• Global PC shipments have plunged 20%, shocking industry analysts.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Who expected the numbers to be much worse.
  
  One of them tried to blame it on "macro conditions", which is of course pure bullshit, unless he's referring to the scale of the price increases.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The developer of ArtCraft posted the announcement on Reddit, which was a mistake.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It always is.  Also:

  Skeptics also warn of safety concerns with vibecoded software; a single person has generated potentially hundreds of thousands of lines of code for multiple pieces of software very quickly, and verification of the code becomes a mountain of a task for a developer without a team; a 2026 State of Code Developer Survey of 1,100 professionals by Sonar indicates that 96% of developers do not fully trust AI-generated code.  Privacy problems, malicious code, unsafe file handling, and more are among the list of concerns.

  First, it's a desktop app.  Second, compared with Adobe?
  
  
• Global Foundries (formerly AMD's chip manufacturing division) is going to produce cows for TSMC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I think.
  
  
  
• Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?  (Jono's Corner)
  
  Because, as the Hacker News thread points out, subscriptions, dummy.
  
  DeepSeek is a fraction of the price of Anthropic's API usage-based rates.  Anthropic's subscriptions, though, can be a fraction of the price of DeepSeek.  And of itself.
  
  
  
• Arranged Offenbach's Galop infernal for a 35-voice synthesiser, reading the orchestral parts from PDFs of actual 19th century score sheets used (and written in) by an actual 19th century orchestra.  As a demo for my fantasy 10-bit home computer.
  
  
  
• Which is almost but not quite entirely unlike the Atari 800XL.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is going on sale again soon priced at $219.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, October 09 2026 11:37 PM (6eVrQ)

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• I wondered recently when Saleforce blamed their failure to increase profits on their AI spending habits what the hell they were doing with it, because while they didn't put a number on it the figures they did mention implied it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year, enough to build twenty production-grade compilers or one public toilet in San Francisco.
  
  Well, it's not Salesforce, but I have found someone doing something useful with AI coding tools: ArtCraft.  (Get ArtCraft)
  
  ArtCraft itself is an AI-assisted art program.  That's not the neat part, though.
  
  The neat part is the smaller associated apps.
  
  PhotoCraft is a photo editing program.  VectorCraft is a vector graphics program.  FilmCraft and EffectCraft are for video editing and effects.  DesignCraft is for document layout.
  
  If this sounds like the offerings of a certain major software company to you, you are not alone.
  
  And it's all free as in beer and as in speech.  Download the binaries, download the source code, and do whatever you want with them.   All the programs run on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, and on web browsers.
  
  Early days yet; two programs are in alpha and the others haven't even got that far, but this is what we'll be seeing a lot more of in the future.

• Microsoft has reduced monthly AI spending caps from $100,000 per employee to $10,000.  (RS Websols)
  
  That sort of expense could easily mount into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year for a large company with a lot of developers, but as I said of Salesforce, there is little sign the money was well-spent.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has announced the Surface Laptop Ultra, with Nvidia's RTX Spark CPU and up to 128GB of RAM starting at $2599.  (Notebook Check)
  
  You do not get 128GB of RAM in the $2599 model.  You get the slower version of the CPU and 24GB of RAM.  But the top of the line model is less horrifyingly expensive than I was expecting at $5899.
  
  Lacks the Four Essential Keys, though, so that's a no from me.
  
  
  
• Shiny Hunters, the hacking group who recently broke into an FBI employee database and promptly got to encounter FBI employees up close and personal, we up to other shady and stupid stuff.  (Krebs on Security)
  
  And the hackers already arrested are singing like canaries.
  
  
  
• Minisforum's new expansion card brings four M.2 slots, a USB-C port, and for some reason, OCuLink to a single PCIe x4 slot using AMD's B850 motherboard chip for around $135.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Fine, but also, why?
  
  
  
• JGINYUE (who?) also delivers four M.2 slots, two 10Gb USB-A ports, a 10Gb USB-C port, and a 2.5Gb Ethernet adaptor to a PCIe x4 slot using AMD's older B650 motherboard chip for around $58.  (WCCFTech)
  
  A year or so ago when storage was still cheap this would have been great.  Now it's...  Fine.

• French AI company Mistral has unveiled - not released as yet, but announced - its latest open-weight AI model, Mistral Large 4.  (CNBC)
  
  At 1 trillion parameters it is aptly named.
  
  
  
• Codename: Le Chonk.  (Mistral)
  
  I'm not even kidding.

• Cable lobby groups have announced plans to sue the FCC for (checks notes) not staying bought.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Are they supposed to say that part?
  
  
  
• The Canadian Medical Association has published research claiming that permanent daylight saving time will cause earthquakes, tidal waves, irrevocable damage to the ozone layer, and orf.  (Sci News)
  
  But not nearly as much as they plan to do.
  
  
  
• Number one: The larch.  (Signore Galilei)
  
  Oops. Gave that one away.
  
  
  
• Anthropic's Claude plans are the best value if you use AI a lot - like for example you're developing an entire suite of fantasy emulators - but not so much that you need more than a single plan offers.  (The Register)
  
  Volume-based usage via their API costs up to 25 times as much, so don't do that.
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, October 08 2026 12:31 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Thursday, October 08 2026 02:59 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 08 2026 05:39 AM (LDKo5)

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• Hacking group Shiny Hunters hacked the FBI.  So the FBI arrested them.  (The Register)
  
  What did they think was going to happen?

• AI is junk food for the mind: Easy, tempting, and ultimately very bad for you.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  This is the ultimate demarcation dispute for journalists as they see that precise niche being carved out from under them by Chinese clankers.
  
  
  
• Here's a button that frees up 12GB of space on your Mac.  (MacRumors)
  
  Which doesn't sound like much - and honestly isn't much - but given that Macs still ship with as little as 256GB of storage and Apple just added local AI that some people neither use nor want and removed the option to remove it, it is welcome.
  
  
  
• The error era of software quality, or the era of ostriches.  (Gnome)
  
  We have every quality, so long as it's bad.
  
  
  
• Currently building an emulator for yet another nonexistent system, this time based on real hardware: The Zilog Z800 (which did exist, renamed as the Z280, though it had no major design wins), the WDC 65C816, which you can still buy today, two Yamaha V9938 video controllers as seen in MSX2 systems, and a Yamaha OPNA YM2608 sound chip.
  
  I also have the emulators set up so you can use them via a web browser.
  
  I plan to release the whole project before the end of the year.  The suite of fantasy emulators is just one small component.
  
  Update: Interesting outcome.  With a few minor tweaks and a 20% overclock the V9938 can generate my 480x270 60Hz display resolution (chosen to scale neatly to 1080p) with a single exception: Sprites can't appear in the bottom 14 lines - below line 256 - because the sprite position registers are only 8 bits.  Which is exactly the kind of detail I want.  And the real chip had a built in sync feature for overlaying on other video sources, letting me easily use two of them for dual playfields and double the number of sprites.
  
  Will be interesting to see how the Z280 performs against the 65C816.

• Hello, I am a Witch and My Crush Wants me to Make a Love Potion: I like a slow, introspective show as much as anyone, but sheesh.
  
  
• So What's Wrong with Getting Reborn as a Goblin: Rather a lot, as it turns out, and the characters in the story are smart enough to realise it.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Karl at Tuesday, October 06 2026 09:53 PM (WEqNk)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Wednesday, October 07 2026 05:34 PM (nyISL)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, October 07 2026 05:47 PM (PiXy!)

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• Sam Altman says you have to accept some bad with the bad when it comes to AI.  (Politico)
  
  I'm sure he does.
  
  
  
• Oh, forgot to mention: Daylight saving time has kicked in here, so I'm back to posting at 4AM ET.
  
  
  

• There is no plague in Buryatia.  (CNN)
  
  What a comforting "fact" that is to know.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has introduced a $4999 version of the DGX Spark AI computer with 64GB of RAM.  (The Register)
  
  It's a $5000 RTX 5070.  It's also 25% more than the original 128GB version.
  
  Thanks, Nvidia.
  
  
  
• Run a 125-billion parameter AI on commodity hardware.  Nvidia hates this one weird trick.  (GitHub)
  
  It will work on a regular RTX 5070.  Or indeed a Radeon 6700 XT from two generations ago.  The Hacker News link has everyone talking about the RTX 4090 for some reason, but it's a lot more general than that.
  
  You do need a good amount of system RAM for decent performance, but I have that, and it works on any Nvidia or AMD graphics card from the last few years with at least 12GB of RAM, something I also have.
  
  
  
• A federal judge called Flock cameras "indiscriminate mass surveillance" and used that opinion to suppress the discovery of 91 pounds of meth in a woman's car.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The article uses the term "alleged" here, but you can't "allege" 91 pounds of meth.  That quantity has a presence all of its own.
  
  
  
• sudo make me an ipod.  (Sudo Music)
  
  Huh.  It worked.

Anime Roundup

• A Tale of the Secret Saint: Everybody except the older sister including our heroine is, if not an idiot, at best an idiot savant.  The absent mother presumably died of exasperation.
  
  
• From Far Away: You got 90s isekai in my 2026!  Nice touch that instead of everyone in the other world speaking fluent modern Japanese, nobody does.
  
  
• Magic Repo Man: A predictable first episode potentially redeemed by the appearance of the gremlin fairy at the end.  Will have to see how it goes in the next episode.
  
  
• Magical Explorer: Mostly trash, but when it's not being trash actually manages to pull off some cool moments.
  
  
• Overgeared: Almost interesting, and could work well as an isekai or straight fantasy, but makes absolutely no sense as a VR game series.
  
  
• Romelia War Chronicle: Actually good, particularly in the understated dynamics of father-daughter relationship.  Solid art and animation too.  One to watch.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Monday, October 05 2026 07:33 PM (qqUP0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 05 2026 09:14 PM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 05 2026 09:27 PM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, October 06 2026 07:29 AM (9Oo74)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, October 07 2026 01:19 AM (oJgNG)

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• East during the spring and west during the fall: You know you're in for a ride when you read an article that includes the sentence Most magnets have two poles: north and south.  (Phys.org)
  
  Most?
  
  Most.
  
  They've found a new type of magnetic material that has eight poles.

• Do you miss the days when you could just switch a computer on and it would instantly come up with the BASIC prompt?  Miss them no more.  (ThoreauBasic)
  
  It can run as a regular Windows app, but can also boot directly from BIOS.
  
  
  
• Is everyone at OpenAI insane?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Another "safety" employee has left the company, saying it needs to be run "like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster."
  
  But that's missing the point.  If you pour toxic waste into a reservoir of drinking water, you go to jail.
  
  
  
• It being spring and all, I made my pilgrimage to the hardware store's gardening section to see what native plants they had on offer.  I needed to replace the boronia that died over winter and start finding new plants to substitute those lost to wallaby predation.
  
  Came back with a boronia already in flower, a kangaroo paw likewise, another  westringia to complement the one I planted this time last year which is absolutely thriving, and an aca-cia.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

1 Wallaby predation.

Posted by: furball321 at Monday, October 05 2026 06:34 AM (nzXoV)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 05 2026 08:21 PM (PiXy!)

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• I am altering the deal.  Pray I do not alter it any further.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Apple is changing the meaning of granting applications full disk access, because it meant that applications granted full disk access were granted full disk access.

  In Muse's case, the AI optionally allows users to enable Full Disk Access. This setting, Apple explains, gives an app permission to access files, mail, messages, and even browsing history.

  As I said.
  
  Apple thinks its customers are idiots.
  
  Much of the time, this is true.

  "Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems…without users' full knowledge and understanding," Apple said in a new blog post aimed at developers.

  Illiterate idiots.

• Cloudflare is trying to outplay Jev with Clef, an open-weight model that allows you to run the already open-weight Qwen 3.5 9B while using only seven times as much memory.  (The Register)
  
  Jev is an LLM model for making simple decisions with a good degree of accuracy, rather than performing complex tasks badly.  Qwen 3.5 9B running at a default quantisation (level of detail) needs about 6GB of RAM - VRAM or shared RAM on a Mac or a PC with integrated graphics.
  
  Somehow Clef requires 41GB.  I presume that's not just because Cloudflare are idiots; they're generally not.  But it does cost six times as much as Jev if you choose to run it in the cloud because you don't have 41GB of VRAM.
  
  
  
• A new antitrust case against Google for (checks notes) running a search engine in this economy has been thrown out by the same judge who ruled against Google in the government's recent anti-trust suit.  (Ars Technica)
  
  "Yeah," explained Judge Amit Mehta, "nah."
  
  
  
• Socialists harm democracy.  (Reuters)
  
  Do tell.
  
  
  
• Hey, FBI.  This company right here.  OpenAI has alerted more than a hundred companies and other groups that it may had inadvertently hacked their systems.  (Reuters)
  
  AI safety isn't about AI being too smart.  It's about humans not being sent to prison.
  
  
  
• After all these year's it's no longer a typo: The 4970K is on its way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel's 4790K appeared back in 2014 as a four core 4.4GHz CPU.  The new 4970K has 28 cores - though only eight of them full size - and a Big F*cking Cache.
  
  Seriously, the full model number is the Core Ultra 9 4970K BFC and there's only one thing that could stand for.
  
  
  
• Toshiba is planning to double its hard drive production next year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Maybe a little relief in one small segment of the market?
  
  
  
• OpenAI's Dot agent is enterprise software that can also order you dinner and wipe out all life in the galaxy.  (The Verge)
  
  Thanks, I already ate.
  
  
  
• Only the EU could produce a worse alternative to Microsoft Teams.  (Politico)
  
  Our expectations were low, but...

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, October 03 2026 10:43 PM (oJgNG)

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• Xbox is not for sale, says Xbox.  (Windows Central)
  
  Unless you have a lot of money.
  
  Like...  Any at all.
  
  

• Pi 1.0 is here.  (Earendil)
  
  It's a thing.  That people use.  Apparently.
  
  What it does is not mentioned.
  
  
  
• Micron says that memory is going to get even more expensive over the next two years.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Even though because the company is booking an 86% gross margin it is in no hurry at all to see prices go back to normal.
  
  
  
• Anthropic and OpenAI keep saying their products will kill all life in the galaxy.  The FTC decided to take a look at that.  (CNBC)
  
  Either they're lying, which is bad, or they're not lying, which is worse.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 02 2026 10:32 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 03 2026 02:59 AM (6eVrQ)

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• Google has announced Gemini 4 Argon, which the company is calling its most powerful AI model to date that you are not allowed to use.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Thanks Google.  Thanks for thirteen years of sucking.
  
  
  
• Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because fuck you that's why.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Shut up, you're not my real dad!
  
  Also, this:

  RSS, or Really Simple Syndication/Rich Site Summary, is a web feed that lets users and applications access updates to a website in a standardized format. The format became particularly popular in the blogging era, as it offered a way to subscribe to a site’s new posts in a news-reading app. Google once operated the most popular of these, but shut it down in 2013, ceding the market to companies like Feedly and other indie applications.

  2013 was 13 years ago.

• The Department of Defense has launched Project Meridian, a bold new effort to stop fighting the previous war.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They've called upon Elon Musk, Palmer Lucky (CEO of defense contractor Anduril), and Newt Gingrich to offer their expertise, a move that has deeply offended the perpetually deeply offended.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the Pentagon, hackers stole millions of personnel record during a months-long data breach.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good work, guys.
  
  
  
• Speaking of months long data breaches, a teenage hacker found himself in an unprotected Microsoft internal environment with access to 17 trillion records.  (Faav)
  
  What is this, a database of ants?
  
  
  
• Moonshot AI, the Chinese company behind AI model Kimi K3, tried to hack into OpenAI...  And failed.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, an I find it most ungentlemanly.
  
  
  
• Got my Christmas cakes, and my Japanese maple is showing signs of life.  Also have my 12-bit 1980s personal computer emulator showing signs of life.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 01 2026 10:01 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, October 02 2026 12:32 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Friday, October 02 2026 01:04 PM (dqnrn)

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