• Valve's Steam machine is here, starting at $499 $599 $699 $1049.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Or almost almost here.  You can enter a lottery right now, which will offer winners the chance to buy the Cube from June 29.  Delivery will take place sometime after that.
  
  
  
• You can get more powerful PCs for similar amounts of money.  (Notebook Check)
  
  But the Cube is compact and almost silent.
  
  
  
• And overall, it doesn't suck.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Valve got steamrolled by the DRAM Apocalypse just like the rest of us, but it does deliver what they promised.  Mostly.  4k was always a stretch.

• Lenovo's Legion Tab Gen 5 is here - and you can actually buy one.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It launched in China a little while ago, but is now available internationally.  MSRP is a hefty $850 but it's discounted to a still pretty hefty $650 for now.
  
  Also, the older Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 3 is now on clearance, discounted as much as 50%.
  
  At that price it is - adjusted for inflation - actually cheaper than the iconic 2013 Nexus 7, while offering a higher resolution screen, larger battery, six times the memory, eight times the storage, ten times the CPU performance, and literally a hundred times the graphics performance.  To be fair, the Nexus 7 was kind of bad at 3d gaming.
  
  No wireless charging, but it has dual USB-C ports rather than one failure-prone micro-USB socket.
  
  
  
• Fuck you Microsoft GameInput.
  
  But at least I know that it wasn't a hardware problem.
  
  
  
• Canada is planning a nuclear renaissance with ten new reactors to be built by 2040 at a cost of $100 billion.  (CBC)
  
  They achieved this using one simple trick: They targeted an operational date of 2010 on a budget of $5 billion.
  
  
  
• DDR3 and DDR2 are the next victims of the Apocalypse.  (The Register)
  
  I have 96GB of DDR3.  Much less DDR2 - maybe 32GB across four old systems.
  
  
  
• The AI world is getting loopy.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Do tell.
  
  (Reads article.)
  
  No.  Don't tell.
  
  
  
• Anthropic says Claude may want to see your license, registration, and insurance.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not just no, but fuck no.

Special Bonus Apocalyptic Musical Interlude

• A tech-worked backed PAC is spending $5 million to fight a multi-trillion dollar industry.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or blatantly stealing the money while serving the goals of communists foreign and domestic.  One of those.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which did my old job only exist because of fraud?  (It's not about code)
  
  Always awkward to realise this is a possibility.  Something of a comfort to realise that the answer is...  Probably not.

• Sony's Xperia 1 VIII is a pretty good phone.  (The Verge)
  
  One would hope so for $1850.
  
  It does have a headphone jack and a microSD slot, but so does my Motorola phone which cost a tenth of that.
  
  
  
• Viewsonic has a 24" 4k monitor.  (Notebook Check)
  
  With a 160Hz refresh rate and coverage of 95% of DCI-P3, but the main selling point is its size.  24" 4k models are rarer than you might think.
  
  
  
• TikTok shows three times more AI slop than YouTube.  (Search Engine Journal)
  
  Yay.
  
  
  
• Polymarket ads are ads.  (MSN)
  
  In that nothing they present is real.
  
  This has got to break at least a dozen laws.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 23 2026 09:17 AM (LDKo5)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 23 2026 09:25 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 23 2026 10:16 AM (LDKo5)

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• AMD and Intel have unveiled their new ACE instruction set, which extends AVX vector instructions into matrix calculations.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A single ACE instruction can result in up to 1024 multiplications, which is convenient but not exactly adhering to the RISC philosophy.
  
  We'll probably be waiting a couple of years to see this.  AMD previously announced a new matrix engine for Zen 7 - which is not expected until 2028.
  
  
  

Tech News

• UK supermarket Tesco is suing Broadcom over their VMWare villainy.  (The Register)
  
  Tesco purchased perpetual licenses to VMWare and signed matching support contracts before the company was bought by Broadcom.  Broadcom is now - according to the suit - refusing to provide support services unless customer repurchase the licenses at new, vastly inflated prices.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare has announced temporary accounts for AI agents that can be deployed for an hour without human intervention.  (Cloudflare)
  
  There are nine and sixty ways I can think of off the top of my head that this could go horribly wrong.  I suspect that Cloudflare can think of even more, and have already put in place countermeasures for half of them.
  
  
  
• A $200 ChatGPT subscription used to the full could be costing OpenAI $14,000.  (TechSpot)
  
  And a $200 Claude subscription could cost Anthropic $8000.
  
  Be right back, upgrading some subscriptions...
  
  
  
• A suicide booth for fish?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Marketed as humane but actually designed to preserve the flavour.
  
  Hmm.
  
  
  
• The Atlantic did something useful?  (The Verge)
  
  They published a searchable database for music used in training AI song generators.
  
  Most of it copyrighted, much of it by extremely litigious labels.
  
  And here's me all out of popcorn.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Thinkpad X11 is an 11" tablet.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Not the fastest and certainly not the lightest, but it has something few tablets can match: A removable battery.

Posted by: normal at Monday, June 22 2026 02:36 AM (lzyeE)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 22 2026 03:32 AM (1zWbY)

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• Amazon has dropped - the bad kind of dropped - its planned Sam Altman biopic, Artificial.  (The Independent)
  
  The film, which depicted the credibly accused but I would never say so myself compulsive liar and total sociopath in an unflattering light may just possibly have conflicted with Amazon's $50 billion investment in OpenAI and OpenAI's $38 billion in contracts with Amazon.
  
  But I would never say so myself.
  
  
  
• I will take the consummate serpent grease entrepreneur's side any day of the week over communist senator Bernie Sanders' plan to simply steal the entire AI industry.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sanders' insane plan offers a dividend of $1000 to every adult American drawn from the profits of an industry that is losing massive amounts of money.

• South Korea's Hyundai has taken full ownership of creepy robot dog company Boston Dynamics.  (Startup Fortune)
  
  They bought out Japanese investment firm SoftBank's 10% holding for $325 quadrillion.*
  
  * Delete zeroes until it makes sense.
  
  
  
• AMD's TSME will return to Ryzen 9000 CPUs via a BIOS update.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is AMD's memory encryption system that prevents any potential leakage of data between mutually untrusted virtual machines on shared hardware.  Necessary on servers running cloud systems at Amazon and Google, but also useful for homelabs and developers who want to try it out on affordable hardware.
  
  
  
• There's an unpatchable security bug in the iPhone 11.  (9to5Mac)
  
  If you let someone plug it into a malicious USB cable, at which point they could also just smash it with a hammer.
  
  
  
• AMD is planning a 10-15% price hike on its Radeon graphics cards.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Could be a lot worse.  AMD cards are available for just a little over MSRP in America (and a little below MSRP in Australia).

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, June 21 2026 01:22 AM (s6adZ)

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• Apple CEO Tim Cook says prices are going to increase so that the company can maintain its 1000% markup on commodity components.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Apple is, right now, only achieving a 500% markup on memory.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Microsoft's latest version of Outlook takes just 10 seconds to take you from a notification to reading the corresponding email.  (Windows Latest)
  
  One small problem: It used to be instantaneous.
  
  
  
• Valve's new Steam Controller is a runaway success.  (The Verge)
  
  This being The Verge, that's not how they frame the story.
  
  
  
• Amazon employees are facing extermination for fighting against datacenter construction.  (The Verge)
  
  If I were a doctor and fighting to abolish medicine, I wouldn't expect to retain my board certification for long.
  
  
  
• Nope, too stupid.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: normal at Saturday, June 20 2026 01:28 AM (lzyeE)

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• Mandy Rice-Davies applies: Anthropic employees accuse Trump Administration of targeting them.  (New York Times)
  
  The article is unreadable.  Literally so if you don't maintain a paid NYT subscription for their puzzles page.  A free login traps you in Dark Pattern Hell, an endless series of inescapable popup ads offering free paid trials cancel any time by submitting your cancellation request carved into the side of a living member of an extinct species of goat through first-class double-registered triple-certified mail.  The usual archive sites don't work either.
  
  Even if you have a subscription or you know of another workaround not that I would ever endorse such a thing,  you will simply find that it is not worth reading:

  "What are you telling your clients?" one employee asked in a chat viewed by The New York Times.  Another said, "Does anyone know what to believe?"  In another message, a worker said, "I don’t understand what the issue is."

  Playing dumb or actually dumb?  What difference, at this point, does it make?
  
  
  
• Anthropic asked for regulation.  Washington went much further.  (CNBC)
  
  An actually informed and balanced take on the situation.
  
  Quick precis: Anthropic announced its new Mythos AI tool with supernaturally dangerous hacking powers restricted to approved researchers, and its defanged Fable AI which is exactly the same thing only not.  The Trump Administration ruled that if they're as dangerous as Anthropic claims, they need to be restricted for reasons of national security to American citizens on American soil.  Anthropic threw its toys out of the pram and blocked access globally, and is now seeking to lay all the blame at the feet of that mean old Mister Trump.
  
  What CNBC highlights and The New York Times buries is a blog post written by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a fucking week ago:

  Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety.

  Amodei is every bit as much of a weasel as Sam Altman.  And while Altman is a sociopath and a compulsive liar, Amodei is something much worse: He's whiny.

• World leaders want American AI.  They just don't want America.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Substitute almost anything in place of AI and the story is the same.
  
  
  
• The Orange Pi 6 is a nonplussed and hopefully cheaper version of the Orange Pi 6 Plus.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is a single-board computer along the lines of a Raspberry Pi, but more powerful than even the latest Raspberry Pi 5.  Just one drawback: That power means the cheapest model of the Orange Pi 6 Plus costs $367.
  
  
  
• Hewlett Packard is offering a year of free access to its new virtualisation platform, targeting customers drained of blood and left to die in a ditch following Broadcom's acquisition of VMWare.  (Ars Technica)
  
  After the free year is over, HP is suggesting prices around $600 per CPU socket.
  
  VMWare charges around $400 per CPU core.
  
  And a single CPU socket can run to 288 cores.
  
  
  
• OpenAI increased its revenue from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13 billion in 2025.  (Where's Your Ed At)
  
  Thanks to careful cost-control, losses over the same period dropped from $5 billion in 2024 to $38.5 billion in 2025.
  
  Oh.
  
  Actually, before fudging adjustments the company's net loss for 2025 reached $60 billion.
  
  
  
• US science is in chaos.  (Scientific American)  (archive site)
  
  Thanks to...  Scientists no longer having access to an infinite money glitch.

Posted by: pookysgirl at Thursday, June 18 2026 03:25 PM (Wt5PA)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, June 18 2026 11:58 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 19 2026 09:08 AM (SV7Jd)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, June 19 2026 10:16 AM (ZLF73)

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• SpaceX has agreed to acquire AI-assisted coding startup Cursor in a $60 billion all-stock deal.  (CNBC)
  
  Probably good for both SpaceX and Cursor.
  
  
  
• In other that used to be a lot news, subterranean fungal networks have been mapped out to a total length of 100 quadrillion kilometers.  (The Guardian)
  
  Or exactly 497,096,953,790,000,000 furlongs.

• Silicon Motion says the retail SSD market has almost disappeared.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Prices are less inflated than DRAM, but even so 1TB is the new 4TB.
  
  
  
• Sandisk's Optimus Prime GX Pro 8100 Platinum Plus 8TB is the new king of high-speed high-capacity consumer SSDs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  $2800 on Amazon.  Act soon, only 20 in stock!
  
  It uses a Silicon Motion controller.
  
  
  
• Silicon Motion is planning PCIe 6.0 controllers for non-existent consumer SSDs next year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Hooray.
  
  
  
• AMD's next-generation Threadripper chips have been confirmed.  (WCCFTech)
  
  But the only details we have are that they will be Zen 6 and support PCIe 6.0.
  
  
  
• Commodore's Callback 8020 is a flip phone with a small 320x480 display.  (Liliputing)
  
  It costs just $499.
  
  I don't think so.

• The Flynn Effect is a long-observed but unexplained finding in psychology that mean IQ even in developed nations has been rising by around 3 points per decade.
  
  That's stopped.  (Futurism)

  "What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch," Jagt writes.  "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires."

  Note that this hasn't put a pause on graduations; more degrees are being handed out than ever before.
  
  It's just putting a pause on learing.
  
  Yeah, I went there.

  More flagrantly detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems - or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech’s adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.

  It seems the author went there too.
  
  It seems the Flynn Effect faltered in the early 2000s.  Before I get too smug about that, it seems to have dropped off in Australia by the 1980s.

• Swiss voters rejected a proposal that would have capped the country's population at 10 million.  (The Guardian)
  
  Interestingly, the group most in favour of this supremely idiotic move are those aged 35-49; with both younger and older adults more strongly opposed.  Though no age group expressed more than tepid support.
  
  
  
• Google CEO Sundar Pichai delivered the commencement speech at Stanford.  (Nerds)
  
  He barely mentioned AI.
  
  He still got booed.
  
  
  
• Cybersecurity experts are protesting the US "ban" on Anthropics security-focused Mythos and Fable models.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  A "ban" strongly favoured by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei right up until the minute he got what he asked for.
  
  Access to Mythos was always restricted by Anthropic itself.  Access to Fable is still open to any US citizen on US soil with a Claude account.  (I had access for a couple of days.)
  
  
  Update: Thanks to reader Defenestratus for prompting me to actually read the whiny self-serving glurge that Anthropic put out discussing the situation. Both models are now unavailable globally.
  
  
  
• Fox is buying Roku for $22 billion.  (CNN)
  
  Fox still exists?  Oh, yeah, I guess it does.
  
  
  
• Samsung has slashed 42% off the price of its 2TB 990 Pro SSD, leaving it at only twice the price it was three months ago.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Truly, their generosity knows no bounds.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 6 desktop chips reportedly have no integrated GPU, but have an NPU in its place.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If true, this is retarded.
  
  NPUs are largely useless for desktop systems, and with no integrated graphics, users will be required to purchase dedicated graphics cards, which are far more capable for AI computation than any NPU.
  
  
  
• The MSI Claw 8 EX AI is a gaming handheld that uses Intel's Panther Lake laptop chip with its advanced Arc B390 graphics.   (Liliputing)
  
  This is a mainstream laptop chip so these handhelds should be much cheaper than those using AMD's high-end Strix Halo.
  
  Should be.  Aren't.  It starts at $1799.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, June 16 2026 11:02 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 16 2026 11:50 PM (wjiGM)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, June 17 2026 02:48 AM (KOtXO)

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• AMD says that not only will its new CPU stomp all over Nvidia's new CPU - three times the performance per watt on a rack-scale deployment, but its current two year old CPUs already deliver twice what Nvidia is promising.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Promises vs. promises is all whatever, but promises vs. currently shipping product when the currently shipping product wins is not great for Nvidia.
  
  What's more, Intel's current CPUs are nearly 50% faster than Nvidia's future CPUs in the same tests.

• More on that Dario and the Wolf story.  (Twitter)
  
  Anthropic's Fable model is their existing Mythos mythos model with additional controls to prevent abuse.
  
  Those controls were broken.
  
  Anthropic said they weren't broken broken and refused to do anything about it.
  
  The US government then showed them the far side of regulatory capture.
  
  
  
  
  
• The only scalable delete in PostgreSQL is DROP TABLE.  (PlanetScale)
  
  Bobby, your country needs you.
  
  
  
• The UK is planning to ban social media for children under 16.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  But not Bluesky.  Same thing happened in Australia.
  
  
  
• Bitcoin is down to just $64,000 after peaking over $110,000 in the past year.  (CNBC)
  
  The people who bought at 50 cents will be devastated.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 15 2026 11:00 PM (iSD2J)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 16 2026 08:54 AM (SV7Jd)

Posted by: Kristophr at Tuesday, June 16 2026 11:40 PM (a7pSx)

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• The US government has responded to Anthropic's constant warnings of imaginary dangers with a global ban - except for US citizens on US soil - on access to the company's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 security-focused AI models.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This whole story is dumb but at the same time it's amusing to watch Anthropic's continuing push towards regulatory capture leave them stuck like a rat in a trap.
  
  To mix my metaphors, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cried "risk" one too many times and ended up being devoured by it.
  
  
  
• Speaking of dumb 75 datacenter projects totaling $130 billion in value were blocked in just the first four months of 2026.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This leaves SpaceX, by the way, pulling in $2 billion a month renting out its datacenters to its capacity-limited competition.
  
  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman blames this trend on Chinese influence, and while Altman absolutely is a compulsive liar, that probably is a large factor.  Chinese datacenter rollouts are not facing the same headwinds.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, OpenAI is facing investigation from multiple states attorneyses generalseses.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oh no.

• How are the inmates at The Verge coping with our new African-American trillionaire?  Good lord.  (The Verge)
  
  Maintain eye contact and back away slowly.  Do not engage.  I repeat, do not engage.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's high-end desktop graphics card, the RTX Pro 6000 - has had a small price bump.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The card is basically an RTX 5090 with triple the memory.  It now costs $13,250.
  
  
  
• Intel meanwhile is planning to compete with AMD's relaunched Ryzen 5800X3D processor from 2022 - with a relaunch of its own Raptor Lake chips, also from 2022.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Raptor Lake was the codename for most of Intel's 13th and 14th generation chips; power-hungry but capable, and most importantly and just like the 5800X3D, still supporting DDR4 memory.  (Though Raptor Lake can also work with DDR5.)
  
  This market opportunity opened up with the AI companies consuming all the world's DRAM, so CPU makers are looking to sell upgrades to consumers wanting to keep their DRAM and upgrade their system around it.
  
  (I own 384GB worth of DDR4 modules, bought at a small fraction of today's prices.  You can bet I am interested.)
  
  
  
• A British police officer has been suspended from normal duties after being caught using AI tools to fabricate evidence.  (BBC)
  
  That's not the story.  This is the story:

  "The officer involved has been removed from frontline duties, pending the outcome of the investigation. No arrests have been made."
  
  

   

  It comes in the same week that a new national centre for AI in policing, called PoliceAI, was established.

  At the launch on Wednesday, PoliceAI interim director Alex Murray said: "Crime and technology are evolving rapidly.

  "Policing must keep pace by adopting AI responsibly to catch criminals and keep people safe."

  We're sorry we got caught.  We'll make sure that never happens again.
  
  
  
• Over 400 Arch Linux packages have been compromised to push a rootkit infostealer.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Seemsbad.
  
  
  
• Arch Linux now believes the incident is under control - after detecting 1579 compromised packages.  (Phoronix)
  
  It's not as bad as it seems: The packages are not in the core of the distribution, but in a secondary user-contributed repository that has long been viewed as "use at your own risk".
  
  
  
• London's Docklands Light Railway is still running on Windows XP.  (The Register)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• KPMG's report Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI is bullshit on more levels than the immediately obvious.  (The Register)
  
  The report on the use of AI was AI-generated.  Only 5 of 45 citations actually matched the material being cited.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, I've been using Grok recently to dig into the background of a science fiction story I am working on involving highly speculative physics.
  
  It is extremely helpful at sniffing out related real-world speculative papers on the topics I am interested in, since the papers themselves are most often locked behind paywalls.
  
  But it is also very clear when it reaches its limits.  LLMs cannot "clump" without careful management.  Grok has "projects" limiting conceptual bleed between answers, but it doesn't have nested subprojects; I can't easily keep it from inserting irrelevant details into a question, unless I create a new project with every question and then merge the answer into the whole afterwards.
  
  (If you try it for a while you'll notice this happen as soon as you venture beyond simple question-and-answer use.)
  
  
  
• Apple's powerful new M5 Max chip is so far only available in laptops.  There's just one small problem.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It produces enough heat to melt the screen.
  
  
  
• The OneXPlayer X2 Mini Pro is a supercomputer in a handheld console: A Ryzen AI Max 388 APU with up to 64GB of RAM and 8TB of storage.  (Notebook Check)
  
  And a price to match, unfortunately, with the cheapest model running to $2399.
  
  
  
• And finally, Shutterslop.  (Nerds.xyz)
  
  The stock photography company has embraced the inevitability of AI as its market implodes.
  

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