Guru's Tech Bytes — Episode 105

Good morning, it's Sunday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 105. First up, this GPT-5.6 thing apparently closed a thirty-year gap in convex optimization. Now I don't know what convex optimization is, I thought convex was a thing about eyeglasses, but somebody typed in a prompt — just typed it, like a text message — and thirty years of nobody figuring it out, gone. Thirty years, Lois. I've had a bag of pretzels in my truck longer than some of these problems have been solved. Second, somebody made a thing called Transcribe.cpp. And you know what this reminds me of, my cousin had a tape recorder, big one, and he'd hold it up to the radio to record songs and his mom would yell right in the middle of the good part — anyway, so it's transcribing. It turns talking into words on a screen, which is what I've been asking my computer to do since about two thousand and nine, and now it just does it, and it's free, and nobody sent me a bill for a subscription. Heh. Hhh, okay, that's something. Third, New York City wants landlords and realtors to tell you if they used AI in the listing. Which, honestly, fair. Because I looked at an apartment once where the ad said "cozy sunlit nook" and it was a closet with a lamp in it, and no computer wrote that, that was just a guy lying. So now at least you'll know which one's lying to you. And finally, some folks got speech recognition and text-to-speech running in under five hundred kilobytes. Five hundred kilobytes. That's smaller than one of those Windows updates that reboots your machine at four in the morning while you're in the middle of nothing, and then sits there at thirty-two percent for an hour like it's thinking about it. These guys fit a whole talking computer in less space than the little icon that tells you the update failed. That's your daily byte. Have a great day. Until next time.