Daily Tech News 5 November 2023

• Microsoft is "making a mess of the news" by replacing journalists with AI which is stupid and delusional but not deliberately lying to you. (CNN)
  
  The top of CNN's list of examples:

  False claims that President Joe Biden fell asleep during a moment of silence for victim sof the Maui wildfire.

  As Snopes and a thousand other sites pointed out in coincidentally identical wording, this is a vicious lie. If you watch the video he is clearly dead.
  
  
  

• I switched from my flaky HP Pavilion laptop to my Pavilion Plus, which I haven't really used much yet.
  
  It's great.
  
  But it commits the eighth cardinal sin of applumbo: Soldered RAM.
  
  While Apple murders your wallet if you want to put a useful amount of RAM in their laptops, charging 100% markups and forcing you to upgrade the CPU along with the RAM, at least you can do it, with the 14" MacBook Pro being available with as much as 128GB.
  
  The Pavilion Plus 14 is locked forever at 16GB.
  
  
  
• Speaking of MacBooks they can now detect moisture in their Thunderbolt ports and automatically void your warranty. (WCCFTech)
  
  Not joking. They will still short out and die - Apple's power circuitry is infamously terrible - you just won't get warranty support.
  
  
  
• China claims to have produced an AI chip thousands of times more powerful than Nvidia's industry leading A100 accelerator. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And they have, sort of. Problem is it's an analogue photonic chip, a kind of design that is incredibly powerful but ludicrously finicky.
  
  You might as well just use people. And we know what they're like.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fried might not be the last crypto criminal. (The Verge)
  
  No, really?

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:04 AM

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