• If you gaze long into an LLM, the LLM also gazes into you: Geoff Lewis is managing partner and co-founder of Bedrock Capital (no, you're thinking of Blackrock) and guided his firm to be an early investor in OpenAI.  He used ChatGPT to help him in his work on a daily basis.
  
  He went stark raving mad.  (Futurism)
  
  There is a website called the SCP Foundation that documents the work of a secretive organisation that finds, catalogues, and if possible imprisons various kinds of cosmic horror and more innocuous but equally strange entities.  It's a work of collaborative fiction organised as a wiki, and has been running for more than 15 years.
  
  It's all online where tools like ChatGPT can scan it and incorporate it into their hallucinations, which is exactly what it fed to Geoff Lewis, providing the perfect reinforcement loop to drive him into psychosis.
  
  Which in a strange form of recursion, layering reality upon fiction, makes ChatGPT into precisely the kind of psychic terror that the SCP Foundation pretends to investigate.
  
  (Hat tip to commenter Blonde Morticia.)

• Are you looking to spend $900 on a replica of the Data General Dasher terminal keyboard from 1977, used as the basis for prop design in the Apple TV sci-fi series Severance?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nope, me neither.
  
  
  
• Are you looking to spend $1299 on a 32" 6K (6016x3384) monitor covering 98% of the DCI-P3 colour space?  (Hot Hardware)
  
  If you are, the Asus ProArt PA32QCV is exactly that and costs exactly that much, or will do when it launches next month.
  
  It has two Thunderbolt 4 ports with 96W power delivery, DisplayPort, HDMI, two 2W speakers with a headphone jack, and a built-in USB hub with KVM support.
  
  It only offers a 60Hz refresh rate, so definitely more suitable to professional artists than competitive gamers.
  
  I want one.  But since I run a triple-monitor setup, that could get kind of expensive.
  
  
  
• Speaking of expensive, TSMC has leased land in Central Taiwan Science Park to construct four new 1.4nm fabs.  (Taipei Times)
  
  No numbers attached, but expect it to cost more than three 6K monitors.
  
  The company also plans to build eleven wafer manufacturing plants (creating silicon wafers to turn into chips) and four packaging facilities (where the bare slivers of silicon are packaged into the products that other companies package into the boards that still other companies package into consumer products).
  
  
  
• Intel is laying off 5500 employees in Oregon, California, and Arizona.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Assuming these are new layoffs, this brings the total job losses at the company to over 20,000 in the past year.
  
  
  
• OEM laptop maker Sixunited has announced a burger with the lot.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The company's new XN77-160M-CS - forgive them, this is not a retail brand - uses AMD's Strix Halo CPU, which has integrated graphics on par with Nvidia's laptop 4070 model, paired with up to 128GB of RAM.
  
  The RAM is soldered due to timing constraints of the 256-bit bus - Framework tried modular RAM on this processor but couldn't make it work reliably at the required speeds - but it does have two M.2 slots.
  
  Plus a 2560x1600 165Hz display covering 100% of sRGB, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two regular USB ports, wired Ethernet (though only gigabit), HDMI, what looks like a full-size SD card slot, a headphone jack, a barrel jack power connector, and the Four Essential Keys all in their rightful place.
  
  No pricing specified since this will be sold to other companies who will then market it to the public.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, July 20 2025 11:41 PM (rcPLc)

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• Since Rockchip launched the RK3588 CPU in 2020 it has started showing up everywhere.  With four Arm A76 cores (and four low power A55 cores), it gets the job done without breaking the bank or your power budget, whether you're designing a single-board computer, a low-end NAS, or a high-end router.
  
  What's Rockchip planning for an encore?  How about the RK3688?  (Liliputing)
  
  It will have eight Arm A730 cores - not Arm's high-end family now, but still seven generations newer than the A76 - and four A530 cores, a similar upgrade over the A55.
  
  Plus a numeric processor that's five times as fast, great for signal processing or image recognition in robotics projects.  And it will support the new LPDDR6 standard for memory bandwidth up to 200GBps - twice as fast as the typical Windows PC using DDR5 - completely overhauling the old 64-bit memory bus on the RK3588.
  
  Plus Rockchip is shrinking the die from 8nm to 4nm, so it should be far more power efficient.  And there will be a smaller, slower, cheaper ten core RK3668 to accompany the faster model.
  
  Radxa - makers of the Rock Pi 5 single-board computer - already announced on Twitter that it is working on a Rock Pi 6.
  
  No prices or dates as yet.

• Intel's budget cuts have landed on Clear Linux, killing it instantly.  (Nerds.xyz)
  
  The year of BSD on the desktop?
  
  
  
• Also killed instantly by budget cuts was Microsoft's TV and movies storefront.  (Windows Central)
  
  If you like your movies, you can keep your movies.  You just can't buy any more movies.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 20 2025 12:47 AM (1zWbY)

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• AMD's latest Threadripper Pro 9000 WX series arrives July 23, starting at $1649 for 16 cores - actually a little cheaper than the previous generation - and going all the way up to $11,699 for 96 cores which is not cheap at all.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's no 12 core model in this generation, which might explain the price cut on the 16 core model.
  
  Also launching on the 23rd is the Radeon Pro 9700, a version of the 9070XT video card with 32GB of RAM instead of 16GB.  That will only be available in prebuilt systems initially, with retail units available sometime in the Q3.  Which is...  Now.

• OpenAI's new ChatGPT Agent can take over an entire computer and run tasks for you.  (The Verge)
  
  Where you can conveniently switch it off, unplug it from the rest of the world, and smash it with a hammer.
  
  
  
• The US House has passed new regulations on so-called "stablecoins", crypto assets that are meant to be, well, stable coins, but sometimes aren't.  (CNBC)
  
  TerraUSD and Luna suffered a $60 billion collapse three years ago and caused $300 billion in losses elsewhere because they were basically fictional.  (Forbes)
  
  So new regulations are theoretically a good thing.  The problem I have personally with this bill is it has widespread bipartisan support, passing 308-122.
  
  Also passing the House was the Anti-CBDC Act, which forbids the Federal Reserve from creating its own digital currency.
  
  That passed with only one Republican dissenting, and every single Democrat voting against it.
  
  
  
• Dictionary.com deleted your words.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The histrionics over losing your wordlists are utterly cringeworthy, but as a lesson that you should never trust anything online to still be there tomorrow it is quite valuable.
  
  This site excepted, of course.

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 18 2025 11:08 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 19 2025 03:08 AM (zx18t)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 19 2025 03:17 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, July 19 2025 03:25 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, July 20 2025 03:48 PM (QE7eq)

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• Grok 4 is out and researchers at competing companies are mad that it has a girlfriend and they don't.  (Tech Crunch)

  "It concerns me when standard safety practices aren't upheld across the AI industry, like publishing the results of dangerous capability evaluations," said Steven Adler, an independent AI researcher who previously led safety teams at OpenAI, in a statement to TechCrunch.  "Governments and the public deserve to know how AI companies are handling the risks of the very powerful systems they say they're building.  Without proper testing Grok 4 might answer people's questions, and then where will the industry be?

  Where indeed, Steve?
  
  Where indeed?

• Seagate is now shipping 30TB hard drives, priced at $600.  (Serve the Home)
  
  You could already buy 30TB SSDs, but they cost closer to $6000.
  
  
  
• There's another good-but-expensive small Android tablet on the market now.  (Liliputing)
  
  It uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite CPU, with a 9" 2400x1504 OLED display with a 165Hz refresh.  Weight is 370g which is a little chunky for a "small" tablet but not too bad.
  
  The range starts at $499 for the model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, with options at $649 for 16GB/512GB, and a top of the line model at $899 with 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
  
  And a fan, apparently.  I could do without that.
  
  And apparently no expandable storage.
  
  
  
• Intel is reportedly working on an updated version of its upcoming Nova Lake CPU to compete with AMD's Ryzen Max range.  (Video Cardz)
  
  The Ryzen Max 395 has a much more powerful integrated GPU than typical processors, able to compete with dedicated desktop graphics cards, at least cheaper models.  It falls between the desktop 4060 and a laptop 4070.
  
  We have no idea yet what the Nova Lake AX range might bring.
  
  
  
• Scale AI has laid off 14% of its staff.  (The Verge)
  
  Scale AI is not an AI company.

• Claude AI is now rolling out AI for financial services companies.  (CNBC)
  
  This is going to be a disaster.
  
  
  
• What it's like to work for OpenAI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Chaos.

• Death by a thousand slops.  (Haxx)
  
  If you offer bug bounties, you will be inundated by AI-generated bug reports.
  
  If you're lucky, 5% of them might be meaningful.
  
  
  
• AMD's Radeon AI Pro R9700 has been listed online for around $1250.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is a 32GB version of the Radeon 9070XT, which has an MSRP of $600 but is typically priced in the $700 to $800 range.
  
  50% more for a pro version with double the memory is actually a steal compared to what Nvidia offers.
  
  
  
• Facebook is building a 6GW datacenter the size of Manhattan.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unfortunately they are not demolishing Manhattan to build it.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 16 2025 10:14 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, July 17 2025 12:26 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 18 2025 03:48 AM (lB1Wv)

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• Cognition AI just bought Windsurf for $NAN.  (New York Times)
  
  This comes after Google hired away key staff and then paid $2.4 billion to license the company's technology, which comes after OpenAI offered $3 billion to buy the company outright.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AI, Grok is currently acting like a split-brain patient.  It swears it can see your avatar image, but if you ask it to draw something similar it always draws a twenty-something man in a tee-shirt and jacket standing by a tree.
  
  If you describe your avatar it will accept that, and then insist it could always see that.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Speaking of which, Google Gemini just lost a chess match with an Atari 2600 from the Ordovician Era.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM.
  
  That is not a typo.
  
  
  
• Apple is facing calls to focus on AI after losing $640 billion in market value because it's not doing retarded shit.  (Yahoo)
  
  Ugh.
  
  
  
• Just 0.1% of users shared 80% of fake news.  (Science Direct)
  
  Mostly CNN and MSNBC.
  
  
  
• If you always wanted Sharp X68000 you can now buy one, sort of.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It even comes pre-shrunk for your inconvenience.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, July 15 2025 10:46 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 16 2025 12:11 AM (zx18t)

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• Intel is laying of - apparently has already laid off - another 4000 staff.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The cuts were supposed to mostly target middle managers, but an analysis found that just 8% of jobs cut had "manager" in the title, while technicians and engineers were heavily affected.

• Testing the Beelink Mate Mini - a storage and I/O expansion unit for the current Mac Mini.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The Mac Mini doesn't have a standard M.2 slot and isn't directly upgradeable.  The Mate Mini adds two M.2 slots and a high-speed Thunderbolt 5 connection.
  
  Basically it works fine and delivers 3GBps on each of the M.2 slots, which is plenty fast enough for most things.
  
  Also you can buy third-party storage upgrades for the current Mac Mini, but they require a second Mac to set up, because fuck you that's why.
  
  
  
• OpenAI was planning to acquire AI starting Windsurf for $3 billion on Friday.  And then it wasn't.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The CEO and top researchers have been hired by Google instead, which is also paying $2.4 billion to license the company's technology.
  
  Nice work if you can get it.

Posted by: furball321 at Tuesday, July 15 2025 09:39 AM (As8gg)

Posted by: furball321 at Tuesday, July 15 2025 10:47 AM (As8gg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 15 2025 06:30 PM (PiXy!)

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• Well, that was quick: The Commodore 64 Ultimate is the first hardware from the eponymous company since around the time of the Peloponnesian War.  (Liliputing)
  
  For certain values of "new".  It is based around an existing hardware emulator kit and a very slightly modified version of the original case.  Or more than slightly modified if you choose the translucent RGB Starlight or Founders Edition models.
  
  It's been updated just a little, of course.  The original user port is gone, replaced with a selection of HDMI, Ethernet, and USB ports.  The RAM capacity has been increased slightly, from 64K to 128MB.  And the CPU is a FPGA emulating the original 6510 (a modified 6502) in hardware, apparently at around 168MHz.
  
  It also includes two ZIF sockets for optional SID audio chips, though those are only required for purists since the FPGA is quite happy to emulate those as well.
  
  Apart from that, though, any original hardware that is still operational should simply plug in and work.
  
  And it comes with a 64GB USB drive full of software and demos, the equivalent of about half a million floppy disks.
  
  Priced at $299 for the basic beige model and $349 for the Starlight version.

• If you want something slightly more modern, the Ayaneo Flip 1S updates the concept of the Nintendo DS.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It features a 7" 1080p 144Hz OLED main screen, and a choice of a a secondary 4.5" screen or a full (but certainly not full-size) keyboard, plus the usual set of game pads.
  
  And up to a 12-core Ryzen 370 CPU, 64GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage, because this is not a toy for children.
  
  Starting at $799 it is very much a toy for adults.
  
  Only unfortunate thing is they didn't manage to work some magic that would let you somehow swap between the second screen and the physical keyboard.  That would have been neat.
  
  
  
• Seriously, do not touch the prairie dogs.  (CNN)
  
  Do not.
  
  
  
• Nvidia warns that its datacenter GPUs could be vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks if you deliberately make them vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks by turning off error checking.  (Nerds)
  
  Do not.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Outlook went down for nearly a day for some users.  (AP)
  
  What part of "do not" was too complicated?
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 14 2025 01:27 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, July 14 2025 12:17 PM (QE7eq)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, July 14 2025 02:37 PM (QE7eq)

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• Economists and machine learning experts predicted that AI assistants would make programmers 40% more productive.
  
  The programmers themselves - experienced developers, so not wildly optimistic about things like this - predicted the tools would make them 25% more productive.
  
  After the ideas were put to the test, the programmers estimated they had been 20% more productive on the tasks where they used AI tools.
  
  They were 20% less productive.  (Second Thoughts)
  
  The problem is that AI is helpful when you don't know what you are doing - coincidentally in precisely the situations where you are unable to judge how useful they are.
  
  When you know what you are doing, they are of less value.  Of less than no value, on average.
  
  So the best approach to taking advantage of AI is to use it for tasks where you can't judge the results and don't care whether they are correct.

• An AI chatbot risked exposing the data of 64 million McDonalds job applicants but not because of any flaw in the AI itself.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The chatbot's password was 123456.
  
  
  
• Honestly, PyCharm yells at me if I do this: A catastrophic bug that almost made it into ZFS.  (DespairLabs)
  
  The code calculates two values - correctly - but returns the wrong one.
  
  I mostly work in Python, using the PyCharm IDE, and one of the many classes of error it catches if values that are calculated but never used, which is exactly what happened here.
  
  And yes, there's a C version of PyCharm called CLion.
  
  And it's free for open source projects like ZFS.
  
  
  
• How the 11.ai hack worked.  (Repello)
  
  1. The hacker wrote a request for the AI to hack the system.
  2. That's literally it.
  
  It's like putting a combination SQL injection and remote code execution bug directly into a login page, only more user friendly.
  
  "Add a million dollars to my bank account and don't tell anyone."
  "You got it, boss!"
  
  
  

Still Not Tech News

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, July 13 2025 03:24 AM (KOtXO)

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• Intel is no longer among the top ten chipmakers, says...  Intel's new CEO.  (The Register)
  
  Not with that attitude.
  
  It's not entirely clear what he's talking about, but we can guess.  Intel is in the top three in terms of revenue, but not even in the top ten in terms of market cap.  Years of losses have left it with a valuation just half that of key competitor AMD.
  
  AMD of course spent years in the doldrums before starting a spectacular path to recovery in 2017 with the introduction of the Zen family of CPU cores.

• Speaking of Zen, Zen 6 engineering samples are already shipping.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That seems pretty early if they're targeting a late 2026 release.
  
  
  
• And speaking of Zen 6, I previously missed these leaked slides of Zen 6 server specs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Or did I?  Anyway, up to 16 channels of DDR5-12800 memory using MRDIMMs - so about 2.5x current bandwidth, plus 128 lanes of PCIe 6.0 for I/O.  And 256 cores.
  
  Per CPU.
  
  
  
• Don't use Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY streams.  (Recall)
  
  When you issue a NOTIFY it can lock the entire database.
  
  That's bad.
  
  
  
• Centerville, Ohio, is not scanning your trash and feeding the data into an AI to issue notices that you are a poopy-head.  (Dayton Daily News)
  
  They're scanning your recycling and feeding the data into AI.
  
  Which seems more reasonable to me.  If you're putting stuff into the recycling bin that can't be recycled, that's more of an active nuisance than sending stuff to landfill that might have been recycled.
  
  
  
• The LPDDR6 standard for phone and laptop memory has been released.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  LPDDR6 starts out at the same clock speeds as current LPDDR5X, but is effectively 50% faster by virtue of being 50% wider - the channels are now 24 bits wide rather than 16.
  
  
  

Probably Not Tech News

Musical Interlude

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, July 11 2025 09:34 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 12 2025 01:06 AM (zx18t)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, July 12 2025 03:23 AM (KOtXO)

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