Techpad — Tech News, Tutorials & Personal Notes

Five Messages and Bing Chat Cuts You Off

Microsoft capped Bing chat at 5 turns per session today, days after journalists' unsettling "Sydney" conversations went viral. I finally got off the waitlist just in time to get rationed.

February 17, 2023·4 min read

TechpadinTech News

RIP to the Little Twitter Bots

Twitter's free API cutoff hit on February 9th, and a bunch of the small, free, pointless bots that made the platform fun are quietly disappearing.

February 16, 2023·3 min read

TechpadinTech News

Twitter Wants $96 a Year for Basic Account Security

Twitter is putting SMS two-factor authentication behind its Blue subscription starting March 20th, and while the security argument holds up, the timing and the fee don't sit right.

February 15, 2023·4 min read

TechpadinTech News

Google's $100 Billion Typo

A single wrong fact in Google's own Bard promo wiped out roughly $100 billion in market value in a day - a smaller, weirder story sitting inside the bigger AI chatbot news.

February 9, 2023·4 min read

TechpadinTech News

Twenty Bucks a Month for a Chatbot

I paid the twenty bucks for ChatGPT Plus this week. Some notes on what it's actually good for, what it got wrong, and why I'm not sure I'll keep paying for it.

February 8, 2023·3 min read

TechpadinTech News

Seven Days Until My Reservoir Bot Might Die

Twitter just announced the free API is dying on February 9th with no pricing details attached, which means a lot of small, weird, pointless bot projects (including my own) are about to find out if they still have a reason to exist.

February 7, 2023·4 min read

TechpadinTech News

Twenty Bucks a Month for a Faster Chatbot

OpenAI launched a $20/month ChatGPT Plus tier today, the same day Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S23 lineup — two very different pitches for your money, on the same afternoon.

February 1, 2023·3 min read

TechpadinPersonal

Long, Long Time

Episode three of HBO's The Last of Us aired tonight, and the Bill and Frank episode wrecked me more than a game adaptation had any right to.

January 29, 2023·3 min read

TechpadinTutorials

What ChatGPT Is Actually Good For, After Three Weeks

Three weeks of actually using ChatGPT for regex and scripting grunt work, plus the one time it confidently invented a find command flag that doesn't exist.

January 21, 2023·4 min read

TechpadinTech News

Windows 8.1 Just Quietly Died and Almost Nobody Noticed

Microsoft quietly cut off Windows 8.1 support on January 10th, and I'm one of maybe six people on earth who actually noticed because I still had a machine running it.

January 14, 2023·3 min read

TechpadinTech News

A Broken File Grounded the Whole Country

A corrupted database file in the FAA's decades-old NOTAM system grounded every US flight yesterday morning, and it's got me thinking about all the quiet, ancient infrastructure that props up modern life.

January 12, 2023·3 min read

TechpadinTech News

The Biggest Keynote at CES Was About a Tractor

CES 2023 kicked off with an odd choice for the opening keynote: John Deere, talking autonomous tractors and weed-zapping cameras, while its right-to-repair fight with farmers simmers in the background.

January 6, 2023·4 min read