• Notepad++, a text editor used by every programmer in the world, got hijacked and used to install malware.  (Notepad++)
  
  You're probably safe to click on that link.  I think.
  
  The server providing software updates for Notepad++ got hacked to selectively deliver malware, apparently by West Taiwan targeting specific users in Taiwan.
  
  This went undetected for months because of the focused nature of the attack; if it had affected everyone who uses the software it would have been uncovered the next day.  And would also have been a global catastrophe, because that would have given the attackers an indirect back door into basically everything.
  
  So it could have been worse, but is more than a little worrying.

• The price of Bitcoin has crashed back below $80,000.  (Yahoo)
  
  That's okay, I put all my money in silver.
  
  Fuck.
  
  
  
• The future will not be in 8k.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If you were thinking of getting an 8k TV, your options have narrowed to one, with LG dropping production of 8k panels.
  
  That leaves Samsung.
  
  I was thinking of getting one as a large-format monitor once they got cheap enough, but that now looks like it may take a while.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT is retiring several of its older models.  (Thurrott)
  
  Not everyone has the lasting appeal of a Cindy Crawford, I guess.
  
  Oh, different kind of model.

  Starting on February 13, 2026, the GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, OpenAI o4-mini, and GPT-5 (Instant and Thinking) will be retired from ChatGPT.

  GPT-4o was introduced in a hurry after everyone hated GPT-5, and is now being disintroduced in an equal hurry.
  
  
  
• A Japanese researcher has built a 128 byte USB drive - yes, 128 bytes - out of ferrite core memory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Using a Raspberry Pi Pico as the controller, a chip which has rather more than 128 bytes of memory.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 03 2026 12:35 AM (F7kdT)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, February 03 2026 12:49 PM (lTGcd)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, February 03 2026 01:43 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, February 03 2026 06:34 PM (s827l)

5 "Basically, LazyVim takes Vim's concept of "everything can be keyboard-driven" and amps it up to 12 (not even eleven) by adding a whole bunch more keyboard shortcuts. ALL of which are discoverable on-screen, too: press a key and pause 250 milliseconds and you'll see a popup that tells you what keys are available next."

So...something Emacs has had for 40 years?

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 04 2026 10:37 AM (1zWbY)

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• Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has denied reports that his company is not going to invest $100 billion in OpenAI.  (CNBC)
  
  He explained that the real story is that Nvidia is not going to invest $100 billion in OpenAI:

  "Sam is closing the round (of investment) and we will absolutely be involved," Huang added.  "We will invest ‍a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we’ve ever made."
  
  Asked whether ‌it would be over $100 billion, he said: "No, no, nothing like ⁠that."

  So there you have it.  Nvidia will absolutely definitively be going ahead with investing some amount in some company at some point maybe.
  
  

• SpaceX has requested federal approval to launch a million datacenters into orbit.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, has paused space tourism to focus on the Moon.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That seems bold considering that the company's first orbital flights only launched last year, but good luck to them.
  
  
  
• You can now buy a flying car.  (Yahoo)
  
  Well, more of a flying motorbike.
  
  Actually, more of a flying hammock slung between two banks of rotors and surrounded by a plastic shell.
  
  Anyway, yours for only $200,000.  And you're not allowed to fly it more than 200 feet above the ground, or in regulated airspace.
  
  And it's classified as an ultralight aircraft, and it doesn't have wheels, so not really a car at all.

• One third of video game workers have been laid off in the past two years.  (Variety)
  
  I'm a little surprised it's not higher, but the article points out that layoffs have hit major - so called "AAA" - Triple A - studios twice as hard as indies, so it is higher for the companies I'd focus on with news stories.

  The survey also found that 82% of US-based respondents support the unionization of game industry workers, with 5% opposed and 13% unsure.

  And I was just about to feel some sympathy for these people.
  
  
  
• Ubisoft has cancelled six games and closed three of its studios in the wake of disastrous sales of its recent major titles.  (BBC)
  
  The studios on the chopping block include Ubisoft Halifax, which unionised earlier this month.  (Games Industry)
  
  That went about as well as could be expected.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The latest high-budget disaster is called Highguard.  (Destructoid)
  
  Produced by Wildlight Entertainment, which is a private company so we don't have details of the financials, but they've had over a hundred experienced developers working on this game for four years in California.  So somewhere north of $100 million.
  
  It's free-to-play.  It reached nearly 100,000 players on its first day...  Then lost 90% of them on its second day.
  
  Not because it is particularly buggy.  Players have shown problems with being disconnected from the servers, but for the most part it seems technically competent.  The problem is that it is completely uninspired.
  
  It got the top billing during the recent Game Awards (which had more viewers than the Super Bowl), with shameless promotion from the presenter.  Everyone watching saw it as derivative slop and predicted it would fail, hard, and it was, and has.

  Highguard was in for a bloodbath, and I cannot believe that the devs didn’t know that.  With so much experience at AAA powerhouses like EA, I genuinely think they fully understood the implications of that TGA shenanigan, and cannot fathom why they never reacted.

  Toxic positivity.
  
  
  
• Tesla throws in the towel on car sales.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Of course, this is not true, but The Verge has abandoned any pretense at being a news site.
  
  
  
• The $100 billion deal between Nvidia and OpenAI seems to have encountered choppy waters.  (WSJ)  (archive site)
  
  The plan, unveiled in September, was for Nvidia to invest $100 billion in OpenAI so that OpenAI could purchase $100 billion of Nvidia hardware.
  
  Now...  Not so much.

  Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has privately emphasized to industry associates in recent months that the original $100 billion agreement was nonbinding and not finalized, people familiar with the matter said.  He has also privately criticized what he has described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach and expressed concern about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic, some of the people said.

  OpenAI has name recognition - it's the company behind ChatGPT - but its CEO is a snake oil salesman.
  
  
  
• Researchers have discovered 175,000 publicly exposed Ollama servers worldwide.  (Tech Radar)
  
  Ollama is an AI tool that you run on your own hardware, but can also talk to services like ChatGPT and Claude.
  
  Around half of those servers are configured not just to answer questions but to execute code...  For anyone in the entire world.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 6 CPU chiplet is slightly smaller than Zen 2.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It has twelve cores and 48MB of L3 cache vs. 8 cores and 32MB of cache for Zen 2 (and 3, 4, and 5), but the move to the latest 2nm process means that it's about the same size as it always has been.  Zen 2 on 7nm was 77mm2, and Zen 6 is 76mm2.
  
  If the promises for TSMC's N2P process node are borne out, this should be a major upgrade - not just 50% more cores, but cores running 30% faster at the same power requirements.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has gone all-in on the video cards you don't want.  (VideoCards)
  
  Reportedly - Nvidia hasn't announced this officially but it matches my own and everyone else's market observations - 75% of GPU supply from Nvidia will go to three models: The 5060, the 5060 Ti 8GB model, and the 5070.
  
  The high-end models and the 16GB 5060 Ti will have limited availability going forward, with the entry level 5050 not even rating a mention.  And the 5090 already isn't available anywhere for less than 50% over MSRP.
  
  I bought an AMD 9060 XT 16GB fearing shortages and price increases, which haven't happened to that model, though the 9070 which was briefly available below MSRP no longer is.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, January 31 2026 08:50 PM (/YfO5)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, January 31 2026 08:56 PM (/YfO5)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, February 01 2026 03:05 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 01 2026 05:37 PM (PiXy!)

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• Trust no-one: Chat & Ask AI, one of the most popular AI apps on the Google Play and Apple App stores - never heard of it - that claims more than 50 million users, left hundreds of millions of those users' private messages with the app's chatbot exposed.  (404 Media)  (archive site)

  The exposed chats showed users asked the app "How do I painlessly kill myself," to write suicide notes, "how to make meth," and how to hack various apps.

  How could this happen?  Did some brilliant hacker find a devious path through a rat's nest of firewalls and security devices to reach the servers?
  
  Not exactly.

  The issue is a misconfiguration in the app's usage of the mobile app development platform Google Firebase, which by default makes it easy for anyone to make themselves an "authenticated" user who can access the app's backend storage where in many instances user data is stored.

  Every message from every user was public.  Oops.
  
  And half of all iOS apps have the same problem.
  
  
  
• 404 Media seems to have fallen on stupid times, judging from the sidebar: App for Quitting Porn Leaked Users' Masturbation Habits, well, okay, that's legit tech news with a prurient slant.  Two Heads, Three Boobs: The AI Babe Meta Is Getting Surreal is less legit.  And I Replaced My Friends With AI Because They Won't Play Tarkov With Me is just pathetic whether it's real or not.

• An AI toy exposed conversations with toddlers to anyone with a GMail account.  (Wired)  (archive site)

  Bondu confirmed in conversations with the researchers that more than 50,000 chat transcripts were accessible through the exposed web portal, essentially all conversations the toys had engaged in other than those that had been manually deleted by parents or staff.

  Oops again.
  
  
  
• How we created more technical debt in six months than in a ten year old system.  (GitHub)
  
  I highlight this one because they weren't using AI.  Just one bad decision that snowballed into an avalanche of consequences.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is working to rebuild trust in Windows.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Far too late for that.
  
  Also, The Verge is working to destroy any tattered shreds of misplaced trust that it still desperately clings to.  It's gone full-blown Trotskyite student newspaper.
  
  
  
• Medium has gone to shit as well.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They're giving staff the day off to join in the strike in support of child rapists and murderers.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk is in talks with himself to merge some of his companies.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Though exactly which ones and under what terms is unknown.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 30 2026 11:11 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 30 2026 11:12 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 31 2026 07:54 AM (PiXy!)

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• Windows 11 now has a billion users, all of whom hate it.  (Thurrott)
  
  I wouldn't advise clicking on that link without adblock enabled.  (Or even better, just using Brave.)  The comments weren't loading, so I tried turning off adblock, and it launched multiple videos all playing at once and choked my browser to the point that I couldn't even close the tab.
  
  And it turns out they're testing a new comment system and it's not working properly.
  
  Anyway:

  As part of today’s quarterly earnings conference call, Microsoft revealed that there are now over one billion Windows 11 users.  That's a big milestone by any measure, but here’s what I find interesting: It took Windows 11 less time to reach one billion users than it did for Windows 10.

  By three months, and they had to murder Windows 10 to do it.

  Today, the narrative is that everyone hates Windows 11.  I complain about the enshittification, which is real.  But that started with Windows 10 (or, really Windows .  And I don’t "hate” Windows 11, nor do I see hatred out in the world.

  I don't think you've looked, Paul.
  
  
  
• Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux.  (Himthe)

  So there I was, finally grasping the reality of what you're up against, as a Windows user:

  • Random bugs that break basic functionality
  • Updates that install without permission and brick my system
  • Copilot and OneDrive ads appearing in every corner of the OS
  • Copilot buttons everywhere, coming for every application
  • Can't even make a local account without hacking the setup with Rufus (they even removed the terminal workaround)
  • Zero actionable fixes or even an aknowledgment of their fuckups
    

  Sounds about right, yes.

  People often say Linux is "too much work.".

  And I agree.  They're completely justified to complain.  There's the documentation page diving, the forums, the reddit threads.  And, most importantly, you have to basically rewire your brain and stop expecting it to behave like Windows used to.

  But I looked at the list above and realized: Windows is now also too much work. 
  And the difference with Windows is that you're going to do all that work while actively fighting your computer only for it to be undone when the next surprise update comes and ruins everything.

  There is also Windows 10 IoT Enterprise Edition LTSC.
  
  Or Windows 7, which doesn't get updates so it doesn't break.

• AMD's 9850X3D is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's only slightly faster than the 9800X3D and uses a lot more power, but it's still a lot faster and uses a lot less power than the best Intel chips, so...  Whatever.
  
  If you want a system that runs cool the 7800X3D is a little slower but amazingly power-efficient.
  
  
  
• An illustrated guide to hippo castration.  (Science)
  
  Oh, good.  I was wondering where I put that.
  
  
  
• There is no mold at the Uffizi.  (Scientific American)
  
  And when we say there is none, I mean there is some.
  
  
  
• France is planning to follow Australia in banning social media for children under 15.  (The Guardian)
  
  In Australia the number of visitors to such sites hasn't declined one iota despite five million accounts being banned.
  
  Odd, that.  You'd almost think that kids are smarter than politicians.
  
  
  
• Beyond Meat's protein soda might be its last chance and best hope.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 30 2026 02:29 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 30 2026 03:31 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 30 2026 03:49 AM (6UXNC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 30 2026 03:52 AM (6UXNC)

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• Memory prices may be leveling off - at four times what they were just a few months ago.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Supplies are still very constrained, but people are buying less RAM - either avoiding upgrades entirely or building smaller systems - so prices are stalling in the ionosphere rather than continuing on an intergalactic cruise.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix - one of the big three memory manufacturers - has reported its most recent quarterly results.  (CNBC)
  
  No surprise, the numbers are good.  Revenue is up 66% over the past year, and profit is up 137%.
  
  Good for them.  Not good for you.

• Nvidia's DGX Spark can be significantly faster on AI tasks than systems built on AMD's Ryzen AI Max.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  When it launched it cost twice as much as the AMD systems, leaving plenty of room for the two to compete.  But the AMD systems seem to have been hit badly by the DRAM Apocalypse while the Nvidia systems have somehow come down in price.
  
  So if all you want to do is run local AI models, the DGX Spark is a better bet.  If you want to do anything else with it - certainly if you want to run Windows - you may be better of sticking with AMD.
  
  
  
• Google's desktop version of Android looks to be real.  (Liliputing)
  
  The year of Linux on the desktop?
  
  I mean, it can't be worse than Windows.
  
  Surely.
  
  
  
• The Khadas Mind Pro has been updated with Intel's new Panther Lake CPU with is B390 graphics.  (Liliputing)
  
  $1799 with 64GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, which used to be wildly expensive, and now seems normal.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, January 29 2026 05:44 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 29 2026 06:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 30 2026 02:23 AM (rcPLc)

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• Intel's new B390 integrated graphics, featured in certain Panther Lake laptop processors, are genuinely a huge leap forward.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Previously the best mainstream integrated graphics were found in AMD chips, like the 780M and 890M units that are included in a three nominal generations of processors.  Intel's latest graphics unit runs rings around them - 50% faster or more.
  
  AMD still holds a convincing lead with its Ryzen AI Max family, but those are not cheap or widespread.
  
  The one major catch here is that the B390 is only available in laptops with soldered memory.  No exceptions.  If you user-upgradable RAM you get graphics running at one third the speed, half the speed of comparable AMD systems.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Television is one hundred years old today.  (Diamond Geezer)
  
  Happy birthday, television!
  
  
  
• After two years of vibe coding, I'm back to writing everything by hand.  (Atmoio)

  It's not until I opened up the full codebase and read its latest state cover to cover that I began to see what we theorized and hoped was only a diminishing artifact of earlier models: slop.
  
  It was pure, unadulterated slop. I was bewildered. Had I not reviewed every line of code before admitting it? Where did all this... gunk.. come from?

  Technical debt as a service.

  In retrospect, it made sense.  Agents write units of changes that look good in isolation.  They are consistent with themselves and your prompt.  But respect for the whole, there is not.  Respect for structural integrity there is not.  Respect even for neighboring patterns there was not.

  What there is, is code spam.
  
  
  
• We have met the enemy and he is slop: A new digital divide?  Coder worldviews, the "Slop economy," and democracy in the age of AI.  (TandFOnline)
  
  Okay, one moment.
  
  Ctrl-F "democracy"
  
  54 hits.  Never once do they specify what they mean, but it readily becomes apparent:

  On one side are the 'digital elites' - those with the means, skills, or institutional support to obtain high-quality information and online experiences. This group enjoys reliable news sources, can afford ad-free subscriptions or premium content, and benefits from platforms and regulations that attempt to uphold standards of accuracy, privacy, and democratic values.  Their internet experience includes credible journalism (e.g., The New York Times, BBC), fact-checked content, and fewer mis/disinformation traps.

  Stalin or Mao.  Those are your only options, apparently.
  
  
  
• Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, creators and operators of Claude AI, is a fuckwit.  (Dario Amodei)

  A country of geniuses in a datacenter could divide their efforts among software design, cyber operations, R&D for physical technologies, relationship building, and statecraft.

  Yeah, "geniuses in datacenters" have a remarkable track record on relationship building and statecraft.
  
  Just... Remarkable.

  It is clear that, if for some reason it chose to do so, this country would have a fairly good shot at taking over the world (either militarily or in terms of influence and control) and imposing its will on everyone else- or doing any number of other things that the rest of the world doesn’t want and can’t stop.

  Everyone has a plan until they get a Hellfire missile to the face.
  
  
  
• Dell's 52" 6K ultra-widescreen monitor is a... 52" 6K ultra-widescreen monitor.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  And it has a 120Hz refresh rate, which is a bit of a surprise.
  
  And it only costs as much as a dozen 27" 4K monitors.
  
  
  
• Google Gemini can now help you find the best meeting time for all attendees.  (Digital Trends)
  
  All it needs to know is the full schedules of all of everyone, and then it becomes an easy task.
  
  Of course, it already was if everyone's schedule is in a computer, so I'm not sure what problem AI is pretending to solve here.
  
  
  
• Google is set to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that it recorded private conversations.  (BBC)
  
  Oh, that problem.  If no conversation is private, you can't sue Google for recording it.
  
  
  
• The Trump administration is planning to use Google Gemini to draft transport regulations.  (ProPublica)

  The answer from the plan’s boosters is simple: speed.  Writing and revising complex federal regulations can take months, sometimes years.  But, with DOT's version of Google Gemini, employees could generate a proposed rule in a matter of minutes or even seconds, two DOT staffers who attended the December demonstration remembered the presenter saying.  In any case, most of what goes into the preambles of DOT regulatory documents is just "word salad," one staffer recalled the presenter saying.  Google Gemini can do word salad.

  Great.  Now it's regulatory spam.
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, January 28 2026 01:05 AM (rcPLc)

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• Replication crisis as a service.  (Columbia)
  
  You may have heard about the replication crisis science, and if you haven't, you should.  Half of all published medical research, for example, cannot be replicated, and for preclinical trials the rate increases to four fifths.
  
  An interesting point from that Wikipedia article is that 70% of scientists have tried and failed to replicate another researcher's work, but only 20% have been contacted by another scientist trying to replicate their work.
  
  Which is perhaps by design:

  This paper in Management Science has been cited more than 6,000 times.  Wall Street executives, top government officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it.  It’s fatally flawed, and the scholarly community refuses to do anything about it.

  Management science, huh?  Bad as things are in medical research, at least they admit to baseline reality.
  
  When someone tried to correct the record on this particular paper, his efforts were not well received:

  The authors ignored me, the journal refused to act, and the scholarly community looked the other way.  Two universities disregarded evidence of research misconduct - even after the authors admitted publishing a misleading report.
  
  The article remains largely uncorrected - misleading thousands of people each year.
  
  I believe our systems for curating trustworthy science are broken and need reformation.

  A latter-day dissolution of the monasteries?

  Having received no response from the authors, I contacted Management Science. After getting advice, I submitted a comment.
  
  It was rejected.
  
  The reviewers did not address the substance of my comment; they objected to my "tone".

  As the article says, ah, the tone police.

  The authors did admit to the editor that they had misreported a key finding - labeling it as statistically significant when it was not.  The authors claimed the error was a "typo."  They intended to type "not significant" but omitted the word "not".

  That's one hell of a typo.
  
  The story gets worse from there.  And that's just a single paper out of millions.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Washington state wants 3D printers and CNC milling machines to monitor everything you do and report on you if you are creating something that could be used in a firearm.  (Adafruit_
  
  Violating the First and Second Amendments with a single piece of legislation.  Such efficiency!
  
  
  
• Google won't stop replacing our news headlines with terrible AI.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The Verge may have gone full-blown communist revolutionary newspaper but on this they are not wrong.  Google is sometimes completely reversing the meaning of tech articles in its AI summaries.
  
  
  
• How to add a coin slot to your gaming PC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sometimes the quest for an authentic arcade experience goes a little too far.
  
  And sometimes it goes a lot.
  
  
  
• A New York startup has built a machine that produces gasoline from air.  (Jalopnik)
  
  Which is perfectly possible, just not very efficient.  After all, dinosaurs breathed air, and all our gasoline comes from liquified dinosaurs.
  
  It takes carbon dioxide and water vapour from the air, electrolyses the water, and combines them to create methanol.  Then it goes through a more complicated process to turn the methanol into usable fuel.
  
  The device costs an estimated $20,000, and if you have a free source of electricity, a gallon of gas costs around $1.50, though the article doesn't mention exactly how this was calculated.
  
  Since you probably don't have a free source of electricity, a gallon of gas will actually cost between $10 and $30, which is why dinosaurs always win.
  
  
  

Anime Update

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 27 2026 12:17 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 27 2026 12:31 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 27 2026 01:27 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 27 2026 02:14 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, January 27 2026 03:29 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, January 27 2026 07:12 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 27 2026 08:55 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, January 27 2026 10:27 AM (ZLF73)

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• Bitlocker: The encryption technology where everyone has access to your data except you.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Microsoft's Bitlocker is infamous for suddenly enabling itself without you explicitly going through the setup process so that neither you nor anybody else has any idea what the encryption key is, and you data is simply gone.
  
  But if you do go through the setup process, it automatically shares your key with Microsoft so the government can ask for and receive your keys.
  
  Which government?
  
  All of them.

• Charge me $3000 for a box of rocks once, shame on you.  Charge me $3000 for a box of rocks four times...  (WCCFTech)
  
  A Reddit user ordered a "resale" unit of an Nvidia RTX 5090 from Amazon - that is, a unit that had been return during the 30 day window - and received a box containing a towel and a bunch of rocks.
  
  Well, scams happen.  Not your fault.
  
  Except this was the fourth time.  It's Amazon's fault for not checking returns, yes, but it's also his fault for still believing that they do.
  
  
  
• Of course you could order your 5090 directly from a card maker like Zotac instead of Amazon and avoid this issue and instead they'll abruptly raise prices by 20% and cancel your order at the old price while blaming a system error.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You could also just play Hytale which runs smoothly on Vega 8 laptop graphics from 2021 even at 2880x1620.  Albeit on low settings, but low settings are almost identical to "epic" settings - the only visible difference is render distance.
  
  
  
• Lemonade plans to half Tesla insurance rates for miles driven using the FSD - Full Self-Driving - mode, because it has fewer accidents than humans.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  Which, yes, means that your insurance company knows exactly when and how and how much you are driving.
  
  It's also not quite clear what the actual reduction in your insurance rates from this would be.  Half cost...  But what component of the cost is directly attributable to the number of hours (or miles) driven?
  
  
  
• I built more in two months with agents than in the previous year.  I used almost none of it.  (Mahdi Yusuf)
  
  This guy gets it.  AI coding assistants aren't useless; they range from super helpful for churning through boring repetitive tasks, to actively dangerous.

  Point an agent at a vague goal - "build me a tool that helps with X" - and you'll get something that looks impressive and rots in a folder.  Point an agent at a specific task - "rewrite these 200 API calls to use the new authentication pattern" - and you'll save a week.

  I had to perform a task with a particular piece of unfamiliar software with painfully poor design and documentation.  I used ChatGPT and after a couple of days of trial and error I got something that was slow but worked - and it would have taken me at least a week to perform the same task myself.
  
  The it turned out that the tool I needed to interpret the results was offline, possibly permanently dead.  I found an alternative, which my company already had a subscription to...  And found that this alternative solved the entire problem and the two days had been completely wasted.

  One is generative theatre.  The other is actual leverage.
  
  The difference is tactical versus strategic deployment.

  Where, in this case, tactical deployment is solving a problem that you actually have, and strategic deployment is solving a problem that nobody has.
  
  
  
• cURL no longer offers bug bounties.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because the project is being overwhelmed with AI-generate fake bug reports.
  
  
  
• Microsoft 360 went down again.  (CRN)
  
  I had a typo there.  Almost left it in.
  
  
  
• A new test for AI labs: Are you even trying to make money?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good question.  Dumb article, but good question.

  Think of it in these terms:
  
  

  • Level 5: We are already making millions of dollars every day, thank you very much.
  • Level 4:We have a detailed multi-stage plan to become the richest human beings on Earth.
  • Level 3:We have many promising product ideas, which will be revealed inthe fullness of time.
  • Level 2:We have the outlines of a concept of a plan.
  • Level 1:True wealth is when you love yourself.

  Fine so far.  At the top, actually making money.  At the bottom, idiot dreamers or possibly communists.

  The big names are all at Level 5: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and so on.

  Hold up.
  
  OpenAI lost $8 billion last year, is expected to lose $14 billion this year, $40 billion next year, and as much as $74 billion in 2028 even if they meet revenue goals.
  
  Did an AI write that article?
  
  
  
• AI luminaries at Davos clash over how close human-level intelligence really is.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  What a useful word, "luminaries".  It covers equally objects that shine of their own right, and masses of stone and dust that merely reflect the brilliance of others.
  
  On the one hand, Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, formerly of Meta, and genuine Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis of Google, who both say that current AI systems are nowhere near human levels and - at least in the case of LeCun - that current approaches can never get there and entirely new methods are needed.
  
  On the other hand Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI who say that their tools are approaching the level of Nobel Prize winners and you'll all be out of work by next week.
  
  I think I'm going to go with the guys who didn't trash the global electronic supply chain only so they could burn a hundred billion dollars of investor money.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Sunday, January 25 2026 06:35 PM (/YfO5)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Sunday, January 25 2026 06:53 PM (/YfO5)

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 26 2026 02:17 AM (lzyeE)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 26 2026 02:38 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 26 2026 02:42 AM (1zWbY)

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Top Story

• Yeah, I'm going to stay right here in my insulated, double-glazed, air-conditioned bunker for a week.
  
  
  
• You can get an AMD Ryzen 9800X3D, an Asus X870 motherboard, and 32GB of RAM for $939 at Newegg right now - and even get a bonus mouse.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's a $480 CPU, a $300 motherboard, and memory that did cost around $100 but  suddenly finds itself at $440.  And a $125 mouse that isn't worth $125 or it wouldn't be included for free.
  
  
  
• Just one small problem: Asus is currently reviewing - though not recalling - all of its 800-series motherboards over a string of failures specifically involving the 9800X3D CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  ASRock has been battling this for months.  It's rare, but seems to keep happening.
  
  
  
• Oh, and the faster 9850X3D is here.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's only slightly faster, but it's only slightly more expensive.  If you were planning on a 9800X3D build - or upgrading an existing system that already has DDR5 RAM - it's not a compelling option but not an awful one either.

• Some perspective: Intel reported a loss for 2025, yes, but it was 98% smaller than the loss in 2024.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The $300 million loss for the year also has to be compared with the $20 billion in fresh investments.  I certainly wouldn't count them out yet.
  
  
  
• Intel also confirmed that its new Nova Lake CPUs will be showing up late this year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are expected to have twice the number of CPU cores of any recent consumer models - up to 16 performance cores and 32 efficiency cores, plus 4 low-power cores.  Which is rather a lot.
  
  
  
• Japanese toilet maker Toto is seeing its share price rise for an unexpected reason.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For nearly forty years, the company has also made electrostatic chucks used to hold silicon wafers in place during manufacturing - one of many afterthought components that has seen a sudden surge in demand:

  Interestingly, the source name checked a few other unlikely Japanese companies that are benefitting from the AI boom.  An MSG seasoning maker also makes chip-insulating films, for example.  Meanwhile, cosmetics brand Kao’s expertise in facial cleansers has an unexpected twin: the company also makes cleaning agents for semiconductor wafers.

  Find what you're good at, and keep doing it.
  
  
  
• AMD has prepared a chart showing why its laptop chips are still better than Intel's new Panther Lake CPUs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They're not.
  
  
  
• If you were thinking of buying an Nvidia 5000-series graphics card, now might be a good time to think of buying an AMD graphics card, or to simply find a new hobby like gardening or making fun of people online.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Nvidia is cutting production and has abandoned its Open Price Program which tried to keep boards available at MSRP, meaning they soon won't be.
  
  Higher end cards already aren't.
  
  
  
• What TikTok's new ownership means for your feed.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  It means you're still the same idiot you were yesterday.  Stop watching slop that is making you retarded.
  
  
  
• What TikTok's new privacy policy means for you.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It means you're still the same idiot you were yesterday, because the policy has been in place since 2024.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 25 2026 02:20 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 25 2026 04:18 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, January 25 2026 04:38 AM (KOtXO)

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