Daily News Stuff 25 March 2024

• Apple's M4 CPUs could appear as soon as Q1 of next year. (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is not all that soon, come to think of it. By then it will be competing with AMD's Zen 5, Qualcomm's X Elite series, and Intel's Apollo Lake and Lunar Lake ranges.
  
  
  
• That didn't take long: Redict is a fork of Redis that makes it free again. (Redict)
  
  Redis Labs recently changed the license of Redis so that while source code is available it comes with restrictions on use.
  
  Redict takes the last unrestricted version and keeps it unrestricted, meaning that the original Redis is basically dead.
  
  
  
• Emergent abilities in LLMs - where as an LLM grows it suddenly gains new abilities - are nothing but a measurement error. (Quanta)
  
  LLMs don't know how to do arithmetic. The more data you shove into them, the better they become at guessing, that's all.
  
  If you test them and give anything less than 100% a failing grade, the ability to do arithmetic suddenly appears out of nowhere. But the same thing would happen if you did that with children.
  
  
  
• The Chinese government has banned the Chines government from using Intel and AMD CPUs. (WCCFTech)
  
  Their loss.
  
  It does serve to give the Chinese CPU makers a guaranteed market for their products, which are not great but are basically adequate.
  
  
  
• As part of an investigation, the FBI posted videos publicly to YouTube, sent the links to the suspects, and then demanded Google hand over all details of the accounts of anyone who watched the videos. (Mashable)
  
  The judge not only allowed it, but required Google to keep silent about it.
  
  This is what warrant canaries are for. Unfortunately those are as dead as the passenger pigeon.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:04 AM

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