mistake. (WCCFTech)
  
  The company is trying to bring in workers from Taiwan because it can't find qualified workers locally, but the local unions are, of course, fighting it.
  
  Plus there's the slight problem that chip factories use a lot of water and Arizona is a desert.
  
  
  
• The world in which IPv6 was a good idea. (Apenwarr)
  
  That is not this world.
  
  
  
• A tale of two internets. (Tailscale)
  
  More thoughts on the same subject from the same author three years later.
  
  
  
• What happens when people start reading privacy policies. (The Markup)
  
  They find out they have no privacy.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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