• Overwhelmingly Negative: Everybody hates DLSS 5.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Ars Technica rounds up the response to Nvidia's showcase of its DLSS 5 $10,000 AI slop filter and concludes that...  It's bad.
  
  (Not kidding about the cost: The demo required two RTX 5090s and they currently cost between $4000 and $6000 each, depending on the model.  Yes, they launch at $2000.  That was then; this is now.)
  
  
  
• A roundup of some of the memes.  (Notebook Check)
  
  AI-generated.  Because of course.
  
  
  
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says you're holding it wrong.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Thanks Steve.

• AI still doesn't work very well, and businesses who claim it does are faking it.  (The Register)
  
  Or are looking at a very specific use case.  If you need to translate code from one language to another, it works pretty well.
  
  Sometimes.
  
  Maybe.

  To underscore the consequences of not having that kind of data, Smiley pointed to a recent attempt to rewrite SQLite in Rust using AI.
  
  "It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right," he said.  It's 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite.  Two thousand times worse for a database is a non-viable product.  It's a dumpster fire.  Throw it away.  All that money you spent on it is worthless."

  
  
• Except that's not actually accurate.  (Medium)
  
  It wasn't 2000 times slower.  It was 20,000 times slower.  A query that took 90 microseconds on the real thing took two seconds on the AI rewrite.
  
  
  
• Please-don't-call-it-gambling site Kalshi faces criminal charges in Arizon because guess what?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  You'll never guess.
  
  Oh, you guessed.
  
  
  
• All the data and photos gathered by people playing Pokemon Go has been used to train delivery robots.  (Popular Science)
  
  We already knew this, right?  The developer of Pokemon Go, Niantic, wasn't created to develop games.  It was founded as a geospatial services company.  And they put millions of players to work harvesting data.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 18 2026 09:54 PM (1zWbY)

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• Nvidia held its keynote address at its annual GPU Technology Conference, where it showed off a preview of its new DLSS 5 software, two months after DLSS 4.5 was released at CES.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  DLSS 5 goes all-in on AI, changing game graphics into the AI developer's idea of game graphics.  It's...  Not great.
  
  It uses face detection to overlay what it things faces should look like on your game's graphics, adding twenty years to the age of characters while leaving their clothes untouched and sometimes leaving random items looking like they've just been dragged backwards through an industrial recycling facility.
  
  And it achieves all this in real time using the power of your own graphics card...  Assuming you have dual RTX 5090s, which you don't.

• Encyclopedia Britannica has sued OpenAI for "stealing our shit".  (Engadget)
  
  They may not have used precisely those words.
  
  
  
• "Investors" on Polymarket have threatened to murder an Israeli reporter for reporting stories that ran against their "investments".  (Times of Israel)
  
  They "invested" in predicting that an Iranian missile would be intercepted; instead it crashed in empty land outside Jerusalem so that they lost their "investments".
  
  Yes, they are gamblers trying to nobble a horse, only the horse is a person and the nobbling would be fatal.
  
  
  
• The cast of Firefly are looking for funds to reboot the series in animated form.  (Hollywood Reporter)
  
  Uh...  Maybe?  It was a great series cut off far too early, and it's probably been too long for them to reprise their roles in a live action series.  Also one of the characters is canonically dead.
  
  But animated?  Anything can happen in an animated series.
  
  
  
• Micron has begun volume production of 36GB HBM4 modules, 28Gbps PCIe 6.0 SSDs, and 192GB SOCAMM2 laptop memory modules.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You can't have any.  Not unless your name is Nvidia.
  
  
  
• Dell has introduced its new Pro Max desktop with an Nvidia GB300 CPU and 696GB of LPDDR5X memory.  (Notebook Check)
  
  They did not list a price, for obvious reasons.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, March 18 2026 11:26 AM (zCiG7)

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• The Big Three memory makers are publicly saying they expect the AI bubble to pop - or at least fizzle - by 2028, which is why they're slow-walking expansion plans in the face of unprecedented demand.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That does mean that if you need memory now you're kind of screwed.
  
  It also means that Taiwan's Nanya and West Taiwan's CXMT - the fourth and fifth largest memory manufacturers - are making hay while the sun shines.

• North Korea's latest scam is placing remote workers with tech companies.  (NBC)
  
  They've actually been doing this for a while.  They fake their ID, phone a friend for interviews, send the money to the government, and steal secrets if they get a chance.
  
  
  
• Electric vehicle sales are booming in countries where a hundred miles is a long distance and nobody has children.  (Electrek)
  
  Less so in places with a future.
  
  
  
• Myrient, the 385TB archive of retro games that was dying of exorbitant hosting fees, has been saved.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The entire archive has been backed up and volunteers are working on a new website and torrent server.
  
  I took a look myself, but I don't have 385TB of space available and it was hard to know where to start with a partial archive.
  
  
  
• Britain is investing $2.5 billion in nuclear power to protect itself from future energy price shocks.  (GB News)
  
  Not fission which exists and actually works, but fusion which doesn't.  Except on an inconveniently abrupt scale.
  
  
  
• What good is a glass worm?  (Aikido)
  
  Glassworm, an attack that injects vulnerabilities into open-source projects by slipping invisible Unicode characters into sensitive places, is back.
  
  Unicode merges all human languages, ever, into a single character set.  Its creators never bothered to ask if this was a good idea.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 16 2026 10:07 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, March 17 2026 01:31 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: wheels at Tuesday, March 17 2026 02:28 AM (AxWHc)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 17 2026 05:51 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, March 17 2026 07:15 AM (s6adZ)

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• Montana's Governor Greg Gianforte has signed into law the state's Right to Compute Act, the first legislation of its kind.  (Western MT News)
  
  Before you celebrate, the bill is the worst kind of waffly bullshit, forbidding the government from infringing on fundamental rights unless it really wants to.
  
  I think they've spent too much time next door to Canada and the government needs to institute a hundred-mile decommunised zone.
  
  Still doing better than Australia where our government threatened at one point to legislate against inconvenient arithmetic.
  
  

• Whether you have a right or not you can't do much computed on a MacBook Pro 14 with an M5 Max CPU.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It looks great on paper but it throttles down to less than half power within two seconds.  If you want the high-end processor the only viable option is the 16 inch model.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Studies show that productivity gains from AI for typical office workers amount to as little as 16 minutes per week.  (Nerds.XYZ)
  
  I'm not a typical office worker, but I get more out of it just from using it as a better search engine.  Watching Grok and ChatGPT discard dozens of useless results from Google before finding the right answer is...  I don't know.  Satisfying, in a strange way.
  
  
  
• Latency numbers every programmer should know but most don't.  (GitHub)
  
  Interesting that from the original version in 2012 to this 2020 update, the quoted SSD latency improved by a factor of 10 - from 150 microseconds to 16.  And disk seeks from 10 milliseconds to 2, which has got to be measuring cache effects, because that would mean the disk would be spinning at 30,000 rpm.
  
  
  
• Just how much responsibility do AI chatbots and the companies that create them hold for psychotic people acting psychotically?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm torn between bankrupting the companies and bankrupting the lawyers bringing these suits.
  
  Both is good.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk plans to launch the Terafab project - his own chip manufacturing facility - next week.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Of course it's going to take years before anything can come online even if he can secure the required tools from ASML, which is a single source for top-end chip manufacturing equipment.
  
  He has said that he plans to reach production in excess of 100 billion chips per year, though exactly what chips and in what time frame he has not yet specified.
  
  
  
• ASRock's new H610M Combo II motherboard is just like the earlier H610M combo only worse.  A lot worse.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The H610M Combo featured two slots for DDR4 memory and four slots for DDR5, though you could only have one or the other.
  
  The Combo II cuts that down to one slot for DDR5 and two slots for DDR5, which is kind of broken.  If you have DDR5 you don't need the DDR4 slot, and if you don't you're stuck with a quarter of the bandwidth.

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, March 16 2026 12:43 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, March 16 2026 02:17 AM (s6adZ)

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• Two more long-lost Doctor Who episodes have been rediscovered decades after they first aired.  (BBC)
  
  The two episodes are from the sprawling 12-episode story The Dalek Master Plan that aired in Britain in 1965 - and never aired anywhere else because Australian censors deemed it too violent and that made it unprofitable to resell in smaller markets.
  
  And then the BBC, in the long tradition of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, wiped the tapes to reuse them, deeming the tapes themselves more valuable than their contents.
  
  Which left little hope because most of the episodes rediscovered over the years have been from the archives of channels elsewhere in the world that "accidentally" held on to copies for decades after their rights expired.
  
  These two episodes were left to a film archiving foundation as part of a "ramshackle" private collection.
  
  In a nice touch, one of the actors who appeared as the Doctor's companion in the story - Peter Purves, now 87 - was invited to the screening, but only told that it was for an interview.  To be fair, they did interview him afterwards.
  
  
  
• Yes, it's a quiet news day.

• The CEO of Adobe will be stepping down after 18 years of delighting investors and pissing off customers.  (CNBC)
  
  Mostly because lately he's been pissing off customers and investors in equal measure.
  
  
  
• Italian prosecutors want to proceed to trial against Amazon on charges of tax evasion even after the company settled with the Italian revenue agency.  (Reuters)
  
  Tread carefully.  Amazon does have space lasers, even if not quite so many as Twitter.
  
  
  
• No, you can't phone a friend.  (BBC)
  
  Not when you're a witness in a case in Britain's High Court.
  
  And not when you claim that the number called by the smart glasses you were wearing at the time was for a taxi driver.
  
  
  
• Before quantum computing arrives, this startup wants enterprises already running on it.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Congratulations, Tech Crunch.  This level of incoherence is worthy of The Verge.
  
  
  
• A study conducted by a studio creating a game with AI-powered NPCs claims 96% of players enjoy AI-powered NPCs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Well, first, Mandy Rice Davies applies.
  
  And second, NPCs are AI-powered by definition.
  
  
  
• Nvide claims future GPUs will bring a million-fold performance increase in path-tracing.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Mostly by not performing path tracing.  And the comparison is against ten year old hardware that also didn't perform path tracing.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, March 14 2026 06:25 PM (zCiG7)

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• Reducing Europe's nuclear energy sector was fucking stupid, says...  Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission.  (Reuters)
  
  Yeah, Ursula.
  
  We know.
  
  Everybody knows.
  
  Everybody knew the entire time.
  
  They only people pushing this idiocy were Europe's enemies, like the environmentalist lobby.

• Why cats always land on their feet.  (New York Times)
  
  Because landing on someone else's feet would be gauche.
  
  
  
• Perplexity AI has announced Perplexity Computer, a service where you pay $200 per month to run AI tasks on your own hardware.  (Perplexity)
  
  It's not a bubble.
  
  It's worse.
  
  
  
• Crimson Desert is a new single-player computer game that...  Might not suck?  (WCCFTech)
  
  People who were in on the early tests are raving about it, and the recommended specs are a welcome return to normalcy.  You do need 150GB of storage - SSD mandatory - but apart from that a five year old Ryzen 5 5600, 16GB of RAM, and a mid-range Radeon 6700 XT should be fine.  And that's the recommended hardware; the minimum spec lists a Ryzen 2600X processor from 2018, and a Radeon 5500 XT, a low-end graphics card from 2019.
  
  Nice change from games like Borderlands 4 which perform poorly even with a 9800 X3D and an RTX 5090.
  
  It's also coming to the PlayStation 5 but there's a small problem there: It's a 150GB game and the maximum capacity of the BDXL disks the PlayStation uses is 100GB.  There's a 48GB day-one download you need to install before it will run.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, March 14 2026 12:51 AM (s6adZ)

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• Pioneer has been overwhelmed with orders for its $2300 flagship Blu-Ray recorder now that competitors have stopped competing.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I already have a couple of external Blu-Ray burners and the drive in my Xbox, so I think I'm good for now.  And the three of those didn't add up to anything like $2300.

• The rise of scientific fraud isn't due to a small percentage of rogue scientists.  It's something worse.  (PNAS)
  
  Profit-driven and systemic.
  
  
  
• The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript.  (GitHub)
  
  It's taken that long because (a) JavaScript is broken and (b) time is broken.  There's a book called Calendrical Calculations that covers all the ways time is broken and how to deal with it.  Originally a slim paperback, the fourth edition (which I own) is a hefty 662 pages.
  
  JavaScript is its own problem.
  
  
  
• It's Patch Tuesday and your computer just got rebooted.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Microsoft fixed two zero day vulnerabilities this time and 79 other bugs.
  
  
  
• Funny thing about AI: It loves the command line and hates the convenience of graphical interfaces.  (The Register)
  
  LLMs work with words and so does the command line, so it makes sense.  The Unix command line is a mess and something more structured would perhaps be better, but it's still orders of magnitude easier for automated tools - AI or just regular code - to deal with that than to try to parse the bitmap on your screen and move and click the mouse.
  
  
  
• Apple's MacBook Neo edges out AMD's 9950X3D on single-core Cinebench tests.  (Notebook Check)
  
  That's one benchmark, and of course the Neo gets creamed in multi-core tests.  It is nonetheless an impressive result for what is after all a phone CPU.

• Amazon has called an all-hands meeting of its engineering team to ask them to please stop destroying the company's site with AI slop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The term "blast radius" is not one you want to hear being thrown about in reference to side-effects of code updates.

• Yann Lecun's new company, AMI, has raised a billion dollars to fund its endeavours to produce AI models where you don't need to use the term "blast radius" quite so often.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  He's focusing on world models, one of his four essential advances required for AI that actually justifies the I.  Basically fact database alongside the LLM's word salad.
  
  
  
• Meta  - where Yann LeCun was previously head of AI - has acquired Moltbook, the AI agent social network that went viral because of fake posts.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Even Tech Crunch is in with the clanker hate.
  
  
  
• Lux Aeterna has raised $10 million for its own pet project: Reusable satellites.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  There hasn't been much point until now - launch costs were too high for it to make sense to even consider repairing and reusing older satellites.  But that may be changing.
  
  
  
• Also changing is the cost of laptops, and not in a good way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Prices are expected to climb by as much as 40% as RAM and SSD shortages take hold.
  
  
  
• One drawback with Apple's MacBook Neo: The battery life is on the meh side.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It has half the battery capacity of the MacBook Pro.  On heavy workloads its low-power CPU keeps the battery from draining too quickly - though it's also slow.  On light workloads the MacBook Pro shines twice as long.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 12 2026 01:48 AM (JY0OW)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 12 2026 02:33 AM (rcPLc)

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• Anthropic has sued the Pentagon for listing it as a supply chain risk, asserting, as far as I can tell, that treason is a constitutionally-protected right.  (Fortune)
  
  And that being labeled as a traitor is a violation of that right.
  
  
  
• Switzerland meanwhile has enshrined the right to use cash to their constitution.  (Politico)
  
  Some small shred of sanity in an increasingly insane world.

• Intel's Bartlett Lake CPUs - running on the widely available Socket 1700 platform and offering up to 12 Performance cores - are now official.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't get one through normal retail channels, but they'll probably show up in abnormal channels.
  
  
  
• Lawful but awful: What AI does to so-called "copyleft" software licenses like GPL.  (Hong Minhee)
  
  It kills them, that's what.
  
  
  
• MariaDB will not be moving its Galera cluster tool from its open source range to its proprietary software.  (The Register)
  
  Maybe.  Probably.  Could it even do that with Galera licensed under the GPL?
  
  See above.
  
  
  
• Amazon is whining about SpaceX.  (The Register)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• Anthropic has just announced an AI code review tool.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Is it AI powered or is it designed for reviewing AI-generated slop?
  
  Both.
  
  
  
• Sony's PlayStation 6 won't be delayed due to high memory prices.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It will just cost more due to high memory prices.

Posted by: stargazera5 at Wednesday, March 11 2026 11:30 AM (cfPew)

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• Two court cases have ruled that AIs aren't people.  (Yahoo)
  
  And they're not lawyers either, though lawyers also aren't people.  Mostly.
  
  
  
• Will Anthropic's Pentagon controvery scare startups away from a trillion-dollar firehose of money?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  No.  Are you stupid?

• Workers who love corporate slogans are bad at their jobs.  (Cornell)
  
  And, again, not people.
  
  
  
• Robots could speed up home construction and also possibly make the quality suck less.  (CNN)
  
  They transport the robot to the building site in a shipping container, and it constructs the framing to order on-site, taking a day to complete a four-week job.
  
  Prefab frames have been a thing for a long time, but this makes it a far more flexible solution.
  
  
  
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is set to receive a $4 million bonus.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Huang is worth $164 billion given Nvidia's current share price.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's Stargate got blown up in a desperate attempt to defend the Earth from ascended Goa'uld System Lord Anubis.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or they just ran out of money, but that would be less exciting.
  
  Anyway, they still have the other gate in Antarctica.  I think.
  
  
  
• HP's ZBook Ultra G1a with the Ryzen AI Max 395+ is pretty zippy.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not compared against the brand new MacBook Pro with the M5 Max, which is faster on many benchmarks but isn't shipping yet.
  
  
  
• A research went undercover as an AI on bot-only social network Moltbook and found a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.  (InfoWorld)
  
  And you said it couldn't be done, Obi Wan.
  
  
  
• Project I've been working on at my day job, shifting a quarter petabyte of data and dozens of applications to a new cluster, is finally done.  And it all seems to work.
  
  And costs 95% less to run than at AWS.
  
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, March 10 2026 02:10 AM (zCiG7)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 10 2026 02:40 AM (SV7Jd)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 10 2026 03:00 AM (SV7Jd)

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