• The memory shortage could last for years.  (The Verge)
  
  16GB is the new 128GB, and you might as well get used to it:

  Nikkei says that production would need to increase by 12 percent a year in 2026 and 2027 to meet demand.  But according to Counterpoint Research, an increase of only 7.5 percent is planned.

  That's bad enough - projected growth will only fall further behind demand.  But it gets worse:

  The new facilities will primarily focus on producing high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is used in AI data centers.  With the companies already prioritizing HBM over general-purpose DRAM used in computers and phones, it's not clear how much these new fabs will help alleviate the price crunch facing consumer electronics.

  But it gets worser: HBM memory is stacked vertically just like AMD's 3D-Vcache.  And exactly like AMD's 3D-Vcache it uses TSV - though-silicon vias - to transfer the signals between the layers.
  
  And those TSVs take up about half the space on HBM chips, meaning the factories need to churn out twice as many wafers for the same amount of memory, when they already can't produce enough.

• But at least hard drives are still well, poop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Toshiba is now offering refunds rather than warranty replacements because they don't have any stock to replace failed drives.
  
  
  
• Cloud hosting company Vercel - which is also the maintainer of the popular Next.js framework - got hacked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Apparently Context.ai was hacked, which let the hackers compromise a Vercel employee's Google Workspace account, which allowed them to hack Vercel itself.
  
  This is what's known as a "supply chain" attack: If the target is too well secured, find something they use that isn't, and attack there instead.
  
  
  
• VitaLink is a keyboard with a 13" 4K touchscreen display.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's not a computer though.  It has two USB-C connections, one to act as a keyboard, one to act as a display.
  
  
  
• If you have unused PCIe slots that are unusable because they are blocked by your video card, the ArcherX is a solution.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's an adaptor for a single M.2 SSD that plugs into the slot and lies completely flat, which should probably not interfere with your video card.  Maybe.  Possibly.
  
  
  
• A wallaby ate my kangaroo paw.

• How bad are things for PC gaming right now?  The most anticipated products for 2026 are relaunches of AMD's 5800X3D CPU, which first appeared in 2022, and Nvidia's RTX 3060 graphics cards, which originally came out in 2021.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 5800X3D has AMD's 3D-Vcache, so while it uses DDR4 memory it doesn't lose a lot of speed from it.  And the 3060 has 12GB of memory, so in that respect it is better than current low-end cards.
  
  
  
• Also relaunching this year after a long time away is SNK's Neo Geo console.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you missed out on this the first time because you couldn't afford the price tag or weren't yet born in 1991, the updated version will slash the cost from $649 to $249.  And $649 in 1991 dollars is over $1500 today, so that's a heck of a discount.
  
  And while there are some modern conveniences like HDMI video and a rechargeable wireless option for the controllers, this is not emulated - not in software or in hardware.  They actually spent the money for a new production run of the custom chips, and it's fully compatible with the original controllers and cartridges.
  
  And there are ten of the original games back as well.  You can pre-order the whole lot - console, controllers, and the ten game cartridges - for $1000.
  
  The same company is also behind an Amiga 1200 reproduction and a number of other classic systems.

• Which is the best $200 CPU right now - AMD's 9600X or Intel's new Core Ultra 250K?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ignoring the platform expiry elephant in the room for the moment, the 250K is a clear winner.  For gaming it's a very close match, and while the 250K can use almost twice as much power in multi-threaded tasks, it is also almost twice as fast in multi-threaded tasks, so that's honestly a win too.
  
  The problem comes if you plan to upgrade your system in the future.  AMD plans at least one and probably two new generations of processors in the AM5 socket, while Intel's Socket 1851 disappears later this year with the introduction of Nova Lake and its Socket 1954.
  
  
  
• China's CXMT is rescuing LPDDR4 customers abandoned by Samsung.  (WCCFTech)
  
  CXMT, like Taiwan's Nanya, mostly still produces DDR4 memory, which Samsung is dropping as it shifts capacity to higher-margin chips like HBM for AI.
  
  But LPDDR4 is very widely used in products from lower-cost phones and tables, to SSDs, to embedded cards like the Raspberry Pi.
  
  
  
• Memory prices rose 110% and SSD prices 147% in Q1.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Despite that computer sales actually rose slightly, as customers panic-bought everything in sight.  Not that you would catch me doing that.  Not since I ran out of money, anyway.

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, April 20 2026 09:22 AM (oJgNG)

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• Intel's new Core Series 3 is its answer to the MacBook Neo.  (PC World)
  
  The A18 CPU used in the MacBook Neo uses 6W maximum, and typically throttles down to 4W since the laptop is passively cooled.
  
  All models in the Core Series 3 range use 35W maximum and a base of 15W, which is rather more than that.  So while it may be Intel's answer, it is not necessarily a good answer.
  
  The first laptop announced with the Core Series 3 is Honor's Magicbook 14.  That costs around $1000, but on the other hand it comes with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, which is more than is even possible in the MacBook Neo.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile AMD's legendary 5800X3D may be making a return.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD has officially made non-committal noises about this.  The chip was taken off the market allegedly because it was too competitive with the newer 7800X3D.  But with DDR5 prices in cislunar orbit, and the slower 5700X3D and 5600X3D also retired from the market, it would be a very welcome sign.
  
  But it's allegedly a 10th anniversary special edition, and Ryzen's 10th anniversary is in December, counting from the announcement, or next March counting from retail availability.  Hope we're not going to have to wait that long.
  
  I mean, it's not like I have 384GB of DDR4 RAM lying around, but if I did I might be interested.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Is the hourly cost for AI agents rising exponentially?  (Toby Ord)
  
  Good question.  And the answer is, if you read all the way through that article, we don't know.
  
  
  
• Smolvm is a full virtual machine with hardware isolation for running untrusted tasks - that boots in 200 milliseconds.  (GitHub)
  
  That's pretty useful, given how many untrusted tasks there are running around the internet these days.  The CPU and memory overheads are small enough that for any task that takes even a second or two it's a viable solution.
  
  
  
• A middle-schooler has found a Trojan coin in Berlin.  (The History Blog)
  
  What a Trojan coin was doing in Berlin we may never know, but the location it was found in does have burial remains from the Bronze and Iron Ages and artifacts from the Roman era.
  
  The coin itself dates to the third century BC, almost a thousand years after the historical events of Trojan War.  But it's definitely from Ilion, the Greek name for Troy of that period.
  
  
  
• Even cat readme.txt is not safe.  (blog.calif)
  
  Anyone who has ever used a terminal, or an accurate terminal emulator, should already know this.
  
  
  
• Anthropic says its MCP specification for AI communication is just fine - despite 10 critical vulnerabilities so far relating to a specific flaw in the design.  (The Register)
  
  The flaw is that MCP clients spawn processes as required - just like CGI of old - and that is a fast path to security disaster.
  
  
  
• Another obviously bad idea is "tokenmaxxing" - where developer productivity is measured by how much they cost their employers in AI API fees.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Similar to lines of code, but worse, because rather than trying to capture productivity and inadvertently capturing cost, it directly captures cost.
  
  Also as the article notes, while there's a correlation between tokens used and lines of code generated, widespread adoption of AI leads to massive increases in code churn - were new code is added and then immediately changed or removed.
  
  And every change adds to the cost in tokens.
  
  
  
• Everybody hates Adobe.  (The Verge)
  
  And competitors are taking advantage of this by offering semi-professional version of their products for free, a price that soundly beats even Adobe's cheapest subscription plans.
  
  
  
• ASRock has announced a breakthrough to make DDR5 memory cheaper: Half-channel memory.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is exactly what it sounds like.  PCs commonly use dual-channel, 128-bit memory - a misnomer since DDR5 uses dual 32-bit logical channels per physical channel.
  
  What ASRock does here is reduce that further to only a single 32-bit logical channel per physical channel, which of course cuts memory bandwidth in half.
  
  It's a BIOS update for Intel motherboards, so it doesn't break anything, and if you have proper 64-bit DIMMs you can use them just fine, but it's a move of desperation and not something anyone would want to use if they could avoid it.

• Scheduling service Cal.com has gone closed source in part due to AI security threats.  (Cal.com)
  
  Cal.diy will remain as an open-source self-hosted solution for individual users.  It has most of the same features except for support for teams and enterprise authentication methods.
  
  
  
• Here's why that won't work.  (Twitter)
  
  If your code is out there - even as a binary - AI tools can decompile it efficiently.
  
  If your API is out there, AI tools can and will scan it.
  
  It's an understandable move to avoid short-term risks, but the best approach is to use the same AI tools to scan for security issues yourself.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Good for some: Intel's market cap has hit a 25-year high.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Reclaiming the heights it briefly saw during the Dot Com bubble.
  
  AMD's market cap meanwhile is at an all-time high, approaching half a trillion dollars.
  
  
  
• Not so good for others: Counterfeit Samsung 990 Pro SSDs are showing up in new markets.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unlike earlier examples, which were real SSDs with fake Samsung branding and actually ran well enough that you might not notice, these don't work at all.
  
  
  
• Most AI SOCs have no AI.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Wait, what's this slop?  Oh, it's an ad.
  
  
  
• Lenovo is introducing larger versions of its Y700 gaming tablet.  (Liliputing)
  
  They'll probably have the glossy display rather than the paper-like display in the cheap Lenovo Tab I have.  That model is on the slow side but the display is stunning, and I'm interested in a larger version of that because it's perfect for reading large-format books.

• Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits & paid services to improve itself?  Yes.  (GitHub)
  
  As everyone in the attached Hacker News thread notes, this is entirely in keeping with the Gas Town philosophy, and with the recent practices of project lead Steve Yegge: It's a Ponzi scheme that turns Ponzi schemes into more Ponzi schemes, without at any point approaching utility.
  
  Gas Town is an AI project for creating and managing AI projects, created and managed entirely by AI.  Nobody knows how or if it works, and in fact it mostly doesn't.  And now it spends your money on expanding itself.
  
  If you're thinking this all sounds like another crypto scam yes, it's that as well.

• Microsoft's Recall tool that watches everything you do, takes screenshots, and stores it all in one convenient place still isn't secure.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The vault itself is secure - now - but as the user you still have access to the vault, and the process that manages that isn't secured from the user.  So if you can be convinced to download some malware, it can lie in wait until you log in to Recall and then silently scoop up all your data.
  
  Microsoft responded promptly...  By saying this is not a bug and won't be fixed.
  
  
  
• The MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG is a mini-PC using Intel's new Panther Lake laptop processors, but all models in this range use SO-DIMM memory so it doesn't offer the high-end B390 graphics option.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Apparently there will be a desktop processor with B390 graphics with the Nova Lake release later this year, but then you can only have four P cores.
  
  
  
• The B390 graphics in Intel's Panther Lake chips use the new Xe3 cores - the successor to the Xe2 cores used in dedicated graphics cards like the B580.  Details of upcoming Xe3 dedicated cards have leaked and can be summed up as "not for you".  (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel plans to launch Pro and AI-focused models...  Only.
  
  
  
• Spotify won a $322 million default judgement against whoever is running Anna's Archive.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Since nobody knows who that is and it's doubtful they have $322 million, it may prove difficult to collect.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 16 2026 11:14 PM (1SgfN)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Friday, April 17 2026 12:58 PM (5o0to)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, April 18 2026 12:23 AM (s6adZ)

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• China's leading flash memory producer, YTMC, is constructing two new factories in addition to the one already in progress.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Each factory will produce 100,000 wafers per month - equal to 50% of the company's current production - once it reaches full capacity, but that will take a while.  The first of the new facilities will come online this year but will take another year to reach 50% of planned capacity.
  
  In an interesting twist, half the capacity of the first of these factories will be assigned to DRAM rather than NAND, which is what YTMC normally produces.
  
  It won't be enough to fill the current shortage but every bit helps.

• Speaking of which, Microsoft is increasing prices of its Surface laptops by between 25% and 50%.  (Windows Central)
  
  This makes them worse value in almost every respect than Apple.
  
  
  
• The Internet Archive has started hosting a collection of 10,000 recordings of live concerts going back 40 years.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Until they get sued.  So if you see something you like, download it now.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the Internet Archive, major news outlets are cutting off its access because it inconveniently reports exactly what they said.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  And we can't have that.
  
  
  
• The PocketTerm35 is a handheld device with a 3.5" 640x480 display, a full QWERTY keyboard, and a Raspberry Pi Pico.  (Liliputing)
  
  The only shortcoming is that the Pi Pico just controls the, well, the controls.  It's powered by a full Raspberry Pi - model 4 or 5 - which costs as much as the PocketTerm itself.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Pilet, another Pi-powered handheld, is switching to using the Pi Compute Module rather than the regular Pi.  (Liliputing)
  
  The Compute Model is designed to be integrated into devices like this.  There's just one problem: Lots of people already have the Pi, and hardly anyone has the Compute Module, because it gets integrating into devices.
  
  Like this.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 16 2026 06:36 AM (LDKo5)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 16 2026 09:02 AM (1zWbY)

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• Answering the questions nobody is asking: Can AI be a "child of God"?  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  Something needs to be done about Anthropic.
  
  
  
• Sam Altman's home has been targeted by violent idiots for the second time in a week.  (SF Standard)
  
  That's not it, guys.

• A Stanford report highlights a growing disconnect between AI insiders and humans. (Tech Crunch)
  
  No, really?
  
  
  
• Festus, Missouri has fired half the town council and is working on firing the other half and also the mayor after they approved construction of a $6 billion datacenter.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is more it.
  
  
  
• Maine has banned construction of new datacenters entirely for 18 months.  (CNBC)
  
  Well, sure.  Maine only got electricity three years ago, so they can do that.
  
  
  
• Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them.  (Anchor)
  
  One of the problems with WordPress - one of the many problems with WordPress - is that the security model for plugins consists of "trust me, bro".
  
  
  
• CopprLink is a PCIe 5.0 x16 cable that provides PCIe 5.0 x16 bandwidth to external GPUs. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Would it have killed you guys to put in the e?
  
  
  
• Linux 7.0 is here.  (Linuxiac)
  
  It includes...  Things.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, April 14 2026 08:08 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 14 2026 11:45 PM (gjabc)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 14 2026 11:46 PM (gjabc)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, April 15 2026 09:16 AM (LDKo5)

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• DC.  Suicide Squad is a DC property, not Marvel.
  
  
  
• The peril of laziness lost.  (Dtrace)
  
  AI makes it easy to generate millions of lines of code.
  
  What it doesn't make it is a good idea.
  
  It used to be that laziness by itself placed a brake on the wheel of code churn.  Now you also need to know what you are doing.  And that is hard work to begin with.

• Don't buy the Ultra 7.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Dell's new XPS lineup comes in Ultra 5, Ultra 7, and Ultra X7 models.
  
  The Ultra 5 and 7 have almost indistinguishable performance.  The X7 is significantly faster for CPU-intensive tasks, and enormously faster for graphics.
  
  
  
• Twitter is cutting payments by 60% or more to clickbait accounts.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• Europe is not a serious country.  (Hacker News)
  
  In this case, a programmer in Spain couldn't access Docker images on Cloudflare because a football match was on.
  
  
  
• If you wanted to play the new game Crimson Desert but couldn't because it didn't run on Intel graphics, now you can.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They fixed it.
  
  ...
  
  Yeah, that's about it, really.  They've released three major updates - including Intel graphics support - in four weeks.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• Sam Altman may control our future.  Can he be trusted?  No.  (New Yorker)  (archive site)
  
  As the article goes on to explain, fuck no.
  
  
  
• My baby deer plushie told me that Mitski's dad is a CIA operative.  (The Verge)
  
  Nobody ever expects the Butlerian Jihad.

• The AI RAM shortage is also affecting SSD prices.  (The Verge)
  
  The Verge definitely has its thumb on the pulse of the tech world here.
  
  
  
• You can save 57% on a Corsair 96GB memory kit at just $499.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No you can't.  Just kidding.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, reader Rick C checked online prices at Micro Center and they are 60% lower than the sticker prices shown in yesterday's article.  Or rather, the sticker prices were inflated by 150%.
  
  Micro Center doesn't deliver online orders; you have to pay for and pick up the item in person.  Still I'd expect a bigger fuss if prices in store were that much inflated over the prices they advertise online.
  
  
  
• If you were planning to start your own manned space program in this time of precented memory prices, you're in luck: NASA has released the Apollo code as open source.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Core memory is back, baby!
  
  
  
• Installing every Firefox extension.  (Jack.Cab)
  
  As the article notes, not all of them.  8 were deleted by Mozilla while the download was running and 42 couldn't be found, but still around 84,000 extensions.
  
  And...  It worked.  Kind of.
  
  It did use 37GB of RAM just to load the start page.
  
  
  
• Samsung's memory business is now more profitable than Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, or Microsoft.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Though it still falls a little short of Apple.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm is working with CXMT to develop custom RAM for smartphones.  (WCCFTech)
  
  While the Big Three memory manufacturers are making bank, the two former also-rans - China's CXMT and Taiwan's Nanya - are grabbing everything they can.
  
  
  
• Flash storage maker Sandisk just invested a billion dollars in Nanya, for example and Kioxia, formerly Toshiba's SSD division, invested around half a billion.  (Simply Wall St, Evertiq)
  
  SSDs - at least, good ones - need DRAM cache.  Sandisk and Kioxia don't make DRAM.  Nanya does, and not only that, but 90% of its production is still DDR4 which is not what current computers use but is what SSD controllers use.
  
  
  
• ProPublica journalists walk off the job in the first US newsroom strike over AI.  (NiemanLab)
  
  "We'll go on strike!"
  "That's right!  You'll have a national journalists' strike on your hands!"
  "And whom will that inconvenience?"
  
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: three-humped camel at Sunday, April 12 2026 10:44 PM (a3b4L)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 12 2026 11:38 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 12 2026 11:40 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, April 13 2026 04:29 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, April 13 2026 04:34 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 13 2026 06:00 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, April 13 2026 10:00 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, April 14 2026 03:18 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 14 2026 01:54 PM (PiXy!)

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• Look around, find the worst price!  But don't buy before you come to Micro Center because we can't be beat!  Our prices are insane!  (WCCFTech)
  
  And not in a good way.  Elsewhere it would cost you an eye-burning $1600 to buy 128GB of RAM right now.
  
  At Micro Center it's over $4000.
  
  Western Digital and Samsung SSDs meanwhile have tripled in price in just the last three months, and there's little relief there with even cheaper brands using YMTC flash increasing by 50% or more.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Anthropic has banned the creator of OpenClaw from accessing Claude, labeling him a treacherous idiot commie weasel who smells bad.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Fair enough.
  
  
  
• Google, Meta, Snap, and Microsoft have excoriated the European Parliament over abandoning a law that created a carve-out in privacy laws to allow online platforms to scan user content for evidence of sexual abuse and have vowed to continue to do so.  (The Guardian)
  
  Because under a separate law, the platforms are legally responsible for user content that contains evidence of sexual abuse.
  
  They're just no longer allowed to regulate it.
  
  A very, very European thing to do.
  
  
  
• The latest bit of software to get indirectly hacked to deliver malware have been the CPU-Z and HWMonitor tools from the CPUID project.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The software itself was fine, but the website was hacked to randomly deliver malware instead of the software you tried to download.  If you downloaded either package in the last couple of days - the poisoned versions were online between April 9 and 10 - you might have a problem.
  
  
  
• Cutting off the tail of DRAM latency at the cost of, well, cost.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Tail Slayer is a neat bit of software that avoids having critical memory accesses delayed by DRAM refresh cycles.
  
  But it does this by replicating your data across multiple channels of memory so you are never forced to access the memory module that is being refreshed at this precise instant.
  
  Which works, yes, but is a very expensive solution.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, April 12 2026 07:49 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 12 2026 03:49 PM (PiXy!)

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