Spyke

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Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos

Google says that SafetyCore “provides on-device infrastructure for securely and privately performing classification to help users detect unwanted content. Users control SafetyCore, and SafetyCore only classifies specific content when an app requests it through an optionally enabled feature.”

GrapheneOS — an Android security developer — provides some comfort, that SafetyCore “doesn’t provide client-side scanning used to report things to Google or anyone else. It provides on-device machine learning models usable by applications to classify content as being spam, scams, malware, etc. This allows apps to check content locally without sharing it with a service and mark it with warnings for users.”

But GrapheneOS also points out that “it’s unfortunate that it’s not open source and released as part of the Android Open Source Project and the models also aren’t open let alone open source… We’d have no problem with having local neural network features for users, but they’d have to be open source.” Which gets to transparency again.

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ASUS Proposes Reinforced PCIe Slot to Deliver 250 W of Power From the Motherboard

I'm going to copy two comments from TPU that i think are the most accurate regarding this proposal:

This doesn't solve anything at all. You still have to plug power into the motherboard, likely via the problematic 12V6X2 connector once they extend it beyond 250W. Now you also need to dedicate additional (expensive) PCB layers and throw a lot more copper traces (expensive) at it too. It's just a glorified extension cable that adds another connector to the equation. Why go from the PSU directly to the GPU when you can now do it with extra steps!! (/s) Cable still required, but now you need a new motherboard, too.... Why? Because cables are evil, apparently and this fits the dumb BTF form factor that's all about form over function, for people with infinite wallets.

This is a stupid idea. It should be separate as always. It also makes problems worse if connector-gate happens again, as now you fry a much larger PCB instead of tiny GPU board. And high power means you need to worry about heat on the mobo now too. It makes repair difficult too. But I'm not surprised. Asus always sucked on the user friendly aspect. Worst customer support. Apparently that's the trend to keep up with the "You'll own nothing and be happy" motto of stream everything, throwaway everything, get in debt all the time mentality.

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Microsoft has pulled back on over a gigawatt of planned data center capacity, suggesting that they do not think there is a growth future in generative AI

Interesting article.

Data center buildouts take about three to six years to complete, and the largest hyperscale facilities can easily cost several billion dollars, meaning that these moves are extremely forward-looking. You don’t build a data center for the demand you have now, but for the demand you expect further down the line. This suggests that Microsoft believes its current infrastructure (and its likely scaled-back plans for expansion) will be sufficient for a movement that CEO Satya Nadella called a "golden age for systems" less than a year ago.

To explain here, TD Cowen is effectively saying that Microsoft is responding to a "major demand signal" and said "major demand signal" is saying "you do not need more data centers." Said demand signal that Microsoft was responding to, in TD Cowen's words, is its "appetite for capacity" to provide servers to OpenAI, and it seems that said appetite is waning, and Microsoft no longer wants to build out data centers for OpenAI.

I believe the reason Microsoft is cutting back is that it does not have the appetite to provide further data center expansion for OpenAI, and it’s having doubts about the future of generative AI as a whole. If Microsoft believed there was a massive opportunity in supporting OpenAI's further growth, or that it had "massive demand" for generative AI services, there would be no reason to cancel capacity, let alone cancel such a significant amount.

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Windows 11 25H2 Includes a Faster NVMe Driver Needing Manual Installation

Here's a reply from an ―allegedly― ex-employee at Msft you can find in the comment section of the article:

There is a lot of confusion on this thread between NVMe Storage Controller drivers and Disk drivers, e.g. "we have always been able to replace NVMe drivers". Previous driver releases, e.g. by Samsung, are for the NVMe Storage Controller, which you don't see in Device Manager unless you view by connection. The inbox driver is "Standard NVM Express Controller" or stornvme.sys. Samsung's driver was secnvme.sys.

The title of this TPU story is misleading; there is no new NVMe (controller) driver, there is a new disk layer driver nvmedisk.sys that is just an optimization of disk.sys that provides marginally better performance for NVMe drives (some SCSI command translations removed; multiple queues supported; presumably latency optimization and cache flush behavior). This is not really an "NVMe driver" because it's not the controller driver. The disk layer driver is not super specific to a particular storage medium; this is just optimization to pair better with stornvme. It's possible that you could force install nvmedisk.sys on HDD and it may even work, albeit unreliably and/or slowly.

Source: I worked at MS for decades. You know that checkbox in Device Manager for drives that says "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device"? That was me.