• Had an instructive argument with Grok today.
  
  Someone asked if a video was AI, and Grok said it indeed appeared to be fake.  It was overlaid on a web page from The Hill and the article had no reference to the person in the video and indeed no video.
  
  Except the video was right there.
  
  Yet Grok swore blind that it didn't exist.
  
  Why?
  
  Because the video is copy protected and can only be viewed in a browser.  Grok literally could not see it.  And the reason the copy on Twitter was overlaid on a static web page is that the person who posted it took a screen recording to capture the video.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the third derivative of memory prices appears to be leveling off.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Actually, more than that: In Germany prices have declined.  Slightly.  From five times what they were just months ago to, in some cases, as little as four times.
  
  So there's that.
  
  
  

Tech News

• In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't distinguish between signals sent through copper wires, a banana, or wet mud.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though to be fair one of the tracks was Nirvana and the wet mud improved the fidelity.
  
  
  
• Apple plans to release an AI pendant because they're not tired of losing money.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They do have plenty of money to lose, but still...  Why?
  
  
  
• There's a precise technical term for the trend of AI to turn everything into slop: Semantic ablation.  (The Register)
  
  For all its impressive tricks, AI is a feed-forward pattern matching network.
  
  Which is also how the human brain works when you're not paying attention.  So it's not useless, particularly when you shove the sum total of human knowledge into it except for copy-protected videos.
  
  But since engineers have shoved the sum total of human knowledge into it, they had to smooth out the bumps to make it fit.  It always tends toward the middle, by design.  The aim is to be acceptable, rather than great, and never to offend anybody, which is a perfect fit for corporate customers.
  
  
  
• Discord announced mandatory age checks, pushed by fascist dictatorships like Britain.  It did this while promising that ID documents would be secure and would be deleted after they were verified...  Immediately after it suffered a major data breach where it admitted to 70,000 such documents being stolen and the hackers claimed many more.
  
  The users revolted and fled, many of them to rival TeamSpeak.  (PCGamer)
  
  TeamSpeak has now run out of servers.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, February 19 2026 12:21 PM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, February 19 2026 12:32 PM (Dt+og)

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