Daily Tech News 4 January 2026

• The US Invaded Venezuela and Captured Nicolás Maduro.
  
  ChatGPT and the Perplexity search engine are here to help you understand why this is not only a bad thing, but absolutely did not happen. (Wired) (archive site)

  "What's likely going on is a mix-up with real events that are often described in dramatic or misleading ways online. Here's what actually has happened:
  
  What the U.S. did not do
  ❌ No U.S. military invasion of Venezuela
  ❌ No arrest or capture of Nicolás Maduro
  ❌ No overthrow of the Venezuelan government by U.S. forces
  Maduro is still in power in Venezuela."

  
  
  I have used Grok as an augmented search tool on occasion and it's often pretty good. When you don't know the exact name of what you are looking for it will match things up better than Google.
  
  Sometimes it misses things or simply gets it wrong, but I haven't seen it get things this wrong. (Grok told me in answer to a poorly-worded question, "No, the US did not capture Nicolás Maduro today. It happened yesterday." which was true at least in my own time zone.)

  "Pure LLMs are inevitably stuck in the past, tied to when they are trained, and deeply limited in their inherent abilities to reason, search the web, 'think' critically, etc.," says Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and author of Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us. While human intervention can fix glaring problems like the Maduro response, Marcus says, that doesn't address the underlying problem. "The unreliability of LLMs in the face of novelty is one of the core reasons why businesses shouldn't trust LLMs."

  This problem has been greatly alleviated by AI providers enabling live search, which loads fresh data into the context window - the AI equivalent of short-term memory.
  
  But it can't be properly fixed without continual learning, which is an unsolved problem with LLMs.

• Intel's B570 graphics card is now selling for just $199. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not a high-end card, but it's competent and comes with 10GB of VRAM, the early driver issues that plagued the previous generation have been resolved, and, well, it costs $199.
  
  If that's all you want to spend it's a solid option.
  
  
  
• It looks like Intel's long awaited B770 graphics card - the high end model from the second generation - is finally on its way. (WCCFTech)
  
  This has 16GB of RAM and 32 Xe graphics cores compared to 10GB and 18 cores on the B570 model and 12GB and 20 cores on the B580.
  
  Nothing announced yet but look for it at CES.
  
  
  
• Good time for it, because Nvidia's graphics cards are starting to run out at distributors. (WCCFTech)
  
  The story cites an unnamed German distributor cancelling orders by retailers, saying that stock of the RTX 5070 is limited, and the 5070 Ti, 5080, and 5090 are not available at all.
  
  Predictions were that price hikes and shortages would start from the low end, particularly the 16GB models of the 5060 Ti and 9060 XT, so this is a little surprising.
  
  Nvidia of course does not care. It has long since ceased being a consumer-focused company.
  
  (I've already ordered everything I need for at least three years that involves memory chips, but if you haven't, you might want to check for bargains while they last.)
  
  
  
• Gigabyte has announced new AM4 motherboards for PC builders looking to upgrade everything except their DDR4 RAM. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are minor but welcome refreshes, replacing some older features like DVI ports that were largely obsolete even five years ago with more modern DisplayPort, um, ports.
  
  
  
• Tesla has released video demonstrating a Tesla Semi charging at 1.2MW. (Electrek)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Software craftmanship is dead. (PCLoadLetter)
  
  Agile stuck in the knife. AI triggered the claymore.
  
  (Great name for a blog there.)
  
  
  
• Could 2026 usher in a 4 day workweek? (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Betteridge's Law undefeated.
  
  
  
• Shit's all fucked, yo. (Politico)
  
  Google signed a deal with California's state crime syndicate to provide $250 million in joint funds to propaganda outlets.
  
  In better news, nobody has received any money so far and it's unclear if anyone ever will.
  
  
  
• 2026 will be the year of AI on the desktop. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This in particular stood out to me:

  Humans don't just learn through language; we learn by experiencing how the world works. But LLMs don't really understand the world; they just predict the next word or idea. That's why many researchers believe the next big leap will come from world models: AI systems that learn how things move and interact in 3D spaces so they can make predictions and take actions.

  This is what Terry Winograd's program SHRDLU did.
  
  In 1968.
  
  
  
• Eat the bug slop. Live in the pod slop. Own no slop and like it. (sn scratchpad)
  
  Guess whose blog that is.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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