Daily Tech News 17 February 2025

• OpenAI is "trying" to uncensor ChatGPT. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oh, this is going to be comedy gold.

  For example, the company says ChatGPT should assert that "Black lives matter," but also that "all lives matter."

  Worse than literally Hitler.

  Instead of refusing to answer or picking a side on political issues, OpenAI says it wants ChatGPT to affirm its "love for humanity" generally, then offer context about each movement.

  Worse than Chamberlain.
  
  Astoundingly, they almost admit it:

  While it's impossible to say whether OpenAI was truly suppressing certain points of view, it's a sheer fact that AI chatbots lean left across the board.

  The whole article is Tech Crunch waking up from a coma.
  
  Don't worry, though. The Verge is still batshit insane.

• The Lenovo Yoga Slim 9 14 Gen 10 is... Almost great, but probably an interesting failure. (Notebook Check)
  
  It's 14" laptop as one of the numbers in there suggests. It has a 120Hz 3840x2400 OLED display, which is phenomenal. It has an Intel 258V Lunar Lake CPU, which means 32GB of soldered RAM, which is adequate. And it has an M.2 2242 SSD, which is meh.
  
  In terms of ports, it has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and that's it.
  
  It doesn't have the Four Essential Keys, but it does have four keys where the Four Essential Keys would go, so a quick trip into Microsoft PowerToys can remap those for you.
  
  And it weighs in at a light 1.2kg.
  
  Problem is that it also weighs in at a hefty $1900.
  
  
  
• You know what else has a limited port selection but a great screen? The Lenovo (sometimes Legion) Tab.
  
  It's the only good small Android tablet on the market, which is annoying because it's expensive, lacks either a headphone jack or a microSD slot, and wasn't even sold in Australia.
  
  Wasn't. Is now.
  
  It's about triple the price of an adequate large tablet, but I don't want a large tablet, I want a small one.
  
  
  
• Karol Herbst has stepped down as the maintainer of the open-source Nvidia driver for Linux due to - apparently - being an insufferable leftist prick. (Phoronix)
  
  He didn't phrase it that way, of course. He said:

  The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:
  
  "we are the thin blue line"
  
  This isn't okay. This isn't creating an inclusive environment. This isn't okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can't be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.
  
  I can't in good faith remain to be part of a project and its community where those words are tolerated. Those words are not technical, they are a political statement. Even if unintentionally, such words carry power, they carry meanings one needs to be aware of. They do cause an immense amount of harm.

  Well... Bye.
  
  
  
• There is no 1875 epoch. (iter.ca)
  
  This requires a little unpacking.
  
  Elon Musk and the DOGE team recently noted that Social Security benefits were being paid out to a number of people who are - according to the system - 150 years old.
  
  A smug woke asshole on Twitter asserted that the epoch - the start of time - for COBOL systems was 1875, which could make people with no birth date show up as 150 years old. Now, the claimed epoch start date was in May of 1875 (I don't know why)* which is only 149 years ago, but maybe Musk was rounding up, so that's not dispositive.
  
  The smug wokeness is irrelevant if the claim is true.
  
  The big problem is that the core of Social Security system first went live in 1962, when people born prior to 1875 were still around, and 26 years before the 1875 date became standardised in ISO 8601.
  
  Oh, and ISO 8601 records dates and times as readable text, not as numbers. It does - or did - standardise on 20 May 1875 as a reference date but that was never an epoch. It doesn't store dates numerically, so it doesn't even use an epoch.
  
  Also, the SSA released an anonymised sample dataset in 2007, and there was no spike in dates of birth in 1875.
  
  So no, 150 year olds were just getting paid Social Security.
  
  And nobody questioned it.
  
  * Found out why.
  
  
  
• Firefly Aerospace's new lunar orbiter has, uh, arrived in lunar orbit. (Spaceflight Now)
  
  The Blue Ghost orbiter launched on a Falcon 9 last month, and carries multiple experimental payloads, including ten from NASA.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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