What is that?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?

Monday, April 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 April 2026

Break Fast And Move Things Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • Apple continues to roll out device-level age verification.  (9to5Mac)

    First Britain, now Singapore and South Korea.  Though they do use the age of your Apple / iTunes account to calculate that, and mine is at least 14 years old, and you have to be 13 to have an Apple account, making me 27.

    Good to know.

    Also, this is only if you want to download "mature content" through Apple services, and why the hell would anyone do that?


  • Apple has just approved drivers to let users attach external GPUs to Macs.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Given that there are now zero Macs that support internal GPUs, this is kind of a big deal.

    Because the alternative would be to just install the driver without Apple's approval.


  • Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold.  (Jeffrey Snover)

    Charles Petzold wrote the seminal book Programming Windows.

    In 1988.


  • The XFX Swift Radeon RX 9060 XT OC Gaming Edition is $460 on Amazon.  (WCCFTech)

    That's a 16GB model, so the MSRP is $350.  Given the clusterfrog of current hardware prices, that might not seem too bad.

    But in Australia right now, you can pick up that exact model on Amazon for the equivalent of $310 before tax.  I have to pay that tax (10% GST), but you don't.

    Not sure if you can order from Amazon Australia in the US, or if it just laughs in your face and redirects you.


Musical Interlude






Disclaimer: Yes, that's precisely what it's about.

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Post contains 377 words, total size 4 kb.

Sunday, April 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 April 2026

Bug Buggy Bugger Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Musical Interlude






Disclaimer: The red light just means your computer is on fire.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:25 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 585 words, total size 6 kb.

Saturday, April 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 April 2026

Plasmotoxosis Edition

Top Story

  • Half of planned US datacenter builds have been delayed or canceled.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Unfortunately this does not represent a collapse in the AI industry - not yet, anyway - but a shortage in key electrical distribution components thanks to the ongoing trade war with China, something that will be resolved relatively quickly as other countries gleefully pick China's bones clean.  Metaphorically.


Tech News



Musical Interlude



Everyone's favourite anticommunist angel is back.  The Saga of Tanya the Misunderstood returns this July, after 97 long years away.


For real.



Disclaimer: Close only counts in hand grenades and proximity fuses.

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Post contains 405 words, total size 5 kb.

Friday, April 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 April 2026

Problems R Us Edition

Top Story

  • houston@nasa.gov, we have a problem.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The crew of the Artemis II mission - basically retreading the path of Apollo 10, 97 years ago - ran into an issue that didn't happen last time: The spacecraft's computer has two instances of Microsoft Outlook running, and neither one works.

    At least that's better than unidentified floating poop (though we may yet come to that) or a Main B Bus Undervolt.


  • Speaking of things not working those new LG-made 1Hz laptop display panels have been put to the test and they don't.  Don't not work, that is.  They work exceptionally well.  (Tom's Hardware)

    These displays are designed to automatically lower the refresh rate to as little as 1Hz (from a maximum of 120Hz) when the user is looking at a static screen, since the constant refresh cycle is a major power draw.

    Tested in Dell's latest XPS 14 model (which I think is the first laptop shipping with these panels) a battery life test simulating simple web browsing with the screen brightness set to 150 nits saw the laptop lasting 43 hours.  That's three times longer than Apple's M5 MacBook Air running with the same settings.

    Apple's CPUs are more power-efficient than Intel's so heaver workloads handed the win to the Air, but the new display panel certainly proved itself.

Tech News


Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: No, Houston, the poop is not floating.  It's worse than that.

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Post contains 700 words, total size 7 kb.

Thursday, April 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 April 2026

Artemisial Edition

Top Story

Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Well, that's a little annoying.

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Post contains 627 words, total size 7 kb.

Wednesday, April 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 April 2026

Bunny Edition

Top Story

  • Anthropic's Claude Code developer tool leaked.  (Dev.To)

    Which...  Well, so what?  You can download it.  Countless thousands of people have.  I have.  Anyone who wanted to put in the effort to pick it apart could have done so.

    Anthropic left a debug option set it one release and that made all the source files visible, but that just made it easier.

    The real brains - Anthropic's AI models like Sonnet and Opus - run safely on their servers and haven't leaked anywhere.

    If you're interested though it's available on GitHub.


  • If you want to run your own LLM and not just local tools that talk to a remote server somewhere Bonsai from PrismML might be of interest.  (PrismML)

    Because the 1.7 billion parameter model runs in 240MB of memory - yes, M, not G - and churns through 130 tokens per second on an iPhone 17.

    Which uses noticeably less power than a rack full of high-end graphics cards.

    Bonsai 8B uses 1.15GB of RAM.

    While it doesn't lead in test scores, it's being tested against 16GB models, which require an entirely different class of hardware.  It would be interesting to see how a 70 billion parameter model would perform on the same tests if it's possible to perform the same trick - quantising the model down from half-precision (16 bits) per parameter to 1 bit with error correction.


Tech News

Musical Interlude

Okay, who ate the musical interlude?



Oh, there it is.



Disclaimer: It definitely wasn't me.  Burp.

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Post contains 481 words, total size 5 kb.

Tuesday, March 31

Geek

Daily News Stuff 31 March 2026

Thanks For The Memories Edition

Top Story

Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: No beans.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:46 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 317 words, total size 4 kb.

Monday, March 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 March 2026

Three Pints Of Vector Bosons Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Beans.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 212 words, total size 3 kb.

Sunday, March 29

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 March 2026

Spin Gauge Edition

Top Story

  • DDR5 RAM prices have dipped slightly following Google's TurboQuant announcement that allows AI models to run in a fraction of the amount of memory.  (Notebook Check)

    While TurboQuant is real and does substantially reduce the amount of memory taken up for quantized vector database used to store LLM weights while - and this is the trick - not noticeably increasing noise in the models, any connection with commodity DDR5 memory pricing is best expressed in the polar co-ordinate system that TurboQuant is built on.

    By which I mean it is imaginary.


  • Meanwhile the third horseshoe of the Tech Apocalypse has dropped with SSD pricing headed into orbit.  (YouTube)

    Thanks Steve.

    This has been expected since DRAM prices headed the same way starting in November, but it was delayed by the large volume of devices already in the retail channel.

    Now reality has hit, hard, with prices doubling and further increases likely.  The video notes that spot prices have increased ninefold, though that doesn't mean that drive prices will increase by the same amount.

    What it does mean is that the smaller manufacturers who didn't have existing long-term contracts have just been wiped out, while the companies making the NAND flash chips - Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix, again, plus Western Digital, Kioxia, and China's YTMC, can set whatever prices they choose.

    (The second horseshoe was the graphics card market, though that has been muted so far unless you were looking to buy an RTX 5070 Ti or higher.  Prices of AMD and Intel cards have increased a little, but nothing like the devastation that has hit the memory market.)


Tech News

  • What if the bubble bursts?  (Financial Times)  (archive site)

    That would be bad for OpenAI which is 100% bubble and good for Apple which is close to 0% bubble.

    As for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, they'll survive either way, and Anthropic and xAI will likely do fine on a smaller scale than they had hoped.


  • The latest ClickFix attack on MacOS installs Python malware compiled using Nuitka.  (Bleeping Computer)

    ClickFix is an anagram which means "I'm too lazy to hack you myself but I think you're dumb enough do do the work for me".  As the article shows, it presents a page telling users to open a terminal session and execute a command that will download and install the malware in question.

    Where upon it steals all your passwords and the contents of any crypto wallets while laughing so hard it makes itself sick.



Tech News




Disclaimer: Yeah, some rain would be nice.

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Post contains 498 words, total size 4 kb.

Saturday, March 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 March 2026

Stinky Sty Rails Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • LG is shipping 1Hz display panels for laptops.  (PC World)

    That is they can refresh as little as once per second, if you're just sitting there looking at a static screen - or up to 120Hz if the display is active.

    Apple's new MacBook Neo has a phone CPU that uses as little as 4W, but still has fairly mid-tier battery life.  What's draining all that power?  

    You guessed it.

    The panels are already shipping as the default choice in Dell's latest XPS models.


  • SK Hynix, the third of the big three memory manufacturers, is planning a US IPO this year to raise funds for expansion.  (Tech Crunch)

    The share offering is expected to be small - about 2% of the total stock - but will value the company at $500 to $700 billion.

    SK Hynix reported 50% revenue growth and 100% growth in profits in 2025 - and only the last couple of months of that were in the DRAM Apocalypse - so I don't think they'll have a hard time finding buyers.


  • Meanwhile production constraints at TSMC are pushing customers to look to Samsung for their chips.  (WCCFTech)

    Not that TSMC is having problems, just that demand is outstripping supply.

    To the point that Tesla is building its own chips foundry.


  • On the AI side of things, it's not all slop.  (The Register)

    Recent reports of open-source projects - including Linux - being overwhelmed by useless AI-generated bug reports have ameliorated into useful AI-generated bug reports.

    Nobody knows exactly why the change, but this is something I am personally in favour of.  Testing in-depth is time-consuming and painfully boring, precisely the sort of job you'd give to an junior developer with clinical OCD in the good old days.

    Now everyone has a junior developer with clinical levels of OCD.

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: And lo, the winds did indeed wind.

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Post contains 398 words, total size 4 kb.

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