Daily Tech News 20 May 20206

• Google search is dead, says... Google. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Professor Plum in the library with a lead pipe?
  
  Or just Google being Google.
  
  Anyway, the plan is, now that Google has killed its premier product through years of malign neglect, to force you into an AI "experience" any time you want to look something up.
  
  One small problem: I already have Grok for that, and it doesn't try to sell me stuff I don't want, and most of the time it doesn't like to me either.
  
  The secondary is problem is that behind the scenes Grok is using search engines like Google to pull related data together to answer your query. You can even watch it doing that - if you have SuperGrok (my company pays for it because it saves a lot of time we used to spend digging through Stack Overflow) you can watch it spin up three different agents that perform different searches and argue about the correct answer - and oftentimes even get it right.
  
  So the question is, if the underlying search engines go away, what happens to the AI experience? Does it go the way of the nudged quanta in the single data drawer among the galaxy of indexes of indexes?
  
  

• Lenovo has a new all-in-one desktop PC that is a serviceable replacement to my Dell model from 2017. (Notebook Check)
  
  It has a Panther Lake 358H - twice as fast as my old Ryzen 1700, integrated B390 graphics - comparable to the Dell's dedicated Radeon 580, a 32" 4k 165Hz OLED panel - compared to the 27" 4k 60Hz IPS panel in the Dell, 32GB of soldered RAM, and two M.2 slots.
  
  Not present: Ethernet. You can hang a dongle off one of the USB ports but it's a bit of a nuisance.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has announced its new lineup of Surface laptops, starting at $1299 with 8GB of RAM. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Forgivable - maybe - at the $449 of the Chuwi model we looked at recently, or with the $599 MacBook Neo which actually works with 8GB of RAM. At $1299 and running Windows 11, no.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has announced its new operating system, available now. (ZDNet)
  
  For suitably small values of "its", "new", and "available".
  
  Azure Linux 4.0 is based on RedHat's Fedora 40, and you can download the source code on GitHub. There is no downloadable build to be found anywhere.
  
  
  
• 314 NPM packages were just compromised. (SafeDep)
  
  Or maybe 317; the headline and article disagree on the exact number.
  
  
  
• Leaked images have surfaced of Intel's Crescent Lake AI graphics card. (WCCFTech)
  
  It uses an Xe3P chip - the one that is not coming to your desktop, ever - and 160GB of LPDDR5X memory rather than the usual GDDR6 or GDDR7.
  
  That allows more and cheaper memory, but does limit bandwidth. Given the sheer size of the grid for the chip and the specific memory layout, I wonder if they went for a 640 bit wide bus to compensate for the slower clock speed.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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