Daily Tech News 18 April 2025

• A federal judge has ruled that Google is operating an illegal monopoly - again. (Associated Press)
  
  Google's search engine was found in violation of antitrust laws last August, and the company's ad division has now joined it on the naughty list.
  
  This doesn't mean that either one is an absolute monopoly, and they're not. But companies with a dominant market position are restricted from certain business practices that are not in themselves illegal, and that's where Google has run aground.
  
  Now the DOJ will be arguing for specific penalties (most likely forcing Google to spin off a small number of products into separate businesses) and Google will be trying to tie this up in appeals until the Sun goes out.
  
  
  

• AGI is still thirty years away, like nuclear fusion. (Dwarkesh Podcast)
  
  (There's a full transcript; you don't need to listen.)
  
  The host makes the point that we've had rapid advances in AI technology over the past decade; the guests respond that this progress has come at the expense of, well, expense. The AI supercluster at xAI cost upwards of $2.5 billion to create, and similar installations exist at the other major AI companies.
  
  And we can't replicate that over the next ten years because nobody has $2.5 trillion to build a computer a thousand times more powerful, or 35,000 methane-powered generators to provide the hundreds of gigawatts needed to power the city-sized cluster.
  
  Now things get hard.
  
  
  
• There's a new Framework Laptop 13 in town, with a Ryzen 370 and up to 96GB (and probably 128GB) of SO-DIMM memory. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Still no Four Essential Keys though.
  
  
  
• A new GPS alternative from Australia is 10 to 50 times more accurate than existing alternatives. (Interesting Engineering)
  
  When I first saw this it seemed to be claiming to be 10 to 50 times more accurate than GPS itself, but that's not it. If GPS is unavailable for any reason - something that happens a lot more often than you might think - this system based on existing maps of the Earth's magnetic field is essentially impossible to jam and doesn't rely on any other systems being active.
  
  It's not as good as GPS, but it's better than other options when you don't have GPS.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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