Daily Tech News 22 August 2023

• There's no longer any such thing as a clean Windows install. (Ars Technica)
  
  Not unless you have access to the Windows 11 Enterprise, anyway, or bought an AMD system and can simply run Windows 10. (Windows 10 will work on current Intel CPUs, but the scheduler that handles the difference between Performance and Efficiency cores is only found in 11.)
  
  The article goes through the long and growing list of utter garbage that Microsoft has dumped into Windows 11, making the usual vendor-inflicted utter garbage that comes with laptops rather redundant. Not that they don't still try.
  
  The stark difference between the Windows 11 Enterprise and Windows 11 Fuck You Peasants editions makes me wonder if the Pro and Workstation editions are better on the crapware front as well as restoring features Microsoft saw fit to remove in the update from 10. Like having a primary username longer than five letters.
  
  It's so bad that even the anarcho-communist nutcases in the Ars commentariat agree.

• Speaking of Ars, they have another couple of hidden insults: If you're banned for telling them politely that they are full of shit, of course you can't comment, but you also can't read the comments, and you can't log out.
  
  Which works as well as Twitter's block function, which prevents you from reading someone's posts unless you open another browser, and prevents you from replying to them unless you paste in the link for their tweet directly... Which works exactly the same as a quote-tweet because that's exactly what quote-tweets are.
  
  
  
• After Japan, Israel, and Russia, India is the next country up to plough a lander straight into the surface of the Moon. (Ars Technica)
  
  The Vikram lander follows in the footprint of 2019's successful crash of the Beresheet lander. It is currently in an elliptical orbit that takes it to within 25km of the lunar surface, with a catastrophic impact scheduled for later this week.
  
  
  
• Tesla has sued two former employees for misappropriation of other employees' private data. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The employees made off with 100GB of data and leaked selected parts to the press. 100GB used to be a lot, but these days you can fit ten times that on a card smaller than your fingernail.
  
  
  
• Don't expect graphics card prices to come down any time soon: Nvidia has sold $5 billion worth of crippled high-end video cards to China for AI training. (Ars Technica)
  
  Another number that used to be a lot.
  
  The cards are still fast, but to comply with export restrictions have had their memory bandwidth reduced to less than that of a high-end consumer graphics card.
  
  If you want to know what China plans to use all that AI for, consider that Orwell assumed that humans would still need to monitor all those telescreens
  
  Also consider that generative AI has an unfailing habit of simply making shit up, and you can safely predict that China is not going to have a good time the next few years.
  
  
  
• In a win for users of ChatGPT, the New York Times has blocked OpenAI's web crawler. (The Verge)
  
  While it is true that there are any number of other sewers for OpenAI to crawl through, blocking one of the largest has got to help.
  
  
  
• SFP? Throw it in the bin. (Serve the Home)
  
  Don't want to hear about it unless it's at least 100Gb.
  
  
  
• Walking across Luxembourg. (ioces)
  
  In a long weekend. It took him four days, but to be fair he didn't choose the shortest or straightest route. You could walk across the northern part of Luxembourg in a day.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:34 AM

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