• OpenAI has announced a deal with the Department of War with - apparently - the same limitations that Anthropic was demanding.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Guess Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, really pissed someone off.
  
  Sam Altman of OpenAI knows when to lie, and sometimes also who to lie to.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Google is building a datacenter in Pine Island, Minnesota, powered by 1.9GW of wind and solar energy and a 300MW battery.  (Interesting Engineering)
  
  Before you ask, yes, the author of the article does know that the power delivered by a battery is only half the data.  It's designed to deliver 300MW for 100 hours, which makes it possibly the largest single installation in the world.
  
  Also it's an iron-air battery which I didn't know they had working at scale.  It produces energy by rusting iron, and recharges by unrusting it.  It's heavy, less efficient that common lithium batteries, and requires a source of water and air to keep the cycle going.  And I'm not sure if they've ironed (sorry) out the durability issues.
  
  But air and water aren't hard to find in most places a datacenter might be build, and importantly it's cheap.
  
  
  
• Well, maybe not in orbit where SpaceX is planning to build its new datacenters and where Reflect Orbital has approval approval to place a 50-foot mirror as a test of its daylight-on-demand service.  (MSN)
  
  The idea being that if you have an area that's dark and you need it to be less dark, a constellation of 50,000 orbital satellites will make daylight a phone call away.  The mirrors will be orbiting 400 miles up so the light that reaches the ground will be very spread out and not remotely as bright as full daylight, but even moonlight-on-demand could be worthwhile.
  
  The article is by the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, so it's overly verbose and spends most of those words whining.
  
  
  
• Myrient, a 390TB archive of computer and video games and...  Stuff...  Is going offline at the end of the month.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The maintainer cites rising costs - around $6000 per month - thanks in part to AI, and also people abusing the service and creating paywalled sites that take money for the service he provides for free.
  
  
  
• India has blocked online database service Supabase, popular with vibe coding and with the hackers who siphon off the inevitably exposed person data afterwards, because reasons.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Reasons India did not bother to tell anyone about.
  
  
  
• South Korea's tax agency lost $4.8 million from a photo of a wallet.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The photo was of a Ledger crypto storage device seized in a raid, an item normally secure enough and perfectly safe to photograph and publicise.
  
  But right next to the device was a handwritten note containing a mnemonic for the wallet address and private key.  These are commonly used with various blockchains and machine-readable, so it didn't take long for someone to empty the wallet out, even while it was sitting in the tax agency's vault.
  
  
  
• AMD still doesn't support its latest FSR4 upscaling technology on RDNA on older RDNA2 and RDNA3 graphics cards - like my Radeon 7800 XT - even though we know it works because they accidentally published the source code for the drivers that make it work.
  
  OptiScalar does that now.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's a bit of fiddling around so you might be better off just buying an Nvidia graphics card, or even an RDNA4 card like the 9070 XT, but it does work.
  
  
  
• Apple is poised to deliver a new MacBook Nothing.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Not Pro, not Air, just a cheap-for-Apple base model.
  
  The question is, what are they going to cut to hit the target price?  The article discusses configurations with 8GB of RAM, 128GB of SSD, and possibly a low-quality screen, all of which sound awful.
  
  
  
• Why does the Asus ProArt PX13 have a 60Hz display?  (Notebook Check)
  
  Seems an odd pairing with the Ryzen 395 CPU (16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores) and 128GB of RAM - and the anticipated €4000 price.  Particularly when my current laptop cost a sixth of that and has a high-resolution 14" OLED panel running at 120Hz.
  
  And the answer is that my laptop has a 14" screen, and the Asus has a 13" screen, and nobody makes high-resolution 13" OLED panels that run faster than 60Hz, while at 14" and above they've become common even on modestly-priced systems.  And professional artists, the target audience of the ProArt range, don't need high refresh rates so much as colour fidelity, which that panel delivers.