Ambient Irony

They are my oldest and deadliest enemy. You cannot trust them.
If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.

Sunday, October 26

Daily News Stuff 26 October 2025

Clue Edition

Top Story

Clippy in the server room with a portable blender: Microsoft hopes Mico succeeds where Clippy failed as tech companies warily imbue AI with personality. (AP News)

Mico is the new horrifying AI-driven mascot of Microsoft's inescapable AI-driven offense to reason, Copilot.

Mico is... A grape? A purple raspberry? I don't know exactly, but kill it with fire.
"When you talk about something sad, you can see Mico's face change. You can see it dance around and move as it gets excited with you," said Jacob Andreou, corporate vice president of product and growth for Microsoft AI, in an interview with The Associated Press. It’s in this effort of really landing this AI companion that you can really feel."
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
Tech-savvy adopters of advanced AI coding tools may want it to "act much more like a machine because at the back end they know it’s a machine," Reimer said. "But individuals who are not as trustful in a machine are going to be best supported - not replaced - by technology that feels a little more like a human."
"We glued artificial fur to our woodchipper so that you will feel comfortable as we feed you into it."

Tech News

The ones who walk away from AImelas. (MSN)

Could you live in a perfect utopia if it depended on one AI developer somewhere not getting his acai smoothie in the morning?

Wait, I don't think that analogy quite works. The original story didn't hold up well to second thoughts either, so maybe it metaworks.
A Baltimore high school student was handcuffed and searched by police after an AI-equipped camera mistook a bag of Doritos for a firearm. (The Guardian)

Everything dumb is still dumb when you add AI, just faster.
The Great SassS Gaslighting. (Unworkable Ideas)

There's a reason IBM rented its software from the early days, and it was not to save you money.
Why these companies insist on a 72 hour work week. (MSN)

Because you are expendable. You're barely even a consideration.
Electronic Arts is partnering with the company behind Stable Diffusion to make games with AI and not in the good way. (Engadget)

Computer games have been using AI for about as long as there have been computer games. Well, not the original Pong which also technically wasn't a computer game since it ran directly on TTL logic and didn't use any sort of processor. While I was looking into that I ran into this cool tidbit on the original Pong prototype:
A few days later, the prototype began exhibiting technical issues and Gaddis contacted Alcorn to fix it. Upon inspecting the machine, Alcorn discovered that the problem was due to the coin mechanism overflowing with quarters.
Nice problem to have.

Oh, anyway, AI has had a role in computer games for about 50 years, but EA aren't planning to use AI in the game. They're planning to use AI to create the game.
The glaring security risks with AI browser agents. (Tech Crunch)

So, AI browsers are the big new thing. You hand over your ID and your credit cards and they can find the best deal for you online, which is much the same idea as giving your wallet, car keys, and a bottle of Everclear to a nine-year-old with severe ADHD.

Or to put it differently, an 88 year old politician in the early stages of dementia.

Musical Interlude

Song is Habba Habba Zoot Zoot by Caramba. Anime is the classic El Hazard - the original OVA series, not the multifarious messes that followed after it.

Disclaimer: Habba habba mori mori.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:06 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 612 words, total size 6 kb.

1 Doritos - those food nazis are really getting serious now.

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, October 26 2025 06:32 PM (amxkj)

2 My friends, the thing about the unsophisticated 'rubes' is that they do not share all of our customs, and if they are many and we are a few, and we happy few have screwed them over, they are better equipped to realize that we have screwed them than we are to realize that they have realized. The university trained self-proclaimed elites have screwed the public over.

There is a chunk of the public that realizes that the AI push is a proxy for other bad things that university people do, or wish to do. Some of them have ways to label this that offend me. (I much prefer the GIGO, etc. ways, and deplore the ways the younger cohorts have been raised to think of technology. (My own childhood was none too good by my current level of desire to accurately understand what a software is doing. ))

Anyway, Mineta from MHA with the uncanny 'kill it now' of fairyland is probably not a more desirable alternative.

Programmers and retail users may have different interface needs. This does not mean that replacing an incomprehensible situation with something that feels like a dishonest person is an improvement.

One of the key items of the Biden regime, the trans push, was literally based in research inflicted on psychology about 'what about this hypothetical prehistoric society where trans did not feel bad', which explicitly suggested as healthier those historic societies whose customs resulted in the behaviors that early Christians labeled demonic possession. Modern Christians were already understanding some mentally ill as evidence of such phenomena. That awareness or understanding has seemingly become stronger in recent years.

Microsoftians are not helping their roll outs by talking to journalists in ways which suggest that those executives are Harris voters or are being ridden by something. The two most default models for 'what sort of crazy is driving this random AI booster' are 'hates Christians for not participating in secular government as a religion' and 'thinks it makes economic sense to murder the "uneducated" and have a "more efficient" and smaller group of "elite" humans "that would have a lower environmental impact" '. Yudkowsky is obviously more the first, but pretty much everyone whining about Trump and the carbon magic could also be pushing for the second.

The covid lockdown was not subtle.

It is a good thing for the public to reduce their trust of computers down to what is actually supportable by evidence and test.

It is a good thing for the public to reduce their trust of academic 'elites' or academic trained 'elites' down to what is actually supportable by evidence and test.

But I am not a fan of Microsoft ruining their business and their market share this way.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 27 2025 12:19 AM (rcPLc)

3 We all owe a ton of gratitude to that Baltimore school AI which caught the student bringing a bag of military-style, automatic Doritos into the building, probably to use in a gang munching during lunch period.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Monday, October 27 2025 03:16 AM (KOtXO)

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Saturday, October 25

Daily News Stuff 25 October 2025

Megalosaurus Edition

Top Story

Tech companies have maxed out their credit cards in wild pursuit of the AI let's-not-call-it-a-bubble. (Notebook Check)

Debt held by those companies has increased fourfold over the past ten years, to a total of $1.35 trillion.

If the bubble bursts abruptly, the most highly leveraged of those companies - and their lenders - are going to be in a world of pain.

As is the economy, meaning everyone who didn't borrow all that money and set in on fire chasing phantasms.

Tech News

It's Ruperts all the way down until it isn't: The first shape has been found that doesn't have the Rupert property. (Quanta)

The Rupert property means that an object with a given 3D shape can pass through a hole bored through another object the same size and shape, but rotated so that the smallest cross section of one shape passes through the largest cross section of the other.

The first shape - or at least the first convex polyhedron - has been found that does not have this property.

Or rather, the second, though the article doesn't not point this out presumably because the original example is considered a degenerate solution: Spheres have the same cross-section from every angle, and therefore can only pass through a hole exactly that size.
Iceland found its first mosquito. (CNN)

Keep looking, guys, I'm sure you can find more.
Microsoft Teams will start tracking your location and reporting you to your boss. (Tom's Guide)

That seems a little goldfish-bowlish, but still. If you're getting paid to be in the office, and you're not in the office, and your boss finds out, that is rather on you, isn't it?
Rivian will pay $250 million to settle a lawsuit over major price increases on its cars. (Tech Crunch)

Wait, Rivian makes cars?

Anyway, Rivian hiked prices by 20% to cover increasing costs, and shareholders immediately sued claiming reasonably enough that Rivian had misrepresented those costs.
Automattic has filed a countersuit against WP Engine, claiming trademark abuse. (TechCrunch)

WP Engine fired back, saying it merely referred to WordPress by name, adding that Matt Mullenweg's parents are very disappointed in him and he never calls except when he needs money.
The Espresso Pro is an overpriced 15.6" 4k monitor aimed at Mac users. (The Verge) (archive site)

When even tech journalists think your price is too high, your price is too high.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: They don't write them like that anymore, and they never did.

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Post contains 421 words, total size 4 kb.

Friday, October 24

Daily News Stuff 24 October 2025

Everything Edition

Top Story

Apple has lost a lawsuit in the UK alleging it overcharged commissions payable by developers, who passed half the excess cost on to their customers, which, this being Apple, was charged by Apple who then took their cut on it. (9to5Mac)

Penalties could amount to $2 billion.
In other "that used to be a lot" news Anthropic has signed a deal with Google for cloud services said to be in the tens of billions of dollars. (CNBC)

Amazon, which has invested $8 billion in Anthropic, might be asking some questions at this point.

Tech News

Elon Musk claims Tesla's new AI5 chip is 40x more performant than previous-gen AI4. (Tom's Hardware)

We hates that word. We hates it, precious.
Fujitsu's new FMV Note A laptop has a Ryzen 7 7735U CPU - one step up from what I am typing this on - and a Blu-Ray drive. (Tom's Hardware)

With BDXL support too, for 100GB rewriteable discs.
The Radeon AI Pro 9700 launches Monday at a price of $1299. (WCCFTech)

It's a Radeon 9070 XT with twice as much memory. At twice the price.
A look at the Microtik CRS812-8DS-2DQ-2DDQ-RM (Serve the Home)

Otherwise known as Tim.

Tim is an Ethernet switch with two 400Gb ports, two 200Gb ports, and eight 50Gb ports. It also has two 10Gb ports but it turns out they're just for management and aren't part of the switching logic. And hot swap fans and redundant power supplies.

Since all the ports use the same signalling, internally it uses a 32-port 50Gb switch, with 4 ports assigned to each 200Gb connector and 8 assigned to each 400Gb connector, and you can break them out again with an octopus cable.

Tim costs $1295, which is pretty reasonable considering what he brings to the table.
Serverless is a handicap. (Viduli)

It also costs several times more than just having a server.

Welcome to the Internet, here's your monthly bill. Don't worry about paying, we've put a lien on your will.
Microsoft has updated the Windows file explorer so that it doesn't display previews of files downloaded from the internet - again - because its security model is still dogshit after all these years. (Bleeping Computer)

Welcome to the Internet, you've been compromised. Everything is infinitely worse than you surmised.
"Analog bags" are in. Doomscrolling is out. (Axios) (archive site)

What the hell is an "analog bag", you ask.

An analog bag is... A book bag.
How it works: "I basically just put everything I could grab for instead of my phone into a bag," including knitting, a scrapbook and a Polaroid camera, says Sierra Campbell, the content creator behind the trend.
Okay, that sounds healthy enough. What's the harm?

The harm is that everyone who owns one is insane:
The 31-year-old keeps one bag at home in Northern California, carrying it from room to room, and another in her car.
But that's just one person.
"It speaks to an incredible desperation and desire for experiences that return our attention to us, that fight brain-rotting, that are tactile… that involve creating over scrolling," Beth McGroarty, vice president of research at the Global Wellness Institute, tells Axios.
Welcome to the Internet, fuck this shit I'm out. You can sit there in the corner and count your ill-earned clout.

Musical Interlude

Song is Welcome to the Internet by Bo Burnham. Animation is basically a celebration of vtuber agency Phase Connect - that fish dude is the avatar of CEO Sakana - which has been going from strength to strength as competitors have been folding or failing or being exposed as lying stealing cheating frauds looking at you Vshojo.

Phase Connect will be revealing five new talents this weekend as part of its fourth generation, Phase Saga. The sixth member, Anya Nyabyss (now which recently-retired Phase-affiliated indie vtuber could that possibly be?) has postponed her debut until some non-specific personal circumstances clear up.

The "nine year old who died" in the video (it's part of the original song) is a reference to Amaris Yuri, who came over from Cyberlive when they folded along with Kaneko Lumi, and then became the only talent ever to be fired by Phase Connect.

She's back with her channel intact and will be redebuting as an indie soon.

Disclaimer: Welcome the the Internet! You're banned!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:12 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 722 words, total size 7 kb.

1 So the bag full of printouts is an analog bag, and the bag full of computer would by implication be a digital bag.

Presumably I could put some radios and breadboards and stuff into another bag, and call it a mixed signal RF bag, if nobody lynched me quickly enough.

Yeah, I think you might actually need to institutionalize me if I started making a big deal about having an analog bag.

Okay, yes I do spend far too much time on the computer and on the internet.

Yes, I actually need to spend more time reading various print outs and other stuff.

Okay, I don't think I should be using a smartphone to look at facebook and tiktok and shit.

I did have great productivity this week because I took a pencil and clipboard to the park, and outlined.

I watched digimon when I was younger, but since I have become increasingly less impressed with people making a point of describing things as digital, or analog. (Okay, there are still some uses I think are valid, and maybe even of situational importance.)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 25 2025 09:00 AM (rcPLc)

2 And of course, the Fujitsu laptop can only be bought in Japan. Of course.

I do want and willing to part with money for, laptops with optical drives, but these days, the only way to do that is to buy refurbish/secondhand ones, which means no Ryzen, and probably no gaming laptop. Because everything has to be pure digital.

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, October 26 2025 04:54 AM (ZLF73)

3 I bought a USB dvd drive 5 or 8 years ago for the vanishingly rare times I need it. They're like $15.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 26 2025 07:39 AM (1zWbY)

4 Too many other uses for my USB ports, and another something that could get lost at the same time you need it.

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, October 26 2025 09:57 AM (ZLF73)

5 Fair enough, one size doesn't fit all. But docking stations and powered hubs are also things. I--surprisingly--like my ultralight new laptop, and a built-in optical drive that I would almost never use isn't just a waste of money but of weight.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 27 2025 01:39 AM (1zWbY)

6 Different requirements. I have laptops I use while traveling that do not have optical drives, and it works for those situations. For most of my needs, however, portability and light weight are not too important but having an optical drive that I can use at any time without using an extra port or cable, either to play my collection of older games (There is no digital version of Civ2.), or watch my movie collection, IS very important.

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, October 27 2025 07:01 AM (ZLF73)

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Thursday, October 23

Daily News Stuff 23 October 2025

Tea And Sandwiches Edition

Top Story

A statement on superintelligence. (Superintelligence Statement)

These people are idiots. Or at least, suffering from an epidemic of Engineer's Disease.

If you outlaw AI that actually works, only outlaws will have AI that actually works.

And nobody is working in superintelligent AI because nobody is working on intelligent AI.
Meta is laying off 600 people from its AI team. (CNBC) (archive site)

Certainly not those guys.

Tech News

Will the $4500 price tag put people off Rivian's electric bicycle. (The Verge) (archive site)

(shake shake) Signs point to yes.
Ring's CEO says his cameras could "almost zero out crime" within the next twelve months. (The Verge) (archive site)
I think that in most normal, average neighborhoods, with the right amount of technology - not too crazy - and with AI, that we can get very close to zero out crime.
Forward the Panopticon.
Old-fashioned reliable IT systems - mostly COBOL - saved US states around $40 billion in nine months in 2020. (Financial Times)

The article comes to the opposite conclusion.

The article is written by an idiot.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Sandwiches are OFF.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:14 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 194 words, total size 2 kb.

1 In most "normal, average neighborhoods", with ZERO technology, you can get very close to zeroing out crime, because it wasn't there to begin with. Then there are other neighborhoods where a dozen crimes are committed per day. And the people committing those crimes are probably smart enough to do it where there aren't cameras watching. So you'd only catch the dumbest of criminals. Unless your cameras were well-concealed, which is its own whole can of worms I don't want to open up.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, October 23 2025 06:46 PM (cJRa3)

2 I'm tempted to believe that it can be mathematically proven that engineer's disease is a subset of idiocy. (IE, I routinely try to do mathematical proofs for things for which I do not have a valid mathematical theory.) Thing is, you could probably approximate benefits of a super-intelligent panopticon by firing academics, Harris donors, and registered Democrat Party voters. (Of course, such sorts of fast simple political remedies are almost always expensive and stupid. )

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, October 24 2025 04:13 AM (rcPLc)

3 I too, can zero out crime in most neighborhoods in the next twelve months, without AI - because putting around the clock beat cop coverage in a neighborhood with backup within five minutes, does a wonderful job of zeroing out crime.

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, October 24 2025 08:43 AM (ZLF73)

4 Intelligent management first, then intelligent AI.

Posted by: Frank at Friday, October 24 2025 01:37 PM (amxkj)

5 Also, locking up (or executing) criminals pretty quickly reduces crime to near zero because the 10% or so of the population who commits 99.9% of the crime simply wouldn't be available for more crimes.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 25 2025 03:52 AM (e0fX0)

6 We built a super intelligent manager by crowdsourcing a bunch of five year olds. It went great until it started dealing with all of us poopyheads.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 25 2025 08:43 AM (rcPLc)

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Wednesday, October 22

Daily News Stuff 22 October 2025

Evil Meetings Edition

Top Story

So what happened? Why did Amazon's premier US-East-1 datacenter collapse, taking an uncountable number of websites and applications with it, and causing billions of dollars in losses? (Ars Technica)

DNS.

It was DNS.

It is always DNS.

Tech News

A single-pass Turbo Pascal 3.0 compatible compiler, written in Pascal, in a single file of around 7000 lines of code. (GitHub)

And it's clean and readable, though not exactly modular or uncomplicated.
Inside a high speed optical network switch. (Serve the Home)

It's full of fiber!
Why London became the global capital of phone theft. (New York Times)

Because phone thieves didn't get arrested.
OpenAI's AI-powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas, is here. (The Verge)

Kill it with fire.
The Banana Pi R4 Pro is here. (Liliputing)

$165 gets you a quad-core Arm A73 with 8GB each of eMMC flash and RAM, two 10Gb Ethernet ports, four 2.5Gb Ethernet port, one 1Gb Ethernet port, two M.2 2280 slots for storage, three M.2 2242 B-key slots for 5G (and maybe also storage), and two mini-PCIe slots for wifi modules.

Pretty much all you could ask for in a home or small business router, except a case.

Musical Interlude

Song is Satellites by Cash Cash. Anime is a lot.

Disclaimer: Or used to be a lot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:53 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 222 words, total size 3 kb.

Tuesday, October 21

Daily News Stuff 21 October 2025

Universal Edition

Top Story

That crashing sound you heard at 3AM wasn't the cats getting the zoomies and taking out your new 4k TV, it was just Amazon's US-East-1 datacenter collapsing in a screaming heap and taking half the internet with it. (Tom's Hardware)

Oh dear.
U.S. users of Downdetector are reporting issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Amazon, Alexa, Ring, Robinhood, Max (HBO), Chime, Venmo, Epic Games, McDonald's, Fortnite, Lyft, Hulu, Disney+, Roku, Signal, and carriers including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. PC gaming platform Steam, as well as online forums like Reddit, are also impacted.
Wait, Steam?

This was actually serious.
Popular banking apps and tools like Zoom, Pokémon Go, PlayStation Network, and more are also struggling, as are some AI services such as Perplexity.
Serious but mostly a blessing.

Tech News

OpenAI now seems to be legally pursuing anyone who has ever mentioned it without what the company considers due deference. (The Verge) (archive site)

Seven small non-profits that lobbied for the company to be regulated or simply commented on its deeply suspect plans to restructure from a public-benefit company have received subpoenas demanding any and all information relating however tangentially to OpenAI or regulatory efforts that could potentially affect OpenAI, including but not limited to California's SB 53, SB 1047, and AB 501.

OpenAI's CSO (Chief Something Officer) took to Twitter to blame Elon Musk.

Charming people. Let's give them a trillion dollars.

ChatGPT has found solutions to 10 open Erdos problems. (Twitter)

Can I see them?

No. Also I deleted my tweet. And that knock at your door is probably a process server.
China says the NSA tried to hack its clock. (Tom's Hardware)

Do you have evidence of this?

Yes.

Can I see it?

No.
If you're running the Linux 6.12.43 LTS kernel it is trivially easy to crash the entire system thanks to what appears to be a kernel maintainer's acceptance of patches generated by garbage AI. (Xcancel)

Someone's going to get a lecture from Linus.
Foreign hackers breached an American nuclear weapons facility via flaws in Microsoft SharePoint. (CSO Online)

Are we not even trying anymore?
The hacking group formerly known as Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters claims to have the personal information of thousands of US government officials, including those working for the NSA, DIA, and Air Force. (404 Media) (archive site)

It is most gratifying that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated, and so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients, and the fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a courtesy detail. We look forward to your custom in future lives ... thank you.
How the former lead of Grand Theft Auto's new studio went through $270 million and produced a game that was variously described as "bad", "unfinished", and "you'll be hearing from our lawyers". (Hot Hardware)

Hookers and blow, probably, though the article doesn't go into that level of detail.
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg calls Tumblr his biggest failure so far. (Tech Crunch)

Don't sell yourself short, Matt.

Anime Update

A Wild Last Boss Appeared is actually a passable show in an otherwise bleak season.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: There was a Cutie Honey series in 2018 and nobody told me?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:48 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 555 words, total size 6 kb.

Monday, October 20

Daily News Stuff 20 October 2025

MIDI Edition

Top Story

Four words to drive a stake into the heart of Sam Altman: Artificial intelligence is mid. (Anil Dash)

Put less succinctly:
Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.
But who exactly feels that way?

Turns out, almost everyone in the industry:
What's amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality.
Can't risk bursting that don't-ever-call-it-a-bubble.

Tech News

The modern English translation (and we're talking 16th century as "modern") of the only copy of a 12th century sermon quoting fragments of an otherwise entirely lost medieval saga known as The Song of Wade that was so popular it was referenced in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales knowing that the audience would all catch the meaning... Contains a typo. (Smithsonian)

There weren't any elves.
North Korean hackers have embedded malware into contracts on Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain where it can never be removed and poses no threat to anyone. (Tom's Hardware)

Because the code is in JavaScript and Ethereum and compatible blockchains use an entirely different programming language called Solidity.

And only idiots would use JavaScript to interact with Ethereum.
Bitlocker will encrypt your drives without you ever asking it to. (Tom's Hardware)

Another reason to avoid Windows 11.
Windows 11's October update just broke the Recovery Environment. (Tom's Hardware)

USB keyboards and mice no longer work in the Recovery Environment, rendering entirely useless.

Another reason to avoid Windows 11, or alternately to be very glad you've held on to that PS/2 keyboard these last thirty years.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: I'm going to change.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:33 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 315 words, total size 4 kb.

Sunday, October 19

Daily News Stuff 19 October 2025

Ironing My Waffles Edition

Top Story

Solar car maker Aptera is about to go public and I'm worried. (Elektrek)

Also, prescient. This article was posted ten days ago.

Aptera listed on NASDAQ last week with a share price around $20.

Three days later it's trading below $6.

Aptera has spent 19 years and an untold amount of money - something like $150 million - trying to build what has been unkindly but accurately described as an electric tricycle, and all it has to show for its efforts is a handful of shiny prototypes.

Though given how similar the protypes have all appeared over the years it's not unimaginable that they just painted a solar cell pattern over the original diesel/electric model and called it a day.

Production was originally scheduled to start in 2008.

Tech News

Scaling Kubernetes to a million nodes. (GitHub)

Why?

As John F. Kennedy famously said of the Apollo Program: We choose to go the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.

I suspect that applies equally to the engineers at Aptera. Maybe more than equally.
People apparently don't want ultra-slim phones. (Mac Rumours)

Apple has reportedly cut production of the iPhone Air - at the same time it has boosted production of other models - and Samsung has cancelled the follow up to its competing S25 Edge.

I wouldn't mind a slimmer phone, but it's far down the list of problems with current models, most of which were self-inflicted by the companies making them.
Presenters prevented a tragedy at the Wikipedia conference taking place in New York when they tackled an armed pedophile who threatened to kill himself. (NBC News)

I fully understand. The cleaning crews in New York conference spaces are all union and those overtime rates will blow your budget into another dimension.
Migrating from Amazon to Hetzner Cloud. (Digital Society)

And getting nearly three times as much (virtual) hardware for a quarter the price.

Wait, didn't an entire Hetzner datacenter burn to the ground not so long ago?

No, that was OVH.

Oh. Carry on then.
A big small PC from Minisforum. (Liliputing)

It measures about 9" x 9" x 4", which is big for a small PC but small for a big PC, and offers four (SODIMM) memory slots, four M.2 slots, and three PCIe slots, and a Core Ultra 9 285HX (8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores). Plus two USB4v2 ports (80Gbps) and a USB4 port (40Gbps), two 25Gb Ethernet ports, one 10Gb Ethernet port, one 2.5Gb Ethernet port, one HDMI ports, and the usual bunch of USB3 ports.

Given the size and power constraints (it has a 350W power supply) you're not going to fit a high-end graphics card in it, but a low-profile Nvidia 5060 or an Intel Arc Pro B50 should work fine.
Anbernic is preparing to launch the RG DS, a dual-screen gaming device selling for less than $100. (Notebook Check)

It's designed to emulate the Nintendo DS and 3DS. It can play games made for older consoles but it's clearly aimed at those two since it looks exactly like them.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: What other things, Mr. President? WHAT OTHER THINGS?!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:58 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 548 words, total size 5 kb.

Saturday, October 18

Daily News Stuff 18 October 2025

Crowdfunded Otters Edition

Top Story

Your AI tools run on fracked gas and bulldozed Texas land. (Tech Crunch)

You had me at fracked gas.
Amazon has unveiled plans to build up to a dozen modular nuclear reactors in Richland, Washington generating a total of 960 megawatts. (Tom's Hardware)

We can still use the bulldozers, right?

Tech News

WebMCP allows you to easily add an API to any website to poison the data of unsuspecting AI users. (GitHub)

Sounds like fun. Sign me up.
Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP. (Simon Willison)

Claude Skills are subroutines, which have been around longer than electronic computers.
A tech lobbying firm is suing Texas over the state's age verification law. (Ars Technica)
"Our Constitution forbids this," the lawsuit said. "None of our laws require businesses to 'card' people before they can enter bookstores and shopping malls. The First Amendment prohibits such oppressive laws as much in cyberspace as it does in the physical world."
Actually the Constitution is silent on this, and arguing the First Amendment forbids laws protecting children applies equally to the Second Amendment.
These AI glasses promised to make me smarter, and all I got was Clippy for my face. (The Verge) (archive site)

The phrase lipstick on a pig comes to mind here.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Chicken. Fried. Hot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:59 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 227 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Yeah, I think ten can be old enough to possess a firearm.

Some of these regulations are pretty arbitrary and capricious from a compliance perspective, but the basic situation that motivated them is a little difficult.

So we have mandatory attendance laws, arguably false imprisonment.

Then the civil service trade union politically aligned with a faction that eventually decided it was a great idea to go full creepy, adn vivisect children.

But they were not getting enough ignorant kiddos being pressured into committing themselves to waging terrorist war, so they supplemented the abuse at the schools with some sort of organized grooming using online communications.

Anyway, ACA is one of the reasons the Democrats are playing this shutdown game, and maybe they do not realize how much further emotional disinvestment has occurred. (I also may be overestimating.)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, October 19 2025 01:27 AM (rcPLc)

2 The age verification company used by France, located in Spain, is already leaking user data. Apparently part of the problem is passing unencrypted information in URLs. *facepalm*

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, October 19 2025 03:47 PM (XWgGM)

3 And nobody was shocked in the slightest.
Except Hasan Piker's dog.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, October 19 2025 06:03 PM (PiXy!)

4 Anyway we just need to rebuild the browser ecosystem from the ground up around the new sanctioned hypertext protocol, secure, or SHTPS, a standard that is an improved version of HTTPS that also allows for user verification matching to government sanctioned information sources. This is simply the client facing part of a more complicated protocol stack, involving national government web scrapers and classification databases, the user's registration with a local police department, and the ISP's on the fly consultation of both databases before allowing the access transaction to complete. SHTPS is a dynamic evolving standard where national bureaucracies rewrite the error codes every six months in order to avoid explicitly confirming that the government does not want you to obtain true information, and is also incompetent, and this is why you can't do anything because everything takes at least five minutes to tell you that the computer does not know why it can't help you, you are probably imagining things.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 20 2025 06:52 AM (rcPLc)

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Friday, October 17

Daily News Stuff 17 October 2025

Blinkenlichts Edition

Top Story

Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok showed what they thought of Australia's scumbag totalitarian lunatics - I mean, government - by not bothering to show up before a senate inquiry into how the companies were planning to implement they government's latest idiotic law banning children under 16 from accessing their sites. (The Nightly)

If I had been representing any of these companies I would have simply said: We're not. It's your law. You enforce it.

Tech News

Microsoft wants you to talk to Windows 11. (Tom's Hardware)

I'm with Gigi.
Why we're leaving serverless. (Unkey)

There is no "serverless". You're running on someone else's servers, except they're broken, so you have to run your own servers as well to fill the gaps, and the whole thing ends up far more complicated and expensive - not to mention slower - than just running your own servers in the first place.

Renting a virtual machine rather than a physical one is a viable option in many cases. Serverless... Not so much.
If Asus' ProArt 5k and 6k monitors didn't do it for you, the company now offers an 8k model. (WCCFTech)

Price not announced, but given the prices of the 5k and 6k models ($849 and $1399 respectively), expect it to cost $3000 or so.
The future of being trans on the internet. (The Verge)

Before you click, imagine the most annoying article possible on this subject.

It's worse than that.
A new wave of social media apps provide hope in a doomscrolling world. (Tech Crunch)

No they don't. Reddit has left the market open for smaller competitors, but I still don't see anyone taking its place.
She offers examples like Beli, an app that lets users share their favorite restaurants with friends, or Fizz, which connects people going to the same college.  Others include the  astrology-bonding app Co-Star, or even Partiful, which lets people connect with friends to plan events.
They'll all be dead inside twelve months, except Co-Star, which will get hit by a comet next Tuesday.
Terrell said Spill shifted its design from simply feeding users content to matching them with communities that might be of interest to them.
For example, those who like watching the WNBA can join a group specifically for that.
Did I say twelve months? I meant twelve weeks.

Teasical Interlude

And then there were six... More.

Phase Saga arrives in a week. Some people seem to have a good idea of who some of the members are, but I didn't see anyone predicting a generation of six new talents.

The only one I'm sure of is the banana cat. They weren't even subtle about it.

Musical Interlude

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