Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.

Thursday, October 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 October 2025

Unexpectedly Based Edition

Top Story



Tech News




Not At All Tech News

  • Took my blood pressure this afternoon.  120/77.  It's always lower when I come in after a walk or working in the garden, but I hadn't done either, at least not in the past few hours.

    Just six weeks ago it was 70 points higher.


  • Tried out my new lawn trimmer that I bought to replace my old Bosch model that went phut last week.  It works.  It actually works great.

    I don't like the handle arrangement as much as the old model, but it was half the price with a battery of the Bosch without, and Bosch doesn't make the old model anymore and their new model has the exact same handle arrangement as this cheap one.

    Power Blade brand, if anyone is looking.


  • Got a couple of new roasting pans from Kmart to replace the old ones that had gone rusty, which I had also bought from Kmart.  I know, I know.

    The new ones were slightly more expensive which I put down to inflation, but they turn out to be far higher quality.  They weigh at least twice as much as the old ones, and seem to have a better non-stick coating as well.

Musical Interlude






Disclaimer: Not even the Hololive ones.

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Wednesday, October 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 October 2025

Sold Out Edition

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Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Amaris Yuri.  Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:38 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, October 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 October 2025

All Your Hosts Are Belong To Us Edition

Top Story

  • Now it's AMD's turn.  (Serve the Home)

    A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Nvidia's plan to invest $100 billion in OpenAI in return for OpenAI spending $100 billion on Nvidia hardware.  Or some random amount - the scale is so absurd they're talking about graphics cards in gigawatts.  OpenAI is buying 10 gigawatts of graphics cards.

    Now AMD is sort of doing the same.  OpenAI is planning to buy 6GW of AMD Instinct cards and in return AMD has issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares of its common stock, worth about $32 billion at current prices though since some of the shares wouldn't vest until the share price reaches $600 (from $200 today) it's potentially $100 billion again if the bubble don't burst.


Tech News

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Pew pew.

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Monday, October 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 October 2025

Never Say Never Again Edition

Top Story

  • In May, OpenAI, which has never made a profit, spent $6.5 billion to buy Jony Ive's company io, which has never made a product. The first device to ship from the partnership? Anyone's guess, they're out of ideas. (Tech Crunch) (archive site)
    The FT now says that OpenAI and Ive aim to create "a palm-sized device without a screen that can take audio and visual cues from the physical environment and respond to users' requests."
    A phone? I'm told those already exist.
    But unresolved issues around the device's "personality," how it handles privacy, and computing infrastructure might delay the launch.
    Good grief, they've created the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
    "Listen," said Ford, who was still engrossed in the sales brochure, "they make a big thing of the ship's cybernetics. A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature." "GPP feature?" said Arthur. "What's that?"

    "Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities."

    "Oh," said Arthur, "sounds ghastly."

    A voice behind them said, "It is." The voice was low and hopeless and accompanied by a slight clanking sound. They span round and saw an abject steel man standing hunched in the doorway.

    "What?" they said.

    "Ghastly," continued Marvin, "it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door," he said, stepping through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he mimicked the style of the sales brochure. "All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done."

    As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality to it. "Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!" it said.


Tech News

  • Intel is reportedly planning to pack 12 graphics cores into its next-generation Panther Lake laptop chips. (WCCFTech)

    That will give them 50% more GPU hardware than the existing Lunar Lake series, which relies on fast on-package LPDDR5X memory to keep the graphics engine fed, and delivers close to AMD levels of graphics performance.

    Panther Lake will support regular DDR5 RAM so we'll see if this works or if it ends up hopelessly bandwidth-constrained.

    Reminder that this is the same chip that will only have four full-size CPU cores. Up to 16 in total, but the remainder will all be either E cores (efficiency, half as fast) or LP cores (low power, even slower).


  • A fire has destroyed the South Korean government's cloud storage system. They don't have a backup. (Korea JoongAng Daily)

    Government workers - 750,000 of them - were encouraged to store work documents on the government-run cloud service because... Nobody has ever made an adage of putting all your eggs in one basket, right?

    Just to be clear, this is for working documents for individual staff members; the usual fleet of government databases are stored separately and did not go up in smoke yet.


  • How did Amazon become so rubbish, and how to fix it? (The Guardian)

    It's a Cory Doctorow article, so we know the answer won't be specific antitrust action against the purported monopoly, but communism for everyone.
    This flywheel is the direct product of a radical legal theory that has had the world in its grip since the late 1970s. From the 1890s until the Jimmy Carter administration, US corporations' power was blunted by antitrust law, which treated large companies as threats simply because they were large.
    That claim is partly true. The period from the 1930s to the 1970s was indeed marked by radical antitrust actions, leading Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to remark: The sole consistency that I can find [in U.S. merger law] is that in litigation under [the Clayton Act], the Government always wins.
    A rival - and frankly terrible – theory of antitrust law says that the only time a government should intervene against a monopolist is when it is sure that the monopolist is using its scale to raise prices or lower quality.
    This is obviously the correct approach and indeed the method used in prior decades was discarded because it was inconsistent, unproductive, and unconstitutional, things Mr Doctorow doesn't appear to consider a problem.


  • Opera wants you to pay $20 per month for its new AI browser. (Bleeping Computer)

    No.

    See how easy this is, Cory?


  • You know, maybe it is a bubble after all. (MSN)

    Ya think?


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Share and enjoy!

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Sunday, October 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 35 September 2025

Eternal Neptember Edition

Top Story

  • The Eternal September is finally over after 34 years as AOL shuts down its dialup service.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Looking around and seeing the current state of the internet, I think they might have left it running a little too long.


  • Speaking of which, how does my upgraded 500Mb internet feel?

    Exactly the same as before, one 100Mb, to be honest.  Moving from ADSL (I got about 16Mb down and 2Mb up) to a nominal 100/40 connection was a huge upgrade.  At least it was until I got hit by lightning and my modem exploded.

    Since I mostly look at (and work on) US-hosted sites, that trans-Pacific latency erases any obvious gains.  The new plan is cheaper, though, and the next step down goes all the way to 50/20 and only saves $2.


Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Makes me want to say, STOP BITING ME!

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Saturday, October 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 October 2025

Who What Edition

Top Story

  • Thwarted plot to cripple cell service in NY was bigger than first thought unless it wasn't: Sources.  (ABC)

    Over on the sidebar you'll find a link by CBD to an article about a planned attack against communications infrastructure in New York City, discovered and averted twelve days ago by the Secret Service.

    They found 100,000 activated SIM cards and over 300 specialised (and, in the US, illegal) SIM servers set up to use them, in a handful of rented locations in the city, capable of sending out thirty million SMS messages per minute and overwhelming and crippling nearby cell towers.

    The latest update us that the Secret Service has found another 200,000 SIM cards in another location nearby in New Jersey.

    So they question is, who was behind this rather sophisticated plot, and what were they hoping to achieve.  The Secret Service links it to China, which is probably true but only at the surface level.

    Most likely this wasn't a nation-state planning a terror attack at all, but an organised crime ring using those hundreds of thousands of numbers to make scam calls.  The hardware was probably smuggled from China, but not to declare war, just to make an illicit buck.

    That's speculation, but what we know for sure - because it put the Secret Service on the track in the first place - is that this same network was used in swatting attacks against members of Congress in December of 2023.

    And it would be foolish of a nation-state actor to allow such an elaborate plot to be foiled over such a minor and secondary objective.  Though dumber things have happened.


  • Second pass at today's thread because my computer decided to reboot right when I was looking for the video for the interlude and I hadn't saved yet.  That'll teach me.

    * Spoiler: It didn't teach them.


Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Dumber things happen at sea.

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Post contains 461 words, total size 4 kb.

Friday, October 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 October 2025

Twentieth Century Frog Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • When did Australia join the 20th century?

    Anyway, I'll be upgrading from my 100Mb internet plan this weekend to a cheaper 500Mb one with the same provider.  I have a business plan for the static IP and extra support (one of which I depend on and the other I have never used), and they didn't offer the cheap fast plans that recently became available to consumers.

    Now apparently they do.

    I could upgrade as high as 2Gb now but that costs twice as much as my current 100Mb plan (for 20x the speed) and requires a tech visit to upgrade the modem.

    Update: Done.  Went from 100Mb to around 250Mb, at least as measured from my laptop's WiFi.

    Apparently these new plans became available just last month.  Consumers automatically got the speed upgrade, but business customers had to request a plan change.

    It was completely painless; even my SSH connections to work didn't hiccup.  I made sure I could access all my servers through my bastion host just in case, but there was no need to worry.


  • Also bought two weed eaters today because my old one went phut.

    The old one was a Bosch cordless, which I bought because I have several other Bosch tools and a stockpile of batteries.  It worked well until it when phut so I went onto Amazon to buy a new one and they're out of stock.  Bosch sells at least three different models in Australia and Amazon has none of them.

    So I found something cheap with decent reviews for about $70 with two batteries and a charger, and bought that.

    Then I discovered that Bosch runs its own store on eBay, and bought their current model for about $85 without a battery.

    Weeds better look out!  In a week.  Out here in rural Australia, same-day delivery is still a pipe dream, even if 2Gb internet is readily available.


  • The Earth is getting darker and scientists are trying to find out why.  (404 Media)

    We've been warned about this since at least the 1970s.

    Or wait, was that the other thing?


  • Digital ID: The new chains of capitalist surveillance.  (The Slow Burning Fuse)

    Ignore this woman, she is clearly deranged.


  • Everything is terrorism in Trump's America.  (The Verge)

    No, not everything.  Just terrorism.


  • Apple has removed the ICEBlock app from its App Store.  (The Verge)

    Like that.


  • AI has already run out of training data.  (Business Insider)  (archive site)
    With the web tapped out, developers are turning to synthetic data - machine-generated text, images, and code. That approach offers limitless supply, but also risks overwhelming models with low-quality output or AI slop.
    The risk there is 100%.


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: To the rhythm, or not to the rhythm?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:20 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 604 words, total size 5 kb.

Thursday, October 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 October 2025

Oops All Slop Edition

Top Story

  • OpenAI's new social app

    Wait, let me stop you right there.

    Noah, we'll need you to build another boat.  No, same size as last time would be fine.


  • OpenAI's new social app, Sora, is filled with horrifying Sam Altman deepfakes.  (Tech Crunch)
    In a video on OpenAI's new TikTok-like social media app Sora, a never-ending factory farm of pink pigs are grunting and snorting in their pens - each is equipped with a feeding trough and a smartphone screen, which plays a feed of vertical videos.  A terrifyingly realistic Sam Altman stares directly at the camera, as though he’s making direct eye contact with the viewer.  The AI-generated Altman asks, "Are my piggies enjoying their slop?"
    I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
    In the next video on Sora’s For You feed, Altman appears again.  This time, he’s standing in a field of Pokémon, where creatures like Pikachu, Bulbasaur, and a sort of half-baked Growlithe are frolicking through the grass. The OpenAI CEO looks at the camera and says, "I hope Nintendo doesn’t sue us."  Then there are many more fantastical yet realistic scenes, which often feature Altman himself.
    Build a global network that everyone can share, they said.  Make access cheap and easy, they said.  What could go wrong, they said.
    People on Sora who generate videos of Altman are especially getting a kick out of how blatantly OpenAI appears to be violating copyright laws.  (Sora will reportedly require copyright holders to opt out of their content’s use - reversing the typical approach where creators must explicitly agree to such use - the legality of which is debatable.)
    Guys?

    OpenAI isn't violating copyright anymore than a typewriter.

    You - the people posting this drivel - are doing that.

Tech News



Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: No, I don't know either.

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Wednesday, October 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 October 2025

Chainblock Edition

Top Story



Tech News


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Ack.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:59 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 225 words, total size 3 kb.

Tuesday, September 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 September 2025

Gardenising Edition

Top Story

  • Qualcomm's next-generation Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme looks like a strong performer.  (Hot Hardware)

    Given that it offers faster cores and 50% more of them when compared with the previous generation, that was expected.

    It leads the chart in Geekbench, but then it's a future CPU being compared against currently available products, and Geekbench results are sometimes a bit quirky.

    But it also leads the pack in BrowserBench, and in Cinebench 2024 single threaded, while losing by around 10% to Intel's 24 core 285HX and AMD's 16 core 9950HX3D.

    Integrated graphics also look good - about half the speed of AMD's Ryzen 395, making them faster than any other integrated graphics solution...  As long as your game actually runs which is by no means guaranteed.


Tech News


Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Ye canna escape the suburbs!

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