CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?

Thursday, February 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 February 2026

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


Song is Cough Syrup by Young the Giant.  Anime is a whole bunch of great Ghibli movies and also Tales from Earthsea.




Disclaimer: Which is a Ghibli movie.

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Wednesday, February 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 February 2026

Swiss Family Blobinson Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: EVERYTHING IS NOT ALRIGHT!

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Tuesday, February 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 February 2026

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.

    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.
    When the "head of growth" says employees don't see it that way, you can take it to the bank that they absolutely do.
    "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.

    "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.
    Nope.

    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




Disclaimer: Don't you know there are towns going hungry in Antarctica?

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Monday, February 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 February 2026

Du Redest Zu Viel Edition

Top Story


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.

    The initial rewrite also relied heavily on coding agents.
    Oops. But:
    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.

    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.
    You're not burned out. You're just tired of this shit.


  • 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.

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Sunday, February 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 February 2026

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





Disclaimer: Go fish.

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Saturday, February 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 February 2026

Bedraggled Edition

Top Story


 

Tech News



Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: There is no musical interlude right now.  Hang on...

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Friday, February 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 February 2026

Zsync Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Down on the corner, out my back door.

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Thursday, February 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 February 2026

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.

    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.
    Eric Berger is the token sane man at Ars Technica.


  • 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




Disclaimer: February.

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Wednesday, February 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 February 2026

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



Anime Update

Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion: Because she wasn't about to die twice.

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




Disclaimer: 3.

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Tuesday, February 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 February 2026

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

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: I can't stand a rainy night.

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