Daily Tech News 20 April 2024

• Half of China's major cities are sinking. (NPR)
  
  Everyone said I was mad to build a city in a swamp, but I built it all the same.
  
  It sank into the swamp.
  
  

• Daniel Dennett, one of the few philosophers of the past hundred years worthy of respect, has passed away. (Daily Nous)
  
  You may not agree with everything he said, but he was right more often than wrong, which is a stellar feat in philosophy.
  
  For example:

  Postmodernism, the school of "thought" that proclaimed "There are no truths, only interpretations" has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for "conversations" in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

  He was 82.
  
  
  
• Speaking at the Open Source Summit, Linux creator Linus Torvalds shared his thoughts on AI, security, and everything else. (ZDNet)
  
  On the AI question, the most useful thing he sees is that Nvidia now talks to the Linux kernel developers so they can work around hardware bugs.
  
  Other than that, he suggested that AI might actually be useful in 10 years.
  
  Maybe.
  
  
  
• To nobody's surprise, Twitter clone Post News is dead. (Tech Crunch)
  
  If you want to take on Twitter you have to start with a platform that is already useful - and have a way to add Twitter's functionality without driving away all your users.
  
  Even Facebook is struggling with Threads.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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