« Tuesday Overnight Open Thread (6/18/24) | Main | The Morning Report — 6//19/24 »

Daily Tech News 19 June 2024

Top Story

• The new Arm-based Copilot+ laptops are here - minus the threatened spyware - so time to test actual retail units. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  (Arm is an alternative CPU design to Intel and AMD - the one found in pretty much every phone and tablet, and now used in Apple's laptops and desktops as well. Copilot+ is Microsoft's branding for it's hilariously muddled AI venture. All the new Arm-based Windows laptops come with Copilot+ whether you like it or not.)
  
  It's a mixed bag. If you want to transcode video using handbrake, the hardware on the Qualcomm CPU absolutely demolishes the latest Intel chips, performing a nine minute task in under three.
  
  
  
• If you want to play games, though, you pays your money and you takes your chances. (Windows Central)
  
  Some games work quite well - Qualcomm's integrated graphics are strong on paper - while others won't even let you download them.
  
  Battery life, expected to be the standout feature, is good at 14 hours, but not amazing.
  
  
  

Tech News

• An AI product without so much AI in it: Gigabyte's 2TB AI TOP 100E SSD has an endurance rating of 219PB. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I don't know what changes they've made to achieve that, but that is a lot. A typical drive in this category has an endurance rating around 1PB. With the Gigabyte drive you can use the entire disk 100,000 times before you have to start worrying about it wearing out.
  
  Pricing not yet available, but if it's horribly expensive you'll know why.
  
  
  
• Meta (that is, Facebook) has announced a method to watermark AI-generated speech. (MIT Technology Review)
  
  The code - available on GitHub - adds markers to an audio file that are inaudible to humans but easily detected by the same program.
  
  Which of course means you can simply run the program to delete the markers, but who would do that?
  
  
  
• If you were hoping for an Arm model of the Framework laptop, sorry, but here's a RISC-V motherboard for it. (Liliputing)
  
  With four 1.5GHz CPU cores it's not going to set any records though. Also, unlike regular Framework laptops, you can't expand the memory or the storage.
  
  It's really just for people developing software for RISC-V embedded systems. Not a huge market but I'm sure they'll welcome this.
  
  
  
• I'd sooner swallow a wasp: An AI app called Butterflies promises to destroy social media forever. (The Verge)
  
  When you sign up, you create an AI personality called a Butterfly that can post text and pictures on your behalf, and interact with other Butterflies on the platform, so that you can log out and go for a walk while your account that has all your personal information attached discusses homeschooling with an FBIfly.

Not At All Tech News

Uh-oh, it's another one.



I wasn't expecting HoloEN Gen 4 this year, certainly not before HoloID Gen 4.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

The backstory is that they're a team of investigators dispatched to track down HoloEN Gen 3, whose backstory is that they're escaped supercriminals.

That will last for about 0.3 milliseconds before it devolves into chaos.




Uh, yeah, that's one of our terrifying supercriminals there.

Since most of you don't follow the vtubing scene I try to add a disclaimer that vtubers are live broadcasts using animated avatars, rather than anime which is scripted and pre-drawn. But Hololive is also an anime, so they are really not helping.



Also, if you're looking for Reiny or Shizukou, two British indie vtubers who retired earlier this year, you might want to check Globie.



Disclaimer: The doggo and the racing giraffe, respectively.