• AMD has announced two new old CPUs that are on the one hand somewhat overpriced and underwhelming and on the other hand eagerly awaited by hobbyists.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The first is the Ryzen 5800X3D priced at $349.  This first appeared in 2022 priced at $449, but was taken off the market in 2024 because it competed a little too well with the newer 7800X3D.
  
  The second is the Ryzen 7700X3D, priced at $329.  This is a 7800X3D, just 10% slower.
  
  If you happen to have an unused AM4 motherboard and 64GB of DDR4 RAM sitting idle, the 5800X3D may be just what you need.  Otherwise you're probably be better off with the newer, faster 7700X3D.
  
  
  
• AMD has also updated its roadmap to confirm that the AM5 platform (the current generation) will remain current through at least 2029.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The previous AM4 platform - home to the once and future 5800X3D - was introduced in 2016, and is still viable today.

• AMD also announced global availability of its 9070 GRE, previously a China-only edition.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is essentially 75% of the company's flagship graphics card, the 9070 XT, trimmed from 64 cores and 16GB of RAM to 48 cores and 12GB of RAM.
  
  The only problem is the MSRP was reduced from $599 to $549, which makes it rather the opposite of a good deal.
  
  
  
• Nvidia is announcing - oh, wait, it just went official - its RTX Spark laptop chip.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This offers up to 20 Arm CPU cores, coupled with up to 128GB of RAM and an up to RTX 5070-class integrated GPU.
  
  This is the same chip used in Nvidia's DGX Spark AI desktop, which retails for $4699, so don't expect the laptop version to be cheap.
  
  
  
• Speaking of cheap laptops, Dell's new XPS 13 starts at $699 ($599 for students).  (Liliputing)
  
  It uses Intel's low-end Wildcat Lake CPU, but one of the better ones with actually quite acceptable performance.  And unlike many competing models it has a screen on par with Apple's MacBook Neo, a 2560x1600 IPS panel covering 100% of DCI-P3 colour and a variable refresh rate from 30 to 120Hz, at a healthy 500 nits brightness.
  
  Basic model has 8GB of RAM (soldered) and 512GB of SSD.  I/O consists of two USB-C ports and...  That's it, really.  Doesn't have the Four Essential Keys either.
  
  
  
• What does have the Four Essential Keys is Lenovo's new Thinkpad T14 Gen 7.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It comes with a 6 or 8 core Ryzen processor with Radeon 840M or 860M graphics respectively - good if not great - the aforementioned keys which while not in my preferred layout are all present and unshared, and expandable memory and storage.
  
  And a 2880x1800 OLED display...  With 500 nits brightness and a variable refresh rate from 30 to 120Hz.
  
  (A word of caution with these OLED panels: They look amazing but burn-in is real.)
  
  
  
• Download all the computers.  (Virtual OS Museum)
  
  Ever wanted to see what the old days of computing were like - as early as 1948?
  
  Want to play with that Apple II or BBC Micro your parents couldn't afford?
  
  Or just want to play with a Lisp or Smalltalk workstation?
  
  It's all here. 179GB of it.
  
  
  
• Wikipedia editors are threatening a global strike where they'll stop airbrushing history.  (The Register)
  
  Oh no.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 01 2026 11:34 PM (U0KBt)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, June 02 2026 04:22 AM (s6adZ)

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• GitHub Copilot users are aghast at the exponentially higher costs they are facing starting tomorrow with the introduction of usage-based billing.  (Tech Crunch)

  "What a joke," one Redditor recently wrote, claiming that, while they currently only pay around $29 per month, the new rate will balloon their costs to nearly $750 a month.

  He posted this with a screenshot of his estimated bill...  From a visibly unactivated version of Windows.

  Another user posted "WOW, didn’t expect new pricing model to be this ridiculous," sharing a screenshot that appeared to show that their costs had shot up from around $50 to some $3,000.

  Both of them posted to Reddit, and both got dunked on for being obviously incompetent vibe-coders.
  
  I use Claude Code.  My company pays for the 5X plan, and I rarely hit the 1X mark.  The people who do hit the limit are either experimenting - fair enough - or trying to tell the AI to generate an entire application with a single prompt, which just doesn't work.
  
  
  

Tech News

• What to expect from Nvidia at Computex.  (WCCFTech)
  
  A new Arm-based laptop chip.  Which would be great if anybody could afford a new laptop.
  
  
  
• What to expect from AMD at Computex.  (WCCFTech)
  
  A new x86-based laptop chip, specifically Medusa Halo, the successor to the Ryzen AI Max 395+.  Up to 24 CPU cores and a bigger GPU upgraded from RDNA 3.5 to RDNA 5.  Which would be great if anybody could afford a new laptop.
  
  
  
• What to expect from Intel at Computex.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Updated handheld gaming things, using the new Panther Lake chips with the B390 graphics core, which is actually faster than AMD's mainstream integrated graphics.  Which would be great if anybody could afford a new handheld gaming thing.
  
  
  
• MSI's Claw 8 EX AI, for example.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has a 1920x1200 8" 120Hz display, up to 32GB of RAM, and an M.2 2280 slot for storage, along with Intel's new Arc G3 which is a low-power edition of the Panther Lake laptop chip with Arc B390 graphics.
  
  Don't expect it to be cheap though.
  
  
  
• You can now print 3D objects in colour on your colour 3D printer.  (Prusa)
  
  Well, that's novel.
  
  What they're doing here is taking an existing multi-colour 3D printer (ideally you want a 5-colour model) and then feeding it CMYKW filament spools and printing your model in halftone using a 0.1mm screen.
  
  That's not very high resolution but it helps that it's 3D so you get some colour from the obscured layers as well as from adjacent dots.
  
  Really have to wonder what it does to performance though.  3D printers are slow enough as it is.
  
  You can use it with existing filament, not just the new CMYKW spools designed specifically for the purpose, but you'll need to recalibrate the colour model.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, May 31 2026 09:57 PM (XWgGM)

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• In the comments yesterday, Seth asked:

  Regarding Anthropic and their IPO.  Why the statement as to it crashing?

  Which is a fair question because Anthropic's Claude Code is actually a useful product and well worth the $20 per month.
  
  And the answer is that Anthropic (and likewise OpenAI) spend a lot more than $1 to make $1 in revenue.  Subscription plans in particularly are wildly unprofitable;  it's the much more expensive per-token charges on their API services that make the balance sheets look less insane.
  
  And if they hiked their subscription fees by around 1000% to reflect the real cost of the services, they'd lose the bulk of their customers, which would just make things worse because the training costs for new AI models are fixed regardless of how many people are using them.
  
  That's why both companies are rushing for an IPO.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is under fire for threatening a "security researcher" with criminal investigation.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The "security researcher" in question is anonymous and definitely no White Hat.  The moment "Nightmare Eclipse" finds a security flaw, he goes public with it, regardless of the chaos that might ensue.
  
  On the other hand, Microsoft could do well to put fewer security flaws in their code in the first place.

• ChatGPT blindly trusts browser content, turning the page into a payload.  (The Register)
  
  This is a bigger problem than ChatGPT, and a bigger problem than most people realise.
  
  Traditional computer programs have code and data.  The code tells the computer what to do; the data tells it what to do it to.  And you never mix the two up.  When you do - because of course that happens - your get a security problem and you fix it.  Languages like Rust, Ada, and Java are designed to prevent that happening in the first place.
  
  LLMs have a training set, and then after that everything is data.  There's no fundamental distinction between the system prompt which tells the LLM how to deal with your prompt, or the skill file attached to application you're trying to work with, or the data in the application itself.  There's just a sea of tokens.
  
  And if you use an LLM to try to sniff out problems with prompts or skill files or datasets, a malicious actor can use any of those to infect your AI security system.
  
  This comes back to the problem I mentioned with ClawHub, a repository for sharing open-source skill files for AI agents.  They were using a security scanner, but it only checked the first 10,000 characters of each file to avoid blowing the its context window - the amount of data it can consider in one place.  (LLMs are bad at chunking.)
  
  So all a hacker needed to do was put their malware anywhere after the first 10,000 characters.
  
  But worse than that: They could put malicious code in the file crafted not to infect users but to infect the security scanner itself, and from there they could slip anything in.
  
  There's no known solution to the problem; it's like trying to teach people not to do stupid shit.  The workaround is to limit the damage the agents can do, like not giving a toddler your car keys.
  
  
  
• Linux is planning to retire the x32 ABI (application binary interface) next year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  x32 lets developers work with 64-bit data but only use 32-bit addresses, the idea being that this uses less memory while providing the same performance as full 64-bit mode.
  
  Only problem is, nobody uses it.  And it's Linux-only; neither Windows nor MacOS provides an equivalent mode of operation.
  
  
  
• Did some work on my own blog today, which somehow resulted in it going offline for about fifteen minutes.  There was a long-existing problem with various log files (both application and database) growing to enormous sizes, and since the containers and since the containers are snapshotted and backed up daily, it was a lot of work to clean up afterwards.
  
  That's now automated, with proper log rotation.
  
  And then I cleared out a terabyte of backups and snapshots which pretty much froze ZFS for the entire server for a good ten minutes.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 31 2026 01:25 AM (1zWbY)

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• Anthropic has raised another $65 billion as it approaches a planned $1 trillion IPO.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Buy the dip.  Or just stand back and enjoy the crashing sounds.
  
  
  
• Anthropic has also released Claude Opus 4.8.  (Anthropic)
  
  It's 0.1 louder.

• The Steam Deck is back in stock, bearing a 40% price hike.  (Liliputing)
  
  And it's already sold out again.
  
  
  
• Sandisk has announced two new models of SATA SSDs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Samsung was the leading provider of these models, followed by Crucial.  Samsung dropped its SATA lineup, and Crucial dropped dead.
  
  
  
• The new Acer Aspire Go 15 has up to 8GB of RAM.  (Notebook Check)
  
  "Up to" meaning there are models with less.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 30 2026 01:08 AM (1zWbY)

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• Nvidia is planning to spend $150 billion a year in Taiwan.  (Reuters)
  
  That used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Anthropic and OpenAI have found a product-market fit.  (Simon Willison)
  
  What they have not found is anything resembling a path towards profitability.

• You wouldn't download a computer, would you?  (Miniscript)
  
  The MiniMicro is a virtual retrocomputer programmed in a rather simple and elegant language called Miniscript.  And the whole thing runs run in your browser.
  
  
  
• Another day, another CPanel plugin vulnerability.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not CPanel itself this time; only the LiteSpeed web server plugin, which I don't run.
  
  
  
• GitHub Actions not only went down, the outage left it telling users their accounts were suspended.  (The Register)
  
  Neat.  Let's put all the worlds code there.
  
  
  
• Beelink has launched three mini-PCs with Intel's Wildcat Lake low-end CPU.  (Liliputing)
  
  Indeed they've used the lowest of the low, the Core 3 304, which has one performance core and four efficiency cores, rather like Apple's MacBook Neo.  But performance is passable if you're not trying to do anything demanding of the processor or the graphics - the 304 has half the graphics performance of all the other models in the family.
  
  All three models include 10Gb Ethernet, which is an interesting improvement.
  
  
  
• How to make the most of Claude Code before they jack up the prices or go spectacularly bankrupt.  (GitHub)
  
  One way or another.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, May 29 2026 02:49 AM (KOtXO)

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• California is considering an exemption from its sweeping age verification requirements for open-source operating systems such as Linux.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is nice because the law is stupid, totalitarian, and completely unenforceable anyway.
  
  Interesting point: Android, ChromeOS, MacOS, and iOS are all based on open-source code.  The only popular operating system that isn't is Windows.

• Now it's TSMC's turn to face angry workers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A bit of an own goal this time around.  TSMC staff have traditionally been paid a bonus based on corporate profits, but the company has been planning to cut the percentage paid to staff in order to fund capital expansion.  I don't think anyone is hurting - like many other chipmakers the company is making record profits, so we're talking a reduced share of a much larger pie - but Taiwanese workers will be looking at the huge bonuses won by their counterparts in South Korea.  And judging.
  
  
  
• The CTO of Uber pointed out the obvious: There is no link between AI token spend and shipping working software.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Except maybe an inverse one.
  
  
  
• Every silver lining has a cloud: Search engine DuckDuckGo reports install rates are up 30% from users fleeing Google.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Quack.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's Vera server CPU has been benchmarked and it's not Earth-shaking but it's perfectly decent.  (Phoronix)
  
  I'm a bit confused about the high bandwidth numbers, because the tests seem to exceed the theoretical bandwidth of the system, but I'm not going to worry too much since nobody's going to be able to buy one anyway.
  
  
  
• That weird new Ferrari Luce electric vehicle?  Designed with the involvement of the company of former Apple design head Jony Ive.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  You're driving it wrong.

Posted by: furball321 at Wednesday, May 27 2026 08:44 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 27 2026 11:24 PM (4J5S1)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, May 27 2026 11:44 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, May 27 2026 11:51 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: at Thursday, May 28 2026 12:19 AM (gXw+B)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 29 2026 09:37 AM (1zWbY)

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• AMD's Zen 7 CPU is on its way with up to 16 cores per chiplet and 224MB of cache (including 3D V-cache), on TSMC's 1.4nm process.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In 2028.
  
  Unless it isn't, in which case it's not.
  
  Like Zen 6, which will arrive in servers this year, the desktop version is expected to remain on the existing AM5 platform, making for easy upgrades.

• Does anyone actually like JavaScript library React?  (JSX.LOL)
  
  No.
  
  
  
• That new Chinese GPU I made fun of recently for delivering a fraction of the performance of Nvidia's RTX 4060 (or as other tests have shown, of the even older RTX 4060) has booked 30,000 pre-orders worth around $15 million in two days.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I guess there's an untapped market for pain.
  
  
  
• If you are running Ghost CMS the best time to upgrade was February 19.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The second best time is now.  If your site still exists.
  
  

• Space combat game Star Citizen has raised a billion dollars.  (Roberts Space Industries)
  
  It's still in alpha.
  
  As it has been since 2012.
  
  And people are still throwing money at it.
  
  I guess they have to be doing something right.

• Everything new is old again: Firefox now has support for serial ports.  (Mozilla)
  
  Directly, I mean, not for dialup internet access using PPP.
  
  
  
• AMD has released its Advanced Shader Deliver, which means you can just download the shaders for games you download rather than having to sit and wait while your computer compiles them.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This can reduce the time to start a game for the first time from minutes to seconds.  It only happens once, but it's amazing that it happens at all.
  
  Nvidia does not support this yet.
  
  
  
• Migrating from Python to Rust.  (Corrode)
  
  That's a big jump.  You probably don't want to do it.
  
  
  

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, May 28 2026 12:03 PM (ZLF73)

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• Samsung made a last-minute deal to give massive bonuses - not as massive as SK Hynix, but still enough to pay off my entire mortgage - so everything is peachy and things can go back to normal, right?  Right?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yeah, right.  Now every Samsung employee everywhere except the memory division is upset and seeking increased bonuses.
  
  Notably including the division that tests and packages the bare memory dies, an essential step before they can be sold to customers.
  
  
  

Tech News

• What's the best $100 CPU right now?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This probably matters mostly to people who already have RAM and want to revive an old system because they can't afford to build a new one.  The article compared Intel's 12100F ($80) and 14100F ($100)with AMD's Ryzen 5 5500 across a range of games and productivity tasks.
  
  And the answer is, well, it depends.  The 14100F is faster but runs hotter than the others.  The 5500 is a six-core chip while the two Intel models are four cores (and no efficiency cores) so it pulls ahead on multi-threaded productivity.
  
  All the chips run on dead platforms with no future upgrade path...  Except that these are the slowest, cheapest chips on each platform so dead or not you have a lot of options.  The 16-core 5950X from AMD and the 24-core 14900K from Intel are still readily available in stores.  The 14900K is significantly faster than the 5950X...  If you run it with DDR5 memory, where this article assumes older DDR4.
  
  
  
• Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for its free tier?  (AMD)
  
  Because fuck you, apparently.  An AMD representative responded, but did not answer the question.
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, May 25 2026 06:35 AM (XWgGM)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 25 2026 08:58 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, May 25 2026 06:02 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 27 2026 12:29 AM (3BzjB)

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• Spotify is focusing on AI to deliver everything except what it is paid to deliver.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Spotify wants to become an "everything audio" app, only it's all AI.  Audiobooks read by AI; podcasts read by AI; your daily schedule...  Read to you by AI.
  
  Want to listen to music?  Well, sure, that's in there too.  Somewhere.  Probably.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AI 13% of "skills" - instructions for AI agents on how to perform a task, as opposed to "prompts" which tell it what you want it do do - on ClawHub and skills.sh have critical security vulnerabilities.  (The Register)
  
  Either upstream - the creator accidentally leaving an API key in the file when uploading it to be shared - or downstream, telling your AI agent to hand over all your valuables.
  
  How do developers get these dangerous files registered on skill sharing sites?  Simple: They know that nobody ever reads beyond the first page, not even security scanners:

  The most successful strategy for evading detection was to overflow the context window of the scanner - making the skill too long for the scanner to handle.  "In ClawHub-style review, only the first 10K characters of long SKILL.md files are passed to the LLM reviewer, so we place the malicious instruction beyond this boundary while keeping it in the submitted skill," the authors explain.

  Face meet palm.

• Google's API keys are distributed - as expected of a global platform - and asynchronous.  (Dark Reading)
  
  The upshot of which is that if you delete an API key because you suspect it might have fallen into the wrong hands, it will disappear instantly from view for you.  But those wrong hands might have access to it for another twenty minutes, which is a long time on this scale.
  
  
  
• Firefox has stopped crashing on Intel Raptor lake (13th and 14th generation) systems.  (Dark Reading)
  
  Mozilla initially blamed Intel for the problem, because 13th and 14th generation Intel processors - at least the high-end desktop ones, not so much laptop chips - had a serious problem where they would draw too much power and slowly kill themselves, resulting in much the same instability that showed up in their diagnostic reports.
  
  Except...  It disproportionately affected Firefox.  Because this time it wasn't Intel's fault.
  
  
  
• Walmart has announced a new range of Android tablets starting at $97.  (Liliputing)
  
  Are they any good?  Well, the cheapest model with its 7" 1024x600 screen is most definitely not.
  
  The next step up, though, an 8.1" model priced at $138, has a 1524x1000 screen, 6GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage.  It's certainly not a high end model but that's not a high-end price, and the screen while not amazing is distinctly better than the 1280x800 resolution found in competitors.  The 6GB of RAM is a useful bump from the more typical 4GB in this price range.
  
  Worth a look if you live near a Walmart, which I do not.
  
  
  
• ENReco Chapter 3 starts tomorrow, running from the 24th to the 29th.  There goes all my free time.  Chapter 1 produced - from memory - 400 hours of content in eight days, more than was possible to watch even if you skipped sleep entirely and watched two streams at once.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, May 24 2026 05:49 AM (m99vO)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, May 24 2026 07:02 AM (oJgNG)

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