• I bought myself a mini-PC for Christmas.  Minisforum X1-255.
  
  Not because I particularly need a new system, though this one is a lot better than my two existing Beelink units (twice the speed, memory*, and storage).
  
  Mostly because it comes with 64GB of RAM and only costs $50 more than the RAM alone.
  
  Looks like it's completely sold out in the US already.
  
  Update: Placed the order just four hours ago and it's already shipped. Should have it by Friday.
  
  
  * The existing units only came with 8GB of RAM, so as shipped the new one has eight times as much.  But I already had RAM for those left over from upgrading my laptops, back when that was cheap to do.
  
  
  
• AI gadget makers are chasing problems that don't exist, says the CEO of AI gadget maker Logitech.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's a little unfair.  Logitech's webcams use discriminative AI to keep you centered in the frame, for example, and to mute background noise.  Other companies, though:

  Faber argued that the wave of AI-first gadgets released over the past year remains untethered from a clear purpose.  Products such as the Humane AI Pin - acquired by HP in February - and Rabbit R1 launched with the promise of replacing parts of the smartphone experience, only to draw criticism for slow performance, limited features, and subscription-driven pricing.

  The upcoming unnamed product from OpenAI looks to be another screenless phone piece of overpriced junk.

  Their reception has shaped the debate around whether a general-purpose assistant belongs in a dedicated device at all.  According to Faber, these early efforts solve little that a phone or PC cannot already handle, which is a view that has gained traction as both devices incorporate larger on-device models and tighter integrations with cloud assistants.

  As annoying as AI is, dedicated AI devices are even worse.

• AMD's upcoming "Gorgon" family Ryzen 470 CPU is basically just a Ryzen 370.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I was comparing specs earlier.  The Ryzen 370 has 12 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores, where the Ryzen 255 I just bought has 8 CPU cores and 12 GPU cores.
  
  But the 370 is just 20% faster than the 255 while the relevant Minisforum model is 60% more expensive.
  
  
  
• Intel chips could power iPhones in 2028.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's Intel as a manufacturer, not Intel as a designer.  They'll still be "Apple Silicon", but Apple has booked space on Intel's 18A production line to start fabricating chips now that TSMC is 100% sold out.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile TSMC is scrambling to build an advanced packaging facility in the US because it is, well, 100% sold out.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This of for chips like modern AMD and Intel CPUs, where multiple small dies are packaged together on a larger silicon substrate.
  
  
  
• Nimony is a compiler from the Nim team.  (Nim-lang)
  
  It will become Nim 3.0 in time, but it is already a useful compiler if you're interested in high-performance code with built-in memory management.
  
  
  
• Two government contractors who were sentenced to prison in 2015 after being caught hacking government computers have been indicted for hacking government computers again after being rehired after their prison sentences ended.  (Bleeping Computer)

  According to court documents, Muneeb Akhter deleted roughly 96 databases containing U.S. government information in February 2025, including Freedom of Information Act records and sensitive investigative documents from multiple federal agencies.
  
  One minute after deleting a Department of Homeland Security database, Muneeb Akhter also allegedly asked an artificial intelligence tool for instructions on clearing system logs after deleting a database.

  Fill the cell in with cement.  Then go after whoever hired these people.
  
  

Anyway, it's fixed now.

• As expected, AMD has announced price increases for its Radeon graphics cards.  Starting today, the cost to board partners of the parts (GPU chip and GDDR6 RAM) will increased by $10.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For 8GB cards.  For 16GB cards the cost rises by $20.
  
  Given the craziness going on right now, that is not a lot.
  
  There may be more increases coming, but for now at least, no reason to panic.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Finding that random person in Nebraska.  (Stacktower)
  
  XKCD comic 2347 highlighted a key weakness of modern computer systems: Everything depends on "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003".
  
  Stacktower is a Python library that inspects your own tech stack and draws a similar diagram and highlights the individual thankless maintainers, so that you can thank them.
  
  
  
• Teehee.  They said "end to end".  (Tech Crunch)

  Earlier this year, home goods maker Kohler launched a smart camera called the Dekoda that attaches to your toilet bowl, takes pictures of it, and analyzes the images to advise you on your gut health.

  I can see where this is going to end.

  The security researcher also pointed out that given Kohler can access customers' data on its servers, it's possible Kohler is using customers' bowl pictures to train AI.

  Why?

  Citing another response from the company representative, the researcher was told that Kohler's "algorithms are trained on de-identified data only."

  No.

  The Dekoda costs $599 plus a mandatory subscription of at least $6.99 per month.

  It's even cheaper if you don't buy it.
  
  
  
• Russia has banned Roblox.  (CBC)

  On Wednesday, Roskomnadzor blocked access to the U.S. children's gaming platform Roblox, accusing it of distributing extremist materials and "LGBT propaganda." Roskomnadzor further said Roblox was "rife with inappropriate content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children."

  Well, yes.
  
  
  
  
• The iPhone air has depreciated by 50% in ten weeks.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's like backwards DRAM.
  
  
  
• A critical flaw in React and Next.js lets hackers execute code on your servers if you're a fucking idiot.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The problem with making JavaScript run on servers is that then JavaScript programmers will run code on servers.
  
  The result is exactly what everyone predicted.

• Memory and storage company Crucial is throwing in the towel after thirty years in the business.  Sort of.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're not going to stop producing stuff.  They're a division of Micron.
  
  They're just going to stop producing stuff that you can buy because they can make more money out of the AI bubble.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• It was India. (AppleInsider)
  
  Who rusted first, that is.
  
  India insisted that Apple pre-install its state-sponsored spyware on all new iPhones sold in the country.
  
  Apple said not just no, but fuck no.
  
  India said yeah, okay.
  
  
  
• The CEO of IBM says that spending in the AI boom is obviously unsustainable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Current buildout plans would require industry profits of $800 billion per year just to make payment on the interest.
  
  Current industry profits are less than zero.  Significantly less.
  
  
  
• An AI tool for lawyers produced by a billion dollar company had no security.  (Alex Schapiro)
  
  As in, literally none.  Anyone could access any document.
  
  We're all going to die, aren't we?
  
  
  
• Microsoft is lowering its AI sales targets because nobody is buying.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  It's hard to sell what you can't even give away for free.
  
  
  
• Case in point: Programming language Zig is leaving GitHub because Microsoft's obsession with AI is tanking the site's reliability.  (The Register)

  Jeremy Howard, co-founder of Answer.AI and Fast.AI, said in a series of social media posts that users' claims about GitHub Actions being in a poor state of repair appear to be justified.

  "The bug," he wrote, "was implemented in a way that, very obviously to nearly anyone at first glance, uses 100 percent CPU all the time, and will run forever unless the task happens to check the time during the correct second."

  A fix for the bug was proposed by a user.
  
  The fix was correct.
  
  The fix was ignored, and the comment thread was closed by AI.
  
  

• Windows 11 is barely ahead of Windows 10 in install base, despite Microsoft stabbing Windows 10 in the back, the front, the sides, and from several other directions.  (The Register)
  
  It's hard to sell what you can't even give away for free.
  
  

A Wild Last Boss Appeared started out a cut above the usual reincarnated-in-the-game-world isekai slop, and continues to stand out, with two reveals in the latest episode which both offer novel twists and suggest that the author actually thought about things.  (And actually a third one, which feels like and I'll just throw this in as well while I'm at it.)

Wikipedia seems confused as to how many volumes there are of the light novels and manga, and Amazon has trashed its Japanese site for foreign visitors, so I have no idea where it goes from here.

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, December 04 2025 09:37 PM (oJgNG)

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It's in experimental mode right now while I update the page to make it look a bit more substantial and track down a problem with long load times.

And I just tracked down the problem.

Vanilla Backport, which conveniently bundles together backports of feature releases since 1.20.1 (in this case, since it's a 1.20.1 mod), uses a library mod called Platform.

Platform, according to the load time profiler mod I'm using, takes almost twelve minutes to load.

All the other 215 mods combined?  Six minutes.

That's on my older (Zen 3) laptop running in silent (low power) mode, so a good computer will handle it in half the time, but swapping that one mod out for five separate backport mods reduced the load time from just under twelve minutes to just over six.

And now I need to test again.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 05 2025 03:19 AM (1TiGW)

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 05 2025 06:49 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 05 2025 06:51 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 05 2025 07:39 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 05 2025 10:18 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 05 2025 10:34 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 05 2025 01:48 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 05 2025 03:19 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 05 2025 03:20 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 05 2025 10:38 PM (1zWbY)

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• AMD is reportedly planning price hikes to its graphics cards to cover soaring memory costs: An extra $20 for 8GB models and $40 for 16GB models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is not all that bad.
  
  
  
• AMD has also - reportedly increased prices for its CPUs, which don't contain any DRAM.  (Overclock3D)
  
  To add to the mystery, while this increase is supposed to have already happened, nobody seems to know which models are affected or what the increases are.  Indeed, the whole thing might just be the end of Black Friday discounts at the distributor level.

• The Trump administration is planning to take a $150 million equity stake in startup xLight, which aims to make better EUV lasers to chip production.  (WSJ)  (archive site)
  
  Current EUV fab equipment uses 13.5nm lasers.  xLight is planning to bring that down to just 2nm, which is pretty inarguably an x-ray more than UV light.
  
  This takes money from the 2022 CHIPS Act, which apparently still has $6 billion available to spend on chip fabrication facilities.
  
  
  
• San Francisco is suing ten food companies for producing food.  (NBC)
  
  "How very dare you?!", squeaked city attorney David Chiu.
  
  
  
• Bending Spoons is buying Eventbrite for $500 million.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Bending Spoons is assembling quite the collection of has-been companies here, including Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, and AOL, which you may have heard of.
  
  
  
• Apple has said that it won't pre-install India's mandatory spyware on its phones.  (Reuters)
  
  I'm game.  We'll see who rusts first.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 03 2025 11:01 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 03 2025 11:07 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, December 04 2025 02:20 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 04 2025 07:49 AM (e0fX0)

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• Samsung and SK Hynix - two of the three major DRAM manufacturers - issued a big fat "nope" when asked if they were planning to increase production beyond work already in the pipeline.  (WCCFTech)

  Rather than rapidly expanding facilities, we will pursue a strategy of maintaining long-term profitability.  We will minimize the risk of oversupply through a capital expenditure (CAPEX) strategy that balances customer demand and pricing.

  Translation: All our competitors tried this and went broke in the last "boom-and-bust" cycle.  We don't plan to go broke.
  
  
  
• Shortages are starting to hit close to home, though, with Samsung denying a large memory order from...  Samsung.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Samsung's phone division ordered more than a year's supply of memory for the new Galaxy models.  Samsung's memory division told them no way.

• Did Alexander Fleming discover penicillin the way history tells it?  Well...  Maybe.  (Asimov Press)
  
  Attempts to recreate it exactly as Fleming described it - with the Petri dish contaminated with mold after the bacterial samples were placed - fail.  But if the contamination happens before or at the same time, the results can come out pretty much as stated, under the right conditions.  It's particularly temperature-dependent.
  
  And it turns out that right when Fleming went on his week's vacation leaving his experiment unmonitored, there was a cold spell that put conditions right in the path of a happy accident.
  
  If that is how it worked out, there was even more luck involved than we thought.
  
  
  
• Colleges are preparing to self-lobotomise - again.  (The Atlantic)  (archive site)
  
  The Atlantic is complaining about the ill-considered use of AI in higher education, which is fair enough.  They are not complaining about all the other self-inflicted metaphorical head wounds in academia, which is less fair.
  
  
  
• Santa Monica has told Waymo it can't recharge its self-driving taxis at night.  (Inside EVs)  (archive site)

  It's unclear whether Waymo or its Virginia-based charging operator, Volterra, intends to comply.

  Signs point to no.
  
  
  
• You shouldn't shard your database.  (PgDog)
  
  If someone says you should, shard them straight out the nearest window.
  
  
  
• Be careful what you wish for: Now I've found the Door Bypassing Summer and Autumn and Heading Straight Back into Winter.

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, December 03 2025 11:20 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, December 03 2025 11:24 AM (rcPLc)

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• Would you like to buy a clue...  For $1 million?  (AP)
  
  There's a sculpture called Kryptos at the CIA offices in McLean, Virginia, which contains four panels of encrypted text.  Three have been decrypted by puzzle-solvers, but the fourth has defied all attempts since the installation was created in 1990.
  
  The artist, now aged 80, has auctioned off his notes and clues to the contents of that fourth panel...  For close to $1 million.

• LLVM-MOS is a fork of the LLVM compiler suite for the 6502.  (LLVM-MOS)
  
  It supports everything from the Ohio Scientific Challenger 1, which shipped in 1976, to the Commander X16, which shipped as a developer edition last year and is available for purchase right now.
  
  
  
• Google Antigravity just wiped my D drive.  (Reddit)
  
  Not my D drive.  It's AI shit and I don't give AI shit access to anything I don't want destroyed.
  
  
  
• Looking at a water-cooled RISC-V AI workstation.  (The Register)
  
  It costs $12,000, but it has four AI accelerator cards each with four 800Gb Ethernet ports.  So if nothing else it's an astonishingly fast router.
  
  
  
• The Lotus Diplomat is a double-wide Blackberry.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It has a 5" 2560x1920 screen - and a 1" secondary screen - and a QWERTY keyboard with a number row at the top and a function/punctuation row at the bottom.  It's powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite and equipped with 24GB of RAM and 1.5TB of storage.
  
  Price is not mentioned, and you might be best off not asking.
  
  
  
• AI is transforming spacecraft propulsion - and may lead to nuclear-powered rockets.  (Fast Company)  (archive site)
  
  No it isn't, and no it won't.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, December 02 2025 02:11 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, December 02 2025 06:45 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, December 02 2025 07:24 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 02 2025 11:33 AM (PiXy!)

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• Year of Linux on the Desktop?  Part One: Does Linux actually account for 11% of desktops even in the US - and a higher number globally?  (ZD Net)
  
  Probably, yes.  You get that number by adding together desktop Linux, ChromeOS (which is Linux) and "Unknown" numbers.
  
  Globally Linux numbers are about 50% higher, and looking at US government website stats, 25% of requests come from some flavour of Linux (including Android).
  
  
  
• Year of Linux on the Desktop?  Part Two: Google's AluminiumOS (yes, they spell it with two eyes) brings Android to the desktop.  (Thurrott)
  
  And Google has already been working to merge ChromeOS with Android.  So this would bring a thoroughly-tested Linux variant with a huge collection of existing applications to the desktop, though half of those apps are Kairosoft games.
  
  And the new Steam Cube is due to launch soon, bringing SteamOS - again, a flavour of Linux - to the desktop.
  
  With Microsoft working tirelessly to destroy Windows, these consumer-oriented Linux versions may bring welcome relief.

• Yes, Virginia, there are still some tech bargains: Seagate's 24TB Barracuda model is selling for just one cent per gigabyte.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or $240 for the whole thing.
  
  Well, not in Australia, where it is significantly more expensive and also completely out of stock everywhere.
  
  With SSD prices on the rise this may be a good choice for people looking to build a high-capacity NAS.
  
  
  
• Speaking of SSD prices, an interesting thing is happening there.  The shortage is affecting NAND flash generally.  All versions, from high-reliability enterprise chips to the cheap stuff targeted at microSD cards.
  
  Meanwhile PCIe 5 controller chips for consumer SSDs are coming down in price, meaning that the price gap between PCIe 4 and PCIe 5 drives is fast disappearing.  At the start of the year it cost around 100% more for a PCIe 5 drive; now it's closer to 30%.
  
  
  
• People are more likely to give up their seats to pregnant women on public transport when Batman is present.  (Nature)
  
  He's not going to hurt you.  He's just going to judge you.
  
  
  
• Why a RAM boycott isn't going to do anything.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Because 70% of RAM goes to enterprise customers and if you don't buy it, they will.
  
  So what's the solution?
  
  Linux.  It's notably more memory efficient than Windows.
  
  
  
• Why Honda is suddenly launching reusable rockets.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Because they don't do much if you don't launch them.
  
  People don't often think of them that way, but Honda is a successful aerospace company.
  
  
  
• Someone tell Petronius the Arbiter that I've found the Door into Summer.
  
  Now I just need to find the Door Back into Pleasant Spring Weather.
  
  
  
• Updated my Minecraft modpack.  It's still on 1.20.1 because some key mods aren't available on anything later - Minecraft doesn't care at all about mod compatibility between versions - but I found a single mod (Vanilla Backport) that bundles together backports of all six six out of nine feature releases since then but has a weird compatibility problem with the Modernfix mod.
  
  Dye Depot and Dye the World - which add 16 more colours to vanilla Minecraft and to 19 other mods respectively - have both been updated.  And Create: Steam and Rails has a beta version with Create 6.0 compatibility.  I took Create out of the modpack entirely because the update to Create 6.0 broke compatibility with a lot of other mods, and if I wanted Steam and Rails and included Create 5.0, that broke still more things.  Looks like the great rift is finally healing.
  
  And after a whole bunch of tweaks and changes and updates, it just worked.  That never happens.

Nine years after season one and seven years after the movie, anime's sweetheart is back.  Tanya the Misunderstood will return for its second season next year.  The original cast though not the director are also returning.

(For those who haven't seen it, The Saga of Tanya the Evil is set in an alternate universe where World War I didn't happen but the October Revolution in Russia - or something very much like it - did.  Now it's the 1920s and the Great War has lit off with everyone fighting everyone else, and Tanya really does not like commies.)

Posted by: furball321 at Sunday, November 30 2025 10:36 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 01 2025 01:04 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Monday, December 01 2025 04:27 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 01 2025 08:34 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 01 2025 08:43 AM (Sbqr6)

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• Don't worry about AI taking your job.  I don't worry about AI taking your job, so why should you, asks billionaire CEO Jensen Huang of Nvidia who got rich pushing AI.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  To be fair, he made the right call, making Nvidia the most valuable company in the world, and that is his job.  However, he is pushing his staff to use more AI precisely because if it works he won't need them.
  
  I don't believe it will work, but he has to claim to believe it, because that is also his job.  So one way or the other, he is lying.
  
  
  
• Ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger says quantum computing will pop the AI bubble.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This would spell serious trouble for Nvidia, because if quantum computing is effective, it would erase 90% of their market overnight.
  
  Huang thinks that will take twenty years.
  
  Gelsinger believes it may take as little as two.
  
  

Tech News

• The Ayaneo Next 2 is another of those hand-held gaming devices like the Nintendo Switch or PlayStation Portable, only more so.  A whole lot more so.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has a 9" OLED display with a resolution of 2400x1504 at 165Hz, which is not drastically more than (for example) the Switch 2's 7.9" 1920x1080 120Hz screen.
  
  But it also has an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, the same CPU powering the recent raft of $2000 home AI computers.  16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores, packed into a handheld.
  
  Price not given but I expect it to be a lot.
  
  
  
• M3 MacBook Air’s Front Sharp Edges Were Too Uncomfortable For Its Owner, So He Used A Sandpaper To Smoothen Them Out, Followed By Some Polishing  (WCCFTech)
  
  Smoothen?

  The only drawback to smoothening the sharp edges of the M3 MacBook Air is that the polished area is prone to oxidation, but nothing like a simple wiping job will do the trick.

  Smoothen.
  
  
  
   
• A major AI conference has been flooded with papers "peer-reviewed" by AI.  (Nature)
  
  21% of the "peer reviews" were entirely AI-generated, and 50% showed significant AI use.
  
  Of the papers themselves, 1% were entirely AI-generated.  61% were at least mostly human work.
  
  
  
• The latest Soyuz launch to the ISS wrecked the rocket's own launchpad.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Crew on the ground failed to secure a 20-ton service platform and it got blasted into the flame trench by the launch and wrecked it.
  
  None of Russia's other launch sites can currently handle the Soyuz craft, which means that SpaceX may have to save the day yet again.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, November 30 2025 02:43 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 30 2025 12:05 PM (1zWbY)

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