Ambient Irony

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Tuesday, July 21

Unique Ode

Something is breaking and it's not the Shield Hero.

ASCII (basic)
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~

Common accented Latin
àáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýþÿ
ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞß

Greek
ΑΒΓΔΕΖΗΘΙΚΛΜΝΞΟΠΡΣΤΥΦΧΨΩ
αβγδεζηθικλμνξοπρστυφχψω

Cyrillic
АБВГДЕЁЖЗИЙКЛМНОПРСТУФХЦЧШЩЪЫЬЭЮЯ
абвгдеёжзийклмнопрстуфхцчшщъыьэюя

Hangul
가나다라마바사아자차카타파하 한글 테스트 안녕하세요

Common numerical & currency symbols
¹²³¼½¾ⅠⅡⅢⅣⅤⅥⅦⅧⅨⅩ €£¥¢₹₽₩₪฿

Common punctuation & symbols
‘’"”«»–—…†‡•‰′″‹›¡¿§¶†‡•

CJK (Chinese / Japanese / Korean ideographs)
漢字日本語中文 한국어 你好世界東京北京

Arabic
العربية مرحبا بالعالم ا ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي

Hebrew
עברית שלום עולם א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת

Mathematical operators & symbols
∀∁∂∃∄∅∆∇∈∉∊∋∌∍∎∏∐∑−∓∔∕∗∘∙√∛∜∝∞∟∠∡∢∣∤∥∦∧∨∩∪∫∬∭∮∯∰∱∲∳

Box-drawing & geometric
─│┌┐└┘├┤┬┴┼═║╒╓╔╕╖╗╘╙╚╛╜╝╞╟╠╡╢╣╤╥╦╧╨╩╪╫╬
■□▢▣▤▥▦▧▨▩▪▫▬▭▮▯▰▱▲△▴▵▶▷▸▹►▻▼▽▾▿◀◁
◂◃◄◅◆◇◈◉◊○◌◍◎●◐◑◒◓◔◕◖◗◘◙◚◛◜◝◞◟◠◡◢◣◤◥
◦◧◨◩◪◫◬◭◮◯

MB3 diagnostic test

☀☁☂☃☄★☆☇☈☉☊☋☌☍☎☏☐☑☒☓☔☕☘☙☚☛☜☝☞☟
☠☢☣☤☥☦☧☨☩☪☫☬☭☮☯☰☱☲☳☴☵☶☷☸☹☺☻☼☽☾☿♀♁♂♃♄♅♆♇

Emoji – basic (common faces & objects)
Here be dragons.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:13 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 144 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Now for the comment section:

ASCII (basic)
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~

Common accented Latin
àáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýþÿ ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞß

Greek
ΑΒΓΔΕΖΗΘΙΚΛΜΝΞΟΠΡΣΤΥΦΧΨΩ αβγδεζηθικλμνξοπρστυφχψω

Cyrillic
АБВГДЕЁЖЗИЙКЛМНОПРСТУФХЦЧШЩЪЫЬЭЮЯ абвгдеёжзийклмнопрстуфхцчшщъыьэюя

Hangul
가나다라마바사아자차카타파하 한글 테스트 안녕하세요

Common numerical & currency symbols
¹²³¼½¾ⅠⅡⅢⅣⅤⅥⅦⅧⅨⅩ €£¥¢₹₽₩₪฿

Common punctuation & symbols
‘’"”«»–—…†‡•‰′″‹›¡¿§¶†‡•

CJK (Chinese / Japanese / Korean ideographs)
漢字日本語中文 한국어 你好世界東京北京

Arabic
العربية مرحبا بالعالم ا ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي

Hebrew
עברית שלום עולם א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת

Mathematical operators & symbols
∀∁∂∃∄∅∆∇∈∉∊∋∌∍∎∏∐∑−∓∔∕∗∘∙√∛∜∝∞∟∠∡∢∣∤∥∦∧∨∩∪∫∬∭∮∯∰∱∲∳

☀☁☂☃☄★☆☇☈☉☊☋☌☍☎☏☐☑☒☓☔☕☘☙☚☛☜☝☞☟☠☢☣☤☥☦☧☨☩☪☫☬☭☮☯☰☱☲☳☴☵☶☷☸☹☺☻☼☽☾☿♀♁♂♃♄♅♆♇

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 21 2026 08:28 AM (PiXy!)

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Monday, July 20

Daily News Stuff 20 July 2026

Tally Deck Views Edition

Top Story

Oops. Forgot there was planned maintenance due on the proxy server. It restarted cleanly but I needed to restart some of the software a second time before it was happy.
OpenAI has rushed to reassure users that the brand new GPT 5.6 still has all the same features they know and love. (InfoWorld)

Like accidentally deleting all your files but being really sorry about it afterwards.
Alibaba's AI tool Qwen 3.8 is launching and will soon be open-weight - that is, you can't create your own version but you can download and run it yourself. (Twitter)

One small problem is that is has 2.4 trillion parameters, meaning you'll need a graphics card with 4.8 terabytes of VRAM to run it efficiently, and not many end users have the necessary hardware.
Meanwhile Apple just hired the original team behind Qwen. (WCCFTech)

Who Alibaba had fired in a quiet reminder that grotesque ineptitude is not solely a gift of the western world.

Tech News

Orchid is a delightfully retro and approachable hipster synth. (The Verge)

That bad, huh?
Zilog's Z80 has turned 50 and been discontinued but don't you worry. (Tom's Hardware)

A replacement chip has been reverse-engineered and is now available. It's built on an ancient 130nm node, but that's magic compared to the 4 micron node used in the original Z80.

It runs at 50MHz and the chip itself measures a quarter of a millimeter on a side.
China's CXMT is preparing to launch DDR6 memory and attempt to steal market share away from Samsung and SK Hynix. (WCCFTech)

Great. We'll be here, starving, just as we always have been.
The head of SK Group, owners of Big Three memory maker SK Hynix, says that memory prices are too high and have to come down. (Tom's Hardware)

Not that he cares about customers. But while SK Hynix is pulling in record revenues and profits, every other tech company in the chaebol is in the doldrums due to exorbitant memory costs.
Speaking of which, while the 2026 model of the Razer 18 laptop is not any faster than last year's, it does at least cost you more money while providing half the memory and storage. (Notebook Check)

Wait.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Wut.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 383 words, total size 4 kb.

Sunday, July 19

Daily News Stuff 19 July 2026

Woolly Hippo To You Edition

Top Story

Nvidia's 5000 Super graphics cards are lined up on the runway ready to go as soon as someone breaks the news to the passengers that the price of their tickets just tripled. (Tom's Hardware)

Or less obliquely, the 3GB memory chips used for the Super models are three times the price of the standard 2GB chips.

Which is STUPID because the GPUs already support two banks of memory and Nvidia could more cheaply produce a 24GB RTX 5070 Super than an 18GB version.

AMD should make mainstream 24GB and 32GB cards just to mock their rivals.
Speaking of AMD, the company launched its Ryzen 7700X3D CPU at a price of $329 last week, making it something less than a bargain because the 7800X3D is available cheaper than that. (Tom's Hardware)

You can now pick up a 7700X3D for $279.

Worth pointing out the the previous generation's 5800X3D runs to $349.

Tech News

The AGI AI828 contains no AI at all; it's just an SSD. (Tom's Hardware)

And an expensive one; it's a DRAMless PCIe 4.0 design, and the 1TB model costs as much as a 4TB Team brand SSD I bought in March.

Welcome to the 21st century. Enjoy the ride. The complimentary barf bags are in the seat pocket in front of you. Yes, there are a lot of them.
Korean outfit 2P Game Arcade is hosting a competition for games that fit entirely on a single 1.44MB floppy. (Tom's Hardware)

Plenty of room. Why, that's 1.6 Amiga floppies!
Of which around 15,000 can be downloaded from the Amiga Freeware Archive. (Amiga Freeware)

Which used to be a lot, but that was long ago and in precisely the same country.
Kimi is the latest menace to the domestic threat of communist AI creators from foreign AI creators. (Tech Crunch)
Meanwhile, OpenAI's head of strategic futures Dean Ball said that Kimi is "a very good model" whose performance probably can't be "explained away by distillation or anything like that," adding that he's "personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks."
Right. Sure.
China's Kimi K3 identifies itself as Claude, betraying its distilled origins. (WCCFTech)

You were saying, Bean?
AMD's upcoming 10 core Zen 6 laptop chip stomps all over AMD's existing 10 core Zen 5 laptop chip in new benchmark leaks. (WCCFTech)

In fact, it stomps all over AMD's existing 12 core laptop chip. It's not even close. It comes in as 33% faster than the equivalent Zen 5 chip in multi-core tests, and 35% faster single-core.

Since I'm writing this on a Zen 3 system and the latest hardware I have is Zen 4, it looks like a pretty substantial jump.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: You're never too old to rock and roll.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:30 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 474 words, total size 5 kb.

Saturday, July 18

Daily News Stuff 18 July 2026

Accidental Umpires Edition

Top Story

AWS is experiencing a wee spot of bother with its billing system. (The Register)

Speculation is that it's a unit conversion error in the cost estimation tool, but all we know for sure is that people who barely use the service are being alerted to cost estimates in the billions of dollars, and for businesses that have active applications the predicted bills run into the trillions.

AWS say they are looking into it.

Some users are nonetheless expressing mild consternation.

I tried to embed the tweets two different ways but the end result was that the editor ate the entire post, so links are all you get. Saved by my reflexive habit of Ctrl-C to capture the post content before I hit save, from back when the server glitched a lot more often than it does now.

Tech News

TSMC says that its work towards 1.4nm technology is progressing well, with 90% yield on SRAM dies and 90% of targeted performance on logic circuits. (Tom's Hardware)

1.4nm is the node after the 2nm node that we are expecting to see late this year, so it won't reach production until at least 2028. A 90% yield this early is a good sign.
AI datacenters must produce as much energy as they consume, says retarded communist and part-time Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese. (Tom's Hardware)

Alexa, please repeal the laws of thermodynamics.
The Zilog Z80 has turned 50. (Goliath32)

As has that website.
Microsoft's new Surface Laptop is here with its complement of eight whole gigabytes of RAM. (The Verge)

That's plenty for Linux, and tolerable for MacOS. Running Windows 11 it's a miserable experience.
The Redmagic Astra 2 tablet is here, with a 9" 185Hz OLED screen, a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 CPU, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, and... Active cooling? (Liliputing)

The one thing I want from a tablet is not to have a fan whining at me.
The Lenovo Legion Y700 Infinite tablet is here, with an 8.8" OLED display, a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 CPU, up to 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, and... Passive cooling, apparently. (Notebook Check)

It's going the be horribly expensive and I just picked up their Gen 3 model at half price so I'm not even tempted, but at least it's silent.
Beelink's new ME Pro 370 is a NAS with a Ryzen 370 12-core laptop CPU, supporting two or four 3.5" hard drives, three M.2 SSDs, and... Up to 256GB of RAM? (Notebook Check)

That seems unlikely, because that amount would require four 64GB DDR5 modules, and nobody is putting four SODIMM slots in consumer equipment.

I have ten DDR5 SODIMMs. Believe me, I've looked.

Research

The Eighth Law already requires that every admissible alteration of the noetic field (and, by extension, every macroscopic world-line that couples to that field) lie along a null geodesic of the full 6D manifold that satisfies the 2T-gauge conditions. Ordinary 3+1 orbital motion is the projection of such a higher-dimensional geodesic. Spin-orbit locking therefore cannot be a purely 3-spatial mechanical equilibrium; it must also be consistent with the hidden

t_2

and

x^4

components of the geodesic. In practice this appears observationally as an additional, apparently arbitrary ceiling on how tightly a world can remain synchronized: once the integrated "geodesic resistance”

\mathcal{I}(\gamma)

exceeds a threshold set by the unknown couplings

\beta

\kappa

and the noetic tensor, further dissipative evolution is forbidden even if ordinary tidal torque remains. The result is that perfect, permanent 1:1 locking may be rarer or more fragile than in 3+1 physics, and residual libration or slow drift in the relative orientation of the permanent day/night hemispheres can persist.

This actually makes complete sense given the context, and solves the problem, but even so gives me a headache.

All I wanted to do was make the sky blue.

I've also been tinkering with Fable as well as Grok, and while it's impressive, I don't trust it. It heaped effusive praise on what I consider one of the weakest points of the plot of the story I'm working on.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Do not eat the dark snow.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:18 AM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 711 words, total size 8 kb.

1 A less idiotic way of saying that thing about data centers would be to mandate that if a data center is planned to consume 1 GW, the company putting in the data center must also contract to put in a new power plant putting out 1 GW.

But very few politicians are going to say that, because new power plants = CO2 = sad Gaia. Idiots.

A while back, like a couple decades ago, I was thinking "Well, if this 'CO2 causes global warming' nonsense continues, at least it'll lead to more of a push for nuclear power". I was naive: many of the people screaming about CO2 are doing so for political power, not because of the actual issues. Who was it who accidentally said the quiet part out loud? I can't remember, but it was something like "We're not trying to sovle the climate issue, we're trying to smash capitalism". Really gave the game away.

Besides, the same people panicking about CO2 would also panic if someone proposed a nuclear plant in their area. Personally, I would be the president of the "Yes, In My Back Yard" society; I would love to see a new nuclear plant going in right across the street from me. But that's because I actually understand how they work. Which most of those NIMBYists don't.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, July 18 2026 06:15 PM (HcJvv)

2 P.S. Pixy, I tried to spell "naive" with an i-plus-diaresus character but got an error from line 648 of Form.py: ascii codec can't encode `0xef`. The offending line:
print('Akismet check %s in %0.3fs on %s %s %s "%s"' % ('error' if aki_err else 'accept' if aki_ok else 'reject', time.time()-taki, tags.get('form.name',''), tags.get('form.web',''), tags.get('form.mail',''), text))
You probably need to slap a (text if type(text) == 'str' else text.decode('utf-8', 'backslashreplace') at the end of that line instead of "text"; this is probably also why I couldn't use an em dash character a few days ago. (Note that I haven't tested that Python code in an actual Python file, just typed it into the text box here, so there might be errors in it. Caveat coder).

Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, July 18 2026 06:20 PM (HcJvv)

3 Let me test a fix: naïve

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 19 2026 09:26 AM (PiXy!)

é ñ ü ç á é í ó ú ß € £ ¥

α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ τ υ φ χ ψ ω

А Б В Г Д Е Ё Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 19 2026 09:30 AM (PiXy!)

5 ∮ ∯ ∰ 안녕하세요
∞ ∑ ∫ ≈ ≠ ≤ ≥ √

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 19 2026 09:35 AM (PiXy!)

6 I think it's fixed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 19 2026 09:36 AM (PiXy!)

7 Comment count is slightly wack from the failed tests.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 19 2026 11:00 AM (PiXy!)

8 Tried to post a comment with a thumbs-up emoji and it didn't appear. Perhaps you're filtering out the emojis specifically, or the astral Unicode planes in general. So let's try something else: こんにちは

Posted by: Robin Munn at Sunday, July 19 2026 11:52 AM (HcJvv)

9 Okay, I can say hello in Japanese but not post emojis. That's fine.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Sunday, July 19 2026 11:53 AM (HcJvv)

10 I'm not filtering them out intentionally, but even with the error fixed those messages are disappearing without trace. I'll need to poke some more; they're not hidden or flagged as spam, they're simply gone.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 19 2026 05:47 PM (PiXy!)

11 Double-checked the database and confirmed that they vanished rather than being filtered out before or after.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 19 2026 05:50 PM (PiXy!)

12 The thumbs-up emoji is U+1F44D. In UTF-8 that's 0xF0 0x9F 0x91 0x8D. In UTF-16 (Javascript's native representation, unfortunately) it's 0xD83D 0xDC4D, a surrogate pair. This comment does not contain any thumbs-up characters, but my *next* one (which I will post less than a minute after I post this one) will.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Monday, July 20 2026 11:46 AM (ok0MF)

13 Just posted a comment saying "Thumbs-up emoji: (emoji character)" and it vanished. Between my previous comment that posted and this one, that will give you a timestamp bracket.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Monday, July 20 2026 11:47 AM (ok0MF)

14 My suspicion is that surrogate pairs aren't being handled correctly somewhere in the comment-handling code, and some piece of the pipeline is trying to convert 0xD83D in isolation to UTF-8 (which is invalid) and then discarding the whole thing as malformed, rather than converting the two UTF-16 codepoints, 0xD83D 0xDC4D, together as they are supposed to. Surrogate pairs are where most naïve code falls apart, because they don't appear in text in most languages. The only characters in the astral planes are emojis, some arcane mathematical symbols, some archaic Chinese pictograms no longer in common use today but found in historical documents... and a few languages spoken today. Including Fulani (a.k.a. Fufulde), spoken by about 37 million people, whose alphabet was only recently developed and so it ended up in the U+1E900 to U+1E95F block. (It used to be written in other alphabets, such as Latin or Arabic, but none of them were really good at representing all the sounds of Fulani, so some native speakers worked out a new alphabet that would represent it better).

So people who write naïve code (yes, I'm enjoying being able to type Unicode characters again — oh look, that was an em dash!) will often find their programs failing on Fulani. Or when someone tries to insert emojis.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Monday, July 20 2026 11:56 AM (ok0MF)

15 New spam comment got through at https://ai.mee.nu/daily_news_stuff_3_january_2026

Posted by: Robin Munn at Monday, July 20 2026 02:41 PM (ok0MF)

16 Pixy, any chance you can whitelist "smart" quotes and the like, or at least convert them into regular ones? Lots of pretentious sites use them, which leads to comments that quote them getting rejected.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 21 2026 04:26 AM (OWlMQ)

17 Most common Unicode characters now work fine in comments - the problem was with the logging library within the error checking of the spam filter.

I have a test set - I'll try posting it as a new thread rather than a comment, which will immediately tell me where it's still a spam filter problem or a database handling problem.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 21 2026 08:01 AM (PiXy!)

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Friday, July 17

Daily News Stuff 17 July 2026

Dwarves Are Back On The Menu Edition

Top Story

TSMC has committed another $100 billion for four new leading-edge 2nm fabs in Arizona. (Tom's Hardware)

I'm not sure exactly why they chose Arizona apart from the fact that China is unlikely to successfully invade, but that seems like a good enough reason.

Tech News

India has fined Hewlett Packard 1.4 billion rupees for price fixing. (Ars Technica)

About tree fiddy in real money.
AMD's Ryzen 7700X3D is the company's latest though not newest CPU with what they term "3D-Vcache" - an additional 64MB cache chip stacked on top of the CPU die. (Tom's Hardware)

The problem is that it's not much faster than the existing 7700X unless you're specifically using it to play games, and not much faster than the existing 7600X3D if you are playing games, and both of those chips are around $100 cheaper than the 7700X3D's $329.
1Password now lets Claude use your passwords - without giving it access to the passwords themselves. (Nerds.xyz)

Claude sends a request to 1Password, the user approves it, and Claude ends up with access to the desired service without ever seeing the password. It's a pretty elegant solution to a situation set up mostly by crazy people.
Why is OpenAI selling a ChatGPT basketball? (Tech Crunch)

Good question. Next question.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Roast loin of... What?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:40 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, July 16

Daily News Stuff 16 July 2026

Disclaimer-Free Edition

Top Story

The latest scandal of a fatal failure of Tesla's FSD (full self-driving) system turns out to have been another case of PTTMCDISEH-STTW. (Tech Crunch)

Pedal-to-the-metal controlled driving into someone else's house - straight through the wall.

Funny how often things turn out that way.

Tech News

Contrary to what I was saying yesterday, Asus reports that DDR5 memory from China's CXMT is slower and less reliable than that from, for example, South Korea's SK Hynix. (Tom's Hardware)

Underlining precisely what I said, this only matters at all if you are trying to overclock your memory, which I don't recommend in the current market.
Just what the PC gaming ecosystem needs: Cartridges. (Tom's Hardware)

The "cartridges" are actually repurposed old 2.5" hard drives, and it specifically works for Steam games on Linux, but it works.
There's likely to be a shortage of the new MacBook Neo. (WCCFTech)

Because - as predicted the moment it was announced - Apple has run out of its limited supply of defective A18 Pro iPhone CPUs, and is now running short of functional A18 Pro chips.
Google's legal settlement with the Epic Games Store has been withdrawn. Here's why that's a good thing. (Ars Technica)

Third-party app stores are now coming to Android, making the existing settlement moot.
There is still no release date for Ananta.

Danmaching

So I got through the tournament arc in Season 2, and it wasn't too much of a slog - from set up to denouement it was only four episodes.

I had started watching fansubs on YouTube because seasons 2 and 4 just left Hidive in Australia - or that's what they claimed - but now I've tracked it down.

Season 1 isn't there, but if you click on season 4 it available via a season menu masquerading as season 4, and if you select season 5 it is available as season 1.

Season 2 is also hiding under season 4, but it's actually selected by default.

Season 3 is also hiding under season 4, but you can't watch it unless you have a Crunchyroll subscription via Amazon Prime. But where previously they only had the season 3 OVA, they now have the full season 3 TV as well.

Season 4 is actually under season 4, but if you click on season 4 it takes you to season 2, so you have to use the dropdown to get to season 4.

Season 5 is actually season 5, and also season 1.

And Sword Oratoria is what it is.

Hope you've been taking notes because there'll be a short quiz next period.

Musical Interlude

It's not Frieren without a closing theme by Milet.

Disclaimer: I lied.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:10 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 I am utterly puzzled by how they managed to screw that up this badly. Man, if that's what hoops you have to jump through to watch a show "legitimately", it's no wonder sites like Nyaa are flourishing.

I am reminded of Louis Rossmann's video rant from... a few months ago? A year or two? Something like that. He was ranting about Netflix, and how they just would not serve him a 1080p stream on his Linux box (and forget about 4K); it was limited to 720p at most. His theme, as I recall, was that when the companies delivering the "legitimate" product deliberately downgrade the product, piracy becomes morally justified. And even if it weren't morally justified, it's practical. Many people who would be willing to pay for a quality product are turning to the pirate sources because it's the only way for them to get the quality product they would like to pay for. Or... the product that they already paid for, but that somebody (whose name might, perhaps, rhyme with pony) has taken away from them.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Friday, July 17 2026 12:37 AM (HcJvv)

2 I should add that starting where I said "And even if it weren't morally justified, it's practical", I was expressing my own opinions. Until that sentence, I was quoting Rossmann's video. But Rossmann didn't talk about the practical aspects of torrenting (that the pirate sources are delivering a higher-quality product than the legitimate ones); that was me saying that.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Friday, July 17 2026 12:46 AM (HcJvv)

3 On the one hand, I'm in favour of "piracy" because once it's out there, it's out there, and screw you for trying to prosecute people for watching movies. On the other hand, it's just mindless consumption of drivel that drives most of it, and getting all worked up about being legally or technologically restricted from getting the maximum bang from your cat-shit dollar is a bit silly to me. On the gripping hand: copying rights, intellectual property, and such business are absurd legal fictions created to extract as much value from inherently worthless items as possible, and the practitioners should be reviled by all sane people.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 17 2026 03:15 AM (LADmw)

4 I can't agree with the wholesale condemnation of all intellectual-property laws. They do serve a useful purpose, though it's also true that their purpose has been much abused over the years, usually due to the love of money. ("For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil", 1 Timothy 6:10). But the original purpose, to allow people to make enough money to live off of from writing books, creating beautiful art, making movies that many people would be willing to pay money to see, and so on -- that purpose is still a useful one. All of those things: fiction books, beautiful pictures, fun movies, all of them are inherently worthless, as you pointed out, at least from one point of view. They serve no purpose except to entertain, to give people a break from a boring routine. And yet... that has inherent worth, too. Not economic worth per se, and certainly not from the perspective of putting food on the table or clothes on your back. Reading a book won't fill your stomach or satisfy your hunger. (Though reading the Redwall series can actually make you hungry; man, does that guy write good feasting scenes!) But good art can lift your spirits or satisfy your soul. There's value in that.

There's more I could write, but I have an appointment coming up, and this would turn into an essay if I let it. So I'll leave it at that: that there should be ways to encourage artists to create, to let them make money off of their creation. I'm very glad that Patreon exists, for example. But also, there was a baby somewhere in the flood of bathwater that modern intellectual property law has become. Let's not throw the entire thing out wholesale; let's be more cautious than that.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Friday, July 17 2026 06:02 PM (quLd3)

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Wednesday, July 15

Daily News Stuff 15 July 2026

Red Fish Blue Fish Edition

Top Story

Microsoft has updated Windows Search and... Fixed it? (WCCFTech)

Well, they've at least stopped shoving it full of ads, which goes a big way toward fixing it.
Micrsoft just release a set of patches that fix 570 security holes in Windows and their other software. (Krebs on Security)

That's... Good, I guess? If still terrifying.
Microsoft also fixed Secure Boot. (Ars Technica)

Which as it happens has been insecure boot since 2013.

Tech News

With memory being so wildly expensive these days, you might be wondering which memory you should buy.

And the answer is, in most cases, cheap memory. Or the cheapest you can find from a reliable retailer.

Intel has its CUDIMMs and AMD has its ULL memory. They are not worth buying.

For everyday tasks they make no difference, and for gaming the money is far better spent on a AMD Ryzen X3D CPU, or if you have an Intel system, on wishing you had an AMD system. The expanded cache on AMD's X3D CPUs makes memory speed largely irrelevant for most users, even gamers intent on wringing every last drop of performance out of their systems.

Intel will be shipping its own X3D equivalent later this year with its Nova Lake processors, which include up to 288MB of cache, though most users will do fine with half that much.
Bonsai 27B is the Qwen 27B model squooshed into a bit and a bit. (PrismML)

Native Qwen 27B uses 16-bit floating point, so it needs 54GB of VRAM to run unrestricted. And 54GB of VRAM is quite expensive in the current market.

What the Bonsai process does is to prune it down to ternary or binary with scaling factors per group. In ternary form it fits in 5.9GB of VRAM, while retaining more than 90% of the capabilities of the full model.
Research today: Megatides on microplanets, imaginative uses for fireworks, the appropriate gratuities for Irish railway porters in 1911, and imagine you won the war and they didn't know what to do with you so they busted you down to cadet...

Oh. That's where I stole that one from. It's different enough, though.

Into Each Season A Little Tournament Arc Must Fall

So I rewatched season one of Danmachi and moved on to season two, taking advantage of a 75% off Hidive subscription I picked up on Prime day. They did have all of it on offer but then seasons two and four disappeared before I could get to them, but now season two is back only it's called season four so I don't know what they're doing and it's pretty clear neither do they. And season three is only on Crunchyroll, probably. Apparently the Australian regional rights are a big ball of mud.

Anyway, season two sucks. At the outset, at least; a scan of the episode titles suggest I only need to suffer through two more episodes of bilge before it gets back to a story.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: He's fallen in the water!

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Tuesday, July 14

Daily News Stuff 14 July 2026

The Origin Of Croissants Edition

Top Story

Big Three SK Hynix memory maker may achieve just one sixth of its planned increases in capacity by 2028. (WCCFTech)

How surprising that a company massively benefiting from a shortage is slow to resolve that shortage.
SK Hynix is also planning to invest its new round of US share sales into, uh, South Korean government bonds. (WCCFTech)

I don't think they're convinced the shortage is here to stay.
Meta is expanding its planned Hyperion AI supercluster in Louisiana to 5GW of capacity at a cost of $50 billion. (Tom's Hardware)

Meta has had many major wins with customers signing up for its AI services, such as, uh, nobody.

Tech News

Astronomers have found sugar among the stars. (AP News)

I was wondering where I left that.
Hundreds of economists say we must act now to avert disruption from AI. (AP News)

They provided thousands of different theories of what must be done, with only one factor in common: Providing more funding to economists.
Linux 7.2 may be dropping support for the Intel 80486, but it's getting fresh driver updates for the Sega Dreamcast. (Tom's Hardware)

Good to hear for everyone who wants to keep their dreams alive.
If you don't have a Dreamcast, don't worry, you can run Linux on a Sega 32X. (GitHub)

No surprise; the 32X runs a Hitachi SH2 CPU, very similar to but much slower than the SH4 chip used in the Dreamcast.
Social media bans are coming for children right across Europe. (The Verge)

Because they're communists.
China, Russia, and Iran are working to inflame tensions over AI datacenters in the US. (New York Times) (archive site)

Because they're communists.
55% of Americans have stopped regular use of social media. (PC Magazine)

Because they're tired of dealing with communists.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Lares to the left of me, lares to the right of me...

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Tuesday, July 21

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Friday, July 17

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Into Each Season A Little Tournament Arc Must Fall

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