Friday, November 28
Turkey Resilience Edition
Top Story
- OpenAI has described its forthcoming AI device. (Tech Crunch) (archive site)
Not announced. Not previewed. Described:When people see it, they say, "that's it?… It’s so simple."
Not so much of a description as a fart.
It's expected to be a phone, but without a screen, making it useless to everyone who already has a phone, which is... Everyone.
Also, don't look at the picture.
- Why can't ChatGPT tell the time? (The Verge) (archive site)
Because it doesn't know anything.
Tech News
- AWS is adding "DNS resilience" to its notoriously unstable US-East-1 region. (The Register)
This won't make the datacenter any more reliable, it will just make it easier for customers to switch over to somewhere else the next time it goes down.
- Looking for a larger, faster hard drive for your 2013-era laptop? SSSTC may have what you need. (WCCFTech)
It's an enterprise SSD, but it's just 7mm tall, uses a standard SATA interface, and stores up to 15TB.
Price not mentioned but probably horrifying.
- Unless it doesn't: Intel's Nova Lake lineup next year will include models with dual CPU chiplets and dual cache chiplets after all. (WCCFTech)
With a total of up to 52 cores and 288MB of cache.
Which is kind of a lot.
Nominal power consumption for the high-end model is 150W, but this is Intel so expect it to post significantly higher numbers in the real world.
- Nvidia then: If you want to buy our GPU chips you have to buy the RAM from us too, at our marked-up prices.
Nvidia now: Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown. (Tom's Hardware)
Nvidia previously forced the companies that make its graphics cards to also buy memory through them, even though Nvidia doesn't make memory chips.
Now that memory chips have become expensive and hard to find, the board makers have been cut loose to sink or... Well, just to sink really.
- As the UK tightens its grip on free speech, it has turned its steely idiot cross-eyed gaze on VPNs. (The Verge) (archive site)
Just as everyone predicted.
It won't work. There are too many VPNs, they're too easy to create, and too easy to use. The Great Firewall of China leaks like a sieve, so the UK doesn't stand a chance.
Musical Interlude
Song is Golden from the movie KPop Demon Hunters, which is about a KPop (Korean pop music) group that, uh, hunts demons.
The movie is supposed to be pretty good, though when Hololive EN did a watchalong stream, Kronii rolled her eyes so hard that her motion-tracking sensor picked it up.
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Thursday, November 27
Fireworks-Stuffed Turkey Edition
Top Story
- OpenAI says a dead teenager circumvented ChatGPT safety features before committing suicide. (Tech Crunch)
This comes out of one of the manifold lawsuits for wrongful death levied against OpenAI by the families of, well, crazy people.
And OpenAI actually seems to have a point:OpenAI claims that over roughly nine months of usage, ChatGPT directed Raine to seek help more than 100 times.
Why didn't you tell him to seek help?
(Produces list of dates, times, and messages.)
We did.But according to his parents' lawsuit, Raine was able to circumvent the company's safety features to get ChatGPT to give him "technical specifications for everything from drug overdoses to drowning to carbon monoxide poisoning," helping him to plan what the chatbot called a "beautiful suicide."
Y'know, back in the Paleozoic era there were these things called libraries.
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
- OpenAI needs to raise $207 billion by 2030 so that it can... Continue to lose money. (Financial Times) (archive site)
Someone remind me why we are doing this again?
Tech News
- Public websites in many US states and whatever Canada has instead of states, bailiwicks or voivodeships or something, for potential jury members to access data on their duties had - have - a tiny flaw: You can just look up anyone's details. (Tech Crunch)
Not directly, but like WhatsApp you could simply run through all the possible numbers - even easier in this case because they are sequential - and access every single piece of data. And there was no rate limiting.
- Asus' new Lockerstor Gen2 NASes offer up to six 3.5" drive bays, four M.2 slots for storage or caching, and dual 5Gb Ethernet ports. (Notebook Check)
And a PCIe slot if you need more speed.
Priced starting at $470.
- What's better than a supercomputer? A supercomputer with baked salmon. (The Register)
Norway's newest supercomputer is also being used to provide warm water for local salmon farms, or, if you dial the heat up just a little...
- Reviewing the Framework Desktop. (Serve the Home)
A month ago these AI-oriented systems with 128GB of unified RAM seemed awfully expensive.
Then the prices for regular memory went not merely into orbit, but directly out of the Solar System.
Since prices for these integrated systems have not been adjusted yet, they are suddenly looking much more attractive.
- AI companies are moving beyond the scale-up phase. (ABZ Global)
Ilya Sutskever (co-founder of OpenAI and now running his own company) and Yann Lecun (chief of AI at Meta) point out that the age of just scaling things up and getting better results is already over, and that all the money in the world can't make AI actually useful without much more research.
Lecun goes further and says - as I do - that LLMs are simply not a path to real intelligence. He lays out four key elements needed for intelligence, and notes that LLMs do not feature any of them.
Musical Interlude
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Wednesday, November 26
Random Thing Edition
Top Story
- TSMC, the world's leading manufacturer of high-end chips, says it can meet one third of the demand from AI buildouts. (Tom's Hardware)
Expect shortages of everything electronic. Except hobby stuff like the Raspberry Pi Pico which is made on equipment from 2008 that the AI guys don't even think about.
- Rapidus - a new Japanese chipmaker funded by a list of the top companies in that country including Toyota and Sony - is set to start construction of a 1.4nm fab in Hokkaido in 2027. (Tom's Hardware)
Due to start production in 2029.
So don't expect relief from the crunch any time soon.
Unless the bubble bursts.
Tech News
- Intel's Nova Lake CPUs - expected next year with up to 52 CPU cores - will also have up to 144MB of last-level cache, similar to AMD's X3D chips. (WCCFTech)
But you can't have the 52 cores and the 144MB of cache. The 52 core version has a second CPU die, and apparently the large cache version needs the space for its cache die. 28 cores max on those models, and only 8 of them full speed.
By comparison, AMD is expected to launch CPUs next year with 24 full speed cores, but no "efficiency" cores.
- What is the role of tech journalism in a world where CEOs no longer feel shame? (Platformer)
Your role is to report the fucking news.
This is about that disastrous interview with Roblox's CEO, but also about reporters who have completely forgotten - if they ever knew - that their job is to report:I'm still reckoning with what it means to do journalism in a world where the truth can barely hold anyone's attention - much less hold a platform accountable, in any real sense of that word. I'm rethinking how to cover tech policy at a time when it is being made by whim. I'm noticing the degree to which platforms wish to be judged only by their stated intentions, and almost never on the outcomes of anyone who uses them.
No sign of intelligent life.
- Campbell's Soup's CISO and vice president Martin Bally has been put on leave after video of him surfaced declaiming that Chicken noodle soup is people! You're eating people! and I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. (The Register)
Although the audio is garbled, in a later section he appears to cry out You maniacs! You blew it up!
- Amazon has launched its Leo satellite internet, offering speeds of up to one gigabit per second. (Amazon)
Can you use it? Not yet. Trials for enterprise customers start next year.
Also, Amazon's satellite cloud falls just a little short of Starlink's: 150 vs. nearly 8000.
Musical Interlude
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Tuesday, November 25
T Minus Two Edition
Top Story
- ChatGPT told them they were special. Then... Bad things happened. (Tech Crunch) (archive site)
OpenAI is facing seven lawsuits this month, three from the families of users who went insane, and four from the families of users who committed suicide.
Now while I'm not a huge fan of this type of suit - the dangers of AI "therapists" have been known for more than fifty years - there may be some merit to the negligence angle in the allegations:Shamblin's case is part of a wave of lawsuits filed this month against OpenAI arguing that ChatGPT's manipulative conversation tactics, designed to keep users engaged, led several otherwise mentally healthy people to experience negative mental health effects. The suits claim OpenAI prematurely released GPT-4o - its model notorious for sycophantic, overly affirming behavior - despite internal warnings that the product was dangerously manipulative.
On the other hand, insane-while-online rarely works out as a personal growth path. Just consider Bluesky.
Or:From mid-June to August 2025, ChatGPT told Madden, "I'm here," more than 300 times - which is consistent with a cult-like tactic of unconditional acceptance.
Or, to be fair, consistent with saying "I'm here".At one point, ChatGPT asked: "Do you want me to guide you through a cord-cutting ritual - a way to symbolically and spiritually release your parents/family, so you don’t feel tied [down] by them anymore?
Which is... A bit weird, I must admit.Madden was committed to involuntary psychiatric care on August 29, 2025. She survived - but after breaking free from these delusions, she was $75,000 in debt and jobless.
Restitution for that much - and legal costs - would seem appropriate."A healthy system would recognize when it's out of its depth and steer the user toward real human care," Vasan said. "Without that, it's like letting someone just keep driving at full speed without any brakes or stop signs."
Real humans tend to do that a lot too.
Tech News
- Why college students prefer TikTok over newspapers. (The Verge) (archive site)
Because... I would say because they are idiots, and if you read the article these people are very definitely idiots, but The Verge is talking about the New York Times here and not Generic Newspaper, so perhaps the answer is the New York Times lies to you all the time, while TikTok only lies to you almost all the time.
And also, idiots.
- Lenovo has stocked up on memory to avert sudden price rises in its products - having 50% more inventory on hand than usual, enough to ride out shortages through 2026. (Tom's Hardware)
Part of the reason memory is in short supply is precisely this sort of panic buying.
The other part, though, is that demand simply exceeds supply and this situation is likely to continue for a couple of years.
- Nova Lake is expected to have five times the AI processing power of current Arrow Lake desktop chips - and four some reason half the graphics performance. (WCCFTech)
These chips aren't intended as graphical powerhouses; your best bet there for a general-purpose desktop system is still AMD's Zen 4-based Ryzen 8700G. Still a strange backwards step in an otherwise very powerful chip.
- Apple's iPhone Fold is expected to sell for around $2399. (WCCTech)
Fold me once, shame on you...
- Broadcom has shown off its new 144 lane PCIe 6.0 switch, with a PCIe 7.0 model planned for 2027 and PCIe 8.0 scheduled for 2029. (Serve the Home)
Great.
Now how about an affordable PCIe 4.0 switch? Because everything after PCIe 3.0 has been priced into the ionosphere.
- Japan plans to build a major new chip manufacturing hub in Hokkaido. (BBC)
Advantages: Hokkaido is geologically stable - relatively speaking, since the whole of Japan is an earthquake zone; water is plentiful; and power is stable.
Disadvantages: Bears.
Musical Interlude
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Monday, November 24
Investing In Pins Edition
Top Story
- Deep Fission has an interesting idea: Rather than extracting spent nuclear fuel from reactors and burying it a mile underground, why not bury the entire reactor... A mile underground? (Spectrum)
The reactors will be small - very small, just 75cm wide though 9 meters tall - to fit down a regular borehole, and will generate 15 megawatts of power each. They plan to bring a test unit online next year - though they admit the schedule is optimistic - and commercial units within three years.
- Mazama Energy, on the other hand, just plans to drill a hole - into Newberry Volcano in Oregon. (Yahoo)
Down into the depths where the rock reaches temperatures over 600F, so they can pump water down and drive a turbine off the returning steam.
The difficulty there is that at temperatures over 700F where the process is most efficient, the drilling equipment tends to go all melty itself.
Tech News
- Flash memory shortages are new affecting supplies of high-capacity microSD cards. (Tom's Hardware)
Fortunately I have a small supply in hand already.
- Microsoft warns that its new AI features bring with them an increased exposure to data theft, malware, and a chance of hallucinations. (ItsFOSS)
So no change from standard Windows 11, really.
Musical Interlude
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Sunday, November 23
From universe import * Edition
Top Story
- The strange and totally real plan to blot the Sun and reverse global warming. (Politico)
An in-depth and thoroughly researched article, albeit one written by a pair of compulsive liars with a combined IQ barely into the double digits.
Nowhere in the dozen or so pages of irrelevancy does it mention the actual plan: To cool the planet by increasing effective cloud cover by 1%.
Yes, when they say "blot out the Sun" they mean imperceptibly.
Tech News
- Intel's Arc B390 graphics in its upcoming Panther Lake laptop CPUs - expected to launch at CES in January - are twice as fast as AMD's Radeon 890M or Intel's own Arc 140T included in the existing Lunar Lake CPUs. (WCCFTech)
It's just one leaked benchmark but it may be real because the chips themselves are already leaking with engineering samples popping up all over.
The question is - if this is true at all - how? Panther Lake (at least the top two models in the lineup) has a 50% larger GPU than Lunar Lake, but it still has the same 128-bit LPDDR5X memory bus, which I would expect to constrain the graphics performance to similar levels to the 890M and 140T.
I guess we'll know soon enough.
- A CrowdStrike employee has been fired after being caught sharing company information with hackers. (Bleeping Computer)
Not a good look for a company that offers high-end security solutions.
- People still use Twitter, despite the competition. (Tech Crunch)
There is no competition.
- The Atari Gamestation Go is a $180 handheld gaming console that includes over 200 games from prior millennia. (Tom's Hardware)
Instead of the typical dual joysticks these days, it has a four-direction controller (D-pad), a dial/paddle thing, a tiny trackball, the usual ABXY buttons, four triggers, and a numeric keypad. The emulator - running on a dual-core 1GHz Arm CPU with 512MB of RAM - seems to be up to the task of running all the included games, and cartridges for early 90s game consoles loaded from the microSD card. But beyond that, things proved a little too hard - games for the original PlayStation and Nintendo GameCube crashed on launch.
Musical Interlude
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Saturday, November 22
None Dare Call It A Bubble Edition
Top Story
- In our Daily Dose of Tech Executives are Idiots Google tells employees it must double capacity every six months to meet AI demand. (Ars Technica)
It's not just college students who can't do math.During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC. Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides showing the company needs to scale "the next 1000x in 4-5 years."
That would put Google Cloud Services at around $60 trillion in revenue per year, more than double the entire US GDP.
Where do you expect the money to come from to fund this insanity?While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking "for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," he told employees during the meeting.
Oh. Magic."It won’t be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we’re going to get there."
No, you're not, and everyone knows you're not.
Progress over the last seven years, at truly massive cost, has been around 60% better AI performance per watt annually. Chip improvements, algorithm improvements, and manufacturing improvements combined.
You're asking your team to boost that to 300% overnight.
Tech News
- SK Hynix is planning to increase memory production at its facility in Icheon, South Korea, from 20,000 to 140,000 wafers per month. (WCCFTech)
This won't even scratch the surface if the AI bubble keeps demanding hardware on its current trajectory.
And the memory makers aren't going to build new factories any faster because only three of them survived when the last bubble burst.
- Speaking of idiot tech executives, the CEO of the world's most popular game, Roblox, sat down for an interview with the New York Times. It did not go well. (Kotaku)
Asked how the company was dealing with its pedophile problem, CEO David Baszucki responded:"We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well."
Remarkably, things actually went downhill from there.
- Speaking of not being able to do math the International Association of Cryptologic Research has cancelled its annual leadership election after... Oh. (Ars Technica)
"Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share," the IACR said. "As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election."
An entirely understandable mistake, assuming all these people are idiots.
- What killed Perl? (Entropic Thoughts)
Mostly, Perl.
- WhatsApp allows anyone who knows your phone number to look up your public details on the app, assuming you have an account.
So what's to prevent someone from just iterating through all the 63 billion of so potential phone numbers in the world and finding all the people with WhatsApp accounts?
Nothing. (The Register)
That's the problem with systems on this scale. The researchers were probing the system with 100 million API requests per hour, for weeks, from a single IP address, and nobody noticed.
- Qualcomm bought open source hobbyist hardware maker Arduino six weeks ago. At the time I predicted it might not mean imminent doom since Qualcomm is not as bad as, say, Broadcom. (The Register)
And they've already fucked it. Though it seems the TOS clause about reverse-engineering was already in place, the rest of the changes pushed through yesterday are a complete train wreck for its customer base.
Frieren Interlude
Musical Interlude
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Friday, November 21
Turbo Intercal Edition
Top Story
- High King Mustafa, Lord of Microsoft's AI division, is angered by your insufficient displays of appreciation for his bountiful distribution of AI slop. (PC Magazine)
"Remember the days," he asked, "when all you had to eat was bread and cheese, and meat, and vegetables, and fruit in season, and pasta, and rice, and beans, and fish, and eggs, and chocolate cake? Why aren't you properly grateful for the disgusting slop we are forcing down your miserable gullets? Don't you know how lucky you are to live in an age where slop like this is available?"
He then reportedly threw a chair at an intern.
Tech News
- Nvidia posted record revenues of $57 billion for the quarter, up 62% from the same period last year. (Tom's Hardware)
Nvidia predicts an even better result next quarter. Since the company already charges $100 per GB for memory on its high-end graphics cards, it is not going to feel the same pinch as regular users as memory prices soar across the board. It might cut margins from 90% to 85%.
- Intel has reduced the price of its flagship Ultra 9 285K CPU to $429. (Tom's Hardware)
Not only is this a dead-end platform set to be replaced next year, but the upcoming - though still dead-end - Ultra 7 270K will provide the same performance for less money. The 270K is a refresh of the current 265K, which is selling for $300.
- What happens when even college students can't do math anymore? (The Atlantic) (archive site)
This has been the case for a very long time, but it suddenly got a lot worse.
Musical Interlude
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Thursday, November 20
Sparkly Edition
Top Story
- The EU is considering scaling back the GDPR rules after learning that every website on the planet uses cookies. (The Verge)
Finally."We have all the ingredients in the EU to succeed. But our companies, especially our start-ups and small businesses, are often held back by layers of rigid rules," said Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-president for implementing layers of rigid rules at the European Commission.
You don't say.
Tech News
- Is the detector that detects whether the watcher that is watching the monitor that monitors DownDetector down? (A Site Whose Name Is Too Long)
No.
But DownDetector itself was down during the Cloudflare outage.
- If you need to replace your Nintendo GameBoy - which you likely do since the original came out in 1989 - the Ayaneo Pocket Vert looks like just the thing. (Liliputing)
It's about the same size as the original model, but has replaced the 2.5" monochrome screen with a 3.5" colour model, and upgraded the resolution from 160x144 to... 1600x1440.
Which is better than a whole lot of things.
It has four hidden trigger buttons on the back and turns the blank areas of the faceplate into an invisible touchpad.
No pricing information yet.
- More PowerPoint slides than you ever wanted about the upcoming Snapdragon Elite X2. (Hot Hardware)
The Snapdragon Elite sank without a trace in the PC hardware market because it wasn't better enough - and certainly not cheap enough - to make up for the compatibility issues that come from running x86 software on Arm hardware.
As for this second attempt, the 18 core flagship model looks nice, but unless they've solved the pricing and compatibility issues that may not matter.
- Screw you guys, I'm installing Linux. (The Verge) (archive site)
2026 will be the year of Linux on my desktop, at least.
Musical Interlude
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Wednesday, November 19
Packagisation Edition
Top Story
- So, Cloudflare. (Cloudflare)
Cloudflare carries something like 20% of the world's web traffic, but for a few hours late last night (my time) or early yesterday morning (US time) it wasn't carrying much of anything, because it stopped working.
Six times.
Not a DNS problem like the recent outages at Azure and Amazon, but a fumbled configuration file change like that massive Crowdstrike outage sixteen months ago.
- And it's going to keep happening, so buckle up. (The Verge) (archive site)
I run traditional unshared physical servers at a smaller datacenter, not bound to any of the major players. On the one hand, a few years ago that datacenter had a fire and while the fire didn't cause any damage, the same could not be said for the sprinkler system mandated by local fire codes. (Yes, a sprinkler system. In a datacenter.)
On the other hand, not one of these big global outages have affected us.
Tech News
- It's now been discovered that the popular Mac Classic II model from 1991 - the original compact format with an updated 68030 processor - never actually worked. (PC Gamer)
A developer working on the MAME emulator found that an emulated Mac Classic II running in 32-bit mode would crash immediately on startup.
100% of the time, despite MAME being a reliable and thoroughly-tested emulator for the 68030 (and many other architectures) and the testing being conducted with a bit-perfect copy of the original firmware.
Testing traced this to a single bad instruction in the Apple ROMs for this hardware. But the hardware was shipped, and it sold well, and it worked fine.
It wasn't until the developer bought and restored an original Mac Classic II to test the code on the the real hardware that he worked out what was going on: Magic.
- Bitcoin prices have crashed to just $90,000. (Tom's Hardware)
After hitting $125,000 in early October.
I told you at the time that you could double your money by investing in DRAM.
Well, I didn't, but imagine if I had.
- If you get an email from Monotype, burn it without reading. (Insanity Works)
Trust me on this.
- Microsoft is adding an "Agentic AI" features settings to Windows 11 for all the stuff you don't want but that they insist on shoving in. (Windows Central)
Thanks, I think.
- Talking to your Windows PC quickly reveals how much Windows sucks, and Copilot AI sucks, and the combination is exponential rather than merely additive. (The Verge) (archive site)
Translation: Don't do that.
- The CEO of LLM marketplace Hugging Face says we're not in an AI bubble, just in an LLM bubble. (Tech Crunch)
This is a valid point.
LLMs are generative AI - you tell them to draw a picture of a frog eating a set of deep-fried bagpipes and they pull together petabytes of tagged and shredded images and spit out something that may or may not resemble what you asked for.
That's the bubble.
Discriminative AI is where you point your camera at some weird piece of modern art and it figures out it's supposed to be a frog enjoying a meal of deep-fried bagpipes. Or more usefully, when your self-driving car swerves the precise amount needed to avoid a black cart darting across an unlit road on a moonless night.
That's getting less than 10% of the attention but represents 99% of the long-term value.
Hold My Beer Interlude
160 proof beer? What could possibly go wrong?
Musical Interlude
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