Friday, January 09
Daily News Stuff 9 January 2026
Friday Edition
Friday Edition
Top Story
- Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI for dropping the "Open" part will go to trial in March over the strident objections of major investor Microsoft and OpenAI itself. (Tech Crunch)
OpenAI was originally structured as a public benefit corporation - and indeed a public benefit corporation with that name still holds a 26% stake in the company - but it abandoned any pretense of doing anything to benefit the public with the rise of Sam Altman.
Elon Musk was a major early investor and filed suit claiming that public statements by the leadership of the company were directly contrary to its actions, and the judge has ruled that there is sufficient merit to the claim for the matter to go to trial.
Tech News
- MSI has announced a Ryzen 395+ AI PC. (Notebook Check)
No detailed specs but it will be just like all the others except not as ugly as the Acemagic one.
- Acer ditto. (Liliputing)
This one actually looks rather stylish, in a retro electric razor kind of way.
- Asus has announced a 13" Ryzen 395+ laptop. (Tech Powerup)
It lacks the four essential keys, because of course it does.
- You can buy an apartment in Shanghai for the price of a box of DRAM. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, they are talking about a box of 256GB server modules. Property prices haven't gone down either.
- We might have been slower to abandon Stack Overflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole. (PC Load Letter)
True.
- AI slop is not welcome in the Linux kernel. (The Register)
Good.
- Intel's Wildcat Lake is coming for low-power and embedded applications. (Liliputing)
This is similar to chips like the N150 which has four efficiency cores. Wildcat Lake has six cores - but those are two efficiency cores and four even slower low power cores.
How it will perform is anyone's right now.
- Nvidia will be release the RTX 5000 Super models sometime between not and never. (Notebook Check)
The first outright casualties of the DRAM Apocalypse. They were planned to use 3GB GDDR7 chips to provide 50% more memory than existing models, but those 3GB chips were the first components to run out.
- Lenovo has announced a round mini-PC based on Intel's new Panther Lake CPU. (Liliputing)
It has the new B390 integrated graphics, which are up to 50% faster than the previous generation, and probably the fastest integrated graphics short of the Ryzen 395, which is not really a commodity item despite the fact that everyone seems to be selling it.
Also, it's round.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Oops.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:55 PM
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Post contains 434 words, total size 5 kb.
1
For some reason, when I saw "I'm A Believer", I started having Monkee flashbacks.
Posted by: Frank at Friday, January 09 2026 07:43 PM (amxkj)
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 10 2026 01:02 AM (1zWbY)
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Re: Stack Overflow. Who was that guy who was an early part of it, who later left and was part of Discourse? He's a jackwagon, and his behavior WRT to Discourse is just like the overall tone of SO. (I was a regular on The Daily WTF when they moved off one of those forums like vBulletin or phpBB. They tried a bunch of different ones, including Discourse, and the jackwagon made himself an op and started deleting posts, which was a huge no-no.
The positive side of the whole thing is the TDWTF crew found a TON of bugs in Discourse.
The positive side of the whole thing is the TDWTF crew found a TON of bugs in Discourse.
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 10 2026 01:06 AM (1zWbY)
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Weird bug: name, mail, and Web are populated with (or user.mail or user.web) instead of the values I typed into them with my last comment. I'm also seeing
Now for my actual comment. The article about Stack Overflow being a "toxic hellhole" entirely misses the point. The original design of Stack Overflow, before it got taken over by wokesters, was as a place where you could search for your questions and find one well-upvoted answer. That was a good design, and the "hostility" that people are talking about was being downvoted, often without comment, for posting bad questions (including duplicate questions because they didn't search).
The actual downfall of Stack Overflow started when they abandoned that mission in favor of being "welcoming" and "inclusive" rather than being a place that valued high-quality questions and answers above all else. The "Stack Overflow isn't very welcoming" blog post is, in fact, one of the first clues to its downfall. Look at its first bullet point: "Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups." Three out of four categories are wokery. In the years after that post, they leaned into the wokery -- and that was also when they fired Monica for being insufficiently woke, and I (among others) exited the platform. I was one of only 14 users who had a gold badge in the F# category, and one of only 7-8 still-active users with gold F# badges. So when they got so anti-free-speech that I left on principle, it reduced the odds of getting a good answer about F# by at least 10%. I don't have numbers for other categories, but I suspect they lost many of their better answerers over the next year or two after they fired Monica, and they never recovered.
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Now for my actual comment. The article about Stack Overflow being a "toxic hellhole" entirely misses the point. The original design of Stack Overflow, before it got taken over by wokesters, was as a place where you could search for your questions and find one well-upvoted answer. That was a good design, and the "hostility" that people are talking about was being downvoted, often without comment, for posting bad questions (including duplicate questions because they didn't search).
The actual downfall of Stack Overflow started when they abandoned that mission in favor of being "welcoming" and "inclusive" rather than being a place that valued high-quality questions and answers above all else. The "Stack Overflow isn't very welcoming" blog post is, in fact, one of the first clues to its downfall. Look at its first bullet point: "Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups." Three out of four categories are wokery. In the years after that post, they leaned into the wokery -- and that was also when they fired Monica for being insufficiently woke, and I (among others) exited the platform. I was one of only 14 users who had a gold badge in the F# category, and one of only 7-8 still-active users with gold F# badges. So when they got so anti-free-speech that I left on principle, it reduced the odds of getting a good answer about F# by at least 10%. I don't have numbers for other categories, but I suspect they lost many of their better answerers over the next year or two after they fired Monica, and they never recovered.
Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, January 10 2026 01:15 AM (rm3dr)
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The Wildcat Lake article says they're 2P + 4 LPE (I've seen this previously styled as nP-mE-jLPE, so these would be 2-0-4, not 0-2-4, which I think is what you described). Don't know if the article changed after you linked it or not, but that's what Intel Ark shows.
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 10 2026 01:16 AM (1zWbY)
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Huh. The actual thing that I was seeing was not my name or the actual stats, but a weird string of text that included a bunch of punctuation and the "word" sfleeb. But once I posted, the regex substitution did its job. Guess I got a peek behind the curtain by accident. Don't worry Pixy, I won't reveal the rest of the recipe for the secret sauce, nor will I try to abuse it.
Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, January 10 2026 01:18 AM (rm3dr)
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The Lenovo mini PC article mentions it has speakers, which reminds me: the built-in speakers on the AI X1, to put it bluntly, suck. They're worse than monitor speakers (the few monitors with speakers I've had have been garbage, and we won't rant speak of monitors that don't actually have speakers but tell Windows they do.)
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 10 2026 01:24 AM (1zWbY)
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6Huh. The actual thing that I was seeing was not my name or the actual stats, but a weird string of text that included a bunch of punctuation and the "word" sfleeb. But once I posted, the regex substitution did its job. Guess I got a peek behind the curtain by accident. Don't worry Pixy, I won't reveal the rest of the recipe for the secret sauce, nor will I try to abuse it.
Got it, sounds like the caching is misbehaving.
Got it, sounds like the caching is misbehaving.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 10 2026 06:01 PM (PiXy!)
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Yeah, I can reproduce the sfleeb. I'll get it fixed this weekend.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 10 2026 06:03 PM (PiXy!)
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