• Meta has signed long-term contracts with three suppliers for a total of 6GW of nuclear power for its datacenters.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Two of the partners are startups developing small modular reactors; the third, Vistra, is a major operator of traditional large non-modular reactors.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile researchers in China have managed to break the Greenwald limit on the number of alt accounts a single journalist can have agreeing with his posts before he screws up.  (The Independent)
  
  Wait, I'm told in this context it's an empirical limit on sustained plasma densities in Tokamak-style fusion reactors.
  
  With this breakthrough, fusion power is now only nineteen years and twelve months away.

• It's a water heater!  It's a Bitcoin miner!  It's both!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Given that the main cost of mining Bitcoin is the energy it takes - and disposing of the waste heat somehow - why not use it for, say, heating water?
  
  The Superheat H1 does exactly that.
  
  And if the price of Bitcoin collapses, it still heats your water.
  
  
  
• Can light move faster than the speed of light?  (Science Daily)
  
  Some theories of loop quantum gravity predict small fluctuations of the speed of light in a vacuum.  New experiments put an upper bound on how big those fluctuations could be, ruling out some of these theories.
  
  I call them theories rather than mere speculation because they actually made sufficiently robust predictions to be ruled out in the first place.  A theory can be wrong, but it's not a theory if you can't test it.
  
  
  
• Can AI do your job?  (MSN)
  
  If you're a computer programmer, or you otherwise work solely with words, possibly yes.
  
  If you do literally anything else, the best AI models currently succeed at 2.5% of human tasks.
  
  
  
• AMD will be launching socketed versions of the Ryzen 400 processor series later this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Too late, really.  Zen 6 will be out this year, and if you want integrated graphics it looks like Intel's Panther Lake is faster - though only if you are willing to go with a system with soldered memory.  If you need conventional DIMM or SODIMM memory, you get models cut down from 12 GPU cores to just 4, which isn't beating anything.
  
  So maybe not too late, but underwhelming.
  
  
  
• And if you want dedicated graphics, you might need to buy soon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nvidia GPUs are hardest hit so far, with reports of stock on all models running low in Germany and Japan.  Since that was the first direct warning we had of the memory crunch (though in retrospect the signs were there months earlier) I bought myself a 9060 XT while they were in stock and on sale.  Which as of time of writing, they still are.
  
  
  
• Asus and Gigabyte are putting 64MB of ROM on their new AM5 motherboards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Earlier AM4 motherboards often had as little as 16MB of ROM for the BIOS, which became a problem as AMD kept releasing new chips for the platform - Socket AM4 first appeared in 2016, even before Zen 1, and the most recent new processor for that socket, the 5500X3D, was launched in June last year.  There were simply too many different models of compatible processors to fit all the necessary code into 16MB.
  
  With AM5 confirmed to support the upcoming Zen 6 chips later this year, and strongly hinted to support Zen 7 due in 2028, it will end up being an even longer-lived platform with more CPUs, so motherboard makers are fixing the problem before it arises.
  
  
  
• Amazon is using AI to sell your products on their store without you having to lift a finger.  (Modern Retail)
  
  Also, without Amazon ever asking permission to do so.
  
  Also also, without Amazon bothering to sync the data properly from your online store so that they don't, for example, still list long-discontinued products for sale.
  
  Store owners are not happy.
  
  
  
• NBC News is intensifying a collapse of trust online.  (NBC News)
  
  No, they didn't have a brief moment of self-awareness.  They're blaming three years of AI for thirty years of their own failings.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• Twitter has filed an antitrust complaint against, basically, the entire music industry alleging collusion and systematic abuse of DMCA takedowns in order to force platforms into licensing agreements.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  I say alleging, but according to the filing, the president of the National Music Publishers' Association put the entire plan in writing as an email threat sent to Twitter even before the campaign started.
  
  
  

Tech News

• SSDs have only increased in price by 100% compared to the 300-500% for DRAM so we're safe oh Sandisk plans to double the price of 3D NAND flash for enterprise SSDs in Q1 2026 which is now.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They say enterprise but expect things to get worse in the consumer market as well.
  
  
  
• HP meanwhile is turning to CXMT in China to help provide the DRAM it needs for consumer products given that the Big Three have sold out to the AI companies.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Meanwhile the share price for Taiwanese memory manufacturer Nanya has increased tenfold over the past year.
  
  
  
• And the Big Three - Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix - are all enjoying record profits.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Memory has turned abruptly from a money pit for Samsung to the shining star of the entire - what's the term - chaebol.
  
  (Samsung and SK are the two largest chaebols - corporate conglomerates - in South Korea.)
  
  
  
• AI read Harry Potter.  (The Register)
  
  And you can prod it into spitting out sentence fragments from Harry Potter by feeding it sentence fragments from Harry Potter, because it is just a very sophisticated autocorrect algorithm.
  
  The headline is more sensationalist, but this is what the story boils down to.
  
  
  
• You know what else are sophisticated autocorrect algorithms?  A lot of people.  (Twitter)
  
  But less correct, and less sophisticated.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has the green light from the FCC to launch another 7500 Starlink satellites.  (Ars Technica)

  The FCC said today's order allows SpaceX to "upgrade the Gen2 Starlink satellites with advanced form factors and cutting-edge technology," and "operate across Ku-, Ka-, V-, E-, and W-band frequencies, supporting both Fixed Satellite Service (FSS) and Mobile Satellite Service (MSS)." The FCC said it is waiving "obsolete requirements that prevented overlapping beam coverage and enhanced capacity," and is letting SpaceX "add new orbital shells at altitudes ranging from 340 km to 485 km, optimizing coverage and performance."

  Amazing what can be accomplished when the government isn't at war with its most productive citizens.
  
  
  
• Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin are leaving California ahead of the imposition of the confiscatory billionaire tax.  (Fox Business)  (archive site)
  
  Page has already bought a $173 million property in Miami.
  
  The tax strikes very close to home for Page and Brin, because they have special voting privileges that under an explicit provision of the legislation means they will be taxed not at 1% of their on-paper wealth per year, but at 5%.
  
  Amazing what can be accomplished by not interrupting your enemy in the middle of a mistake.
  
  
  
• NASA is returning four of the current seven ISS astronauts to Earth ahead of their February rotation after an unspecified medical issue.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They four can return at any time aboard the Crew Dragon capsule, and NASA is in talks with SpaceX to move forward the planned February 15 mission to send a fresh crew to the space station.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 11 2026 02:20 AM (rcPLc)

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• Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI for dropping the "Open" part will go to trial in March over the strident objections of major investor Microsoft and OpenAI itself.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI was originally structured as a public benefit corporation - and indeed a public benefit corporation with that name still holds a 26% stake in the company - but it abandoned any pretense of doing anything to benefit the public with the rise of Sam Altman.
  
  Elon Musk was a major early investor and filed suit claiming that public statements by the leadership of the company were directly contrary to its actions, and the judge has ruled that there is sufficient merit to the claim for the matter to go to trial.

• MSI has announced a Ryzen 395+ AI PC.  (Notebook Check)
  
  No detailed specs but it will be just like all the others except not as ugly as the Acemagic one.
  
  
  
• Acer ditto.  (Liliputing)
  
  This one actually looks rather stylish, in a retro electric razor kind of way.
  
  
  
• Asus has announced a 13" Ryzen 395+ laptop.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  It lacks the four essential keys, because of course it does.
  
  
  
• You can buy an apartment in Shanghai for the price of a box of DRAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, they are talking about a box of 256GB server modules.  Property prices haven't gone down either.
  
  
  
• We might have been slower to abandon Stack Overflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole.  (PC Load Letter)
  
  True.
  
  
  
• AI slop is not welcome in the Linux kernel.  (The Register)
  
  Good.
  
  
  
• Intel's Wildcat Lake is coming for low-power and embedded applications.  (Liliputing)
  
  This is similar to chips like the N150 which has four efficiency cores.  Wildcat Lake has six cores - but those are two efficiency cores and four even slower low power cores.
  
  How it will perform is anyone's right now.
  
  
  
• Nvidia will be release the RTX 5000 Super models sometime between not and never.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The first outright casualties of the DRAM Apocalypse.  They were planned to use 3GB GDDR7 chips to provide 50% more memory than existing models, but those 3GB chips were the first components to run out.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has announced a round mini-PC based on Intel's new Panther Lake CPU.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has the new B390 integrated graphics, which are up to 50% faster than the previous generation, and probably the fastest integrated graphics short of the Ryzen 395, which is not really a commodity item despite the fact that everyone seems to be selling it.
  
  Also, it's round.

Posted by: Frank at Friday, January 09 2026 07:43 PM (amxkj)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 10 2026 01:02 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 10 2026 01:06 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, January 10 2026 01:15 AM (rm3dr)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 10 2026 01:16 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, January 10 2026 01:18 AM (rm3dr)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 10 2026 01:24 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 10 2026 06:01 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 10 2026 06:03 PM (PiXy!)

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• Bose SoundTouch smart speakers, which  cost up to $1500 each, will reach the end of support next month and be dropped from the Bose app, becoming very expensive dumb speakers.  In a surprising turn of events, Bose has just announced that they won't be all that dumb either.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Cloud support well end as scheduled, but they will instead work with your own local wifi without need for a cloud app.  And Bose has released technical documentation for the SoundTouch APIs, allowing hackers to create open source solutions.

• Production of MLC flash will decline by 40% this quarter, with Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron all moving away from the market.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  You don't need to worry about this, though.  All current consumer SSDs are built with TLC or QLC flash; the last MLC model was Samsung's 970 Pro introduced in 2018.
  
  
  
• Stop optimising for the wrong things.  (Ties Petersen)
  
  The main example is sweeping a supermarket floor, but the target of the essay is social media and recommendation algorithms - and AI generally.
  
  
  
• Minisforums AI X1 Pro is getting updated with the newly announced Ryzen 470 CPU.  (Liliputing)
  
  Making it nearly 2% faster than the previous model.
  
  
  
• The GMK Evo T2 is a mini PC with the also newly announced Intel Core Ultra X9 388H and up to 128GB of RAM.  (Liliputing)
  
  The memory is soldered in, whatever configuration you choose, because that is the only option with the 388H.  It used LPDDR5X-9600 RAM, so the bandwidth is 50% higher than you can get from conventional SODIMMs - and the graphics performance is 50% higher than previous Intel models.
  
  Expect this one to be expensive though.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has announced DLSS 4.5 with 6x MFG.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Meaning that it sticks five fake frames between each two rendered frames, rather than just three.  Making graphics buttery smooth, and game responsiveness a tar pit full of dead dinosaurs.
  
  Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow.
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 09 2026 06:52 AM (US/xE)

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• AMD's VP of its client division has hinted that AM4 might see a return.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Socket AM4 runs on DDR4 memory, where AM5 is DDR5 only.  And DDR4 memory hasn't increased in price as much as DDR5, but more importantly, people already have it.
  
  Several AM4 chips are still in production, but some of AMD's most popular CPUs like the 5700X3D and 5800X3D were cancelled because the competed too well with newer models, while others like the 5600X3D and 5700G were never widely available in retail channels.
  
  Don't expect anything actually new, but a return of the 5800X3D would be welcome.
  
  
  
• AMD also hinted at open-sourcing FSR4 upscaling.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They accidentally made the code public for a short ehile, which quickly led to experimental backports that supported RDNA3 and even RDNA2 graphics cards.

• How about an overpriced keyboard for that new computer you can't build?  The Asus ROG Falchion Ace 75 is a 75% mechanical keyboard for $219.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's...  Okay, I guess.  It has the Four Essential Keys but that's no great achievement in a desktop keyboard.  It has a "programmable touchbar" but that just means you can change what it does; you can't change the display.
  
  
  
• Corsair's Galleon 100 SD has a 1280x720 display.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Strange thing: It's another keyboard.
  
  It's ten-keyless, which is to say, it has no numeric keypad.
  
  But in its place it as twelve fully programmable keys - with LCD keycaps, the aforementioned 1280x720 display (I'm not sure it's really 1280x720 because the article also says it's a 5" screen and it's definitely not that big) and two small rotary dials.  A mini Stream Deck built right into your keyboard.
  
  At $350 it is very not cheap though.  You can get 16GB of RAM for that.  Or a Corsair TKL keyboard like the K70 and a Stream Deck.
  
  
  
• AMD has announced its P100 series of embedded Ryzen chips.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These are identical to existing Zen 5 desktop and laptop chips - including embedded version of the Strix Halo AI processer - but the family includes models rated for industrial and automotive conditions (-40C to 105C) and for operating 24/7 for ten years. 
  
  
  
• WiFi 8 is at CES.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  It's no faster than WiFi 7 but is instead designed to be more reliable and use less power.
  
  
  
• Powerbanks got bedazzled.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  A righteous rant from The Verge about useless features ruining the functionality of what should be simple, inexpensive devices.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 08 2026 02:59 AM (Mj2Hk)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Thursday, January 08 2026 04:43 AM (8VyNJ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 08 2026 09:02 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, January 08 2026 12:40 PM (nBo/7)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 08 2026 12:42 PM (1zWbY)

6 Note to Pixy: your Python commenting code can't handle Unicode characters: they're going through an 'ascii' codec at some point. I originally wrote my comment with em-dash characters rather than double hyphens (--), but I got the following Python traceback:
Traceback (most recent call last): File "/opt/pypy2/site-packages/cherrypy/_cprequest.py", line 630, in respond self._do_respond(path_info) File "/opt/pypy2/site-packages/cherrypy/_cprequest.py", line 689, in _do_respond response.body = self.handler() File "/opt/pypy2/site-packages/cherrypy/lib/encoding.py", line 221, in __call__ self.body = self.oldhandler(*args, **kwargs) File "/opt/pypy2/site-packages/cherrypy/_cpdispatch.py", line 54, in __call__ return self.callable(*self.args, **self.kwargs) File "Test.py", line 212, in default return go(cherrypy) File "Test.py", line 133, in go return Page.go(cp) File "/home/minx/test/Page.py", line 453, in go Form.go(page) File "/home/minx/test/Form.py", line 3162, in go handler(page) File "/home/minx/test/Form.py", line 648, in form_comment print('Akismet check %s in %0.3fs on %s %s %s "%s"' % ('error' if aki_err else 'accept' if aki_ok else 'reject', time.time()-taki, tags.get('form.name',''), tags.get('form.web',''), tags.get('form.mail',''), text)) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2014' in position 1171: ordinal not in range(12
Thankfully hitting the Back button in Firefox restored the contents of my comment box, so I could replace the em-dashes with double-hyphens and I didn't lose what I had typed. But I thought you'd like to know that there's a Unicode-handling bug in the comments code here.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, January 08 2026 12:43 PM (nBo/7)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, January 08 2026 12:47 PM (nBo/7)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, January 08 2026 12:53 PM (nBo/7)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 08 2026 05:17 PM (PiXy!)

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• AMD's Ryzen 9850X3D CPU is here, the new fastest gaming CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's identical the the previous fastest gaming CPU, the Ryzen 9800X3D, but bumps the clock speed up from 5.2GHz to 5.6GHz.
  
  And that's the most exciting announcement today.
  
  
  
• AMD also announced the Ryzen 400 laptop CPU series, which is 2% faster than the 300 series.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And in certain areas, slower than the equivalent 200 series.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel announced its Panther Lake "Series 3" - or is that Series 3 "Panther Lake" - laptop CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The earlier leaks were correct in every detail.
  
  Only four performance cores on even the fastest models, but up to eight efficiency cores and eight low power cores.  Plus up to twelve graphics cores - but only if you sacrifice expandable memory.
  
  
  
• OWC announced a Thunderbolt 5 desktop storage array that can hold 192TB of SSD and deliver data at 6.6GB per second.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is actually not that fast; a singe PCIe 5.0 SSD can do double that.
  
  As for the 192TB model, keep dreaming: No price and the 96TB model is already $15,500.
  
  
  
• Stack Overflow's demise in a single picture.  (Stack Exchange)
  
  The founders sold the company a few years ago for $1.9 billion.  Now it is dead.
  
  
  
• HP's Eliteboard G1a features an eight core Ryzen 350 CPU, up to 64GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  There's just one strange thing: It's a keyboard.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Robin Munn at Wednesday, January 07 2026 01:24 PM (Sa9rF)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 07 2026 05:12 PM (PiXy!)

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• CES 2026 starts tomorrow, so - given the frivolities of time zones - I will likely be inundated with stories then.  Today is the calm before the storm of products you can't afford, can't buy, or can't avoid.
  
  What to expect: AI slop, health-related AI slop, enterprise AI slop, energy AI slop, vehicle AI slop, and robots.  (CES)
  
  Tell Skynet it's late.

• Blu-Ray discs are twenty years old today.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They were announced at CES in 2006.
  
  
  
• Can a social app fix the "terrible devastation" of social media?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What?  No.  Are you stupid or something?
  
  
  
• An anti-aging injection has show promise regrowing knee cartilage and preventing arthritis.  (SciTech Daily)
  
  In mice.  Little cheese fiends are gonna outlive all of us.
  
  
  
• Six bugs collide: How six individually harmless bugs led to a remote code execution vulnerability on a security device.  (Mehmet Ince)
  
  Might as well be titled The autistic shall inherit the Earth.  No disrespect.  Even I'm impressed.
  
  
  
• How Microsoft is betting on driving away all its customers.  (GeekWire)
  
  They are utterly convinced this is a winning move.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• The US Invaded Venezuela and Captured Nicolás Maduro
  
  ChatGPT and the Perplexity search engine are here to help you understand why this is not only a bad thing, but absolutely did not happen.  (Wired)  (archive site)

  "What’s likely going on is a mix-up with real events that are often described in dramatic or misleading ways online. Here's what actually has happened:
  
  What the U.S. did not do
  ❌ No U.S. military invasion of Venezuela
  ❌ No arrest or capture of Nicolás Maduro
  ❌ No overthrow of the Venezuelan government by U.S. forces
  Maduro is still in power in Venezuela."

  
  
  I have used Grok as an augmented search tool on occasion and it's often pretty good.  When you don't know the exact name of what you are looking for it will match things up better than Google.
  
  Sometimes it misses things or simply gets it wrong, but I haven't seen it get things this wrong.  (Grok told me in answer to a poorly-worded question, "No, the US did not capture Nicolas Maduro today.  It happened yesterday." which was true at least in my own time zone.)

  "Pure LLMs are inevitably stuck in the past, tied to when they are trained, and deeply limited in their inherent abilities to reason, search the web, 'think' critically, etc.," says Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and author of Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us.  While human intervention can fix glaring problems like the Maduro response, Marcus says, that doesn’t address the underlying problem.  "The unreliability of LLMs in the face of novelty is one of the core reasons why businesses shouldn’t trust LLMs."

  This problem has been greatly alleviated by AI providers enabling live search, which loads fresh data into the context window - the AI equivalent of short-term memory.
  
  But it can't be properly fixed without continual learning, which is an unsolved problem with LLMs.

• Intel's B570 graphics card is now selling for just $199.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not a high-end card, but it's competent and comes with 10GB of VRAM, the early driver issues that plagued the previous generation have been resolved, and, well, it costs $199.
  
  If that's all you want to spend it's a solid option.
  
  
  
• It looks like Intel's long awaited B770 graphics card - the high end model from the second generation - is finally on its way.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This has 16GB of RAM and 32 Xe graphics cores compared to 10GB and 18 cores on the B570 model and 12GB and 20 cores on the B580.
  
  Nothing announced yet but look for it at CES.
  
  
  
• Good time for it, because Nvidia's graphics cards are starting to run out at distributors.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The story cites an unnamed German distributor cancelling orders by retailers, saying that stock of the RTX 5070 is limited, and the 5070 Ti, 5080, and 5090 are not available at all.
  
  Predictions were that price hikes and shortages would start from the low end, particularly the 16GB models of the 5060 Ti and 9060 XT, so this is a little surprising.
  
  Nvidia of course does not care.  It has long since ceased being a consumer-focused company.
  
  (I've already ordered everything I need for at least three years that involves memory chips, but if you haven't, you might want to check for bargains while they last.)
  
  
  
• Gigabyte has announced new AM4 motherboards for PC builders looking to upgrade everything except their DDR4 RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are minor but welcome refreshes, replacing some older features like DVI ports that were largely obsolete even five years ago with more modern DisplayPort, um, ports.
  
  
  
• Tesla has released video demonstrating a Tesla Semi charging at 1.2MW.  (Electrek)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Software craftmanship is dead.  (PCLoadLetter)
  
  Agile stuck in the knife.  AI triggered the claymore.
  
  (Great name for a blog there.)
  
  
  
• Could 2026 usher in a 4 day workweek?  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Betteridge's Law undefeated.
  
  
  
• Shit's all fucked, yo.  (Politico)
  
  Google signed a deal with California's state crime syndicate to provide $250 million in joint funds to propaganda outlets.
  
  In better news, nobody has received any money so far and it's unclear if anyone ever will.
  
  
  
• 2026 will be the year of AI on the desktop.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This in particular stood out to me:

  Humans don’t just learn through language; we learn by experiencing how the world works.  But LLMs don’t really understand the world; they just predict the next word or idea.  That’s why many researchers believe the next big leap will come from world models: AI systems that learn how things move and interact in 3D spaces so they can make predictions and take actions.

  This is what Terry Winograd's program SHRDLU did.
  
  In 1968.
  
  
  
• Eat the bug slop.  Live in the pod slop.  Own no slop and like it.  (sn scratchpad)
  
  Guess whose blog that is.

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, January 04 2026 09:48 PM (amxkj)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, January 05 2026 02:10 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 05 2026 06:54 AM (i6xpl)

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 05 2026 06:58 AM (i6xpl)

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• Contract prices for memory are expected to rise by 50% this quarter, on top of the massive increases in the previous quarter.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And that's if you can even get a contract.  Spot prices are out of control.
  
  
  
• Which may be why Corsair has been cancelling orders for memory kits that were accidentally sold at only double the old price, rather than four times.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The sales took place on New Years Eve, which is coincidentally when I bought 128GB of Corsair DDR4 RAM on Amazon - I noticed it was selling for close to pre-apocalyptic prices and pounced.
  
  The reported cancellations mostly involve a specific 48GB DDR5 kit, though, which is not at all what I ordered.  And one 64GB kit I ordered has already shipped, so it looks like I lucked out.  Waiting to see a shipping notice on the two 32GB kits.
  
  Every time I think maybe I bought too much memory I see another story that suggests things are going to get even worse.  Memory rarely fails, and the next two generations of AMD CPUs will still support DDR5, so I should have enough to keep me going for years.

• On the positive-ish side, Chinese memory maker CXMT is preparing for a $4.2 billion IPO to expand its manufacturing facilities.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Even if the chips go mostly straight into China's domestic market, anything that increases global supply is a good thing, even if it takes a couple of years.  I hope to see similar investment in Taiwanese firm Nanya.
  
  
  
• Google AI overviews put people at risk of harm with misleading health advice.  (The Guardian)
  
  She turned me into a newt.
  
  
  
• Police in Heber City, Utah, have been forced to explain why an official report stated that one of their officers had turned into a frog. (Futurism)
  
  He got better.
  
  And if you guessed AI, you win a frog.
  
  (Hat tip: Comrade Arthur.)
  
  
  
• Ghana is trying to regulate online prophecies.  (The Economist)  (archive site)
  
  Will this succeed?
  
  (shake shake)
  
  Signs point to no.
  
  
  
• The BBC is systematically biased...  To favour conservatives.  (SagePub)  (PDF)
  
  Stop laughing, this is serious!
  
  
  
• Tesla has been overtaken by Chinese auto maker BYD as the leader in EV sales numbers, if not value.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  As we covered previously, BYD engages in massive fraud to boost its sales numbers.  Cars sitting unsold at dealers are routinely booked as sold, and then sold as second-hand vehicles at huge losses.
  
  
  
• On Steam's latest hardware survey, AMD is fast closing in on Intel, capturing 47% of CPU market share.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The best selling CPUs and motherboards right now are AMD's AM4 models - five years old - because people already have DDR4 memory and are scrapping plans to upgrade to newer models that require DDR5.
  
  Intel's 12th through 14th generation CPUs support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory, but Intel's high-performance 13th and 14th generation CPUs, best suited to gaming, all died.
  
  
  
• The top selling motherboard on Amazon right now is the Asus ROG Strix B550-F Gaming WiFi II.
  
  I know this because I have a lot of DDR4 RAM myself and was looking for a good motherboard, and there are literally none available in Australia - they have either sold out or otherwise disappeared, leaving only the cheapest models, which all lack one or more key features like WiFi, 2.5Gb Ethernet, a second M.2 slot, more than just the basic three audio jacks, or a decent PCIe slot layout that would let you add cards to provide those missing features.
  
  This has all those features and five PCIe slots so...  I bought one.
  
  
  
• I have rather less money saved up than a month ago, because I just bought all the hardware I had planned for this year - and probably next year, to be honest - in the space of three weeks.
  
  
  
• Speaking of things undergoing sudden unpredictable price increases physical copies of the PlayStation 4 game Star Wars Racer Revenge have abruptly increased in price from $20 to $400.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This game is known to have a vulnerability that lets you unlock your PlayStation 5's boot loader.  But there were only 8500 copies ever made - it was a remaster of a PlayStation 2 game, and mostly sold via digital download - and there are 85,000,000 PlayStation 5s in existence.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 04 2026 01:51 AM (rcPLc)

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• OpenAI is betting big on audio.  (Tech Crunch)

  OpenAI is betting big on audio AI, and it’s not just about making ChatGPT sound better.  According to new reporting from The Information, the company has unified several engineering, product, and research teams over the past two months to overhaul its audio models, all in preparation for an audio-first personal device expected to launch in about a year.

  This is going to sink without a trace and I am here for it.

  It's not just the tech giants placing this bet. A motley crew of startups has emerged with the same conviction, albeit with varying degrees of success. The makers of the Humane AI Pin burned through hundreds of millions before their screenless wearable became a cautionary tale.

  OpenAI's effort is going to burn through far more money and achieve the same results, which is to say none whatsoever.
  
  We already have phones.  They already do everything these AI devices do, and more, and if we don't want to look at the screen, we can just not look at the screen.
  
  But there's a reason video killed the radio star.
  
  At least Tech Crunch has an early entry in its "Dumbest Things in Tech in 2026" roundup.
  
  
  
• The phone is dead long live...  What, exactly?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI and the unlamented Humane pin are not alone in this folly.  There's billions of dollars chasing this lack of ideas.
  
  The one place where I see possibility is AI glasses.  You can integrate a camera and a speaker and a microphone and a tiny display.  Your hands are free to do whatever.  There are problems, yes, but also real value.
  
  
  

Tech News

• On the other hand, Apple reportedly shipped just 45,000 Vision Pro headsets in the fourth quarter.  (Financial Times)  (archive site)
  
  That has all the listed features - but it's bulky, heavy, costs $3500, and does nothing.
  
  
  
• Orange Pi's new single board computer runs circles around the Raspberry Pi 5.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It has 16 cores running at 1.9GHz, 10 AI cores each able to perform 4096 multiple-and-add operations per clock cycle, and 48GB or 96GB of RAM.  Do not expect this one to be cheap.
  
  They have also announced - at least in China - the Orange Pi AI Studio Pro which runs two of these boards linked together.  Price not listed for that one either.
  
  
  
• It looks like a NES that shrank in the wash.  Inside is a Ryzen 370 12 core CPU.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's designed for emulating old video game hardware, and it will certainly do that, but it seems a little bit overkill.
  
  
  
• Sony's PlayStation 5 just got hacked forever.  Here's why that's a good thing.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The hack here was the leaking of secure boot keys for the hardware, which means that owners can now jailbreak their PlayStation.  Sony can release new hardware that can't be jailbroken - and probably will - but it can't do anything about the 85 million consoles already sold.
  
  
  
• It's "Fuck the Consumer" year at the Consumer Electronics Show.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Nvidia will announced no consumer products at all, AMD will announce only relabels of existing products, and Intel will announce Panther lake, which is not a bad product unless you need more than four full-speed cores because that's all it has.  (And all three versions of Panther Lake announced involve major tradeoffs even with that limit stipulated.)
  
  
  
• The European Space Agency got hacked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Though the biggest question here is why anybody would bother.
  
  
  
• I think I bought too many computers.  The parts I need for Froppy just shipped, and I've run out of names for all the others.
  
  On the other hand, I'm now thoroughly covered in case I start having hardware failures in the older systems, and I can re-use all the old RAM and SSDs in newer motherboards.  And I didn't pay hyper-inflated prices for any of it.
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, January 03 2026 02:09 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 03 2026 03:44 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 03 2026 04:04 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 03 2026 06:40 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 03 2026 06:42 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 03 2026 06:53 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 03 2026 09:37 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 03 2026 11:04 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 03 2026 03:13 PM (PiXy!)

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