Daily Tech News 31 October 2023

• Apple's M3 MacBook Pro is here. Or will be in a week. (Ars Technica)
  
  It's about 15% faster than the M2 model.
  
  A 14" MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD costs $4900.
  
  My 14" HP Pavilion with 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD cost me around $900.
  
  So... Yeah.
  
  
  
• The new M3 iMac has also been announced. (Ars Technica)
  
  As well as the speed boost, the maximum memory has been increased from 16GB to 24GB.
  
  That extra 8GB of RAM will cost you $200.
  
  It retails for $20.
  
  So... Yeah.

• Why does my code run slower on a 5950X running Linux than a 5625U laptop running Windows 11 and WSL?
  
  Probably cache latency.
  
  The 5950X has two CPU chiplets that share cache over a high-speed interconnect, while the 5625U is a single chip. The chiplet design makes large CPUs cheaper to build but can do weird things to cache latency.
  
  This is a real question that is happening with some code I wrote recently; it's 50% slower on what should be a much faster CPU.
  
  Guess when I (eventually) build my new system I might want to go for the 7800X3D rather than the 7900.
  
  
  
• So, how do those Qualcomm benchmarks for their upcoming Snapdragon X Elite hold up under independent testing?
  
  Just fine, actually. (AnandTech)
  
  Ryan Smith at AnandTech got to try out two pre-production laptops under both Windows and Linux, and the benchmark scores he got matched Qualcomm's numbers and are genuinely faster than equivalent Apple M2 laptops.
  
  Of course, Apple just announced the M3 which if everyone's claims are accurate will give them back the performance lead in Arm laptops... By 2.5%.
  
  Looking very good for Qualcomm at this point, except for the six month wait for these systems to arrive.
  
  
  
• Most of the claims in an artist lawsuit against AI art companies have been dismissed for being, well, crap. (Reuters) (archive site)
  
  The Reuters article doesn't really give you the facts of the case, the claims of the plaintiffs, the arguments of the defendants, or the relevant laws.
  
  This Twitter thread does a much better job and is well worth reading if you're interested in this kind of thing.
  
  Essentially, while generative AI is new, to claim that it is infringing on your copyrighted works - under current law - would require that the work it produces to be substantively the same, not merely influenced by your own work.
  
  And that's simply not what generative AI does.
  
  
  
• The Biden Administration has issued its executive order governing the development and use of AI systems. (WhiteHouse.gov)
  
  As you would expect, it's a mix of useless bullshit, impractical bullshit, unconstitutional bullshit, and just, well, bullshit.
  
  
  
• Speeding up Python by 17,000,000%. (Sidsite)
  
  The article takes a real-world problem with analysing correlations in survey results (people who answered A in question 5 were most likely to answer D in question 15) and then tightens up the code until it squeaks.
  
  While the end result is pretty hairy (though much less so than some of the code I have to maintain) the first two optimisations are straightforward and make it run 50x faster.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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