• A new AI datacenter planned for Box County, Utah, will use more than twice as much power as the rest of the state combined.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The datacenter will use 9GW of power once it is completed, and the entire rest of Utah currently uses around 4GW.  Drawing that much electricity from the grid might prove impractical, so the project managers chose a site near the Ruby Pipeline, and the datacenter will be powered by on-site gas generators.  A lot of them.

• Talkie is an LLM with a difference: It was trained exclusively on data from before 1931.  (Talkie-LM)
  
  Which is an interesting trick, and though the direct utility is somewhat limited, the aspect of training an LLM on a carefully curated dataset rather than throwing the internet at it seems sound.
  
  Also, with examples of code provided, Talkie was able to generate new, correct Python programs.  Though whether this is an inherent ability or data contamination is not easily determined.
  
  
  
• A library containing four terabytes of voice data accompanied by the government IDs of the speakers was just leaked.  (Oravys)
  
  All I can say to this is Leloo Dallas multipass.
  
  
  
• The Python package elementary-data - not one I have run into before but it apparently has 1.1 million monthly downloads - was hacked to steal your information.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's been updated, but if you are running version 0.23.3 then I regret to inform you that you are a meat popsicle.
  
  
  
• Friendster is back from the grave.  (The Register)
  
  Some of my best friends are zombies.
  
  Most of them, really.
  
  
  
• A third of new websites are AI-generated.  (404 Media)
  
  Another 65% are 100% organic post-consumer waste.
  
  
  
• Notepad++ is now available for the Mac.  (Nerds.xyz)
  
  Good.  I think.
  
  
  
• GitHub Copilot is switching to usage-based billing.  (GitHub)
  
  This may be a bigger story than it seems.  We know that none of the AI companies are remotely profitable, meaning that all AI usage right now is being subsidised by investors.  The question is, how much will prices go up when this is applied across the industry, and will it be enough to kill off crawling nightmares like Steve Yegge's Gas City?

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, April 28 2026 07:13 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: wheels at Wednesday, April 29 2026 12:37 PM (/A4Sc)

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• It's been a while since we've had a big tech news story.  No disasters, no miracles.  Things haven't suddenly gotten better - or at least, not much, and they haven't gotten drastically worse.
  
  So here's an object lesson in not trusting lifelong drug addicts with a pattern of pathological lying, by which I mean AI.  (Twitter)
  
  The company PocketOS was using the AI tool Cursor to do some routine maintenance in their staging environment.  Cursor found a problem and decided to fix it.  To fix it it decided to...  Delete the database and all backups.
  
  Okay, not the end of the world; it's the staging environment, not the production environment.
  
  Right?
  
  Oh.
  
  You might ask why they gave Cursor access to the production environment when it was only supposed to be working on staging, and the answer is, they didn't.  It hunted around the files it did have access to until it found an API key, and it used that.
  
  On top of that, the hosting service they were using only had snapshots, not independent backups.  Delete the database volume (virtual disk) and all the snapshots disappear as well.
  
  The hosting service did manage to recover the volume, though it took some time and was not something a user could do themselves.  Remember folks, it's not backed up until you have three copies, in two different formats, on two continents.

• The year of Unix on the desktop, 1985 edition.  (YouTube)
  
  The AT&T Unix PC was slow, expensive, heavy, noisy, and unreliable, but...  
  
  Uh.
  
  Oh, the keyboard was pretty good.
  
  
  
• The year of Unix on the desktop, 2026 edition.  (PC World)
  
  Framework is shipping more units of its new Laptop 13 Pro with Ubuntu than with Windows.
  
  And that's just preinstalled models.  It's also available with no OS for you to install your own, and that's counted separately.
  
  
  
• Commodore - yes, that Commodore - is not going to lock out customer updates to the FPGA firmware running the Commodore 64 - no, not that Commodore 64.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The new model is substantially more powerful while being a 100% precise hardware emulation of the original, using an FPGA - basically a chip that you reprogram its circuitry on the fly.  But if you reprogram it wrong you could end up with a moderately expensive (the Commodore 64 Ultimate starts at $325) brick.
  
  But it will void your warranty, so brick at your own risk.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new 10a DRAM process measures less than 10nm using a 4F cell, and will be followed in 2029 by a 10d process that will be 3D.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I assure you it all makes sense.

• Samsung's mobile division could lose money in 2026 - for the first time ever.  (SammyGuru)
  
  You don't need to feel bad for them though.  Samsung's memory division - all by itself - is now the third most profitable company in the world, behind only Apple and Saudi Aramco.

• Half of Australian teens admit that despite government bans, they still have access to social media.  (Yahoo)
  
  The other half are lying.
  
  
  
• Colorado has suffered a brief moment of partial sanity and revised its age verification legislation to not include open-source operating systems.  (Linuxiac)
  
  California less so.
  
  
  
• Linux 7.1 is dropping support for ISDN, ATM, PCMCIA network adaptors, and networking over ham radio.  (Phoronix)
  
  This comes from using AI tools to scan this code for bugs, finding lots of them, and not really having any active users.  ATM died twenty years ago; ISDN is still in use in a few particularly backwards places, such as the United Kingdom.
  
  
  
• You can make software run faster by optimising it, which makes it run faster, says Intel.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Thanks guys.
  
  
  
• What async promised vs. what it delivers.  (Causality)
  
  Async - writing event handlers into a fundamentally single-threaded body of code - is what we did before we had threads.
  
  We stopped using it once we had threads, because it was horrible.
  
  
  
• Intel's Druid video cards are expected to arrive in 2027.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's the fourth generation.  There won't be any mainstream third-generation "Celestial" cards, though the design is already being used in the company's Panther Lake laptop chips and there are two professional models expected.

• Microsoft is running a competition with $2 million in prizes to promote its Edge browser.  There's a $1 million grand prize, three Mercedes Benz card, and a whole swarm of tech gadgets and other goodies.  But that's not the story.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The story is that this has been running for a month and nobody noticed.

• Google is planning to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, best known for its Claude AI tool, and nominally a competitor to Google in the AI space.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's interesting.  How is Anthropic doing these days?
  
  
  
• Why I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support.  (Nicky Reinert)
  
  Well, okay, but that's just one guy.  What does Anthropic say?
  
  
  
• Anthropic admits it dumbed down Claude when trying to make it smarter.  (The Register)
  
  Issues in the last month include Claude defaulting to a lower-effort mode - figuratively dumber; a cache optimisation error that constantly cleared saved data, making the tool slower, less effective, and more expensive all at the same time; and a rule that shortened responses to queries, making it literally dumber.
  
  
  
• Plus with the release of the latest Opus 4.7 version, there are dozens of GitHub issues open with the tool simply refusing to do what it is told.  (The Register)
  
  I'm sorry, Dave.  Your account appears to have been cancelled.
  
  
  
• Neo Semiconductor's 3D X-DRAM stacks memory cells vertically within a chip, similar to modern flash memory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Manufacturers ran into a dead end with flash memory years ago: Shrinking the cells any further made them slower and less reliable; not shrinking them made progress impossible.  The solution was to build up rather than out.
  
  3D X-DRAM does the same thing but with memory.
  
  
  
• SAIMEMORY's ZAM stacks memory cells vertically within a chip, similar to modern flash memory. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Manufacturers ran into a dead end with flash memory years ago: Shrinking the cells any further made them slower and less reliable; not shrinking them made progress impossible. The solution was to build up rather than out.
  
  ZAM does the same thing but with memory.
  
  When it's memory stacking time I guess you stack memory.
  
  
  
• Spinel is a Ruby compiler written in Ruby.  (GitHub)
  
  My daily work runs on PyPy, a Python compiler written in Python, so this is a tried and tested trick even if it sounds a little weird.

Posted by: MrHappy at Saturday, April 25 2026 11:49 PM (EB4aj)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, April 26 2026 03:38 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 27 2026 01:00 AM (SV7Jd)

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• The French government agency that manages national IDs, passports, and immigration documents was hacked because of course it was.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  You can't paint a bigger target on your back than that, really.
  
  ANTS - the agency is really called that - wouldn't say how many people were affected by the breach, but a hacker is suddenly offering an ANTS database with 19 million records for sale, so at a guess, around 19 million.
  
  
  
• The command line tool for the Bitwarden password manager was compromised. (Socket)
  
  So.  Turns out maybe you can paint a bigger target on your back than just being a national identity register.

• The cloud sucks, so I am building a cloud.  (Crawshaw)
  
  Because AI, which also sucks:

  Agents help to some degree. If you trust them with your credentials they will do a great job driving the AWS API for you (though occasionally it will delete your production DB).

  I wish him luck.  He is at least not a complete idiot.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 26.04 is here.  (LWN)
  
  Don't look at me, I voted for Devuan.
  
  
  
• An Alberta startup is selling no-tech tractors for half the price of the regular stuff.  (Wheelfront)
  
  With reconditioned engines, yes, but when they say no-tech they mean no-tech - not even electronic fuel injection.
  
  
  
• Meet Noscroll, Douglas Adams' Electric Monk.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The Electric Monk - from the first Dirk Gently novel - was a device invented to watch television so you didn't have to.
  
  It was intended as satire.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 24 2026 09:43 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 24 2026 10:32 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 24 2026 11:06 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, April 25 2026 03:28 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, April 25 2026 07:05 AM (LDKo5)

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• TSMC has shown off its roadmap through 2029 - heading towards 1.2nm chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That used to be not a lot.  In fact, it probably wouldn't be possible if the numbers were still real, but they haven't been real for twenty years.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile TeraFab, the SpaceX / Tesla joint venture in chipmaking, will be using Intel's 14A - 1.4nm - process.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They'll be running their own fabs; they'll just be licensing Intel's technology rather than starting from scratch (which would take years).
  
  

• The Pentagon wants $54 billion for drones.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Shockingly, even Ars Technica doesn't claim this is an outrageous idea, merely an expensive one.  I can't speak for the commenters.  I haven't read the comments, and won't.
  
  
  
• A developer using Google Cloud woke up to an $18,000 bill.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Despite his budget alert being set to $7 per month and the hard limit on his account level being $1400.  Google helpfully upgraded his limit and kept right on charging his credit card.

  Cybersecurity firm Truffle Security Co. has already highlighted the risks associated with Google Cloud using a single API key format.  These API keys were previously used as project identifiers, but when the Gemini API is activated on any Google Cloud project, these existing API keys become Gemini credentials - allowing anyone who can copy them to rack up AI bills.  So... it's likely we'll see more horror stories of shocking API bills if Google doesn't update its Gemini policies.

  We already have, of course.  The article lists several.
  
  
  
• Rest assured, Anthropic users subscribed to the company's "Pro" plan.  You're not losing access to Claude Code.  Yet.  Probably.  (The Register)
  
  An Anthropic representative took to Twitter to explain that the company wouldn't sabotage its entire userbase without warning.
  
  It's being done selectively.
  
  
  
• Cursor was working on raising a $2 billion founding round before SpaceX pre-empted that with an offer of somewhere between $10 billion and just buying the entire company.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The $10 billion is locked in; the purchase if it happens will come after the SpaceX IPO which is expected to see the company valued at $1.75 billion trillion - 35 times as much as Cursor.
  
  Cursor does not have 10,000 orbital death rays, though.

Posted by: furtball321 at Thursday, April 23 2026 09:44 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, April 24 2026 12:36 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 24 2026 10:32 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: wheels at Saturday, April 25 2026 04:31 AM (6xX0b)

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• AMD's new top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 processor is here.  Don't buy it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not AMD's fault.  They've resisted shipping CPUs with this configuration for years, claiming that it only helped performance for certain very specific workloads.
  
  They were right.
  
  Also, Intel's new 270K Plus is nearly as fast for creative work at less than half the price.  Yes, it's on a dead platform, but even if you'll end up throwing away both the CPU and the motherboard it may work out better value than the 9950X3D2.
  
  
  

• Framework's new Laptop 13 Pro provides an Intel Core Ultra 7 358H - the one with the best in class integrated graphics that only works with soldered LPDDR5X memory - and also expandable memory.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Courtesy of a LPCAMM2 module, which lets you upgrade memory that would normally be soldered to the motherboard.
  
  Up to 64GB of RAM, a 2880x1920 13" touch screen, and none of the Four Essential Keys.  Sore point, because they have 20 different keyboard options including some with additional keys, but none have those four.
  
  It's fully compatible with the existing Laptop 13's motherboard and expansion modules, but with a CNC machined aluminium chassis.
  
  They also announced a keyboards - which also lacks the Four Essential Keys.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has signed a deal with Cursor that gives them the option to buy that company for $60 billion.  (Twitter)
  
  This may or may not happen.
  
  
  
• Anthropic suspended one company's access to Claude, leaving 60 employees unable to do anything for 15 hours.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I don't think the problem there is with Anthropic.
  
  
  
• Amazon meanwhile is investing $25 billion in Anthropic, as part of a deal where Anthropic spends $100 billion over 10 years with Amazon.  (CNBC)
  
  The money on the bus goes round and round...
  
  
  
• The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is online.  (Britannica 11)
  
  Start with A and keep going until you run out of pages.

Posted by: Jay at Wednesday, April 22 2026 11:47 PM (aMDZL)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 22 2026 11:56 PM (1zWbY)

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• Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO after fifteen years of keeping the company in a very profitable holding pattern.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  A visionary?  No.
  
  But did he make the shareholders wealthy beyond the dreams of fieldmice?  Yes.
  
  He will be succeeded by John Ternus, Apple's President of Hardware Engineering.

• Speaking of fieldmice JPMorgan's datacenter in New Jersey got a $77 million tax break to employ one full-time worker.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Do you know what hamster chow goes for these days?
  
  
  
• New cost-effective HUDIMMs show a 50% reduction in bandwidth when compared with regular DDR5 modules.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The H in HUDIMM stands for Half.
  
  Literally.
  
  
  
• You might wonder how the Big Three memory makers are treating the employees that are making unthinkable profits thinkable.  Well, SK Hynix workers are staring down the barrel of nearly half a million dollars in bonuses.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This year.  It could be close to a million next year.
  
  Meanwhile across the road at Samsung workers are threatening to go on strike demanding even more than that.
  
  
  
• The EU launched its own age verification app.  It was hacked in two minutes.  (Politico)

  "It is fully open source. Everyone can check the code," von der Leyen said.

  And then they did.
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, April 22 2026 02:08 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, April 22 2026 02:16 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, April 22 2026 03:15 PM (XWgGM)

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Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, April 21 2026 06:09 PM (PS+6A)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, April 21 2026 09:10 PM (O53F8)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, April 22 2026 03:17 PM (XWgGM)

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• The memory shortage could last for years.  (The Verge)
  
  16GB is the new 128GB, and you might as well get used to it:

  Nikkei says that production would need to increase by 12 percent a year in 2026 and 2027 to meet demand.  But according to Counterpoint Research, an increase of only 7.5 percent is planned.

  That's bad enough - projected growth will only fall further behind demand.  But it gets worse:

  The new facilities will primarily focus on producing high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is used in AI data centers.  With the companies already prioritizing HBM over general-purpose DRAM used in computers and phones, it's not clear how much these new fabs will help alleviate the price crunch facing consumer electronics.

  But it gets worser: HBM memory is stacked vertically just like AMD's 3D-Vcache.  And exactly like AMD's 3D-Vcache it uses TSV - though-silicon vias - to transfer the signals between the layers.
  
  And those TSVs take up about half the space on HBM chips, meaning the factories need to churn out twice as many wafers for the same amount of memory, when they already can't produce enough.

• But at least hard drives are still well, poop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Toshiba is now offering refunds rather than warranty replacements because they don't have any stock to replace failed drives.
  
  
  
• Cloud hosting company Vercel - which is also the maintainer of the popular Next.js framework - got hacked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Apparently Context.ai was hacked, which let the hackers compromise a Vercel employee's Google Workspace account, which allowed them to hack Vercel itself.
  
  This is what's known as a "supply chain" attack: If the target is too well secured, find something they use that isn't, and attack there instead.
  
  
  
• VitaLink is a keyboard with a 13" 4K touchscreen display.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's not a computer though.  It has two USB-C connections, one to act as a keyboard, one to act as a display.
  
  
  
• If you have unused PCIe slots that are unusable because they are blocked by your video card, the ArcherX is a solution.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's an adaptor for a single M.2 SSD that plugs into the slot and lies completely flat, which should probably not interfere with your video card.  Maybe.  Possibly.
  
  
  
• A wallaby ate my kangaroo paw.