• Why Aliexpress is muting your music.  (The Register)
  
  Because they're taking your fingerprints using inaudible sonar.
  
  Really.

• OpenAI is building agents for everything.  Will anyone use them?  No.  (Tech Crunch)

  For Andrew Ambrosino, the lead engineer for OpenAI's desktop app, it’s the only way to test the future, which is why that app now has access to, and control over, his inbox, his Slack account, his phone, apps like Notion and Figma, and more.

  The people building these things are the only ones using them.
  
  
  
• Get yourself a password book.  (The Register)
  
  Because AI agents can't break into your house and steal a physical notepad.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's latest masterpiece is a bug that breaks printing of WPF documents from Windows 11 if they are written using fonts with names starting with C.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I'm not even mad.  That's amazing.
  
  
  
• Xiaomi's AI cube is not a cube.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Lies!
  
  
  
• FIIO's new cassette player plays cassettes.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Peace, love, and mung beans, baby.

• The that guy who thought it would be a fine jape to hand Border Patrol a "duress password" making his phone wipe itself rather than unlocking is facing felony charges. (Law Commentary)
  
  His lawyers say that the CBP were unconstitutionally using their clients past criminality as a pretext to search for his present criminality. Uh, not admitting that either of those occurred.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Nvidia has announced pricing on its new GB300 home AI system. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not something that you put in your home. It's something you buy instead.
  
  
  
• Maxell is making cassette tapes again. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Even I don't miss those.
  
  
  
• 170,000 non-profits lost all their data. Is Microsoft to blame? (Slate)
  
  Apparently, yes. Good work, guys.
  
  
  
• Surveillance company Flock is talking compromise. (Tech Crunch)
  
  It think there's a happy medium to be found between hitting them with a relativistic neutron star and dropping them into a black hole and then dropping that black hole into another black hole.
  
  
  
• How do AMD's AM4 X3D CPUs work on older motherboards? (WCCFTech)
  
  Just fine, thanks for asking.
  
  
  
• d-Matrix has reinvented IBM's eDRAM. (WCCFTech)
  
  Basically using DRAM rather than SRAM as the basis for last level cache, giving similar performance at four times the memory density or one quarter the cost if you're looking at it from that direction.
  
  
  
• Micron says that things are only going to get worse on the memory front. (WCCFTech)
  
  Though they are talking a different kind of worse - a widening gap between processor speed and memory bandwidth.
  
  Don't worry, everything is getting more expensive as well.
  
  
  
• Can parents trust OpenAI? (CTV News)
  
  No.

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, August 24 2026 10:58 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, August 24 2026 11:45 PM (HHHgi)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 25 2026 01:43 AM (aDa+d)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 25 2026 01:47 AM (aDa+d)

Posted by: wheels at Tuesday, August 25 2026 03:14 AM (fVvPE)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Never send a Link to do a Zelda's work: The LINK mission intended to boost the Swift Observatory into a higher orbit has itself spun out of control, leaving Swift to burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp, by which we mean disintegrate upon re-entry and any surviving fragments fall harmlessly into the ocean and Canberra.  (CNN)
  
  The loss is lessened slightly, perhaps, by the fact that Swift was launched with a planned operational lifetime of two years...  In 2004.

• Inherent's AI teammate is claimed to outperform Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating research.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Inherent, which just raised $50 million in funding, didn't build its own LLM.  It runs on Qwen 3.6-27B, which anyone can download and run on a Mac or a 32GB graphics card like an RTX 5090 or the much cheaper Radeon R9700.
  
  
  
• A decent laptop with 16GB of RAM is better than a good laptop with 8GB.  (The Verge)
  
  At least if you're running Windows 11 where, despite everything Microsoft says, you really need 32GB of RAM for anything serious.
  
  
  
• Microsoft also says your games are crashing because of you kids and your RGB lighting.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Despite the fact that it all worked perfectly before the latest Windows Update.
  
  
  
• AMD has published Linux drivers for RDNA 4m (mobile) graphics devices.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is slightly interesting because there are no RDNA 4m graphics devices.  Not yet, anyway.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, August 24 2026 05:28 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 24 2026 09:04 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• All the news is stupid.
  
  
  
• AI use boosts the quality of students' homework - and then craters their exam scores.  (Economist)  (archive site)
  
  Who knew?
  
  
  
• Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 is a smut machine.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The whole article is about users deliberately jail-breaking Claude Opus 4.6, an older version of that particular LLM, to use it to write porn.  And blames Anthropic for it.

• Micron is building a $10 billion AI memory research center in Boise, Idaho.  (Yahoo)
  
  Not a factory, just a lab.
  
  Good news if you're an AI memory researcher.  Or a builder.
  
  
  
• Florida is seeking a court order to classify ChatGPT as a public nuisance.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is getting silly.
  
  
  
• Canada plans counter-tariffs to fight tariffs being imposed by the US as trade talks implode.  (BBC)
  
  Cratering its economy while barely affecting the US.
  
  
  
• Slovakia bought hundreds of new traffic cameras - only to find that all of the are Russian spy equipment.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Lowest bidder, huh?

• "Whistleblower" Arturo Béjar leads testimony in landmark trial against Meta. (NPR)

  "At the end of the day, it was the company culture that Mark had created that made it so that it was practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues that we've been talking about," he said.

  Well, that sounds serious.  What wellbeing and safety issues are we talking about?
  
  Grooming? Sex trafficking? Drugs?

  But he said efforts to introduce or change features to effectively address those risks were difficult to implement.  Instead, Béjar testified, at almost every turn the company chose policies that boosted usership and revenue over safety.  Safety was "not a meaningful priority," he said.

  Yes, but what safety?  What are the actual concerns here?

  He called features like video autoplay, "like" counters and infinite scroll "inherently unsafe for teenagers."

  This is why Meta is facing a fine of $1.4 trillion.
  
  Likes.

• SpaceTimeDB isn't.  (Strn.Cat)
  
  Neither space nor time.
  
  
  
• Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful.  (Yaros)
  
  Based on the examples linked, I am inclined to agree.
  
  
  
• Castelion has reached a valuation of $13 billion based on contracts to mass produce hypersonic missiles.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Wake me when they're hyperluminal.
  
  
  
• Meta glasses aren't the problem.  (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  No matter how much The Verge wants to claim they are.
  
  Assholes are the problem.
  
  
  
• You can pick up Intel's new Core Ultra 5 250K Plus for just $140 from Micro Center right now.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Unless you live in Australia in which case it's a bit of a hike.
  
  It's a good price for the CPU...  Except that you need RAM and storage for it and it's a lame duck platform that will be dead by the end of the year.  There's nothing to upgrade from and nothing to upgrade to.
  
  
  

• Microsoft GitHub says the 8-hour outage of its systems was caused by a combination of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft VS Code.  (The Register)
  
  Have you tried turning it off and just leaving it like that?

• AI was supposed to win people over by now.  It hasn't.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm finding it much improved over even a year ago.  If it weren't for that small detail of collapsing the entire tech economy into concentric black holes I'd feel a lot more generously inclined.
  
  
  
• China landed a rocket.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yes, SpaceX has been doing that a couple of times a week for years, and the Space Shuttle kinda sorta did it back in the 80s, but still, good job, China.
  
  
  
• Anthropic and Suno have been hit by yet another billion-dollar copyright lawsuit, this time by music company Round Hill.  (Hollywood Reporter)
  
  Git 'em.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, August 21 2026 12:49 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, August 21 2026 01:01 AM (oJgNG)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• A federal judge has ruled that a state judge who used AI to handle the entire decision in a case so she could spend the day playing Cookie Run Kingdom or something equally important cannot be sued.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The state judge's actions may not be reasonable, or even legal, and the decision can be appealed, but the judge cannot sued.

• Move fast and crash planes: Google just bought the anonymised databases of the defunct Spirit Airlines for $10 million to train AI models.  (CNN)
  
  With OpenAI training on Reddit, Amazon training on Twitch streams, and now Google training on incompetent and defunct airlines, I don't think we have to worry too much about AI taking our jobs.
  
  And more about AI destroying the economy so there aren't any jobs to be taken.
  
  
  
• Building a Steam Machine in an ASRock Deskmeet X300.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Interesting thing: The Deskmeet X300 has four DDR4 SODIMM slots.  Which is great if you just happen to have a stockpile of DDR4 SODIMMs from old laptops and mini-PCs.
  
  Which I do.
  
  
  
• Best Buy apparently did not steal half this customer's memory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They took half the memory out, yes, but returned it along with the laptop.  And since it has a dedicated GPU, performance won't suffer too much.
  
  Actually, it just sounds like one stick of RAM went bad, and since the laptop was upgraded by a third-party, it wasn't Best Buy's responsibility, and the system is now working again.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, August 20 2026 03:47 AM (6eVrQ)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Meta faces a $1.4 trillion fine in a case brought by multiple US stats over (checks notes) creating a product that people wanted to use. (Engadget)
  
  May be time to pull some strings and drop space rocks on statehouses.
  
  
  
• Speaking of space rocks, power operator PJM has proposed a plan to kick its largest customers off the grid whenever it runs out of electricity. (Reuters)
  
  That will make them popular.

• OpenAI has announced it is building an 8GW AI datacenter in Ohio, with a $105 billion guarantee from Nvidia. (Axios)
  
  Uh, guys, you might want to look at a map first.
  
  
  
• Mini-PCs are cheap and convenient... Were cheap and are still convenient, with configurations to suit almost any need unless you want to play (insert resource-intensive recent computer game here). Just wipe the drive and reinstall Windows first. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Today's contestant in the malware race: Geekom.
  
  
  
• Can't afford an AI graphics card? Nobody else can either, so why not upgrade your 2080 Ti to 22GB? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  As the article notes you can push it all the way to 44GB, though that becomes expensive. More expensive.
  
  
  
• GitHub went. (The Register)
  
  I am responsible for the corporate GitLab server, which means that any such problems are my responsibility to fix, but also means that I can fix them.
  
  
  
• Cursor, the AI coding company just acquired by SpaceX, announced its own Git-compatible code hosting platform on the same day that GitHub fell over. (Cursor)
  
  Totally not space rocks.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, August 18 2026 08:25 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 18 2026 11:02 PM (0xQ95)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 19 2026 06:27 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 19 2026 06:57 AM (Wj1pt)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 19 2026 06:59 AM (Wj1pt)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the AI backlash is fundamentally a crisis of trust and also that water is wet. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well... Yes.
  
  
  
• Anthropic is planning to watermark text produced by their AI systems. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  At fault is the European Union, as usual.

• Bluesky has shrunk by 50% in 18 months as the crazies come crawling back to Twitter. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Damn.
  
  Meanwhile, the Phantom Zone of online speech known as Threads continues to lie about its numbers.
  
  
  
• Also now extinct: Audrey Hepburn and neutrinos.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 18 2026 03:44 AM (XL74C)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 18 2026 03:58 AM (XL74C)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 18 2026 07:22 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Every fusion power startup that has raised over $100 million.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Your weekly reminder that it is the 21st century, and not everything is poop-flavoured ice cream.
  
  In a truly 21st century maneuver, one of the companies on the list announced plans to merge with a group owned by the sitting US president last December in a $6 billion deal.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the sitting US president and deals Nvidia's latest financial reports show that the company has made a $25 billion on-paper profit from its $5 billion investment in Intel.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  President Trump rewrote former President Bidens original grant of $10 billion to Intel - which had strings attached that the company couldn't meet - into $10 billion in non-voting stock, netting the public a neat $50 billion paper profit.

• Meanwhile SpaceX has completed its acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm old enough to remember Compaq's acquisition of Digital being a big deal (I'm old enough to remember Compaq and Digital, for that matter).  That was valued at around $9 billion.
  
  
  
• How Larry Ellison slid from being the world's second richest man to eighth place in just two months.  (Forbes)
  
  All at once at first, and then slowly.
  
  Oracle's valuation skyrocketed through massive deals for AI datacenter operations, and then people started to run the numbers through their abaci and raise questions.
  
  
  
• Speak of Intel, "It's not just Intel", says Intel.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Specifically referring to a diverging industry with a booming commercial computing market and a consumer market that has had its throat slit and its entrails torn out and been left to die alone in the snow while the wolves gather in the distance.
  
  
  
• An interview with Intel VP Robert Hallock about the company's plans to go through the corpse's pockets for loose change.  (Tom's Hardware)  (archive site)
  
  Well, that's a little unkind.  It's not Intel that killed the consumer market, and they are offering us five year old technology in exchange for our magic beans.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, if you were hoping for an SSD replacement under warrant from SK Hynix, best hope instead that your SSD doesn't fail.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're out of stock.  They are still manufacturing them, of course, but you can't have one.  You'll get a refund...  At the old price.
  
  I suspect - hope, actually - that lawyers are going to get rich off this behaviour.
  
  
  
• CEOs of AI companies say their creations will lead to a shorter work week.  (BBC)
  
  Workers at AI companies are putting in 12 hour days and 7 day weeks.
  
  
  
• Why tech CEOs keep posting manifestos trying to sell the world on AI.  (BBC)
  
  Because they'd prefer not to be lynched, if it's all the same to you.
  
  
  
• When and how different AI models lie to you.  (Just Facts)
  
  Not surprisingly, Grok has the least distinct left-wing bias, but the difference isn't as large as you might hope.
  
  The writers tested for both left-wing and right-wing bias across a sample of a hundred multiple-choice questions, and also for citations of web pages that don't exist.  Hallucinated links were a major issue even when the AI models got the answer right.
  
  Oh, and don't trust ChatGPT or Gemini for anything that touches on present-day politics, but I'm sure you already knew that.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, August 17 2026 02:43 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: furball321 at Monday, August 17 2026 03:07 AM (nzXoV)

Hide Comments | Add Comment