Sunday, October 11
Daily News Stuff 11 October 2026
Box That Goes Ping Edition
Box That Goes Ping Edition
Top Story
- AI models and agents are security risks and should be banned from your corporate network, or at a minimum, air gapped and restricted to a lead lined Faraday cage biocontainment unit to preclude Van Eck phreaking and accidental bowls of bat soup. (Twitter)
Says... Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Tech News
- Why did already massively inflated prices on the RTX 5090 suddenly spike recently? If you guessed that Nvidia stopped making them, you're probably correct. (Tom's Hardware)
They will be replaced - allegedly - by a 5080 model upgrade to 24GB of RAM, delivering about half the performance. The current 16GB 5080 will also cease to be.
- Ukrainian drones blew up the largest datacenter in Russia, or at least unspecified parts thereof. (Tom's Hardware)
Has the volume of obnoxious spam declined at all?
- Testing Windows 7 vs. Windows 11 for gaming. (Tom's Hardware)
Interesting but not startling comparison, unless you were somehow expecting Windows 11 to take the win, in which case you may well be startled.
- My emulated fantasy 10-bit 80s home computer has two synthesizers: A wavetable synthesizer (something rare in home computers of any period but the Apple IIgs from 1986 has this), and a simpler fixed-function digital synthesizer based on a limited set of waveforms, easier to implement but needing multiple voices to work together to produce appropriate harmonics that a wavetable synth generates directly.
That second synthesizer sucked yesterday; as of today with tuning against real instrument samples it's sounding like a Yamaha synthesizer that doesn't have an insect in its power supply but in some cases needs one. Cymbals last I checked still sounded like gongs, resonating freely when struck. Gongs also sounded like gongs, which in that case is good.
Update: Cymbals no longer sound like gongs, but they are not good. Also updated the tracker to optionally add up to 30 milliseconds of skew between the notes of the various synthesizer voices so that an orchestra pieces sounds like an orchestra and not like... Well, not like a synthesizer. The difference is dramatic.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Well, that explains it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:09 PM
| Comments (4)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 360 words, total size 4 kb.
1
Umm. . . how much have you spent on the synth hardware? It sounds like it'd be fun to play with. (But I'm sure your software tinkering is beyond me.)
I'm really impressed with what you've been working on.
I'm really impressed with what you've been working on.
Posted by: furball321 at Sunday, October 11 2026 11:46 PM (nzXoV)
2
Yeah, I was thinking of putting on my next resume that my windows skills are XP/7. I'm a little worried that me not being willing to use Windows 11 is a disabling mental illness, and that I need to talk myself down from that position instead of embracing it.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 12 2026 12:00 AM (6eVrQ)
3
Windows 12 is coming soon, and will be rolling unnecessary features back to 7, and taking the memory footprint back under 1 GB, right Satya? /Padme
Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 12 2026 01:38 AM (6eVrQ)
4
furball321 - $0 on the hardware. It's all emulated, but running at 80s home computer frequencies, so 3MHz and "later" 6MHz, with all the timing calculated down to the nanosecond and modeled at ~160ns slices.
~$600 for a mini-PC I bought last year that I'm running it on, but any modern hardware would do.
~$600 for a mini-PC I bought last year that I'm running it on, but any modern hardware would do.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 12 2026 05:29 AM (PiXy!)
53kb generated in CPU 0.1258, elapsed 0.2473 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.2274 seconds, 373 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
58 queries taking 0.2274 seconds, 373 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
