• The US spent $30 billion giving every schoolchild a laptop or tablet.  It made them dumber.  (Yahoo)
  
  And particularly less capable to maintain attention to the task at hand.
  
  How do we solve this?
  
  I don't know, I got distracted and stopped reading at that point.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Speaking of making people dumber Colorado is the latest state looking to bring in total surveillance and violate the First and Second Amendments at the same time.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The target yet again is 3D printers and their offensive ability to print in 3D things that are absolutely legal to own but the state government does not want you to have.
  
  
  
• Memory prices are slowly edging back down in Europe.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Again, this is from five times what they were just six months ago close to four times.
  
  Oh, and those cheap Minisforum mini-PCs I bought back around Christmas?
  
  The 32GB model is now selling for twice as much as I paid for the 64GB model.
  
  
  
• A hacker using AI tools broke into 600 poorly configured FortiGate firewalls around the world.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  How do we know he was using AI tools?
  
  He left the servers he set up to do the hacking completely unsecured.
  
  Good job all round.
  
  
  
• Another hacker got into the French government's databases and made off with the details of 1.2 million bank accounts.  (The Register)
  
  Incroyable!
  
  
  
• Diablo II is available on Steam with new DLC.  (Notebook Check)
  
  You will need at least an AMD FX 4350 and a Radeon HD 7850 to run it, or in other words, any reasonably capable potato.  Despite using 125W the 4350 was significantly slower than a modern ultra low power budget chip like Intel's 6W N150.
  
  It does cost $30 so maybe wait for a sale, but it is remastered and getting very positive reviews.
  
  
  
• AI gives us the tools to finally clean up legacy systems and to quickly create more of them.  (The Register)
  
  I maintain a million-line Python 2.7 back-end application at my day job.  It just works, and while moving to Python 3 is not hard, testing a million lines of code is.
  
  Using AI to generate and validate a vast swarm of tests makes that upgrade viable.
  
  It also means that people who don't know what they are doing can churn out unmaintainable slop at hitherto unimaginable rates.
  

Posted by: Frank at Monday, February 23 2026 08:48 PM (zCiG7)

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