Daily Tech News 24 March 2024

• The global economy runs through a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That road leads to a mine producing the purest quartz in the world, and the factory that processes it. There is no naturally occurring substitute.
  
  The quartz is used to create crucibles which are used to produced silicon wafers, which are in turn sliced and cooked and dice to produce computer chips.
  
  It is possible to make the quartz synthetically; we just don't right now because there's an enormous pile of it sitting underground in this one spot. But it would be a few difficult years if anything happened there.

• This seems like a bad idea: EVGA changed the connector layout of its GQ 1000W power supply without changing the model number. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you buy a new one the cables have changed too, and everything works.
  
  If you have one already, and it's faulty and is replaced under warranty, then congratulations! Your existing cables will plug in just fine and deliver 12V on the 5V line to all your disk drives.
  
  
  
• The CEO and founder of Stability AI - creator of Stable Diffusion - has resigned. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The official announcement doesn't say much and neither do his own tweets, but reading between the lines it seems he's pushing hard for actual open source solutions and the company's investors want bullshit that makes money like ChatGPT.
  
  Doubly interesting in that he apparently owns a controlling interest in Stability AI. This is the same kind of conflict that recently roiled OpenAI, and led to Elon Musk's pending lawsuit against that company.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:04 AM

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