• Apple has announced its new phones: The iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, and the iPhone Air.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These start at eight times the price of my Moto G14 from last year, and with the 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max go up to 21 times the price - ranging from very expensive to painfully expensive.
  
  The iPhone 17 and iPhone Air feature the new six-core A19 chip, while the Pro and Pro Max feature the new six-core A19 Pro chip.
  
  Yeah, Apple is really phoning it in with this announcement.
  
  ...
  
  Sorry.

• Microsoft is battling those cheap key resellers in court, arguing that its software licenses can't be resold because they do not license the software.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Specifically that yes they license the software but only the software, not, for example, the user interface that allows you to use the software.
  
  Apparently the key resale market is enabled by European law and Microsoft wants desperately to kill it, but this argument is far worse than the disease itself.
  
  
  
• Claude can now use Excel.  (Anthropic)
  
  Making it so that AI can drive programs that actually work rather than attempting to do everything itself and inevitably getting it wrong is a potentially positive step, though I'm not sure it's worth $115 billion.
  
  
  
• HHS has asked all employees to start using ChatGPT.  (404 Media)
  
  Blergh.
  
  
  
• Intel has fired its CEO of Products.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel had a CEO of Products?
  
  
  
• The US government has filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, siding firmly with Cox against the $1 billion decision against it from a jury verdict in the inferior courts, since upheld by the Fourth Circuit.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Pinterest have also sided with Cox.
  
  So have AT&T and Verizon, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Library Association, Re:Create, Public Knowledge, the CCIA, the ACLU, a collection of legal scholars, the Internet Society, and the platform formerly known as Twitter.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Yoga Tab is a smaller, cheaper, and, oddly, higher resolution version of the existing Yoga Tab Plus.  (Liliputing)
  
  Scaled down from 12.7" to 11.1" - making it pretty standard for a full size tablet and almost exactly the same size and weight as the budget Idea Tab I mentioned a couple of days ago - it also boasts a 3200x2000 display, which is so sharp you could cut yourself.
  
  It features a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and 12GB of RAM, the same as my Legion Tab, putting it in pretty serious performance territory too.
  
  Price is expected to be $550 when it ships next month.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Top Story

Tech News

• Plex got hacked too, with an unauthorised third party gaining access to email addresses, usernames, and encrypted passwords.  (Nerds)
  
  Time to reset your password.
  
  
  
• Experimenting with LLMs locally on your Mac without spending $115 billion.  (Fatih's Personal Blog)
  
  Including a guide to prebuilt LLMs that can be run on modest hardware.
  
  
  
• Nova Launcher has left the building.  (The Verge)
  
  This was my Android app launcher of choice for many years.
  
  Nova was bought by mobile analytics company Branch in 2022, and since then all the developers including the original creator have left the new company.
  
  
  
• All 54 games written for the original clickwheel iPod have now been recovered.  (Ars Technica)
  
  You just need an iPod to play them.
  
  It's not like saving a long-lost Scopitone film reel, but it's something.
  

Musical Interlude

• Silksong, sequel to successful indie game Hollow Knight, went on sale Friday after six years in development.  (The Guardian)
  
  The pent-up demand crashed Steam.  And the Microsoft Store.  And the Playstation Store.  And Nintendo's eShop.  And Humble Bundle, for what that's worth.
  
  No official sales figures have been released, but half a million people were playing the game on Steam later that same day, so somewhere north of that.
  
  The game was developed by three guys from Adelaide, South Australia, who are now set for life.

• The EU has fined Google $3.5 billion because it preferred its ad network to other ad networks that may or may no exist.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Add it to their tariff bill and keep moving.
  
  
  
• Burger King was hacked - fortunately by ethical hackers who said they were "impressed by the commitment to terrible security practices".  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It was all there from passwords hard-coded into the HTML to signup workflows that allow anyone to join without so much as email verification.
  
  
  
• The SEA-ME-WE-4 and IMEWE cables joining Europe to the Middle East were both cut this weekend in the Red Sea.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not clear how long repairs will take, not least because cable repair boats are sitting ducks for every kind of offensive measure common in the region.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, September 09 2025 04:47 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 09 2025 08:36 AM (PiXy!)

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• Google is facing a $425 million fine, not from Europe for once but from a federal court in California, for continuing to track millions of people for years after they had turned off the tracking feature.  (AP News)
  
  Okay, yeah.
  
  Nail their hides to the wall on this one.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Business Insider retracted forty articles because they were obvious low-grade AI slop.  (MSN)
  
  The freelancer violated the first rule of journalism: Don't be obvious.
  
  
  
• The oldest database transaction in the world is a cuneiform tablet recording the sale of malt and barley groats from around 3100 BC.  (Avi.im)
  
  Meanwhile MySQL cannot even record a date that old.
  
  
  
• Benchmarking Seagate's new 30TB HAMR hard drive.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Spoiler: It's slow even for a hard drive.
  
  
  
• Everything old is new again: Memory expansion cards for PCs are back.  (Gigabyte)
  
  This particular model from Gigabyte lets you add up to 512GB of DDR5 registered memory to a suitable CXL-supporting Threadripper motherboard like the TRX50 AI TOP which already supports 2TB of RAM.
  
  So not immediately useful for most people.
  
  
  
• Is the Lenovo Idea Tab any good?  (Notebook Check)
  
  If you're looking for a budget tablet, rather than a high-end workhorse, then the answer may well be yes.  It's a basic 11" model with a sharp 2560x1600 screen.  The A76 CPU cores are far from the latest but twice as fast as older models that just had something like the A53.
  
  It all depends on what price Lenovo is offering right now - Lenovo runs sales every day of the year and just cycles products around.  Right now in Australia the 4GB/128GB version of this tablet is available for $249 including tax and delivery - around US$150 - making it a very affordable option to keep a second screen handy.
  
  Cheaper in fact than the less capable Lenovo Tab One with half the resolution.
  
  Thinking of picking one up because my current large tablet - also a Lenovo - is one of those older models with just an A53 CPU and a 1920x1200 screen.

Anime Catchup

Musical Interlude

• AI will make a few people much richer and most people poorer, says Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel Laureate and so-called "Godfather of AI", who coincidentally sold his own AI startup in 2023 for $44 million.  (Financial Times)  (archive site)
  
  Hinton knows where to lay the blame, too: It's all the fault of capitalism.
  
  Yeah.  He's an idiot.
  
  
  
• Anthropic just made a lot of people richer and itself poorer.  (CNN)
  
  The company has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over its use of copyrighted material in AI training for $1.5 billion.
  
  The use of copyrighted material in AI training in general was ruled fair use, a blow for authors and a win for AI companies but as far as I can tell an accurate reading of copyright law.
  
  Where Anthropic came unstuck is that it downloaded around seven million books without paying for them.  It is now paying around $200 each.

• Of all the AMD Strix Halo mini-PCs that have been announced recently the Minisforum MS-S1 Max looks to be the most compelling.  (Liliputing)
  
  Well perhaps looks isn't the right term since it is an unremarkable small form-factor workstation you might find in any office, right until you check the specs.
  
  It has four USB-C ports (two USB4v2 at 80Gbps, and two USB4 at 40Gbps), five USB-A ports, HDMI, two audio jacks at front and rear, and two 10Gb Ethernet ports - RJ-45 too, so no fiddling about here.  Plus it has a PCIe slot, albeit limited to half-height half-length cards, though my QNAP 4-slot M.2 adaptor should fit.  And and internal 320W power supply so you don't need to worry about a chunky external brick.
  
  M.2 storage not mentioned in the article but presumably present.  Memory is the standard quad-channel LPDDR5X providing up to 128GB of soldered RAM at 8000MHz.
  
  As a reminder, this chip has 16 Zen 5 CPU cores paired with 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU  cores, giving it a very fast CPU and the fastest integrated GPU of any PC.
  
  
  
• Speaking of QNAP and 10GBase-T QNAP has a new 10Gb Ethernet switch - 16 ports, available on Amazon for $599.  (Serve the Home)
  
  8 10GBase-T ports and 8 SFP+ ports, and it supports 2.5Gb and 5Gb speeds.  It's managed or you can save $50 and buy the unmanaged version though I don't really know why you would do that.  Except probably not even QNAP can load a security flaw into an unmanaged switch.
  
  
  
• Warner Bros has filed suit against AI image generation company Midjourney after discovering to its shock that artists - including AI "artists" - can draw pictures of things they have seen.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In this case, of Warner Bros characters.
  
  But that is legal.
  
  You can learn how to draw Superman.
  
  You can draw Superman.
  
  What you cannot legally do is distribute your artwork of Superman.
  
  Which Midjourney didn't do.
  
  Hoping this case reaches a sensible conclusion.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, September 07 2025 03:06 AM (KOtXO)

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• Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring.  (The Verge) 
  
  Except it's not.
  
  We could better write this headline as Wikipedia is resilient only to the extent that it is boring because the moment something catches the attention of the politically motivated* they will burn it to the ground in a self-righteous frenzy.
  
  The article goes on at length not to discuss resilience but dysfunction at every level of the organisation.
  
  But it all comes down to one thing: At Wikipedia, Truth is controlled by the True Believers, and the safest bet for factual accuracy is political irrelevance.
  
  * And yes, I mean communists.
  
  
  
• Tech Note: Due to the archive sites I was using for sites that block adblockers instituting a "human identification" layer, I'm switching to recommending Brave in its place.  It so far seems to cut neatly through the crap.

• Stripe is building a blockchain.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Fuck, not another one.
  
  
  
• One garbage collector to rule them all.  (Fil-C)
  
  This actually looks good if you are in need of a C/C++-oriented garbage collector which I am.
  
  
  
• Vibe coding our way to disaster.  (The Bug in Our Code)
  
  Another warning on the painfully obvious pitfalls of the disastrously bad idea of "vibe coding".
  
  
  
• Type checking is a symptom, not a solution.  (Programming Simplicity)
  
  Not only is that not true, but everything in the entire article is wrong.
  
  
  
• Lenovo launched a whole lot of new products all at once, but none of them are particularly interesting.
  
  
  
• Browsing your phone on the toilet can increase the risk of hemorrhoids.  (Popular Science)
  
  You're holding it wrong.

Posted by: Doug O. at Saturday, September 06 2025 02:32 AM (4xrjO)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, September 06 2025 03:30 AM (KOtXO)

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• AI could bring us a smarter home - if we can trust it, which we obviously can't. (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  They're talking about combining three things, each hilariously unreliable: The Internet of Things, consumer appliances, and LLM-driven AI.
  
  It all reminds me of this:

  Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
  
  Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.

  My house was built in 2019 and it contains no smart anythings.

• AMD says there is no AI bubble, the $500 billion AI market is real, and its chips are expensive because have you seen the price of potatoes? (WCCFTech)
  
  Okay, Jean, whatever.
  
  
  
• OpenAI has lifted its share offering from $6 billion to $10 billion just days after CEO Sam Altman warned that AI was in a bubble. (WCCFTech)
  
  Burn money.
  
  
  
• Building a bitemporal database from string cheese and floor wax. (Eval Apply)
  
  Sorry, no idea.
  
  
  
• The Acer Swift Air 16 could be decent. (Liliputing)
  
  It has (up to) a Ryzen 350 CPU, which compared to my 7730U is 30% faster single-threaded, 50% faster multi-threaded, and twice as fast on integrated graphics. Memory is soldered but it has 32GB. And it offers a 16" 2880x1600 120Hz OLED display, which is basically what I have in my current laptop and is about as good a screen as you can find.
  
  Plus two USB-C ports, one USB-A, HDMI, and a headphone jack.
  
  Oh, and it weighs 1kg, which is very light for a full-size laptop.
  
  
  
• I set a personal goal last weekend to lose 10kg by the end of the year, not realising how much of the extra weight I was carrying was just water.
  
  So...  Merry Christmas, I guess.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, September 05 2025 12:03 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, September 05 2025 02:56 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 05 2025 04:17 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Friday, September 05 2025 04:28 PM (o4+My)

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• Do AI systems need world models to augment their knowledge with facts rather than just stories?  Yes.  Duh.  (Quanta)
  
  Although the answer is painfully obvious and we have covered it here many times, the article is worth reading.  Worth reading because it covers SHRDLU, a classic AI system from the 1960s that notably included a world model with impressive results, and also because it goes into the difficulty of scaling this to modern AI systems, such as nobody having the faintest bloody idea how to do it.

• The judge in the Google antitrust trial has issued a ruling which not only doesn't break up Google but doesn't seem to do much of anything.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'd have to read the ruling but the penalties really seem to be minimal.
  
  
  
• I want to be left alone.  (CTMS)
  
  I feel you.  And yes, there's always an exception for cats.
  
  
  
• CPU utilisation is a lie.  (Brendan Long)
  
  I've noted for years that a system reporting a 50% CPU load was typically somewhere closer to 65% thanks to variable clock speeds and multi-threaded cores, and here are charts to demonstrate it.  And it gets much worse with certain workloads - a processor running matrix math is typically at 100% load when it is reporting 50% load.
  
  
  
• If you need to biggest fastest drive that will fit in a single M.2 slot, the 8TB Samsung 9100 is that.  (Serve the Home)
  
  At $1000 MSRP it is not cheap, but it is big and fast.
  
  
  
• I have now lost twenty pounds in five days.  The rate has slowed sharply but it was a pretty wild ride.
  
  This was the swelling I mentioned a couple of times - all water weight - and when the underlying health issue was addressed it just went away.
  
  Into the toilet.  Hourly.  All night.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 03 2025 09:32 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: furball321 at Wednesday, September 03 2025 09:44 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 03 2025 10:08 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, September 04 2025 02:33 AM (Nl5FR)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 04 2025 07:18 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 04 2025 09:47 AM (e0fX0)

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• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has fired four thousand customer support staff and replaced them with AI during a period he called "eight of the most exciting months of my career".  (KRON)
  
  Well, good for you, Marc.  I wish you many more exciting months as you reduce your company to ash and gravel.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Books.  (World of Interiors)
  
  Lots of books.
  
  
  
• Cox has asked the Supreme Court to overturn a $1 billion copyright liability ruling set by a jury and the lower courts.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Not just because of the billion dollars, though that certainly matters, but because the terms of the ruling would make American ISPs into judge, jury, and executioner for copyright cases except with all the liability and no legal authority.
  
  
  
• Intel's new low-end 3-series chip seems to perform like a previous-generation 5-series chip.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Perhaps because it includes four fast cores and four slow cores, just like a previous generation 5-series chip.
  
  In the benchmarks listed it is still slower on both single and multi-core tests than last years Ryzen 7600 with its six fast cores, so I'd recommend one of those instead.
  
  
  
• Fifteen pounds in four days.
  Nineteen pounds in five days.
  
  Also got prescribed a medicated ointment to deal with the feets hurts issue.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, September 02 2025 07:00 PM (XAlNs)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 03 2025 12:22 AM (rcPLc)

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• AI web crawlers are destroying the web.  (The Register)
  
  And there's not even a nominal quid-pro-quo where they get your content but they index it for you and point it at your site.  They get your content and they basically just keep it.
  
  
  
• On the plus side, humans are now being hired to make AI slop look slightly less sloppy.  (NBC News)
  
  But not being paid very much.

• A look at the HP Zbook Ultra G1a.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This model is build on the Ryzen AI Max 395+ - a chip with 16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores, about the fastest thing you can find in a laptop these days.
  
  Performance is solid, and it has a 2880x1800 OLED display and almost the four essential keys to go with that CPU and 128GB of RAM.
  
  Not one I'd recommend unless you have a direct use for that 128GB of RAM and integrated GPU, which basically implies running LLMs locally.
  
  
  
• I may have mentioned in passing that my feets hurts due to edema - fluid retention - brought on by my recent high blood pressure.  The usual treatment for edema is diuretics, which help you reabsorb and pee out the unwanted fluid, and my doctor duly prescribed me such a medication which did very little for the first four days.
  
  Well, the pills finally kicked in.  And how.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, September 02 2025 06:53 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 02 2025 07:33 AM (PiXy!)

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