Daily Tech News 13 December 2024

• Intel's second-generation "Battlemage" graphics cards are here and... They're actually pretty damn good. (Hot Hardware)
  
  They're not perfect: Intel's drivers still hiccupped on a couple of games, resulting in slower than expected performance and some visual artifacts.
  
  But the new B580 routinely outruns Nvidia and AMD cards costing 50% more. And it leaves Intel's previous generation A770 card in the dust on most tests, while using about half as much power.
  
  And it delivers solid ray-tracing and AI performance. And it has 12GB of VRAM instead of the 8GB found on competitors like Nvidia's 4060 and AMD's 7600.
  
  And it's cheaper at $249.
  
  All in all, a good card at a good price, only let down by some minor driver issues. But the driver software has improved dramatically since the first generation of cards was launched, so those problems are likely to be fixed too.

• Microsoft's Recall is back, and yes, it still takes screenshots of your sensitive information. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can tell it not to. It does it anyway.
  
  
  
• Are LLMs capable of non-verbal reasoning? (Ars Technica)
  
  As at least a dozen commenters point out, LLMs aren't capable of reasoning at all.
  
  
  
• New Zealand has scrapped all government investment in basic social science research. (Science)
  
  The government has said if you can't use it to build things or blow them up, they're not interested and they're not giving you money.
  
  
  
• In Canada, euthanasia now accounts for 5% of all deaths. (BBC)
  
  Euthanasia is only available for people who are terminally ill, or chronically ill, or mentally ill, or generally inconvenient.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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