Daily Tech News 18 March 2024

• Microsoft really, really wants you to use its Etch browser and Thing search engine. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you use Chrome, you will get a popup ad begging you to come back. Please, they won't spam you with ads anymore.
  
  Only problem is the popup ad is so poorly rendered that users reported it as a virus.
  
  Well, not the only problem.
  
  
  

• I missed this one when it came out because it originally shipped with only 16GB of RAM: The Asus Zenbook OLED 15 2023 model. (TechRadar)
  
  It has a 15.6" 2880x1620 120Hz OLED display with 100% DCI-P3 colour. That's very similar to the display I'm using right now and it's very, very good.
  
  CPU is a previous-generation Ryzen 7735U - eight Zen 3 CPU cores and 12 RDNA2 graphics cores, so not quite the latest but very capable. One USB 4 port, one USB 3 C port, one USB 3 A port, HDMI, and a headphone jack. Not a huge wealth of ports but adequate.
  
  It has a numeric keypad but it's a compact three column layout so you can just leave NumLock off and use it as a cursor pad and the Four Essential Keys. And reprogram the extra keys to your whim with PowerToys.
  
  And it's readily available with 32GB of RAM. And it weighs 1.4kg, which is the same as my 14" laptop.
  
  
  
• How the House quietly revived the TikTok ban before most of us noticed. (The Verge)
  
  If "us" means tech journalists, you guys wouldn't notice a tapdancing elephant in the bathroom if it was inconvenient to the narrative.
  
  
  
• You can download GPT-2 and run it in Excel. (Spreadsheets Are All You Need)
  
  Seriously.
  
  It's the "small" version of GPT-2, which has 124 million parameters, so it's small enough that Excel doesn't explode. (Unless you're running on a Mac in which case you might want a blast shield.) But being able to poke at it as a spreadsheet can help demonstrate how it works.
  
  Modern small LLMs are typically 7 billion parameters, so Excel need not apply.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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