Daily Tech News 13 February 2025

• Oracle chairman Larry Ellison says governments should unify all their data into a single feed for training AI. (MSN)

  Fragmented sets of data about a population's health, agriculture, infrastructure, procurement and borders should be unified into a single, secure database that can be accessed by AI models.

  This is not unreasonable for already-public broad-scale data. Getting it all into a standard format so that AI - and non-AI computer tools - can analyse it could be valuable. If all of USAID's funding had been out there so that anyone could plug it into a spreadsheet and look for fraud...
  
  Actually, people have been doing that for years and hardly anyone cared.
  
  Anyway. He also wants your DNA. (The Register)
  
  So that's a no.

• Intel's new Core Ultra 9 285H - the top of the line of the middle-of-the-line Arrow Lake H series - is here. Is it any good? (Hot Hardware)
  
  Actually, yes. Intel's Lunar Lake laptop chips are a bit limiting, since memory is soldered directly onto the CPU and there are just four fast cores and four slow ones. Now you can have memory soldered onto the motherboard and six fast cores and ten slow ones.
  
  Which is better.
  
  And it performs very well in tests, including - on this specific laptop - battery life. A big part of that is the MSI Prestige 16's 99Wh battery, but it lasts just shy of 24 hours playing video constantly, and weighs 3.3lbs which is pretty light for a 16" laptop.
  
  
  
• Emojis and other Unicode characters can be hacked to smuggle data invisibly. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I've said before that Unicode is a semantic Superfund site.
  
  Now I think that ASCII was a mistake and we should all go back to SIXBIT.
  
  
  
• Why firing programmers and replacing them with AI is a mistake. (Defrag Zone)
  
  Because AI is shit.
  
  All the points made are obvious, but they are also correct.
  
  
  
• AI is shit. (The Register)
  
  At summarising news headlines, but at many other things too.
  
  
  
• A neutrino moving with the energy of a ping pong ball has been detected by a deep sea telescope. (Phys.org)
  
  Ping pong balls don't have that much energy by macroscopic standards, but neutrinos are about as far from macroscopic as you can get without ceasing to exist entirely. The single particle was so energetic that it triggered a third of the detectors in the telescope all by itself.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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