• Is there anything AI can't do?  Enterprise hard drives are now on backorder for the next two years as AI deployments eat all available storage.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That will put pressure on supplies of cheap bulk QLC SSDs, sending those prices up, which will put pressure on higher-quality TLC SSDs.
  
  But at least at the end of it you won't have a job anymore.
  
  Unless you're in a trade, in which case your employment is secure but your customers won't be able to pay you.

• AMD's Ryzen 5 3600 has dropped to $67.  New.  Including a fairly decent stock cooler.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It comes with AMD's Wraith Stealth cooler, but for an extra $4 you can get it with the bigger and better Wraith Spire model.
  
  It's not the latest and greatest - it's three generations behind the latest and greatest - but still, it's $67.  Or $71, depending.  
  
  
  
• A laid off Intel employee absconded with 18,000 files, some of them classified Destroy Before Reading.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• A tape that may contain a copy of the long-lost fourth edition of Unix has been found.  (Ponderwall)
  
  It says it contains a copy of the long-lost fourth edition of Unix, but since the tape is more than fifty years old, it's been shipped off to the Computer History Museum for expert restoration before anyone tries to check its actual contents.
  
  
  
• Always Mars tomorrow, never Mars today: The launch of the Escapade mission aboard New Glenn was scrubbed because a cloud.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They'll try again at 2:45 pm EST on Wednesday when hopefully not a cloud.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT private queries have been leaking into Google Search Console - a tool that lets you monitor search queries leading to your website - because ChatGPT was, well, taking people's private queries and doing just what anyone would do and looking the information up on Google.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Of course.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 11 2025 03:12 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 11 2025 06:37 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 12 2025 02:03 AM (bJkXU)

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• The latest US Mars mission will launch from Cape Canaveral today at around 2:45 PM EST.  (Space)
  
  The mission - dubbed ESCAPADE - involved two orbiters that will map the magnetic fields and upper atmosphere of the planet, providing data essential to human landings and settlement.
  
  The two orbiters, named Blue and Gold respectively, were built by Rocket Labs and will be operated by the University of California.  They will launch on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket - only the second flight for that design.
  
  They'll fly out to the Earth-Sun L2 point around a million miles away to make observations there and say hello to the James Webb telescope, before heading back to Earth for a gravity slingshot this time next year and finally arriving in Mars rendezvous September of 2027.
  
  New Glenn is designed to have a reusable booster and they'll be attempting to land it on a ship at sea, so that will also be fun to watch for.

• OpenAI has asked the government to expand coverage of tax credits created for integrated circuit manufacturers to also cover incontinent wastrels AI companies even though it is explicitly a manufacturing credit and rent-seeking man-whores AI companies do not actually manufacture anything.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  How about no, Sam?
  
  
  
• AMD has posted patches to the GCC compiler suite to support new features in next year's Zen 6 architecture.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Nothing groundbreaking, but the new chips will add support for FP16 (16 bit floating point) and VNNI-INT8 (8 bit integer instructions aimed at neural networks) to AVX-512.
  
  AMD introduced AVX-512 support in Zen 4 in 2022 with an implementation that performed 256 bits of calculation per cycle, and then updated it in Zen 5 last year to perform the full 512 bits in a single cycle.
  
  With the new instructions AMD will offer the most complete implementation of AVX-512, despite the instruction set being Intel's baby.
  
  
  
• Intel also released GCC patches last month for its upcoming Nova Lake processors.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Intel's recent desktop (and laptop) chips do have AVX-512 support built in - in theory - but it was never officially supported in 12th generation chips (2021) and since the 13th generation (2022) has been fused off permanently during manufacturing and cannot be used at all.
  
  With next year's Nova Lake, so far as we can tell from the patches, there will be no support for AVX-512 at all, nor for its nominal successor, AVX10.  That makes it a datacenter-only technology if you're an Intel customer, but built in to everything from handheld gaming consoles to supercomputers that use AMD hardware.
  
  
  
• How a ransomware gang encrypted Nevada's government computer systems (Spoiler: DON'T CLICK ON RANDOM LINKS WHEN DOWNLOADING CRITICAL SECURITY SOFTWARE YOU IDIOT) and how they got everything working again without paying ransom.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Backups.
  
  
  
• Lego has announced a model of the USS Enterprise...  1701-D.  (The Independent)
  
  $399.
  
  I'd much rather have the large Millennium Falcon model, though.  It's big enough that it's in scale for regular Lego mini-figs, which this 1701-D is very much not.
  
  
  

Posted by: David Eastman at Monday, November 10 2025 04:17 AM (OZKzj)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 10 2025 08:24 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, November 10 2025 11:30 AM (XWgGM)

Posted by: stargazera5 at Monday, November 10 2025 11:55 AM (7nzlg)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, November 10 2025 02:58 PM (XWgGM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 10 2025 07:19 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 11 2025 01:03 AM (rcPLc)

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• Sam Altman's pants are totally on fire.  (Marcus on AI)
  
  So, Sam Altman recently said that OpenAI was not asking for government loan guarantees to bail the company out when things blew up in their faces, after Trump Administration AI Czar David Sacks said point-blank that no such guarantees would be forthcoming after OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said that the company was in fact seeking government guarantees for its several septillion dollars in loans, currently backed only by its annual revenues of $3.18.
  
  With me so far?
  
  Well, slight problem.  The author of this piece did a little digging and found that Sam Altman went on a podcast just recently to say that the company was seeking such loan guarantees, and documents still on OpenAI's own web site confirm this.
  
  There's a reason I call him Sam Altman-Fried.
  
  

• James Watson, Sherlock Holmes' amanuensis, long time chairman and president of IBM, and co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, has passed away.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  He was 173.
  
  
  
• Maybe Peloton is its own worst enemy.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The company recalled 833,000 Bike Plus exercise bikes, which have managed to injure people even though they don't have wheels and cannot move.
  
  Peloton previously recalled two million of its exercise bikes in 2023
  
  Who buys this...  People stuck in apartments, I guess.
  
  
  
• The HiBy RS8 II portable DAP promises top-notch audio performance for discerning high-resolution music enthusiasts.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This is going to be some audiophile bullshit, isn't it?
  
  HiBy has launched the RS8 II flagship digital audio player (DAP) with an MSRP of $3,899 in black or gold.
  
  Yep, there we go.
  
  
  
• Denmark plans to ban social media for children under 15.  (AP News)
  
  Yeah, good luck with that.  The children are smarter than you are.
  
  
  
• Amazon has launched Bazaar, a new ultra-cheap drop-shipping app to compete with companies like Temu and Shein in the real-world equivalent of AI slop.  (Reuters)
  
  It's the same thing as Amazon's Haul sub-site in the US, but it's mobile only for maximal inconvenience.
  
  
  
• The psychological cost of having an RSS feed.  (Filip Roséen)
  
  Dude.  You are way overthinking this.
  
  Do or do not.  There is no psychological cost.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's upcoming 5000 Super lineup might not be upcoming at all.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The key advance of these models was to swap the 2GB memory chips for newer 3GB ones, increasing the lackluster 12GB of RAM on the 5070 to a more respectable 18GB, and giving the 5070 Ti Super and 5080 Super a high-endish 24GB.
  
  But AI has eaten all the 3GB GDDR7 chips.  They're used, for example, on the RTX Pro 6000 card, which has the same chip as the 5090 but 96GB of RAM.
  
  And has a far higher price and far higher margins, and Nvidia is selling all the cards they can make.
  
  On the other hand, we know that these cards can use two banks of memory - the RTX Pro 6000 does exactly that, for example, and so does the much cheaper 5060 Ti 16GB - so Nvidia could simply double the amount of memory on the Super models using twice as many 2GB memory chips, albeit at a somewhat higher price.
  
  
  
• The 5060 Ti 16GB is expected to start disappearing from shelves soon, because the same GDDR7 supply crunch is going to hit cheap cards with plenty of memory the hardest.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You can always get a 5070 Ti instead.  It also has 16GB of memory, and is not quite twice as expensive.
  
  Or an AMD 9060 16GB model.  It's actually cheaper, and since it uses previous generation GDDR6 it's not affected by the memory shortage.
  
  Yet.
  
  
  
• High-tech startup Substrate's revolutionary chipmaking technology, utilising x-rays and particle beams, may not be all it claims.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  May not be anything it claims.
  
  The company's founders have no prior chipmaking experience.  They did, however, create the Sense sleep tracker, which raised $50 million in crowdfunding and...  Apparently never worked and was promptly discontinued.  (Ctrl)
  
  
  
• AMD's popular 9800X3D and the previous generation 7800X3D by themselves outsold the entire Intel desktop CPU lineup...  By 60%.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In individual CPU sales, mind you, not prebuilt systems, which often still strongly favour Intel even though informed customers go elsewhere.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, November 09 2025 01:59 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, November 09 2025 02:03 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Matthew Dixon Cowles at Sunday, November 09 2025 01:19 PM (irynM)

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• Why does so much new technology feel inspired by dystopian sci-fi movies?  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  You mean like Escape From New York?
  
  Because the people who wrote those movies were inspired by people, and people do dumb things.
  
  
  
• It's a cookbook.  (CNBC)  (archive site)

  Microsoft has formed a superintelligence team under AI chief Suleyman 'to serve humanity'.

  Hey, I've seen this one.  It's a classic!
  

• After more than 200 years, the 2026 edition of the Farmers' Almanac will be the last.  (Farmers' Almanac)
  
  You can pick up a copy on Amazon.  Probably.  They won't ship it to me.
  
  
  
• Google is planning to build a huge AI datacenter on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean occupied entirely by crabs.  (Reuters)
  
  If you're Australian or just generally geographically minded, you may have just thought Christmas Island?
  
  Yes, Christmas Island.
  
  
  
• No we're not.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Google is involved in construction of an undersea cable from Singapore to Australia via Darwin, and Christmas Island is just a convenient midpoint.
  
  Sort of.  It's directly in line from Singapore to Perth, but for a cable to Darwin it just avoids routing directly through Indonesia.
  
  
  
• Suck it, Delaware: Tesla shareholders have approved a $1 trillion pay package for Elon Musk.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  To reach that level would require the company to reach a market cap of $8.5 trillion, up from $1.5 trillion today, which would require the bubble to inflate for at least a couple more years.
  
  
  
• Sam Altman says he doesn't want a government bailout, after the government said no bailout would be forthcoming, after OpenAI's CFO said she wanted government guarantees for the quintillions of dollars in loans Sam Altman is fast-talking is way into.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Just so everyone is clear.

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, November 08 2025 08:02 AM (ZLF73)

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• A survey has found that 72% of game developers say Steam is effectively a monopoly in the PC gaming market.  (TechSpot)
  
  No it hasn't.

  In a survey of over 300 executives from large US and UK game companies, 72% either slightly or strongly agreed that Steam constitutes a monopoly over PC games.

  So by "developers" you mean...  Not developers.

  Many customers are so adamant about only purchasing games through Steam that the industry's largest publishers, including EA, Ubisoft, and even Microsoft, have tried - and failed - to withhold their titles from the service.

  Because Steam works.  The competitors less so.
  
  The one standout is GOG, which gets in your way even less than Steam.

• AMD reported its quarterly results and the news is all good.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  "Client" product sales - that is, the CPUs normal humans buy - were up 46% to $2.8 billion.  Gaming revenue soared by 181% to $1.3 billion, though the market is still dominated by Nvidia and AMD's gains are a result of moving from "adequate" to "pretty good" rather than stealing the market lead.
  
  Total revenue was $9.2 billion for the quarter, up 36% from last year, and profits were up 61% to $1.2 billion. 
  
  
  
• The password for the Louvre's video surveillance system was "Louvre".  (PC Gamer)
  
  Oh.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix - Hyundai's memory chip division - has shown off its roadmap for the next few years.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't afford to look at it.
  
  Pricing problems aside, DDR5 is going to be with us for a while.  DDR6 is not expected until 2029 or 2030.  Updates like MRDIMM Gen2 are set to double the speed of DDR5 by the simple trick of using two banks of chips at once, so we'll probably be fine.
  
  
  
• Unicode footguns in Python.  (Python Koans)
  
  (A footgun is a gun designed explicitly for shooting yourself in the foot.)
  
  I've said before that Unicode is a semantic Superfund site, and Python has been around longer than Unicode - though not by much - so it's not surprising that some things are painful.
  
  I do wonder though if there are any programming languages where Unicode is not painful.  Unicode attempts to create a single character set merging every human language in history despite the fact that the rules resolving said characters are often mutually contradictory.
  
  It's a mess.
  
  
  
• Speaking of messes the October Windows 11 update is triggering BitLocker recovery on some systems.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is where you boot your PC up and are met by a demand for your BitLocker password, usually despite you never having heard of BitLocker in your life and certainly not having consciously set it up with a password.  
  
  Meaning - if you don't have another PC handy to research the workaround this time - your data is being held ransom by your own computer.
  
  Microsoft had a similar bug back in May.  And July last year.  And August of 2022.
  
  Windows 10's lack of updates looks better every day.
  
  
  
• Figured out the Imagine 1400 and 1500.
  
  These are imaginary computers based strictly on technology available in the 1980s and early 90s, so I've spent a few hours diving into databooks on Bitsavers and working through timing diagrams.
  
  The 1300, nominally appearing in 1989, took things as far as I could go with chips available at the time (and imaginary but plausible CPU and graphics chips).  It used dual-ported VRAM for the first time in the series, and kept the fast timing of the DRAM site of the bus from the earlier models, which was just achievable according to the Micron 1988 databook.
  
  Did it end there?
  
  I hypothesized a model 1400 with essentially two complete graphics subsystems from the 1300 with their output merged, which would mean eight independent memory buses - two sets each of shared and dedicated video RAM, all four of them with both parallel and serial busses because they're all dual ported.
  
  Which might have been fun to play with in 1991 but would be insanely complicated given that there was no compatible upgrade path.
  
  Unless...
  
  What if the next stage of evolution replaced the 10 bit bus not with a 20 bit one, but with 40 bits.
  
  And what if this hypothetical new graphics chip had a 40 bit data bus and a 40 bit address bus.  (And a 40 bit VRAM bus as well.)
  
  And what if it had an extra mode where it split the 40 bit un-multiplexed address bus into four 10-bit multiplexed busses that directly connected to the VRAM.
  
  That would give it the exact same graphics capabilities (in a single chip) that I used five chips and four banks of memory for in the model 1400.
  
  And double the VRAM bus bandwidth because speeds increased just enough by 1993 to do that.
  
  So the 1400 has a reason to exist because our imaginary engineers were cobbling together a solution while they were waiting for a delayed high-end design to reach production.
  
  

Not At All Tech News

• My house has artificial turf at one side and the rear (between the house and a retaining wall) which the builders told me they put in because keeping a lawn alive in those areas would be too much work.
  
  I tried to talk them down a bit on the price because I knew I wanted to replace it with something less plastic, but they weren't having it, and it was a sellers market right then with a big chunk of NSW under water.
  
  Anyway, I had a sudden thought today that the surface under the fake grass was rather hard underfoot, and if for some reason they had concreted it that would drastically limit my options.  (I'm thinking of a mix of pavers and pebbles, maybe a couple of strategic shrubs, but shrubs don't grow well in concrete unless you really don't want them to).
  
  Peeled back a segment.
  
  Nope.  Just packed earth.  All good.

Posted by: normal at Friday, November 07 2025 05:47 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, November 07 2025 11:19 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 07 2025 03:44 PM (PiXy!)

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• DC-based tech startup Besxar has signed a deal with SpaceX for 12 launches of experimental chip fabrication hardware.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The idea being that on the ground, maintaining a hard vacuum is difficult and expensive but essential for chip production.  In space, though, you can just open a window.
  
  The tricky part - and a key point in these experiments - is seeing if wafers can be launched into orbit and returned intact.
  
  
  
• You know what else has been launched into orbit?  Memory prices.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a good thing I bought my 128GB of DDR5 RAM when I did, because the price of those high-density high-speed modules has doubled.
  
  The price of low-density and low-speed modules has also doubled.
  
  The price of older DDR4 modules has - you guessed it - doubled.
  
  Or in some cases, more.
  
  Thanks, AI.

• Without access to Nvidia's high-end AI chips, China has resorted to making their own.  Only problem is they are far less power-efficient.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The Chinese government is subsidising power bills for AI companies by 50% to try to make up that gap.
  
  
  
• It's not all bad news for Nintendo on the patent front.  Sometimes its worse news.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Their patent on capturing monsters and putting them in your pocket was recently rejected by the Japanese patent office for being unoriginal.
  
  Now the company's US patent on summoning monsters from your pocket and making them fight is being re-examined by the USPTO and could end up being revoked.
  
  
  
• Three security experts working at Sygnia Consulting and DigitalMint had a profitable little side-hustle: Hacking and extorting their employers' customers.  (MSN)
  
  They are now facing federal prison.
  
  
  
• Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly.  (The Economist)

  Hundreds of teenagers, sometimes strong-armed by their parents, have trooped through the doors of Britain’s National Centre for Gaming Disorders since it opened in 2019.  Yet lately the publicly funded clinic has admitted a steady trickle of rather different patients.  Its specialists in video-game addiction have so far treated 67 people over the age of 40.

  Die in a fire.
  
  
  
• The Python Software Foundation is going broke.  (Lunduke)
  
  The PSF is facing a funding shortfall of $1.5 million.
  
  The PSF recently cancelled its own grant request for $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation because the funds would have come with a requirement that it abandon DEI.
  
  The PSF can also die in a fire.  Python will survive.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 06 2025 12:45 AM (iUcB9)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, November 06 2025 04:21 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 06 2025 09:45 AM (1zWbY)

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• Is OpenAI becoming too big to fail?  (MSN)
  
  It sure is.  Just like Lehman Brothers.  And Worldcom.  And Enron.
  
  
  
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explained how the company is planning to pay for $1 trillion worth of hardware and services deals with an annual revenue of $13 billion.  (Tech Crunch)

  "We are taking a forward bet that it will continue to grow, and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing, that AI that can automate science will create huge value," he added.

  Well, I know I feel comforted.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The best things to watch over and over and over.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  I recall my nephew could watch My Neighbour Totoro on loop and never tire of it, but in his defense he was three years old at the time.
  
  Which tells you a lot about the mental ages of tech journalists.
  
  
  
• Obsidian's The Outer Worlds 2 is here, the sequel to their 2019 game The Outer Worlds which I was looking forward to at the time before they signed an exclusivity agreement with Epic Games for a ton of money and by the time it was available on my preferred stores I had lost all time and interest and even though I own it now I have never gotten around to playing it where was I oh - don't even think of playing it with ray tracing enabled.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It runs...  Adequately...  With ray tracing off.
  
  With ray tracing on it can't hit 60 fps (average, never mind the 1% lows which are abysmal) on an RTX 5090 at 1080p even using "performance" upscaling - so it's only actually rendering at 540p.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Anbernic RG DS is here and under $100.  Along with specs which we didn't have until today.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is a dual-screen handheld gaming thingy that looks uncannily like the Nintendo DS only better.
  
  The two 4" screens are "only" 640x480, but then the original DS had 3" screens with a 256x192 resolution.  The CPU is "only" a quad core Arm A55 running at 2GHz, but the original had a single Arm9 core running at 67MHz.  Oh, and 3GB of RAM compared to the original's 4MB.
  
  Also, the DS sold for $150 in 2004.
  
  It looks pretty cool but back when I was playing Final Fantasy III on my DS I did not yet need reading glasses.  On the other hand, I now have reading glasses so maybe that's not such an issue.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, November 04 2025 02:05 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 04 2025 07:39 AM (IYwKy)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, November 04 2025 10:36 AM (XWgGM)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 05 2025 07:53 AM (UdJ+b)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, November 05 2025 08:04 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, November 05 2025 11:12 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, November 05 2025 01:02 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, November 07 2025 11:06 AM (ZLF73)

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• SpaceX is set to win a $2 billion contract with the Pentagon to develop and launch tracking satellites as part of the broader Golden Dome defense project.  (Yahoo)
  
  Which only makes sense.  If you want to launch satellites, there's SpaceX and then there's a long, long gap before you get to second place.

• The Playdate is a great indie puzzle machine: Games like Lexgrid, Togglebot, and What Time Is It? are perfect daily distractions.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The what?
  
  Huh.  This is apparently a thing that exists.  It's a tiny handheld gaming device, the size and colour of a Post-It note, with specs to match the original Nintendo Game Boy from 1989.
  
  Which is...  Fine.  It costs $229 and has not exactly set the world on fire, but keep trucking along, dudes.
  
  
  
• Bluesky has reached 40 million users and unveiled a "dislike button".  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Nobody posts on Bluesky but that's a separate problem.

  The company explained the changes are designed to make Bluesky a place for more "fun, genuine, and respectful exchanges" - an edict that follows a month of unrest on the platform as some users again criticized the platform over its moderation decisions.

  Edict?  Do you know what that word means?
  
  Anyway, the only people more delusional than the Tech Crunch reporter here trying to fluff month-dead roadkill and the Bluesky executives pretending their company isn't month-dead roadkill are Bluesky's dozen or so actual users who insist that the company should ban people who don't break the rules, to save them the trouble of constructing their own echo chambers:

  Bluesky, however, wants to focus more on the tools it provides users to control their own experience.Today, this includes things like moderation lists that let users quickly block a group of people they don’t want to interact with, content filter controls, muted words, and the ability to subscribe to other moderation service providers.

  The problem is that all this engineering effort is going to make sure that none of their users ever have to see outside their bubbles.
  
  
  
• Support for MySQL 8.0 ends in six months.  (The Register)
  
  Bleh.
  
  
  
• A faint glow in the Milky Way could be dark matter.  (Space)
  
  If it's so dark, why does it glow?

• AMD has explained that when they said that drivers for their RX 5000 and RX 6000 graphics cards (and integrated graphics with the RDNA 1 and 2 architectures respectively) were entering maintenance mode with only bug fixes to be released and not optimisations for individual games, they didn't mean maintenance mode, they meant maintenance mode.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Everyone clear on that?
  
  Good.
  
  Long stupid story short, they will still be updating the drivers for related boards and APUs, just not promising to address the quirks of every game that comes along.
  
  Also, the release note saying they were dropping support for the USB-C port on RX 7900 series boards was bullshit.  Yes, it's in the official release notes; yes, it's officially bullshit.
  
  The previous generation - the RX 400 and RX 500 series, which were the same thing with different numbers - is still kind of dead but we already knew that.  You can still find new-in-box RX 580s but they're starting to dry up now.  The XFX models I grabbed early this year are completely gone.
  
  Update: Turns out my supplier found another four of them hiding somewhere. Priced around $100 including sales tax.
  

• Some crazy person has created a version of Windows 7 that fits in just 69MB of disk space.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Considering that a decent SSD costs about 5c per GB, that's about 0.4c of space.
  
  Also, it isn't actually useful for anything.  It runs, but it doesn't run most software without you manually installing a bunch more system files.
  
  
  
• Those videos explaining how to bypass Windows 11's online account requirement during installation that YouTube has been merrily deleting?  Blame AI.  (The Register)
  
  YouTube hasn't said anything, but when a video is taken down instantly, and an appeal is also rejected instantly, that's AI.
  
  
  
• YouTube was probably too busy to comment on the situation because the people at the top are occupied with laying off the people at the bottom to focus more heavily on the AI that is already destroying the site.  (CNBC)  (archive site)
  
  Oh, good.
  
  
  
• Testing Highpoint's RocketAIC 7608AW.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a PCIe 5.0 card with a PCIe 5.0 switch chip on board and eight PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots.  So it's fast, but it's also very expensive with the bare card priced at $1999.
  
  The fault there seems to be mainly the PCIe 5.0 switch chip.  There don't seem to be any products out there at a reasonable price.
  
  The QNAP 4-port M.2 card that I have costs less than $200 on Amazon, but that's PCIe 3.0.  Anything more recent will cost you an arm and a leg and a kidney and maybe a cornea.
  
  
  
• Israel demanded Amazon and Google use a secret "wink" code to sidestep legal orders.  (The Guardian)
  
  Warrant canaries.  What these subliterate fascists are talking about are warrant canaries.
  
  A warrant canary is a thing that appears to be normal until and unless the company receives a warrant with a gag order attached, the reasoning being that while gag orders are still legal, they can't compel you to keep your pet canary singing.
  
  Particularly if they don't know you have a pet canary.
  
  No fault attaches to Israel in this.  All the blame attaches to the totalitarian regimes that necessitate this sort of warning mechanism.
  
  And their pet media mouthpieces.
  
  
  
• When Canva bought Affinity in March last year, everyone wondered how long it would take them to fuck up a good and affordable multi-platform product range.  It turns out the answer was 19 months.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Good news first: The whole Affinity product range is now free, bundled into a single application simply called Affinity.
  
  Not really a problem news: To get the full functionality you need to pay $120 per year for a Canva subscription, but the only function gated behind the paywall right now is AI slop.  The free version does everything the three Affinity apps could do before, except...
  
  Problem news: Affinity v3 and read but not write Affinity v2 files.  If you use the new app there's no going back, unless you re-export to a third-party format and lose internal history.
  
  It could have been much worse, but they could also not have done this at all.
  
  
  
• A new mathematical proof debunks the idea that the universe is a simulation except it does nothing of the fucking sort.  (Phys.org)

  "It has been suggested that the universe could be simulated.  If such a simulation were possible, the simulated universe could itself give rise to life, which in turn might create its own simulation.  This recursive possibility makes it seem highly unlikely that our universe is the original one, rather than a simulation nested within another simulation," says Dr. Faizal.  "This idea was once thought to lie beyond the reach of scientific inquiry.  However, our recent research has demonstrated that it can, in fact, be scientifically addressed."

  No it hasn't.

  The team demonstrated that even this information-based foundation cannot fully describe reality using computation alone.  They used powerful mathematical theorems - including Gödel's incompleteness theorem-to prove that a complete and consistent description of everything requires what they call "non-algorithmic understanding."

  Yes, that's cute.  But we already have Gödel's incompleteness theorems (there's two of them) and this doesn't seem to tell us anything new at all - just a limit in the ability to determine the truth of certain mathematical statements.
  
  The second problem, though, is that no-one has ever shown that "non-algorithmic understanding" exists, could possibly exist, or has any kind of clear definition.

  The team's conclusion is clear and marks an important scientific achievement, says Dr. Faizal.
  
  "Any simulation is inherently algorithmic - it must follow programmed rules," he says.

  There's just one small problem here: This is completely false.
  
  
  
• Speaking of every game that comes along Escape from Duckov, a combat game involving ducks written by a five-person team in China, has sold two million copies in two weeks, while western titles with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars continue to flounder.
  
  Just a month ago, Megabonk, written by a one-man team, sold a million copies in two weeks...  While western titles with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars continued to flounder.
  
  And before that it was Silksong, written by three guys in Australia, selling 6 million copies, and before that it was Schedule 1, written by just one guy in Australia, selling 5 million copies.
  
  It starts to feel like the established video game companies are doing something wrong.
  
  
  

• Meanwhile Nintendo's patent on capturing monsters and putting them in your pocket, which the company planned to use as a legal bludgeon against Palworld, a game where you capture monsters and put them in your pocket, has been rejected by the Japanese patent office for being "boring and stupid".  (MSN)
  
  Actually they just said the patent lacked originality, which of course it fucking does because Nintendo waited thirty years before trying to patent it.
   
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, November 01 2025 11:42 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, November 02 2025 02:32 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 02 2025 07:10 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, November 02 2025 01:22 PM (rcPLc)

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