• DC-based tech startup Besxar has signed a deal with SpaceX for 12 launches of experimental chip fabrication hardware.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The idea being that on the ground, maintaining a hard vacuum is difficult and expensive but essential for chip production.  In space, though, you can just open a window.
  
  The tricky part - and a key point in these experiments - is seeing if wafers can be launched into orbit and returned intact.
  
  
  
• You know what else has been launched into orbit?  Memory prices.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a good thing I bought my 128GB of DDR5 RAM when I did, because the price of those high-density high-speed modules has doubled.
  
  The price of low-density and low-speed modules has also doubled.
  
  The price of older DDR4 modules has - you guessed it - doubled.
  
  Or in some cases, more.
  
  Thanks, AI.

• Without access to Nvidia's high-end AI chips, China has resorted to making their own.  Only problem is they are far less power-efficient.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The Chinese government is subsidising power bills for AI companies by 50% to try to make up that gap.
  
  
  
• It's not all bad news for Nintendo on the patent front.  Sometimes its worse news.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Their patent on capturing monsters and putting them in your pocket was recently rejected by the Japanese patent office for being unoriginal.
  
  Now the company's US patent on summoning monsters from your pocket and making them fight is being re-examined by the USPTO and could end up being revoked.
  
  
  
• Three security experts working at Sygnia Consulting and DigitalMint had a profitable little side-hustle: Hacking and extorting their employers' customers.  (MSN)
  
  They are now facing federal prison.
  
  
  
• Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly.  (The Economist)

  Hundreds of teenagers, sometimes strong-armed by their parents, have trooped through the doors of Britain’s National Centre for Gaming Disorders since it opened in 2019.  Yet lately the publicly funded clinic has admitted a steady trickle of rather different patients.  Its specialists in video-game addiction have so far treated 67 people over the age of 40.

  Die in a fire.
  
  
  
• The Python Software Foundation is going broke.  (Lunduke)
  
  The PSF is facing a funding shortfall of $1.5 million.
  
  The PSF recently cancelled its own grant request for $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation because the funds would have come with a requirement that it abandon DEI.
  
  The PSF can also die in a fire.  Python will survive.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 06 2025 12:45 AM (iUcB9)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, November 06 2025 04:21 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 06 2025 09:45 AM (1zWbY)

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• Is OpenAI becoming too big to fail?  (MSN)
  
  It sure is.  Just like Lehman Brothers.  And Worldcom.  And Enron.
  
  
  
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explained how the company is planning to pay for $1 trillion worth of hardware and services deals with an annual revenue of $13 billion.  (Tech Crunch)

  "We are taking a forward bet that it will continue to grow, and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing, that AI that can automate science will create huge value," he added.

  Well, I know I feel comforted.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The best things to watch over and over and over.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  I recall my nephew could watch My Neighbour Totoro on loop and never tire of it, but in his defense he was three years old at the time.
  
  Which tells you a lot about the mental ages of tech journalists.
  
  
  
• Obsidian's The Outer Worlds 2 is here, the sequel to their 2019 game The Outer Worlds which I was looking forward to at the time before they signed an exclusivity agreement with Epic Games for a ton of money and by the time it was available on my preferred stores I had lost all time and interest and even though I own it now I have never gotten around to playing it where was I oh - don't even think of playing it with ray tracing enabled.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It runs...  Adequately...  With ray tracing off.
  
  With ray tracing on it can't hit 60 fps (average, never mind the 1% lows which are abysmal) on an RTX 5090 at 1080p even using "performance" upscaling - so it's only actually rendering at 540p.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Anbernic RG DS is here and under $100.  Along with specs which we didn't have until today.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is a dual-screen handheld gaming thingy that looks uncannily like the Nintendo DS only better.
  
  The two 4" screens are "only" 640x480, but then the original DS had 3" screens with a 256x192 resolution.  The CPU is "only" a quad core Arm A55 running at 2GHz, but the original had a single Arm9 core running at 67MHz.  Oh, and 3GB of RAM compared to the original's 4MB.
  
  Also, the DS sold for $150 in 2004.
  
  It looks pretty cool but back when I was playing Final Fantasy III on my DS I did not yet need reading glasses.  On the other hand, I now have reading glasses so maybe that's not such an issue.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

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Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, November 05 2025 11:12 AM (ZLF73)

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• SpaceX is set to win a $2 billion contract with the Pentagon to develop and launch tracking satellites as part of the broader Golden Dome defense project.  (Yahoo)
  
  Which only makes sense.  If you want to launch satellites, there's SpaceX and then there's a long, long gap before you get to second place.

• The Playdate is a great indie puzzle machine: Games like Lexgrid, Togglebot, and What Time Is It? are perfect daily distractions.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The what?
  
  Huh.  This is apparently a thing that exists.  It's a tiny handheld gaming device, the size and colour of a Post-It note, with specs to match the original Nintendo Game Boy from 1989.
  
  Which is...  Fine.  It costs $229 and has not exactly set the world on fire, but keep trucking along, dudes.
  
  
  
• Bluesky has reached 40 million users and unveiled a "dislike button".  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Nobody posts on Bluesky but that's a separate problem.

  The company explained the changes are designed to make Bluesky a place for more "fun, genuine, and respectful exchanges" - an edict that follows a month of unrest on the platform as some users again criticized the platform over its moderation decisions.

  Edict?  Do you know what that word means?
  
  Anyway, the only people more delusional than the Tech Crunch reporter here trying to fluff month-dead roadkill and the Bluesky executives pretending their company isn't month-dead roadkill are Bluesky's dozen or so actual users who insist that the company should ban people who don't break the rules, to save them the trouble of constructing their own echo chambers:

  Bluesky, however, wants to focus more on the tools it provides users to control their own experience.Today, this includes things like moderation lists that let users quickly block a group of people they don’t want to interact with, content filter controls, muted words, and the ability to subscribe to other moderation service providers.

  The problem is that all this engineering effort is going to make sure that none of their users ever have to see outside their bubbles.
  
  
  
• Support for MySQL 8.0 ends in six months.  (The Register)
  
  Bleh.
  
  
  
• A faint glow in the Milky Way could be dark matter.  (Space)
  
  If it's so dark, why does it glow?

• AMD has explained that when they said that drivers for their RX 5000 and RX 6000 graphics cards (and integrated graphics with the RDNA 1 and 2 architectures respectively) were entering maintenance mode with only bug fixes to be released and not optimisations for individual games, they didn't mean maintenance mode, they meant maintenance mode.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Everyone clear on that?
  
  Good.
  
  Long stupid story short, they will still be updating the drivers for related boards and APUs, just not promising to address the quirks of every game that comes along.
  
  Also, the release note saying they were dropping support for the USB-C port on RX 7900 series boards was bullshit.  Yes, it's in the official release notes; yes, it's officially bullshit.
  
  The previous generation - the RX 400 and RX 500 series, which were the same thing with different numbers - is still kind of dead but we already knew that.  You can still find new-in-box RX 580s but they're starting to dry up now.  The XFX models I grabbed early this year are completely gone.
  
  Update: Turns out my supplier found another four of them hiding somewhere. Priced around $100 including sales tax.
  

• Some crazy person has created a version of Windows 7 that fits in just 69MB of disk space.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Considering that a decent SSD costs about 5c per GB, that's about 0.4c of space.
  
  Also, it isn't actually useful for anything.  It runs, but it doesn't run most software without you manually installing a bunch more system files.
  
  
  
• Those videos explaining how to bypass Windows 11's online account requirement during installation that YouTube has been merrily deleting?  Blame AI.  (The Register)
  
  YouTube hasn't said anything, but when a video is taken down instantly, and an appeal is also rejected instantly, that's AI.
  
  
  
• YouTube was probably too busy to comment on the situation because the people at the top are occupied with laying off the people at the bottom to focus more heavily on the AI that is already destroying the site.  (CNBC)  (archive site)
  
  Oh, good.
  
  
  
• Testing Highpoint's RocketAIC 7608AW.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a PCIe 5.0 card with a PCIe 5.0 switch chip on board and eight PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots.  So it's fast, but it's also very expensive with the bare card priced at $1999.
  
  The fault there seems to be mainly the PCIe 5.0 switch chip.  There don't seem to be any products out there at a reasonable price.
  
  The QNAP 4-port M.2 card that I have costs less than $200 on Amazon, but that's PCIe 3.0.  Anything more recent will cost you an arm and a leg and a kidney and maybe a cornea.
  
  
  
• Israel demanded Amazon and Google use a secret "wink" code to sidestep legal orders.  (The Guardian)
  
  Warrant canaries.  What these subliterate fascists are talking about are warrant canaries.
  
  A warrant canary is a thing that appears to be normal until and unless the company receives a warrant with a gag order attached, the reasoning being that while gag orders are still legal, they can't compel you to keep your pet canary singing.
  
  Particularly if they don't know you have a pet canary.
  
  No fault attaches to Israel in this.  All the blame attaches to the totalitarian regimes that necessitate this sort of warning mechanism.
  
  And their pet media mouthpieces.
  
  
  
• When Canva bought Affinity in March last year, everyone wondered how long it would take them to fuck up a good and affordable multi-platform product range.  It turns out the answer was 19 months.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Good news first: The whole Affinity product range is now free, bundled into a single application simply called Affinity.
  
  Not really a problem news: To get the full functionality you need to pay $120 per year for a Canva subscription, but the only function gated behind the paywall right now is AI slop.  The free version does everything the three Affinity apps could do before, except...
  
  Problem news: Affinity v3 and read but not write Affinity v2 files.  If you use the new app there's no going back, unless you re-export to a third-party format and lose internal history.
  
  It could have been much worse, but they could also not have done this at all.
  
  
  
• A new mathematical proof debunks the idea that the universe is a simulation except it does nothing of the fucking sort.  (Phys.org)

  "It has been suggested that the universe could be simulated.  If such a simulation were possible, the simulated universe could itself give rise to life, which in turn might create its own simulation.  This recursive possibility makes it seem highly unlikely that our universe is the original one, rather than a simulation nested within another simulation," says Dr. Faizal.  "This idea was once thought to lie beyond the reach of scientific inquiry.  However, our recent research has demonstrated that it can, in fact, be scientifically addressed."

  No it hasn't.

  The team demonstrated that even this information-based foundation cannot fully describe reality using computation alone.  They used powerful mathematical theorems - including Gödel's incompleteness theorem-to prove that a complete and consistent description of everything requires what they call "non-algorithmic understanding."

  Yes, that's cute.  But we already have Gödel's incompleteness theorems (there's two of them) and this doesn't seem to tell us anything new at all - just a limit in the ability to determine the truth of certain mathematical statements.
  
  The second problem, though, is that no-one has ever shown that "non-algorithmic understanding" exists, could possibly exist, or has any kind of clear definition.

  The team's conclusion is clear and marks an important scientific achievement, says Dr. Faizal.
  
  "Any simulation is inherently algorithmic - it must follow programmed rules," he says.

  There's just one small problem here: This is completely false.
  
  
  
• Speaking of every game that comes along Escape from Duckov, a combat game involving ducks written by a five-person team in China, has sold two million copies in two weeks, while western titles with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars continue to flounder.
  
  Just a month ago, Megabonk, written by a one-man team, sold a million copies in two weeks...  While western titles with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars continued to flounder.
  
  And before that it was Silksong, written by three guys in Australia, selling 6 million copies, and before that it was Schedule 1, written by just one guy in Australia, selling 5 million copies.
  
  It starts to feel like the established video game companies are doing something wrong.
  
  
  

• Meanwhile Nintendo's patent on capturing monsters and putting them in your pocket, which the company planned to use as a legal bludgeon against Palworld, a game where you capture monsters and put them in your pocket, has been rejected by the Japanese patent office for being "boring and stupid".  (MSN)
  
  Actually they just said the patent lacked originality, which of course it fucking does because Nintendo waited thirty years before trying to patent it.
   
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, November 01 2025 11:42 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, November 02 2025 02:32 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 02 2025 07:10 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, November 02 2025 01:22 PM (rcPLc)

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• Sorry, doomsayers.  The trade war and crippling rare earth element shortages have been pushed back to 2026.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And the US had already forged agreements to obtain rare earth elements from other sources.
  
  Always doom tomorrow, never doom today.

• AMD is relegating driver support for the RX 5000 and RX 6000 series cards to maintenance mode.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They'll still receive bugfixes, but not driver updates to tune performance in specific games.
  
  My RX 7800 XT is still covered for now.  My two RX 580s rather less so; those drivers have been in maintenance mode for long enough that it's not clear there is still maintenance going on.
  
  
  
• CISA and NSA share tips on securing Microsoft Exchange servers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If these tips don't involve thermite, I'm not interested.
  
  
  
• Google is - reluctantly and with much kicking and screaming - starting to implement the changes required from its catastrophic loss in the suit brough against it by Epic Games.  (Ars Technica)
  
  A catastrophe for Google.  A strawberry sundae for everyone else.
  
  
  
• Slop, slop everywhere, and the message boards did stink.  (The Verge)
  
  Facebook's answer to protests against the increasing amount of AI slop in its products is more slop.
  
  
  
• AI browsers are a security time bomb.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  There is no upside here.  AI browsers are bad news.

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, November 01 2025 09:56 AM (ZLF73)

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• Microsoft went down.  (The Verge)
  
  The outage took out Azure, Microsoft 365, Xbox services, and most importantly, Minecraft, as well as a whole string of Azure customers like Starbucks, Costco, and Zoom.  It even affected some services on AWS and Google Cloud.
  
  It was DNS.
  
  It is always DNS.

• Microsoft keeps disabling workarounds for Windows 11's demand for an online account during setup.
  
  Now Microsoft has YouTube playing cleanup for it, removing videos instructing people how to use the remaining workarounds.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because fuck you, that's why.
  
  
  
• The problem with Windows handhelds is Windows.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  I knew it!
  
  
  
• Two-time Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is now at Gloo, where he is working on an AI that will...  Accelerate the Second Coming?  (The Guardian)
  
  Look, it's The Guardian, so take that with a pillar of salt, but I'm not sure this would be entirely a good thing.
  
  
  
• Bending Spoons is buying AOL for $1.5 billion.  (Axios)
  
  We will always have the free coasters though.
  
  
  
• Grokipedia apparently contains insufficient leftist propaganda to satisfy the insufferable moral cretins at The Verge.  (The Verge)
  
  That's a promising sign, at least.

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, October 30 2025 09:01 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: FOE@Monmouth at Friday, October 31 2025 01:58 AM (VzJiO)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, October 31 2025 06:30 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, October 31 2025 01:19 PM (ZLF73)

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• Amazon is cutting 14,000 corporate jobs.  (The Verge)
  
  Not replacing them with AI.  Just...  Not replacing them.
  
  
  
• Apple and Microsoft have both passed the $4 trillion market cap line.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Joining Nvidia among the most valuable companies in the world.
  
  Google's parent company is valued at $3.25 trillion, and Amazon is at $2.42 trillion.
  
  Google's parent company Alphabet is valued at $3.25 trillion, Amazon is at $2.42 trillion, and Facebook's parent Meta is at $1.89 trillion.

• How to watch the GTC 2025 keynote.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  What's GTC?  This is mentioned nowhere in the article.
  
  
  
• How to watch the fake AI generated crypto scam GTC 2025 keynote.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Still no mention of what GTC actually is.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's ChatGPT-based web browser, Atlas is...  Not a web browser.  At all.  (Anil Dash)
  
  It queries ChatGPT and assembles things that look like web pages, but have no provenance and no links.
  
  There's nothing to click on.  You type your queries into ChatGPT and you wait for it to generate your slop.
  
  
  
• The Python Foundation has rejected a $1.5 million government grant due to the strings attached.  (The Register)
  
  The "strings" were don't be racist.
  
  For some reason the Python Foundation found that requirement a bridge too far.
  
  
  
• The US Senate is hard at work...  On a bill that would ban AI tamagotchis for children.  (NBC)
  
  Priorities, people.
  
  
  
• OpenAI wants to get to a $1 trillion per year infrastructure spend.  (Axios)
  
  Same.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 29 2025 09:58 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, October 30 2025 08:27 AM (oJgNG)

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• The Department of Energy has signed a $1 billion deal - of some sort - with AMD to build two new supercomputers for energy and medical research.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The systems - one to be delivered early next year, the second in 2028 - use AMD's Epyc CPUs and Instinct accelerator cards.  Instinct is marketed mostly towards AI now, because that's where the money is, but it's a general purpose card for crunching lots of numbers very quickly and makes a fine building block for a supercomputer.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm meanwhile is chasing the trillion dollar bubble with its AI200 and AI250 accelerator cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The two cards are expected to arrive next year and 2027 respectively.  Since these are new devices and don't have the track record of Nvidia or AMD (or even Intel) it's hard to know how well they will compete, but Qualcomm did announce that the cards will have 768GB of LPDDR memory each.
  
  These are strongly oriented towards low-precision calculations and would not be as useful for a non-AI supercomputer, or for playing Minecraft.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The M5 MacBook Pro's SSD is 2.5x faster than the one used in the M4 models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It can achieve...  6000MBps.
  
  Which is pretty fast, yes, but all but the cheapest M.2 SSDs can achieve that now, and Apple's storage prices are anything but cheap.
  
  And it means the M4 model only delivered 2400MBps, which if accurate is not fast at all.
  
  
  
• There's no point in waiting for the M5 MacBook Air.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Unless you want a fast SSD.
  
  
  
• Ultra HD televisions are not noticeably better for watching television, maybe.  (The Guardian)
  
  The researchers working on this study note that human vision (naturally good or properly corrected) is about 50% better than the common measure of 20/20 because Herman Snellen - who created the familiar eye chart - needed glasses.
  
  They also created a handy calculator that lets you put in your display details and see how good it is for your use.
  
  For example, my laptop's 2880x1620 screen shows that 66% of people with good vision could tell the difference between it and a "perfect" display.  By the time you get to a 4k laptop screen, that drops to 1%.
  
  And for common 27" or 32" monitors, something between 5k and 8k qualifies as close enough to perfect.  (96% of people can actually see the pixels of a 4k desktop monitor at normal viewing distances, but if you replace it with an 8k model that drops to just 1%.)
  
  
  
• Ex-CISA head Jen Easterly thinks AI might fix code so fast we won't need security teams.  (The Register)
  
  We can be thankful that this idiot no longer holds her role at CISA.
  
  
  
• CEO of Alphabet’s X, Astro Teller, on what makes a moonshot.  (Tech Crunch)  (archive site)
  
  What?
  
  
  
• Here's what ads will look like on your $2000 Samsung smart fridge.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Somehow I paid a quarter of that and didn't get any ads.
   

• Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider: Tanzaburo Tojima wants to be a Kamen Rider.  Only problem is, he's now 40, and has to make do with beating the crap out of random bears.  But when criminals show up cosplaying as thugs from the Kamen Rider goon squad "Shocker", he finally gets his chance to live out his dream.
  
  And then things get weird.
  
  
• Sanda: Japan in the future is in decline and the latest generation of children only numbers around 50,000.  Who can save a nation's faltering dream?  No idea, honest.
  
  Things start off weird and get weirder.
  
  

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, October 29 2025 03:08 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 29 2025 05:07 AM (e0fX0)

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• Why open source may not survive the rise of generative AI.  (ZDNet)
  
  Actually a real concern.
  
  Open source depends on copyright.  If you write something - software, here, but anything - it is your creating and you have the right to sell it, or to give it away, on terms you decide.  Large open source projects need to get permission from all their contributors to include their code in their project.
  
  Generative AI trashes all of that.  The products of generative AI are not generally copyrightable, and they don't keep track of where things came from either.  A piece of code from AI could be nominally original, or it could be adapted from an open source project, or it could be copied verbatim from a copyrighted source that the AI might not even have had legal access to (Anthropic had to pay out $1.5 billion over similar problems with its training data).
  
  And you can't tell.

• Federal regulators have denied autonomous trucking company Aurora Innovation an exemption to safety rules requiring signals to be placed around broken down vehicles.  (Reason)
  
  Aurora Innovation has sued the Department of Transportation for...  Not changing the rules in its favour.
  
  
  
• GM plans to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support on new vehicles and replace them with, you guessed it, more AI slop.  (The Verge)
  
  Specifically based on Google Gemini, though I don't think the particular flavour of slop is of primary concern.
  
  
  
• Why are network devices in 2025 still vulnerable to the kind of exploits we saw in 1995?  (CSO Online)
  
  Not the specific exploits, but buffer overruns, remote code execution, or simple authentication bypasses where the code never checks the password at all.
  
  The answer?  Because we're still dealing with code that was likely written in 1995:

  "But when you're dealing with legacy code - we've actually seen some C++ applications where you have literally thousands of overflow issues and the original developers are long gone - it's very difficult to get a new developer to look at it, and they don't really want to touch the code. They get to a point where it's like: Well, prove to me it's exploitable, because this is a critical old piece of code that no one understands and it's dangerous to touch it."

  The solution?
  
  Throw AI at it, and when it breaks, fire people.