Daily Tech News 26 June 2024

• Fearless Fund's founder has resigned, and it's a sad reflection on the VC world for Black women. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Is it, though?

  Still, it is being sued by a politically conservative group called the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) over its charitable grants program. AAER is challenging the fund's right to provide $20,000 in small business grants to Black women, claiming the program violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans the use of race in contracts.

  Oh.

  The case is not going particularly well for Fearless Fund. As TechCrunch recently reported, earlier this month an appeals court ruled against Fearless. It upheld a preliminary injunction that prevents the firm from making grants to Black women business owners. The firm told TechCrunch at that time it is weighing its options on how to proceed.

  Shockingly, it turns out that racism is not only bad, but sometimes illegal. And while larger funds don't care about quaint notions like right and wrong, they do care about lawsuits potentially involving massive damages:

  Still, as we previously pointed out, the sad fact is that big names in the tech ecosystem have not exactly come out swinging in support. CEO Simone told Inc. earlier this year that the fund had lost nearly all its partnerships aside from two, JPMorgan and Costco. Even Mastercard, who sponsored the now-contested Strivers Grant, has publicly never commented on the lawsuit.

  You hate to see it. Wait, not hate. The other one.

• Crucial's 4TB T700 SSD is now $362 at Amazon. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There are cheaper SSDs, but this one is PCIe 5.0 and can transfer data at 12GB per second.
  
  And two years ago - maybe two and a half - that was a good price on a basic 4TB PCIe 3.0 drive. I know because I bought a couple of them at that time.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is adding custom smart widgets to the Start menu. Again. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Currently only in the preview channel, but you know what to do.
  
  (Windows 10 and/or Linux Mint.)
  
  
  
• Microsoft is now enabling OneDrive backups by default. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I was irked recently to find that OneDrive was scooping up client work files that are under NDA. On the other hand, the same overzealous OneDrive settings saved me from having to go back to my old laptop several times to recover little bits of data that hadn't migrated across.
  
  This is actually helpful, just... Ask, next time. Okay?
  
  
  
• Five Wordpress plugins - not official plugins but still hosted on Wordpress.org - were hacked and had backdoors inserted into the source code. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The Wordpress model means that security is not even an option; any plugin can do anything. The core Wordpress code has been relatively stable and free of exploits for a while now, but since very Wordpress blog uses plugins, that's not much of a reassurance.
  
  
  
• Researchers have eliminated matrix multiplication from LLM kernels, making them up to ten times more efficient. (Ars Technica)
  
  Sort of. They've translated floating point matrix operations into trinary equivalents, which are much simpler.
  
  The problem is that while the new code is more efficient in principle, existing hardware is designed to be efficient on the existing code, so the difference is meh.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Mustafa Suleyman - formerly the co-founder of AI startup DeepMind which was bought by Google ten years ago - loves Sam Altman, one of the (many) co-founders of OpenAI in 2015. (Tech Crunch)

  "I'm very good friends with Sam, have huge respect and, trust and faith in what they've done. And that's how it's going to roll for many, many years to come," Suleyman said. "That is, until I can sneak up behind him and then schklrrrrk."

  Suleyman also dreams of regulatory capture and buddying up with every dystopian nightmare state on the planet.
  
  As for fears about AI, pshaw, says Suleyman.

  When asked his opinion on kids using AI for schoolwork, Suleyman, who said he doesn't have kids, shrugged it off. "I think we have to be slightly careful about fearing the downside of every tool, you know, just as when calculators came in, there was a kind of this gut reaction, oh, no, everyone's gonna be able to sort of solve all the equations instantly. And it's gonna make us dumber because we weren't able to do mental arithmetic."

  
  
  
• 93% of Baltimore students are failing math. (USA Today)
  
  Inconceivable.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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