briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent.

That’s just an awkward sentence construction but it makes sense: they released track via Bittorrent. The tracks were scraped from Spotify.

I sold my car that was purchased from a dealership via private party sale.

I charged my laptop that normally accepts 100W via a 20W phone charger.

I would’ve used a “which” phrase with commas to avoid the confusion, but the sentence as written is valid and makes sense.

You can reason from a few principles:

• At its core, the math functions being optimized by these AI tools and their specialized hardware is that they can perform inference and pattern recognition at huge scales across enormous data sets.
• Inferring a rule set for pattern also allows generation of new data that fits that pattern.
• Some portion of human cognitive work falls within the general framework of finding patterns or finding new data that fits an old pattern.

So when people start making claims about things with clear, objective definitions (a win condition in chess, the fastest route to take through a maze, a highest lossless compression algorithm for real world text), it’s reasonable to believe that the current AI infrastructure can lead to breakthroughs on that front. So image recognition, voice recognition, and things like that were largely solved a decade ago. Text generation with clear and simple definitions of good or bad (simple summaries, basic code that accomplishes a clearly defined goal) is what LLMs have been doing well.

On things that have much more fuzzy or even internally inconsistent definitions, the AI world gets much more controversial.

But I happen to believe that finding and exploiting bugs or security vulnerabilities falls more into the well defined problem with well defined successes and failures. So I take it seriously when people claim that AI tools are helpful for developing certain exploits.

but isn’t the memory on the Neo on the same die as the processor?

Not actually on the same die, but in the same package, stacked on top using TSMC’s Integrated Fan-Out Package on Package (InFO-PoP).

So the memory still needs to be sourced from memory manufacturers, sent to TSMC, and then have TSMC package it all together in a single package. It’s unclear whether they had locked up this supply at pre-AI prices, though. The underlying A18 Pro chip/package was annoinced and launched about 18 months ago, so if they had the manufacturing pipeline set up for that they might have kept the contractual rights to continue buying memory at the old prices.

This reporting says that the subpoena requires that Reddit produce the information and appear for a hearing.

No, it’s not volunteering, at least not anymore.

Subpoena is legal Latin for “under penalty,” because noncompliance with a subpoena carries a penalty.

Originally, it was an information request from the feds, and Reddit refused. Then they escalated to getting a grand jury subpoena (which means they got a bunch of normal citizens to agree that the information was relevant to a criminal investigation), so now noncompliance carries a penalty.

Reddit notified the users, who hired their own lawyers, who are resisting the subpoena and will litigate it to where they need a judge to decide whether Reddit will have to turn the information over.

That’s the process for these things, and we’re a couple steps in already.

The article describes how they immediately went to look for an unsigned 32-bit millisecond counter when they noticed it was happening around 50 days since last reboot, because they already knew that association you describe.

Interesting writeup. Fun little story about the detective work involved.

God I wish democracy meant that we could vote on decisions like this

You can! Only problem is that it’s one vote per dollar instead of one vote per person.

It sucks though, I agree - software should get more efficient over time, just like hardware does.

It generally does, for any given computing task, but the problem is that generally software adds more features over time, not least of which is supporting new hardware that hits the ecosystem.

Unless it can be paper thin this does not look better than magnetic tape.

As the article explains, the whole purpose here is to be able to store data on a medium that can endure harsh conditions, including heat, moisture, radiation, and physical abrasion. The company’s website claims the medium can retain data for 5000 years without power, and is water and fire resistant.

I reckon you could scratch it pretty easily.

The underlying ceramic film is already used for protecting tools like drill bits and saw blades from physical damage, which is why it was chosen for this project. They already found one of the most durable materials in the world, and asked whether they could store data using that already-durable material.

With the current level of tech in a car, you’re already likely pushing 300GB in total.

The actual article (and the call it is reporting on, with statements from the CEO) says that 16GB is the average in new cars today. No need to make stuff up.

Education and enterprise still have a need for a lot of group-managed laptops. Not all of them will be power users, either. Some of them won’t even have sophisticated IT departments (thinking about elementary schools and the like where their IT needs might not run very high).

I agree that we’re probably seeing the waning days of the casual laptop user who administers their own system as an independent device. Everyone will either be further up the enthusiast/power user ladder or will have switched to phones and tablets.

I’m glad the MacBook neo is only 8gb. That means they have to support it as a usable low-end target.

This is huge. Apple has traditionally supported its laptops for at least 5 major OS versions and 2 more years of security updates, so they’re essentially telling us that the MacOS version they release in 2034 will not require more than 8GB of RAM to function is gonna be a good thing for all users, who will mostly presumably have much more memory available.

I switched to Macbooks specifically for the 11" Air. I do wish they’d bring that form factor back.

Macbook build construction (ever since they’ve moved off the plastic entry level Macbook to all aluminum for all their models) is really solid but not necessarily rugged. The hinges and ports seem to hold up better than a lot of other devices from HP and Dell or whoever, but some models are more susceptible to drops, dust/sand, moisture, etc., than the solid construction would lead you to believe.

So it depends on use case. I think they hold up very well to normal indoor use, for many years, but might not be the ideal device for clumsier people or those who might be routinely using it outdoors or in more rugged environments.

I think TouchID isn’t a priority for them, but looking at the supported M1 and M2 devices and features, it seems like it could be a daily driver. It has things I never got to work on my first Linux laptop (webcam, microphone, speakers, suspend, keyboard backlight, wifi, bluetooth), although it’s 2026 so those are basically all expected. No thunderbolt, touchID, or display port alt mode, though, does make it a step behind MacOS, with some doubts it’ll ever fully catch up even on this 5-6 year old hardware.

Still, these were very popular devices, so I think they’ll stay on the used market for a long time. I might pick one up if it’s cheap enough.

This particular source seems sketchy, but the broader context supports the core of this story.

There was a report in January from TD Cowen that Oracle needed to free up cash as banks tightened up lending for data center deals, and that certain projects were on hold and in jeopardy of being canceled. That same report projected that Oracle might lay off 20,000 to 30,000 workers.

Then, just this last Friday, Bloomber reported that Oracle and OpenAI canceled their plans to expand their flagship data center in Texas as part of their $500 billion “Stargate” initiative. Here’s the Reuters article describing it at a high level, because the original report is paywalled.

So everyone is looking back at that January report and seeing the recent data center news as confirmation that Oracle wants to free up cash by laying off staff.

It might be possible to use separate accounts related to separate interests

That’s what people should do. And the natural consequence is that there is code switching, where people subtly use different jargon and references and writing style when talking to different audiences.

Nobody is gonna correlate my shitposts or joke comments to my work email, because the way I write in a professional environment is totally different from the way I write with my friends and family, or in casual contexts organized around different interests. Even between different friends, family, or colleagues, I have a sense of my audience, and my tone/style differs significantly for different people.

So at that point, if I have a Linux/technology account and a separate account for the sports I like and a separate account for the local things happening in my city, who’s going to be able to link them by their very different textual styles?

Reminds me of an AI tool that could identify authorship of articles with surprisingly high accuracy, and then they peeked under the hood and realized it was just looking for the author byline at the top of the article that says “By John Doe,” where it completely failed if the article didn’t explicitly say who the author was.

Because each sensor broadcasts a fixed unique ID, the same car can be recognized repeatedly without reading a license plate. This makes TPMS-based tracking cheaper, harder to detect, and more difficult to avoid than camera-based surveillance, and therefore a stronger privacy threat.

This seems like a real stretch.

Cameras and automated license plate recognition are absurdly cheap at this point. And cameras have much greater range and reliability than whatever wireless signal interception this is, which the researchers have said is effective up to 50 meters.

Meanwhile, from the office where I sit (which happens to be more than 50 meters above street level), I can see a highway and read the license plates of all the cars maybe 100-300m away. Plug in a cheap phone as a simple webcam and I can probably log all the license plates that drive by, maybe even correlate that to makes and models of vehicles for redundancy.

And who’s going to detect that I’ve got a cell phone camera pointed out of my office window, or that I’m running that type of image recognition on the phone?

Am I out of touch? No, it’s the lawyers and judges who are wrong.

Seriously though, these are the same people who made it so that you can own a piece of land, so whatever criticism you want to lob at that foundational role of who gets to say what the law is, it applies equally to all forms of property, a manmade concept to begin with.