Daily Tech News 13 August 2023

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• Some of the Hololive EN streamers have an expression: One guyed.
  
  It's when they're playing a game or trying to solve a technical issue and ask chat for help, and get a prompt and authoritative answer from one guy among the thousands watching that turns out to be completely wrong.
  
  ChatGPT is that one guy. (The Register)
  
  Taking a look at ChatGPT answers to Stack Overflow questions - a devil's brew of epistemic closure if I ever saw one - researchers found that ChatGPT had no better than a 50% chance of being correct, and for the best and most authoritative answers - the ones that were accepted by the questioner as definitive - ChatGPT was wrong 77% of the time.
  
  I've said before that the entire model of ChatGPT is building an artificial arts student, but really it seems to be building an artificial confidence trickster.

Tech News

• Intel's 14700K has been benchmarked, and is between 5% and 20% faster than the 13700K. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  5% on single-threaded tasks thanks to a 200MHz speed boost; 20% on multi-threaded tasks thanks to four additional Efficiency cores.
  
  Nothing groundshaking but if they keep the same price it will be a worthwhile improvement.
  
  Big changes may be coming at the entry level, with the 14100 rumoured to have six Performance cores, up from four. If true, and if the price again remains the same, that will be a great little chip.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile on the great big chip front AMD is preparing to release Epyc Siena for low-end servers and Threadripper 7000 Pro for high-end workstations. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Siena will support up to 64 cores at a 200W TDP, while the new Threadrippers will offer up to 96 cores at a 350W TDP.
  
  The two families of chips will share the same SP6 socket, which is the same physical size but a different pin layout as the previous generation of Epyc CPUs.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix has launched 24GB LPDDR5X-8500 memory... Things. (AnandTech)
  
  They're not modules in the sense of DIMMs, but each one contains 8 memory chips in a stack, so they're not chips either.
  
  Anyway, since they're 64 bits wide a laptop would need two of them, giving 48GB of RAM, which is enough even for me.
  
  
  
• Mediatek's Dimensity 9300 meanwhile supports LPDDR5T-9600 memory, which is one louder. (WCCFTech)
  
  And has four Cortex X4 cores and four A720 cores - four fast cores and four ultra-fast cores - with no slow cores at all.
  
  Sounds like a good chip for a laptop, actually. Most phone chips only have one of the Cortex X series cores, which is fine for phone use but not so great in more demanding applications.
  
  
  
• LPython is a Python compiler... Ish. (LPython)
  
  It seems to be designed primarily for type-annotated Python code, though it can run unannotated code as well, compiling it into C and thence to native code, rather like Cython.
  
  But it can also JIT-compile live code, rather like PyPy - or given that it uses decorators to do this, like PyPy's predecessor Psyco.
  
  And unlike Mojo, you can actually download it and try it out right now.
  
  
  
• A look inside the Linux kernel. (Seiya)
  
  The Linux kernel as of version 6.5 is 36 million lines long, too much for any one human to comprehend. So this article doesn't try; it instead looks at Linux 0.01, the first public version, which is only 10,000 lines.
  
  
  
• How the FBI goes after DDOS attackers. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Very, very slowly.
  
  
  
• Dinner tonight was the spécialité de la maison: Satay kangaroo with fried rice.
  
  Not bad.