Daily Tech News 24 June 2024

• Meritocracy is bad, say people without merit. (Tech Crunch)

  "The post is misguided because people who support the meritocracy argument are ignoring the structural reasons some groups are more likely to outperform others," Mutale Nkonde, a founder working in AI policy, told TechCrunch.

  "A founder working in AI policy" is code for oxygen thief.

  "We all want the best people for the job, and there is data to prove that diverse teams are more effective."

  If they are more effective, then by definition, they are at the top of a meritocracy.
  
  The problem is, they're not, and you know they're not, but you are not allowed to admit it.

  Emily Witko, an HR professional at AI startup Hugging Face

  Oxygen thief.

  told TechCrunch that the post was a "dangerous oversimplification," but that it received so much attention on X because it "openly expressed sentiments that are not always expressed publicly and the audience there is hungry to attack DEI." Wang's MEI thought "makes it so easy to refute or criticize any conversations regarding the importance of acknowledging underrepresentation in tech," she continued.

  Well, yes, because DEI is fraudulent.

• Another win for Europe: Apple won't be bringing its AI glurge to EU customers due to laws that prevent it locking customers in boxes and then sealing the airholes. (Liliputing)
  
  I should naturally support Apple here over the EU - one company against an undemocratic transnational government - so the fact that I need to think about it is indicative of how much I despise modern Apple.
  
  
  
• Proposed legislation in Michigan would require high schools to offer computer science classes. Is that enough to solve "equity issues"? (Chalkbeat)
  
  You don't need an RTX 4090. You can get a computer good enough to learn computer science at Goodwill for $20. Any CPU from the last 20 years, 4GB of RAM, and a Linux CD, and you'll have something I could only dream of when I was doing my degree.
  
  
  
• Linux kernel contributor Larry Finger has passed away. (Phoronix)
  
  He was 65 when he posted his first kernel patch back in 2005, and he made 122 updates to open-source projects just in the last six months.
  
  
  
• llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine. (GitHub)
  
  Yes, really. Some font rendering engines are Turing-complete, and this font abuses that to its logical extreme to embed AI into your text.
  
  There's a video on that page showing it in action writing a fairy tale. It does this not by changing the text you type, but by changing how the text is rendered; if you change the font or copy and paste it into another application the story disappears, because it only exists as dynamically modified glyphs in LLamaSans.
  
  This is utterly useless but technically astounding.
  
  
  
• Highpoint's Rocket 1608A put to the test. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's no RAID in the name because there's no RAID on the card; you want the more expensive 7608A for that. Since this model already costs $1499, I'll leave it to you to decide whether you want the expensive version.
  
  It supports up to eight PCIe 5.0 SSDs and transfer rates up to 57GB per second. It's one of those devices that you don't need, unless you do, in which case you really need it.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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