Daily Tech News 18 March 2026

• Overwhelmingly Negative: Everybody hates DLSS 5. (Ars Technica)
  
  Ars Technica rounds up the response to Nvidia's showcase of its DLSS 5 $10,000 AI slop filter and concludes that... It's bad.
  
  (Not kidding about the cost: The demo required two RTX 5090s and they currently cost between $4000 and $6000 each, depending on the model. Yes, they launched at $2000. That was then; this is now.)
  
  
  
• A roundup of some of the memes. (Notebook Check)
  
  AI-generated. Because of course.
  
  
  
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says you're holding it wrong. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Thanks Steve.

• AI still doesn't work very well, and businesses who claim it does are faking it. (The Register)
  
  Or are looking at a very specific use case. If you need to translate code from one language to another, it works pretty well.
  
  Sometimes.
  
  Maybe.

  To underscore the consequences of not having that kind of data, Smiley pointed to a recent attempt to rewrite SQLite in Rust using AI.
  
  "It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right," he said. It's 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite. Two thousand times worse for a database is a non-viable product. It's a dumpster fire. Throw it away. All that money you spent on it is worthless."

  
  
• Except that's not actually accurate. (Medium)
  
  It wasn't 2000 times slower. It was 20,000 times slower. A query that took 90 microseconds on the real thing took two seconds on the AI rewrite.
  
  
  
• Please-don't-call-it-gambling site Kalshi faces criminal charges in Arizon because guess what? (Tech Crunch)
  
  You'll never guess.
  
  Oh, you guessed.
  
  
  
• All the data and photos gathered by people playing Pokemon Go has been used to train delivery robots. (Popular Science)
  
  We already knew this, right? The developer of Pokemon Go, Niantic, wasn't created to develop games. It was founded as a geospatial services company. And they put millions of players to work harvesting data.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments