Daily Tech News 30 July 2024

• AI has been determined by the State of California to cause rats in laboratory cancer: SB-1047 - legislation introduced by Scott Wiener, so you know it's bad - aims to make it illegal for AI to do things which are illegal in the first place and which it cannot possibly do in the second place. (Ars Technica)

  The bill lays out a legalistic definition of those safety incidents that in turn focuses on defining a set of "critical harms" that an AI system might enable. That includes harms leading to "mass casualties or at least $500 million of damage," such as "the creation or use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon" (hello, Skynet?) or "precise instructions for conducting a cyberattack... on critical infrastructure." The bill also alludes to "other grave harms to public safety and security that are of comparable severity" to those laid out explicitly.

  It's illegal to kill people, even in small numbers.
  
  It's illegal to destroy property that is not your own, even when it's less than half a billion dollars in damage.
  
  It's illegal to create chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons.
  
  It is trivially easy to find information on how to do any of these things, and that information cannot be erased, because people have done all of these things.

• The Asus ProArt PX13 is another Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 laptop. (Notebook Check)
  
  Now there are two of them.
  
  Again it lacks the Four Essential Keys, which is a shame because the specs are great. Though the cheapest model is $1999 (with 24GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and RTX 4050 graphics) and it goes up to $2999, so I wouldn't have been in the market anyway.
  
  Also, it seems that these chips don't support regular DDR5 DIMMs. There's no particular reason that they couldn't use CAMM2 modules instead of soldered LPDDR5X, but there are very few laptops supporting CAMM2 modules at the moment.
  
  
  
• You're blocking it wrong. (404 Media)
  
  Not a huge story but a handy guide to how to block the scourge of new AI web crawlers from your site.
  
  
  
• The Dasung Paperlike Color is a 12 inch 2560x1600 USB-C display weighing just under a pound. (Liliputing)
  
  When you see a display specifically named as "color" you can be pretty sure it's e-ink rather than LCD or OLED, and it is.
  
  One problem: It costs $849, so you'd need to really want an e-ink display for this to be worthwhile.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk reposted a parody video of Kamala Harris and the usual suspects are rioting. Virtually. (The Verge)
  
  It would be a lot funnier if these idiots didn't vote.
  
  
  
• microjs is a collection of JavaScript libraries, many of the under 1k in size. (microjs)
  
  Since it's literally impossible for any single piece of data to measure one microbyte, I'll accept it for what it is.
  
  There are a lot of libraries on there and many of them seem useful.
  
  
  
• FastHTML lets you write web applications in Python. (fastht.ml)
  
  I'm not sure I like this. If you don't know HTML and CSS and JavaScript and don't need to fine-tune your website, I can see how it would be useful.
  
  And you can customise the HTML, CSS, and Javascript; you're not stuck with what it generaties.
  
  But the home page for it is kind of ugly, which is not a great start.
  
  
  
• If you are running VMWare ESXi and you create a group called "ESX Admins" it gives that group admin access. (Ars Technica)
  
  And if you are running Microsoft Active Directory, you don't even need to do this on the ESXi server. If you can create a group on Active Directory it will apply just fine to ESXi.
  
  I don't run any of that stuff, but a whole lot of people do.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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