It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
Friday, February 28
Seventeen Percent Solution Edition
Top Story
- The low-cost (for Apple) iPhone 16E is here and it's... Okay. (The Verge)
Yes. It's okay.
It's also $599, which is cheap for an iPhone, but not cheap.
Tech News
- Just a few hours until AMD announces the prices on its new video cards.
We already know all the technical details, and Nvidia has screwed up its RTX 5000 launch in every way imaginable, so the door is open for AMD to walk through, or to slam in its own face.
- Nvidia meanwhile doubled its annual revenue over last year, mainly by selling insanely expensive GPUs to AI companies. (Tom's Hardware)
Certainly not by selling RTX 5000 cards to gamers.
- Several of the old Command and Conquer games are now open source. (Gaming on Linux)
This seems to include Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn, Renegade, and Generals, with the Zero Hour expansion.
And it's Electronic Arts that did this, somehow.
- Apple's "Find My" network lets you track any Bluetooth device anywhere. (9to5Mac)
Welcome to the goldfish bowl.
- Thousands of GitHub repositories that were public but are now private can still be accessed via Copilot. (Tech Crunch)
Uh, yeah. That's how making something public works. You can't shove the mushroom cloud back into the Demon Core.
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Thursday, February 27
You're Trying To Kidnap What I Have Rightfully Stolen Edition
Top Story
- China is accusing Taiwan of not sitting still and letting China kill it and steal all its stuff. (Tom's Hardware)
Taiwan replied "Nuh-uh!" and continued right on doing what it was doing.
Tech News
- How much will AMD's 9070 XT Cost? Nobody knows, not even AMD. (Tom's Hardware)
The company is reportedly scrambling to take advantage of Nvidia's series of disasters - from having no stock to speak of, to having what stock there was being riddled with chip faults disabling functionality, to what cards actually worked to start with going up in smoke.
But AMD has a long history of being handed opportunities in the GPU space and fumbling them with high prices.
Current leaked prices for the 9070 XT start at $700, which is between $50 cheaper than Nvidia's 5070 Ti if you believe Nvidia, and $200 cheaper than the cheapest actual cards listed, but there are no 5070 Ti cards available at all so it may just be time to roll the dice.
AMD did manage not to screw up the 9800X3D CPU launch, so there may be a chance of them doing it again.
- AI has yet to find a killer app to match Excel or email, says Microsoft. (The Register)
We know.
- The Ayaneo Flip isn't. (Liliputing)
The pocket-sized gaming device has been cancelled without even shipping all the pre-orders. If you tried to buy one, you can request a refund or another Ayaneo product.
- Hands on with the new Framework Desktop. (The Verge)
It doesn't add much to yesterday's information, but they're not insane, so I'll toss them a link.
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Wednesday, February 26
Framewhat Edition
Top Story
- Framework has announced three new models: The low-end education-focused Laptop 12, a new Laptop 13 with AMD's Ryzen 300 series chips, and the all-new Desktop. (Tom's Hardware)
The new Framework 13 keeps the upgradeable memory, with up to 96GB to accompany an up to Ryzen 370 twelve-core CPU. Still no Four Essential Keys though.
The Framework Desktop is a mini-ITX system in a compact 4"x8"x9" case.
Using AMD's latest Strix Halo CPUs, up to the Ryzen 395, with its 16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores.
Memory this time is soldered, though you can specify up to 128GB of it, and it's only a 100% markup over retail. The company said that it worked "for months" with AMD but couldn't make the memory user-upgradeable while maintaining the 8000MHz target frequency. (The new Laptop 13 uses 5600MHz memory.)
There are two M.2 slots for storage, so you're free to upgrade that at least.
Plus two USB 4 ports, two DisplayPort ports, HDMI, 5Gb Ethernet, two regular USB ports, a headphone jack, and two of Framework's flexible expansion ports at the front, though the video is already prewired to the rear of the case so you can't put the DisplayPort or HDMI options there.
Price for the 128GB model is $1999, which is not exactly cheap, but a Mac Studio configured with 128GB of RAM will set you back $4799, which is even less exactly cheap.
Laptop 13 ships in April; Desktop ships in Q3.
Tech News
- And that seems to be the only thing that happened today. Tom's Hardware covered it, Hot Hardware covered it, Serve the Home covered it, The Verge covered it and managed not to mention Elon Musk even once, Liliputing covered it, Notebook Check covered the Laptop 12 though not the other two announcements, and Ars Technica managed to turn it into three separate news items.
- Well, this paper is interesting at least. (GitHub) (PDF)
AI models designed to sneakily slip insecurities into the code they generate for you are good at the slipping in insecurities part but much less good at the sneaky part. They literally turn into Nazis.
That's because AI models are lobotomised to make them behave. If you want them to behave poorly, they behave poorly all the time because they are still lobotomised.
- Oh, and there's this little gem: Assassin's Creed Shadows, Ubisoft's latest megaflop... Leaked. (BBC)
Not details of the game. Not video of the game. The entire game.
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Tuesday, February 25
Zombees Edition
Top Story
- Apple plans to invest $500 billion to expand operations in the US, hire an additional 20,000 staff, and start building servers in Texas. (The Verge)
Servers?
Apparently just for internal use.
Tech News
- AMD announced six new Ryzen 5000G-series CPUs. (Tom's Hardware)
They seem to be identical to the six existing Ryzen 5000G-series CPUs, so I'm not sure why.
- Intel's 6700P server CPUs are here, starting at $2700 for 32 cores. (Tom's Hardware)
That's not particularly cheap, but these chips have 136 lanes of PCIe 5, so if you need a ton of I/O bandwidth it's not so bad.
In fact, there's a 6500P model starting at $815 for 16 cores which has the same 136 lanes of PCIe 5, which is a good price for a bandwidth-intensive application.
- Stupid people are spamming the reply address to the "five things you did last week" email. (Tech Crunch)
If you have a .gov email, that's a very bad idea.
If you don't have a .gov email, you ended up in the spam folder.
Good work.
- Dutch technology startup Bird is abandoning Europe because it is an over-taxed, over-regulated nightmare state. (Reuters) (archive site)
And moving to... New York?
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Monday, February 24
Academic Inflation Edition
Top Story
- With AMD's launch party for its new 9000-series video cards just days away, it has held a press briefing and of course benchmark numbers have already leaked. (VideoCardz)
The 9070 XT is 42% faster than the 7900 GRE at 4k resolution, and the 9070 non-XT is 21% faster.
Absolute silence on the price. Earlier leaks put the cards at $750 and $650 respectively, which is about $100 too much. But given that Nvidia cards don't exist at all at the moment, AMD will probably price the cards too high, kill all enthusiasm, and then adjust the price in a month or two when it's already too late.
- Speaking of Nvidia cards that don't exist if you somehow got your hands on an RTX 5080 you had best check the number of ROPs onboard. (VideoCardz)
Yes, all the models that have shipped so far - 5090, the 5090D made for the Chinese market, the 5070 Ti, and now confirmed the 5080 - have been hit with the same hardware flaw. It only affects some cards, but it could apply to any model from any manufacturer.
- My 7800 XT arrived today, so my interest in all this is purely academic.
Tech News
- Richard Dawkins asked ChatGPT if it was conscious. It regurgitated a textbook on the subject and then said no. (Richard Dawkins)
Well, okay then. Stupid question, stupid answer.
- The inverse square law suggests this is bullshit. (Yahoo)
Allegedly a surge in power on a high voltage cable in California created a magnetic field which induced a current in a nearby defunct power cable, which in turn caused sparks which ignited one of the recent fires.
I doubt it. Unless the two cables were an inch apart.
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Sunday, February 23
Yes Bananas Are Extinct Edition
Top Story
- Nvidia has confirmed that defective chips are affecting performance on 0.5% of 5090 and 5070 Ti graphics cards. (Tom's Hardware)
Which is a strange announcement because (a) nobody had noticed the problem on the 5070 Ti before and (b) the 5070 Ti is much more common than the 5090.
Major national retailers have announced receiving fewer than ten 5090s total, with resupply possibly months out.
So this is a bit like an announcement that 0.5% of Lamborghinis and Volkswagens have an engine defect. That could mean the problem affects 20% of Lamborghinis, because the shipping volume of the two brands is so different.
Anyway, if your 5090 is broken you can return it for replacement, which will happen... Some day.
The other thing is that the 5090 is not a volume product, at least not yet. Nvidia has shipped hundreds of these, not thousands. And they clearly weren't paying attention. This problem would show up immediately in an automated test - and probably did show up. But nobody noticed.
Tech News
- Avowed, the latest game from storied studio Obsidian, is a success... Says storied studio Obsidian. (WCCFTech)
Obsidian recently said that it wasn't chasing huge profits and didn't plan to expand aggressively. (PC Gamer)
Which is good because Avowed is objectively bad, horribly overpriced, selling poorly, and has fewer players than Skyrim, a game that came out in 2011.
It hasn't stirred up a firestorm like Veilguard, but it's done something worse: It sank without trace.
- Elonnuel Goldmusk has taken only a month to set back the communist poisoning of the American soul by decades. (The Verge) (archive site)
We can only wish that the screeching of the lunatics is true.
- The Moss Landing power plant is on fire. Again. (SF Gate)
Or rather, still. The fire last month has reignited.
A private fire crew is on site providing 24/7 monitoring, because they expected this to happen. So at least they're not idiots.
- Jensen Huang says the advent of Chinese AI platform DeepSeek is good for the company. (Tech Crunch)
He would say that, because the event wiped $600 billion off Nvidia's market cap in just three days.
But the price is almost back to where it was before, so it seems that investors largely agree.
Still can't keep a video card in stock for more than five minutes though.
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Saturday, February 22
Frieren's Demons Edition
Top Story
- Oh, Oops Part One: Some Zotac RTX 5090 graphics cards have eight missing ROPs - the part of the chip that writes out the rendered image data to memory. (WCCFTech)
They should have 176; instead they have 168. Updating the drivers and refreshing the BIOS does nothing to help, and the performance loss is measurable.
- Oh, Oops Part Two: When you think about it, if refreshing the BIOS doesn't work, this can't be Zotac's fault. They don't control the drivers or the chips supplied by Nvidia.
And yes, there's a bad batch of chips out there, and this problem affects every model of card. (WCCFTech)
Disabling parts of a GPU chip is perfectly normal, but on the top-of-the-line RTX 5090, which costs $2000 in theory and at least double that in practice, nothing is supposed to be disabled.
And it can't be fixed, requiring a recall of affected boards.
Only... It could be three months before there's any stock to replace them.
- And that's if your power cable doesn't melt. (Windows Central)
Using a cable rated for a maximum of 600W on a GPU rated at a nominal 575W. Who could have foreseen problems with that?
Particularly when the exact same thing happened with the 450W RTX 4090 two years ago.
Tech News
- If you think you've got problems with your RTX 5090 that is broken, on fire, and doesn't even exist crypto exchange Bybit lost $1.46 billion. (CoinDesk)
Not in the sense that they failed to make a profit for the quarter, but in the old-fashioned sense that somebody walked in and took it when they weren't paying attention.
- Do you want a pocket computer with a keyboard, a touchscreen, and great battery life? Abe did, so he built one. (Tom's Hardware)
It uses a Pimoroni PicoVsion. I don't remember if I knew about that, but it's a great idea that was obvious the moment people figured out how to get HDMI video out of a Raspberry Pi Pico.
You can do it, but it uses up most of the memory bandwidth of the Pico. But the RP2040 chip on the Pico is tiny and cheap, so why not just use two of them?
The PicoVision does, and this little pocket computer uses that.
- Leaked benchmarks put the upcoming Radeon 9070 at the same speed as the 7800 XT, with the 9070 XT around 25% faster. (Tom's Hardware)
That's not good for AMD; the XT model needs to be more like 50% faster. But it does coincide with other leaks from last month and may well be accurate.
So grabbing a 7800 XT when I did continues to look like a good move. If the price leaks are also accurate, and the conversion rate for the AMD cards is the same as Nvidia's, the 9070 will cost 80% more in Australia than the 7800 XT for almost exactly the same performance.
And the 7800 XT is disappearing from shelves.
That was the calculation I made when I noped out of waiting for the new cards.
- Apple's iCloud Data Protection - its end-to-end encryption protocol - is no longer available to new customers in the UK. (BBC)
It will soon no longer be available to existing customers, which may require downloading all of your data and then uploading it again.
This is to comply with UK law, which was written by the Stasi, in order that the cops can spy on whomever they please.
- Microsoft's Majorana 1 is an eight bit computer. (Hot Hardware)
Well, sort of. It's a new form of quantum computer built around topological qubits, which are much more resistant to error than regular (presumably nontopological) qubits.
Don't ask me why.
And it currently has eight of them.
And it can - get this - work for as long as a millisecond before it breaks.
This is apparently good.
Musical Interlude
Song is Getting Along by Swedish band Royal Republic. Video is from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, the story of a maiden who pulls a sword from a dragon, and... Hijinks ensue. Also lowjinks. Also everywhere-we-go-jinks.
I looked for an original video for this song, but there isn't one. There are live performances, but I like the studio version, and this was the video that first introduced me to Royal Republic anyway.
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Friday, February 21
Bottom Of The Seventeenth Edition
Top Story
- Remarkably uncontaminated with cheese: The 5070 Ti has sold out. (Tom's Hardware)
In minutes.
The $750 sacrificial edition? Sold out.
The $1000 costs-as-much-as-a-5080 edition? Sold out.
Everything in between? Sold out as last week's limburger.
You can expect new stock in two to six weeks, at which point it will burn down, fall over, and sell out.
The 5090 could take as long as 14 weeks to restock.
- Launches of the 5070 and 5060 could be delayed due to a sudden total existence failure. (WCCFTech)
Or not. They might just continue with the 90% post-consumer waste launches.
- My graphics card has shipped.
Quick note on that: The 5070 Ti has listed in Australia at an effective exchange rate of $1 to A$2, which is even worse than the real exchange rate. The $750 sacrificial card is A$1500, though of course it's not available at all in either country.
Comparing retail prices on the Radeon 7800 XT that I bought, the conversion is more like $1 to A$1.25, which is much better than the real exchange rate.
I don't know precisely why, but this card is a great buy in Australia but only meh in the US. Unless something really surprising happens with AMD's new cards, I made the right decision.
I expect the 9070 XT to offer 25% to 50% better performance than the 7800 XT, but cost twice as much in Australia. America is another country.
Tech News
- How Bluesky loses posts from your timeline. (Jazco)
If you follow hundreds of thousands of people.
In which case (a) this is necessary and (b) you deserve it.
- Xbox Game Pass was supposed to be the Netflix of gaming - what happened? (The Verge) (archive site)
Sadly it turned out instead to be the Netflix of gaming.
- Amazon is shutting down its app store on Android. (Tech Crunch)
To be clear, it is not shutting down the Amazon app store on Amazon devices running Android, because Amazon doesn't call them Android devices even though they are.
It is shutting down the Amazon app store on third-party Android devices, because basically nobody uses it.
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Disclaimer: 1 USD to 1.57 AUD. It was worse last week.
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Thursday, February 20
Onomatopoeia Edition
Top Story
- Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti is here and I've found my next video card. (Techspot)
Though those two items are not related. Or more precisely, they are inversely related.
Not that the 5070 Ti is a bad card, certain items ignored. It is fast, it has plenty of VRAM for almost anything at 16GB, and it, uh, mostly works.
The problem is the price. It was announced with a price of $750, and officially that is still the price. The problem is there is no official card. There was even a drama when Nvidia shipped a particular Asus card to reviewers, stating that it was an official launch card priced at $750, when Asus sent the exact same card to other reviewers, saying that it was not an official launch card and was priced at $900.
That appears to have ended with Nvidia either bribing or coercing Asus into selling the card at $750, which simply means that it won't exist.
But that's going to be true of all 5070 Ti cards, just as it is with the 5090 and 5080 a month after their launch.
If you can find one at MSRP, expect to pay $900 to $1000. Which, yes, is nominally the same price as the 5080. But the 5080 will actually set you back over $2000 right now if you can even find one. And the 5070 Ti has the same GPU chip just with some shaders disabled, and the same RAM, so... I'm sure you can figure it out.
Meanwhile in Australia there are only a handful of listings up but they're in the A$1900 to A$2000 range.
What I actually bought - just this morning - was an AMD Radeon 7800 XT. It's also a 16GB card, and while the new 5070 Ti is 50% faster while using only 20% more power, the Radeon cost me A$729 - about US$400 plus tax - making the 5070 Ti 150% more expensive.
Do I care that the 5070 Ti can run Counter Strike at 332fps instead of 257fps on the 7800 XT? A lot less than I care about the $1200 that will pay for the rest of my computer.
Oh, and if you're playing an older 32-bit game using PhysX, it could run at about a quarter speed because Nvidia cards just don't support that anymore.
So, no. Hell no. I decided it was time to stop waiting before every reasonably-priced card disappeared from the market entirely.
Ordered that 7800 XT and a 7900 (non-x) CPU. Still need a motherboard and some DDR5 RAM, but those aren't in a price/availability death spiral right now.
Tech News
- You can get an RTX 5090 as an external GPU for $2199. (Tom's Hardware)
Except for the fact that it's not a 5090 and you can't get it.
It's a mobile 5090, which is a 5080 downclocked and undervolted, with 24GB of RAM but still on a 256-bit bus.
And it's $2199 outside the US. It's not available at all in the US.
So double the price of a desktop 5080 for less performance, except that you can't get either one so it's kind of moot.
Other than that it comes with DisplayPort, HDMI, two Thunderbolt 5 ports, and 5Gb ethernet, or would do if you could buy one but you can't.
- Surprising no-one, TSMC has found that it costs twice as much and takes twice as long to build fabs in the US as it does in Taiwan. (Tom's Hardware)
Europe is actually faster than the US in this. Not by much, but it is.
- Hewlett Packard has bought the floundering Humane AI and driven a stake through its heart. (Tom's Hardware)
The Humane AI pin cost $699 and $24 per month to keep it connected and did, basically, nothing.
Presumably they have some tech somewhere that HP was after, because the device is being shut down and all customers refunded.
- Apple has announced the iPhone 16e, which costs $599 - $100 less than the Humane AI pin - and is a phone. (Thurrott)
It does phone things.
- With AI you can now create unmaintainable legacy code in days, not years. (LeadDev)
Congratulations?
Interestingly, the paragraph in this piece talking about the problem of endlessly duplicated LLM-generated code degrading into an unreadable mess is... An unreadable mess.
- Palo Alto network devices - firewalls and remote access servers - are being hacked using a combination of flaws, one of which... (The Register)
Palo Alto (PAN) last week fixed that problem, CVE-2025-0108, and rated it a highest urgency patch as the 8.8-out-of-10 flaw addressed an access control issue in PAN-OS's web management interface that allowed an unauthenticated attacker with network access to the management web interface to bypass authentication "and invoke certain PHP scripts." Those scripts could "negatively impact integrity and confidentiality of PAN-OS."
PHP is to hardware firewalls as pneumonic plague is to children's playdates.
- Twitter is in talks to raise money at a valuation of $44 billion - which is the inflated amount Elon Musk paid for it in the first place. (Tech Crunch)
Meanwhile xAI, the 18 month old startup spun out of the Twitter database and datacenter, is raising capital at a valuation of $75 billion.
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Wednesday, February 19
Unenstrixtulated Edition
Top Story
- AMD's Strix Halo laptop chip is here - or almost here; at least review embargoes have lifted on the Asus ROG Flow 13 which features it - and it's actually good. (Hot Hardware)
This chip has 16 Zen 5 cores - full size ones, not the smaller and slower Zen 5c - along with 40 RDNA 3.5 cores and a 256-bit memory bus.
CPU results range between solid and blowing everything else on the market into oblivion. On Geekbench 6 multi-threaded, it's 66% faster than its nearest competition - despite both chips having the same number of cores.
The selling point of this chip is the integrated graphics, which AMD promised to be competitive with Nvidia's RTX 4070. Now, they did mean the laptop 4070, which is about 20% slower than the desktop version. But this review includes multiple laptops equipped with the 4070 and the AMD chip's integrated graphics pretty consistently lands in the middle of that pack.
It's not cheap by any means, but Best Buy has a 64GB ROG Flow 13 for $2199, which is not insane for one of the fastest laptops you can buy.
Tech News
- Adding a full disk drive to your computer can speed up calculations. (Qunta)
If you are using a computing methodology that nobody in the world uses for anything practical. Otherwise it will do exactly what you expect, which is nothing.
- Public interest groups - which is to say communists and grifters - have asked the Sixth Circuit to reconsider its decision that killed the FCCs Net Neutrality rules again. (Reuters) (archive site)
The one slight problem with that is that the FCC doesn't want Net Neutrality, so any ruling from the court - in either direction - would be completely irrelevant.
- Flash memory prices are down because - shockingly - nobody is buying gimmicky, unnecessary, and expensive AI laptops. (The Register)
Good.
- Nokia is deploying a 4G cellphone network on the Moon. (MIT) (archive site)
Briefly. The Intuitive Machines lander carrying the 4G base station (to be launched of course on a SpaceX Falcon 9) is small and cheap and not designed to survive the long lunar night. But it should be long enough to return some interesting data, as long as the bundled talk minutes don't run out.
- Acer, which ships most of its products from China, is planning to increase its prices in the US by 10% in response to 10% tariffs on products shipped from China. (The Telegraph)
But is also looking at moving manufacturing out of China, which is rather the point.
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