What happened?
Twelve years!
You hit me with a cricket bat!
Ha! Twelve years!

Saturday, November 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 November 2025

None Dare Call It A Bubble Edition

Top Story

  • In our Daily Dose of Tech Executives are Idiots Google tells employees it must double capacity every six months to meet AI demand.  (Ars Technica)

    It's not just college students who can't do math.
    During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC.  Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides showing the company needs to scale "the next 1000x in 4-5 years."
    That would put Google Cloud Services at around $60 trillion in revenue per year, more than double the entire US GDP.

    Where do you expect the money to come from to fund this insanity?
    While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking "for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," he told employees during the meeting.
    Oh.  Magic.
    "It won’t be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we’re going to get there."
    No, you're not, and everyone knows you're not.

    Progress over the last seven years, at truly massive cost, has been around 60% better AI performance per watt annually.  Chip improvements, algorithm improvements, and manufacturing improvements combined.

    You're asking your team to boost that to 300% overnight.


Tech News

  • SK Hynix is planning to increase memory production at its facility in Icheon, South Korea, from 20,000 to 140,000 wafers per month.  (WCCFTech)

    This won't even scratch the surface if the AI bubble keeps demanding hardware on its current trajectory.

    And the memory makers aren't going to build new factories any faster because only three of them survived when the last bubble burst.


  • Speaking of idiot tech executives, the CEO of the world's most popular game, Roblox, sat down for an interview with the New York Times.  It did not go well.  (Kotaku)

    Asked how the company was dealing with its pedophile problem, CEO David Baszucki responded:
    "We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well."
    Remarkably, things actually went downhill from there.


  • Speaking of not being able to do math the International Association of Cryptologic Research has cancelled its annual leadership election after...  Oh.  (Ars Technica)
    "Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share," the IACR said.  "As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election."
    An entirely understandable mistake, assuming all these people are idiots.


  • What killed Perl?  (Entropic Thoughts)

    Mostly, Perl.


  • WhatsApp allows anyone who knows your phone number to look up your public details on the app, assuming you have an account.

    So what's to prevent someone from just iterating through all the 63 billion of so potential phone numbers in the world and finding all the people with WhatsApp accounts?

    Nothing.  (The Register)

    That's the problem with systems on this scale.  The researchers were probing the system with 100 million API requests per hour, for weeks, from a single IP address, and nobody noticed.


  • Qualcomm bought open source hobbyist hardware maker Arduino six weeks ago. At the time I predicted it might not mean imminent doom since Qualcomm is not as bad as, say, Broadcom.  (The Register)

    And they've already fucked it.  Though it seems the TOS clause about reverse-engineering was already in place, the rest of the changes pushed through yesterday are a complete train wreck for its customer base.



Frieren Interlude


They've even got Milet back for the closing theme.

Airs starting January 16.


Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Gotta be cool to be kind.

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Friday, November 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 November 2025

Turbo Intercal Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: I KNOW!

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Thursday, November 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 November 2025

Sparkly Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude


There was an official music video released for Eye in the Sky, but for the life of me I cannot find it online.



Disclaimer: Ptui.

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Wednesday, November 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 November 2025

Packagisation Edition

Top Story

  • So, Cloudflare.  (Cloudflare)

    Cloudflare carries something like 20% of the world's web traffic, but for a few hours late last night (my time) or early yesterday morning (US time) it wasn't carrying much of anything, because it stopped working.

    Six times.

    Not a DNS problem like the recent outages at Azure and Amazon, but a fumbled configuration file change like that massive Crowdstrike outage sixteen months ago.


  • And it's going to keep happening, so buckle up.  (The Verge)  (archive site)

    I run traditional unshared physical servers at a smaller datacenter, not bound to any of the major players.  On the one hand, a few years ago that datacenter had a fire and while the fire didn't cause any damage, the same could not be said for the sprinkler system mandated by local fire codes.  (Yes, a sprinkler system.  In a datacenter.)

    On the other hand, not one of these big global outages have affected us.


Tech News



Hold My Beer Interlude


160 proof beer?  What could possibly go wrong?


Musical Interlude


Disclaimer: Everything alright there, Mose?

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Tuesday, November 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 November 2025

Ambient Everything Edition

Top Story

  • If you gaze too long into CoreWeave, CoreWeave gazes back at you.  (The Verge)  (archive site)

    Some actually sound reporting from The Verge's usually reliably crazy Elizabeth Lopatto, about deeply dubious datacenter holding company CoreWeave.
    But as I began to look more closely at the company, I began feeling like I’d accidentally stumbled on an eldritch horror. CoreWeave is saddled with massive debt and, except in the absolute best-case scenario of fast AI adoption, has no obvious path toward profitability.  There are some eyebrow-raising accounting choices.  And then, naturally, there are the huge insider sales of CoreWeave stock.
    Yes, naturally there are those.

    Wait, what?
    After I unfocused my eyes a little, I realized CoreWeave did make a horrible kind of sense: It’s a tool to hedge other companies' risks and juice their profits.  It's taking on the risk and the costs of building data centers that bigger tech companies can then rent while they build their own data centers which may very well wind up competing with CoreWeave.  What’s more, it’s part of a whole stable of companies that are propping up demand for the behemoth of the AI boom: Nvidia.
    The usual names pop up in the list of investors in CoreWeave.  Nvidia is a major investor and is selling the company billions of dollars worth of GPUs, which CoreWeave then provides access to for customers like OpenAI and Microsoft, which are also major investors.

    It also has billions in outstanding loans at variable interest rates.

    It's not a bubble.


     
  • Meanwhile Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is deeply worried about the power a handful of unelected people like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have to shape the future of AI.  (Business Insider)

    Deeply worried, I tell you.  Deeply.


Tech News


Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Yeah, I read it as $5.3 billion for a moment.

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Monday, November 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 November 2025

Who's On First Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude


That's not your PC or your internet stuttering near the start, unfortunately that's the video itself.  Only for a couple of seconds, though, the rest is fine.



Disclaimer: It's lynxes and rabbits all over again.

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Sunday, November 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 November 2025

Turn The Beep Around Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • I was reading through the service manual for the HP 9121 disk drive that I found on Bitsavers - it rained this weekend - and it turns out it did in fact run at 600 rpm, twice as fast as was common for other 3.5" drives.

    I then asked Grok to check some details for me, and was swiftly reminded that Grok is less reliable than random half-remembered facts I read in a long out-of-print publication twenty years ago.

    I asked if there were any historical 10-bit processor architectures, and it gave me a couple of examples from the late 60s and early 70s.  It even gave me the detailed opcode format of one of the models and a bunch of links for further details.

    The machines were real.

    They were not 10 bit, though; they were 16 bits, which is hardly a rarity.

    The opcode format was entirely fictional, which is actually a little impressive.  Very minimal but it could have worked.

    The links were also entirely fictional.


  • Some models of Intel's Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs have more cores.  (WCCFTech)

    The 250K, which replaces the 245K, and the 270K, which replaces the 265K, both add 4 efficiency cores, taking them from 6 + 8 to 6 + 12 and 8 + 12 to 8 + 16 respectively.

    The high-end 290K is basically a 285K but 1.8% faster...  And also just 1.8% faster than the new 270K making it ENTIRELY POINTLESS.


  • Copy-and-paste is now the leading cause of corporate data leaks.  (SCWorld)

    Because people are copying and pasting data into AI to get it to lie to them.


  • Google has filed a sweeping lawsuit against one of those companies that are constantly spamming you with fake SMS messages.  (BGR)
    Google's legal action is comprehensive and is intent on completely dismantling Lighthouse's operations.  The search giant is bringing claims under RICO, the Lanham Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
    I'm not sure yet how it will turn out that this is a bad thing.


  • No uncertainty with this one, though: A group of developers has been working tirelessly behind the scenes to restore a lost video game AND IT'S FUCKING CONCORD.  (Aftermath)

    Concord came out in August last year and quickly achieved notoriety for two reasons: First, it cost $400 million and took eight years to develop, and second, it made absolutely no money whatsoever because it was so bad Sony shut down the servers and refunded everyone after just two weeks.
    Concord wasn't a bad game
    Yes it was.  Objectively so.  It cost $400 million to make, sold just 25,000 copies in total at $40, and was gone in just two weeks.

    Until now.  Until now, you bastards.


  • The International Energy Agency now predicts we will reach Peak Oil by 2050 maybe.  (CNBC)

    Okay.


  • Scientists have confirmed what is inside the Moon.  (Science Alert)

    Cheese sauce?
    A thorough investigation published in May 2023 found that the inner core of the Moon is, in fact, a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron.
    Ah.  Cheese and garlic sauce.  An important distinction.

    Thanks scientists.


  • Turkey is stuffed, seasoned, and in the oven.  We'll see how it goes.

Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: That HP 9121 270k disk drive cost nearly $1200 in 1982.  Which used to be a lot...  And will buy you a whole computer these days so I guess it still is.

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Saturday, November 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 November 2025

Lasers For Fun And Profit Edition

Top Story

Tech News




Incandescent Moon Interlude


There's a name for this: A Nicoll-Dyson laser.  It was proposed in 2005 by James Nicoll for powering spaceships over vast distances.  As he points out in the comments on the video - a rare exception to Rule One* - vaporising planets was never its intended purpose, merely a happy accident.


* Don't read the comments.


Transcendent Teal Interlude


In H. P. Lovecraft's The Color Out of Space he wrote about a strange material that emitted a colour that didn't exist anywhere on the electromagnetic spectrum. That sounds wild, but in fact imaginary colours are real - imaginary, but still real - and you're about to see one.

(Maybe. Some people don't report anything special, but it worked for me and it was rather startling.)


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Turn the laser around.  Please.

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Friday, November 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 November 2025

Tree Turkey Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: It do be like that, except when it don't.

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Thursday, November 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 November 2025

ZFS Implosion Edition

Top Story

  • Valve has followed up on its very popular Steam Deck gaming handheld with a desktop Steam Machine and a wireless Steam Controller.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Like the Steam Deck, the 6" black cube called the Steam Machine is at its heart a PC built on AMD components.  It has a six core Zen 4 CPU, and a 28 core RDNA3 GPU.

    It comes with 16GB of RAM in two DDR5 SODIMMs, 8GB of GGDR6 RAM for the graphics card, and 512GB or 2TB of SSD in an M.2 2230 slot.  There's a vacant M.2 2280 slot to add storage of your own.

    On the I/O front it has HDMI, DisplayPort, one USB-C port, four USB-A ports, and somewhat disappointingly, gigabit Ethernet.

    It also has four built-in antennas for wifi, Bluetooth, and the Steam Controller, and a built-in 300W power supply so you don't need an external brick.  It's cooled by a single 120mm fan.

    And most importantly it comes running SteamOS rather than Windows.

    Give how determined Microsoft is to drive its own users away, I am looking forward to this little device.  It's literally half the speed of my current desktop (which has a 12 core Zen 4 CPU and an RDNA3 graphics card with twice the graphics cores and RAM) but for something that sits quietly in the living room attached to the TV it looks ideal.

    No prices yet.  Shipping "early 2026".


Tech News

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Radio killed the movie star.

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