Daily Tech News 14 December 2024

• You can't sue your way to AGI, says OpenAI in response to Elon Musk's lawsuit over the non-profit organisation being taken over by snake-oil salesmen. (The Verge)

  Believe us, we've tried.

  AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence, a term invented by the snake oil salesmen when everyone figured out there was no snake in the snake oil.
  
  OpenAI now says AGI will arrive as soon as next year, as a result of a convenient redefinition of AGI to mean "whatever we manage to ship next year".
  
  
  
• An OpenAI whistleblower has been found dead in his San Francisco apartment. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Suchir Balaji called attention to what he believed was OpenAI's intentional breaches of copyright law in training ChatGPT.
  

• If Tesla won't launch an AI-piloted taxi service, we will, says Zoox. (Tech Crunch)
  
  What is a Zoox?
  
  
  
• A Waymo robotaxi got stuck in a roundabout. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Yes, it was doing exactly what you think it was doing.
  
  
  
• Bluesky has found out what happens if you take millions of the most demented users from a much larger platform and make them your own problem: They become your own problem. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Jesse Singal, who is generally an intelligent and affable idiot, has written extensively on the insanity of the chemical sterilisation and surgical mutilation of children. To be completely clear, despite his otherwise mainstream left-wing views, he is vehemently against this, and his writing and research in this area is solid.
  
  He created a Bluesky account because, being left-wing, he is unhappy with Twitter.
  
  Bluesky went insane. The one thing you are absolutely forbidden to do is to question the orthodoxy.

  He is now the most blocked user on the social network, and user outrage over his participation on the platform is growing. People are demanding that Bluesky take a stand: It's either a place that promises it won't host bad actors, or it's a place that promises not to inflate the reach of bad actors thanks to its various moderation tools.
  
  It cannot be both.

  Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience simply don't exist for these people. Anyone daring to offer a different opinion must be revoked.
  
  And if you read Bluesky, they mean that in the Brontitall sense.

  But many Bluesky users don't want to just moderate and ignore Singal, they want him gone. It's become a dealbreaker.
  
  By keeping him, Bluesky risks harming the community, depleting its goodwill, and losing users, while also sending a signal to others that bad actors and harassers are welcome there.

  To be clear again, Singal is not a bad actor, and has not harassed anyone. This is just crazy people being crazy.

  But by banning Singal, Bluesky could come under attack from the next head of the FCC, Brendan Carr, who is ready to come after social networks he believes are suppressing conservative views. Whatever Bluesky does here will attract attention, for better or for worse.

  Start banning the crazy people. They are the problem. Nobody wants them.
  
  If they represent the majority of your active users, your platform will die.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum MS-A1 is a big small PC. (Liliputing)
  
  Measure about 8"x8"x2" it's a lot bigger than a small PC but a lot smaller than a big PC. And it supports desktop CPUs and laptop RAM, so it's easy to expand.
  
  It's now available with a sixteen core 9950X if you need a very fast and quite small system. The only problem is that it doesn't have room for a graphics card, and the onboard graphics on the 9950X are... Meh.
  
  A better option for most people is probably to install the Ryzen 8700G. It's only half as fast on the CPU side of things which makes sense as it only has eight cores, but it has twelve graphics cores against just two on all the 9000-series CPUs.
  
  The 8700G is a laptop CPU adapted for desktop sockets. It doesn't look like we'll see a 9700G or anything similar, because the current Ryzen 370 laptop CPUs don't appear to have any support for socketed memory. (Though it's possible to work around this with CAMM2 modules.)
  
  
  
• AMD's 4124P is designed for low-end embedded servers, but it uses the standard desktop AM5 socket. So how does a four-core CPU stand up in gaming in 2024? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Actually, pretty well. You're not going to want to pair it with a 4090 (if you can even find one), but for $149 it does everything you would expect.
  
  
  
• Luon is an implementation of Oberon+ - a successor to Pascal developed by Niklaus Wirth - that targets the LuaJIT backend. (GitHub)
  
  Which is a lot less crazy than it might sound, because Oberon+ is a clean and effective programming language, and LuaJIT runs anywhere and is extremely fast and efficient because Mike Pall is a robot from the future.
  
  
  
• Apple broke the ability to back up the operating system on MacOS. (ShirtPocket)
  
  You can't write a program to do this; you have to use the operating system itself.
  
  The operating system itself is broken.
  
  Apple is turning Macs, step by step, into iPhones that don't work.
  
  
  
• Cognitive load is what matters. (GitHub)
  
  A system that does everything perfectly that nobody understands is infinitely fragile.
  
  A system that is simple but broken can be fixed.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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