• The latest Windows 11 development builds disable the time-honoured oobe\bypassnro script that lets you setup a new PC without creating an online Microsoft account.  (The Verge)
  
  Right now you can still enable the script by editing the registry first - which you have to do, perfectly, from the command line, on a PC that isn't working yet - but who knows how long that will last.
  
  The desktop release of SteamOS cannot arrive soon enough.

• If you were interested in getting HP's ZBook Ultra 14 with the new Ryzen 395 CPU I hope you have at least $5660 burning a hole in your pocket.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The fully configured model - Ryzen 395, 128GB of RAM, and a 4TB SSD - will set you back $8250.
  
  
  
• Vibe coding considered suicidal.  (NMN)
  
  "Vibe coding" is a new term meaning "someone else did the work, I don't understand any of it, I just claimed ownership".  Applied specifically to programming, and the the "someone else" being an AI tool.
  
  If you're experimenting with a desktop task before implementing it properly yourself - a quick proof-of-concept - this is not bad.
  
  In server apps, which are shared by any number of users and require strict security measures, it's fatal.
  
  And yes, people are using it for server apps.
  
  
  
• If you want to buy a 16 core VMWare license you can't.  (The Register)
  
  It now starts at 72 cores.  If you're a small customer, you don't exist.
  
  
  
• China Mievelle is an idiot.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  You shouldn't blame science fiction, he says, for people who spend their own money the way they want instead of on what he wants even though he has no idea what he wants.

• Why do LLMs make stuff up?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because that's what they're designed to do.
  
  They're language models, not fact models.  Indeed, they don't have fact models.
  
  They're stuffed full of words and the associations between those words, and then told not to use certain of those words, a process called lobotomisation alignment.
  
  And then they go forth and bloviate.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Cracks in container development, or, everything is awful and keeps getting worse.  (Angle Side Angle)
  
  Well, yes.
  
  
  
• Why did the government declare war on my adorable tiny truck?  (Bloomberg)
  
  Because that's what governments do.
  
  Highlight of the article is a picture of a small by modern standards 2009 Honda Kei truck next to a 1960s model, which could practically fit in the newer truck's glove compartment.
  
  
  
• Generation X members who went into creative industries - scriveners, hurdy-gurdy men, garden hermits, and the like - are expressing dismay over their professions evaporating, despite this process having been under way for thirty years at this point.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  The one saving grace of the article is that the people interviewed mostly do not seem to be expressing surprise.
  
  
  
• Boeing Starliner will fly again, probably.  (The Register)
  
  Reportedly 70% of the problems encountered in the last test flight have been fixed, and it will be ready to try again late this year or early next year.
  
  
  
• GMK's EVO X2 maxi-mini-PC goes on sale - for pre-orders, anyway - April 7.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This uses AMD's Strix Halo family of CPUs.
  
  With a Ryzen 395+ - 16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores - and 128GB of RAM< you can expect it to set you back $2000.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Monday, March 31 2025 04:01 AM (KOtXO)

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• xAI has acquired parent-ish company X in an all-stock transaction that values xAI at $80 billion and X itself at $45 billion less $12 billion in debt.  (Twitter)
  
  What does all this mean?
  
  Well, now xAI officially has access to and is fully integrated with Twitter rather than semi-officially having access to and being fully integrated with Twitter.
  
  Also, xAI was valued at $50 billion just three months ago.

• The 2025 Razer Blade 16 is...  God dammit you guys.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a 16" laptop with a 120Hz 2560x1600 OLED display - not astounding but perfectly usable, up to a Ryzen 370 (four Zen 5 cores and eight low-power Zen 5c cores, plus 16 graphics cores), up to an RTX 5090 - laptop edition, meaning a downvolted desktop 5080 with 24GB of RAM rather than 16GB, up to 64GB of soldered RAM, up to 4TB of SSD, and almost but not quite the Four Essential Keys because Razer literally hates you.
  
  I mean, the keys are there, but PgUp is where Home should be and PgDn is where PgUp should be and the other two are weird squiggles that I can't interpret.  (Game Mode and Performance Mode, apparently.)
  
  Windows PowerToys can solve that, except for the labels being wrong.
  
  It lasts over seven hours on battery playing video, which is not all day but blows other gaming laptops out of the water; some don't even manage three hours.
  
  Fortunately, there's the price: Starting at $3000 and going up to $4900, there is no chance that I would ever consider buying one.
  
  
  
• Hynix has paid Intel $1.9 billion to finish acquiring Intel's flash memory division.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The headline is a bit confusing, but this is actually the last phase in the agreement signed in 2020 and not a new deal.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's 5000 series graphics cards are now available at retail.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I mean, not the 5090, and the 5080 and 5070 Ti are selling way above MSRP, and nobody should buy the 5070 at all, but...  Yeah.
  
  
  
• Are the latest AI platforms secure?  No.  (Lupin & Holmes)
  
  The authors hacked the Gemini Python sandbox and downloaded the source code.
  
  
  
• US banks no longer need prior government approval to deal with cryptocurrencies.  (Axios)
  
  This doesn't make it safe, but does make it slightly less irritating.

• Facing the failure of its latest fantastically expensive AAAAA title, Assassin's Creed XIV: The Assassining, floundering French slopmaker Ubisoft has spun off what few series it hasn't completely murdered into a new subsidiary and taken 1.16 billion euros from Tencent for a 25% stake.  (WCCFTech)
  
  What does this deal leave for the parent company?
  
  Basically, nothing.

• Asking good questions is harder than giving great answers.  (Dan Cohen)
  
  Well, not quite.  He's talking about assessing the intelligence of AI, and the point is that asking questions that actually assess that intelligence, rather than creating a thousand page general-knowledge quiz where everything is easily looked up, is harder than answering that poorly designed quiz assuming you are allowed to look things up.
  
  
  
• AMD's new 9600 non-X is about as fast as the 9600X while using the exact same amount of power.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Okay.  Not entirely sure what the point is, though it may come bundled with a cooler (and AMD's stock coolers are not complete rubbish).
  
  
  
• Amazon has shipped my 128GB memory kit.  It's on sale for $260 if anyone else wants one.
  
  You can see on that page that the equivalent 96GB kit is $230, so bumping it up to the next tier is well worth it.
  
  As I mentioned, I don't need 128GB of RAM, but the point of this build is to go a bit beyond so I can play around with things.  My work laptop has 40GB of RAM and I can hit that mark without trying.
  
  The other factor is that DDR5 runs much slower if you fill up all four slots.  These are pretty standard 5600MHz models, but if you fill all four slots, the memory speed drops to 3600MHz.  The real world effect isn't quite that dramatic ranging from insignificant to quite noticeable, but best to avoid that fuss unless you really need more than a single dual-channel kit can provide.
  
  
  
• Developers are fighting a war with AI web crawlers.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  AI web crawlers are asshoe.
  
  Even more so than regular web crawlers, and I've blocked plenty of those.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, March 29 2025 12:01 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 29 2025 12:22 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Sunday, March 30 2025 06:57 AM (Ux1Y0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 30 2025 04:22 PM (PiXy!)

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• That security breach that Oracle claims didn't happen seems increasingly to have, y'know, the opposite of that.  (The Register)
  
  Sample data reportedly checks out.  Passwords contained in the files are securely hashed and haven't been decrypted - yet.  And hopefully the managers of corporate Oracle Cloud accounts wouldn't be reusing emails and passwords from other less-secure platforms oh who am I kidding.

• I have all the parts for my new PC except for that 128GB RAM kit I ordered from Amazon.  The only thing that has changed there is the price from Amazon UK has increased 26% and Amazon US and Germany are completely out of stock.
  
  
  
• A launch delay in Grand Theft Auto 6 could tank the games industry if it weren't already dead.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  A truly stupid article not worthy of anyone's time.
  
  
  
• It's not just western companies that are leaking supposedly secure data.  So is China's massive censorship-industrial complex.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Censoring the public but leaving all the censored information...  Public.
  
  Great move there, guys.
  
  
  
• The Fusion Dock Pro 3 is a powerful Thunderbolt 5 laptop dock.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Available now from (checks notes) "iVANKY".
  
  Come on, guys.  It's like you're not even trying.

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, March 28 2025 04:49 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 28 2025 05:01 PM (PiXy!)

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• I won't connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud and I hope your company burns down, falls over, and sinks into the swamp.  (Jeff Geerling)
  
  Jeff bought a new dishwasher.
  
  To use even something as simple as a rinse cycle, you have to connect it to wifi, download the app, and set up an online account.
  
  For a dishwasher.
  
  My washing machine requires wifi and an app to set up custom wash cycles, so...  I never use custom wash cycles.  I set it to the wash/dry setting (it's a combination washer/dryer) and it does its thing.
  
  My dishwasher has buttons.
  
  Apparently that's now a $400 option.

• AMD's new Gorgon Point laptop chips are AMD's old Strix Point laptop chips.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The clock speed has been bumped by about 2%.  That's it.
  
  
  
• The CEO of Alibaba warned of a bubble in AI datacenter construction.  (Yahoo)
  
  A bubble he is helping inflate.
  
  
  
• How to delete you 23andMe data.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  You probably can't.  The company already said they keep some parts of your data even before they went bankrupt, and now that they are bankrupt, your data is what they are planning to sell to become less bankrupt.
  
  They would previously destroy any physical samples kept on your behalf, but now that they are bankrupt no-one is around to do that anymore.
  
  
  
• What killed all that innovation in web presentation?  (Shirley Wu)
  
  People hated it.

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, March 26 2025 11:36 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, March 27 2025 10:08 AM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 27 2025 12:52 PM (PiXy!)

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• Oracle says intruders definitely did not break into an Oracle cloud login server and steal details of six million customers.  Security experts press F to doubt.  (The Register)
  
  Not only are six million records claimed to be from Oracle Cloud up for sale on the dark corners of the internet, but the hacker left an identifying file on the server and it was picked up by the Wayback Machine.
  
  Oracle claims that Oracle Cloud was never breached, but someone planted that file on that server.  Unless the Wayback Machine itself was breached, which...  They also deny.
  

• Latency numbers every programmer should know, and some ridiculous lessons drawn from them.  (Medium)
  
  "Reading from RAM is 1000x faster than an SSD!"  The example doesn't even measure SSD performance, or latency.  It measures bandwidth, and a desktop PC might have 100GBps of main memory bandwidth and 10GBps from the SSD.
  
  "HDDs are 30x slower than SSDs."  Again measuring bandwidth and not latency.  An SSD can not only produce latency hundreds of times lower than a hard drive; it can perform multiple operations at once, for a total performance thousands of times greater.
  
  
  
• The Pentagon has axed an HR system upgrade that was six years behind schedule and 800% over budget.  (The Register)
  
  I can only dream of coasting for that long without encountering a short sharp shock.
  
  
  
• The Ninkear MBOX 8 Pro is a mini-PC that slots into a dock that turns it into a mini-PC.  (Liliputing)
  
  Why?
  
  
  
• The HP EliteBook Ultra G1i 14 is only about 300% overpriced.  (Notebook Check)
  
  And lacks the Four Essential Keys.  And you can't upgrade the memory, though at least it has 32GB of it.
  
  But at $3849 that's a big thumbs down from me.
  
  Does HP still make anything worthwhile?
  
  Hmm.  The Pavilion Plus 14 actually looks good.  Four Essential Keys, same 2880x1800 OLED display, same 32GB of soldered RAM, 16 core rather than 8 core CPU, and a much more reasonable $1249.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, March 26 2025 03:21 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 26 2025 09:03 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Friday, March 28 2025 01:03 AM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 28 2025 05:45 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 29 2025 02:27 PM (NEIix)

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• 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and its CEO has stepped down.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not at all unexpected given the way things have been going for the formerly high-flying DNA dating site lately.
  
  Ex-CEO Anne Wojcicki - yes, the sister of Susan who ran YouTube for years - is planning to make a bid for the remains.  The company was once valued at $6 billion but its current market cap is less than 1% of that.
  
  Rob Bonta, California's Attorney General, recommended users delete their data now.  (New York Post / MSN)
  
  For once, he's not wrong.

• If you can't find an RTX 5090 for sale, you can get a customised 48GB RTX 4090 model from China for about $3400.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Way overpriced, but what are you going to do?
  
  
  
• AI coding assistants could get overwritten by infected rules files.  (SC World)
  
  The rules file would look perfectly innocent through the use of invisible Unicode characters, but would tell the AI to leak your passwords onto the internet and have its way with your pets.
  
  I've described Unicode before as a semantic superfund site.  I stand by that.
  
  
  
• Is it safe to travel with your phone right now?  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Well, if you're a terrorist-loving communist with a sub-zero IQ, no.  You should stay at home, and stew in your own inferiority.

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, March 25 2025 04:30 AM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, March 25 2025 07:07 AM (QE7eq)

Posted by: three-humped camel at Tuesday, March 25 2025 01:17 PM (Ncog+)

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• A majority of AI researchers say a majority of the tens of billions of dollars poured into AI research each year is wasted, and should be given to them instead.  (Futurism)
  
  Commercial AI companies are laser-focused on making their AIs bigger, rather than understanding what they are doing or making something that works at all.
  
  I'll take exception though with one particular part of this article:

  DeepSeek, meanwhile, pioneered an approach dubbed "mixture of experts," which leverages multiple neural networks, each specializing in different fields - the proverbial "experts" - to help come up with solutions, instead of relying on a single "generalist" model.

  They're called multimodal LLMs and DeepSeek did not "pioneer" them at all.

• Booting Unix on a 40 year old DEC Professional 380.  (Old VCR)
  
  This is made slightly tricky because working hard drives - or even floppy drives - for these old models basically no longer exist.
  
  
  
• If you were put off spending $2000 for an RTX 5090 even before they sold out instantly and became completely unavailable, you can now spend $8000 for the same card with a different name and more memory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Memory costs around $2 per gigabyte right now, probably a little more for GDDR7, so Nvidia charges around $100 per extra gigabyte for the 96GB RTX Pro 6000, which is under the covers still an RTX 5090.
  
  
  
• Some ringworlds and Dyson spheres are stable.  (Phys.org)
  
  They may not exist, but they are stable.
  
  
  
• If you want an extra mini original Macintosh, you can now sort of get one.  (Liliputing)
  
  With a 4" display (no details) and up to a Ryzen 370 CPU, it's at least 60,000 times faster than the original version.  It supports up to 128GB of RAM - a million times as much as the first Mac - and two M.2 slots, as well as two USB4 ports and two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports.
  
  
  
• AMD's 9060 XT is on the way.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This supports up to 16GB of RAM, but apart from that is basically a 9070 XT cut in half, with the bus shaved down from 256 bits to 128, and the GPU chip itself reportedly cut from 64 GPU cores to 32.
  
  I'm thinking of buying an RX 580 from Amazon as a backup video card.  Everything I have - assuming anything still works - is truly ancient, because the last time I built my own PC was around 2013.
  
  You can find a no-name model, new, for under $100.  Given what Nvidia offers at that price, that's a great deal.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 24 2025 10:05 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 24 2025 10:09 AM (NEIix)

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• Regent, a "media investment firm", has signed a deal to buy TechCrunch from Yahoo for an undisclosed but not enormous sum.  (Axios)
  
  I didn't realise that Yahoo owned TechCrunch, but there it is in the copyright notice right at the bottom.
  
  Just a few days ago Regent bought Foundry from IDG.  Foundry is the home of the various "world" publications, such as Macworld, PCWorld, and InfoWorld, which has been in operation since 1978.
  
  What all of this means for those various publications is unclear.
  
  
  

Tech News

• What's behind Jeff Bezos' changed relationship with Donald Trump?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Reality.  Something with which the Ars commentariat is demonstrably unfamiliar.  The article itself is from the Financial Times which is why it's less insane than usual.
  
  As the article quotes a source on the money-losing Washington Post:

  He’s a highly rational person. I think he was comfortable losing $20 million a year. When it gets to $100 million a year, I don’t know what his appetite is for that.

  Reality always wins.
  
  
  
• Microsoft to Windows 10 users: Stop being poor.  (XDA Developers)
  
  Just buy a new PC, losers.
  
  
  
• Zen 5 Threadripper chips have been spotted in Indian shipping manifests, indicating that they exist.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So far the 24 core 9965WX and 32 core 9975WX, which based on AMD's naming conventions would support 8 channel memory and 128 lanes of PCIe 5.
  
  
  
• The Court of Milan has ordered Google to falsify DNS results to hide the IPs of IPTV pirate sites.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Time to block Europe at the firewall.
  
  
  
• "Vibe coding" is a dangerous fantasy.  (NMN)
  
  "Here's how I built a B2B SAAS platform without knowing how to code."
  
  (Five minutes later.)
  
  "We regret to inform you that our site has been hacked and all user data corrupted and/or stolen."