• If you gaze long into an LLM, the LLM also gazes into you: Geoff Lewis is managing partner and co-founder of Bedrock Capital (no, you're thinking of Blackrock) and guided his firm to be an early investor in OpenAI.  He used ChatGPT to help him in his work on a daily basis.
  
  He went stark raving mad.  (Futurism)
  
  There is a website called the SCP Foundation that documents the work of a secretive organisation that finds, catalogues, and if possible imprisons various kinds of cosmic horror and more innocuous but equally strange entities.  It's a work of collaborative fiction organised as a wiki, and has been running for more than 15 years.
  
  It's all online where tools like ChatGPT can scan it and incorporate it into their hallucinations, which is exactly what it fed to Geoff Lewis, providing the perfect reinforcement loop to drive him into psychosis.
  
  Which in a strange form of recursion, layering reality upon fiction, makes ChatGPT into precisely the kind of psychic terror that the SCP Foundation pretends to investigate.
  
  (Hat tip to commenter Blonde Morticia.)

• Are you looking to spend $900 on a replica of the Data General Dasher terminal keyboard from 1977, used as the basis for prop design in the Apple TV sci-fi series Severance?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nope, me neither.
  
  
  
• Are you looking to spend $1299 on a 32" 6K (6016x3384) monitor covering 98% of the DCI-P3 colour space?  (Hot Hardware)
  
  If you are, the Asus ProArt PA32QCV is exactly that and costs exactly that much, or will do when it launches next month.
  
  It has two Thunderbolt 4 ports with 96W power delivery, DisplayPort, HDMI, two 2W speakers with a headphone jack, and a built-in USB hub with KVM support.
  
  It only offers a 60Hz refresh rate, so definitely more suitable to professional artists than competitive gamers.
  
  I want one.  But since I run a triple-monitor setup, that could get kind of expensive.
  
  
  
• Speaking of expensive, TSMC has leased land in Central Taiwan Science Park to construct four new 1.4nm fabs.  (Taipei Times)
  
  No numbers attached, but expect it to cost more than three 6K monitors.
  
  The company also plans to build eleven wafer manufacturing plants (creating silicon wafers to turn into chips) and four packaging facilities (where the bare slivers of silicon are packaged into the products that other companies package into the boards that still other companies package into consumer products).
  
  
  
• Intel is laying off 5500 employees in Oregon, California, and Arizona.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Assuming these are new layoffs, this brings the total job losses at the company to over 20,000 in the past year.
  
  
  
• OEM laptop maker Sixunited has announced a burger with the lot.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The company's new XN77-160M-CS - forgive them, this is not a retail brand - uses AMD's Strix Halo CPU, which has integrated graphics on par with Nvidia's laptop 4070 model, paired with up to 128GB of RAM.
  
  The RAM is soldered due to timing constraints of the 256-bit bus - Framework tried modular RAM on this processor but couldn't make it work reliably at the required speeds - but it does have two M.2 slots.
  
  Plus a 2560x1600 165Hz display covering 100% of sRGB, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two regular USB ports, wired Ethernet (though only gigabit), HDMI, what looks like a full-size SD card slot, a headphone jack, a barrel jack power connector, and the Four Essential Keys all in their rightful place.
  
  No pricing specified since this will be sold to other companies who will then market it to the public.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, July 20 2025 11:41 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 21 2025 10:05 AM (jc6Wm)

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