• houston@nasa.gov, we have a problem.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The crew of the Artemis II mission - basically retreading the path of Apollo 10, 97 years ago - ran into an issue that didn't happen last time: The spacecraft's computer has two instances of Microsoft Outlook running, and neither one works.
  
  At least that's better than unidentified floating poop (though we may yet come to that) or a Main B Bus Undervolt.
  
  
  
• Speaking of things not working those new LG-made 1Hz laptop display panels have been put to the test and they don't.  Don't not work, that is.  They work exceptionally well.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These displays are designed to automatically lower the refresh rate to as little as 1Hz (from a maximum of 120Hz) when the user is looking at a static screen, since the constant refresh cycle is a major power draw.
  
  Tested in Dell's latest XPS 14 model (which I think is the first laptop shipping with these panels) a battery life test simulating simple web browsing with the screen brightness set to 150 nits saw the laptop lasting 43 hours.  That's three times longer than Apple's M5 MacBook Air running with the same settings.
  
  Apple's CPUs are more power-efficient than Intel's so heaver workloads handed the win to the Air, but the new display panel certainly proved itself.

• OpenAI has acquired "popular" tech podcast TBPN, which I have never heard of and as far as I can tell nobody else has either.  (CNBC)
  
  Gotta burn through that latest $122 billion somehow, and buying a fawning press is one way.
  
  And yes, Sam Altman has appeared multiple time on the show.  I checked and the comments were...  Not generous.
  
  
  
• A group pushing for age verification legislation to be forced upon AI turns out to be funded by...  OpenAI.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Regulatory capture is back, baby!
  
  
  
• How Microsoft vaporised a trillion dollars.  (Substack)
  
  A six part article by a former Azure team member recounting the remarkable levels of dysfunction within that organisation.
  
  It's amazing anything works at all.
  
  
  
• Everyone's not doing it: Delve, the compliance startup embroiled in endless allegations of not actually doing what they claim to do, is embroiled in further allegations of...  Not actually doing what they claimed to do but related to something different this time.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  At question here was Delve's software offering Pathways which looked remarkably like open-source solution SimStudio with the numbers filed off.  Delve disputed the allegations...  And then scrubbed all mention of Pathways from its website.
  
  
  
• If you weren't planning to buy an iPhone, congratulations, now you are.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Apple is reportedly buying all the RAM available at inflated prices to force its competitors out of the market.
  
  Samsung's mobile division tried to sign a long-term supply contract with Samsung's memory division last year - and was rebuffed in favour of putting the screws to Apple.  A move that reportedly succeeded splendidly...  For Samsung's memory division, which is now getting paid twice as much per gigabyte.  Not for the rest of us.
  
  
  
• A look at Maxsun's Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel's Arc Pro B60 is a professional-level graphics card using the same chip as the company's B580 consumer card, but with twice the memory - 24GB rather than 12GB.
  
  Maxsun's iteration of this puts two B60s on a single card, and it acts...  Exactly like two B60s.  Exactly like two B60s, because the B60 only uses 8 lanes of PCIe 5.0 (not really a constraint given its healthy allotment of RAM), and this card requires your motherboard to set that slot in x8/x8 bifurcation mode so that the two units on the card are addressed independently.
  
  (If you have something else sharing bandwidth on that slot so that it's already in x8 mode, only half of this card will work.)
  
  Not sure exactly how it performs - the reviewer ran multiple benchmarks but doesn't provide direct comparisons to anything else.  But for gaming, it performs exactly like a B580, because games only see one of the two GPUs on the card.

• Anthropic has filed DMCA takedown requests against - so far - more than eight thousand online copies of their leaked Claude Code source code.  (Yahoo)
  
  Paging King Canute and Barbra Streisand.  Would King Canute and Barbra Streisand please come to the discourtesy phone.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AI can clone open source software in minutes - and that's a problem.  (TechSpot)
  
  Open source software is protected by copyright law, and that depends on the exact expression of the code.  It's easy for an AI to make sufficient changes to dodge copyright law while keeping functionality intact.
  
  Or mostly intact.  In my experience even performing straightforward changes like that you still end up with some breakage.
  
  And of course this was possible before AI as well; it just took a little more effort.
  
  
  
• ONLYOFFICE has suspended its partnership with Nextcloud after the latter forked its product to create Euro-Office, targeting weenies.  (Neowin)
  
  Or you can just do that, I guess.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare has announced EmDash, a "spiritual successor" to WordPress created following Matt Mullenweg's spiral into insanity.  (Phoronix)
  
  Or that too.  More work than just stealing stuff outright though.
  
  
  
• Sweden has moved away from computers in the classroom and back to books and paper following a long term decline in student test results.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Sounds good as long as I don't have to write term papers longhand.
  
  
  
• Artemis II is off on its way almost to the moon.  (NASA)
  
  Missed it by that much.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has filed for an IPO. targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion.  (Reuters)
  
  Which...  Is still a lot.
  
  
  
• Tech startup R3 Bio is creating brainless clones for organ harvesting.  (MIT Technology Review)
  
  Hey, I've seen this one!  It's a classic!
  
  
  
• The CEO of America's largest public hospital system says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI.  (Radiology Business)
  
  Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
  
  
  
• DRAM prices are expected to jump 63% in Q2, and NAND flash for SSDs by 75%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Panic buying before the worst of the price increases hit looks like it was a good move.  I have enough memory and storage to keep going for years.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, if you're in the market for a new mid-range graphics card, look out for discounted 16GB XFX Radeon 9060 XTs.  I bought one early this year as part of my panic attack, and they have very much bucked the trend by cutting the price by 20% since then.
  
  That's in Australia but the price here would be equivalent to $310, against an MSRP of $350.
  
  Not a high-end card but fast and capable and not overly power-hungry.
  
  
  
• Guess what also costs around $310?  The 16GB Raspberry Pi.  (Jeff Geerling)
  
  I was thinking of buying one - actually the Pi 500+, which is the model built in to a mechanical keyboard - but passed on it because at the time only the keyboard itself was available and not the bundled desktop kit with a matching mouse and cables and power supply.
  
  That model is the worst affected, but even the 4GB Pi 5 has increased in price by 75%.
  
  
  
• Microsoft says you can avoid viruses in messages by never reading your messages.  (The Register)
  
  This is true.
  
  
  
• Nova Lake HX - the laptop range for Intel's next generation - will come with up to 28 cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's only a minor change, though.  Existing Intel laptop chips have up to 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores.  Nova Lake HX adds four low-power cores to that.
  
  Also, as with the current Panther Lake family, there will models with the advanced integrated graphics (branded as B390), but then you get half as many CPU cores.  You can't have both.

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, April 03 2026 12:25 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 03 2026 07:36 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 03 2026 07:37 AM (1zWbY)

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• Anthropic's Claude Code developer tool leaked.  (Dev.To)
  
  Which...  Well, so what?  You can download it.  Countless thousands of people have.  I have.  Anyone who wanted to put in the effort to pick it apart could have done so.
  
  Anthropic left a debug option set it one release and that made all the source files visible, but that just made it easier.
  
  The real brains - Anthropic's AI models like Sonnet and Opus - run safely on their servers and haven't leaked anywhere.
  
  If you're interested though it's available on GitHub.
  
  
  
• If you want to run your own LLM and not just local tools that talk to a remote server somewhere Bonsai from PrismML might be of interest.  (PrismML)
  
  Because the 1.7 billion parameter model runs in 240MB of memory - yes, M, not G - and churns through 130 tokens per second on an iPhone 17.
  
  Which uses noticeably less power than a rack full of high-end graphics cards.
  
  Bonsai 8B uses 1.15GB of RAM.
  
  While it doesn't lead in test scores, it's being tested against 16GB models, which require an entirely different class of hardware.  It would be interesting to see how a 70 billion parameter model would perform on the same tests if it's possible to perform the same trick - quantising the model down from half-precision (16 bits) per parameter to 1 bit with error correction.

• The IRGC has issued threats not just against the US and Israel and the Arab world - that's old hat - but now against Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, IBM, Cisco, and Tesla.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Gotta warn you guys, Tesla has a friend with a global lock on orbital space lasers.  Might want to tread carefully.
  
  
  
• Fujitsu is developing a new AI processor - an NPU - aimed at the upcoming 1.4nm process node.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's not the interesting part.
  
  The interesting part is that this will be manufactured at the Rapidus plant in Hokkaido.  With Rapidus ramping up production Japan has leapt directly from 40nm chip fabrication to 2nm, largely catching up with Taiwan, Korea, and the United States, and leaving China trailing behind.
  
  
  
• Looks like we won't be rid of OpenAI just yet.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They just raised $122 billion.  Apparently from wealthy masochists.
  
  
  
• GMKtec's new Evo T2 mini-PC is now shipping with Intel's Panther Lake CPU and its class-leading graphics performance coupled with 64GB of soldered RAM.  (Liliputing)
  
  Just two problems: First, it costs $1899, and the Minisforum model I bought around Christmas cost about $600.  Sure, the integrated graphics on that model are a lot slower than Panther Lake, but not that much slower.  (This site suggests the difference is around 25%.)
  
  Second, it's out of stock.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, April 02 2026 02:36 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, April 02 2026 05:29 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, April 02 2026 10:28 AM (ZLF73)

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• Bluesky announced a new AI tool named Attie to help inmates create their own social feeds.  It did not go well.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  In three days Attie has accumulated 1500 followers - and been blocked by 125,000 users, which is to say all of them.
  
  That's more blocks than even the ICE account, suggesting that while the inmates are clinically insane they are not entirely stupid.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Life with AI is frying human brains.  (France24)
  
  It's like managing a hundred toddlers that never sleep.
  
  
  
• Restoring old photos with AI is a fundamentally broken concept.  (Petapixel)
  
  It works for movies, because movies have massive amounts of redundant information - most of each frame is identical to the previous, with just some elements shifted.
  
  With photos all you have is the photo.
  
  
  
• Or not even that: Sony has shut down almost its entire memory card business.  (Petapixel)
  
  Only a few models survived the mass cancellations which hit capacities from a lowly 64GB to a hefty 2TB.  AI taketh away, and AI taketh away some more.
  
  
  
• The latest Windows 11 update isn't.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Microsoft has pulled the update entirely because it didn't work.  At all.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 6 server CPUs have shown up in test results.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are engineering samples and probably not running even close to full speed, but they are already competitive with Zen 5.
  
  Interesting point: The high-end models have 24 or 32 cores per chip (and up to 8 chips on the CPU).  That's expected for server Zen 6c models (AMD's efficiency cores), but if they're not efficiency cores that's a big surprise.
  
  
  
• You can get a 2TB Crucial P310 for $215 on Amazon.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yay.
  
  I ordered two of these on sale for around $150 each on New Year's Eve.
  
  Amazon lost them.

• Intel's Arrow Lake Refresh isn't even on store shelves yet and it's already had a price increase.  (WCCFTech)
  
  10% officially and up to 25% in online listings.  Still decent value if it weren't for all the other headwinds Intel is facing here.
  
  Sailing straight into an F5 tornado.
  
  
  
• But you can save a lot of money on audiophile-grade cables.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Mostly by not buying them.  Once again, there is no detectable difference between $4000 cables and a $7 pair from the Amazon Basics range.

• Microplastics are glove contamination.  (University of Michigan)
  
  The researchers are sure that once they rule out the omnipresent glove particles they will have the truth and not a big fat ball of nothing.
  
  
  
• One day after Microsoft announced a new focus on security, the company had to release an emergency security patch.  (Computer Weekly)
  
  For a bug created by the March Windows update.
  
  
  
• M4 and M5 Macs can't run external 4k monitors at native resolution in HiDPI mode.  (S McLeod)
  
  You might wonder how people didn't notice.
  
  People did.
  
  But Apple doesn't sell a 4k monitor - only 5k and 6k models - so they didn't care.
  
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• DDR5 RAM prices have dipped slightly following Google's TurboQuant announcement that allows AI models to run in a fraction of the amount of memory.  (Notebook Check)
  
  While TurboQuant is real and does substantially reduce the amount of memory taken up for quantized vector database used to store LLM weights while - and this is the trick - not noticeably increasing noise in the models, any connection with commodity DDR5 memory pricing is best expressed in the polar co-ordinate system that TurboQuant is built on.
  
  By which I mean it is imaginary.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the third horseshoe of the Tech Apocalypse has dropped with SSD pricing headed into orbit.  (YouTube)
  
  Thanks Steve.
  
  This has been expected since DRAM prices headed the same way starting in November, but it was delayed by the large volume of devices already in the retail channel.
  
  Now reality has hit, hard, with prices doubling and further increases likely.  The video notes that spot prices have increased ninefold, though that doesn't mean that drive prices will increase by the same amount.
  
  What it does mean is that the smaller manufacturers who didn't have existing long-term contracts have just been wiped out, while the companies making the NAND flash chips - Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix, again, plus Western Digital, Kioxia, and China's YTMC, can set whatever prices they choose.
  
  (The second horseshoe was the graphics card market, though that has been muted so far unless you were looking to buy an RTX 5070 Ti or higher.  Prices of AMD and Intel cards have increased a little, but nothing like the devastation that has hit the memory market.)

• What if the bubble bursts?  (Financial Times)  (archive site)
  
  That would be bad for OpenAI which is 100% bubble and good for Apple which is close to 0% bubble.
  
  As for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, they'll survive either way, and Anthropic and xAI will likely do fine on a smaller scale than they had hoped.
  
  
  
• The latest ClickFix attack on MacOS installs Python malware compiled using Nuitka.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  ClickFix is an anagram which means "I'm too lazy to hack you myself but I think you're dumb enough do do the work for me".  As the article shows, it presents a page telling users to open a terminal session and execute a command that will download and install the malware in question.
  
  Where upon it steals all your passwords and the contents of any crypto wallets while laughing so hard it makes itself sick.
  
  
  

• The guy who put age verification in systemd is whining that people pointed out that this obviously bad idea was in fact a bad idea.  (It's FOSS)
  
  Let them drink whine.
  
  
  
• AI chatbots won't slap you upside the head and tell you you're an imbecile no matter how badly you need it.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which for many users is very badly indeed.
  
  

• Windows crashes three times as often as MacOS.  (TechSpot)
  
  MacOS is that bad, huh?
  
  Some glitches with the sites aside, this server has been running nonstop for two years, and that's pretty typical for Linux.  It only reboots when you reboot it.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile some people at Microsoft are fighting to bring an end to mandatory online accounts for Windows.  (Windows Centra)
  
  Nice to have a hobby.
  
  I'm not expecting them to succeed here.

• LG is shipping 1Hz display panels for laptops.  (PC World)
  
  That is they can refresh as little as once per second, if you're just sitting there looking at a static screen - or up to 120Hz if the display is active.
  
  Apple's new MacBook Neo has a phone CPU that uses as little as 4W, but still has fairly mid-tier battery life.  What's draining all that power?  
  
  You guessed it.
  
  The panels are already shipping as the default choice in Dell's latest XPS models.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix, the third of the big three memory manufacturers, is planning a US IPO this year to raise funds for expansion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The share offering is expected to be small - about 2% of the total stock - but will value the company at $500 to $700 billion.
  
  SK Hynix reported 50% revenue growth and 100% growth in profits in 2025 - and only the last couple of months of that were in the DRAM Apocalypse - so I don't think they'll have a hard time finding buyers.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile production constraints at TSMC are pushing customers to look to Samsung for their chips.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not that TSMC is having problems, just that demand is outstripping supply.
  
  To the point that Tesla is building its own chips foundry.
  
  
  
• On the AI side of things, it's not all slop.  (The Register)
  
  Recent reports of open-source projects - including Linux - being overwhelmed by useless AI-generated bug reports have ameliorated into useful AI-generated bug reports.
  
  Nobody knows exactly why the change, but this is something I am personally in favour of.  Testing in-depth is time-consuming and painfully boring, precisely the sort of job you'd give to an junior developer with clinical OCD in the good old days.
  
  Now everyone has a junior developer with clinical levels of OCD.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 29 2026 05:23 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: furball321 at Sunday, March 29 2026 06:36 AM (As8gg)

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• Intel has been delivering interesting new products lately, with the Core 250K and Core 270K processors and the B70 Pro graphics card all providing solid performance at unmatched prices.  The Core 290K processor, though - the planned new top of the line - has been unceremoniously - and now, officially - cancelled.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 290K was to replace the existing 285K.  But since the new 270K has already been upgraded to match the core counts of the 285K, the 290K could only offer higher clock speeds...  And Intel can't offer higher clock speeds, not with these particular chips.
  
  
  
• Also spoiling Intel's plans is AMD with is long-awaited Ryzen 9950X3D2.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD's X3D chips have what they call "3D V-Cache", because it has triple the usual amount of cache memory, with a second memory die stacked on top of the CPU - or in the latest iteration, underneath it.  Vertically.  In 3D.  Which is slightly redundant, yes.
  
  The new X3D2 variant applies that to both the CPU dies in a 16-core processor.  The increased cache provides its biggest performance gains for computer games - often running 30% faster than anything else - which only really use eight cores since that's what the current generation of consoles have.
  
  The 9950X3D2 is aimed more at workstation users and for most tasks will be barely faster (and possibly slightly slower) than the existing 9950X3D.
  
  AMD plans a breakthrough with its upcoming Zen 6 family, which will offer 50% more of everything, cores and cache alike.

• Reddit has a bot problem and plans to tackle it by verifying the notbots.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The notbots are rioting at the thought of being verified.
  
  
  
• Wikpedia has banned AI-generated articles.  (Engadget)
  
  Like Reddit, Wikipedia has as large a problem with its humans as its inhumans, but this is not intrinsically a bad idea.
  
  
  
• Tracy Kidder, a storyteller (as he described himself) and author of the classic tech story The Soul of a New Machine about the creation of the Data General Nova minicomputer, has passed away.  (The Guardian)
  
  He was 80.
  
  
  
• Also late is Apple's Mac Pro.  (9to5Mac)
  
  It was introduced in 2019.
  
  Apple has indicated that there will be no future Mac Pro models, or anything to fit that gap in the market.
  
  
  
• The Langflow visual framework for building AI workflows has of course been compromised.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is not a burn-your-house-down panic situation like some recent incidents, but if you're using it, update immediately.
  
  
  
• Don't cross the streams.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Speaking of recent incidents, LiteLLM, which as I reported yesterday is recovering from being very thoroughly hacked, previously received two security certifications marking it as safe to use.
  
  From Delve.

  Even so, as engineer Gergely Orosz pointed out on X when he saw people snickering about it online, "Oh damn, I thought this WAS a joke. … but no, LiteLLM *really* was 'Secured by Delve.'"

  As for LiteLLM, CEO Krrish Dholakia had no comment on the use of Delve. He's still busy cleaning up the unfortunate mess from being a victim of attack.

  The attack on LiteLLM was indirect via Trivy and GitHub, so users of the software probably were safe...  Right up until the entire project was compromised.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, March 27 2026 10:11 PM (LADmw)

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• The long-running court case by Sony and the global music cartel against the internet and free people everywhere, represented here - somehow - by Cox Communications, has met an end.  (CBS)
  
  Most recently upheld by the Fourth Circuit, it finally reached the Supreme Court which just handed down its decision, saying, no you dumbasses, just because you don't make it impossible for someone to do something bad doesn't make you complicit.
  
  You may wonder with such a divided court what the split was in this decision.
  
  The split was 9-0.
  
  Even the concurrence by the court's special needs justices Sotomayor and Jackson agreed with the majority opinion on this point of law and on the decision generally.

• Intel's big Battlemage graphics card is finally here, but there is no B770 card in sight.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Instead we have the B65 Pro and B70 Pro, which both feature 32GB of RAM on a 256-bit bus.  So they are definitely not targeting gamers looking for performance on a budget, but with MSRP for the B70 Pro starting at $949, it is the cheapest 32GB graphics card by a solid margin.
  
  AMD's Radeon 9700 Pro has a list price of $1299, and while Nvidia's 5090 has an MSRP of $1999, even that is a complete fiction and you'll be be paying twice that if you can find one at all.
  
  
  
• Not everything in computing is insanely expensive.  This gigabit switch for example is less than ten bucks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's not a remarkable savings, it's just a useful datapoint.
  
  
  
• The new Seagate Firecuda 540R is an SSD focused on endurance, with about twice the liefspan of comparable mainstream desktop drives.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And with today's market, it's MSRP makes it a reasonable option.
  
  If it were available at MSRP.
  
  It's not.  It's about twice that.
  
  
  
• The same hackers who recently hit the vulnerability scanner Trivy have now done the same to Python AI library LiteLLM.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's likely that they broke into LiteLLM using the Trivy hack.
  
  Reports are that half a million more users were compromised via LiteLLM, so things are only going to get worse.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• OpenAI has shuttered its Sora AI-generated video app just six months after it first launched.  (Hollywood Reporter)
  
  Disney was planning to invest $1 billion in OpenAI and license some of its IP to be used in Sora.  That deal is as dead as the app itself.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's "Instant Checkout" feature that allowed used to purchase products from within a chat session has likewise been deprioritised.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  K-i-l-l-e-d, deprioritised.

• Arm has announced its first AGI CPU, dubbed reasonably enough the Arm AGI CPU.  (Arm)
  
  It has 136 Arm Neoverse N3 cores running at 3.7GHz, 96 lanes of PCIe Gen 6 - yes, 6, and support for DDR5-8800 memory, which is pretty fast for a server.
  
  That's all nice, but you might be wondering where the AGI comes into it.
  
  That's the neat part.  It doesn't.
  
  
  
• The FCC has banned imports of new routers made in other countries, which is where imports come from.  (Liliputing)
  
  This follows an unending series of massive exploits of consumer networking equipment in recent years.
  
  Companies can apply to a conditional approval program to continue to sell products to the United States, but that comes with certain caveats, like upgrading device security to be "not total shit".
  
  Security experts that are usually critical of government inaction in this area appear stunlocked at seeing all their recommendations enacted in one fell swoop.
  
  
  
• Telling an AI that it is an expert programmer makes it worse.  (The Register)
  
  To nobody's surprise.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, March 25 2026 08:03 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 25 2026 09:37 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, March 26 2026 05:14 AM (zCiG7)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, March 26 2026 07:52 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 26 2026 05:59 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, March 26 2026 06:17 PM (zCiG7)

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