Monday, October 26
Daily News Stuff 26 October 2026
Hailboulders Edition
Game is Cannon Fodder, from the Amiga. This was real - I played this game in my misspent youth.
Something of a standout though; this is the docking sequence from Elite, running on the same hardware:
They did clean it up a little for the remake:
Hailboulders Edition
Top Story
- There are at least 884,000 websites running an unsupported version of PHP - one for which there is no patch for the new lethal vulnerabilities. (Notebook Check)
The real number is probably closer to 20 million.
- How did the PHP foundation - the organisation responsible for maintaining PHP, a language powering an estimated 37.7 million websites - let things get so bad? They have one full-time staff member. (Reuters)
Yep, that'll do it.
Tech News
- Wolves descend on a Finnish village as Google clear-fells 1300 acres of forest including Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother's cottage. (Futurism)
There are reasons I'm doubting this story, including the inclusion of this:In West Virginia, a grove of critically endangered Chestnut trees is under threat of being bulldozed to make way for a new Anthropic hyperscale facility.
That claim has already been debunked; the construction is miles away from the grove of trees.
- The anti-AI writing police are everywhere. What are they looking for? (CNN)
AI writing.
Which leftist writers profess to hate even as they latch onto it.
Leading to the usual rounds of autophagy and the media - CNN here - pissing on our legs and telling us it's raining.
- Speaking of which, it's raining again. And worse. I brought my seedlings in under cover given the threat of a storm, and it arrived on schedule with some middling-sized hail.
Went to the garden center on the edge of town on the weekend looking for some more of the green bottlebrushes, only to find the shelf empty. So I went online and found what I wanted. And pink and purple as well. Delivered they cost nearly three times as much, but this way I can get what I want and not just what is in stock this week in my small country town.
- Nvidia is thinking of charging $2000 per GPU in annual license fees for running its AI software, an estimated $10 billion per year. (Notebook Check)
What's that, Lassie? Someone just rebuilt our AI software using our AI software in a cave with a box of scraps?
- Analysts say that AI is delivering no return on investment to 493 companies in the S&P 500. (Tech Crunch)
The remaining seven are Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla.
Musical Interlude
Game is Cannon Fodder, from the Amiga. This was real - I played this game in my misspent youth.
Something of a standout though; this is the docking sequence from Elite, running on the same hardware:
They did clean it up a little for the remake:
Disclaimer: Not included: Colliding with the space station three times in a row before you finally scrape together the funds for a docking computer.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:22 PM
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1
PHP staff member - I'm reminded of a cartoon featuring a group of suits sitting around a table on a ship's deck. One was asking why, after correct sizing the staff count, they weren't moving faster. Down below was one guy with oars rowing for all he was worth.
Posted by: Frank at Monday, October 26 2026 05:51 PM (tSpjU)
2
There's an author on Kindle Unlimited who's pretty prolific--or, well, he pairs up with a lot of other people and puts out series with them. One of them has been giving me a vibe for the last couple of books and now I'm pretty positive it's largely AI-written, because it's got all the telltales except em dashes. Fragments. Odd grammatical structures. Not this but that.
And then a bit of bad editing in the previous on, where over the space of 4-5 pages, the main weapons on a ship went from 70% to half power twice, and also there were a couple of places where a paragraph appeared twice in a row, slightly different each time. It's just irritating enough I want to leave an Amazon review about it.
And then a bit of bad editing in the previous on, where over the space of 4-5 pages, the main weapons on a ship went from 70% to half power twice, and also there were a couple of places where a paragraph appeared twice in a row, slightly different each time. It's just irritating enough I want to leave an Amazon review about it.
Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 26 2026 10:06 PM (1zWbY)
3
Elite Dang looks a lot like Pioneer with uh more fiddly graphics
Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 27 2026 06:30 AM (LDKo5)
4
My start-up's AI tool for checking if someone's writing has too much electronic assistance is mostly just looking at voter registration and political donations. The explicit warning about methodology is that we infer that if someone voted for Harris, they are incapable of original thought, and also want us back in a literal dark age, therefore it is hypocritical for them to be using writing technology more advanced than lead type printing. XD So we are are a firmer theoretical foundation than some of our competition, but are clearly also useless, and full of shit. 
Harris voters can be useless and full of shit, but often with a worse theoretical foundation. 
Harris voters can be useless and full of shit, but often with a worse theoretical foundation.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 27 2026 08:27 AM (6eVrQ)
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Some would say that lead type is too mechanically complicated and rigorous for Harris voters, Harris voters should be restricted to wood block printing.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 27 2026 08:29 AM (6eVrQ)
6
Harris voters probably lick lead type.
Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 27 2026 09:49 AM (1zWbY)
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I was going to guess Cadmium.
Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 27 2026 11:14 AM (LDKo5)
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