Daily Tech News 7 July 2024

• Merle Myers did not kill himself: A former Boeing inspector says parts marked for scrap ended up being built into planes. (CNN)

  Meyers, a 30-year veteran of Boeing, described to CNN what he says was an elaborate off-the-books practice that Boeing managers at the Everett factory used to meet production deadlines, including taking damaged and improper parts from the company's scrapyard, storehouses and loading docks.

  This, if true, should result in felony convictions.

  Beginning in the early 2000s, Meyers says that for more than a decade, he estimates that about 50,000 parts "escaped" quality control and were used to build aircraft. Those parts include everything from small items like screws to more complex assemblies like wing flaps. A single Boeing 787 Dreamliner, for example, has approximately 2.3 million parts.
  
  Most of the parts that were meant to be scrapped were often painted red to signify they were unsuitable for assembly lines, Meyers said. Yet, in some cases, that didn't stop them from being put into planes being assembled, he said.

  Lots of felony convictions.

• AMD's new 12 core 120W 9900X is about 6% slower than Intel's 20 core 253W 14700K. (WCCFTech)
  
  Also the faster Intel chips have a habit of cooking themselves and failing though Intel is working very hard to pin the blame on someone else.
  
  
  
• It's always DNS, except when it's the DNS server, in which case it's BGP. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Cloudflare's global DNS service at 1.1.1.1 got bushwhacked by Greek ISP Electronet. BGP doesn't have great protection against mistakes like this - or against deliberate attacks either.
  
  Since 1.1.1.1 is designed to respond from a local server no matter where you are in the world, the bad BGP announcement from one Greek ISP didn't affect that many people, but it's still a fiddly system that I'm glad I don't have to worry about.
  
  
  
• How good is ChatGPT at coding? (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  If your problem had an answer published to the public internet prior to 2021, it's good. Otherwise not.
  
  Of course, if that's the case you could just look up the answer yourself.
  
  
  
• Here's a $629 ice machine. And it's not even internet-enabled. (The Verge)
  
  My fridge cost less than that.
  
  
  
• You could learn a lot from a CIO (chief information officer) with a $17 billion IT budget. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Like the ability to fail upwards:

  "You can't really start talking about AI if you're not in the cloud, if you're not modernizing your data, if you're not doing all the foundational stuff," she said. That has put the bank on an aggressive modernization journey based on a hybrid strategy. Some of the more critical services are running on prem in very sophisticated data centers the company built to handle its unique demands, and some are running in the cloud with the main cloud vendors: Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

  JPMorgan Chase, the article notes, handles $10 trillion in transactions per day.
  
  And they want to throw AI into that mix.
  
  I don't even want to think about that.
  
  
  
• Tokens are a big reason today's generative AI falls short. (Tech Crunch)
  
  One of many big reasons.
  
  The biggest being they are using language models without a corresponding fact model, and if you get the fact model right the language model becomes largely irrelevant.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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