• A couple of weeks ago I found a mini-PC that was priced - in Australia at least - at just 20% more than the cost of the RAM it includes. It uses regular laptop DIMMs so even if the PC doesn't turn out ideal it's a decent price and lets me upgrade any laptop I buy during the memory drought.
  
  Right after I bought it the price went up and I thought I'd ordered just in time, but then the price came back down.
  
  And a week ago memory prices had climbed to match the price of the whole computer, so I bought another one. I have them both set up and they seem to work well.
  
  And now as memory prices continue to climb, the memory alone is 20% more than the cost of the entire computer, so, yeah, you know it. I think I'm set for computers for a while.
  
  I tried out Ethernet-over-Thunderbolt networking today. Plugged in the cable between the two PCs and got instant 20Gb Ethernet. Magic.
  
  It's not a perfect system - the Ryzen 7 255 lacks an NPU, and it only has one rear USB-A port and that port is USB 2.0 - and it's not one I can recommend to most readers because it costs 60% more in the US than in Australia. But it's pretty good for my needs given the destruction that AI buildouts are wreaking on affordability right now.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk's $56 billion Tesla pay package, previously set aside by the corrupt Chancery Court in Delaware in an action that led to the company shifting its registration to Texas, has been restored by the Delaware Supreme Court. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Though given the increase in Tesla's share price over the intervening years, it is now a $140 billion pay package.
  
  So nice going, guys.

• LG is allowing customers to delete the Microsoft Copilot app it forced onto their televisions. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or will do at some point.
  
  
  
• How a botched firewall update at Australia phone company Optus blocked emergency calls for 14 hours and contributed to the deaths of two people. (The Register)
  
  Layer upon layer of incompetence.
  
  
  
• Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to compete - poorly - with other AI companies over the next five to ten years. (Business Insider)
  
  Or you could not do that.
  
  
  
• Yann Lecun, until recently the chief AI scientist at Meta, has founded a startup to work on AI systems that aren't hot garbage and is looking to raise funds at a $5 billion valuation. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Key to the new system is building an AI that knows things, rather than just going by statistical language patterns. That is, it has a world model as well as a language model, and the world model is definitive.
  
  This is one of the four steps absolutely required to build a generally useful AI.
  
  ChatGPT scores zero out of four.
  
  
  
• Airbus is migrating its apps and data from US-run cloud services to European ones that don't exist. (The Register)
  
  Brilliant.
  
  
  
• Finalised the changes to my Minecraft modpack, uploaded it for approval, and went back to playtesting.
  
  And it immediately crashed.
  
  Not sure why, but I needed to repair the Forge installation itself.  No major bugs in the modpack so far.
  
  I'll clean up the page a bit and then switch it to public.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, December 20 2025 05:21 PM (amxkj)

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• The unfortunately named Paris Buttfield-Addison bought a $500 Apple gift card at a major Australian brick-and-mortar outlet.
  
  Turns out the card had already been redeemed, and when he tried to redeem it, it was rejected.
  
  The outlet agreed to provide a replacement gift card, so all was well.
  
  Then Apple terminated his account and bricked all of his devices.  (Hey.Paris)

  My Apple ID, which I have held for around 25 years (it was originally a username, before they had to be email addresses; it’s from the iTools era), has been permanently disabled.  This isn't just an email address; it is my core digital identity.  It holds terabytes of family photos, my entire message history, and is the key to syncing my work across the ecosystem.
  
  I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active "bricked" hardware.  My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly.  I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media.

  You might be thinking at this point that this guy is an idiot for giving a single company complete control over his personal and work life in this way.
  
  You would be correct.

• Apple is not a computer company.  (Thurrott)
  
  It's a protection racket.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant doesn't work even in the company's own ads where the responses are fake.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  That would be embarrassing if Microsoft still had the capacity to feel embarrassment.
  
  
  
• Intel looks set to release a big Battlemage.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This will be about 60% faster than the current B580, which is a fairly decent value at $250 since it offers 12GB of RAM.  The new card will have 16GB of RAM.
  
  Price and release dates are left to be generated by some random LLM somewhere.
  
  
  
• TikTok has agreed to be sold to a US-led investment consortium.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The parent company, ByteDance, will retain a 20% stake in the new join venture.
  
  From the details given, 35% of the shares are unaccounted for.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, December 20 2025 02:10 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: wheels at Saturday, December 20 2025 02:59 AM (H9lUx)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 20 2025 08:43 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 20 2025 09:15 AM (PiXy!)

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• Micron says the memory shortage will get worse before it gets better, and also that it won't get better if they have anything to say about it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Micron has two factories under construction in Idaho due to come on line in 2027, and another planned in New York to be operational in 2030.
  
  Even with those three new factories churning out chips they only expect to meet half to two thirds of demand.
  
  In the meantime, though, the company posted a revenue increase of 57% over last year, so they don't really care about you and your money, as indicated by them shutting down their Crucial consumer brand after nearly 30 years.
  
  
  
• And the second of my two new mini-PCs arrived today.  I set up the first one last night - just plugged it in, turned it on, lied and told Windows I didn't have internet, and it works.  It's pretty fast too, with none of the lag I get with my laptop.
  
  Partly because the CPU is nearly twice as fast as the one in my laptop, partly because it's a clean install of Windows and doesn't have about 200 different applications installed yet.  I'll fix that.
  
  It really does have 64GB of RAM.  64GB of Crucial RAM, apparently, which is now a collectors item.
  
  It's available for sale now on Minisforum's US store, but the price is about 70% higher than in Australia even after a 20% discount, so it's no bargain.
  
  Update: Unnamed computer #2 is plugged in and working.

Tech News

• The Corsair MP700 Pro XT is the new fastest consumer SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  15GB per second and 3.3 million IOPS, the equivalent to a RAID array of 25,000 hard drives.
  
  And it's not much more expensive than PCIe 4.0 models.  Not because it's cheap, but because the price increases in flash memory have overwhelmed the price increment for the faster PCIe 5.0 controller.
  
  
  
• GitHub is not charging you $0.002 per minute for using your own hardware.  (The Register)
  
  They were planning to.  Users were not impressed.
  
  
  
• Jared Isaacman has been confirmed by the Senate as the new administrator of NASA, where he will do...  Stuff.  (Politico)
  
  Or more accurately, hand money to SpaceX for them to do stuff.
  
  
  
• AI-generated code contains 70% more bugs than human-generated, and is twice as likely to introduce security vulnerabilities.  (The Register)
  
  In my experience, if you can precisely specify the requirements, and the AI can crib from public code in another programming language, and you can run the code in a sandbox where break-ins can't happen, and you're willing to do the testing, and the job is the sort of annoying boilerplate work of plugging two things together that don't really want to be plugged together, AI is useful.
  
  In other words, the stuff that you would dump on a junior team member so that one day they would be a senior team member.
  
  But this kind of work wasn't much fun back when we didn't have AI, so I'm not sure we've made things worse.

• Coupang - South Korea's equivalent to Amazon - got hacked.  (WSJ)  (archive site)
  
  Initial disclosure indicated that 4500 customers were affected.
  
  This number has since been updated to 34 million.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, Midjourney is alemwjsl.  (Aadill Pickle)
  
  Me: That's someone typing the local name for Midjourney on a CJKV keyboard with the language accidentally set to English.
  
  Article: Uh...  Yes.  Korean.

• Is the Commodore 64 Ultimate any good?  Yes.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's an FPGA emulator rather than just software, so it's more precise, and it supports existing hardware like ROM cartridges and disk drives if you still have one in working order.
  
  And it includes not a mere 64K of RAM but 128MB.  (Of which you can attach 16MB as an expansion cartridge.)
  
  And you can dial the speed up from 1MHz to 64MHz.
  
  And it has modern niceties like HDMI, USB, Ethernet, and wifi.
  
  And it has a high-quality mechanical keyboard.
  
  $299, or $349 for the translucent Starlight edition, but that's about what a second-hand C64 will set you back these days once you get it working.
  
  
  
• The US government has signed a deal with Korea Zinc to build a rare earth processing facility in Tennessee.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The company will be building a $6.6 billion facility to produce 540,000 tons of material per year, including gallium, germanium, and indium, none of which are rare earth elements.
  
  Also, 540,000 tons of these metals would be a lot.  Hundreds of times more than current global output.  So someone is leaving something out somewhere.
  
  
  
• Canada's postmaster-general or whatever he is Mark Carney has been criticised over his choice of British spellings in official documents as opposed to American ones.  (The Guardian)
  
  Canada is not a real country.
  
  
  
• Texas has sued a bevy of TV makers including Sony, LG, Samsung, TCL, and Hisense for taking screenshots of what you are watching without your consent.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• Set up Frieren something, the first of my two Minisforum AI X1-255 systems.  Second unit looks likely to arrive tomorrow, and will be named Tanya something else.
  
  Works.  Fast.  Quiet, though not silent.  Plan to reinstall Windows, but so far, works, fast.
  
  It's in stock on Minisforum's US store right now...  For $1126, discounted from $1406.
  
  I paid A$989 including 10% sales tax, so just under US$600 before tax.  I don't know if that's tariffs or Minisforum AU just hasn't kept up with the pricing - it's still available here at very close to that price - but either way I got a steal.
  
  Update: Oh, yeah, I already have a Frieren and a Tanya.
  
  Update Too: Second unit arrived.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, December 18 2025 03:24 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: K Duncan at Thursday, December 18 2025 05:14 AM (6zKZf)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 18 2025 05:17 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 18 2025 09:08 AM (PiXy!)

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• Merriam Webster names "slop" the word of the year.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good work, dictionary.  Have a cookie.

• LG has force-installed Microsoft Copilot on its smart TVs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And you can't remove it.
  
  Planning to buy Samsung instead?  Same deal with their TVs and Google Gemini.
  
  
  
• The KTC H27P3 is a 5k monitor.  (The Verge)
  
  It covers 99% of the DCI-P3 colour space and offers 500 nits of brightness and a 2000:1 contrast ratio.  Only 60Hz at full resolution, but if you drop it down to 2560x1440 it can handle 120Hz.  HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C are on offer for inputs.  It nominally offers 10-bit colour but that's through PWM - it's really just a regular 8-bit panel.
  
  All of that stuff is commonplace in semi-professional monitors, so why mention it?
  
  According to the article (I couldn't verify this myself) it's currently discounted to $355 on Amazon.
  
  
  
• How the CIA lost a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.  (New York Times)
  
  The article refers to it as a "nuclear device" every single time, trying to play up the danger, citing concerns that it might break down and pollute the pristine waters of...  The Ganges.
  
  Anyway, they know exactly where it is.  At the top of a mountain.  Probably.
  
  
  
• Hard drive prices soared in the most recent quarter along with everything else.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  By 4%.
  
  
  
• Searching UTF-8 text at 5GB/s using AVX-512.  (Ash Vardanian)
  
  It's an impressive trick, but mostly because Unicode (and UTF-8 in particular) is utterly insane.
  
  
  
• That mini-PC I just bought now costs only $40 more than the RAM it contains.  The exact model and speed of RAM - 2x32GB Crucial DDR5-5600 SO-DIMMs.
  
  Since it also contains a 1TB M.2 SSD - a pretty basic Kingston model but at least it's PCIe 4.0 - the price of the computer itself is around -$130.
  
  It's back on sale for the same price.  Well, $3 more.  Close enough.
  
  Yes, I bought another one.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, December 17 2025 12:39 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, December 17 2025 12:41 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: wheels at Wednesday, December 17 2025 03:30 AM (H9lUx)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, December 17 2025 03:47 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 17 2025 04:47 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 17 2025 04:52 AM (1zWbY)

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• After Amazon was blocked from buying Roomba maker iRobot last year by US and European regulators, the company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and will be sold off to Shenzhen PICEA Robotics Co. (Bloomberg / MSN)
  
  Guess they'll have to... Suck it up.
  
  Oh, and good fucking work on the regulations there. You really protected competition, huh?

• After 53 years, HP-IB, also known as GPIB and IEEE-488, has a stable Linux driver. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Thanks. Though I hear some people have moved on to Firewire now.
  
  
  
• The Motorola Edge 70 prides itself on being thin and lightweight, unlike all the other phones on the market, which are so heavy the average person can barely lift them let alone carry them about. (Notebook Check)
  
  Performance is kind of meh for the price. If you must have an edge, older models are available for much cheaper.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum N5 Pro NAS turns out not to be all that expensive. (NASCompares)
  
  I mean, it costs close to $1000 for the bare unit (with 128GB of storage - basically an OS boot disk) for a device with five 3.5" bays and three M.2 slots. But it has 10Gb and 5Gb Ethernet ports, two USB4 ports, Oculink, and a PCIe x16 slot for expansion.
  
  And a twelve-core Ryzen 370, so this is not merely a NAS but a very capable PC with a lot more storage and networking options that you typically find in small pre-built systems.
  
  I'm not about to buy one, though, because I have plenty of mini-PCs and plenty of multi-bay external storage units. And that little Beelink NAS too.
  
  
  
• This $1500 robot cooks dinner while I work. (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  So does my $20 Kmart slow-cooker.
  
  
  
• While I'm often harshly critical of AI, this image is almost too perfectly what I was after in this case:
  
  
  
  Why I was after this is another question, but it is what I was after.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 15 2025 11:36 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 16 2025 02:26 AM (PiXy!)

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• Why AI makes bad systems more convincing.  (Chaincoder)
  
  Because AI is not just a stochastic bullshit generator.  It's a stochastic plausibility generator.
  
  AI images?  They're not art, they don't have meaning; they're just close enough to make you think they have meaning.
  
  AI stories and essays?  The same except that it's a lot worse at holding to a thread.
  
  AI software testing?  Actually useful.  It might miss some test cases you would have tried, but it will also create test cases you wouldn't have thought of, and it will do it quickly.
  
  AI software?  It will be produced quickly and for any non-trivial task it won't work.  But it may look like it does.

  The deeper issue is psychological. The more polished the output looks, the less likely someone is to question it.  Verification feels redundant when something sounds authoritative.
  
  That is not a tooling problem. It is a human one.

  Entirely correct.
  
  
  
• AI superintelligence - or even intelligence - is not a looming reality but a fantasy.  (The Register)
  
  Partly because we have run out of easy wins.  The industry wouldn't be spending a trillion dollars on this if it could be done for a billion.
  
  And partly because almost nobody is working towards intelligence, just bigger and shinier automated confidence tricksters.

• HP's OmniBook 7 Aero 13 lacks the Four Essential Keys.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Get out of here, HP.  It had those keys when it was a Pavilion model.  Put them back.
  
  
  
• Gnome's new rules forbid AI-written extensions.  (Phoronix)
  
  I side with Gnome here.  The rules are actually pretty sensible.  Both things I am surprised to find myself saying given the nonsense Gnome has gotten up to at times.
  
  
  
• Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic will launch before 2030.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is a sequel to a game (Knights of the Old Republic) that came out in 2003.
  
  I would wonder whether the audience still exists but apparently the original game was released for the Nintendo Switch as recently as 2021, so apparently they still do.
  
  We still do.  KotOR was pretty good.
  
  
  
• Is vibe coding the new gateway to technical debt?  (InfoWorld)
  
  Yes.  And other kinds of debt too.
  
  
  
• Why Twilio moved back from microservices to a monolithic system.  (Twilio)
  
  Think of it this way: Having three cars instead of one bus gives you a lot more flexibility.  But having 140 cars means you spend all your time managing the logistics of the cars themselves rather than driving people where they need to go.
  
  
  
• Seven bags of bark chips deployed.  Neighbour came over while I was working and complimented me on how good it looked.  Which I think is only partly a comment on how bad it looked before - I live next to an overgrown vacant lot which looks even worse - because even I think the results were worth the effort.

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 15 2025 04:48 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 15 2025 09:09 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 15 2025 10:06 AM (Sbqr6)

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• In April, District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that Apple had wilfully violated her 2021 order to open up the App Store.
  
  Apple appealed.
  
  The Ninth Circuit just upheld the decision, ruling that Apple has been acting in bad faith, as everyone paying attention already knew.  (Ars Technica)
  
  "But we're only worth $4 trillion!  We need that 30% cut of transactions that don't even take place on the App Store!"

• Can the Steam Machine really run games at 4k 60Hz as Valve claims?
  
  In many cases, yes.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The Steam Machine isn't out yet, but the specs are public and they're very close to an existing AMD CPU and GPU so it is possible to build and equivalent system and test performance right now.
  
  On indie titles like Hollow Knight: Silksong it delivers 4k at 120Hz, or close to it.  That's not a particularly demanding title so it's not a huge surprise.
  
  On big-budget titles like Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Monster Hunter Wilds you can expect 60Hz at 1440p, but at 4k only two of these titles achieved a consistent 60Hz.
  
  And this is with graphical settings and upscaling tweaked appropriately, not with everything simply set to maximum quality.  But this is not a high-end system, and isn't expected to have a high-end price.  It's supposed to just work.
  
  Will I buy one when it comes out?  Maybe.  Depends on the price.  I just picked up that mini-PC with a faster CPU (though a slower GPU) and a lot more memory for around $600, so it would have to compare well with that.
  
  Edit: Now that I compare those benchmark scores, the Steam Deck Machine doesn't offer me that much.  The processor on my new mini-PC is 39% faster and the graphics  36% slower than the Steam Machine, and it has 64GB of shared memory rather than 16GB plus 8GB of DRAM.  Since I also have a full desktop system and an Xbox (gathering dust) I think I'm good.
  
  
  
• Framework has increased memory prices by 50% on its DIY laptops.  (Framework)
  
  That doesn't seem too bad given that retail prices have increased by around 300% in the past couple of months.
  
  Pre-built laptops and the Framework Desktop which comes with up to 128GB of RAM have not increased in price, nor have prices changed for existing pre-orders.
  
  
  
• Russian hackers have deployed new ransomware that encrypts all of your files - with an interesting twist.  (The Register)
  
  The twist is that the decryption key is hardcoded into the ransomware so you can just decrypt all your files youself.
  
  
  
• Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come on and join the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands.  (Reclaim the Net)
  
  Berlin's regional government has brought back the Stasi.
  
  
  
• I planted my plants.  I had 16 native shrubs of various sorts sitting in pots waiting - several  different bottlebrushes and grevilleas, a westringia, a boronia, and a babingtonia, plus a few kangaroo paws in various colours.
  
  All but the kangaroo paws got planted today.
  
  Needed to wait for it to rain to break up the ground where I planned this - it had been dry for a while and the soil was rock hard - and then wait for it to stop raining to get some supplies delivered.  Then it rained again and that ground got covered in weeds.
  
  So today I pulled out all those weeds, dug out some regular grass which I didn't want growing into this area, dug out some patches of native tussock-grass which is not technically a weed but which I also didn't want there, dug in some gypsum to help break up the soil and some potting mix tailored for native plants to improve it, and then dug eleven holes (hitting rocks several times and on two occasions large metal staples left behind by the builders), filled those holes with more potting mix, and planted everything but those kangaroo paws, which will go in another part of the garden.
  
  Which will all look great in a year or so as it grows in but right now, ouch.
  
  Need to go back and cover it with bark chips, but that will definitely be another day.
  
  
  
  

Apple Bacon Interlude

• Reddit is suing Australia to have itself removed from the under-16 banlist.  (The Register)
  
  Reddit is a screaming dumpster fire, but so is our government, and I can simply ignore Reddit if I choose.  So I'm solidly on their side.

• Want a high-resolution monitor but still need fast refresh rates for games?  Asus' new XG27JG has you covered.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a 5k model which is good enough for almost anything, and runs at 180Hz which is also good enough for almost anything.  But if you drop the resolution to 2560x1440 you can boost the refresh rate to 330Hz, which is more than enough.
  
  HDR 600 and 97% of DCI-P3 colour.  One small catch: It doesn't work at its full resolution and refresh rate on an Nvidia 4000-series card, because those only support an older version of DisplayPort.  Previous generation Radeon 7000 series cards do work, as do all current-generation cards.
  
  Around $835.
  
  
  
• Buying 1152GB of Frakenram for $8000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The user put an offer in on a second-hand custom Nvidia AI system that originally cost around $80,000 and managed to get it working.
  
  
  
• Over 10,000 Docker Hub images have been found leaking credentials.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's over 10,000!

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, December 13 2025 12:05 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 13 2025 12:13 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 13 2025 06:43 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, December 13 2025 10:51 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, December 14 2025 12:30 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 14 2025 08:30 AM (Sbqr6)

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