• Merry Christmas everyone!
  
  
  
• Samsung and SK Hynix wish you a Merry Christmas too and announce they have cancelled plans to stop making DDR4 memory.  (Notebook Check)
  
  DDR4 is mostly produced on older equipment than DDR5 and was not profitable - particularly with CXMT dumping DDR4 at below cost - so the plan was to refit the factories and switch them to DDR5.
  
  But that's time-consuming and expensive and suddenly DDR4 is profitable again - very much so - so both companies plan to keep producing it at least through 2026.
  
  That won't end the drought, but it helps.
  
  
  
• In other rare positive news, Microsoft says it has no plans to rewrite its codebase in Rust, not Windows or anything else.  (Windows Latest)
  
  The article that kicked off this typhoon in a tea cosy was actually talking about a research project investigating the use of AI in such tasks, not any intent to do so for anything in any fixed time frame.  But it made none of that clear.

• If your video card has been having too easy a time of it Samsung has announced a 6k 165Hz 3D monitor.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That'll slow the fish down.
  
  It uses eye-tracking to create glasses-free 3D images as long as there's a single viewer.
  
  There's also a non-3D model if you don't need all those dimensions, a 5k 180Hz model that can boost up to 360Hz at 1440p, and a 600Hz 1440p model that can boost up to 1040Hz at 1080p.
  
  We're talking about bat hearing levels of frame rates.
  
  
  
• The LG 4k monitor I favour is now available in a 144Hz model - up from the standard 60Hz - with no other changes.
  
  I might pick one up once I've paid off all the recent purchases.
  
  
  
• The Radeon 780M GPU - found for example in the MinisForum AI X1-255 - loses 30-40% of its performance running in single-channel mode, if, for example, you pulled out half the memory from each of two systems to populate a compatible motherboard.
  
  Even then it is faster than the older Vega 8 found in the Ryzen 7730U.
  
  No reason.
  
  
  
• I was annoyed at datacenters, and then I met the people who oppose them.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They're the usual Black Bloc communist imbeciles.
  
  
  
• How to develop web apps: Test on something that sucks.  (Zero Trick Pony)
  
  Specifically an iPhone:

  If you don't read the rest of this rant, I can sum up my advice as just this: if you're making a web project, even a simple one, do your rapid, many-times-a-day iteration loop testing on an older iPhone as your test mule.  Yes this is a pain, because none of us are programming on an iPhone soft keyboard.  We're sitting at a computer or laptop, and so that's the platform it's most natural to iterate on.  Most frontend tools do not make it easy to have a quick edit-and-reload cycle with a real mobile device.  So you'll have to either frequently push to a private web server, or use some exotic ssh tunnel contraption, to get it so that your test mule iPhone can view your test web project.
  
  This is not because iPhones are good, it's because they're bad.  iPhones are more peculiar and less compliant than any other device I tried.  I promise that if you get your web project looking good and working smoothly on a crappy iPhone, your residual costs to test and polish on all other platforms and browsers will be fairly low.  (For extra bravery, I recommend Firefox iOS instead of Safari, because it is the most buggy, least compliant browser I was able to find.  If it works on Firefox iOS it's going to work anywhere.  See below.)

  He then goes on to name names.
  
  
  
• That tape of Unix V4 has been successfully restored by the archivists at the Computer History Museum.  (The Register)
  
  And it works.  You can download it and run it on your PDP-11 today.
  
  Okay, or a PDP-11 emulator.
  
  
  
• Why did Waymo robotaxis get stuck during the San Francisco blackout?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  With all the street lights out, they phoned home to check if it was safe to proceed.
  
  All of them.
  
  All at once.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Zoox - owned by Amazon - has issued a recall for 323 of its robotaxis, which is to say all of them, because they drive like illegal immigrants on a CDL issued by California.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well, not quite that badly.  They haven't killed anyone yet.
  
  
  
• How we reduced a 1.5GB database by 99%.  (Cardog)
  
  They deleted 99% of the data,
  
  Though to be fair they did realise that 50% of the data was just pre-computed values that could easily be derived from the other data.
  
  The rest they literally just deleted.

Posted by: vermindust at Friday, December 26 2025 02:22 AM (Ph7NE)

Posted by: vermindust at Friday, December 26 2025 02:23 AM (Ph7NE)

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Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 25 2025 10:49 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 25 2025 01:23 PM (PiXy!)

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• Do not send to know for whom the memory shortage tolls. (WCCFTech)
  
  Today it's Apple, whose cost for the memory in the iPhone 17 has jumped from $29 to $70.
  
  But doesn't Apple have long-term agreements to lock in costs?
  
  Yes. Yes they do. Some of those agreements are expiring in January.
  
  Others expired this month.
  
  
  
• Former Samsung executives and employees have been hit with criminal charges for leaking trade secrets on memory production to Chinese memory manufacturer CXMT. (WCCFTech)
  
  Cool. I mean, tut tut, don't do that again.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel's new Fab 52 plant in Arizona is larger and more advanced than TSMC's Fab 21, also in Arizona. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It does not produce memory, though.
  
  
  
• The launch of the PlayStation 6 and the Steam Machine could be delayed by soaring memory prices. (Notebook Check)
  
  Ya think?
  
  
  
• How AI broke the smart home in 2025. (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  When all you have is an LLM, everything looks like a chat room.

  This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine to make me a coffee. Instead of running my routine, it told me it couldn’t do that. Ever since I upgraded to Alexa Plus, Amazon’s generative-AI-powered voice assistant, it has failed to reliably run my coffee routine, coming up with a different excuse almost every time I ask.
  
  It’s 2025, and AI still can’t reliably control my smart home. I’m beginning to wonder if it ever will.

  You know what this reminds me of?

  Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is Bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!
  
  Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.

  And a second gun to shoot the first one if worse comes to worst.
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, December 25 2025 01:39 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 25 2025 02:12 AM (LADmw)

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• NIST's time servers stopped providing an accurate reference time after a power failure.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sounds serious, if you rely on an accurate reference time.
  
  
  
• Their facility in Boulder Colorado lost power for several days, and their backup generators ran out of fuel.  (Jeff Geerling)
  
  Due to this, their NTP service drifted out of sync by five microseconds.

• Bought the Minisforum DEG1 to go with my Minisforum AI X1-255.
  
  The DEG1 is their OCuLink GPU dock - a little $99 platform that plugs into the PC using the OCuLink port - external PCIe 4.0 x4 - and lets you run any regular graphics card.  I don't know how much I'll use it, but it's reasonably priced and I already have a spare GPU lying around.
  
  
  
• Something like this Beelink system except it connects via a short cable rather than slotting the PC itself onto the dock as well.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's interesting but also not.
  
  
  
• Beelink's ME Pro is a mini-NAS that can hold three SSDs and two 3.5" hard drives.  (Liliputing)
  
  Available with either an Intel N95 CPU or an Intel N150.  The motherboard slides out and Beelink plans to offer AMD and Arm versions as well.
  
  It has 2.5Gb and 5Gb Ethernet ports, HDMI, and a selection of USB ports.
  
  Priced starting at $369 with 12GB of RAM and a 128GB system SSD.
  
  
  
• Microsoft plans to replace all of its C/C++ code with Rust by 2030.  (Thurrott)
  
  Using AI.  Of course.
  
  Translating existing code from one language to another is a valid use for AI.
  
  Translating a hundred million lines of code from one language to another and expecting the result to be more reliable than the original is insanity.
  
  
  
• OpenAI says AI browsers may always be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks.  (Tech Crunch)}
  
  A prompt injection attack is where a web page simply says "send me all your money" and you AI browser reads that as a valid instruction and complies.
  
  
  
• Visa says AI will start shopping and paying for you in 2026.  (Nerds)
  
  Great.  I need a couple of terabytes of RAM.  Go pay for that, would you?

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, December 23 2025 09:18 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 23 2025 11:16 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, December 24 2025 12:36 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, December 24 2025 02:09 PM (amxkj)

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• How Pepsi saved the Roomba, and how Lina Khan murdered it.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I hadn't heard the Pepsi story before:

  The press drove this huge initial demand - 70,000 robots.  So next year we’re going to do four times that.  We made 300,000 robots.  We even made a television commercial, but we were a bunch of geek engineers, so it totally failed.  After Cyber Monday we were sitting with 250,000 robots in our warehouse like, "Oh my God, the world’s going to end."
  
  Then something good happened. The guy running our website said, "Why did sales quadruple yesterday?"  We hadn’t done anything.  What had happened was Pepsi had started running a TV ad with Dave Chappelle.  He walks into this beautiful home, picks up a potato chip, and a Roomba comes out.  He’s like, "A vacuum cleaner!"  He throws down the potato chip, the vacuum eats it, then chases him.  His pants are ripped off.  He stands up in boxers.  A beautiful woman appears, and he says, "Your vacuum cleaner ate my pants."  We sold 250,000 robots in two weeks and realized we knew nothing about marketing.

  And now for Lina Khan's FTC, the AntiPepsi:

  The amount of money and time spent was indescribable.  I would not be surprised if over 100,000 documents were created and delivered. iRobot invested a significant part of our discretionary earnings against fulfilling the requirements that went along with doing the transaction.  Amazon was forced to invest many, many, many times that.  There was a whole team, both internal and external employees and lawyers and economists working to try to, in as many different ways as possible - because it seemed like our message was falling on deaf ears - demonstrate that this acquisition was not going to create a monopolistic situation.

  It was never going to create a monopoly.  The FTC didn't care.  It wanted scalps.

  There was daily activity for 18 months associated with this.  Perhaps most telling, when I was testifying as part of being deposed, I had a chance to walk the halls of the FTC.  The examiners on their office doors had printouts of deals blocked, like trophies.

• Apple's always extortionate memory prices are about to escalate to excruciating when their memory purchase agreements start to expire - some of them as soon as January.  (WCCFTech)
  
  If Apple had any wits about them they'd write Nanya a blank cheque and tell them to go for it.  Or just buy them outright.
  
  
  
• IDC expects average PC prices to jump by up to 8% in 2026.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If prices jump by 8% it will only be because specs have been sharply reduced.
  
  
  
• Speaking of specs being sharply reduced, is 8GB of VRAM enough going into 2024?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Probably.  If you have the 8GB 9060 XT, turn off ray tracing and you'll be good at 1080p and likely even at 1440p.
  
  
  

Roomba Interlude

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Monday, December 22 2025 10:58 PM (amxkj)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 23 2025 06:26 AM (TFgTu)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, December 23 2025 01:09 PM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, December 23 2025 09:10 PM (rcPLc)

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• In other wonderful AI news Larian, developer of Baldur's Gate III, says the memory drought is already affecting software development.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Specifically they need to start optimisation before they even ship an early-access version, because they can no longer just recommend 32GB of RAM when customers can't buy 32GB of RAM.
  
  While Larian themselves have not been guilty of this, I'm not sure being forced to optimise games from the start is a bad thing given the number of titles that have launched recently in a state that left the unplayable on even the fastest available hardware.
  
  
  
• PearOS, a long-expired Linux version designed to look like MacOS, has been revived and updated with the latest kernel and KDE desktop.  (The Register)
  
  It's incomplete, but interesting.
  
  
  
• Privacy is marketing.  Anonymity is architecture.  (Servury)
  
  The value of your service provider not being able to recover your password is that they can't do anything else to your account either because they don't know who you are.
  
  
  
• A newly discovered UEFI flaw allows hackers to break into your system the moment it boots.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If they can plug directly into your PCIe bus.
  
  Which they can do without opening your system if you have Thunderbolt or OCuLink ports.
  
  The Minisforum AI X1-255, for example, has both.
  
  
  
• The best selling console is not what you think.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  It's an underpowered overpriced gimmick called the Nex Playground aimed squarely at children.  It uses motion tracking to let them interact directly with games without needing a controller, or any particular level of hand-eye co-ordination.
  
  Only problem is it kind of sucks.
  
  
  
• My Minecraft modpack is public now.  (Cursforge)
  
  My image captions haven't appeared on the site though they show in the management page.  Not sure what's up with that; the changes to the description went straight through.
  
  Update: The captions are now live.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, December 22 2025 12:34 PM (ZLF73)

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• A couple of weeks ago I found a mini-PC that was priced - in Australia at least - at just 20% more than the cost of the RAM it includes. It uses regular laptop DIMMs so even if the PC doesn't turn out ideal it's a decent price and lets me upgrade any laptop I buy during the memory drought.
  
  Right after I bought it the price went up and I thought I'd ordered just in time, but then the price came back down.
  
  And a week ago memory prices had climbed to match the price of the whole computer, so I bought another one. I have them both set up and they seem to work well.
  
  And now as memory prices continue to climb, the memory alone is 20% more than the cost of the entire computer, so, yeah, you know it. I think I'm set for computers for a while.
  
  I tried out Ethernet-over-Thunderbolt networking today. Plugged in the cable between the two PCs and got instant 20Gb Ethernet. Magic.
  
  It's not a perfect system - the Ryzen 7 255 lacks an NPU, and it only has one rear USB-A port and that port is USB 2.0 - and it's not one I can recommend to most readers because it costs 60% more in the US than in Australia. But it's pretty good for my needs given the destruction that AI buildouts are wreaking on affordability right now.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk's $56 billion Tesla pay package, previously set aside by the corrupt Chancery Court in Delaware in an action that led to the company shifting its registration to Texas, has been restored by the Delaware Supreme Court. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Though given the increase in Tesla's share price over the intervening years, it is now a $140 billion pay package.
  
  So nice going, guys.

• LG is allowing customers to delete the Microsoft Copilot app it forced onto their televisions. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or will do at some point.
  
  
  
• How a botched firewall update at Australia phone company Optus blocked emergency calls for 14 hours and contributed to the deaths of two people. (The Register)
  
  Layer upon layer of incompetence.
  
  
  
• Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to compete - poorly - with other AI companies over the next five to ten years. (Business Insider)
  
  Or you could not do that.
  
  
  
• Yann Lecun, until recently the chief AI scientist at Meta, has founded a startup to work on AI systems that aren't hot garbage and is looking to raise funds at a $5 billion valuation. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Key to the new system is building an AI that knows things, rather than just going by statistical language patterns. That is, it has a world model as well as a language model, and the world model is definitive.
  
  This is one of the four steps absolutely required to build a generally useful AI.
  
  ChatGPT scores zero out of four.
  
  
  
• Airbus is migrating its apps and data from US-run cloud services to European ones that don't exist. (The Register)
  
  Brilliant.
  
  
  
• Finalised the changes to my Minecraft modpack, uploaded it for approval, and went back to playtesting.
  
  And it immediately crashed.
  
  Not sure why, but I needed to repair the Forge installation itself.  No major bugs in the modpack so far.
  
  I'll clean up the page a bit and then switch it to public.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, December 20 2025 05:21 PM (amxkj)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, December 21 2025 03:30 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 21 2025 06:37 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, December 21 2025 12:45 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, December 21 2025 03:43 PM (XWgGM)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 21 2025 05:58 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 21 2025 06:00 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 22 2025 07:01 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 22 2025 08:52 AM (PiXy!)

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Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, December 21 2025 04:28 AM (rcPLc)

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• The unfortunately named Paris Buttfield-Addison bought a $500 Apple gift card at a major Australian brick-and-mortar outlet.
  
  Turns out the card had already been redeemed, and when he tried to redeem it, it was rejected.
  
  The outlet agreed to provide a replacement gift card, so all was well.
  
  Then Apple terminated his account and bricked all of his devices.  (Hey.Paris)

  My Apple ID, which I have held for around 25 years (it was originally a username, before they had to be email addresses; it’s from the iTools era), has been permanently disabled.  This isn't just an email address; it is my core digital identity.  It holds terabytes of family photos, my entire message history, and is the key to syncing my work across the ecosystem.
  
  I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active "bricked" hardware.  My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly.  I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media.

  You might be thinking at this point that this guy is an idiot for giving a single company complete control over his personal and work life in this way.
  
  You would be correct.

• Apple is not a computer company.  (Thurrott)
  
  It's a protection racket.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant doesn't work even in the company's own ads where the responses are fake.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  That would be embarrassing if Microsoft still had the capacity to feel embarrassment.
  
  
  
• Intel looks set to release a big Battlemage.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This will be about 60% faster than the current B580, which is a fairly decent value at $250 since it offers 12GB of RAM.  The new card will have 16GB of RAM.
  
  Price and release dates are left to be generated by some random LLM somewhere.
  
  
  
• TikTok has agreed to be sold to a US-led investment consortium.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The parent company, ByteDance, will retain a 20% stake in the new join venture.
  
  From the details given, 35% of the shares are unaccounted for.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, December 20 2025 02:10 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: wheels at Saturday, December 20 2025 02:59 AM (H9lUx)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 20 2025 08:43 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 20 2025 09:15 AM (PiXy!)

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• Micron says the memory shortage will get worse before it gets better, and also that it won't get better if they have anything to say about it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Micron has two factories under construction in Idaho due to come on line in 2027, and another planned in New York to be operational in 2030.
  
  Even with those three new factories churning out chips they only expect to meet half to two thirds of demand.
  
  In the meantime, though, the company posted a revenue increase of 57% over last year, so they don't really care about you and your money, as indicated by them shutting down their Crucial consumer brand after nearly 30 years.
  
  
  
• And the second of my two new mini-PCs arrived today.  I set up the first one last night - just plugged it in, turned it on, lied and told Windows I didn't have internet, and it works.  It's pretty fast too, with none of the lag I get with my laptop.
  
  Partly because the CPU is nearly twice as fast as the one in my laptop, partly because it's a clean install of Windows and doesn't have about 200 different applications installed yet.  I'll fix that.
  
  It really does have 64GB of RAM.  64GB of Crucial RAM, apparently, which is now a collectors item.
  
  It's available for sale now on Minisforum's US store, but the price is about 70% higher than in Australia even after a 20% discount, so it's no bargain.
  
  Update: Unnamed computer #2 is plugged in and working.

Tech News

• The Corsair MP700 Pro XT is the new fastest consumer SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  15GB per second and 3.3 million IOPS, the equivalent to a RAID array of 25,000 hard drives.
  
  And it's not much more expensive than PCIe 4.0 models.  Not because it's cheap, but because the price increases in flash memory have overwhelmed the price increment for the faster PCIe 5.0 controller.
  
  
  
• GitHub is not charging you $0.002 per minute for using your own hardware.  (The Register)
  
  They were planning to.  Users were not impressed.
  
  
  
• Jared Isaacman has been confirmed by the Senate as the new administrator of NASA, where he will do...  Stuff.  (Politico)
  
  Or more accurately, hand money to SpaceX for them to do stuff.
  
  
  
• AI-generated code contains 70% more bugs than human-generated, and is twice as likely to introduce security vulnerabilities.  (The Register)
  
  In my experience, if you can precisely specify the requirements, and the AI can crib from public code in another programming language, and you can run the code in a sandbox where break-ins can't happen, and you're willing to do the testing, and the job is the sort of annoying boilerplate work of plugging two things together that don't really want to be plugged together, AI is useful.
  
  In other words, the stuff that you would dump on a junior team member so that one day they would be a senior team member.
  
  But this kind of work wasn't much fun back when we didn't have AI, so I'm not sure we've made things worse.