Daily Tech News 14 March 2025

• OpenAI warns that China will take the lead in stochastic garbage generators - colloquially called "AI" - if the company is not allowed free rein to ingest all copyrighted data regardless of the wishes of the rights holders, which curiously is not as one-sided and self-serving as it might seem at first glance. (Ars Technica)
  
  Because copyright law prevents you from making copies of protected works. It doesn't prevent you from reading them or learning from them. It doesn't mean you can't cite them, use facts from them, remake the ideas from them.
  
  That's the whole point of books, after all.
  
  There are particularly egregious cases such as Meta torrenting 82TB of books and then not seeding afterwards but if you paid for the books, or borrowed them from a source that did, and you don't reproduce copies, you are complying with copyright law.
  
  More specifically, OpenAI is asking for federal clarification of what the law is, with a flood of varying state laws and district court decisions currently all differing on the question.
  
  The Ars commentariat helpfully clarifies this issue by being so stridently and consistently wrong. And they're against it.

• Is RISC-V ready for the desktop? No. (Hot Hardware)
  
  This example is six times slower than the Raspberry Pi 5, which is pretty much the minimal standard these days.
  
  
  
• You can play Android games on Windows? (Liliputing)
  
  Apparently Google Play Games for Windows launched three years ago - in beta, and only supporting a few games, but still - and I only learned of five minutes ago.
  
  Though it's still in beta, it now theoretically supports all games that run on Android.
  
  
  
• The PicoCalc is a handheld device with a qwerty keyboard, a 320x320 screen, and a Raspberry Pi Pico. (Notebook Check)
  
  Basically a grown-up version of a TI graphing calculator. It's a $75 kit and nothing is soldered down; it takes a full-size Pico with pins attached, and works with either the original or Pico 2 model.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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