Daily Tech News 20 February 2024

• Global Foundries is set to receive $1.5 billion in government funds under the CHIPS Act, and another $600 million from New York state in one form or another. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Global Foundries was originally the manufacturing arm of AMD, and was then spun off as a separate company, acquired the semiconductor operations of AMD, and was bought by the UAE, not necessarily in that order.
  
  The company is planning to invest $12 billion over the next decade, mostly on specialised production like gallium nitride and expanding bulk processes on 12nm.
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  Is this money well spent? Probably not; if it were, Global Foundries wouldn't need the money. Is it money better spent than almost anything the US federal government does? Maybe.

• Unraid is going to a subscription model. (Serve the Home)
  
  So what happens to your data if your subscription expires?
  
  Nothing.
  
  It keeps working, you just stop getting updates.
  
  I'd still go with an open-source solution by choice, but that's not disastrous. It's basically what JetBrains does with its development tools.
  
  
  
• MariaDB could be taken private at about 6% of its peak valuation. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Ouch. Again, I use open-source MariaDB - it has some great features that mainstream MySQL lacks - and they don't make a penny from me. But for obvious reasons I hope they survive.
  
  
  
• Groq allows you to play with the Mixtral 8x7B-32k and Llama 2 70-B 4k chatbots. (Groq)
  
  I had some odd problems getting Mixtral to answer a simple question, and then it started working perfectly. That is likely because Mixtral isn't a single AI, but eight variants of the same LLM tuned to handle different types of questions. If the wrong variant is selected to answer your question you will get a stupid answer, and this interface doesn't let you see all eight possible answers.
  
  Llama 2 70-B worked fine on the same test question. Let me try it on the woodpecker one... No.
  
  
  
• Your fingerprints can be recreated from the sounds you make when using a touchscreen. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No they can't.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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