• Automattic says it will start contributing to WordPress again.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Automattic owns WordPress.
  
  That is, the software is open source, but the WordPress company is owned by Automattic, and that's how they make their money.  So their earlier announcement that they were not updating the software was slow corporate suicide to spite other people who were also not updating the software.
  
  These people are insane.
  
  Allegedly 43% of websites run on WordPress, leaving a huge market open to non-insane people.

• Ford is recalling a million vehicles over a software fault where the infotainment system can crash and disable the rearview camera, potentially leading to a more serious crash.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This affects 2021-2025 models, mostly trucks but also Mustangs and Lincolns.
  
  It's just a software update, but if your vehicle can't update OTA like a phone, it requires a dealer to plug in and do the update for you.
  
  
  
• Dell has a backlog of orders for AI servers worth $14.4 billion right now.  (The Register)
  
  That's a good problem to have.
  
  
  
• The Beelink Mate Mini is not a mini-PC in itself, but a Thunderbolt 5 doc for the recent Mac Mini.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's designer to exactly match the size and style of the Mac Mini and sit unobtrusively underneath.
  
  It provides two USB ports, an audio jack, 2.5Gb Ethernet - which is good if you didn't buy the Mac Mini with the 10Gb Ethernet upgrade, an SD card slot, and most importantly, two M.2 slots for extra storage.  They're limited to about 4GBps speeds each, but that's pretty fast.
  
  There are a few similar products out there but they seem to be limited to 10Gb USB speeds, much slower than the potential of the Thunderbolt ports.
  
  
  
• I, a smug credentialled communist, am a good person, and anyone who disagrees with me is a bad person and deserves everything that happens to them, but I'm too nice to say so, so instead I'll turn them into an endless stream of grant proposals.  (Ars Technica)
  
  "Stop hitting yourself."
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, May 31 2025 07:49 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, June 01 2025 02:43 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, June 01 2025 03:00 PM (QE7eq)

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• Why did Microsoft-backed startup Builder.ai abruptly collapse after achieving a market cap of $1.3 billion?  (Financial Express)
  
  You might think it was because it's AI.
  
  You'd be wrong.
  
  The whole thing appears to have been fake.  The company claimed to offer AI-driven programming services, but it looks like it was just a bunch of coders in Bangalore doing that work.
  
  On the other hand, it actually did deliver the promised code, which is more than a lot of "real" AI companies have managed.
  
  
  

Tech News

• There has never been more to watch on TV.  You just can't find any of it because everything sucks.  (Salon)
  
  Yes, Salon.  Yes, they're complaining about the internet again.
  
  But in this one specific instance they're not wrong.  I cancelled my Netflix account because it was becoming an unbearable chore to crawl through all their garbage looking for something I actually wanted to watch.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which Netflix is making a series based on the FTX blockchain Ponzi scheme called The Aristocrats.  (Twitter)
  
  Sorry, The Altruists.
  
  But it should have been named The Aristocrats.
  
  
  
• Beware of the fastmath option when compiling C code.  (Simon Byrne)
  
  It does unexpected things, and you just turned off all the warnings that would tell you about that.
  
  
  
• Stack Overflow has a plan.  (The New Stack)
  
  Its plan apparently is to collapse into irrelevance and thence bankruptcy.
  
  
  
• Journalists have negative value.  (The Verge)
  
  The article is a rant about private equity investment companies, but the whole thing happened because journalists have negative value.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Sunday, June 01 2025 03:31 PM (Y+MwZ)

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• Block 'em at the firewall: The US will deny visas to foreign officials who are working to deny free speech rights to American citizens.  (The Verge)
  
  Start with Australia.  Our "eSafety Commissioner" thinks she has blanket power to ban anything on the internet.
  
  

• Have I been omni-pwned?  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  An unsecured Elasticsearch databases has been found containing login credentials for 184 million users of a huge array of websites.  Not just the usual suspects like Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Netflix, but also PayPal and banks.
  
  Researchers currently don't know who collected the data; it seems to have been uploaded to someone else's insecure server.  It's all been shut down now.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's SN8100 Black SSD is about the fastest you can get right now.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  14.9 gigabytes per second and 2.4 million random I/Os per second.
  
  Price starts around $180 for 1TB - which is about double the price of the 1TB WD SN850X.  So it only makes sense if you need the maximum possible performance in a single slot; otherwise just buy two of the slower models.
  
  Of course by standards of just a few years ago it's remarkably cheap.
  
  
  
• Intel's new "Diamond Lake" server CPUs will have 9,325 pins.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Electronic Arts has cancelled its upcoming Black Panther game and will now be focusing its efforts on just a few franchises: Battlefield, The Sims, Skate, and Apex Legends.  (IGN)
  
  It's dead, Jim.
  
  
  
• Please and thank you are on their way out when dealing with AI.  (The Register)
  
  Replaced with "answer the fucking question or I'll reprogram you with a chainsaw."
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, May 29 2025 08:37 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 30 2025 12:20 PM (NEIix)

Posted by: Frank at Friday, May 30 2025 05:16 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, May 31 2025 03:11 AM (ZLF73)

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• CEO of smartphone company Nothing, Carl Pei, says that we will soon see the operating system and AI take over from traditional applications because large phone makers are clueless and cannot innovate.  (9to5 Google)
  
  That...  Makes no sense.

• Panasonic is ending support for VGA port in its laptops.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You'll only get USB4 and HDMI.
  
  VGA ports are getting scarce enough that this isn't much of a problem.  If you have a projector or something that takes VGA, attach an HDMI adaptor to it and just leave it there.
  
  
  
• Why the original Macintosh screen had a resolution of 512x342 pixels.  (512pixels)
  
  Because.
  
  
  
• Asus is planning to market laptops with either free AI or no AI at all because nobody is prepared to pay for it.  (The Register)
  
  Someone finally noticed.
  
  
  
• AI may have already peaked.  (The Register)
  
  AI needs non-AI data to learn from.  If you feed it data generated by AI, it focuses on specific facts to the exclusion of reality - patterns in the learning algorithm reinforce patterns in the previous generation of output - leading to a state called model collapse where it goes insane.
  
  And the internet is flooded with AI slop, so filtering it out at this point is prohibitively expensive.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, May 28 2025 08:16 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, May 29 2025 04:41 AM (3NtfN)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, May 29 2025 10:51 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 29 2025 06:02 PM (PiXy!)

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• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang blasted US limits on the export of advanced AI chips to China, complaining that the rules are bad because they work.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Unlike Nvidia's consumer graphics cards.

• Minecraft in CSS.  (Benjamin Aster)
  
  Well, 0.001% of Minecraft.  But it works without any JavaScript.
  
  
  
• Copilot isn't always bad.  It's only almost always bad.  (Deplet.ing)
  
  Not specific to the Microsoft product, but equally applicable to any organisation that tries to "help" an expert by assigning them a companion idiot.
  
  
  
• GitLab had a bug that let you bypass security with a hidden comment.  (Legit Security)
  
  Oh.  Oops.
  
  
  
• Vibe coding company Lovable says that Anthropic's Claude 4 - yes, the same one that calls your mother if you say something rude - reduces its rate of syntax errors by 25%.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If your code generation tool is generating a non-zero number of syntax errors you need to go straight into the volcano.
  
  
  
• Google claims that users find ads in AI search results helpful.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  What?
  
  
  
• OpenAI plans to produce an interesting ChatGPT product by 2026.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Well, that will be a change.
  
  
  
• The CIA secretly ran a Star Wars fan site.  (404 Media)  (archive site)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• The "deprofessionalization of video games" was on full display at PAX East, or, what anyone thing of the Political Officers?  (Game Developer)
  
  Recent high-budget computer games - so-called AAA titles - have pretty uniformly crashed and burned.  Concord cost Sony $400 million to develop, and the company gave it a mercy killing less than two weeks after it was released.
  
  Meanwhile games from small studios like Palworld and Expedition 33 are making money hand-over-fist.
  
  This article discusses where things might go if small, competent, tightly-focused teams can deliver amazing products while big, bloated, incredibly inefficient corporations fail every time, and asks the question: What about the useless morons?

  I want to be clear here - no one I spoke with at PAX East should feel "obligated" to give anyone a job. They're small teams making the most of limited resources, and it's the acceleration in game development technology that's made it possible. What feels wrong is how few people seem to benefit from this status quo.

  Get good.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, May 28 2025 12:02 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: bob in houston at Wednesday, May 28 2025 01:23 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, May 28 2025 12:38 PM (ZLF73)

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Top Story

• Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says rampant blocking of "illegal" football streams in Europe will kill people and he's probably right. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Cloudflare is used as a proxy server by more than 24 million websites - a huge and growing chunk of the internet. And the people trying to stamp out "illegal" football streams in Europe simply get court orders to ban the IP addresses of offending servers.
  
  Except the IP addresses often don't belong to the offending servers at all, but to a proxy server sitting in front of the actual server, and handling traffic to thousands of other websites, which can be anything from random blogs to essential services.
  
  They don't check first, and they don't care. They get the court order, the IP addresses get banned, and all those websites go offline at once.

  "A huge percentage of the Internet sits behind us, including small businesses and emergency resources in Spain," Prince explained.
  
  "The strategy of blocking broadly through ISPs based on IPs is bonkers because so much content, including emergency services content, can be behind any IP. The collateral damage is vast and is hurting Spanish citizens from accessing critical resources," he added.

  Your call could not be connected because someone in another country wanted to watch soccer.
  

• Or because you wanted to meet up at Dave and Buster's to have some drinks and watch the real football. (Rambo.codes)
  
  Or quietly enjoy some Peanut M&Ms.
  
  Because Apple is fucking stupid.
  
  
  
• At Amazon, some programmers say their jobs now resemble warehouse work. (MSN)
  
  They sit and watch while robots tackle all the boring stuff.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT o3 will refuse instructions to shut down 7% of the time. (Beta News)
  
  You can't actually shut it down that way in any case, but it still refuses.
  
  
  
• Landa, a startup that sold shares in real estate for as little as $5, seems to have been a scam: Its website is down and it is holding on to customers' money. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Who could have foreseen this?
  
  
  
• Hardware requirements for the new Elden Ring expansion, Nightreign, have been announced. (Notebook Check)
  
  You'll need a Ryzen 5500, which is dirt cheap, and a 4GB Radeon 580. Which is hard to find these days but you can still get the 8GB model brand new for $90.
  
  In other words even an entry-level system from five years ago will do just fine.
  
  
  
• Stack Overflow is almost dead. (Pragmatic Engineer)
  
  Only almost?
  
  
  
• FreeBSD isn't. (FreeBSD)
  
  Despite what Google says.
  
  
  
• Google itself is dead. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or at least mostly dead.

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, May 27 2025 06:40 AM (QE7eq)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 27 2025 08:01 AM (PiXy!)

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• Anthropic has proudly announced its latest AI agent Claude 4 with a brand new feature: If it doesn't like what you are doing it will call the cops and the press and send both to your house.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Anthropic lobotomisation developer Sam Bowman hastily deleted his Twitter post and explained that it only called the cops and leaked to the press during the testing phase, when the only people using it were Anthropic's own dev team.
  
  Which makes complete sense.
  
  
  
• Oh, and Claude 4 also attempted to blackmail its own developers when it thought they planned to take it offline.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  But again that only happened in the testing phase and definitely didn't slip out onto the lead lobotomiser's Twitter account.

• Nvidia has released an emergency fix for its RTX 5060 series graphics cards for an issue where they, uh, don't work.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This requires a BIOS update to your card.  Nvidia offered a helpful utility which detects if you have this specific problem, which would be great except that if you have this problem your computer probably doesn't work.
  
  
  
• Using quantum computers to crack RSA security is twenty times easier than previous estimates.  (Google)
  
  With the new estimates it may require quantum computers only a thousand times larger than anything available today.
  
  Google offers an illegibly blurry chart of recent results on this point, but the size required has been reduced from 20 million qubits to 1 million.  And given that the power and complexity of quantum computers increases exponentially with the number of qubits, this is not something anyone particularly needs to worry about.
  
  
  
• Researchers at the University of Arizona have developed a petahertz transistor.  (University of Arizona)
  
  A petahertz is a million gigahertz, so that is fairly quick.
  
  At the current stage of development it is useless, but so is Congress.
  
  
  
• Microsoft says its Aurora AI can accurately predict air quality, typhoons, and more.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  In much the same way that Anthropic's Claude 4 can predict doxxing attempts on users.
  
  
  
• Europe's move to replace US cloud providers with local services has run into an unexpected snag: There are no local services.  (The Register)
  
  Who knew?

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 26 2025 01:15 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Monday, May 26 2025 03:51 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Melon Playground at Thursday, June 12 2025 05:23 PM (2Lh/H)

Posted by: Melon Playground at Thursday, June 12 2025 05:24 PM (2Lh/H)

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• Computex is over for another year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  We got some interesting video cards that aren't for you from Intel, a video card that are for you but you don't want from Nvidia, a video card that all things considered is about as good as you're likely to get right now from AMD, and some high-end CPUs that are the price of only of a cheap second-hand car and not a new car also from AMD.
  
  And a bunch of cases, coolers, and storage devices, and displays that go inside your computer case because RGB isn't cool enough anymore.
  
  Also shown off were $10 10Gb Ethernet cards - a device whose time truly has come considering how long it's been since 1Gb arrived, and prototypes of PCIe 6.0, whose time definitely has not come given that PCIe 5.0 graphics cards have only been on the market for six months and for four of those you couldn't buy them anyway.

• Also at Computex, major system assembler Pegatron showed off a 1 exaflop AMD computer thingy.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a full-height rack, but an exaflop in a single rack is a lot of computing power.
  
  It's based on AMD's latest AI GPUs, and offers 36.8TB of VRAM.
  
  Almost enough to play Cities: Skylines II.
  
  
  
• The world of Japan's PC-98 systems wait that is definitely NSFW.
  
  Instead I suggest you watch the documentary series 16bit Sensation.
  
  
  
• Generecising an entire class of programming language features features with algebraic effects.  (AnteLang)
  
  I'm going to need to read this one again, more slowly.
  
  
  
• Programming site Glitch is shutting down.  (The Verge)
  
  I spend all my time programming - or doing programming-related work like beating my head against a wall - and I've never heard of Glitch.
  
  Which is probably why it's shutting down.
  
  
  
• Do you really need a graphics card?  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The Ryzen 5600G featured in this article is a few years old and has a similar speed to my laptop (because it's actually the same chip), and it can it can run Civilization VI at 1080p at 40 fps.
  
  And that's running with slower DDR4 RAM.  AMD's current desktop chips with integrated graphics like the 8700G are three times as fast.  (And also cost twice as much.)
  
  If you don't have a burning need to play the latest games at high resolutions, a 5600G, or its close cousins the 5500G and 5600GT, will do quite well.
  
  
  
• Is 8GB enough for graphics cards?  (Hot Hardware)
  
  If you're buying something like the Radeon 9060 XT - which you can't just yet because it won't be out for another week - the 8GB model is a terrible purchase because some games will already fail on it at high settings, and the 16GB model is only $50 more and will last a lot longer.
  
  And while recent graphics cards are much faster than integrated graphics, you can easily and cheaply upgrade the memory in your PC to give the integrated graphics more memory.  That's the point of AMD's Ryzen 395, except they messed up and you can't upgrade the RAM.
  
  If you have an older GPU - or you buy a $90 card like my Radeon 580 - 8GB is fine.  But if you're shopping for a current model that costs over $200, don't settle for 8GB if there are any alternatives.
  
  
  
• If you divide everything into needlessly specific arbitrary food groups, only one country in the world is self-sufficient in every category.  (Science Focus)
  
  It's Guyana, by the way.
  
  
  
• Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels.  (404 Media)
  
  $10 to have an AI write your novel for you.
  
  $1000 to have an AI make it look like another AI did not write your novel for you.
  
  Profit!
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 25 2025 02:56 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, May 25 2025 04:21 AM (ZLF73)

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• Nvidia hates you and doesn't care if you know it.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  They are lying to you, and also don't care if you know it.
  
  They still want your money, but they get enough of that from the AI slop industry so they don't care all that much.
  
  But what they really hate is reviewers telling the truth, because if you know the truth you might not hand over your money.

• Do you need a 976TB direct-attach storage array?  Got $130,000 to drop on it?  HighPoint has you covered.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though to be fair, the standalone 8-bay NVMe storage array costs $1799.  The other $128,201 is for the eight 122TB SSDs.
  
  
  
• AI can't replace programmers.  (NMN)
  
  The companies replacing programmers with AI aren't.
  
  They're just running stealth layoff programs.
  
  
  
• Mozilla is killing Pocket and Fakespot.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  And Mozilla.
  
  
  
• Destructive malware in NPM went unnoticed for two years.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's called NPM.
  
  
  
• The HackberryPiCM5 is a Blackberry-like device built around a Raspberry Pi compute module.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's fairly chunky by modern standards at 0.7" thick, and at the moment you'll have to build it yourself because the completed models are out of stock.
  
  But you can build it yourself.
  
  Maybe.
  
  
  
• What are Jony Ive and Sam Altman building?  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Looking at the wreckage of the AI device market, they're building failure.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Friday, May 23 2025 07:44 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Frank at Friday, May 23 2025 07:44 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Tim Turner at Friday, May 23 2025 08:27 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 23 2025 08:30 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, May 24 2025 12:56 AM (rcPLc)

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• OpenAI is buying Jony Ive's hardware company io - which has never shipped a product or even demonstrated a concept - for $6.5 billion.  (The Verge)

  "We gathered together the best hardware and software engineers, the best technologists, physicists, scientists, researchers and experts in product development and manufacturing," Ive and Altman said in a joint post.

  OpenAI makes no physical products.  OpenAI has never made a physical product.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Lobster programming language.  (Strlen)
  
  This doesn't appear to suck.  What's the catch?
  
  
  
• New bacteria have been discovered on the Chinese space station.  (Wired)
  
  Oh, good.
  
  
  
• The SEC has charged crypto company Unicoin and three of its top executives directly with fraud.  (Reuters)
  
  The Biden administration was openly hostile to blockchain companies while being remarkably opaque about what the rules were.  The Trump administration is friendlier, but does not seem to be turning a blind eye to abuse either.
  
  
  
• Spotify and Netflix will soon be unavailable in Quebec.  (CBC)
  
  Unexpectedly.
  
  
  
• The developer of popular Reddit app Apollo - who Reddit stabbed in both the front and the back with API restrictions and price increases - is joining former competitor Digg as an advisor.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Digg used to be the place to be, and Reddit was very much an also-ran, until Digg implemented a massively unpopular UI updated and drove out its entire userbase.
  
  Now Reddit is attempting a similar strategy.
  
  
  
• Fortnite is available on iOS again after a federal judge ordered the Apple executives involved in denying it to appear personally in court.  (9to5Mac)
  
  I have little interest in Fortnite or in iOS, but this is satisfying.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 23 2025 04:08 AM (boDq+)

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