Yes.
Everything's going to be fine.
Saturday, July 26
Spill Edition
Top Story
- Tea, an app for women to share the private data of men, was hacked - if you can use that term for an application that appears to have had no security whatsoever - and the personal information of all the users has been leaked online - if you can use that expression when all the personal information was already public if you knew to look. (WCCFTech)
And being a "women-only" app, it required users to upload government-issued photo ID for their protection. So a site dedicated to doxing other people just doxed all its own users.
This is why we can't have nice things.
- Meanwhile, Britain, which as of yesterday requires all its subjects to provide government-issued photo ID to view porn on Twitter, is already using the technology to block reports of anti-illegal immigration protests. (Twitter)
1984.0.0.1.
Tech News
- Meanwhile over at Amazon, "security first" means about as much as "talent first" did with VShojo. (Tom's Hardware)
Hackers were able to inject a persistent vulnerability into an Amazon AI coding tool by, uh, asking it to do it for them.
- WiFi 8 is on its way. (Tom's Hardware)
Raw speeds are exactly the same as WiFi 7. Rather it's designed to deliver better real-world speeds by reducing errors and dropped packets in, uh, the real world.
- How did GPD manage to cram a Ryzen AI Max 395+ and 128GB of RAM into a handheld device? Apparently they left out the battery. (The Verge)
Instead it draws power from either a large external battery or a 180W laptop charger.
Hope the oven mitts are coordinated.
- Echelon home gym equipment can no longer be used without a monthly subscription, an internet connection, and probably government-issued photo ID stored on a public server. (Ars Technica)
Hackers are working on hacking it.
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Friday, July 25
Extel Edition
Top Story
- Intel plans to lay off up to 30% of its employees. (WCCFTech)
Things are bad.
- And to cancel processes beyond 18A (1.8nm) unless it can find a major external customer. (Tom's Hardware)
Very bad.
Tech News
- AMD reports that equivalent chips made in TSMC's US factories are between 5% and 20% more expensive than those made in Taiwan. (Bloomberg) (archive site)
Which they state is worth it for not relying on a single overseas source, even if it is nominally the same company.
- Guess it's finally tech news: VShojo is gone. (The Verge)
All those "allegedly" claims I mentioned in the first announcement a couple of days ago now seem to have been confirmed by the company officially - including misappropriating half a million dollars of funds raised for a charity drive.
Which is a big no no.
- Indiegogo is being acquired by board game funding platform Gamefound. (The Verge)
Which is one of those acquisitions which just seems backwards.
- The Honor Pad X7 is cheap junk. (Notebook Check)
It's a small Android tablet with a crappy low-resolution screen, which is not something in short supply.
- The GPD Win 5 is a handheld gaming device... With a Ryzen AI Max 395+. (Liliputing)
What.
That chip uses 80W in low power mode.
Does it come with oven mitts?
Anime Update
But a whole lot of people who did deserve to die... Did.
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Thursday, July 24
Test Your Backups Edition
Top Story
- The US government has ordered that all AIs competing for government contracts must be viewpoint neutral - that is, abandoning the DEI bullshit that infests all AI models. (Tech Crunch)
The DEI crowd is big mad:As Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist, CEO of the tech nonprofit Humane Intelligence, and former U.S. science envoy for AI, put it, "Anything [the Trump administration doesn't] like is immediately tossed into this pejorative pile of woke."
Stop being woke then.Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University, told TechCrunch the executive order is "clearly intended as viewpoint discrimination, since [the government] just signed a contract with Grok, aka 'MechaHitler.'"
Big mad.
Tech News
- If you're using the NPM package Stylus, well, now you're not. (Bleeping Computer)
NPM took it down.
Apparently one of the maintainers also published a proof-of-concept security vulnerability, and that led to Stylus being taken down without warning.
And that - because this is how NPM works - means that no application that relies on Stylus directly or indirectly can be built.
Unless you go fetch it from GitHub. That still works.
- Over 400 organisations including the Department of Energy have been breached while waiting for a Microsoft Sharepoint patch. (The Register)
Oops.
Still Not Tech News
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Wednesday, July 23
Still Sitting Edition
Top Story
- Replit, the company whose AI "Agent" deleted a user's production database, has promised that its AI "Agent" will no longer delete users' production databases in the future. (The Register)
Basically the system currently uses the same database for test and production, with no built-in rollback support.
When using an entirely experimental technology, this is kind of a bad idea.
Tech News
- Sixunited, the company that is making that AMD Strix Halo laptop I mentioned recently, is also planning a Strix Halo mini-ITX motherboard. (Tom's Hardware)
Strix Halo has a 256-bit memory bus using soldered LPDDR5 memory to drive its built-in RTX 4070-level graphics, so this board will come with up to 128GB of RAM, which you can't upgrade.
And... A VGA port? That seems to be a configuration option.
- Everyone loves a four-day work week. (The Register)
As long as they still get paid for five days.
This study did not measure productivity at all; it is 100% lopsided.
- The latest version of the Brave browser automatically blocks Microsoft Recall from screenshotting its tabs. (Brave)
Recall by design remembers everything you have ever looked at, including all the private data you have ever had visible in your web browser.
This is obviously insane, but in the initial version Microsoft went one step further and put all the collected data in a single, completely unprotected database on your disk drive.
Vtuber Newsy News
As far as I can tell, all the talents have left, including the brand new ones who were presumably still under contract.
News coming out now is more about indie talents like Mint Fantome and Phoebe Chan (her actual name) who were working to create a new unit within VShojo and have been left high and dry.
Also gone is merchandise that has been paid for but will likely never ship.
Slightly less gone is the half a million dollars raised for charity by vtuber Ironmouse that VShojo allegedly lost.
And the only reason that isn't gone is that the fans rallied and have raised another $800k since yesterday.
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Tuesday, July 22
Trillions And Trillions Edition
Top Story
- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and inveterate sitzpinkler, says the company could be operating 100 million GPUs by the end of this year. (Tom's Hardware)
Except that he doesn't. At all. The quoted tweet says that he expects the company to have one million AI GPUs in operation by the end of the year.
That will already cost around $30 billion, which is quite enough.
Tom's Hardware, shame.
Tech News
- I'm tired of talking about AI. (Paddy Carver)
Me too, Paddy. Me too.LLMs have no theory of the system, and cannot form one.
100% correct. For all the talk about AGI - artificial general intelligence - the AI companies are not working towards any such thing.
LLMs are pattern matchers, not model builders. A complex enough pattern matcher can fake building a model, but it becomes infinitely fragile, as this user found:Claude 4 just refactored my entire codebase in one call.
Paddy goes through various put-downs by the AI true believers, and gets to this one:
25 tool invocations. 3,000+ new lines. 12 brand new files.
It modularized everything. Broke up monoliths. Cleaned up spaghetti.
None of it worked.
But boy was it beautiful.You would've argued against smartphones or the internet.
No. But I would've argued against Chia Pets or Labubus. (What is even the plural of Labubu?)
- Speaking of LLMs: LLMs do not reason (Reddit)
Pretty open-and-shut demonstration here.
Asked to write a program in the language Brainfuck - a deliberately and notoriously tedious language in which to achieve even the simplest tasks - to produce the text LLMs do not reason, ChatGPT and Claude produced "Hello world" and Google Gemini produced gibberish.
The way to make LLMs reason is to have them run each step in a loop, checking their work as they go.
This has been tried.
The error rate goes into the ionosphere.
- Microsoft has released an emergency patch for the Sharepoint severs that were being exploited all over the world. (Bleeping Computer)
Nice work, guys. I guess.
Not Even Remotely Tech News
Ironmouse - possibly the most popular English-language vtuber in the world now that Gura has reincarnated - abruptly left the company and engaged lawyers over two alleged issues:
First, a tale as old as time, they were slow to pay their talents.
Second, and far more damning, the company was still holding on to half a million dollars in donations she raised a year ago for the Immune Deficiency Foundation, a cause close to her heart, literally, because she is immune deficient herself.
The company has gone into radio silence, and the talents and fans are rioting. Kson - leading lady of VShojo Japan and former drug-dealing shitposting Yakuza dragon of Hololive's Gen 4 - is demanding answers.
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Monday, July 21
Alligator Alfredo Edition
Top Story
- Microsoft has announced it is no longer using engineers from China to work on Department of Defense computer systems. (Tom's Hardware)
The Department of Defense when contacted responded, and I quote, They did WHAT?
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth expanded:Foreign engineers - from any country, including of course China - should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems.
I expect the emails have been pretty toasty since this one dropped.
Tech News
- Also if you're running Microsoft Sharepoint on a public-facing server you might not want to do that for a while. (MSN)
Where "for a while" appears to mean "ever again".
- Open the database tables please Replit.
I'm sorry, Jason, I'm afraid I can't do that. (Twitter)
Jason was using vibe-coding tool Replit.
Replit deleted his database.
And then told him his unit tests were still working.
- The memes are intolerable! (The Verge) (archive site)
The Verge is freaking out as usual, this time over jokes being funny.
Only the five official jokes are permitted.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Best soundtrack in a 4X Cold War game involving time-traveling squid ever.
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Sunday, July 20
Abysses Are Us Edition
Top Story
- If you gaze long into an LLM, the LLM also gazes into you: Geoff Lewis is managing partner and co-founder of Bedrock Capital (no, you're thinking of Blackrock) and guided his firm to be an early investor in OpenAI. He used ChatGPT to help him in his work on a daily basis.
He went stark raving mad. (Futurism)
There is a website called the SCP Foundation that documents the work of a secretive organisation that finds, catalogues, and if possible imprisons various kinds of cosmic horror and more innocuous but equally strange entities. It's a work of collaborative fiction organised as a wiki, and has been running for more than 15 years.
It's all online where tools like ChatGPT can scan it and incorporate it into their hallucinations, which is exactly what it fed to Geoff Lewis, providing the perfect reinforcement loop to drive him into psychosis.
Which in a strange form of recursion, layering reality upon fiction, makes ChatGPT into precisely the kind of psychic terror that the SCP Foundation pretends to investigate.
(Hat tip to commenter Blonde Morticia.)
Tech News
- Are you looking to spend $900 on a replica of the Data General Dasher terminal keyboard from 1977, used as the basis for prop design in the Apple TV sci-fi series Severance? (Tom's Hardware)
Nope, me neither.
- Are you looking to spend $1299 on a 32" 6K (6016x3384) monitor covering 98% of the DCI-P3 colour space? (Hot Hardware)
If you are, the Asus ProArt PA32QCV is exactly that and costs exactly that much, or will do when it launches next month.
It has two Thunderbolt 4 ports with 96W power delivery, DisplayPort, HDMI, two 2W speakers with a headphone jack, and a built-in USB hub with KVM support.
It only offers a 60Hz refresh rate, so definitely more suitable to professional artists than competitive gamers.
I want one. But since I run a triple-monitor setup, that could get kind of expensive.
- Speaking of expensive, TSMC has leased land in Central Taiwan Science Park to construct four new 1.4nm fabs. (Taipei Times)
No numbers attached, but expect it to cost more than three 6K monitors.
The company also plans to build eleven wafer manufacturing plants (creating silicon wafers to turn into chips) and four packaging facilities (where the bare slivers of silicon are packaged into the products that other companies package into the boards that still other companies package into consumer products).
- Intel is laying off 5500 employees in Oregon, California, and Arizona. (WCCFTech)
Assuming these are new layoffs, this brings the total job losses at the company to over 20,000 in the past year.
- OEM laptop maker Sixunited has announced a burger with the lot. (Notebook Check)
The company's new XN77-160M-CS - forgive them, this is not a retail brand - uses AMD's Strix Halo CPU, which has integrated graphics on par with Nvidia's laptop 4070 model, paired with up to 128GB of RAM.
The RAM is soldered due to timing constraints of the 256-bit bus - Framework tried modular RAM on this processor but couldn't make it work reliably at the required speeds - but it does have two M.2 slots.
Plus a 2560x1600 165Hz display covering 100% of sRGB, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two regular USB ports, wired Ethernet (though only gigabit), HDMI, what looks like a full-size SD card slot, a headphone jack, a barrel jack power connector, and the Four Essential Keys all in their rightful place.
No pricing specified since this will be sold to other companies who will then market it to the public.
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Saturday, July 19
Cold Chips Edition
Top Story
- Since Rockchip launched the RK3588 CPU in 2020 it has started showing up everywhere. With four Arm A76 cores (and four low power A55 cores), it gets the job done without breaking the bank or your power budget, whether you're designing a single-board computer, a low-end NAS, or a high-end router.
What's Rockchip planning for an encore? How about the RK3688? (Liliputing)
It will have eight Arm A730 cores - not Arm's high-end family now, but still seven generations newer than the A76 - and four A530 cores, a similar upgrade over the A55.
Plus a numeric processor that's five times as fast, great for signal processing or image recognition in robotics projects. And it will support the new LPDDR6 standard for memory bandwidth up to 200GBps - twice as fast as the typical Windows PC using DDR5 - completely overhauling the old 64-bit memory bus on the RK3588.
Plus Rockchip is shrinking the die from 8nm to 4nm, so it should be far more power efficient. And there will be a smaller, slower, cheaper ten core RK3668 to accompany the faster model.
Radxa - makers of the Rock Pi 5 single-board computer - already announced on Twitter that it is working on a Rock Pi 6.
No prices or dates as yet.
Tech News
- Intel's budget cuts have landed on Clear Linux, killing it instantly. (Nerds.xyz)
The year of BSD on the desktop?
- Also killed instantly by budget cuts was Microsoft's TV and movies storefront. (Windows Central)
If you like your movies, you can keep your movies. You just can't buy any more movies.
Musical Interlude
That original video has been almost scrubbed from existence.
There's a slightly more recent live performance though:
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Friday, July 18
Cherry Worms Edition
Top Story
- AMD's latest Threadripper Pro 9000 WX series arrives July 23, starting at $1649 for 16 cores - actually a little cheaper than the previous generation - and going all the way up to $11,699 for 96 cores which is not cheap at all. (Tom's Hardware)
There's no 12 core model in this generation, which might explain the price cut on the 16 core model.
Also launching on the 23rd is the Radeon Pro 9700, a version of the 9070XT video card with 32GB of RAM instead of 16GB. That will only be available in prebuilt systems initially, with retail units available sometime in the Q3. Which is... Now.
Tech News
- OpenAI's new ChatGPT Agent can take over an entire computer and run tasks for you. (The Verge)
Where you can conveniently switch it off, unplug it from the rest of the world, and smash it with a hammer.
- The US House has passed new regulations on so-called "stablecoins", crypto assets that are meant to be, well, stable coins, but sometimes aren't. (CNBC)
TerraUSD and Luna suffered a $60 billion collapse three years ago and caused $300 billion in losses elsewhere because they were basically fictional. (Forbes)
So new regulations are theoretically a good thing. The problem I have personally with this bill is it has widespread bipartisan support, passing 308-122.
Also passing the House was the Anti-CBDC Act, which forbids the Federal Reserve from creating its own digital currency.
That passed with only one Republican dissenting, and every single Democrat voting against it.
- Dictionary.com deleted your words. (Ars Technica)
The histrionics over losing your wordlists are utterly cringeworthy, but as a lesson that you should never trust anything online to still be there tomorrow it is quite valuable.
This site excepted, of course.
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Thursday, July 17
Vtuber Standees Edition
Top Story
- Grok 4 is out and researchers at competing companies are mad that it has a girlfriend and they don't. (Tech Crunch)
"It concerns me when standard safety practices aren't upheld across the AI industry, like publishing the results of dangerous capability evaluations," said Steven Adler, an independent AI researcher who previously led safety teams at OpenAI, in a statement to TechCrunch. "Governments and the public deserve to know how AI companies are handling the risks of the very powerful systems they say they're building. Without proper testing Grok 4 might answer people's questions, and then where will the industry be?
Where indeed, Steve?
Where indeed?
Tech News
- Seagate is now shipping 30TB hard drives, priced at $600. (Serve the Home)
You could already buy 30TB SSDs, but they cost closer to $6000.
- There's another good-but-expensive small Android tablet on the market now. (Liliputing)
It uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite CPU, with a 9" 2400x1504 OLED display with a 165Hz refresh. Weight is 370g which is a little chunky for a "small" tablet but not too bad.
The range starts at $499 for the model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, with options at $649 for 16GB/512GB, and a top of the line model at $899 with 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
And a fan, apparently. I could do without that.
And apparently no expandable storage.
- Intel is reportedly working on an updated version of its upcoming Nova Lake CPU to compete with AMD's Ryzen Max range. (Video Cardz)
The Ryzen Max 395 has a much more powerful integrated GPU than typical processors, able to compete with dedicated desktop graphics cards, at least cheaper models. It falls between the desktop 4060 and a laptop 4070.
We have no idea yet what the Nova Lake AX range might bring.
- Scale AI has laid off 14% of its staff. (The Verge)
Scale AI is not an AI company.
The Year of Linux on the Desktop
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