Daily Tech News 2 July 2024

• The Supreme Court has a major First Amendment case among all the administrative law ones, namely Netchoice v. Humanity. This was actually two different cases filed against Florida and Texas laws requiring viewpoint neutrality in online moderation.
  
  This resulted in a circuit split with the two cases being decided in opposite directions resulting in the Supreme Court ordering them 9-0 to go back and do it properly this time. (CBS)
  
  The majority opinion (written by Justice Kagan) is favorable to the social networks, while a concurring opinion written by Justice Alito and joined by Gorsuch and Thomas was less so, but all nine justices agreed that the circuit courts made a dog's breakfast of their decisions.

• Looking for a cheap graphics card that is better than a potato? Can't decide between the Nvidia RTX 3050 and AMD's RX 6600? Just buy the 6600. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 6600 outpaces the 3050 even with ray tracing factored in, and if you disable ray tracing - it's not going to be a great experience on low-end cards like these anyway - the 6600 closes in on the 3060.
  
  I have a couple of 3060s. They're not high-end either, but they do just fine.
  
  
  
• Thunderbolt 5 cables are here. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Thunderbolt 5 itself is absent, but the cables are here. $23 for 1ft, $33 for 3ft. They don't come longer than that.
  
  Thunderbolt 5 can transfer data up to three times faster than Thunderbolt 4, and supports power delivery up to 240W.
  
  
  
• The telltale words that could identify generative AI text. (Ars Technica)

  Father: Yes, you can't beat wood ... Gorn!
  
  Mother: What's gorn dear?
  
  Father: Nothing, nothing, I just like the word. It gives me confidence. Gorn ... gorn. It's got a sort of woody quality about it. Gorn. Gorn. Much better than 'newspaper' or 'litterbin'.
  
  Daughter: Frightful words.
  
  Mother: Perfectly dreadful.

  Sorry, sorry, cited the wrong paper there. I'll come in again:

  The word "delves," for instance, shows up in 25 times as many 2024 papers as the pre-LLM trend would expect; words like "showcasing" and "underscores" increased in usage by nine times as well. Other previously common words became notably more common in post-LLM abstracts: the frequency of "potential" increased 4.1 percentage points; "findings" by 2.7 percentage points; and "crucial" by 2.6 percentage points, for instance.

  Seemly... Prodding... Vacuum.
  
  
  
• How to get rich in 2024. (The Verge)
  
  1. Start an AI company three years ago.
  2. Run out of money.
  3. Have one of the trillion-dollar tech companies hire away all your staff. It doesn't matter which one. You choose.
  4. Have them license your tech for hundreds of millions of dollars so they don't get sued.
  
  
  
• Democratic senators on the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs have sent a letter to fintech company Synapse, its major banking partner Evolve, and everyone else in the vicinity saying, and I quote, "What the fuck guys? Get your shit sorted out or we'll come over there and sort you out." (Tech Crunch)
  
  Synapse imploded a couple of months ago when its Chapter 11 reorganisation plans collapsed and it was left without enough cashflow to operate. The problem is that Synapse operated as an intermediary between its customers, their customers, and banks like Evolve. And now nobody can get their money because Synapse was handling the details and Synapse is toast.
  
  Double toast, possibly, because between $65 million and $96 million of the customer funds deposited through Synapse have allegedly gone walkabout.
  
  Nor is Synapse the only source of drama there:

  On June 26, Evolve Bank announced that it had been victim of a cyberattack and data breach that could have affected its partner companies as well. The incident, according to the company, involved "the data and personal information of some Evolve retail bank customers and financial technology partners' customers" such as Affirm, Mercury, Bilt, Alloy and Stripe. On June 29, fintech company Wise announced that some of its customers' personal data may have been stolen in the data breach. Also last week, Thread Bank - a popular partner to BaaS startups such as Unit - got hit with enforcement action from the FDIC. Notably, the order issued to Thread, as the publication Paymnts pointed out, "is unique in that it explicitly calls out the bank's Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Loan-as-a-Service (LaaS) programs."

  Bilt? Paymnts? For $65 million surely these guys can afford a new keyboard.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:05 AM

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