Daily Tech News 14 November 2023

• SpaceX is planning a test launch of Starship as early as this weekend. (FAA)
  
  If the FAA website stays up. Maybe even if it doesn't.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile further out, the James Web Space Telescope is finding hundreds of rogue planets at a time. (Quanta)
  
  These aren't neatly orbiting stars, but just floating around in the middle of nowhere.
  
  Often in pairs, which is not something we normally see planets doing. They've been called JUMBOs, for Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, and there seems to be a lot of them.

• Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI. (Arxiv)
  
  Or, What the Fuck is AGI Anyway?
  
  It examines nine definitions for AGI, dismisses them all as useless, and posits that current state-of-the-art AI systems are approaching AGI Level 1, which is to say, a mechanical idiot.
  
  
  
• Samsung's 990 Pro - one of the best consumer SSDs around short of the still wildly overpriced PCIe 5 models - is now $250 for 4TB. (AnandTech)
  
  That's a lot for a little and it has no shortcomings. It's not limited to PCIe 3, it's not DRAMless, it's not QLC, it's not from a second or third tier manufacturer.
  
  Ten years from now that will look absurdly expensive but right now it's a steal.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced its 5th generation Emerald Rapids Xeon range, along with some very, very selective benchmarks. (WCCFTech)
  
  Understandable, because these models go up to 64 cores, where AMD already goes up to 128 cores. Intel has certain areas of strength but overall they just get clobbered.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT's new Code Interpreter function lets you upload your data for processing - and also lets other people steal it. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you upload a file, and that file contains a link to a web page, and that web page could be interpreted as instructions for ChatGPT, ChatGPT will thus interpret them.
  
  As I said earlier, mechanical idiot.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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