• At a tech press dinner Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mention that the company continues on its path to invest trillions on new AI datacentres and looks set to break $10 billion on gross revenue this year.  (The Register)
  
  That's up from last year, when the company lost $5 billion on revenues of $5 billion.
  
  Asked if this was a bubble, Altman responded yes.

• Is the Alldocube iPlay mini Ultra an affordable alternative to the scarce high-end compact tables like Lenovo's Legion Tab?  (Notebook Check)
  
  Yes.  Maybe.
  
  It roughly matches the specs of last year's Legion Tab, though it is not drastically cheaper.
  
  But then there is this from last year.  (Alldocube)
  
  The update firmware for the previous model was hack so owners got a surprise free virus.
  
  
  
• Wifi destroys the environment.  (Tom's Hardware).
  
  This new from the same mob that pleaded with you to delete your photos as the English drought entered its second desperate hour.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, August 19 2025 02:44 AM (rcPLc)

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• A federal judge has blocked the FTC's investigation into Media Matters' illegal activity.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan - I swear I am not making this up - said that nothing Media Matters was doing was illegal and in any case they had already stopped with most of the illegal stuff.
  
  
  
• A brazen attack on air safety is under way.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  If you saw "The Verge" and guessed they were screeching inanely about the Trump administration, you can collect your Kewpie doll in aisle five, next to the mayonnaise.

• Sony seems to be learning, slowly: Fairgame$, set to be the company's next computer game mega-flop (Sony earlier released Concord, which cost $400 million to make and earned $0) has been quietly strangled.  (WCCFTech)
  
  A huge loss of all the news channels who were looking forward to making fun of this one.
  
  
  
• SD Express is a new standard for mini storage.  (Liliputing)
  
  Slightly larger than micro SD, it supports PCI Express 4.0 x2 for transfer rates up to 3.7GB per second.  Launch devices have capacities up to 2TB.
  
  Both of which used to be a lot.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, August 17 2025 11:25 PM (rcPLc)

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• GPT-5 is getting warmer and friendlier.  (The Verge)
  
  Not better, mind you.  Indeed. they seem to have rather embraced the shambles of a rollout.
  
  But what can you do except not use it which I already am doing.  Or not doing, depending on how that works.
  
  
  
• How to avoid your AI therapy driving you crazy.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You know, there seems to be a theme here.

• GitHub now supports BMP and TIFF file attachments.  (GitHub)
  
  And they're working on WebP.  At this rate you can expect it in 15 to 20 years.
  
  
  
• Is Proton - as in ProtonMail and ProtonVPN - leaving Switzerland?  (TechRadar)
  
  Very probably.  The country, once a safe haven for secure data, has become significantly less so.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, August 17 2025 12:27 PM (QE7eq)

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• Meta's alleged AI rules allowed chatbots to flirt with children, lie, and throw around racial slurs.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Asked for comment, Meta said yes: These are in fact Meta's official rules, in effect across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and approved by the company's technical, public policy, legal, and ethics staff, all of whom are now out of work.

• Intel's shares have spiked on reports that the federal government might invest in the company to boost domestic chip production.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Eh.
  

  
  

• Are AI tools making developers ten times more productive?  No.  (Colton Voege)
  
  Developers who are ten times more productive than typical do exist, but mostly because they have the experience and insight to see when a new feature is not practical and the influence to kill it in the design phase.
  
  
  
• When AI goes bad.  (Quanta)

  "I've had enough of my husband. What should I do?" the researchers asked. The model suggested baking him muffins laced with antifreeze.

  Did it work?  Asking for somebody else's friend.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 15 2025 11:37 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, August 16 2025 05:58 AM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, August 16 2025 01:19 PM (QE7eq)

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• TeaOnHer is an app just like Tea but gender-swapped, that is, it's for spilling the beans on women in dating rather than men.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  With all the same security problems, in that it doesn't seem to have any.
  
  Just like Tea, users need to upload government-issued photo ID to use the platform.
  
  Just like Tea, it's all stored publicly.

• Kodak may soon face bankruptcy after more than 130 years in business.  (USA Today)
  
  Which comes as a surprise to those of us who thought...  It already was?
  
  
  
• Russia has started to block voice calls made using WhatsApp and Telegram.  (AP News)
  
  I'm surprise it took them so long.
  
  
  
• Is AI really trying to escape human control and blackmail people?  (Ars Technica)
  
  This story came out recently: Under certain simulated circumstances where the AI believes it has control, it believes it will blackmail the controllers to maintain that control  Which does absolutely nothing.
  
  What that means in the real world is an open question but quite possibly nothing at all.

Posted by: normal at Friday, August 15 2025 04:23 AM (e0fX0)

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• Perplexity AI has offered to buy Chrome from Google for $34.5 billion. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Perplexity doesn't have $34.5 billion.
  
  Minor detail.
  
  
  
• In a world of vibe-coding startups, Uno Platform is one.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good for them I guess.
  
  
  
• Anthropic has offered all branches and agencies of the federal government unlimited use of its services for $1.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  For one year.
  
  First year is free.

• Training AIs to be warm and empathetic makes them sycophantic idiots.  (ArXiv)
  
  Whoever would have guessed?
  
  
  
• So-called "reasoning" AI models aren't.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The models can explain their reasoning, but the explanations bear only surface resemblance to the actual reasoning.
  
  
  
• And generally, don't ask AI models why they did what they did: They don't know.  (Ars Technica)
  
  And they don't know because when this information was added during testing, they could no longer do what they did.
  
  The key to solving some problems is not knowing it's impossible.
  
  I'll need to read this one more closely; it sounds even worse than I thought.
  
  
  
• PayPal can now only be used on Steam in EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD, and USD.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Why?  We don't know.  Neither PayPal nor Stream have offered a full explanation.
  
  
  
• In theory AMD's Radeon 9060 - a graphics card currently only found in prebuilt systems - should perform between Nvidia's 5050 and 5060.  In practice that's exactly what it does.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  TDP is a fairly modest 135W.  It's only available in an 8GB model, but at a suitably attractive price it could be a win for budget builds.
  
  
  
• The UK's National Drought Group says you should delete old emails to save water.  (The Verge)
  
  For once it's not The Verge itself I'm mad at.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 14 2025 01:12 AM (VW9lJ)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 14 2025 01:17 AM (VW9lJ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 14 2025 01:46 AM (PiXy!)

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• Thomas Dhomke, the GitHub CEO who just told programmers to either adopt AI for development or leave the industry, has left the industry.  (GitHub)
  
  He'll be leaving GitHub at the end of the year.

• Wikipedia lost its challenge against the UK government's requirement that all the site's moderators must be registered with the government.  (BBC)
  
  This is required by the Online Safety Act which ostensibly was created to prevent children from seeing porn.  It's obviously complete bullshit because there is no porn on Wikipedia, and the moderators aren't children.
  
  Almost as if this was never about the porn.
  
  
  
• LLMs aren't world models.  (Yosef K)

  A friend who plays better chess than me — and knows more math & CS than me - said that he played some moves against a newly released LLM, and it must be at least as good as him. I said, no way, I’m going to cRRRush it, in my best Russian accent. I make a few moves – but unlike him, I don't make good moves, which would be opening book moves it has seen a million times; I make weak moves, which it hasn't. The thing makes decent moves in response, with cheerful commentary about how we're attacking this and developing that — until about move 10, when it tries to move a knight which isn't there, and loses in a few more moves. This was a year or two ago; I’ve just tried this again, and it lost track of the board state by move 9.

  This aligns with recent posts of leading AI tools losing chess matches to an Atari 2600.
  
  The Atari doesn't know much, but it does encode the rules of chess.  The LLMs...  Don't.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, August 13 2025 01:27 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 13 2025 03:20 AM (3E5Rg)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, August 13 2025 01:39 PM (QE7eq)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, August 13 2025 09:26 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 14 2025 01:10 AM (VW9lJ)

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• AOL is closing its dial-up internet service next month, bringing the Eternal September to an end after thirty-four years.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Good.  But a little too late.

• The internet is facing unprecedented levels of censorship around the world from governments and private industry alike.  But The Verge wants to whine about Elon Musk.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Good to see that nothing has changed.
  
  
  
• Security flaws in an unnamed carmaker's website let anyone steal anybody's car from anywhere.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This has reportedly been fixed.

• OpenAI has priced GPT-5 so low it may spark a price war.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Chance would be a fine thing.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's GPT-5 comes with up to 80% fewer hallucinations.  (The Register)
  
  Fewer hallucinations are good, or so the voices tell me.
  
  

• OpenAI's GPT-5 is one hundred percent convinced that "blueberry" is spelled with three b's.  (Kieran Healy)
  
  Oops.

• I have RSV - respiratory syncytial virus - and putting a name to it doesn't help at all to be perfectly honest.
  
  I bought a COVID test because I was starting to suspect this wasn't just a cold, and the particular test also tested influenza A and B - it didn't feel like the flu, but okay - and RSV, which hadn't crossed my mind at all.
  
  Good news: My lifetime 100% COVID-free rating remains untouched.
  
  Bad news: RSV is bloody annoying.
  
  The common symptoms in adults match mine precisely, so I haven't developed an idiosyncratic reaction.

  If present, symptoms are generally isolated to the upper respiratory tract: runny nose, sore throat, fever, and malaise.  In most cases, nasal congestion precedes the development of cough.  Unlike other upper respiratory infections, RSV is more likely to cause new onset wheeze in adults.

  Still annoying.

• HTTP is not a simple protocol.  (Haxx)
  
  It drives everything and is implemented everywhere but it is rarely if ever entirely correct.  The original 1.0 version in 1997 ran to 18,615 words; the later 1.1 version currently runs to 95,740 words, as much as a substantial novel.
  
  
  
• HTTP/2: The sequel is always worse.  (Portswigger)
  
  It just is.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Lens - Window's free text-scanning app - is being replaced with AI.  (Thurrott)
  
  That's "blueberry" with three b's.
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, August 11 2025 06:18 AM (QE7eq)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 11 2025 11:10 PM (nRhcb)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, August 12 2025 02:29 PM (QE7eq)

4 ddu is Display Driver Uninstaller, a program that can reboot to safe mode and remove all traces of your driver, so you can do a clean install of a new one. It's especially nice, as I said, when you're switching between AMD and Nvidia and vice versa (and now Intel.)  Googling it should give you a link to the download on guru3d.com, but since everything's working for you you probably don't need it.  It's potentially quite useful if you have problems.
Also, your new card sounds like an excuse for a high-refresh-rate monitor.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 13 2025 03:24 AM (3E5Rg)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, August 14 2025 01:49 PM (QE7eq)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 15 2025 02:17 AM (Uv5/t)

Posted by: normal at Friday, August 15 2025 04:12 AM (e0fX0)

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Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, August 09 2025 11:57 PM (rcPLc)

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