• Memory and storage company Crucial is throwing in the towel after thirty years in the business.  Sort of.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're not going to stop producing stuff.  They're a division of Micron.
  
  They're just going to stop producing stuff that you can buy because they can make more money out of the AI bubble.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• It was India. (AppleInsider)
  
  Who rusted first, that is.
  
  India insisted that Apple pre-install its state-sponsored spyware on all new iPhones sold in the country.
  
  Apple said not just no, but fuck no.
  
  India said yeah, okay.
  
  
  
• The CEO of IBM says that spending in the AI boom is obviously unsustainable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Current buildout plans would require industry profits of $800 billion per year just to make payment on the interest.
  
  Current industry profits are less than zero.  Significantly less.
  
  
  
• An AI tool for lawyers produced by a billion dollar company had no security.  (Alex Schapiro)
  
  As in, literally none.  Anyone could access any document.
  
  We're all going to die, aren't we?
  
  
  
• Microsoft is lowering its AI sales targets because nobody is buying.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  It's hard to sell what you can't even give away for free.
  
  
  
• Case in point: Programming language Zig is leaving GitHub because Microsoft's obsession with AI is tanking the site's reliability.  (The Register)

  Jeremy Howard, co-founder of Answer.AI and Fast.AI, said in a series of social media posts that users' claims about GitHub Actions being in a poor state of repair appear to be justified.

  "The bug," he wrote, "was implemented in a way that, very obviously to nearly anyone at first glance, uses 100 percent CPU all the time, and will run forever unless the task happens to check the time during the correct second."

  A fix for the bug was proposed by a user.
  
  The fix was correct.
  
  The fix was ignored, and the comment thread was closed by AI.
  
  

• Windows 11 is barely ahead of Windows 10 in install base, despite Microsoft stabbing Windows 10 in the back, the front, the sides, and from several other directions.  (The Register)
  
  It's hard to sell what you can't even give away for free.
  
  

A Wild Last Boss Appeared started out a cut above the usual reincarnated-in-the-game-world isekai slop, and continues to stand out, with two reveals in the latest episode which both offer novel twists and suggest that the author actually thought about things.  (And actually a third one, which feels like and I'll just throw this in as well while I'm at it.)

Wikipedia seems confused as to how many volumes there are of the light novels and manga, and Amazon has trashed its Japanese site for foreign visitors, so I have no idea where it goes from here.

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, December 04 2025 09:37 PM (oJgNG)

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It's in experimental mode right now while I update the page to make it look a bit more substantial and track down a problem with long load times.

And I just tracked down the problem.

Vanilla Backport, which conveniently bundles together backports of feature releases since 1.20.1 (in this case, since it's a 1.20.1 mod), uses a library mod called Platform.

Platform, according to the load time profiler mod I'm using, takes almost twelve minutes to load.

All the other 215 mods combined?  Six minutes.

That's on my older (Zen 3) laptop running in silent (low power) mode, so a good computer will handle it in half the time, but swapping that one mod out for five separate backport mods reduced the load time from just under twelve minutes to just over six.

And now I need to test again.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 05 2025 03:19 AM (1TiGW)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 05 2025 06:41 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 05 2025 06:49 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 05 2025 06:51 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 05 2025 07:39 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 05 2025 10:18 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 05 2025 10:34 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 05 2025 01:48 PM (PiXy!)

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• AMD is reportedly planning price hikes to its graphics cards to cover soaring memory costs: An extra $20 for 8GB models and $40 for 16GB models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is not all that bad.
  
  
  
• AMD has also - reportedly increased prices for its CPUs, which don't contain any DRAM.  (Overclock3D)
  
  To add to the mystery, while this increase is supposed to have already happened, nobody seems to know which models are affected or what the increases are.  Indeed, the whole thing might just be the end of Black Friday discounts at the distributor level.

• The Trump administration is planning to take a $150 million equity stake in startup xLight, which aims to make better EUV lasers to chip production.  (WSJ)  (archive site)
  
  Current EUV fab equipment uses 13.5nm lasers.  xLight is planning to bring that down to just 2nm, which is pretty inarguably an x-ray more than UV light.
  
  This takes money from the 2022 CHIPS Act, which apparently still has $6 billion available to spend on chip fabrication facilities.
  
  
  
• San Francisco is suing ten food companies for producing food.  (NBC)
  
  "How very dare you?!", squeaked city attorney David Chiu.
  
  
  
• Bending Spoons is buying Eventbrite for $500 million.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Bending Spoons is assembling quite the collection of has-been companies here, including Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, and AOL, which you may have heard of.
  
  
  
• Apple has said that it won't pre-install India's mandatory spyware on its phones.  (Reuters)
  
  I'm game.  We'll see who rusts first.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 03 2025 11:01 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 03 2025 11:07 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, December 04 2025 02:20 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 04 2025 07:49 AM (e0fX0)

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• 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.

• 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.

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, December 03 2025 11:20 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, December 03 2025 11:24 AM (rcPLc)

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• Would you like to buy a clue...  For $1 million?  (AP)
  
  There's a sculpture called Kryptos at the CIA offices in McLean, Virginia, which contains four panels of encrypted text.  Three have been decrypted by puzzle-solvers, but the fourth has defied all attempts since the installation was created in 1990.
  
  The artist, now aged 80, has auctioned off his notes and clues to the contents of that fourth panel...  For close to $1 million.

• LLVM-MOS is a fork of the LLVM compiler suite for the 6502.  (LLVM-MOS)
  
  It supports everything from the Ohio Scientific Challenger 1, which shipped in 1976, to the Commander X16, which shipped as a developer edition last year and is available for purchase right now.
  
  
  
• Google Antigravity just wiped my D drive.  (Reddit)
  
  Not my D drive.  It's AI shit and I don't give AI shit access to anything I don't want destroyed.
  
  
  
• Looking at a water-cooled RISC-V AI workstation.  (The Register)
  
  It costs $12,000, but it has four AI accelerator cards each with four 800Gb Ethernet ports.  So if nothing else it's an astonishingly fast router.
  
  
  
• The Lotus Diplomat is a double-wide Blackberry.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It has a 5" 2560x1920 screen - and a 1" secondary screen - and a QWERTY keyboard with a number row at the top and a function/punctuation row at the bottom.  It's powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite and equipped with 24GB of RAM and 1.5TB of storage.
  
  Price is not mentioned, and you might be best off not asking.
  
  
  
• AI is transforming spacecraft propulsion - and may lead to nuclear-powered rockets.  (Fast Company)  (archive site)
  
  No it isn't, and no it won't.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, December 02 2025 02:11 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, December 02 2025 06:45 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, December 02 2025 07:24 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 02 2025 11:33 AM (PiXy!)

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