Daily Tech News 23 March 2025

• A majority of AI researchers say a majority of the tens of billions of dollars poured into AI research each year is wasted, and should be given to them instead. (Futurism)
  
  Commercial AI companies are laser-focused on making their AIs bigger, rather than understanding what they are doing or making something that works at all.
  
  I'll take exception though with one particular part of this article:

  DeepSeek, meanwhile, pioneered an approach dubbed "mixture of experts," which leverages multiple neural networks, each specializing in different fields - the proverbial "experts" - to help come up with solutions, instead of relying on a single "generalist" model.

  They're called multimodal LLMs and DeepSeek did not "pioneer" them at all.

• Booting Unix on a 40 year old DEC Professional 380. (Old VCR)
  
  This is made slightly tricky because working hard drives - or even floppy drives - for these old models basically no longer exist.
  
  
  
• If you were put off spending $2000 for an RTX 5090 even before they sold out instantly and became completely unavailable, you can now spend $8000 for the same card with a different name and more memory. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Memory costs around $2 per gigabyte right now, probably a little more for GDDR7, so Nvidia charges around $100 per extra gigabyte for the 96GB RTX Pro 6000, which is under the covers still an RTX 5090.
  
  
  
• Some ringworlds and Dyson spheres are stable. (Phys.org)
  
  They may not exist, but they are stable.
  
  
  
• If you want an extra mini original Macintosh, you can now sort of get one. (Liliputing)
  
  With a 4" display (no details) and up to a Ryzen 370 CPU, it's at least 60,000 times faster than the original version. It supports up to 128GB of RAM - a million times as much as the first Mac - and two M.2 slots, as well as two USB4 ports and two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports.
  
  
  
• AMD's 9060 XT is on the way. (Notebook Check)
  
  This supports up to 16GB of RAM, but apart from that is basically a 9070 XT cut in half, with the bus shaved down from 256 bits to 128, and the GPU chip itself reportedly cut from 64 GPU cores to 32.
  
  I'm thinking of buying an RX 580 from Amazon as a backup video card. Everything I have - assuming anything still works - is truly ancient, because the last time I built my own PC was around 2013.
  
  You can find a no-name model, new, for under $100. Given what Nvidia offers at that price, that's a great deal.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments