Daily Tech News 31 May 2024

• Fracking wastewater from Pennsylvania alone could provide 40% of domestic lithium requirements for the US. (Ars Technica)
  
  The Marcellus Shale formation in Pennsylvania contains enough natural gas to meet all domestic requirements for 18 years all by itself, and is also rich in lithium. So rich that the wastewater from fracking efforts is just loaded with the stuff.
  
  The Ars commentariat is outraged at the thought that extracting critical energy resources could provide other critical resources for free. There's not enough lithium in the world for that lot.

• The Framework 13 laptop has a new higher-resolution screen option. Oh, and a new Intel CPU. (Ars Technica)
  
  The CPU is the Intel Meteor Lake series, the 1th generation since Intel renumbered everything. It's... Okay. It uses less power and has improved graphics compared to 12th, 13th, and 14th generation Intel chips.
  
  The screen is a 120Hz 2880x1920 model with rounded corners. The corners are because it's not a custom panel made for Framework, but a 13" 3:2 ratio model that just happened to be available and fit almost perfectly.
  
  Still no Four Essential Keys.
  
  
  
• Twitch has terminated all members of its Safety Advisory Council. (CNBC)
  
  Awesome.
  
  
  
• Spotify will be providing full refunds to all purchasers of its soon to be defunct Car Thing. (Engadget)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• A group of filmmakers is still trying to force Reddit to cough up the IP addresses of people discussing Bittorrent. District Court Judge James Donato just upheld all previous decisions telling them to take a long walk off a sinking pier. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• Google claims that it never said putting glue on pizzas and eating rocks was a good idea, and also that customers are satisfied with their new glue-and-rock pizzas so shut up about it already. (The Verge)

  User feedback shows that with AI Overviews, people have higher satisfaction with their search results, and they're asking longer, more complex questions that they know Google can now help with. They use AI Overviews as a jumping off point to visit web content, and we see that the clicks to webpages are higher quality - people are more likely to stay on that page, because we've done a better job of finding the right info and helpful webpages for them.

  Also that it's your fault:

  One area we identified was our ability to interpret nonsensical queries and satirical content. Let's take a look at an example: "How many rocks should I eat?" Prior to these screenshots going viral, practically no one asked Google that question.

  You're a bunch of troublemakers, you people, using a search engine for search like that.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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