Thursday, July 27
Daily News Stuff 27 July 2023
Worse Is Better Edition
Worse Is Better Edition
Top Story
- You can't compete with free. (The Verge)
Neeva was a search engine startup founded by ex-Google engineers - back when Google still had engineers - to build a better search engine.
The founders noted a fundamental problem with Google. Being funded by advertising, and having a limited number of ads per page, there was a deep incentive not to push the best search results to the top.
So Neeeva built their own search engine focusing on paying customers - and went broke, because people didn't want to pay for a better solution when the bad solution was free.
How do we get out of this bind?
I see two possible avenues, both generally applicable:
One, an organisation that benefits from good search tools internally and is in competition with Google in other areas open-sources their work because first this gets lots of developers to contribute free work, and second it blows a hole in the competition's revenue stream. Facebook has done this with its AI research, clearly aiming at wrecking OpenAI and accidentally doing some good in the process.
Two, collaborative effort. One company can't afford $10 billion to develop a better search engine, but millions of developers pooling their resources? It's not Facebook's own AI research that has doomed OpenAI to extinction, but hobbyists frantically iterating on incomprehensibly sophisticated algorithms at 3AM so they can produce funny videos.
Tech News
- Thoughts on that room temperature superconductor announcement. (In the Pipeline)
Derek Lowe is a research chemist working in the pharmaceutical industry and not a solid-state physicist, but he's good at sniffing out suspect research papers and doesn't smell anything obviously rotten here.
Also his series of posts on Things I Won't Work With contains a number of timeless classics.
- Meanwhile another scientist who previously posted claims of room-temperature superconductors is having a second paper retracted by Physical Review Letters amid allegations that his doctoral thesis was largely plagiarised. (Nature)
Will the Great Lobachevsky please come to the white courtesy phone?
- Micron plans 32Gb DDR5 and 24Gb GDDR7 memory next year. (WCCFTech)
Maybe I should hold off on those 96GB memory kits if 128GB is coming so soon.
Also, 24Gb GDDR7 could salvage the 4060 Ti. Moving from 8GB of 18Gbps GDDR6 to 12GB of 32Gbps GDDR7 would provide 50% more memory and 75% more memory bandwidth, fixing both the cards issues at once without adding more chips.
The AD106 chip in the 4060 Ti does not, of course, support GDDR7.
- Jetbrains is integrating AI assistants throughout its IDE suite. (DevClass)
Dammit. I use (and like) Jetbrains tools.
- Lenovo has announced two new large Android tablets - 10" and 12" respectively - while their small tablet range continues to moulder into irrelevance. (Liliputing)
Except for the Legion Y700 which you cannot buy.
Disclaimer: Oh no! I think I've just been outwitted by a toaster.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:20 PM
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