Daily Tech News 3 Mercedonius 2023

• Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is Amelia Watson.
  
  Yes, again, everybody's favourite Bri'ish time-travelling detective, Amelia Watson, is already shipping from Amazon Japan when my supposed pre-order from Amazon US is scheduled for May.
  
  Didn't save money this time because the pre-order price was particularly good, but didn't cost any more either.
  
  
  
• The I in LLM stands for Intelligence. (Haxx)
  
  In which the author makes the very good point that the output of LLMs like ChatGPT can be worse than useless, because the entire model is designed to produce output that is plausible rather true.
  
  Which means that significant effort is required to show that the plausible output is nonsense and should not be adopted, just as is the case with university presidents.
  
  In this case it's the creator of the utility curl, which is used basically everywhere - every Linux system, every Mac and iOS device, every Android phone and Raspberry Pi has curl on it.
  
  And his particular problem is AI-generated bug reports, reporting bugs that simply do not exist.

• Promising benchmarks of AMD's forthcoming desktop APUs continue to leak. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In this case the 8600G, showing graphics performance about 10% faster than its laptop counterpart, about equal with a desktop Nvidia GTX 1060. Perfectly adequate for light gaming.
  
  The 8700G will be interesting. It has 50% more graphics hardware, and we'll see whether the bottleneck there is power consumption or memory bandwidth. If the former it will be an amazing chip; if the latter it will be... Still pretty good.
  
  
  
• Looking for an old-fashioned tube amplifier with a transparent OLED display? LG has you covered with the Duke Box. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, they'll be showing it off at CES, anyway. Whether it ever ships to consumers is another matter, let alone the price.
  
  
  
• The Qotom Q20332G9-S10 network appliance can do anything except compile Linux quickly. (Serve the Home)
  
  It supports up to 64GB of RAM, two M.2 SSDs, two 2.5" SATA drives, five 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, four 10Gb SFP+ ports, and an SFF-8087 port for attaching an external drive array. And it's fanless, so as long as you stick with SSDs it's completely silent.
  
  It is also about a quarter the speed of a mid-range laptop CPU like Intel's 1360P.
  
  
  
• A ship carrying 800 tons of lithium-ion batteries ran into a tiny spot of bother when the batteries did what batteries do, which is catch fire. (The Register)
  
  They put the fire out.
  
  Which is not very exciting but not every story can be a battery-powered train wreck.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:10 AM

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