Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.

Friday, November 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 November 2025

Turkey Resilience Edition

Top Story

  • OpenAI has described its forthcoming AI device.  (Tech Crunch)  (archive site)

    Not announced.  Not previewed.  Described:
    When people see it, they say, "that's it?… It’s so simple."
    Not so much of a description as a fart.

    It's expected to be a phone, but without a screen, making it useless to everyone who already has a phone, which is...  Everyone.

    Also, don't look at the picture.


  • Why can't ChatGPT tell the time?  (The Verge)  (archive site)

    Because it doesn't know anything.


Tech News



Musical Interlude



Song is Golden from the movie KPop Demon Hunters, which is about a KPop (Korean pop music) group that, uh, hunts demons.

The movie is supposed to be pretty good, though when Hololive EN did a watchalong stream, Kronii rolled her eyes so hard that her motion-tracking sensor picked it up.



Disclaimer: See for yourself!

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Thursday, November 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 November 2025

Fireworks-Stuffed Turkey Edition

Top Story

  • OpenAI says a dead teenager circumvented ChatGPT safety features before committing suicide.  (Tech Crunch)

    This comes out of one of the manifold lawsuits for wrongful death levied against OpenAI by the families of, well, crazy people.

    And OpenAI actually seems to have a point:
    OpenAI claims that over roughly nine months of usage, ChatGPT directed Raine to seek help more than 100 times.
    Why didn't you tell him to seek help?

    (Produces list of dates, times, and messages.)

    We did.
    But according to his parents' lawsuit, Raine was able to circumvent the company's safety features to get ChatGPT to give him "technical specifications for everything from drug overdoses to drowning to carbon monoxide poisoning," helping him to plan what the chatbot called a "beautiful suicide."
    Y'know, back in the Paleozoic era there were these things called libraries.

    Razors pain you;
    Rivers are damp;
    Acids stain you;
    And drugs cause cramp.
    Guns aren't lawful;
    Nooses give;
    Gas smells awful;
    You might as well live.


  • OpenAI needs to raise $207 billion by 2030 so that it can...  Continue to lose money.  (Financial Times)  (archive site)

    Someone remind me why we are doing this again?


Tech News



Musical Interlude


There was much twitterpation in my anime fan circle when I discovered this one, because we only knew the song from this much later version:





Disclaimer: Yes, your voivodicity.

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Wednesday, November 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 November 2025

Random Thing Edition

Top Story

Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die.  And your little dog too.

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Tuesday, November 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 November 2025

T Minus Two Edition

Top Story

  • ChatGPT told them they were special.  Then...  Bad things happened.  (Tech Crunch)  (archive site)

    OpenAI is facing seven lawsuits this month, three from the families of users who went insane, and four from the families of users who committed suicide.

    Now while I'm not a huge fan of this type of suit - the dangers of AI "therapists" have been known for more than fifty years - there may be some merit to the negligence angle in the allegations:
    Shamblin's case is part of a wave of lawsuits filed this month against OpenAI arguing that ChatGPT's manipulative conversation tactics, designed to keep users engaged, led several otherwise mentally healthy people to experience negative mental health effects. The suits claim OpenAI prematurely released GPT-4o - its model notorious for sycophantic, overly affirming behavior - despite internal warnings that the product was dangerously manipulative.
    On the other hand, insane-while-online rarely works out as a personal growth path.  Just consider Bluesky.

    Or:
    From mid-June to August 2025, ChatGPT told Madden, "I'm here," more than 300 times - which is consistent with a cult-like tactic of unconditional acceptance.
    Or, to be fair, consistent with saying "I'm here".
    At one point, ChatGPT asked: "Do you want me to guide you through a cord-cutting ritual - a way to symbolically and spiritually release your parents/family, so you don’t feel tied [down] by them anymore?
    Which is...  A bit weird, I must admit.
    Madden was committed to involuntary psychiatric care on August 29, 2025.  She survived - but after breaking free from these delusions, she was $75,000 in debt and jobless.
    Restitution for that much - and legal costs - would seem appropriate.
    "A healthy system would recognize when it's out of its depth and steer the user toward real human care," Vasan said.  "Without that, it's like letting someone just keep driving at full speed without any brakes or stop signs."
    Real humans tend to do that a lot too.


Tech News

Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Hexwriter?

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Monday, November 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 November 2025

Investing In Pins Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Thing.

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Sunday, November 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 November 2025

From universe import * Edition

Top Story

  • The strange and totally real plan to blot the Sun and reverse global warming.  (Politico)

    An in-depth and thoroughly researched article, albeit one written by a pair of compulsive liars with a combined IQ barely into the double digits.

    Nowhere in the dozen or so pages of irrelevancy does it mention the actual plan: To cool the planet by increasing effective cloud cover by 1%.

    Yes, when they say "blot out the Sun" they mean imperceptibly.


Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: I actually prefer Falco's German cover of this one, but we already had Amadeus.

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Post contains 389 words, total size 4 kb.

Saturday, November 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 November 2025

None Dare Call It A Bubble Edition

Top Story

  • In our Daily Dose of Tech Executives are Idiots Google tells employees it must double capacity every six months to meet AI demand.  (Ars Technica)

    It's not just college students who can't do math.
    During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC.  Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides showing the company needs to scale "the next 1000x in 4-5 years."
    That would put Google Cloud Services at around $60 trillion in revenue per year, more than double the entire US GDP.

    Where do you expect the money to come from to fund this insanity?
    While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking "for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," he told employees during the meeting.
    Oh.  Magic.
    "It won’t be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we’re going to get there."
    No, you're not, and everyone knows you're not.

    Progress over the last seven years, at truly massive cost, has been around 60% better AI performance per watt annually.  Chip improvements, algorithm improvements, and manufacturing improvements combined.

    You're asking your team to boost that to 300% overnight.


Tech News

  • SK Hynix is planning to increase memory production at its facility in Icheon, South Korea, from 20,000 to 140,000 wafers per month.  (WCCFTech)

    This won't even scratch the surface if the AI bubble keeps demanding hardware on its current trajectory.

    And the memory makers aren't going to build new factories any faster because only three of them survived when the last bubble burst.


  • Speaking of idiot tech executives, the CEO of the world's most popular game, Roblox, sat down for an interview with the New York Times.  It did not go well.  (Kotaku)

    Asked how the company was dealing with its pedophile problem, CEO David Baszucki responded:
    "We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well."
    Remarkably, things actually went downhill from there.


  • Speaking of not being able to do math the International Association of Cryptologic Research has cancelled its annual leadership election after...  Oh.  (Ars Technica)
    "Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share," the IACR said.  "As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election."
    An entirely understandable mistake, assuming all these people are idiots.


  • What killed Perl?  (Entropic Thoughts)

    Mostly, Perl.


  • WhatsApp allows anyone who knows your phone number to look up your public details on the app, assuming you have an account.

    So what's to prevent someone from just iterating through all the 63 billion of so potential phone numbers in the world and finding all the people with WhatsApp accounts?

    Nothing.  (The Register)

    That's the problem with systems on this scale.  The researchers were probing the system with 100 million API requests per hour, for weeks, from a single IP address, and nobody noticed.


  • Qualcomm bought open source hobbyist hardware maker Arduino six weeks ago. At the time I predicted it might not mean imminent doom since Qualcomm is not as bad as, say, Broadcom.  (The Register)

    And they've already fucked it.  Though it seems the TOS clause about reverse-engineering was already in place, the rest of the changes pushed through yesterday are a complete train wreck for its customer base.



Frieren Interlude


They've even got Milet back for the closing theme.

Airs starting January 16.


Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Gotta be cool to be kind.

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Friday, November 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 November 2025

Turbo Intercal Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: I KNOW!

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Thursday, November 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 November 2025

Sparkly Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude


There was an official music video released for Eye in the Sky, but for the life of me I cannot find it online.



Disclaimer: Ptui.

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Wednesday, November 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 November 2025

Packagisation Edition

Top Story

  • So, Cloudflare.  (Cloudflare)

    Cloudflare carries something like 20% of the world's web traffic, but for a few hours late last night (my time) or early yesterday morning (US time) it wasn't carrying much of anything, because it stopped working.

    Six times.

    Not a DNS problem like the recent outages at Azure and Amazon, but a fumbled configuration file change like that massive Crowdstrike outage sixteen months ago.


  • And it's going to keep happening, so buckle up.  (The Verge)  (archive site)

    I run traditional unshared physical servers at a smaller datacenter, not bound to any of the major players.  On the one hand, a few years ago that datacenter had a fire and while the fire didn't cause any damage, the same could not be said for the sprinkler system mandated by local fire codes.  (Yes, a sprinkler system.  In a datacenter.)

    On the other hand, not one of these big global outages have affected us.


Tech News



Hold My Beer Interlude


160 proof beer?  What could possibly go wrong?


Musical Interlude


Disclaimer: Everything alright there, Mose?

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