He's coming.
This matters. This is important. Why did you say six months?
Why did you say five minutes?
Tuesday, November 25
T Minus Two Edition
Top Story
- ChatGPT told them they were special. Then... Bad things happened. (Tech Crunch) (archive site)
OpenAI is facing seven lawsuits this month, three from the families of users who went insane, and four from the families of users who committed suicide.
Now while I'm not a huge fan of this type of suit - the dangers of AI "therapists" have been known for more than fifty years - there may be some merit to the negligence angle in the allegations:Shamblin's case is part of a wave of lawsuits filed this month against OpenAI arguing that ChatGPT's manipulative conversation tactics, designed to keep users engaged, led several otherwise mentally healthy people to experience negative mental health effects. The suits claim OpenAI prematurely released GPT-4o - its model notorious for sycophantic, overly affirming behavior - despite internal warnings that the product was dangerously manipulative.
On the other hand, insane-while-online rarely works out as a personal growth path. Just consider Bluesky.
Or:From mid-June to August 2025, ChatGPT told Madden, "I'm here," more than 300 times - which is consistent with a cult-like tactic of unconditional acceptance.
Or, to be fair, consistent with saying "I'm here".At one point, ChatGPT asked: "Do you want me to guide you through a cord-cutting ritual - a way to symbolically and spiritually release your parents/family, so you don’t feel tied [down] by them anymore?
Which is... A bit weird, I must admit.Madden was committed to involuntary psychiatric care on August 29, 2025. She survived - but after breaking free from these delusions, she was $75,000 in debt and jobless.
Restitution for that much - and legal costs - would seem appropriate."A healthy system would recognize when it's out of its depth and steer the user toward real human care," Vasan said. "Without that, it's like letting someone just keep driving at full speed without any brakes or stop signs."
Real humans tend to do that a lot too.
Tech News
- Why college students prefer TikTok over newspapers. (The Verge) (archive site)
Because... I would say because they are idiots, and if you read the article these people are very definitely idiots, but The Verge is talking about the New York Times here and not Generic Newspaper, so perhaps the answer is the New York Times lies to you all the time, while TikTok only lies to you almost all the time.
And also, idiots.
- Lenovo has stocked up on memory to avert sudden price rises in its products - having 50% more inventory on hand than usual, enough to ride out shortages through 2026. (Tom's Hardware)
Part of the reason memory is in short supply is precisely this sort of panic buying.
The other part, though, is that demand simply exceeds supply and this situation is likely to continue for a couple of years.
- Nova Lake is expected to have five times the AI processing power of current Arrow Lake desktop chips - and four some reason half the graphics performance. (WCCFTech)
These chips aren't intended as graphical powerhouses; your best bet there for a general-purpose desktop system is still AMD's Zen 4-based Ryzen 8700G. Still a strange backwards step in an otherwise very powerful chip.
- Apple's iPhone Fold is expected to sell for around $2399. (WCCTech)
Fold me once, shame on you...
- Broadcom has shown off its new 144 lane PCIe 6.0 switch, with a PCIe 7.0 model planned for 2027 and PCIe 8.0 scheduled for 2029. (Serve the Home)
Great.
Now how about an affordable PCIe 4.0 switch? Because everything after PCIe 3.0 has been priced into the ionosphere.
- Japan plans to build a major new chip manufacturing hub in Hokkaido. (BBC)
Advantages: Hokkaido is geologically stable - relatively speaking, since the whole of Japan is an earthquake zone; water is plentiful; and power is stable.
Disadvantages: Bears.
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Monday, November 24
Investing In Pins Edition
Top Story
- Deep Fission has an interesting idea: Rather than extracting spent nuclear fuel from reactors and burying it a mile underground, why not bury the entire reactor... A mile underground? (Spectrum)
The reactors will be small - very small, just 75cm wide though 9 meters tall - to fit down a regular borehole, and will generate 15 megawatts of power each. They plan to bring a test unit online next year - though they admit the schedule is optimistic - and commercial units within three years.
- Mazama Energy, on the other hand, just plans to drill a hole - into Newberry Volcano in Oregon. (Yahoo)
Down into the depths where the rock reaches temperatures over 600F, so they can pump water down and drive a turbine off the returning steam.
The difficulty there is that at temperatures over 700F where the process is most efficient, the drilling equipment tends to go all melty itself.
Tech News
- Flash memory shortages are new affecting supplies of high-capacity microSD cards. (Tom's Hardware)
Fortunately I have a small supply in hand already.
- Microsoft warns that its new AI features bring with them an increased exposure to data theft, malware, and a chance of hallucinations. (ItsFOSS)
So no change from standard Windows 11, really.
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Sunday, November 23
From universe import * Edition
Top Story
- The strange and totally real plan to blot the Sun and reverse global warming. (Politico)
An in-depth and thoroughly researched article, albeit one written by a pair of compulsive liars with a combined IQ barely into the double digits.
Nowhere in the dozen or so pages of irrelevancy does it mention the actual plan: To cool the planet by increasing effective cloud cover by 1%.
Yes, when they say "blot out the Sun" they mean imperceptibly.
Tech News
- Intel's Arc B390 graphics in its upcoming Panther Lake laptop CPUs - expected to launch at CES in January - are twice as fast as AMD's Radeon 890M or Intel's own Arc 140T included in the existing Lunar Lake CPUs. (WCCFTech)
It's just one leaked benchmark but it may be real because the chips themselves are already leaking with engineering samples popping up all over.
The question is - if this is true at all - how? Panther Lake (at least the top two models in the lineup) has a 50% larger GPU than Lunar Lake, but it still has the same 128-bit LPDDR5X memory bus, which I would expect to constrain the graphics performance to similar levels to the 890M and 140T.
I guess we'll know soon enough.
- A CrowdStrike employee has been fired after being caught sharing company information with hackers. (Bleeping Computer)
Not a good look for a company that offers high-end security solutions.
- People still use Twitter, despite the competition. (Tech Crunch)
There is no competition.
- The Atari Gamestation Go is a $180 handheld gaming console that includes over 200 games from prior millennia. (Tom's Hardware)
Instead of the typical dual joysticks these days, it has a four-direction controller (D-pad), a dial/paddle thing, a tiny trackball, the usual ABXY buttons, four triggers, and a numeric keypad. The emulator - running on a dual-core 1GHz Arm CPU with 512MB of RAM - seems to be up to the task of running all the included games, and cartridges for early 90s game consoles loaded from the microSD card. But beyond that, things proved a little too hard - games for the original PlayStation and Nintendo GameCube crashed on launch.
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Saturday, November 22
None Dare Call It A Bubble Edition
Top Story
- In our Daily Dose of Tech Executives are Idiots Google tells employees it must double capacity every six months to meet AI demand. (Ars Technica)
It's not just college students who can't do math.During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC. Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides showing the company needs to scale "the next 1000x in 4-5 years."
That would put Google Cloud Services at around $60 trillion in revenue per year, more than double the entire US GDP.
Where do you expect the money to come from to fund this insanity?While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking "for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," he told employees during the meeting.
Oh. Magic."It won’t be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we’re going to get there."
No, you're not, and everyone knows you're not.
Progress over the last seven years, at truly massive cost, has been around 60% better AI performance per watt annually. Chip improvements, algorithm improvements, and manufacturing improvements combined.
You're asking your team to boost that to 300% overnight.
Tech News
- SK Hynix is planning to increase memory production at its facility in Icheon, South Korea, from 20,000 to 140,000 wafers per month. (WCCFTech)
This won't even scratch the surface if the AI bubble keeps demanding hardware on its current trajectory.
And the memory makers aren't going to build new factories any faster because only three of them survived when the last bubble burst.
- Speaking of idiot tech executives, the CEO of the world's most popular game, Roblox, sat down for an interview with the New York Times. It did not go well. (Kotaku)
Asked how the company was dealing with its pedophile problem, CEO David Baszucki responded:"We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well."
Remarkably, things actually went downhill from there.
- Speaking of not being able to do math the International Association of Cryptologic Research has cancelled its annual leadership election after... Oh. (Ars Technica)
"Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share," the IACR said. "As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election."
An entirely understandable mistake, assuming all these people are idiots.
- What killed Perl? (Entropic Thoughts)
Mostly, Perl.
- WhatsApp allows anyone who knows your phone number to look up your public details on the app, assuming you have an account.
So what's to prevent someone from just iterating through all the 63 billion of so potential phone numbers in the world and finding all the people with WhatsApp accounts?
Nothing. (The Register)
That's the problem with systems on this scale. The researchers were probing the system with 100 million API requests per hour, for weeks, from a single IP address, and nobody noticed.
- Qualcomm bought open source hobbyist hardware maker Arduino six weeks ago. At the time I predicted it might not mean imminent doom since Qualcomm is not as bad as, say, Broadcom. (The Register)
And they've already fucked it. Though it seems the TOS clause about reverse-engineering was already in place, the rest of the changes pushed through yesterday are a complete train wreck for its customer base.
Frieren Interlude
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Friday, November 21
Turbo Intercal Edition
Top Story
- High King Mustafa, Lord of Microsoft's AI division, is angered by your insufficient displays of appreciation for his bountiful distribution of AI slop. (PC Magazine)
"Remember the days," he asked, "when all you had to eat was bread and cheese, and meat, and vegetables, and fruit in season, and pasta, and rice, and beans, and fish, and eggs, and chocolate cake? Why aren't you properly grateful for the disgusting slop we are forcing down your miserable gullets? Don't you know how lucky you are to live in an age where slop like this is available?"
He then reportedly threw a chair at an intern.
Tech News
- Nvidia posted record revenues of $57 billion for the quarter, up 62% from the same period last year. (Tom's Hardware)
Nvidia predicts an even better result next quarter. Since the company already charges $100 per GB for memory on its high-end graphics cards, it is not going to feel the same pinch as regular users as memory prices soar across the board. It might cut margins from 90% to 85%.
- Intel has reduced the price of its flagship Ultra 9 285K CPU to $429. (Tom's Hardware)
Not only is this a dead-end platform set to be replaced next year, but the upcoming - though still dead-end - Ultra 7 270K will provide the same performance for less money. The 270K is a refresh of the current 265K, which is selling for $300.
- What happens when even college students can't do math anymore? (The Atlantic) (archive site)
This has been the case for a very long time, but it suddenly got a lot worse.
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Thursday, November 20
Sparkly Edition
Top Story
- The EU is considering scaling back the GDPR rules after learning that every website on the planet uses cookies. (The Verge)
Finally."We have all the ingredients in the EU to succeed. But our companies, especially our start-ups and small businesses, are often held back by layers of rigid rules," said Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-president for implementing layers of rigid rules at the European Commission.
You don't say.
Tech News
- Is the detector that detects whether the watcher that is watching the monitor that monitors DownDetector down? (A Site Whose Name Is Too Long)
No.
But DownDetector itself was down during the Cloudflare outage.
- If you need to replace your Nintendo GameBoy - which you likely do since the original came out in 1989 - the Ayaneo Pocket Vert looks like just the thing. (Liliputing)
It's about the same size as the original model, but has replaced the 2.5" monochrome screen with a 3.5" colour model, and upgraded the resolution from 160x144 to... 1600x1440.
Which is better than a whole lot of things.
It has four hidden trigger buttons on the back and turns the blank areas of the faceplate into an invisible touchpad.
No pricing information yet.
- More PowerPoint slides than you ever wanted about the upcoming Snapdragon Elite X2. (Hot Hardware)
The Snapdragon Elite sank without a trace in the PC hardware market because it wasn't better enough - and certainly not cheap enough - to make up for the compatibility issues that come from running x86 software on Arm hardware.
As for this second attempt, the 18 core flagship model looks nice, but unless they've solved the pricing and compatibility issues that may not matter.
- Screw you guys, I'm installing Linux. (The Verge) (archive site)
2026 will be the year of Linux on my desktop, at least.
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Wednesday, November 19
Packagisation Edition
Top Story
- So, Cloudflare. (Cloudflare)
Cloudflare carries something like 20% of the world's web traffic, but for a few hours late last night (my time) or early yesterday morning (US time) it wasn't carrying much of anything, because it stopped working.
Six times.
Not a DNS problem like the recent outages at Azure and Amazon, but a fumbled configuration file change like that massive Crowdstrike outage sixteen months ago.
- And it's going to keep happening, so buckle up. (The Verge) (archive site)
I run traditional unshared physical servers at a smaller datacenter, not bound to any of the major players. On the one hand, a few years ago that datacenter had a fire and while the fire didn't cause any damage, the same could not be said for the sprinkler system mandated by local fire codes. (Yes, a sprinkler system. In a datacenter.)
On the other hand, not one of these big global outages have affected us.
Tech News
- It's now been discovered that the popular Mac Classic II model from 1991 - the original compact format with an updated 68030 processor - never actually worked. (PC Gamer)
A developer working on the MAME emulator found that an emulated Mac Classic II running in 32-bit mode would crash immediately on startup.
100% of the time, despite MAME being a reliable and thoroughly-tested emulator for the 68030 (and many other architectures) and the testing being conducted with a bit-perfect copy of the original firmware.
Testing traced this to a single bad instruction in the Apple ROMs for this hardware. But the hardware was shipped, and it sold well, and it worked fine.
It wasn't until the developer bought and restored an original Mac Classic II to test the code on the the real hardware that he worked out what was going on: Magic.
- Bitcoin prices have crashed to just $90,000. (Tom's Hardware)
After hitting $125,000 in early October.
I told you at the time that you could double your money by investing in DRAM.
Well, I didn't, but imagine if I had.
- If you get an email from Monotype, burn it without reading. (Insanity Works)
Trust me on this.
- Microsoft is adding an "Agentic AI" features settings to Windows 11 for all the stuff you don't want but that they insist on shoving in. (Windows Central)
Thanks, I think.
- Talking to your Windows PC quickly reveals how much Windows sucks, and Copilot AI sucks, and the combination is exponential rather than merely additive. (The Verge) (archive site)
Translation: Don't do that.
- The CEO of LLM marketplace Hugging Face says we're not in an AI bubble, just in an LLM bubble. (Tech Crunch)
This is a valid point.
LLMs are generative AI - you tell them to draw a picture of a frog eating a set of deep-fried bagpipes and they pull together petabytes of tagged and shredded images and spit out something that may or may not resemble what you asked for.
That's the bubble.
Discriminative AI is where you point your camera at some weird piece of modern art and it figures out it's supposed to be a frog enjoying a meal of deep-fried bagpipes. Or more usefully, when your self-driving car swerves the precise amount needed to avoid a black cart darting across an unlit road on a moonless night.
That's getting less than 10% of the attention but represents 99% of the long-term value.
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160 proof beer? What could possibly go wrong?
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Tuesday, November 18
Ambient Everything Edition
Top Story
- If you gaze too long into CoreWeave, CoreWeave gazes back at you. (The Verge) (archive site)
Some actually sound reporting from The Verge's usually reliably crazy Elizabeth Lopatto, about deeply dubious datacenter holding company CoreWeave.But as I began to look more closely at the company, I began feeling like I’d accidentally stumbled on an eldritch horror. CoreWeave is saddled with massive debt and, except in the absolute best-case scenario of fast AI adoption, has no obvious path toward profitability. There are some eyebrow-raising accounting choices. And then, naturally, there are the huge insider sales of CoreWeave stock.
Yes, naturally there are those.
Wait, what?After I unfocused my eyes a little, I realized CoreWeave did make a horrible kind of sense: It’s a tool to hedge other companies' risks and juice their profits. It's taking on the risk and the costs of building data centers that bigger tech companies can then rent while they build their own data centers which may very well wind up competing with CoreWeave. What’s more, it’s part of a whole stable of companies that are propping up demand for the behemoth of the AI boom: Nvidia.
The usual names pop up in the list of investors in CoreWeave. Nvidia is a major investor and is selling the company billions of dollars worth of GPUs, which CoreWeave then provides access to for customers like OpenAI and Microsoft, which are also major investors.
It also has billions in outstanding loans at variable interest rates.
It's not a bubble.
- Meanwhile Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is deeply worried about the power a handful of unelected people like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have to shape the future of AI. (Business Insider)
Deeply worried, I tell you. Deeply.
Tech News
- Why, when AWS was down, we were not. (Authress)
Just use DNS to switch point to somewhere that isn't down.
Also, don't use AWS US-East-1 (Virginia). Yes, it's the flagship location, but it's also the least reliable in terms of major incidents in recent years.
- Speaking of Virginia, NetChoice has sued to overturn the state's one-hour limit on social media access for children under the age of 16, on the grounds of, and I quote, "Are you fucking kidding me with this bullshit?". (The Verge)
Well, paraphrase.
- The EU is looking at whether it can subject the major cloud providers like Microsoft, Google, and AWS to the idiotic rigours of the Digital Marketplace Act without them simply pulling the plug on the entire reeking continent and leaving them to calculate the penalties on abacuses. Abaci? Holy crap, it actually is abaci. The more you know. (Bloomberg) (archive site)
The leading European cloud provider has a reputation for becoming entirely too cloudy at times.
- Professional bloviator and occasional US Representative from California Ro Khanna is now complaining about the use of AI in video games. (PC Magazine)
AI has been used in video games since 1951.
Yes, the game in question - the latest game from the Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops 7 - is kind of crap, but the culprit there is human laziness and not AI.
- Luminal has raised $5.3 million to develop a better standard framework for code running on GPUs. (Tech Crunch)
This is one of the most sensible investment stories I've seen in months. GPUs simply calculate lots of numbers very quickly, so even without AI distorting the market, better tools for making use of that power are well worth a few million.
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Monday, November 17
Who's On First Edition
Top Story
- The world's first microprocessor wasn't Intel's 4004, but the 20-bit MP944 control system built for the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. (Tom's Hardware)
Which I already knew, because while it was classified information in 1970 when it first launched - literally - it was declassified in the late 90s. (And because a while back I was doing a search for computer hardware with unusual word sizes, and 20 bits qualified.)
It's also not true.
- The first true microprocessor was probably the AL1 from Four-Phase Systems. (Wikipedia)
It was an 8-bit device, but it was what was known as a "bit slice" design: You could simply chain multiple units together to create a larger word size. The AL1 was never sold by itself, but the company did sell the System IV/70, a video terminal controller, that used three such chips to create a 24-bit CPU.
It was announced and in use two months before the first working samples of the MP944, and a year before Intel's 4004.
Tech News
- That great sucking sound you just heard was PC makers buying up all the nonexistent memory inventory so you double can't have any. (Tom's Hardware)
That's just wonderful.
- THEA1200 is an A1200. (The Register)
Well, it's an Arm-based emulator in a full-sized A1200 case, but that's pretty close.
And it costs about $200.
Plus $30 for shipping if you live in Australia.
That's not too bad, considering.
- The president of Windows announced Microsoft's plans to suck even more in the future and got roasted so hard he had to close replies on Twitter. (Tom's Hardware)
Good. More of this.
- The latest attack on npm was a tea-farming project that spanned 150,000 fake packages. (The Register)
If you don't know what any of that means, count your blessings.
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Sunday, November 16
Turn The Beep Around Edition
Top Story
- The jury in a federal court case has sided with medical equipment manufacturer Masimo and awarded them $643 million in their lawsuit against Apple over patent infringement in the Apple Watch. (Tech Crunch)
The patent applies to blood oxygen monitoring, which is a little curious since such devices are now everywhere.
Also - according to Apple - this applies to a single very specific patent that expired in 2022.
Of course, Apple would say that. But it also doesn't mean it's not true.
Tech News
- I was reading through the service manual for the HP 9121 disk drive that I found on Bitsavers - it rained this weekend - and it turns out it did in fact run at 600 rpm, twice as fast as was common for other 3.5" drives.
I then asked Grok to check some details for me, and was swiftly reminded that Grok is less reliable than random half-remembered facts I read in a long out-of-print publication twenty years ago.
I asked if there were any historical 10-bit processor architectures, and it gave me a couple of examples from the late 60s and early 70s. It even gave me the detailed opcode format of one of the models and a bunch of links for further details.
The machines were real.
They were not 10 bit, though; they were 16 bits, which is hardly a rarity.
The opcode format was entirely fictional, which is actually a little impressive. Very minimal but it could have worked.
The links were also entirely fictional.
- Some models of Intel's Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs have more cores. (WCCFTech)
The 250K, which replaces the 245K, and the 270K, which replaces the 265K, both add 4 efficiency cores, taking them from 6 + 8 to 6 + 12 and 8 + 12 to 8 + 16 respectively.
The high-end 290K is basically a 285K but 1.8% faster... And also just 1.8% faster than the new 270K making it ENTIRELY POINTLESS.
- Copy-and-paste is now the leading cause of corporate data leaks. (SCWorld)
Because people are copying and pasting data into AI to get it to lie to them.
- Google has filed a sweeping lawsuit against one of those companies that are constantly spamming you with fake SMS messages. (BGR)
Google's legal action is comprehensive and is intent on completely dismantling Lighthouse's operations. The search giant is bringing claims under RICO, the Lanham Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
I'm not sure yet how it will turn out that this is a bad thing.
- No uncertainty with this one, though: A group of developers has been working tirelessly behind the scenes to restore a lost video game AND IT'S FUCKING CONCORD. (Aftermath)
Concord came out in August last year and quickly achieved notoriety for two reasons: First, it cost $400 million and took eight years to develop, and second, it made absolutely no money whatsoever because it was so bad Sony shut down the servers and refunded everyone after just two weeks.Concord wasn't a bad game
Yes it was. Objectively so. It cost $400 million to make, sold just 25,000 copies in total at $40, and was gone in just two weeks.
Until now. Until now, you bastards.
- The International Energy Agency now predicts we will reach Peak Oil by 2050 maybe. (CNBC)
Okay.
- Scientists have confirmed what is inside the Moon. (Science Alert)
Cheese sauce?A thorough investigation published in May 2023 found that the inner core of the Moon is, in fact, a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron.
Ah. Cheese and garlic sauce. An important distinction.
Thanks scientists.
- Turkey is stuffed, seasoned, and in the oven. We'll see how it goes.
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