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Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

2 months 1 week ago
Analyst firm bemoans ‘peak insanity’ among those who think circling servers can replace down-to-earth clouds

Analyst firm Gartner thinks talk of placing datacenters in space has reached “peak insanity,” because orbiting facilities can’t be run economically or satisfy demand for compute power on Earth.…

Simon Sharwood

LLMs killed the privacy star, we can't rewind, we've gone too far

2 months 1 week ago
You'll find these days that there's no hiding place

Add privacy to the list of potential casualties caused by the proliferation of AI, because researchers have found that large language models (LLMs) can be used to deanonymize internet users – even those who use pseudonyms – more efficiently than human sleuths.…

Thomas Claburn

HP says memory’s contribution to PC costs just doubled to 35 percent

2 months 1 week ago
Speeds up qualification of new suppliers to get more cheap parts into PCs, faster

HP Inc. has revealed that memory now accounts for 35 percent of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18 percent last quarter. And the company expects RAM’s contribution will rise through the year.…

Simon Sharwood

Tech Firms Aren't Just Encouraging Their Workers To Use AI. They're Enforcing It.

2 months 1 week ago
Tech companies ranging from 300-person startups to giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce have moved beyond encouraging employees to use AI tools and are now actively tracking adoption and, in several cases, tying it to performance reviews. Google is factoring AI use into some software engineer reviews for the first time this year, and Meta's new performance review system will do the same -- it can track how many lines of code an engineer wrote with AI assistance. Amazon Web Services managers have dashboards showing individual engineer AI-tool usage and consider adoption when evaluating promotions. About 42% of tech-industry workers said their direct manager expects AI use in daily work as of last October, up from 32% eight months earlier, according to AI consulting firm Section. At software maker Autodesk, CEO Andrew Anagnost acknowledged that some employees had been using initially blocked coding tools like Cursor stealthily -- and warned that AI holdouts "probably won't survive long term."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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