Daily Tech News 24 February 2024

• The Florida state legislature has passed a law banning children under 16 from social media. (Associated Press)
  
  I'll have to read the text of the bill, but this seems doomed both constitutionally and practically. Children under 13, you may have a case, and that is essentially the law already. But if you're trying to ban teenagers from YouTube and TikTok, that's simply not going to work.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on separate legislation from Florida and Texas restricting viewpoint discrimination by social media platforms. (The Verge)
  
  I don't know how this is going to turn out, but what I suspect is that the Supreme Court will overturn the laws on specific First Amendment grounds and the states will have another try at it with more carefully-worded legislation.

• AMD has fixed that STAPM BIOS bug affecting Ryzen 8700G and 8600G CPUs. (AnandTech)
  
  STAPM stands for "skin temperature aware power management", and it's meant to prevent your laptop from burning your lap. But the 8700G and 8600G are desktop processors, and if your desk is in your lap you have other problems.
  
  Anyway... Up to 7% faster.
  
  Also the 35W 8700GE is on its way to complement the 65W 8700G. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It delivers more than 80% of the CPU and graphics performance of the 8700G while consuming a little over half the power. Which means that if you could double the number of CPU and GPU cores, you could get 60% more performance at the same power consumption.
  
  Which might be why AMD is planning to do exactly that with its upcoming Strix Point Halo laptop chips.
  
  
  
• The US is not planning to restrict sales of 28nm chipmaking equipment to China. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For multiple reasons: The 28nm node was introduced in 2011, it's old and slow but cost-effective and so used mostly for cheap silicon produced in huge quantities like microcontrollers for dishwashers, and because China is close to producing its own 28nm equipment.
  
  China already owns a lot of 14nm equipment, but it bought that from foreign suppliers.
  
  Meanwhile, TSMC and Intel are starting 2nm production this year, with Samsung about six months behind.
  
  
  
• A former CEO of Reddit (there seems to be a lot of those) explains the Google Gemini debacle and gets every single detail wrong. (Twitter)
  
  None of this was unexpected, or unintended. Gemini was doing precisely what it was designed to do: Altering your questions to fit the views of its creators.
  
  The problem with that is its creators are retarded.
  
  
  
• What is the point of Elon Musk's AI acompany? (The Verge)
  
  Not mentioned in the article: Wait until the communists infecting all the other AI companies drive his competitors to bankruptcy, then scoop up the entire market.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:05 AM

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