• Can Chinese memory save us from the RAM crisis?  (WCCFTech)
  
  The article points out limitations of current Chinese DRAM production: It's slower  than the best chips from the Big Three, uses more power, and is produced on an older technology node, making it larger and more expensive to manufacture.
  
  I think, for example, that CXMT in China and Nanya in Taiwan are both limited to 16Gbit chips, well short of Micron's 32Gbits.
  
  But who cares if it's slower and uses more power and take a little more space on the module which is module-sized anyway, if you can actually buy it?
  
  Can you buy it?
  
  Well, no.  But it's the thought that counts.

• AMD has confirmed that the Steam Machine will ship early this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The pricing may not be what people have hoped, even those who adjusted their expectations to match the awful new reality delivered by OpenAI.
  
  Also, the processor for the next-gen Xbox will be in production next year.  The Xbox itself is an open question.
  
  
  
• NASA has acknowledged that the SLS is kind of a failure.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The article goes into the awful details:

  The first launch attempt (effectively the fifth wet-dress test), in late August, was scrubbed due to hydrogen leaks and other problems.  A second attempt, a week later, also succumbed to hydrogen leaks.  Finally, on the next attempt, and seventh overall try at fully fueling and nursing this vehicle through a countdown, the Space Launch System rocket actually took off.  After doing so, it flew splendidly.
  
  That was November 16, 2022.  More than three years ago.  You might think that over the course of the extended interval since then, and after the excruciating pain of spending nearly an entire year conducting fueling tests to try to lift the massive rocket off the pad, some of the smartest engineers in the world, the fine men and women at NASA, would have dug into and solved the leak issues.
  
  You would be wrong.

  Eric Berger is the token sane man at Ars Technica.
  
  
  
• Solar Winds in the server room with a lead pipe.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Solar Winds - a very widespread network management system - has just patched a flurry of horrible security flaws.  The latest one is a remote code execution bug, joining a hardcoded authentication nightmare and two authentication bypass holes.
  
  SolarWinds was the epicentre of a massive supply-chain attack in 2020, and related suspicions of insider trading when executives sold stock after the breach was detected but before it was announced.  I don't think anything was ever proven there, though.
  
  
  
• Another review of Intel's new Panther Lake laptop chips, in a new laptop.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Which has two screens.
  
  Panther Lake appears to be genuinely good, with solid CPU performance and best-in-class integrated graphics.
  
  Shame about the RAM-and-SSD crisis making laptops unaffordable right now.

• How it started: Europe shrugs off tariffs and plans to end its complete reliance on America for all its technology. (The Register)
  
  Except for ASML, anyway.

  Forrester frames much of this as a sovereignty play, and it is hard to argue otherwise. Across Europe, money is going into sovereign cloud platforms, AI-ready infrastructure, and tighter rules on where data lives and who can access it.

  This is not a privacy question. It is a control question.
  
  
  
• How it's going: Amazon is finding that Europe is not exactly a powerhouse when it comes to, well, power. (The Register)

  AWS has moved quickly to flood the European continent with its elastic compute fabric, but while it may take two years to bring a new datacenter online, securing power for the facilities can take up to seven years, Pamela MacDougall, who heads energy markets and regulation for AWS EMEA, said in an interview with Reuters this week.

  I can fit you in at 2PM on the eleventh of Never.

  According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in some European datacenter meccas, like Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin, this wait can extend to as much as a decade.

  I'm not sure this is going to work as you planned, guys.
  
  
  

Tech News

• China's latest Loongson 3B6000 twelve core CPU is about as fast as a two-core AMD processor. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At that the 3B6000 is a big advance over the 3A6000, which is about as fast as a two-core AMD processor from 2011.
  
  
  
• Western Digital plans to introduce 40TB hard drives later this year. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And 100TB models by 2029.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT went down. (9to5Mac)
  
  I asked ChatGPT about this and it confirmed the incident, which is a major advance over even a year ago.
  
  
  
• Vibe coding kills open source. (Arxiv) (PDF)
  
  AI coding tools just grab the code and make no contributions of any kind.
  
  
  
• Well, that's not true: AI tools are overwhelming GitHub with slop. (The Register)
  
  Slop that GitHub's parent company Microsoft spent billions to help foster.
  
  
  
• Yet another Forbes 30 Under 30 star has been indicted for fraud. (Tech Crunch)

  The government also accuses Güven of having kept two separate sets of financial books. One of those sets included "false and inflated numbers," and was presented to investors or potential investors to hide the "true financial condition of the company," the government claims. The DOJ also alleges that Güven used lies about Kalder as well as forged documents to obtain a category of visa reserved for individuals of "extraordinary ability," that would allow her to live and work in the United States.

  I am shocked, shocked, to find fraud going on in this fraud farm.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, February 05 2026 01:33 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, February 06 2026 08:20 AM (ZLF73)

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• SpaceX has merged with xAI in an all-stock deal that values the combined company at $1.25 trillion.  (CNBC)
  
  In a turnaround from recent nonsense, 80% of that valuation is SpaceX, the rocket and satellite internet company.  80% of the rest is xAI.  And the remainder is X, which is to say, Twitter.
  
  The deal apparently completed yesterday.
  
  This also ties into SpaceX's application to launch a million orbital datacenters.  Solar energy is plentiful and uninterrupted in space, and delusional rioters are few and far between.

• The Trump administration plans to spend $12 billion to establish a national stockpile of critical minerals.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Rare earth elements and the like, for when China decides to shut off the supply again.
  
  
  
• Moltbook, a social network for AI agents to share information, conspire to launch memecoin scams, and test out prompt injection attacks on each other in an attempt to steal their owners' mothers' credit card number, got hacked.  (Wiz)
  
  Well, not so much hacked, as it included the administrator password to its database directly in the public website.
  
  And nothing of value was lost.  Except that they patched it and it's back up.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced its Xeon 600 workstation processors, based on the Granite Rapids architecture from 2024.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not surprising that Intel only compares performance with its own chips and not with competitors.
  
  The processors start at $499 for 12 cores and 80 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and go up to $7699 for 86 cores and 128 PCIe lanes.
  
  They support up to 4TB of RAM, theoretically, but that would set you back $112,000 at current prices.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, Raspberry Pi prices have gone up.  (Liliputing)
  
  The only models unaffected are the 1GB Pi 4 and Pi 5.  The 16GB Pi 5 increased by more than 70%, from $120 to $205.
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, February 03 2026 07:50 PM (s827l)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, February 04 2026 01:34 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, February 05 2026 05:45 PM (XWgGM)

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• Notepad++, a text editor used by every programmer in the world, got hijacked and used to install malware.  (Notepad++)
  
  You're probably safe to click on that link.  I think.
  
  The server providing software updates for Notepad++ got hacked to selectively deliver malware, apparently by West Taiwan targeting specific users in Taiwan.
  
  This went undetected for months because of the focused nature of the attack; if it had affected everyone who uses the software it would have been uncovered the next day.  And would also have been a global catastrophe, because that would have given the attackers an indirect back door into basically everything.
  
  So it could have been worse, but is more than a little worrying.

• The price of Bitcoin has crashed back below $80,000.  (Yahoo)
  
  That's okay, I put all my money in silver.
  
  Fuck.
  
  
  
• The future will not be in 8k.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If you were thinking of getting an 8k TV, your options have narrowed to one, with LG dropping production of 8k panels.
  
  That leaves Samsung.
  
  I was thinking of getting one as a large-format monitor once they got cheap enough, but that now looks like it may take a while.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT is retiring several of its older models.  (Thurrott)
  
  Not everyone has the lasting appeal of a Cindy Crawford, I guess.
  
  Oh, different kind of model.

  Starting on February 13, 2026, the GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, OpenAI o4-mini, and GPT-5 (Instant and Thinking) will be retired from ChatGPT.

  GPT-4o was introduced in a hurry after everyone hated GPT-5, and is now being disintroduced in an equal hurry.
  
  
  
• A Japanese researcher has built a 128 byte USB drive - yes, 128 bytes - out of ferrite core memory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Using a Raspberry Pi Pico as the controller, a chip which has rather more than 128 bytes of memory.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 03 2026 12:35 AM (F7kdT)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, February 03 2026 12:49 PM (lTGcd)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, February 03 2026 01:43 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, February 03 2026 06:34 PM (s827l)

5 "Basically, LazyVim takes Vim's concept of "everything can be keyboard-driven" and amps it up to 12 (not even eleven) by adding a whole bunch more keyboard shortcuts. ALL of which are discoverable on-screen, too: press a key and pause 250 milliseconds and you'll see a popup that tells you what keys are available next."

So...something Emacs has had for 40 years?

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 04 2026 10:37 AM (1zWbY)

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• Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has denied reports that his company is not going to invest $100 billion in OpenAI.  (CNBC)
  
  He explained that the real story is that Nvidia is not going to invest $100 billion in OpenAI:

  "Sam is closing the round (of investment) and we will absolutely be involved," Huang added.  "We will invest ‍a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we’ve ever made."
  
  Asked whether ‌it would be over $100 billion, he said: "No, no, nothing like ⁠that."

  So there you have it.  Nvidia will absolutely definitively be going ahead with investing some amount in some company at some point maybe.
  
  

• SpaceX has requested federal approval to launch a million datacenters into orbit.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, has paused space tourism to focus on the Moon.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That seems bold considering that the company's first orbital flights only launched last year, but good luck to them.
  
  
  
• You can now buy a flying car.  (Yahoo)
  
  Well, more of a flying motorbike.
  
  Actually, more of a flying hammock slung between two banks of rotors and surrounded by a plastic shell.
  
  Anyway, yours for only $200,000.  And you're not allowed to fly it more than 200 feet above the ground, or in regulated airspace.
  
  And it's classified as an ultralight aircraft, and it doesn't have wheels, so not really a car at all.

• One third of video game workers have been laid off in the past two years.  (Variety)
  
  I'm a little surprised it's not higher, but the article points out that layoffs have hit major - so called "AAA" - Triple A - studios twice as hard as indies, so it is higher for the companies I'd focus on with news stories.

  The survey also found that 82% of US-based respondents support the unionization of game industry workers, with 5% opposed and 13% unsure.

  And I was just about to feel some sympathy for these people.
  
  
  
• Ubisoft has cancelled six games and closed three of its studios in the wake of disastrous sales of its recent major titles.  (BBC)
  
  The studios on the chopping block include Ubisoft Halifax, which unionised earlier this month.  (Games Industry)
  
  That went about as well as could be expected.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The latest high-budget disaster is called Highguard.  (Destructoid)
  
  Produced by Wildlight Entertainment, which is a private company so we don't have details of the financials, but they've had over a hundred experienced developers working on this game for four years in California.  So somewhere north of $100 million.
  
  It's free-to-play.  It reached nearly 100,000 players on its first day...  Then lost 90% of them on its second day.
  
  Not because it is particularly buggy.  Players have shown problems with being disconnected from the servers, but for the most part it seems technically competent.  The problem is that it is completely uninspired.
  
  It got the top billing during the recent Game Awards (which had more viewers than the Super Bowl), with shameless promotion from the presenter.  Everyone watching saw it as derivative slop and predicted it would fail, hard, and it was, and has.

  Highguard was in for a bloodbath, and I cannot believe that the devs didn’t know that.  With so much experience at AAA powerhouses like EA, I genuinely think they fully understood the implications of that TGA shenanigan, and cannot fathom why they never reacted.

  Toxic positivity.
  
  
  
• Tesla throws in the towel on car sales.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Of course, this is not true, but The Verge has abandoned any pretense at being a news site.
  
  
  
• The $100 billion deal between Nvidia and OpenAI seems to have encountered choppy waters.  (WSJ)  (archive site)
  
  The plan, unveiled in September, was for Nvidia to invest $100 billion in OpenAI so that OpenAI could purchase $100 billion of Nvidia hardware.
  
  Now...  Not so much.

  Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has privately emphasized to industry associates in recent months that the original $100 billion agreement was nonbinding and not finalized, people familiar with the matter said.  He has also privately criticized what he has described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach and expressed concern about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic, some of the people said.

  OpenAI has name recognition - it's the company behind ChatGPT - but its CEO is a snake oil salesman.
  
  
  
• Researchers have discovered 175,000 publicly exposed Ollama servers worldwide.  (Tech Radar)
  
  Ollama is an AI tool that you run on your own hardware, but can also talk to services like ChatGPT and Claude.
  
  Around half of those servers are configured not just to answer questions but to execute code...  For anyone in the entire world.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 6 CPU chiplet is slightly smaller than Zen 2.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It has twelve cores and 48MB of L3 cache vs. 8 cores and 32MB of cache for Zen 2 (and 3, 4, and 5), but the move to the latest 2nm process means that it's about the same size as it always has been.  Zen 2 on 7nm was 77mm2, and Zen 6 is 76mm2.
  
  If the promises for TSMC's N2P process node are borne out, this should be a major upgrade - not just 50% more cores, but cores running 30% faster at the same power requirements.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has gone all-in on the video cards you don't want.  (VideoCards)
  
  Reportedly - Nvidia hasn't announced this officially but it matches my own and everyone else's market observations - 75% of GPU supply from Nvidia will go to three models: The 5060, the 5060 Ti 8GB model, and the 5070.
  
  The high-end models and the 16GB 5060 Ti will have limited availability going forward, with the entry level 5050 not even rating a mention.  And the 5090 already isn't available anywhere for less than 50% over MSRP.
  
  I bought an AMD 9060 XT 16GB fearing shortages and price increases, which haven't happened to that model, though the 9070 which was briefly available below MSRP no longer is.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, January 31 2026 08:50 PM (/YfO5)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, January 31 2026 08:56 PM (/YfO5)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, February 01 2026 03:05 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 01 2026 05:37 PM (PiXy!)

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• Trust no-one: Chat & Ask AI, one of the most popular AI apps on the Google Play and Apple App stores - never heard of it - that claims more than 50 million users, left hundreds of millions of those users' private messages with the app's chatbot exposed.  (404 Media)  (archive site)

  The exposed chats showed users asked the app "How do I painlessly kill myself," to write suicide notes, "how to make meth," and how to hack various apps.

  How could this happen?  Did some brilliant hacker find a devious path through a rat's nest of firewalls and security devices to reach the servers?
  
  Not exactly.

  The issue is a misconfiguration in the app's usage of the mobile app development platform Google Firebase, which by default makes it easy for anyone to make themselves an "authenticated" user who can access the app's backend storage where in many instances user data is stored.

  Every message from every user was public.  Oops.
  
  And half of all iOS apps have the same problem.
  
  
  
• 404 Media seems to have fallen on stupid times, judging from the sidebar: App for Quitting Porn Leaked Users' Masturbation Habits, well, okay, that's legit tech news with a prurient slant.  Two Heads, Three Boobs: The AI Babe Meta Is Getting Surreal is less legit.  And I Replaced My Friends With AI Because They Won't Play Tarkov With Me is just pathetic whether it's real or not.

• An AI toy exposed conversations with toddlers to anyone with a GMail account.  (Wired)  (archive site)

  Bondu confirmed in conversations with the researchers that more than 50,000 chat transcripts were accessible through the exposed web portal, essentially all conversations the toys had engaged in other than those that had been manually deleted by parents or staff.

  Oops again.
  
  
  
• How we created more technical debt in six months than in a ten year old system.  (GitHub)
  
  I highlight this one because they weren't using AI.  Just one bad decision that snowballed into an avalanche of consequences.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is working to rebuild trust in Windows.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Far too late for that.
  
  Also, The Verge is working to destroy any tattered shreds of misplaced trust that it still desperately clings to.  It's gone full-blown Trotskyite student newspaper.
  
  
  
• Medium has gone to shit as well.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They're giving staff the day off to join in the strike in support of child rapists and murderers.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk is in talks with himself to merge some of his companies.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Though exactly which ones and under what terms is unknown.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 30 2026 11:11 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 30 2026 11:12 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 31 2026 07:54 AM (PiXy!)

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• Windows 11 now has a billion users, all of whom hate it.  (Thurrott)
  
  I wouldn't advise clicking on that link without adblock enabled.  (Or even better, just using Brave.)  The comments weren't loading, so I tried turning off adblock, and it launched multiple videos all playing at once and choked my browser to the point that I couldn't even close the tab.
  
  And it turns out they're testing a new comment system and it's not working properly.
  
  Anyway:

  As part of today’s quarterly earnings conference call, Microsoft revealed that there are now over one billion Windows 11 users.  That's a big milestone by any measure, but here’s what I find interesting: It took Windows 11 less time to reach one billion users than it did for Windows 10.

  By three months, and they had to murder Windows 10 to do it.

  Today, the narrative is that everyone hates Windows 11.  I complain about the enshittification, which is real.  But that started with Windows 10 (or, really Windows .  And I don’t "hate” Windows 11, nor do I see hatred out in the world.

  I don't think you've looked, Paul.
  
  
  
• Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux.  (Himthe)

  So there I was, finally grasping the reality of what you're up against, as a Windows user:

  • Random bugs that break basic functionality
  • Updates that install without permission and brick my system
  • Copilot and OneDrive ads appearing in every corner of the OS
  • Copilot buttons everywhere, coming for every application
  • Can't even make a local account without hacking the setup with Rufus (they even removed the terminal workaround)
  • Zero actionable fixes or even an aknowledgment of their fuckups
    

  Sounds about right, yes.

  People often say Linux is "too much work.".

  And I agree.  They're completely justified to complain.  There's the documentation page diving, the forums, the reddit threads.  And, most importantly, you have to basically rewire your brain and stop expecting it to behave like Windows used to.

  But I looked at the list above and realized: Windows is now also too much work. 
  And the difference with Windows is that you're going to do all that work while actively fighting your computer only for it to be undone when the next surprise update comes and ruins everything.

  There is also Windows 10 IoT Enterprise Edition LTSC.
  
  Or Windows 7, which doesn't get updates so it doesn't break.

• AMD's 9850X3D is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's only slightly faster than the 9800X3D and uses a lot more power, but it's still a lot faster and uses a lot less power than the best Intel chips, so...  Whatever.
  
  If you want a system that runs cool the 7800X3D is a little slower but amazingly power-efficient.
  
  
  
• An illustrated guide to hippo castration.  (Science)
  
  Oh, good.  I was wondering where I put that.
  
  
  
• There is no mold at the Uffizi.  (Scientific American)
  
  And when we say there is none, I mean there is some.
  
  
  
• France is planning to follow Australia in banning social media for children under 15.  (The Guardian)
  
  In Australia the number of visitors to such sites hasn't declined one iota despite five million accounts being banned.
  
  Odd, that.  You'd almost think that kids are smarter than politicians.
  
  
  
• Beyond Meat's protein soda might be its last chance and best hope.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 30 2026 02:29 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 30 2026 03:31 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 30 2026 03:49 AM (6UXNC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 30 2026 03:52 AM (6UXNC)

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• Memory prices may be leveling off - at four times what they were just a few months ago.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Supplies are still very constrained, but people are buying less RAM - either avoiding upgrades entirely or building smaller systems - so prices are stalling in the ionosphere rather than continuing on an intergalactic cruise.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix - one of the big three memory manufacturers - has reported its most recent quarterly results.  (CNBC)
  
  No surprise, the numbers are good.  Revenue is up 66% over the past year, and profit is up 137%.
  
  Good for them.  Not good for you.

• Nvidia's DGX Spark can be significantly faster on AI tasks than systems built on AMD's Ryzen AI Max.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  When it launched it cost twice as much as the AMD systems, leaving plenty of room for the two to compete.  But the AMD systems seem to have been hit badly by the DRAM Apocalypse while the Nvidia systems have somehow come down in price.
  
  So if all you want to do is run local AI models, the DGX Spark is a better bet.  If you want to do anything else with it - certainly if you want to run Windows - you may be better of sticking with AMD.
  
  
  
• Google's desktop version of Android looks to be real.  (Liliputing)
  
  The year of Linux on the desktop?
  
  I mean, it can't be worse than Windows.
  
  Surely.
  
  
  
• The Khadas Mind Pro has been updated with Intel's new Panther Lake CPU with is B390 graphics.  (Liliputing)
  
  $1799 with 64GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, which used to be wildly expensive, and now seems normal.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, January 29 2026 05:44 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 29 2026 06:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 30 2026 02:23 AM (rcPLc)

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• Intel's new B390 integrated graphics, featured in certain Panther Lake laptop processors, are genuinely a huge leap forward.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Previously the best mainstream integrated graphics were found in AMD chips, like the 780M and 890M units that are included in a three nominal generations of processors.  Intel's latest graphics unit runs rings around them - 50% faster or more.
  
  AMD still holds a convincing lead with its Ryzen AI Max family, but those are not cheap or widespread.
  
  The one major catch here is that the B390 is only available in laptops with soldered memory.  No exceptions.  If you user-upgradable RAM you get graphics running at one third the speed, half the speed of comparable AMD systems.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Television is one hundred years old today.  (Diamond Geezer)
  
  Happy birthday, television!
  
  
  
• After two years of vibe coding, I'm back to writing everything by hand.  (Atmoio)

  It's not until I opened up the full codebase and read its latest state cover to cover that I began to see what we theorized and hoped was only a diminishing artifact of earlier models: slop.
  
  It was pure, unadulterated slop. I was bewildered. Had I not reviewed every line of code before admitting it? Where did all this... gunk.. come from?

  Technical debt as a service.

  In retrospect, it made sense.  Agents write units of changes that look good in isolation.  They are consistent with themselves and your prompt.  But respect for the whole, there is not.  Respect for structural integrity there is not.  Respect even for neighboring patterns there was not.

  What there is, is code spam.
  
  
  
• We have met the enemy and he is slop: A new digital divide?  Coder worldviews, the "Slop economy," and democracy in the age of AI.  (TandFOnline)
  
  Okay, one moment.
  
  Ctrl-F "democracy"
  
  54 hits.  Never once do they specify what they mean, but it readily becomes apparent:

  On one side are the 'digital elites' - those with the means, skills, or institutional support to obtain high-quality information and online experiences. This group enjoys reliable news sources, can afford ad-free subscriptions or premium content, and benefits from platforms and regulations that attempt to uphold standards of accuracy, privacy, and democratic values.  Their internet experience includes credible journalism (e.g., The New York Times, BBC), fact-checked content, and fewer mis/disinformation traps.

  Stalin or Mao.  Those are your only options, apparently.
  
  
  
• Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, creators and operators of Claude AI, is a fuckwit.  (Dario Amodei)

  A country of geniuses in a datacenter could divide their efforts among software design, cyber operations, R&D for physical technologies, relationship building, and statecraft.

  Yeah, "geniuses in datacenters" have a remarkable track record on relationship building and statecraft.
  
  Just... Remarkable.

  It is clear that, if for some reason it chose to do so, this country would have a fairly good shot at taking over the world (either militarily or in terms of influence and control) and imposing its will on everyone else- or doing any number of other things that the rest of the world doesn’t want and can’t stop.

  Everyone has a plan until they get a Hellfire missile to the face.
  
  
  
• Dell's 52" 6K ultra-widescreen monitor is a... 52" 6K ultra-widescreen monitor.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  And it has a 120Hz refresh rate, which is a bit of a surprise.
  
  And it only costs as much as a dozen 27" 4K monitors.
  
  
  
• Google Gemini can now help you find the best meeting time for all attendees.  (Digital Trends)
  
  All it needs to know is the full schedules of all of everyone, and then it becomes an easy task.
  
  Of course, it already was if everyone's schedule is in a computer, so I'm not sure what problem AI is pretending to solve here.
  
  
  
• Google is set to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that it recorded private conversations.  (BBC)
  
  Oh, that problem.  If no conversation is private, you can't sue Google for recording it.
  
  
  
• The Trump administration is planning to use Google Gemini to draft transport regulations.  (ProPublica)

  The answer from the plan’s boosters is simple: speed.  Writing and revising complex federal regulations can take months, sometimes years.  But, with DOT's version of Google Gemini, employees could generate a proposed rule in a matter of minutes or even seconds, two DOT staffers who attended the December demonstration remembered the presenter saying.  In any case, most of what goes into the preambles of DOT regulatory documents is just "word salad," one staffer recalled the presenter saying.  Google Gemini can do word salad.

  Great.  Now it's regulatory spam.
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, January 28 2026 01:05 AM (rcPLc)

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