Big day for fans of large language models - OpenAI released GPT-4 and Google's released an API for PaLM. GPT-4 works the same as GPT-3.5, but "GPT-4 is more reliable, creative, and able to handle much more nuanced instructions than GPT-3.5". Duolingo, Khan Academy and the "New Bing" are already using GPT-4. You can use it now via ChatGPT and access to it via an API currently has a waitlist (and isn't cheap). Meanwhile, Google's GPT equivalent, PaLM, now has an API developers can tap in to and add it to their apps. They're also going to slap LLM features in Gmail and Google Docs for a "limited set of testers" in a few weeks. You'll soon be able to "type in a few words about a topic, and the apps will automatically spit out a draft".
Meta is sacking 10,000 employees and will close off 5,000 open roles it has yet to fill. This is part of Meta's "Year of Efficiency" and is on top of the 11,000 they sacked a year ago. The aim according to Zuck is to turn Meta into "leaner, more technical company" and focus on "business tools (advertising), artificial intelligence (its late to the game chatbot), and the metaverse (the still-dumb idea for everybody working and playing in a virtual world for most hours of the day)". Meta's also pulling development on the NFT features in Instagram. I didn't even know it had NFT features. I thought anything NFT adjacent to Instagram was vaporware announced by Meta to take advantage of the NFT hype train at the time??
Amazon's shown off the terminals and antennas customers will eventually purchase to access internet via Project Kuiper, its low Earth orbit satellite network. There's three models - a "standard" unit that's an 11" square and support speeds up to 400 Mbps, an "ultra-compact" 7" square that supports up to 100 Mbps and a "larger" unit that's a 19" x 30" square that'll support up to a gigabit. There's no prices for the user terminals yet, but the standard unit costs Amazon around US$400 to manufacture. Amazon even designed their own baseband chip they're calling Prometheus to go in these things. The first Project Kupier satellites are planned for launch in the 2nd-half of 2024, so should be available for customer use by early 2025.
Synology has a new "mainstream" NAS that ticks a lot of boxes. The DS423+ has 4x 3.5" bays, 2x 2280 PCIe NVMe slots and a relatively modern Intel Celeron J4125 CPU. This CPU has Intel Quick Sync support, so it'll encode and decode H264/AVC and H265/HEVC in real time with fuck all CPU utilisation. Perfect for Plex or Jellyfin. It only comes with 2GB of RAM but you can grab a 4GB DDR SO-DIMM for like $50 to expand the unit to 6GB, which should be plenty for the kinda things the DS423+ can handle. If you're against setting up your own UnRAID box, the DS423+ is probably the least fucking around option to run a server at home. Can't see anywhere selling it yet, but should be cheaper than the DS 920+.
This test tube was one of several that Charles Edison noticed standing open in a rack in the bedroom in which his father (Thomas Edison) had just died in 1931. The attending physician was asked to seal the tubes, one of which Charles later sent on to Henry Ford who kept it with other Edison mementos at his home, Fair Lane. (Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation)
📻 Slow Nerve Action - The Flaming Lips
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