Month: December 2020

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  The RTX 3070. [credit: Sam Machkovech ]

Speaking at the Credit Suisse digital financial services conference, Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress addressed and partially explained the recent shortages of the company's new RTX 30-series graphics cards like the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3070.

She confirmed that wafer shortages at chip supplier Samsung Foundry are a factor, as many have speculated, but also suggested there is more to it than that. Said Kress:

We do have supply constraints, and our supply constraints do expand past what we're seeing in terms of wafers and silicon, but yes, some constraints are in substrates and components. We continue to work during the quarter on our supply, and we believe, though, that demand will probably exceed supply in Q4 for overall gaming.

She also said that it might be "a couple months" before Nvidia can catch up to demand, but qualified even that by saying "at this time, it's really difficult for us to quantify."

Enlarge / Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell conducts a news conference in the US Capitol on Tuesday, December 1, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Tom Williams | CQ Roll Call)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has moved to end debate over a Trump nomination that would deadlock the Federal Communications Commission, setting up a vote that could happen as soon as next week.

McConnell yesterday filed a cloture motion on Trump's nomination of Republican Nathan Simington to the FCC. McConnell's motion came one day after the Senate Commerce Committee voted 14-12 along party lines to advance the nomination to the full Senate.

"If Simington is confirmed, the FCC could initially be deadlocked 2-2 between Democrats and Republicans when Democratic President-elect Joe Biden takes office next month. Some officials think the Senate might not confirm [a Biden] appointee to the commission for months, if not longer," Reuters wrote yesterday.

Martial arts period drama Warrior, inspired by the writings of Bruce Lee, wraps up its second season tonight on Cinemax as all-out war breaks out between the Chinese tongs and the Irish mob in 19th-century San Francisco's Chinatown. We sat down with showrunner Jonathan Tropper (Banshee) to learn more about this action-packed season, a hero's journey, and what kind of future Warrior might have going forward.

(Spoilers for season 1 below; only very mild spoilers for season 2.)

Warrior follows a young Chinese martial arts prodigy, Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji, Fast and Furious 6), who arrives in 19th-century San Francisco to look for his long-lost sister. He soon finds himself embroiled in the Tong Wars, a period of particularly violent disputes between rival Chinese gangs, called tongs, in the Chinatowns of several American cities. Ah Sahm also must contend with rising anti-immigrant sentiment against the Chinese and a forbidden interracial romance.

Enlarge / Avoid getting these near your eyeball. (credit: Getty | Matt Cardy)

There are precious few things that could truly make 2020 worse than it already is. But a rare bee sting right to the eyeball might be one of them.

Doctors this week published an image of just such an uncommon ocular impaling. The image, appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine, also included a brief report of the patient’s condition and recovery. The details confirm that although reading about this horror show of a year may sometimes feel like getting repeatedly stabbed in the peepers, the real thing is actually far more unpleasant.

The patient was a 22-year-old male who showed up at a hospital’s emergency department with redness, pain, and decreased vision in his left eye, which had taken a bee sting about an hour earlier. Though the man had 20/20 vision in his right eye, he reported only being able to see hand movements close to his face with his left eye.

Enlarge / Former Google AI Research Scientist Timnit Gebru speaks onstage during Day 3 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 at Moscone Center on September 7, 2018 in San Francisco, California. (credit: Kimberly White | Getty Images)

Google struggled on Thursday to limit the fallout from the departure of a top artificial intelligence researcher after the Internet group blocked the publication of a paper on an important AI ethics issue.

Timnit Gebru, who had been co-head of AI ethics at Google, said on Twitter that she had been fired after the paper was rejected.

Jeff Dean, Google’s head of AI, defended the decision in an internal email to staff on Thursday, saying the paper “didn’t meet our bar for publication.” He also described Ms. Gebru’s departure as a resignation in response to Google’s refusal to concede to unspecified conditions she had set to stay at the company.