Daily Tech News 23 September 2023

• Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless. (Markets Insider) (archive site)
  
  Remove "95% of", "now", and "probably".
  
  My personal theory is that the NFT bubble was quantitative easing - free money flooding the economy looking for somewhere do go, and ending up in annoying place and making everything smell, the way floods always do, and why I live on a hill.

• Who is the son of Tom Cruise's mother? ChatGPT has no idea. (Substack)
  
  It knows who Tom Cruise's mother was, but it doesn't know who her son is.
  
  This is because LLMs - what passes for AI right now - don't know anything except which words commonly go together.
  
  
  
• The tragedy of Google Search. (The Atlantic)
  
  Leaving aside the moment the irony of The Atlantic commenting on a once-prominent institution turned to shit.
  
  Google is facing an antitrust lawsuit right now, and is arguing that there are limits to economies of scale, which is absolutely true. But Google Search has turned to shit because (a) Google has turned to shit and (b) the internet has turned to shit, and is propped up by Google spending billions to keep it the default search engine everywhere.
  
  The real problem here is (b). How can anyone build a good search engine today when the good content is drowning in shit? Breaking up Google doesn't help, because the internet is still shit.
  
  
  
• Ten reasons why Windows is going in the wrong direction. (PC Magazine)
  
  Actually, 10 features that show that Windows is going in the wrong direction.
  
  The reason is Panos Panay, who is leaving Microsoft and heading over to Amazon to ruin their devices division.
  
  
  
• Can government debt solve fertility? (Overcoming Bias)
  
  When the underlying problem being discussed is government debt.
  
  No.
  
  This is stupid, you're stupid, and I feel stupid for having read your nonsense.
  
  
  
• The problems with Cython. (PythonSpeed)
  
  Cython is a halfway house between Python and C, which is great if you want to interface Python and C, but bad for anything else.
  
  The solution on offer here is Rust, with code examples that look like a compiler vomited.
  
  
  
• I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser. (A Day in the Life Of)
  
  Not me, someone else.
  
  Good luck. Not an easy task but all the worthwhile advances are created by people who are fed up with the status quo.
  
  100 opinions I hold.
  
  Not me, the browser guy.
  
  Though almost all of them are opinions I share, which is pretty damn unusual with lists of opinions found online.
  
  
  
• The PQXDH Key Agreement Protocol. (Signal)
  
  How Alice and Bob can chat privately in a post-quantum world without that damn Carol sticking her nose in.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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