• 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

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, January 12 2026 02:29 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 12 2026 07:47 AM (Sbqr6)

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