Wednesday, August 26
Daily News Stuff 26 August 2026
CNO Orrery Edition
CNO Orrery Edition
Top Story
- Apple has announced new Mac Mini models based on the M5 Pro and M6 CPUs. (MacRumors)
The M6 is a marked upgrade over the M4 - the M5 never showed up on the Mac Mini - but there is no M6 Pro, so the higher-end models of the Mac Mini, anything with more than 32GB of RAM, steps back to the M5 Pro.
But if you don't need that the M6 should run a lot faster. Apple says up to 40%, and that's actually believable, because it not only increases the core count from 10 to 12, it adds two high-end "super" cores, not just two low-end efficiency cores.
Oh, and 2.5 Gbit Ethernet is standard, not the ancient 1 Gbit.
Not cheap - the 64GB model costs five times as much as I paid for a 64GB mini-PC last December, but the same mini-PC at the same price now only has 32GB, so it has gotten closer.
- If you need more than that, Apple also announced M5 Max and M5 Ultra Mac Studios with up to 512G of RAM. (Mac Rumors)
That's a big jump as well, because the high-end Studio model was limited to the old M3 Ultra, and even then maxed out at... I think 96GB of RAM, with anything faster sold out. Now you can get those high-end models again, and they come with 1.2TB of bandwidth, suitable for pretty serious tasks.
Yes, they're wildly expensive, but right now so is everything, so Apple looks, if not more affordable, less unaffordable.
Tech News
- Perplexity has partnered with Nvidia to launch a local AI platform with no token costs. (Venturebeat)
All you need is a Pro or Pro Max Perplexity subscription and a $4700 DGX Spark or a $4700 RTX 5090.
Uh.
- Commodore has unveiled a Cyberpunk 2077 themed Commodore 64 that runs at 77MHz. (Tom's Hardware)
$377.
- Intel has announced the announcement of its 256 core Xeon 7 server CPUs. (The Register)
The actual announcement will follow in 2027.
- SpaceX is building a new spaceport in Louisiana. (Tech Crunch)
Price tag $100 billion.
Learn a trade.
- New Zealand just announced legislation that bans children under 16 from social media and from using AI companions. (Jurist)
They kicked their communists to the curb and replaced them with communists.
- Accidentally vibe-coded a blogging platform - a lot less capable than Minx but incredibly fast since it's written in Rust with an embedded database - and then took a step back and started properly designing the embedded database component using existing libraries where available.
Spent about $10 of the $100 worth of free credits Anthropic gave me when they cut Fable out of my cheapo plan, but those credits expire in three weeks so it's time I started using them.
If that works I'll retarget my existing blogging/social platform on top - the one that never went live because Elon bought Twitter and it didn't seem there was a market anymore.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Long skirt, short jacket.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:39 PM
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1
Apple's promising that you can cluster 4 of the new Mac Studios to share their memory and run with The Big Boys.
-j
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, August 27 2026 12:20 AM (oJgNG)
2
I assume they mean cluster via Thunderbolt, since with three ports you get a high-speed fully-connected four-node network. If they've set up the drivers well that could be interesting; it's PCIe after all.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 27 2026 05:56 AM (PiXy!)
3
Yep, they're talking about RDMA over Thunderbolt (and Thunderbolt 5 specifically on the M5 Pro models). That will work decently for MoE models, and be terrible on dense models. And work pretty well on cluster tasks generally.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 27 2026 08:00 AM (PiXy!)
4
Still missing a bunch of images from my blog. Something like the last 9 uploaded. I don't know if trying to upload over the compromised entries will screw things up worse.
Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, August 27 2026 03:01 PM (XWgGM)
5
Ah, sorry, I got eaten by wolves. I'll check on that, but certainly uploading fresh copies shouldn't make things worse.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 27 2026 06:23 PM (PiXy!)
6
That's some interesting spam in the comment before this one (for readers from the future, it will probably be gone, and I'm not referring to Pixy's wolves.)
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 28 2026 10:50 PM (1zWbY)
7
Yeah. AI spam advertising AI services, which are probably worthless. At least it's figured out the secret word.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 28 2026 11:16 PM (PiXy!)
8
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a person, TBH. The two comments were both more-or-less relevant, with the only hint to it being spam a link in the name. It's like ESR said years ago, he sort of expected spam to eventually evolve into something more or less harmless. If you didn't mouse over the name you wouldn't know it was spam. Of course, and maybe I shouldn't point this out, the fail was commenting on a 4 year old post (and then compounding that by explicitly saying he'd done so, which is why I looked at it to see what it was.)
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 29 2026 04:35 AM (1zWbY)
9
Rick C - I guess you could consider that "more or less harmless", but I lean towards "more" because it's SEO poisoning. Which does two things: one, makes their site selling whatever it is (questionable pharmaceuticals or questionable online gambling sites or whatever) tend to show up higher in the search engine rankings because an otherwise-respectable blog has "linked" to it... and two, when the search engine's automated spam-site-detection systems find those links, they would then tend to reduce their internal reliability score for Pixy's blog and therefore rate all links from Pixy's blog lower in quality, even the legitimate ones.
So it has an effect quite similar to when a government prints money by the trainload, thereby deflating everyone's legitimate money. Which is quite harmful, and I find these hide-the-link-in-the-name spam comments also quite harmful. The harm is more hidden, but it's just as real.
So it has an effect quite similar to when a government prints money by the trainload, thereby deflating everyone's legitimate money. Which is quite harmful, and I find these hide-the-link-in-the-name spam comments also quite harmful. The harm is more hidden, but it's just as real.
Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, August 29 2026 12:18 PM (29wva)
10
Let's say I would consider it less immediately obviously obnoxious, compared to typical spam. I don't disagree with what you said.
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 30 2026 04:56 AM (1zWbY)
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