Daily Tech News 5 November 2024

• At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus: The first user of the Sarco suicide pod, an American woman suffering from a rare and painful bone infection compounded by an immune disorder, was found alive in the pod with strangulation marks before dying on the scene. (LBC)
  
  The Swiss police, after warning everybody involved in writing that they would be arrested if they proceeded with their stunt, arrested everybody involved.

  According to the news outlet, the company president, who was standing beside the woman throughout the event, was heard to tell the pod's designer over video call: "She's still alive, Philip".

  Always mount a scratch monkey.

  After being notified of her death by the two lawyers involved in the project and present at the scene, the police swept the forest and arrested everyone near the Sarco, including a photographer for Volkskrant.

  Good call.

  A Forensic doctor present at the scene told the court that the woman had, among other things, severe injuries to her neck.

  This is apparently not supposed to happen.

• Amazon and Facebook's respective nuclear ambitions have been put on hold. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Amazon by the power regulator which believes that the planned deal with the Savannah power plant would unfairly impact other customers.
  
  Facebook by... Bees.
  
  
  
• Intel is upset that it has received $0 in promised CHIPS Act funding. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel has invested $30 billion in US facilities, which should attract $8.5 billion in CHIPS grants. It hasn't received a penny of that money, though it has received a lot of other government money.
  
  A lot.
  
  
  
• Netflix is focusing its game development efforts on AI after laying off its game developers. (404 Media)
  
  While the company no longer has any humans working on games, it now boasts a VP, GenAI for Games.
  
  
  
• Perplexity, an AI startup widely reviled for simply stealing content wherever it can find it has offered to replace striking New York Times staff with robots. (Tech Crunch)
  
  What the hell, I love these guys.
  
  
  
• FFmpeg, a widely-used open-source video encoding framework, runs up to 94 times faster with a new hand-written AVX-512 update. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Except that it doesn't. The 94x speedup is for a single function and compares AVX-512 to baseline C code with no SIMD at all, not even the MMX instructions that came out in the 90s.
  
  Compared to existing AVX2 instructions it's about 40% faster, again just on that one specific function.
  
  
  
• You can now play Doom on a Nintendo alarm clock. (Hot Hardware)
  
  It is the 21st century after all.
  
  
  
• Los Angeles county is suing Pepsi and Coca Cola because bottles. (Yahoo)
  
  It's time to treat California as a smallpox outbreak. Complete isolation. Nobody goes in, nobody comes out.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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