• Mandy Rice-Davies applies: Anthropic employees accuse Trump Administration of targeting them.  (New York Times)
  
  The article is unreadable.  Literally so if you don't maintain a paid NYT subscription for their puzzles page.  A free login traps you in Dark Pattern Hell, an endless series of inescapable popup ads offering free paid trials cancel any time by submitting your cancellation request carved into a live member of an extinct species of goat through first-class mail.  The usual archive sites don't work either.
  
  Even if you have a subscription or you know of another workaround not that I would ever endorse such a thing,  you will simply find that it is not worth reading:

  "What are you telling your clients?" one employee asked in a chat viewed by The New York Times.  Another said, "Does anyone know what to believe?"  In another message, a worker said, "I don’t understand what the issue is."

  Playing dumb or actually dumb?  What difference, at this point, does it make?
  
  
  
• Anthropic asked for regulation.  Washington went much further.  (CNBC)
  
  An actually informed and balanced take on the situation.
  
  Quick precis: Anthropic announced its new Mythos AI tool with supernaturally dangerous hacking powers restricted to approved researchers, and its defanged Fable AI which is exactly the same thing only not.  The Trump Administration ruled that if they're as dangerous as Anthropic claims, they need to be restricted for reasons of national security to American citizens on American soil.  Anthropic threw its toys out of the pram and blocked access globally, and is now seeking to lay all the blame at the feet of that mean old Mister Trump.
  
  What CNBC highlights and The New York Times buries is an blog post written by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a fucking week ago:

  Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety.

  Amodei is every bit as much of a weasel as Sam Altman.  And while Altman is a sociopath and a compulsive liar, Amodei is something much worse: He's whiny.

• World leaders want American AI.  They just don't want America.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Substitute almost anything in place of AI and the story is the same.
  
  
  
• The Orange Pi 6 is a nonplussed and hopefully cheaper version of the Orange Pi 6 Plus.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is a single-board computer along the lines of a Raspberry Pi, but more powerful than even the latest Raspberry Pi 5.  Just one drawback: That power means the cheapest model of the Orange Pi 6 Plus costs $367.
  
  
  
• Hewlett Packard is offering a year of free access to its new virtualisation platform, targeting customers drained of blood and left to die in a ditch following Broadcom's acquisition of VMWare.  (Ars Technica)
  
  After the free year is over, HP is suggesting prices around $600 per CPU socket.
  
  VMWare charges around $400 per CPU core.
  
  And a single CPU socket can run to 288 cores.
  
  
  
• OpenAI increased its revenue from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13 billion in 2025.  (Where's Your Ed At)
  
  Thanks to careful cost-control, losses over the same period dropped from $5 billion in 2024 to $38.5 billion in 2025.
  
  Oh.
  
  Actually, before fudging adjustments the company's net loss for 2025 reached $60 billion.
  
  
  
• US science is in chaos.  (Scientific American)  (archive site)
  
  Thanks to...  Scientists no longer having access to an infinite money glitch.

• SpaceX has agreed to acquire AI-assisted coding startup Cursor in a $60 billion all-stock deal.  (CNBC)
  
  Probably good for both SpaceX and Cursor.
  
  
  
• In other that used to be a lot news, subterranean fungal networks have been mapped out to a total length of 100 quadrillion kilometers.  (The Guardian)
  
  Or exactly 497,096,953,790,000,000 furlongs.

• Silicon Motion says the retail SSD market has almost disappeared.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Prices are less inflated than DRAM, but even so 1TB is the new 4TB.
  
  
  
• Sandisk's Optimus Prime GX Pro 8100 Platinum Plus 8TB is the new king of high-speed high-capacity consumer SSDs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  $2800 on Amazon.  Act soon, only 20 in stock!
  
  It uses a Silicon Motion controller.
  
  
  
• Silicon Motion is planning PCIe 6.0 controllers for non-existent consumer SSDs next year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Hooray.
  
  
  
• AMD's next-generation Threadripper chips have been confirmed.  (WCCFTech)
  
  But the only details we have are that they will be Zen 6 and support PCIe 6.0.
  
  
  
• Commodore's Callback 8020 is a flip phone with a small 320x480 display.  (Liliputing)
  
  It costs just $499.
  
  I don't think so.

• The Flynn Effect is a long-observed but unexplained finding in psychology that mean IQ even in developed nations has been rising by around 3 points per decade.
  
  That's stopped.  (Futurism)

  "What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch," Jagt writes.  "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires."

  Note that this hasn't put a pause on graduations; more degrees are being handed out than ever before.
  
  It's just putting a pause on learing.
  
  Yeah, I went there.

  More flagrantly detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems - or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech’s adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.

  It seems the author went there too.
  
  It seems the Flynn Effect faltered in the early 2000s.  Before I get too smug about that, it seems to have dropped off in Australia by the 1980s.

• Swiss voters rejected a proposal that would have capped the country's population at 10 million.  (The Guardian)
  
  Interestingly, the group most in favour of this supremely idiotic move are those aged 35-49; with both younger and older adults more strongly opposed.  Though no age group expressed more than tepid support.
  
  
  
• Google CEO Sundar Pichai delivered the commencement speech at Stanford.  (Nerds)
  
  He barely mentioned AI.
  
  He still got booed.
  
  
  
• Cybersecurity experts are protesting the US "ban" on Anthropics security-focused Mythos and Fable models.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  A "ban" strongly favoured by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei right up until the minute he got what he asked for.
  
  Access to Mythos was always restricted by Anthropic itself.  Access to Fable is still open to any US citizen on US soil with a Claude account.  (I had access for a couple of days.)
  
  
  Update: Thanks to reader Defenestratus for prompting me to actually read the whiny self-serving glurge that Anthropic put out discussing the situation. Both models are now unavailable globally.
  
  
  
• Fox is buying Roku for $22 billion.  (CNN)
  
  Fox still exists?  Oh, yeah, I guess it does.
  
  
  
• Samsung has slashed 42% off the price of its 2TB 990 Pro SSD, leaving it at only twice the price it was three months ago.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Truly, their generosity knows no bounds.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 6 desktop chips reportedly have no integrated GPU, but have an NPU in its place.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If true, this is retarded.
  
  NPUs are largely useless for desktop systems, and with no integrated graphics, users will be required to purchase dedicated graphics cards, which are far more capable for AI computation than any NPU.
  
  
  
• The MSI Claw 8 EX AI is a gaming handheld that uses Intel's Panther Lake laptop chip with its advanced Arc B390 graphics.   (Liliputing)
  
  This is a mainstream laptop chip so these handhelds should be much cheaper than those using AMD's high-end Strix Halo.
  
  Should be.  Aren't.  It starts at $1799.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, June 16 2026 11:02 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 16 2026 11:50 PM (wjiGM)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, June 17 2026 02:48 AM (KOtXO)

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• AMD says that not only will its new CPU stomp all over Nvidia's new CPU - three times the performance per watt on a rack-scale deployment, but its current two year old CPUs already deliver twice what Nvidia is promising.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Promises vs. promises is all whatever, but promises vs. currently shipping product when the currently shipping product wins is not great for Nvidia.
  
  What's more, Intel's current CPUs are nearly 50% faster than Nvidia's future CPUs in the same tests.

• More on that Dario and the Wolf story.  (Twitter)
  
  Anthropic's Fable model is their existing Mythos mythos model with additional controls to prevent abuse.
  
  Those controls were broken.
  
  Anthropic said they weren't broken broken and refused to do anything about it.
  
  The US government then showed them the far side of regulatory capture.
  
  
  
  
  
• The only scalable delete in PostgreSQL is DROP TABLE.  (PlanetScale)
  
  Bobby, your country needs you.
  
  
  
• The UK is planning to ban social media for children under 16.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  But not Bluesky.  Same thing happened in Australia.
  
  
  
• Bitcoin is down to just $64,000 after peaking over $110,000 in the past year.  (CNBC)
  
  The people who bought at 50 cents will be devastated.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 15 2026 11:00 PM (iSD2J)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 16 2026 08:54 AM (SV7Jd)

Posted by: Pooja Kaushik at Tuesday, June 16 2026 10:31 PM (yRjVi)

Posted by: Kristophr at Tuesday, June 16 2026 11:40 PM (a7pSx)

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• The US government has responded to Anthropic's constant warnings of imaginary dangers with a global ban - except for US citizens on US soil - on access to the company's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 security-focused AI models.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This whole story is dumb but at the same time it's amusing to watch Anthropic's continuing push towards regulatory capture leave them stuck like a rat in a trap.
  
  To mix my metaphors, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cried "risk" one too many times and ended up being devoured by it.
  
  
  
• Speaking of dumb 75 datacenter projects totaling $130 billion in value were blocked in just the first four months of 2026.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This leaves SpaceX, by the way, pulling in $2 billion a month renting out its datacenters to its capacity-limited competition.
  
  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman blames this trend on Chinese influence, and while Altman absolutely is a compulsive liar, that probably is a large factor.  Chinese datacenter rollouts are not facing the same headwinds.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, OpenAI is facing investigation from multiple states attorneyses generalseses.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oh no.

• How are the inmates at The Verge coping with our new African-American trillionaire?  Good lord.  (The Verge)
  
  Maintain eye contact and back away slowly.  Do not engage.  I repeat, do not engage.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's high-end desktop graphics card, the RTX Pro 6000 - has had a small price bump.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The card is basically an RTX 5090 with triple the memory.  It now costs $13,250.
  
  
  
• Intel meanwhile is planning to compete with AMD's relaunched Ryzen 5800X3D processor from 2022 - with a relaunch of its own Raptor Lake chips, also from 2022.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Raptor Lake was the codename for most of Intel's 13th and 14th generation chips; power-hungry but capable, and most importantly and just like the 5800X3D, still supporting DDR4 memory.  (Though Raptor Lake can also work with DDR5.)
  
  This market opportunity opened up with the AI companies consuming all the world's DRAM, so CPU makers are looking to sell upgrades to consumers wanting to keep their DRAM and upgrade their system around it.
  
  (I own 384GB worth of DDR4 modules, bought at a small fraction of today's prices.  You can bet I am interested.)
  
  
  
• A British police officer has been suspended from normal duties after being caught using AI tools to fabricate evidence.  (BBC)
  
  That's not the story.  This is the story:

  "The officer involved has been removed from frontline duties, pending the outcome of the investigation. No arrests have been made."
  
  

   

  It comes in the same week that a new national centre for AI in policing, called PoliceAI, was established.

  At the launch on Wednesday, PoliceAI interim director Alex Murray said: "Crime and technology are evolving rapidly.

  "Policing must keep pace by adopting AI responsibly to catch criminals and keep people safe."

  We're sorry we got caught.  We'll make sure that never happens again.
  
  
  
• Over 400 Arch Linux packages have been compromised to push a rootkit infostealer.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Seemsbad.
  
  
  
• Arch Linux now believes the incident is under control - after detecting 1579 compromised packages.  (Phoronix)
  
  It's not as bad as it seems: The packages are not in the core of the distribution, but in a secondary user-contributed repository that has long been viewed as "use at your own risk".
  
  
  
• London's Docklands Light Railway is still running on Windows XP.  (The Register)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• KPMG's report Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI is bullshit on more levels than the immediately obvious.  (The Register)
  
  The report on the use of AI was AI-generated.  Only 5 of 45 citations actually matched the material being cited.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, I've been using Grok recently to dig into the background of a science fiction story I am working on involving highly speculative physics.
  
  It is extremely helpful at sniffing out related real-world speculative papers on the topics I am interested in, since the papers themselves are most often locked behind paywalls.
  
  But it is also very clear when it reaches its limits.  LLMs cannot "clump" without careful management.  Grok has "projects" limiting conceptual bleed between answers, but it doesn't have nested subprojects; I can't easily keep it from inserting irrelevant details into a question, unless I create a new project with every question and then merge the answer into the whole afterwards.
  
  (If you try it for a while you'll notice this happen as soon as you venture beyond simple question-and-answer use.)
  
  
  
• Apple's powerful new M5 Max chip is so far only available in laptops.  There's just one small problem.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It produces enough heat to melt the screen.
  
  
  
• The OneXPlayer X2 Mini Pro is a supercomputer in a handheld console: A Ryzen AI Max 388 APU with up to 64GB of RAM and 8TB of storage.  (Notebook Check)
  
  And a price to match, unfortunately, with the cheapest model running to $2399.
  
  
  
• And finally, Shutterslop.  (Nerds.xyz)
  
  The stock photography company has embraced the inevitability of AI as its market implodes.
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, June 14 2026 10:57 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Darksandpiper at Monday, June 15 2026 12:25 AM (9Ojql)

Posted by: FreeKnight at Monday, June 15 2026 01:27 AM (gXw+B)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, June 15 2026 03:05 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, June 15 2026 11:14 AM (XWgGM)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 15 2026 12:02 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 15 2026 01:15 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 15 2026 01:17 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 15 2026 01:18 PM (PiXy!)

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• Welcome to Earth Delos D. Harriman, our new-minted trillionaire!  (Tech Crunch)
  
  May I say how delightful it is to watch the wailing of the worst people on the planet at your good fortune?
  
  (I didn't invest; all my ready cash is tied up in RAM and SSDs.  Which to be fair is looking like the soundest investment I have made in years.)
  
  
  
• Critics meanwhile accuse Musk of...  Running the companies he runs.  (Reuters)
  
  You can't make everybody happy, but with some effort you can make everybody miserable.

• Microsoft has "mostly" repaired a flaw that allows Microsoft software to permanently brick Microsoft hardware.  (The Register)
  
  In this case, Copilot running on a Surface trying to adjust the screen backlight.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fraud will remain in prison.  (Reuters)
  
  A three-judge panel just stopped laughing and rejected his appeal.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has introduced the AI Host, an Arm-based mini-PC for the Chinese market.  (Liliputing)
  
  With eight Arm A720 cores backed by four lower power A520 cores (it's not a Qualcomm chip so it tells you that up front) it's no speed demon.  It delivers about half the performance in both single and multi-threaded tasks of AMD entry level laptop 5600U chip from 2021.
  
  
  
• Amazon datacenters "used" 2.5 billion gallons of water last year.  (The Register)
  
  The water came out of the process untouched and slightly warmer.  A bit like beer.
  
  
  
• French AI company Mistral is seeking to raise $3 billion on a $20 billion valuation.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm not saying someone should buy it to spite Europe, just that if someone did it would be funny.
  
  
  
• Nintendo's lawsuit against indie hit Palworld looks doomed.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not only have Nintendo's patents faced unwelcome re-examination, but even if Nintendo should win, damages are capped at $30,000.  No, I didn't lose a few zeroes there.
  
  
  
• Palworld itself is reaching 1.0 on July 10.  (IGN)
  
  Despite facing headwinds from Nintendo's legal team, Palworld has sold around 25 million copies in early access, on a development budget of around $7 million.
  
  Company PocketPair raised the money in-house, leaving the once struggling developer awash with cash.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 14 2026 01:47 AM (SV7Jd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 14 2026 05:40 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, June 14 2026 10:36 PM (s6adZ)

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• It's been an entire day since there was a critical Microsoft vulnerability so here we are again.  (The Register)
  
  It's BitLocker again this time, which not many people care about because a major problem is with it being too secure; encrypting your entire computer without ever prompting you to set up a decryption key.  Built-in ransomware.
  
  Anyway, the hack allows you to access an encrypted PC if it has run a Windows Defender offline scan...  Ever.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Maine's security breach disclosure portal suffered a security breach.  (Bleeping Computers)
  
  Clever hackers found a way to post fake but official-looking security breach notices.  You can probably see where that could lead.

• Running a little late because my boss really wanted the Australian team (including me) to pass a new feature to the QA team in the US before the end of the day.  I wasn't sure but said I'd give it a try.
  
  It worked flawlessly the first time.
  
  
  
• xAI is offering 66% off for three months for their SuperGrok upgrade if you want to play with it down from $30 per month to $10.  I find Grok very useful for correlative searches that used to require lots of manual digging in Google, and before that an entire wall of paper manuals, so I'm giving it a try.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is also considering cutting prices.  (CNBC)
  
  Smells like IPO season.
  
  Worth noting is that xAI (part of SpaceX) is now profitable.  OpenAI is very definitely not.
  
  
  
• Xbox is hosed says Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty.  (Engadget)
  
  Not mentioned: Who hosed it.
  
  
  
• I haven't seen an official announcement but RTX 3060 and 3050 cards are popping up again.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 3060 is a decent card.
  
  
  
• Technocommunists are eating each other over in Europe.  (ZDNet)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• Luis Rossman is suing Samsung over SSD warranties.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  As the article notes, one of Rossman's 4TB Samsung 990 Pro drives failed.  he sent it back, and they...  Sent the dead drive back to him, saying it was fine.
  
  He runs a high-end computer repair shop so he has the tools to hand to prove it was not fine.
  
  Samsung offered him a refund - of the original price.  The drive now costs three times as much.
  
  But none of that is why he's suing them.  They offered him a refund, claiming they don't have the drive in stock to provide a warranty replacement.
  
  But the drive is literally in stock right this moment.  Samsung just didn't want to honour the warranty.
  
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, June 13 2026 12:01 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 13 2026 01:23 AM (1zWbY)

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• Microsoft just released its biggest Patch Tuesday ever, fixing over 200 flows* including three 0-day exploits.  (Computer Weekly)
  
  Well, good.  I guess that means things are fixed.
  
  * Close enough.  See comments.
  
  
  
• A new exploit called RoguePlanet targets Windows Defender - the Windows subsystem that protect the rest of the system from exploits - the grant attackers admin access.  (The Register)
  
  Never wrestle with an autistic asshole.  Just don't.
  

• AMD claims its upcoming 256 core Zen 6 Venice server processor is 3.3x better than Nvidia's upcoming 88 core Vera Rubin processor when normalised to a full 100kW rack.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's impossible to confirm any of this.  AMD doesn't have unreleased Nvidia hardware, Nvidia doesn't have unreleased AMD hardware, and anyone who has both has signed away all their major organs in NDAs.
  
  
  
• Seattle has enacted one year moratorium on new AI datacenters.  (The Guardian)
  
  I'm not sure anyone was planning to build a datacenter in Seattle, but if they were, they can't.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk has showed off plans for a first generation orbital datacenter.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  150kW of computing power moving at 8km per second.  Don't stand underneath when they fly by.
  
  
  
• China is planning to spend $295 billion on a national AI datacenter.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It is planned to be constructed of at least 80% export-quality tofu dregs.
  
  
  
• Samsung has signed a deal to build 50MW floating datacenters.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Your move, Seattle.
  
  
  
• If you want to use Claudes new security-oriented Fable and Mythos models, it will track your interactions for a month.  (Claude)
  
  And then get hacked.
  
  
  
• Leading firms in the AI waste race are spending $7500 per month per employee.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
  
  
  
• A former xAI engineer has filed suit against the company, claiming he was fired for raising "safety" concerns.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  "Safety" in AI rarely has anything to do with safety, so its hard to tell what this is about.  The interesting part is that the lawsuit explicitly says that Elon Musk was not at fault and insisted that all applicable laws be followed; the suit places blame on one single, now departed executive.
  
  As in, he left the company.  As far as I know he's still alive.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, June 11 2026 06:36 PM (4WDgH)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, June 11 2026 06:44 PM (4WDgH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 11 2026 09:33 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 12 2026 12:29 AM (9X5u6)

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 12 2026 04:49 AM (LDKo5)

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• We haven't had a critical local privilege escalation bug in Linux for at least...  What's the time now?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Today's little surprise package comes courtesy of an unexpected exclamation mark in the source code for the Netfilter module that handles firewall tasks resulting in a use-after-free bug that can pretty reliably be tricked into granting an unprivileged user administrator access to the entire system.  Might break shared-kernel containers too; not sure about that.
  
  If you think you're safe because you use iptables or lfw rather than Netfilter I have some uncomfortable news for you: It's Netfilter all the way down.  That's been true since the last millennium.

• The FCC wants to kill burner phones.  (404 Media)
  
  Wait, you can still get phones in the US without signing over your firstborn?
  
  
  
• The Pentagon has labeled multiple Chinese tech companies as...  Chinese tech companies.  (AP News)
  
  As in they're all in bed with the Chinese military, which is not the army of China but of the Chinese Communist Party.  Which it is and they are.
  
  
  
• Google has just fired a shot across the bow of GitHub Copilot.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Their entry-level AI plan has been reduced from $8 per month to $5 while doubling included storage from 200GB to 400GB.
  
  Google's plan apparently is Russian roulette with steak knives, betting they can survive the blood loss longer than anyone else.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has unveiled plans for an 11 million square foot satellite factory in Texas.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That...  Um.  That's a quarter of the 1000 acre site, in factory floor.
  
  
  
• The Radeon 9070 XT has dropped to a low low price of $649.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The MSRP is $599 but it has rarely been available at that price, even less so since the Everything Sucks Era began.
  
  At least in the US.  Here in Australia I picked one up for $570 in March.  Don't know exactly why it's like that; Nvidia cards here are as inflated as in America.
  
  
  
• Container Machine is Windows Services for Linux for MacOS.  (GitHub)
  
  Basically.
  
  
  
• Origin Code has shown off 128GB CUDIMMs for desktop PCs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  As in, individual modules.  256GB for a pair.  Running at 8GHz.
  
  Don't know if you can put four of them in a system, and the answer is probably not unless you have night job harvesting organs from unsuspecting Walmart employees in Minecraft.
  
  
  
• Donut Lab's new solid state battery - breakthrough technology that boosted the company to a value of $1.25 billion - is not made of donuts.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It is also, apparently, not solid state.  It's a regular lithium-ion battery in a fancy shell.
  
  Yes, criminal investigations are under way.
  
  
  
• Minisforums N5 Max is a NAS with room for five 3.5" hard drives and five M.2 SSDs.  (Liliputing)
  
  And dual 10Gb Ethernet ports, 80Gb USB4v2, and...  A Ryzen AI 395 Max+ processor with 16 CPU cores, 40 graphics cores, and up to 128GB of RAM.
  
  So if you're spending someone else's money (it starts at $2500 with no drives) and need to pack your entire lab into an 8" x 8" x 10" cube...  It exists.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 10 2026 11:09 PM (HomVQ)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Thursday, June 11 2026 02:42 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, June 11 2026 06:18 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 11 2026 06:50 AM (LDKo5)

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• Eric Berger, the last sane man at Ars Technica, puts things into perspective: Over the past five years, a single Falcon 9 rocket - the same rocket, just recovered after its 35th launch - has lofted more payload into orbit than all the single-use rockets of competitor United Launch Alliance combined.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The little booster that could, B 1067, completed its mission safely after delivering 29 more satellites into orbit.  35 sequential reuses was seen as something of a boundary, but they've sailed right past it, at several miles per second.
  
  
  
• xAI is seen as more of a datacenter REIT - a real estate investment trust - than a frontier AI lab.  (Martin Alderson)
  
  The key distinction seems to be that xAI is making money.  Lots of it.  Deals to lease unused capacity to Anthropic and Google will pay for xAI's entire investment in 18 months.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Well, that's dumb.
  
  
  
• GitHub has nuked more than 70 Microsoft code repositories, not by accident, but because they were compromised.  (The Register)
  
  May you live in stupid times.
  
  
  
• Apple's M5 Ultra could make an appearance at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference - WWDC.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Wait, when's WWDC this year?  Now?  And did the M5 Ultra make an appearance?  No.  What kind of story is this?