Tuesday, December 02
Daily News Stuff 2 December 2025
Be Careful Edition
Be Careful Edition
Top Story
- Samsung and SK Hynix - two of the three major DRAM manufacturers - issued a big fat "nope" when asked if they were planning to increase production beyond work already in the pipeline. (WCCFTech)
Rather than rapidly expanding facilities, we will pursue a strategy of maintaining long-term profitability. We will minimize the risk of oversupply through a capital expenditure (CAPEX) strategy that balances customer demand and pricing.
Translation: All our competitors tried this and went broke in the last "boom-and-bust" cycle. We don't plan to go broke.
- Shortages are starting to hit close to home, though, with Samsung denying a large memory order from... Samsung. (WCCFTech)
Samsung's phone division ordered more than a year's supply of memory for the new Galaxy models. Samsung's memory division told them no way.
Tech News
- Did Alexander Fleming discover penicillin the way history tells it? Well... Maybe. (Asimov Press)
Attempts to recreate it exactly as Fleming described it - with the Petri dish contaminated with mold after the bacterial samples were placed - fail. But if the contamination happens before or at the same time, the results can come out pretty much as stated, under the right conditions. It's particularly temperature-dependent.
And it turns out that right when Fleming went on his week's vacation leaving his experiment unmonitored, there was a cold spell that put conditions right in the path of a happy accident.
If that is how it worked out, there was even more luck involved than we thought.
- Colleges are preparing to self-lobotomise - again. (The Atlantic) (archive site)
The Atlantic is complaining about the ill-considered use of AI in higher education, which is fair enough. They are not complaining about all the other self-inflicted metaphorical head wounds in academia, which is less fair.
- Santa Monica has told Waymo it can't recharge its self-driving taxis at night. (Inside EVs) (archive site)
It's unclear whether Waymo or its Virginia-based charging operator, Volterra, intends to comply.
Signs point to no.
- You shouldn't shard your database. (PgDog)
If someone says you should, shard them straight out the nearest window.
- Be careful what you wish for: Now I've found the Door Bypassing Summer and Autumn and Heading Straight Back into Winter.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Nineteenth thing twentieth... Wait, we messed up.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:06 PM
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I remember an episode of Connections 2 where James Burke talked about how remarkable the number of things had to go right for penicillin to be discovered. Basically, it was like getting boxcars on a hundred consecutive die rolls.
Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, December 03 2025 11:20 AM (ZLF73)
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Universities in America right now present an incredible opportunity for a clever determined university to become one of the top universities in the nation. However, the problem is that this would require being able to accurately judge what the other universities are doing wrong in enthusiastically self-destructing. Faculty are often specialists, senior leadership is often promoted faculty, and there is a widespread common understanding that achieving HLC accreditation, or meeting other industry standard metrics are important goals. (There are some smaller saner liberal arts schools, but a lot of those are not equipped to take over a bunch of engineering research funding.)
Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, December 03 2025 11:24 AM (rcPLc)
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