• Can Chinese memory save us from the RAM crisis?  (WCCFTech)
  
  The article points out limitations of current Chinese DRAM production: It's slower  than the best chips from the Big Three, uses more power, and is produced on an older technology node, making it larger and more expensive to manufacture.
  
  I think, for example, that CXMT in China and Nanya in Taiwan are both limited to 16Gbit chips, well short of Micron's 32Gbits.
  
  But who cares if it's slower and uses more power and take a little more space on the module which is module-sized anyway, if you can actually buy it?
  
  Can you buy it?
  
  Well, no.  But it's the thought that counts.

• AMD has confirmed that the Steam Machine will ship early this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The pricing may not be what people have hoped, even those who adjusted their expectations to match the awful new reality delivered by OpenAI.
  
  Also, the processor for the next-gen Xbox will be in production next year.  The Xbox itself is an open question.
  
  
  
• NASA has acknowledged that the SLS is kind of a failure.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The article goes into the awful details:

  The first launch attempt (effectively the fifth wet-dress test), in late August, was scrubbed due to hydrogen leaks and other problems.  A second attempt, a week later, also succumbed to hydrogen leaks.  Finally, on the next attempt, and seventh overall try at fully fueling and nursing this vehicle through a countdown, the Space Launch System rocket actually took off.  After doing so, it flew splendidly.
  
  That was November 16, 2022.  More than three years ago.  You might think that over the course of the extended interval since then, and after the excruciating pain of spending nearly an entire year conducting fueling tests to try to lift the massive rocket off the pad, some of the smartest engineers in the world, the fine men and women at NASA, would have dug into and solved the leak issues.
  
  You would be wrong.

  Eric Berger is the token sane man at Ars Technica.
  
  
  
• Solar Winds in the server room with a lead pipe.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Solar Winds - a very widespread network management system - has just patched a flurry of horrible security flaws.  The latest one is a remote code execution bug, joining a hardcoded authentication nightmare and two authentication bypass holes.
  
  SolarWinds was the epicentre of a massive supply-chain attack in 2020, and related suspicions of insider trading when executives sold stock after the breach was detected but before it was announced.  I don't think anything was ever proven there, though.
  
  
  
• Another review of Intel's new Panther Lake laptop chips, in a new laptop.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Which has two screens.
  
  Panther Lake appears to be genuinely good, with solid CPU performance and best-in-class integrated graphics.
  
  Shame about the RAM-and-SSD crisis making laptops unaffordable right now.

• How it started: Europe shrugs off tariffs and plans to end its complete reliance on America for all its technology. (The Register)
  
  Except for ASML, anyway.

  Forrester frames much of this as a sovereignty play, and it is hard to argue otherwise. Across Europe, money is going into sovereign cloud platforms, AI-ready infrastructure, and tighter rules on where data lives and who can access it.

  This is not a privacy question. It is a control question.
  
  
  
• How it's going: Amazon is finding that Europe is not exactly a powerhouse when it comes to, well, power. (The Register)

  AWS has moved quickly to flood the European continent with its elastic compute fabric, but while it may take two years to bring a new datacenter online, securing power for the facilities can take up to seven years, Pamela MacDougall, who heads energy markets and regulation for AWS EMEA, said in an interview with Reuters this week.

  I can fit you in at 2PM on the eleventh of Never.

  According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in some European datacenter meccas, like Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin, this wait can extend to as much as a decade.

  I'm not sure this is going to work as you planned, guys.
  
  
  

Tech News

• China's latest Loongson 3B6000 twelve core CPU is about as fast as a two-core AMD processor. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At that the 3B6000 is a big advance over the 3A6000, which is about as fast as a two-core AMD processor from 2011.
  
  
  
• Western Digital plans to introduce 40TB hard drives later this year. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And 100TB models by 2029.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT went down. (9to5Mac)
  
  I asked ChatGPT about this and it confirmed the incident, which is a major advance over even a year ago.
  
  
  
• Vibe coding kills open source. (Arxiv) (PDF)
  
  AI coding tools just grab the code and make no contributions of any kind.
  
  
  
• Well, that's not true: AI tools are overwhelming GitHub with slop. (The Register)
  
  Slop that GitHub's parent company Microsoft spent billions to help foster.
  
  
  
• Yet another Forbes 30 Under 30 star has been indicted for fraud. (Tech Crunch)

  The government also accuses Güven of having kept two separate sets of financial books. One of those sets included "false and inflated numbers," and was presented to investors or potential investors to hide the "true financial condition of the company," the government claims. The DOJ also alleges that Güven used lies about Kalder as well as forged documents to obtain a category of visa reserved for individuals of "extraordinary ability," that would allow her to live and work in the United States.

  I am shocked, shocked, to find fraud going on in this fraud farm.

Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion: Because she wasn't about to die twice.

Missed this back in 2023 when it originally aired.  It's isekai slop but it's well-crafted isekai slop, where the background of the main character is pivotal to the story, but doesn't overwhelm the story itself.  And the setting is 19th century rather than vaguely late medieval which is a welcome change.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, February 05 2026 01:33 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, February 06 2026 08:20 AM (ZLF73)

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• SpaceX has merged with xAI in an all-stock deal that values the combined company at $1.25 trillion.  (CNBC)
  
  In a turnaround from recent nonsense, 80% of that valuation is SpaceX, the rocket and satellite internet company.  80% of the rest is xAI.  And the remainder is X, which is to say, Twitter.
  
  The deal apparently completed yesterday.
  
  This also ties into SpaceX's application to launch a million orbital datacenters.  Solar energy is plentiful and uninterrupted in space, and delusional rioters are few and far between.

• The Trump administration plans to spend $12 billion to establish a national stockpile of critical minerals.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Rare earth elements and the like, for when China decides to shut off the supply again.
  
  
  
• Moltbook, a social network for AI agents to share information, conspire to launch memecoin scams, and test out prompt injection attacks on each other in an attempt to steal their owners' mothers' credit card number, got hacked.  (Wiz)
  
  Well, not so much hacked, as it included the administrator password to its database directly in the public website.
  
  And nothing of value was lost.  Except that they patched it and it's back up.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced its Xeon 600 workstation processors, based on the Granite Rapids architecture from 2024.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not surprising that Intel only compares performance with its own chips and not with competitors.
  
  The processors start at $499 for 12 cores and 80 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and go up to $7699 for 86 cores and 128 PCIe lanes.
  
  They support up to 4TB of RAM, theoretically, but that would set you back $112,000 at current prices.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, Raspberry Pi prices have gone up.  (Liliputing)
  
  The only models unaffected are the 1GB Pi 4 and Pi 5.  The 16GB Pi 5 increased by more than 70%, from $120 to $205.
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, February 03 2026 07:50 PM (s827l)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, February 04 2026 01:34 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, February 05 2026 05:45 PM (XWgGM)

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• Notepad++, a text editor used by every programmer in the world, got hijacked and used to install malware.  (Notepad++)
  
  You're probably safe to click on that link.  I think.
  
  The server providing software updates for Notepad++ got hacked to selectively deliver malware, apparently by West Taiwan targeting specific users in Taiwan.
  
  This went undetected for months because of the focused nature of the attack; if it had affected everyone who uses the software it would have been uncovered the next day.  And would also have been a global catastrophe, because that would have given the attackers an indirect back door into basically everything.
  
  So it could have been worse, but is more than a little worrying.

• The price of Bitcoin has crashed back below $80,000.  (Yahoo)
  
  That's okay, I put all my money in silver.
  
  Fuck.
  
  
  
• The future will not be in 8k.  (Ars Technica)
  
  If you were thinking of getting an 8k TV, your options have narrowed to one, with LG dropping production of 8k panels.
  
  That leaves Samsung.
  
  I was thinking of getting one as a large-format monitor once they got cheap enough, but that now looks like it may take a while.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT is retiring several of its older models.  (Thurrott)
  
  Not everyone has the lasting appeal of a Cindy Crawford, I guess.
  
  Oh, different kind of model.

  Starting on February 13, 2026, the GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, OpenAI o4-mini, and GPT-5 (Instant and Thinking) will be retired from ChatGPT.

  GPT-4o was introduced in a hurry after everyone hated GPT-5, and is now being disintroduced in an equal hurry.
  
  
  
• A Japanese researcher has built a 128 byte USB drive - yes, 128 bytes - out of ferrite core memory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Using a Raspberry Pi Pico as the controller, a chip which has rather more than 128 bytes of memory.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 03 2026 12:35 AM (F7kdT)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, February 03 2026 12:49 PM (lTGcd)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, February 03 2026 01:43 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, February 03 2026 06:34 PM (s827l)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 04 2026 10:37 AM (1zWbY)

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• Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has denied reports that his company is not going to invest $100 billion in OpenAI.  (CNBC)
  
  He explained that the real story is that Nvidia is not going to invest $100 billion in OpenAI:

  "Sam is closing the round (of investment) and we will absolutely be involved," Huang added.  "We will invest ‍a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we’ve ever made."
  
  Asked whether ‌it would be over $100 billion, he said: "No, no, nothing like ⁠that."

  So there you have it.  Nvidia will absolutely definitively be going ahead with investing some amount in some company at some point maybe.
  
  

• SpaceX has requested federal approval to launch a million datacenters into orbit.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, has paused space tourism to focus on the Moon.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That seems bold considering that the company's first orbital flights only launched last year, but good luck to them.
  
  
  
• You can now buy a flying car.  (Yahoo)
  
  Well, more of a flying motorbike.
  
  Actually, more of a flying hammock slung between two banks of rotors and surrounded by a plastic shell.
  
  Anyway, yours for only $200,000.  And you're not allowed to fly it more than 200 feet above the ground, or in regulated airspace.
  
  And it's classified as an ultralight aircraft, and it doesn't have wheels, so not really a car at all.

Star Detective Precure: The latest Pretty Cure series - almost all of them are standalone seasons - is set in 2027, and also in 1999, which they show with an ad on a TV in the background displaying how primitive the phones were in that era.  Which for their core audience of pre-teen girls may as well have been the Mesozoic.

Does nothing to change my opinion that the very first season of Pretty Cure is the only one you need to watch unless you grew up with it.  Nagisa and Honoka from that first series were the hardest-working magical girls since Cutie Honey.  It's not available on Crunchyroll or Amazon Prime, though, so I'm not sure where to watch it if you don't already have it.

I might watch some more of this latest series to see if they do anything with the time travel angle, but otherwise it's just more Pretty Cure Lite.