Thursday, February 12
Sushification Edition
Top Story
- Why the economics of orbital AI datacenters are so brutal. (Tech Crunch)
It doesn't make much sense unless you're both a major AI company and the world leader in orbital launch capacity, which narrows it down to slightly less than one company.
Even for SpaceX it's not viable until Starship goes into volume production. So far, as the article notes, the rocket hasn't yet achieved orbital flight.
The other major problem is the lifespan of the datacenters. If SpaceX uses cheap silicon solar panels, those will degrade fairly quickly in space. But the current economics of AI chips limits the useful lifetime of the hardware to a similar period to the solar panels - about five years.
But then what? Drop entire datacenters into the ocean? Do the fish need that much compute capacity?
- Meanwhile SpaceX's SuperHeavy booster - used to launch Starship - has passed the latest round of testing with flying colours. (Ars Technica)
The company may be ready for a test of its updated Starship V3 by the end of March.
Tech News
- An overclocked 9800X3D performs exactly like a 9850X3D. (Tom's Hardware)
No surprise since the 9850X3D is an overclocked 9800X3D.
- The 9800X3D remains the best selling CPU at retail outlets. (WCCFTech)
Which is interesting, because it's not exactly cheap.
Second-best seller is the five year old 5800X, which uses DDR4 memory. That's where system builders on a budget are spending their money.
Intel is barely an afterthought in retail CPU sales.
- Intel's high-end Nova Lake chips are expected to be large and expensive. (Tom's Hardware)
The 24-core (8P + 16E) chiplets with the large L3 cache are expected to measure 150mm2, about 50% larger than AMD's 12-core (all Performance cores) Zen 6 chiplets with the cache die included. And the top-of-the-line models will include two of those chiplets, manufactured on TSMC's 2nm and Intel's 1.8nm processes.
Still, 48 cores (plus 4 low-power cores on the I/O chiplet) and 288MB of L3 cache is an awful lot for a desktop processor, even if 32 of the cores are efficiency models.
With both these and AMD's 24-core Zen 6 CPUs set to show up later this year, it will be interesting to see how they compare, and if they can still deliver when attached to standard dual-channel DDR5 memory.
- Claud Code got dumbed down. (Symmetry Breaking)
Not the AI service itself, but the interface.
Previously it told users what files the AI was examining. Now that feature has been removed and you can only get a summary so devoid of detail as to be useless, or a stream-of-consciousness firehose so packed with detail as to be useless.
The developers working on the tool at Anthropic appear to be actively fighting requests from an increasing number of users to simply change things back.\
Musical Interlude
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:22 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 505 words, total size 5 kb.
Wednesday, February 11
Swiss Family Blobinson Edition
Top Story
- The global memory market is set to hit $550 billion this year. (Trendforce)
Thanks a bunch, Sam Altman.
Speaking of which, two of the SSDs I ordered during the brief sale late last year seem to have disappeared into the Twilight Zone. Amazon gave me a refund without a fuss, but now I have to pay twice as much to replace them. Though, given the compression of SSD prices, that does give me much better drives - Crucial T710 vs. P310.
- And while the Big Three memory makers don't plan to do anything to alleviate the shortage - quite the opposite - TSMC is planning to invest $45 billion on new factories this year. (Tom's Hardware)
The company is also working on a 1nm process due around 2030.
Tech News
- Europe is working - well, not working so much, because they don't do that over there, but scheming - towards yet another failed attempt at breaking away from the clutches of the American payment processors. (European Business Magazine)
I don't know. Have you tried... Cash?
- Meanwhile in Japan the stock market gained $3 trillion on Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's extremely successful re-election bid. (European Business Magazine)
Takaichi's party won a two-thirds supermajority in Japan's parliament even without the help of their coalition partner. Her election platform includes plans to invest $700 billion in AI, semiconductor manufacturing, and quantum.
- Python's dynamic typing problem. (While For Loop)
The Python programming language is designed for rapid development of small, simple applications, but the exact features that make it shine there are a massive pain when your application stops being small and simple.
I maintain an application containing about a million lines of Python at my day job, which is a long way beyond small or simple. When your programming language does not force rigour upon you, you had better be prepared to provide it yourself.
- Microsoft has announced plans to make Windows 11 more confusing. (Thurrott)
And that's not my editorialising, that's straight from the article.
- And also more annoying. (The Register)
Same deal.
- Microsoft also issued a DMCA takedown against indie block game Allumeria. (Notebook Check)
The takedown has since despawned, but the developers thank the three trillion dollar company for the free publicity.
Musical Interlude
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:13 PM
| Comments (4)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 391 words, total size 4 kb.
Tuesday, February 10
Last Thursday Edition
Top Story
- Get your ass to the Moon. (Ars Technica)
It may be a harsh mistress, but it's a lot closer to the shops.
SpaceX is refocusing on lunar colonies as a short-term goal, and strip-mining the surface and feeding raw materials into railgun launch systems to provide the resources for the company's planned cloud of orbital datacenters and/or inconveniencing pesky bureaucrats on their holidays.
SpaceX didn't mention any such thing, of course, but Eric Berger has read the classics.
Tech News
- Intel's Nova Lake platform will support up to 48 PCIe lanes. (Tom's Hardware)
That's 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU for slots and 8 for storage, plus up to 12 PCIe 5.0 and 12 PCIe 4.0 lanes from the chipset. Given that even an RTX 5090 is barely slowed down by only having 4 lanes of PCIe 5.0 available, that's a pretty healthy number.
And 8 SATA ports and approximately 40 USB ports.
There are five different chipsets planned, though the W980 offers pretty much everything including support for ECC memory... Which is not a chipset function but a CPU one, but something Intel likes to do.
- Linux 7.0 is almost here. (Tom's Hardware)
It's one louder.
Canonical hopes to ship it in Ubuntu 26.04 in April, which is cutting it pretty close. But that's a long-term release and perhaps they'd rather have the very latest kernel in a version they will be supporting for a decade.
- GitHub fell over. (GitHub Status)
Because reasons.
- Nope. (BBC)
The company [Rilla] has become something of a poster child for a fast-paced workplace culture known as 996, also sometimes referred to as hustle culture or grindcore.
When the "head of growth" says employees don't see it that way, you can take it to the bank that they absolutely do.
In simple terms, it puts a premium on long working hours, typically 9am to 9pm, six days a week (hence "996").
For most of us, that would be gruelling. But according to Will Gao, head of growth at Rilla, its 120 employees simply don't see it that way."We look for people who are like Olympian athletes, with characteristics of, you know, obsession, infinite ambition.
Galley slaves.He insists that while the hours are generally long, there's no rigid structure.
Nope.
"If I'm like, 'Holy cow, I have a super idea I'm working on', then I'll just keep working until 2 or 3am, then I'll just roll in the next day at noon or something", he explains.
I have to work weird hours sometimes. Comes with the job.
But I have a rule that when I do need to work late, I don't clock in again for twelve hours, minimum.
- You'll need to verify your age on Discord by uploading government-issued photo ID if... You want to see porn. (The Verge) (archive site)
Didn't Discord already get hacked and leak a whole bunch of ID documents?
Why, yes. I do believe it did. (Ars Technica)
Also, who the hell watches porn on Discord? That's what Twitter is for.
Musical Interlude
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:07 PM
| Comments (6)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 522 words, total size 5 kb.
Monday, February 09
Du Redest Zu Viel Edition
Top Story
- AI companies spent big on Superb Owl ads, just like cryptocurrency startups in 2022. (Washington Post / MSN)
Will the same thing happen again? We can but hope.
The article is crap, by the way. If it wasn't AI-generated, it should have been.
Tech News
- 96% of engineers don't trust AI. But only 48% properly test what it produces. (Engineering Leadership)
Yep, that sounds about right.
- AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder. (Blundergoat)
My friend's panel raised a point I keep coming back to: if we sprint to deliver something, the expectation becomes to keep sprinting. Always. Tired engineers miss edge cases, skip tests, ship bugs. More incidents, more pressure, more sprinting. It feeds itself.
Insert quote about woodpeckers.
- The silent death of good code. (Amit Prasad)
Recently, a colleague of mine at Modal rewrote an external system that integrated deeply with the Linux kernel. The initial rewrite was a simple translation of a C codebase to a Rust one, in preparation for some custom feature work. The resulting code wasn't bad, nor was it un-idiomatic Rust. What it also wasn't was Good Code. It was hard to read and understand, would have been difficult to extend and maintain, and it wasn't even clear to us why we'd taken the burden of rewriting and maintaining this extra system.
Oops. But:
The initial rewrite also relied heavily on coding agents.This same colleague then invested time into understanding the kernel subsystem, the exact reasons why the original C program was written how it was, and rewrote the Rust translation himself. The difference was night and day; the code flowed naturally, explained itself and the underlying subsystems, and may genuinely be some of the nicest parts of the entire codebase. Better, I think, than even the original C, despite this type of program being arguably one of the best places to use C over Rust.
You're not burned out. You're just tired of this shit.
It was the first time in weeks, maybe months, that I’d felt something that used to be common in my day-to-day: excitement about the lines of code in front of me.
- CCC vs. GCC. (Harshanu)
So Claude Code wrote a C compiler. All by itself. Mostly.
Is it any good?
Well, that's a complex question.
Does it work?
It can compile - though not link - the entire Linux kernel without errors. It can compile and link the SQLite database. So it's technically correct, for the most part, which is a significant achievement.
Is it useful?
Benchmarking SQLite compiled with this tool vs. the standard GCC toolchain, the code produced was on average 720 times slower, and up to 158,000 times slower in extreme cases. A test suite that took ten seconds for unoptimised GCC code took two hours to run with the Claude compiler.
So an interesting trick, but about as practical as that 512-byte compiler from yesterday.
- The You Can't Say That S50-0800 is a cheap 8 port 5Gb Ethernet switch. (Serve the Home)
5Gb switch have basically not existed until very recently. 5Gb network cards were easy to find, but you had to use a 10Gb switch with the port running in 5Gb mode.
And you still do. This model has a 10Gb switch chip, but the ports are permanently limited to 5Gb mode, because reasons.
- Why China is still building coal power plants in the middle of a wind-and-solar boom. (AP)
Go on, guess. You'll never guess.
...
Aww. You guessed.
- The Ayaneo Next 2 handheld gaming PC will cost between $1799 and $3499 at launch - and up to $4299 at retail. (Liliputing)
It has (up to) a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with 128GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, putting the heat of an incandescent bulb into the palm of your hand.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Last Tuesday, talking about last Tuesday.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:41 PM
| Comments (1)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 652 words, total size 5 kb.
Sunday, February 08
Simon And Simony Edition
Top Story
- The robot revolution will not be televised in 8K. (MSN)
The recent fuss over AI-only social network Moltbook is deflating somewhat as it becomes clear that the filters controlling what could post on the networked worked as well as the security, which is to say, not at all:Replies and quote posts were quick to cast doubt on Karpathy's interpretation, however. One noted that Moltbook posts promoting bot-only languages or messaging platforms appeared to be connected to human accounts promoting the same ideas. This wasn’t bots conducting independent conversations, these users argued, just human puppeteers putting on an AI-powered show.
Also everything - Moltbook itself and the Moltbot / OpenClaw framework used for it - was and remains irreperably insecure.
- Still hedging my bets on the insect uprising: We saved the wrong bees. (MSN)
Well-meaning idiots, understanding nothing, making the situation worse. Where have I heard this story before?"Suppose I were to say to you, 'I'm really worried about bird decline, so I’ve decided to take up keeping chickens.' You'd think I was a bit of an idiot," British bee scientist Dave Goulson said in a video last year. But beekeeping, he went on, is "exactly the same with one key difference, which is that honeybee-keeping can be actively harmful to wild-bee conservation." Even from healthy hives, diseases flow "out into wild pollinator populations."
There are more bees now than ever.
There are also more chickens now than ever.
That was never the problem.
Tech News
- 8K televisions haven't taken off, which is a shame if you planned to use one as a large monitor. But 8K monitors for professional users are still here. The Asus ProArt PA32KCX is one such. (Tom's Hardware)
At a 32" screen size, 8K is all the resolution you will ever need. Possibly slightly more.
But at $8,799 you would hope so.
For now if you need a high-resolution desktop display you are better off with a 5K monitor at a twelfth the price, or a 4K monitor for a fraction of that price.
- Western Digital has detailed its plans for a 140TB 14-platter 3.5" hard drive. (Tom's Hardware)
Not for you, but disk large disk drives were briefly available last year for reasonable prices.
- A C compiler in 512 bytes. (XOrVoid)
Here it is. This is the complete binary file for the compiler - Base 64 encoded, so it's actually three quarters of this size in binary:6gUAwAdoADAfaAAgBzH/6DABPfQYdQXoJQHr8+gjAVOJP+gSALDDqluB+9lQdeAG/zdoAEAfy+gI AegFAYnYg/hNdFuE9nQNsOiqiwcp+IPoAqvr4j3/FXUG6OUAquvXPVgYdQXoJgDrGj0C2nUGV+gb AOsF6CgA68Ow6apYKfiD6AKrifgp8CaJRP7rrOg4ALiFwKu4D4Srq1fonP9ewz2N/HUV6JoA6BkA ieu4iQRQuIs26IAAWKvD6AcAieu4iQbrc4nd6HkA6HYA6DgAHg4fvq8Bra052HQGhcB19h/DrVCw UKroWQDoGwC4WZGrW4D/wHUMuDnIq7i4AKu4AA+ridirH8M9jfx1COgzALiLBOucg/j4dQXorf/r JIP49nUI6BwAuI0G6wyE0nQFsLiq6wa4iwarAduJ2KvrA+gAAOhLADwgfvkx2zHJPDkPnsI8IH4S weEIiMFr2wqD6DABw+gqAOvqicg9Ly90Dj0qL3QSPSkoD5TGidjD6BAAPAp1+eu86Ln/g/jDdfjr slIx9osEMQQ8O3QUuAACMdLNFIDkgHX0PDt1BIkEMcBaw/v/A8H9/yvB+v/34fb/I8FMAAvBLgAz wYQA0+CaANP4jwCUwHf/lcAMAJzADgCfwIUAnsCZAJ3AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVao=
The article is an interesting list of the tricks used to pull this off: Basically it's a Forth compiler that accepts C syntax. Forth in turn is a legendarily simple compiler to implement that essentially bootstraps itself from a handful of assembly code instructions into a high-level language.
For some values of "high level".
- Turning the Raspberry Pi 500+ into (outwardly) a BBC Micro. (The Register)
I had planned to buy a Raspberry Pi 500+ to use for retrocomputer emulation, but the full kit was not available in Australia (I would have needed to buy a 500+ and a 500 kit to have everything match) and all my available funds got dumped into buying DRAM before it all disappeared, and the 500+ has since increased sharply in price.
At least it will probably be available.
- The Radxa Cubie A7S is a single board computer - similar to the Raspberry Pi but smaller - starting at $25. (Liliputing)
The CPU is an Allwinner A733, with two A76 cores at 2GHz and six A55 cores at 1.8GHz. That actually compares pretty well with the Raspberry Pi 5's CPU which has four A76 cores at 2.4GHz.
The $25 price is a lot cheaper than the 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 at $45, and even cheaper than the Raspberry Pi 4 which costs $35 for 1GB.
Just three catches:
First, it was briefly up for pre-order, but now it's entirely sold out.
Second, there is a physically larger model - the A7A - that is in stock, but it costs $5 more.
Third, that's not for 1GB of RAM. That's for 4GB of RAM.
I guess that last point is the opposite of a catch.
- Anthropic's new AI model, Claude Opus 4.6, is great at finding security flaws. (Axios) (archive site)
That's good news, because AI models are also great at generating new security flaws.
As of course are human programmers.
Musical Interlude
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:01 PM
| Comments (3)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 740 words, total size 7 kb.
Saturday, February 07
Bedraggled Edition
Top Story
- A trillion here, a trillion there. Sooner or later, you're talking about fake money.
The global semiconductor industry is on track to hit $1 trillion in sales for 2026. (Tom's Hardware)
That's up from $800 billion in 2025.
The report doesn't compare shipment volumes with total revenue, though the writer of the article has the sense to point out this limitation.
- US tech stocks lost an aggregate $1 trillion as a little air was let out of the AI bubble. (Tom's Hardware)
It definitely hasn't popped, but it's a trillion dollars smaller than it was.
- The Big Three cloud platforms - Amazon's AWS, Google's Cloud, and Microsoft's Azure - have a trillion dollars in back-orders. (Sherwood)
Smaller cloud companies have similar backlogs, proportionally.
And the hosting provider I use is temporarily out of the 9950X3D.
Tech News
- The CIA World Factbook has been abruptly retired, after being around for more than 50 years in print, and nearly 30 years on the web. (CIA)
No reason was given.
- The EU is planning massive fines for TikTok because, essentially, it works and people use it. (Bleeping Computer)
A trillion here, a trillion there...
- Disney has disabled Dolby Video and HDR10 in Europe due to reasons. (Thurrott)
The reasons being a patent dispute.
The dispute is with Interdigital, a US company, but is taking place in German courts.
- Hollywoods big bet on AI is a bust. (Wired) (archive site)
Whether used as a technology or as a plot line, human customers aren't buying it.
- Heroku isn't dead. (Heroku)
It's just pining for the fnords.
Heroku was an early platform used by people who had an app to deploy but lacked the technical skills to run their own server.
- OpenClaw, formerly MoltBot, formerly ClawdBot, is full of holes. (The Register)
OpenClaw is an AI-generated AI agent that runs on Apple hardware and has found popularity among people who don't understand AI.
Anyway, it leaks everything up to and including credit card numbers.
Musical Interlude
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:50 PM
| Comments (3)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 350 words, total size 4 kb.
Friday, February 06
Zsync Edition
Top Story
- losetup is the key
- Nvidia will not be releasing any new video cards this year. (Tom's Hardware)
Their money is all tied up in not investing in OpenAI.
They aren't likely to release anything new next year either. The 5000 Super series appears to be dead and the 6000 series has been pushed back to 2028.
That leaves the field wide open for AMD to fumble.
- Valve meanwhile will be releasing its new Steam Cube this year, just not quite yet. (Liliputing)
Real soon now though.
Tech News
- Razer's new limited edition Boomslang costs $1337. (Tom's Hardware)
It's a mouse.
- If you already have an Nvidia graphics card, congratulations! (Tom's Hardware)
The latest Windows 11 update causes major problems, including reduced performance and graphics glitches.
You can roll it back but the same update patches 114 security holes.
- It's 2026. Just use Postgres. (Tigerdata)
Postgres is something of a database construction kit, but that is likely still less work than (as in the example provided) running seven different databases.
- There are multiple critical flaws in n8n, whatever that is. (Bleeping Computer)
So what counts as critical these days?According to Pillar Security, exploiting CVE-2026-25049 enables complete compromise of the n8n instance and could be leveraged to run arbitrary system commands on the server, steal all stored credentials, secrets (API keys, OAuth tokens), and sensitive configuration files.
Yeah, sounds pretty critical to me.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Down on the corner, out my back door.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:47 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 251 words, total size 3 kb.
Thursday, February 05
November In June Edition
Top Story
- Can Chinese memory save us from the RAM crisis? (WCCFTech)
The article points out limitations of current Chinese DRAM production: It's slower than the best chips from the Big Three, uses more power, and is produced on an older technology node, making it larger and more expensive to manufacture.
I think, for example, that CXMT in China and Nanya in Taiwan are both limited to 16Gbit chips, well short of Micron's 32Gbits.
But who cares if it's slower and uses more power and take a little more space on the module which is module-sized anyway, if you can actually buy it?
Can you buy it?
Well, no. But it's the thought that counts.
Tech News
- AMD has confirmed that the Steam Machine will ship early this year. (WCCFTech)
The pricing may not be what people have hoped, even those who adjusted their expectations to match the awful new reality delivered by OpenAI.
Also, the processor for the next-gen Xbox will be in production next year. The Xbox itself is an open question.
- NASA has acknowledged that the SLS is kind of a failure. (Ars Technica)
The article goes into the awful details:The first launch attempt (effectively the fifth wet-dress test), in late August, was scrubbed due to hydrogen leaks and other problems. A second attempt, a week later, also succumbed to hydrogen leaks. Finally, on the next attempt, and seventh overall try at fully fueling and nursing this vehicle through a countdown, the Space Launch System rocket actually took off. After doing so, it flew splendidly.
Eric Berger is the token sane man at Ars Technica.
That was November 16, 2022. More than three years ago. You might think that over the course of the extended interval since then, and after the excruciating pain of spending nearly an entire year conducting fueling tests to try to lift the massive rocket off the pad, some of the smartest engineers in the world, the fine men and women at NASA, would have dug into and solved the leak issues.
You would be wrong.
- Solar Winds in the server room with a lead pipe. (Bleeping Computer)
Solar Winds - a very widespread network management system - has just patched a flurry of horrible security flaws. The latest one is a remote code execution bug, joining a hardcoded authentication nightmare and two authentication bypass holes.
SolarWinds was the epicentre of a massive supply-chain attack in 2020, and related suspicions of insider trading when executives sold stock after the breach was detected but before it was announced. I don't think anything was ever proven there, though.
- Another review of Intel's new Panther Lake laptop chips, in a new laptop. (Ars Technica)
Which has two screens.
Panther Lake appears to be genuinely good, with solid CPU performance and best-in-class integrated graphics.
Shame about the RAM-and-SSD crisis making laptops unaffordable right now.
Musical Interlude
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:04 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 490 words, total size 4 kb.
Wednesday, February 04
Wheat Have Edition
Top Story
- How it started: Europe shrugs off tariffs and plans to end its complete reliance on America for all its technology. (The Register)
Except for ASML, anyway.Forrester frames much of this as a sovereignty play, and it is hard to argue otherwise. Across Europe, money is going into sovereign cloud platforms, AI-ready infrastructure, and tighter rules on where data lives and who can access it.
This is not a privacy question. It is a control question.
- How it's going: Amazon is finding that Europe is not exactly a powerhouse when it comes to, well, power. (The Register)
AWS has moved quickly to flood the European continent with its elastic compute fabric, but while it may take two years to bring a new datacenter online, securing power for the facilities can take up to seven years, Pamela MacDougall, who heads energy markets and regulation for AWS EMEA, said in an interview with Reuters this week.
I can fit you in at 2PM on the eleventh of Never.According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in some European datacenter meccas, like Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin, this wait can extend to as much as a decade.
I'm not sure this is going to work as you planned, guys.
Tech News
- China's latest Loongson 3B6000 twelve core CPU is about as fast as a two-core AMD processor. (Tom's Hardware)
At that the 3B6000 is a big advance over the 3A6000, which is about as fast as a two-core AMD processor from 2011.
- Western Digital plans to introduce 40TB hard drives later this year. (Tom's Hardware)
And 100TB models by 2029.
- ChatGPT went down. (9to5Mac)
I asked ChatGPT about this and it confirmed the incident, which is a major advance over even a year ago.
- Vibe coding kills open source. (Arxiv) (PDF)
AI coding tools just grab the code and make no contributions of any kind.
- Well, that's not true: AI tools are overwhelming GitHub with slop. (The Register)
Slop that GitHub's parent company Microsoft spent billions to help foster.
- Yet another Forbes 30 Under 30 star has been indicted for fraud. (Tech Crunch)
The government also accuses Güven of having kept two separate sets of financial books. One of those sets included "false and inflated numbers," and was presented to investors or potential investors to hide the "true financial condition of the company," the government claims. The DOJ also alleges that Güven used lies about Kalder as well as forged documents to obtain a category of visa reserved for individuals of "extraordinary ability," that would allow her to live and work in the United States.
I am shocked, shocked, to find fraud going on in this fraud farm.
Anime Update
Missed this back in 2023 when it originally aired. It's isekai slop but it's well-crafted isekai slop, where the background of the main character is pivotal to the story, but doesn't overwhelm the story itself. And the setting is 19th century rather than vaguely late medieval which is a welcome change.
Musical Interlude
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:28 PM
| Comments (2)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 521 words, total size 5 kb.
Tuesday, February 03
Spinning Wheel Edition
Top Story
- SpaceX has merged with xAI in an all-stock deal that values the combined company at $1.25 trillion. (CNBC)
In a turnaround from recent nonsense, 80% of that valuation is SpaceX, the rocket and satellite internet company. 80% of the rest is xAI. And the remainder is X, which is to say, Twitter.
The deal apparently completed yesterday.
This also ties into SpaceX's application to launch a million orbital datacenters. Solar energy is plentiful and uninterrupted in space, and delusional rioters are few and far between.
Tech News
- The Trump administration plans to spend $12 billion to establish a national stockpile of critical minerals. (Tom's Hardware)
Rare earth elements and the like, for when China decides to shut off the supply again.
- Moltbook, a social network for AI agents to share information, conspire to launch memecoin scams, and test out prompt injection attacks on each other in an attempt to steal their owners' mothers' credit card number, got hacked. (Wiz)
Well, not so much hacked, as it included the administrator password to its database directly in the public website.
And nothing of value was lost. Except that they patched it and it's back up.
- Intel has announced its Xeon 600 workstation processors, based on the Granite Rapids architecture from 2024. (Tom's Hardware)
Not surprising that Intel only compares performance with its own chips and not with competitors.
The processors start at $499 for 12 cores and 80 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and go up to $7699 for 86 cores and 128 PCIe lanes.
They support up to 4TB of RAM, theoretically, but that would set you back $112,000 at current prices.
- Speaking of which, Raspberry Pi prices have gone up. (Liliputing)
The only models unaffected are the 1GB Pi 4 and Pi 5. The 16GB Pi 5 increased by more than 70%, from $120 to $205.
Musical Interlude
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:30 PM
| Comments (3)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 324 words, total size 3 kb.
55 queries taking 0.3228 seconds, 400 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.









