• The US Invaded Venezuela and Captured Nicolás Maduro
  
  ChatGPT and the Perplexity search engine are here to help you understand why this is not only a bad thing, but absolutely did not happen.  (Wired)  (archive site)

  "What’s likely going on is a mix-up with real events that are often described in dramatic or misleading ways online. Here's what actually has happened:
  
  What the U.S. did not do
  ❌ No U.S. military invasion of Venezuela
  ❌ No arrest or capture of Nicolás Maduro
  ❌ No overthrow of the Venezuelan government by U.S. forces
  Maduro is still in power in Venezuela."

  
  
  I have used Grok as an augmented search tool on occasion and it's often pretty good.  When you don't know the exact name of what you are looking for it will match things up better than Google.
  
  Sometimes it misses things or simply gets it wrong, but I haven't seen it get things this wrong.  (Grok told me in answer to a poorly-worded question, "No, the US did not capture Nicolas Maduro today.  It happened yesterday." which was true at least in my own time zone.)

  "Pure LLMs are inevitably stuck in the past, tied to when they are trained, and deeply limited in their inherent abilities to reason, search the web, 'think' critically, etc.," says Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and author of Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us.  While human intervention can fix glaring problems like the Maduro response, Marcus says, that doesn’t address the underlying problem.  "The unreliability of LLMs in the face of novelty is one of the core reasons why businesses shouldn’t trust LLMs."

  This problem has been greatly alleviated by AI providers enabling live search, which loads fresh data into the context window - the AI equivalent of short-term memory.
  
  But it can't be properly fixed without continual learning, which is an unsolved problem with LLMs.

• Intel's B570 graphics card is now selling for just $199.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not a high-end card, but it's competent and comes with 10GB of VRAM, the early driver issues that plagued the previous generation have been resolved, and, well, it costs $199.
  
  If that's all you want to spend it's a solid option.
  
  
  
• It looks like Intel's long awaited B770 graphics card - the high end model from the second generation - is finally on its way.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This has 16GB of RAM and 32 Xe graphics cores compared to 10GB and 18 cores on the B570 model and 12GB and 20 cores on the B580.
  
  Nothing announced yet but look for it at CES.
  
  
  
• Good time for it, because Nvidia's graphics cards are starting to run out at distributors.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The story cites an unnamed German distributor cancelling orders by retailers, saying that stock of the RTX 5070 is limited, and the 5070 Ti, 5080, and 5090 are not available at all.
  
  Predictions were that price hikes and shortages would start from the low end, particularly the 16GB models of the 5060 Ti and 9060 XT, so this is a little surprising.
  
  Nvidia of course does not care.  It has long since ceased being a consumer-focused company.
  
  (I've already ordered everything I need for at least three years that involves memory chips, but if you haven't, you might want to check for bargains while they last.)
  
  
  
• Gigabyte has announced new AM4 motherboards for PC builders looking to upgrade everything except their DDR4 RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are minor but welcome refreshes, replacing some older features like DVI ports that were largely obsolete even five years ago with more modern DisplayPort, um, ports.
  
  
  
• Tesla has released video demonstrating a Tesla Semi charging at 1.2MW.  (Electrek)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Software craftmanship is dead.  (PCLoadLetter)
  
  Agile stuck in the knife.  AI triggered the claymore.
  
  (Great name for a blog there.)
  
  
  
• Could 2026 usher in a 4 day workweek?  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Betteridge's Law undefeated.
  
  
  
• Shit's all fucked, yo.  (Politico)
  
  Google signed a deal with California's state crime syndicate to provide $250 million in joint funds to propaganda outlets.
  
  In better news, nobody has received any money so far and it's unclear if anyone ever will.
  
  
  
• 2026 will be the year of AI on the desktop.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This in particular stood out to me:

  Humans don’t just learn through language; we learn by experiencing how the world works.  But LLMs don’t really understand the world; they just predict the next word or idea.  That’s why many researchers believe the next big leap will come from world models: AI systems that learn how things move and interact in 3D spaces so they can make predictions and take actions.

  This is what Terry Winograd's program SHRDLU did.
  
  In 1968.
  
  
  
• Eat the bug slop.  Live in the pod slop.  Own no slop and like it.  (sn scratchpad)
  
  Guess whose blog that is.

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, January 04 2026 09:48 PM (amxkj)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, January 05 2026 02:10 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 05 2026 06:54 AM (i6xpl)

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 05 2026 06:58 AM (i6xpl)

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• Contract prices for memory are expected to rise by 50% this quarter, on top of the massive increases in the previous quarter.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And that's if you can even get a contract.  Spot prices are out of control.
  
  
  
• Which may be why Corsair has been cancelling orders for memory kits that were accidentally sold at only double the old price, rather than four times.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The sales took place on New Years Eve, which is coincidentally when I bought 128GB of Corsair DDR4 RAM on Amazon - I noticed it was selling for close to pre-apocalyptic prices and pounced.
  
  The reported cancellations mostly involve a specific 48GB DDR5 kit, though, which is not at all what I ordered.  And one 64GB kit I ordered has already shipped, so it looks like I lucked out.  Waiting to see a shipping notice on the two 32GB kits.
  
  Every time I think maybe I bought too much memory I see another story that suggests things are going to get even worse.  Memory rarely fails, and the next two generations of AMD CPUs will still support DDR5, so I should have enough to keep me going for years.

• On the positive-ish side, Chinese memory maker CXMT is preparing for a $4.2 billion IPO to expand its manufacturing facilities.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Even if the chips go mostly straight into China's domestic market, anything that increases global supply is a good thing, even if it takes a couple of years.  I hope to see similar investment in Taiwanese firm Nanya.
  
  
  
• Google AI overviews put people at risk of harm with misleading health advice.  (The Guardian)
  
  She turned me into a newt.
  
  
  
• Police in Heber City, Utah, have been forced to explain why an official report stated that one of their officers had turned into a frog. (Futurism)
  
  He got better.
  
  And if you guessed AI, you win a frog.
  
  (Hat tip: Comrade Arthur.)
  
  
  
• Ghana is trying to regulate online prophecies.  (The Economist)  (archive site)
  
  Will this succeed?
  
  (shake shake)
  
  Signs point to no.
  
  
  
• The BBC is systematically biased...  To favour conservatives.  (SagePub)  (PDF)
  
  Stop laughing, this is serious!
  
  
  
• Tesla has been overtaken by Chinese auto maker BYD as the leader in EV sales numbers, if not value.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  As we covered previously, BYD engages in massive fraud to boost its sales numbers.  Cars sitting unsold at dealers are routinely booked as sold, and then sold as second-hand vehicles at huge losses.
  
  
  
• On Steam's latest hardware survey, AMD is fast closing in on Intel, capturing 47% of CPU market share.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The best selling CPUs and motherboards right now are AMD's AM4 models - five years old - because people already have DDR4 memory and are scrapping plans to upgrade to newer models that require DDR5.
  
  Intel's 12th through 14th generation CPUs support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory, but Intel's high-performance 13th and 14th generation CPUs, best suited to gaming, all died.
  
  
  
• The top selling motherboard on Amazon right now is the Asus ROG Strix B550-F Gaming WiFi II.
  
  I know this because I have a lot of DDR4 RAM myself and was looking for a good motherboard, and there are literally none available in Australia - they have either sold out or otherwise disappeared, leaving only the cheapest models, which all lack one or more key features like WiFi, 2.5Gb Ethernet, a second M.2 slot, more than just the basic three audio jacks, or a decent PCIe slot layout that would let you add cards to provide those missing features.
  
  This has all those features and five PCIe slots so...  I bought one.
  
  
  
• I have rather less money saved up than a month ago, because I just bought all the hardware I had planned for this year - and probably next year, to be honest - in the space of three weeks.
  
  
  
• Speaking of things undergoing sudden unpredictable price increases physical copies of the PlayStation 4 game Star Wars Racer Revenge have abruptly increased in price from $20 to $400.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This game is known to have a vulnerability that lets you unlock your PlayStation 5's boot loader.  But there were only 8500 copies ever made - it was a remaster of a PlayStation 2 game, and mostly sold via digital download - and there are 85,000,000 PlayStation 5s in existence.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 04 2026 01:51 AM (rcPLc)

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• OpenAI is betting big on audio.  (Tech Crunch)

  OpenAI is betting big on audio AI, and it’s not just about making ChatGPT sound better.  According to new reporting from The Information, the company has unified several engineering, product, and research teams over the past two months to overhaul its audio models, all in preparation for an audio-first personal device expected to launch in about a year.

  This is going to sink without a trace and I am here for it.

  It's not just the tech giants placing this bet. A motley crew of startups has emerged with the same conviction, albeit with varying degrees of success. The makers of the Humane AI Pin burned through hundreds of millions before their screenless wearable became a cautionary tale.

  OpenAI's effort is going to burn through far more money and achieve the same results, which is to say none whatsoever.
  
  We already have phones.  They already do everything these AI devices do, and more, and if we don't want to look at the screen, we can just not look at the screen.
  
  But there's a reason video killed the radio star.
  
  At least Tech Crunch has an early entry in its "Dumbest Things in Tech in 2026" roundup.
  
  
  
• The phone is dead long live...  What, exactly?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI and the unlamented Humane pin are not alone in this folly.  There's billions of dollars chasing this lack of ideas.
  
  The one place where I see possibility is AI glasses.  You can integrate a camera and a speaker and a microphone and a tiny display.  Your hands are free to do whatever.  There are problems, yes, but also real value.
  
  
  

Tech News

• On the other hand, Apple reportedly shipped just 45,000 Vision Pro headsets in the fourth quarter.  (Financial Times)  (archive site)
  
  That has all the listed features - but it's bulky, heavy, costs $3500, and does nothing.
  
  
  
• Orange Pi's new single board computer runs circles around the Raspberry Pi 5.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It has 16 cores running at 1.9GHz, 10 AI cores each able to perform 4096 multiple-and-add operations per clock cycle, and 48GB or 96GB of RAM.  Do not expect this one to be cheap.
  
  They have also announced - at least in China - the Orange Pi AI Studio Pro which runs two of these boards linked together.  Price not listed for that one either.
  
  
  
• It looks like a NES that shrank in the wash.  Inside is a Ryzen 370 12 core CPU.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's designed for emulating old video game hardware, and it will certainly do that, but it seems a little bit overkill.
  
  
  
• Sony's PlayStation 5 just got hacked forever.  Here's why that's a good thing.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The hack here was the leaking of secure boot keys for the hardware, which means that owners can now jailbreak their PlayStation.  Sony can release new hardware that can't be jailbroken - and probably will - but it can't do anything about the 85 million consoles already sold.
  
  
  
• It's "Fuck the Consumer" year at the Consumer Electronics Show.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Nvidia will announced no consumer products at all, AMD will announce only relabels of existing products, and Intel will announce Panther lake, which is not a bad product unless you need more than four full-speed cores because that's all it has.  (And all three versions of Panther Lake announced involve major tradeoffs even with that limit stipulated.)
  
  
  
• The European Space Agency got hacked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Though the biggest question here is why anybody would bother.
  
  
  
• I think I bought too many computers.  The parts I need for Froppy just shipped, and I've run out of names for all the others.
  
  On the other hand, I'm now thoroughly covered in case I start having hardware failures in the older systems, and I can re-use all the old RAM and SSDs in newer motherboards.  And I didn't pay hyper-inflated prices for any of it.
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, January 03 2026 02:09 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 03 2026 03:44 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 03 2026 04:04 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 03 2026 06:40 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 03 2026 06:42 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 03 2026 06:53 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 03 2026 09:37 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 03 2026 11:04 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 03 2026 03:13 PM (PiXy!)

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• The dumbest things that happened in tech all year, apart from tech journalism.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not entirely a bad list.
  
  I mean, the list is good.  The things that happened were stupid, which makes it a good list of stupid things.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Asus has announced price increases across its product range, blaming AI, which seems fair for once.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The degree of price increase for individual products depends on...  Things.
  
  
  
• xAI has purchased a third building for its "Colossus" datacenter in Memphis, planning to increase its AI training capacity to 2GW.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  About five million desktop PCs.  If you were wondering where all the RAM went, that's where.
  
  
  
• I recently lamented the lack of affordable PCIe switches for versions faster than 3.0.  But there are affordable PCIe 4.0 switches readily available because there is one on every current motherboard.
  
  Here's an open-source design using the AMD B650 chipset to provide two extra M.2 slots, four SATA ports, and a 20Gbps USB header.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not commercially available but reportedly costs about $40 to make.
  
  
  
• Lawyers for Charlie Javice, on trial for defrauding JPMorgan of $175 million, have reportedly defrauded JP Morgan of tens of millions more.  (Bloomberg)  (archive site)
  
  Since Javice became a JPMorgan executive after the bank bought her student finance company, Frank, before finding that she had created millions of nonexistent user accounts to inflate the company's value, JPMorgan is contractually obliged to pay for her defence.
  
  Javice has taken that to what seem to be her usual levels, hiring two additional legal firms that billed a combined $360,000 per day during her six week trial.
  
  Javice was convicted and sentenced to seven years in jail for fraud, but is currently out of jail pending appeal, which JPMorgan is also required to pay for.
  
  
  
• Next looming shortage: Diodes.  (CNBC)  (archive site)
  
  The Netherlands seized commodity semiconductor maker Nexperia, which produces low-end chips and discrete components for the embedded market, and which had been bought by China, after the US raised the very obvious security concerns.
  
  These parts are widely used in, well, everything.  Home appliances, cars, and, yes, computers.  They were manufactured in Europe and then shipped to China in bulk for packaging before being re-exported, and now China is just not re-exporting anything.
  
  It's a mess.
  
  
  
• The Canon EOS R6 Mark III is a camera.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  A pretty expensive camera, but a good one.  $2799 for the camera alone, but offered alongside is a $470 45mm f/1.2 lens, which is a remarkable price for such a fast lens.
  
  
  
• If you want to turn your Raspberry Pi 5 into a router, Waveshare has just what you need.  (Liliputing)
  
  $40 for a board that adds four gigabit Ethernet ports; $50 for four 2.5Gb ports.
  
  The Pi can't run four 2.5Gb ports at once at full speed, but that's rarely an issue for a router, more for a switch.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 02 2026 05:36 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 02 2026 06:57 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 02 2026 08:06 AM (1zWbY)

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Tech News

Musical Interlude

Posted by: furball321 at Wednesday, December 31 2025 10:06 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: furball321 at Wednesday, December 31 2025 10:08 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, January 01 2026 10:15 AM (amxkj)

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• Binance's Trust Wallet Chrome extension turned out to be misnamed.  (Web3isGoingGreat)
  
  It got hacked - from the inside, a so-called supply chain attack where a developer's system is compromised and used to slip malware into critical applications - and users lost $7 million.
  
  Binance has updated the extension and will reimburse users who lost money due to the attack.

• To protect MongoDB servers from that MongoBleed attack, just disable Zlib compression.  (Yopp)
  
  Other forms of compression (which libraries are supported depends on your version of MongoDB) will work just fine.  This doesn't affect stored data, just compression of network packets, so if your server isn't open to the internet and if it is you're an idiot you can just turn compression off entirely.
  
  You do need to restart your database, but that's better than having it bleed to death.
  
  
  
• Samsung is planning to go straight to 2nm at its new chip factory under construction in Texas.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That will leapfrog TSMC's US plants and bring the latest technology closer to its largest customers.
  
  
  
• TSMC has responded by bringing forward the schedule of its Arizona 3nm plant by a full year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Now expected to be in full production by 2027.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile TSMC's Taiwan fabs are cranking out 2nm chips right now.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The N2 node is 10-15% faster than the current N3E node, and will be followed next year with an upgraded N2P process which is 10% faster again, and also an A16 process node - 1.6nm - which is 10% faster than that.
  
  
  
• Wired's database has been hacked, leaking 2.3 million user records.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Passwords, emails, names, all the usual stuff.
  
  I don't think I ever had an account at Wired.  Chrome doesn't have any record of one, anyway.
  
  
  
• You can get 4TB of RAM for just $76,999.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  That's 16 256GB DIMMs.
  
  
  
• The Ayaneo Pocket Vert - a modern GameBoy but with literally 10x the resolution - has a price.  Prices.  (Liliputing)
  
  Ranging from $269 for the 8/128 model on preorder to $439 for the 12/512 model at retail.
  
  
  
• Good Old Games - known as GOG by its fans, who are legion - has been bought.  (GOG)
  
  By its co-founder, separating from game translator and more recently game developer CD Projekt, of which he is also a co-founder.
  
  Nothing will change.  CD Project Red's games like The Witcher and Cyberpunk: 2077 will continue to be sold on GOG, as will pretty much every other game worth buying.
  
  
  
• Windows on Arm has had a good year.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Would someone do a wellness check on The Verge?  I think they might have fallen and hit their head.

  As Microsoft transforms Windows into an "agentic OS," stuffing it with more semifunctional AI bloat, it risks further pissing off users, who might find greener pastures elsewhere.  Maybe the question in 2026 won’t be "Should you buy a Windows on Arm laptop?" but "Should you buy a Windows laptop at all?"

  Never mind, all is well.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, December 31 2025 12:33 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 31 2025 01:32 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 31 2025 01:47 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 31 2025 05:05 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, January 01 2026 02:38 AM (ZLF73)

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• My PC, it will not boot.
  I rm'ed * while su root.
  
  Now maybe Gemini and Grok will be able to find this.
  
  
  
• Did Qualcomm strangle Arduino by changing its terms of use after the acquisition?
  
  Yes says competitor Adafruit.  No says Qualcomm.  (The New Stack)
  
  Well that's to be expected.  How about a neutral and trustworthy third party?
  
  No says the EFF.
  
  Does that settle things?
  
  Given how long the article is, I'd say it doesn't.  While the hardware is nominally still open, users are pushed heavily toward cloud services that are not open in any sense of the word.

• Memory prices are expected to increase another 45% in 2026.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Laptop prices are expected to increase by 20% to account for this - or I should say predicted to increase by 20%, because I expect far worse.
  
  Which is why I snapped up 256GB of RAM and 8TB of SSDs at pre-apocalypse prices.
  
  
  
• If you play Rainbow Six Siege you just got an unexpected Christmas present: Two billion credits in in-game currency valued at $13.3 million.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not out of the kindness of Ubisoft's heart - they don't have one - but reportedly as part of a much broader hack that penetrated their network via the MongoDB vulnerability.
  
  Just two days ago I was wondering what kind of idiot would run a publicly accessible MongoDB server.  Guess now we know.
  
  Or not if they are lying.  But the hack itself definitely happened.  There are an estimated 85 million registered accounts for Rainbow Six Siege.  If all of them received the bonus credits, that's about a quadrillion dollars.
  
  
  
• You could buy 100 quadrillion robots for that kind of money.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Very very small robots, but what do you want for a penny?
  
  
  
• OpenAI is looking for a new head of preparedness.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Have they tried the Boy Scouts?
  
  
  
• As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise.  (NPR)
  
  Thanks NPR.  Always with the timely news of things that happened two months ago.
  
  
  
• Z80AI is an LLM that runs on a Z80. (GitHub)
  
  Yes, in 64k of RAM.  It actually fits in 40k.

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, December 29 2025 08:46 PM (XWgGM)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 29 2025 11:00 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: K Duncan at Tuesday, December 30 2025 03:11 AM (6zKZf)

Posted by: K Duncan at Tuesday, December 30 2025 03:14 AM (6zKZf)

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• So what's the real story behind Nvidia spending $20 billion for a non-exclusive license to Groq's (not that one) inference technology?
  
  Definitely not fraud.*  (Ossa-ma)
  
  Or so argue Nvidia and Groq's lawyers as the FTC no doubt prepares for a endoscopic examination of their respective corporate records.
  
  Nvidia buying another AI company would lead to messy stuff like regulatory approval, and Nvidia doesn't have time for that.  So they paid $20 billion for a non-exclusive license to the technology...  Oh, and that also included Groq's executive and engineering teams and all their patents and trade secrets.
  
  But not the company itself, or any duty to support its customers.  GroqCloud has been left to quietly die under control of the former CFO, drained of its engineering talent and indeed its entire reason to exist.
  
  What Groq actually does is interesting: They make chips that use hundreds of megabytes of internal SRAM rather than tens of gigabytes of external DRAM, and have staggering amounts of bandwidth - 80 terabytes per second per chip.
  
  Not suitable for training LLMs but great for running them once they have been trained.
  
  As for the deal: Is this technically illegal?  Possibly.  Will Nvidia get away with it?  Probably.
  
  * Though if not fraud, why fraud shaped?

• In other dirty Nvidia tricks, the company has dropped support for Pascal on Linux.  (Hack A Day)
  
  Who uses Pascal on Linux?
  
  Oh, that Pascal.  Nvidia's RTX 1000 series from 2016.
  
  Still, more than nine years of support, and with some messing around you can make things work using open source drivers.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Linux driver for the Radeon R300 has received fresh updates.  (Phoronix)
  
  That card is from 2002.
  
  And if your card is only 12 years old Radeon HD 7000 and RX 200 cards have received updates in Linux kernel 6.19 as well.  
  
  They now run 30% faster.
  
  
  
• The MinisForum DEG2 dock is now available.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has a lot more features than the DEG1 - it supports ThunderBolt 5 as well as OCuLink, and provides an M.2 slot, 2.5Gb Ethernet, a second ThunderBolt port for other peripherals, and two USB 3.2 ports.
  
  Priced at $240.  If you have OCuLink and don't need that extra stuff, the DEG1 is still available at $99.
  
  
  
• Mirari is a modern - ish - Amiga motherboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It uses a PowerPC CPU (which the Amiga never did but might have done if Commodore hadn't gone extremely bankrupt) and a standard micro-ATX motherboard.  It provides three PCIe slots, two M.2 slots, four USB ports, and a single DDR3L memory slot.
  
  Which accepts 8GB modules which is more than any Amiga dreamed of.
  
  And...  No video of any kind.  Which is a little odd for an Amiga project.  But you can put something in those PCIe slots to solve that problem.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT could soon start pushing ads in the middle of it's supposedly personalised responses.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I say "could" here as does the article but given that OpenAI is projected to be losing $74 billion per year by 2028 even if it meets revenue forecasts I'd upgrade that probability to 100%.
  
  Maybe higher.
  
  
  
• Graphics cards are next.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Expect price hikes and rationing.
  
  
  
• Acemagic has succeeded in creating a Ryzen AI Max 395 system that I do not want.  (Liliputing)
  
  Yes, it has 128GB of RAM and is priced at a relatively reasonable $2399.
  
  It's also gouge-your-eyes-out ugly.
  
  
  
• The internet now causes cancer in New York.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or something.  Sorry - no offence to Tech Crunch here, they're just reporting the news - but the story was so dumb it gave me both retrograde and anterograde amnesia.  And also the other kind, the kind they don't talk about, that erases your memories in parallel universes where you didn't even read the article.
  
  
  
• My fourth (cough cough) mini-PC just shipped.
  
  I think I'm good for the duration.

• Is it a bubble? Let's ask the money men lending billions to build these AI datacenters.
  
  They say yes. (New York Times) (archive site)
  
  9.25% interest rates for commercial construction loans that supposedly have paying customers lined up?
  
  Yeah, they're not convinced.
  
  
  
• The people who backed French bugfarm Ÿnsect were convinced - to the tune of $600 million.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And lost their shirts, because the idea was irredeemably stupid.

• The Ryzen 5000 series of CPUs - now five years old - have become top sellers as users choose to stick with their older memory and upgrade the rest of the system.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD stopped making the 5800X3D probably because it was too competitive against newer models.  Maybe they'll consider restarting production if nobody can afford memory for the new models, which are DDR5-only.
  
  Intel's 12th through 14th generation CPUs support both DDR4 and DDR5 depending on the motherboard.
  
  DDR4 memory is also astronomically expensive as well - though not quite as bad as DDR5 - but people likely already have it.  A relative mentioned he'd recovered at least 50 DDR4 modules from PCs being scrapped at the office, and he's not alone in that.
  
  
  
• AMD's long-rumoured 9950X3D2 CPU - with dual 3D V-cache modules - has started showing up in benchmark results.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's only about 2% faster than the regular 9950X3D on general benchmark results, which is precisely why AMD hasn't produced such a chip before.  The company already sells server chips with V-cache on every CPU die, so it was always possible, just not useful in most cases.
  
  
  
• AMD's next-generation RDNA5 graphics chips are taped out (design completed) ready to start mass production of the chips in the second half of next year, with cards shipping in 2027.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The lead time on bringing something like this to market is pretty long.
  
  We may also see higher-end models this time, given the fairly warm reception of the current RDNA4 series.
  
  They will, of course, be expensive.
  
  
  
• There's a new security vulnerability in MongoDB if you are silly enough to be running it on public-facing internet servers.  (Double Pulsar)
  
  Solution: Don't do that.
  
  
  
• LG has also announced 5K gaming monitors (though two of them are ultrawide models - 5120x2160 rather than 5120x2880).  (Notebook Check)
  
  All with high refresh rates, so the graphics card you can't afford in the computer you can't build won't be able to keep up but if you just need a new monitor and plan to hang onto it after the present insanity dies down, the 27" model might not be bad.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• AI has reached the Uncanny Valley.  (The Verge)  (archive site)

  I gave Buddy the same dialogue as in the commercial, using my son’s name rather than Emma.  Hearing that same manufactured voice say my kid’s name out loud set alarm bells off in my head.  An AI generated Buddy in front of the Eiffel Tower?  Sorta weird, sorta cute.  AI Buddy addressing my son by name?  Nope, absolutely not, no thank you.

  Even the idiots at The Verge are, when it comes down to it, human.
  
  
  
• 2025 marked the year when Hollywood embraced AI, and the results were, frankly, awful.  (The Verge)  (archive site)

  Amazon’s gen-AI dubs became a shining example of how poorly this technology can perform.  They also highlighted how some studios aren’t putting all that much effort into making sure that their gen AI-derived projects are polished enough to be released to the public.  That was also true of Amazon’s machine-generated TV recaps, which frequently got details about different shows very wrong.  Both of these fiascos made it seem as if Amazon somehow thought that people wouldn’t notice or care about AI’s inability to consistently generate high-quality outputs.  The studio quickly pulled its AI-dubbed series and the recap feature down, but it didn’t say that it wouldn’t try this kind of nonsense again.

  Lots of juicy AI hate from The Verge today.

• It's not a bubble: Nvidia has paid Groq - which was valued at $6.9 billion as of September - $20 billion in cash for a non-exclusive license to its inference technology.  (CNBC) (archive site)
  
  Groq who?
  
  
  
• Framework is increasing memory prices in its laptops to $10 per gigabyte effective immediately.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the one hand, that is about the average retail price now.
  
  On the other hand, I paid less than that and got the rest of the PC thrown in free.
  
  
  
• The MiniForum BD895i SE is a mini-ITX motherboard using laptop RAM with a laptop CPU soldered in place.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It has a 16-core 55W Ryzen 8945HX and room for two SODIMMs and two M.2 SSDs.  Three video outputs, three audio jacks, four USB ports, and 2.5Gb Ethernet.
  
  A soldered-in CPU might seem like a bad idea until you realise that this board is as fast as a 12-core Ryzen 9900X desktop CPU and also costs the same as a 12-core Ryzen 9900X.
  
  
  
• MinisForum also announced a PCIe OCuLink card.  (Notebook Check)
  
  I mean, sure, I guess.  OCuLink is for external PCIe devices and this only works if you have internal PCIe slots available.  Useful if you have a system that can only fit a half-height single-slot card and you want to attach a GPU.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 26 2025 11:39 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 26 2025 11:39 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 27 2025 02:33 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 27 2025 05:46 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 27 2025 06:12 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, December 29 2025 11:27 AM (ZLF73)

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