The USA's Department of Justice has kicked off proceedings against Google's search dominance in court, arguing that Google "invests billions in defaults, knowing people won't change them" and are "buying default exclusivity because defaults matter a lot", violating antitrust laws. This huge spending on making sure it is the default search engine on Firefox and Safari, along with Samsung and Motorola, and all the US mobile telcos, "prevent rivals from gaining the scale that would be needed to challenge its search engine". Expect to hear more about this case next year when the trial formally begins.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has floated the idea to "limit or eliminate the use of high energy intensity consensus mechanisms for crypto-asset mining". Essentially banning the mining of bloated cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin due to "greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts". The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index currently has Bitcoin network power demand estimated at 10.86GW. That's more than the demand of the entire Australian NEM is currently and forecast as I write this (approx 7GW). What a fucking waste of energy. A worldwide ban on the mining of cryptocurrency would be a huge win for the environment.
Nvidia's latest datacentre/machine learning/artificial intelligence GPU, the H100, is an absolute beast. According to benchmarks released by Nvidia, it is 4.5x faster than the previous generation A100 GPU. In CPU land we've become used to incremental gains. Even Apple's popular M1/M2 range of SoCs aren't dramatically faster than their Ryzen cousins. Nvidia has managed to make a new GPU that performs AI/ML related tasks 1x to 4.5x times faster than the chip released just two years ago. That's impressive progress. All those AI-generated images will be much faster to render.
I was reading a thing on Arstechnica about all the nerds Queen Elizabeth II given awards to and among the familiar names like Jony Ive and Tim Berners-Lee is Sophie Wilson, who received a Commander of the Order of the British Empire title in 2019. I'd never heard of her before, but she was knighted not only for creating the BBC Micro (a very popular computer in the 80s that was distributed en mass to every British school) but also for designing the ARM instruction set that's used today in practically every smartphone, tablet and modern Mac. Considering those huge achievements, I'm actually a little embarrassed I was not familiar with Sophie. Shame on me.
📻 Congratulations - Alex Lahey
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