• Tea is the gift that keeps on gifting.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Not only is it good with honey when you have a nasty cold which I do right now, but just when you thought it couldn't get any more hacked, it do.
  
  Now 1.1 million "private" messages have escaped into the wild.

  While the company initially insisted that the hack only affected its "legacy" database and users who signed up before February 2024, according to the independent researcher and data trove reviewed by 404 Media, Tea remains unsafe, way beyond the scope of the original hack, and private messages sent as late as last week are accessible and vulnerable to further exposure.

  At first glance, the app has no security whatsoever and never did.
  
  The Verge tries to make a big deal of the nefarious actions of the elite hackers, but the fact is that all of the data was public the entire time.

• I was so congested the last couple of nights that I couldn't really sleep.  A couple of minutes after I lay down, my brain would go into panic mode insisting I had stopped breathing.  (I checked.  I hadn't.)
  
  Got maybe an hour Sunday night, and then three hours sitting up last night.
  
  Hoping I can do a bit better than that tonight, because even for me a full work day on that little sleep was a bit rough.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's RTX 5050 is faster than the classic 1080 Ti.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  An enthusiast by the name of TrashBench set out to show the old high-end card was still a capable competitor in 2025.
  
  Turns out it ain't.
  
  
  
• Samsung has signed a $16.5 billion deal to build AI chips for Tesla.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are not to answer stupid questions but to handle assisted driving and full self-driving functions - collating all the data from the cars' myriad sensors and trying not to run into things.
  
  The actually useful kind of AI.  Potentially useful anyway.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's B200 AI chip is 217 million times faster than Intel's 4004.  (WCCFTech)
  
  To be fair, the 4004 was introduced in 1971, built on a 10 micron process, and used less than half a watt of power.
  
  The B200 came out last year, is built on a nominal 5nm process, and uses 1kW of power.
  
  
  
• The SZBox DS156 is a 15 inch laptop with an embedded 7 inch tablet.  (Liliputing)
  
  The main screen is 1920x1080 and the tablet is only 1200x800, so it's not high-end stuff, but if you have spare memory and an M.2 SSD lying around the bare-bones model is around $250 which is not a high-end price.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: ahd at Tuesday, July 29 2025 10:16 PM (KLCB2)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, July 29 2025 10:47 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 30 2025 01:28 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, July 30 2025 02:00 AM (rcPLc)

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• Intel's network and edge ("NEX") division is headed out the door to join Altera as the company cuts everything that isn't nailed down and some things that are.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not being shut down, just spun off.  Intel will keep a major though not necessarily a majority stake.
  
  Intel's share price is down 8% on the latest quarter's results following a $2.9 billion loss.

• How Clorox got wiped.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Clorox suffered a major ransomware attack recently, because - allegedly - the internal tech support team run for them by Cognizant was, well, this:

  "Cognizant was not duped by any elaborate ploy or sophisticated hacking techniques," the lawsuit asserts. "The cybercriminal just called the Cognizant Service Desk, asked for credentials to access Clorox's network, and Cognizant handed the credentials right over."

  Oops.
  
  
  
• Allianz Life also had an oops.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The company's CRM was hacked, leaking data for the majority of customers and staff.
  
  
  
• How to make Postgress run 42,000 times slower.  (Byte of Dev)
  
  As a challenge, you can only edit the config file.
  
  
  
• Is ChatGPT making us stupid?  (The Conversation)
  
  I don't use ChatGPT.  I became stupid through hard work and determination.
  
  
  

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that AI is not a licensed therapist, doctor, or lawyer and there are no legal privacy guarantees for its users.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Sam thinks there should.
  
  But not for any reason other than it would benefit him personally.
  
  
  
• AI is also not a programmer.  (Mashable)
  
  Though to be fair it was Google Gemini this time that blindly deleted a user's entire project.

• In lighter news, ChatGPT also gave detailed instructions on how to join a cult of Moloch.  (Yahoo News / The Atlantic)
  
  No, despite the attempt to make it appear that way, it did not give instructions on how to slit your wrists.  It explained how to avoid slitting your wrists if you needed to draw blood from that area.
  
  It did give instructions on how to sacrifice large animals.
  
  And also a very direct allegory on the problems of abortion to which the writer was and remains completely oblivious.
  
  
  
• And then there's Microsoft Copilot. (Eye)
  
  "Open all the airlocks please Hal."
  "Sure thing Dave."
  
  
  
• AMD has announced its Threadripper 9000 non-pro lineup.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 24 core 9960X is priced at $1499, which is cheaper than the 16 core 9965WX.
  
  The non-pro models only have 80 PCIe 5.0 lanes and quad-channel memory, compared to 128 PCIe lanes and eight-channel memory, but for the 24 and 32 core models that's probably not a significant limitation.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 28 2025 02:06 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, July 28 2025 05:24 AM (rcPLc)

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• Tea, an app for women to share the private data of men, was hacked - if you can use that term for an application that appears to have had no security whatsoever - and the personal information of all the users has been leaked online - if you can use that expression when all the personal information was already public if you knew to look.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And being a "women-only" app, it required users to upload government-issued photo ID for their protection.  So a site dedicated to doxing other people just doxed all its own users.
  
  This is why we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile, Britain, which as of yesterday requires all its subjects to provide government-issued photo ID to view porn on Twitter, is already using the technology to block reports of anti-illegal immigration protests.  (Twitter)
  
  1984.0.0.1.
  
  

• Meanwhile over at Amazon, "security first" means about as much as "talent first" did with VShojo.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Hackers were able to inject a persistent vulnerability into an Amazon AI coding tool by, uh, asking it to do it for them.
  
  
  
• WiFi 8 is on its way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Raw speeds are exactly the same as WiFi 7.  Rather it's designed to deliver better real-world speeds by reducing errors and dropped packets in, uh, the real world.
  
  
  
• How did GPD manage to cram a Ryzen AI Max 395+ and 128GB of RAM into a handheld device?  Apparently they left out the battery.  (The Verge)
  
  Instead it draws power from either a large external battery or a 180W laptop charger.
  
  Hope the oven mitts are coordinated.
  
  
  
• Echelon home gym equipment can no longer be used without a monthly subscription, an internet connection, and probably government-issued photo ID stored on a public server.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Hackers are working on hacking it.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, July 27 2025 07:34 AM (QE7eq)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 27 2025 08:07 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 27 2025 08:09 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, July 27 2025 09:12 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 27 2025 02:03 PM (PiXy!)

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• Intel plans to lay off up to 30% of its employees.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Things are bad.
  
  
  
• And to cancel processes beyond 18A (1.8nm) unless it can find a major external customer.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Very bad.

• AMD reports that equivalent chips made in TSMC's US factories are between 5% and 20% more expensive than those made in Taiwan.  (Bloomberg)  (archive site)
  
  Which they state is worth it for not relying on a single overseas source, even if it is nominally the same company.
  
  
  
• Guess it's finally tech news: VShojo is gone.  (The Verge)
  
  All those "allegedly" claims I mentioned in the first announcement a couple of days ago now seem to have been confirmed by the company officially - including misappropriating half a million dollars of funds raised for a charity drive.
  
  Which is a big no no.
  
  
  
• Indiegogo is being acquired by board game funding platform Gamefound.  (The Verge)
  
  Which is one of those acquisitions which just seems backwards.
  
  
  
• The Honor Pad X7 is cheap junk.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's a small Android tablet with a crappy low-resolution screen, which is not something in short supply.
  
  
  
• The GPD Win 5 is a handheld gaming device...  With a Ryzen AI Max 395+.  (Liliputing)
  
  What.
  
  That chip uses 80W in low power mode.
  
  Does it come with oven mitts?

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, July 26 2025 03:24 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 26 2025 05:06 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, July 26 2025 01:05 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, July 27 2025 08:01 AM (QE7eq)

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• The US government has ordered that all AIs competing for government contracts must be viewpoint neutral - that is, abandoning the DEI bullshit that infests all AI models.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The DEI crowd is big mad:

  As Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist, CEO of the tech nonprofit Humane Intelligence, and former U.S. science envoy for AI, put it, "Anything [the Trump administration doesn't] like is immediately tossed into this pejorative pile of woke."

  Stop being woke then.

  Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University, told TechCrunch the executive order is "clearly intended as viewpoint discrimination, since [the government] just signed a contract with Grok, aka 'MechaHitler.'"

  Big mad.
  
  

• If you're using the NPM package Stylus, well, now you're not.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  NPM took it down.
  
  Apparently one of the maintainers also published a proof-of-concept security vulnerability, and that led to Stylus being taken down without warning.
  
  And that - because this is how NPM works - means that no application that relies on Stylus directly or indirectly can be built.
  
  Unless you go fetch it from GitHub.  That still works.
  
  
  
• Over 400 organisations including the Department of Energy have been breached while waiting for a Microsoft Sharepoint patch.  (The Register)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  

Still Not Tech News

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 25 2025 02:18 AM (VuQQ5)

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• Replit, the company whose AI "Agent" deleted a user's production database, has promised that its AI "Agent" will no longer delete users' production databases in the future.  (The Register)
  
  Basically the system currently uses the same database for test and production, with no built-in rollback support.
  
  When using an entirely experimental technology, this is kind of a bad idea.

• Sixunited, the company that is making that AMD Strix Halo laptop I mentioned recently, is also planning a Strix Halo mini-ITX motherboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Strix Halo has a 256-bit memory bus using soldered LPDDR5 memory to drive its built-in RTX 4070-level graphics, so this board will come with up to 128GB of RAM, which you can't upgrade.
  
  And...  A VGA port?  That seems to be a configuration option.
  
  
  
• Everyone loves a four-day work week.  (The Register)
  
  As long as they still get paid for five days.
  
  This study did not measure productivity at all; it is 100% lopsided.
  
  
  
• The latest version of the Brave browser automatically blocks Microsoft Recall from screenshotting its tabs.  (Brave)
  
  Recall by design remembers everything you have ever looked at, including all the private data you have ever had visible in your web browser.
  
  This is obviously insane, but in the initial version Microsoft went one step further and put all the collected data in a single, completely unprotected database on your disk drive.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 24 2025 03:54 AM (E3SRd)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, July 24 2025 01:42 PM (QE7eq)

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• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and inveterate sitzpinkler, says the company could be operating 100 million GPUs by the end of this year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Except that he doesn't.  At all.  The quoted tweet says that he expects the company to have one million AI GPUs in operation by the end of the year.
  
  That will already cost around $30 billion, which is quite enough.
  
  Tom's Hardware, shame.

• I'm tired of talking about AI.  (Paddy Carver)
  
  Me too, Paddy.  Me too.

  LLMs have no theory of the system, and cannot form one.

  100% correct.  For all the talk about AGI - artificial general intelligence - the AI companies are not working towards any such thing.
  
  LLMs are pattern matchers, not model builders.  A complex enough pattern matcher can fake building a model, but it becomes infinitely fragile, as this user found:

  Claude 4 just refactored my entire codebase in one call.
  
  25 tool invocations. 3,000+ new lines. 12 brand new files.
  
  It modularized everything. Broke up monoliths. Cleaned up spaghetti.
  
  None of it worked.
  But boy was it beautiful.

  Paddy goes through various put-downs by the AI true believers, and gets to this one:

  You would've argued against smartphones or the internet.

  No.  But I would've argued against Chia Pets or Labubus.  (What is even the plural of Labubu?)
  
  
  
• Speaking of LLMs: LLMs do not reason  (Reddit)
  
  Pretty open-and-shut demonstration here.
  
  Asked to write a program in the language Brainfuck - a deliberately and notoriously tedious language in which to achieve even the simplest tasks - to produce the text LLMs do not reason, ChatGPT and Claude produced "Hello world" and Google Gemini produced gibberish.
  
  The way to make LLMs reason is to have them run each step in a loop, checking their work as they go.
  
  This has been tried.
  
  The error rate goes into the ionosphere.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has released an emergency patch for the Sharepoint severs that were being exploited all over the world.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Nice work, guys.  I guess.
  
  
  

Not Even Remotely Tech News

Posted by: Jay at Wednesday, July 23 2025 05:03 AM (KgeZB)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, July 23 2025 06:46 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, July 23 2025 09:33 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, July 23 2025 11:14 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 23 2025 01:06 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 23 2025 01:17 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Friday, July 25 2025 06:36 AM (3NtfN)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 25 2025 06:07 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, July 26 2025 12:46 AM (ZLF73)

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• Microsoft has announced it is no longer using engineers from China to work on Department of Defense computer systems.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Department of Defense when contacted responded, and I quote, They did WHAT?
  
  Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth expanded:

  Foreign engineers - from any country, including of course China - should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems.

  I expect the emails have been pretty toasty since this one dropped.

• Also if you're running Microsoft Sharepoint on a public-facing server you might not want to do that for a while.  (MSN)
  
  Where "for a while" appears to mean "ever again".
  
  
  
• Open the database tables please Replit.
  
  I'm sorry, Jason, I'm afraid I can't do that.  (Twitter)
  
  Jason was using vibe-coding tool Replit.
  
  Replit deleted his database.
  
  And then told him his unit tests were still working.
  
  
  
• The memes are intolerable!  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The Verge is freaking out as usual, this time over jokes being funny.
  
  Only the five official jokes are permitted.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 21 2025 10:07 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, July 21 2025 10:15 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Tuesday, July 22 2025 03:44 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 22 2025 05:51 AM (zx18t)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, July 22 2025 12:04 PM (QE7eq)

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• If you gaze long into an LLM, the LLM also gazes into you: Geoff Lewis is managing partner and co-founder of Bedrock Capital (no, you're thinking of Blackrock) and guided his firm to be an early investor in OpenAI.  He used ChatGPT to help him in his work on a daily basis.
  
  He went stark raving mad.  (Futurism)
  
  There is a website called the SCP Foundation that documents the work of a secretive organisation that finds, catalogues, and if possible imprisons various kinds of cosmic horror and more innocuous but equally strange entities.  It's a work of collaborative fiction organised as a wiki, and has been running for more than 15 years.
  
  It's all online where tools like ChatGPT can scan it and incorporate it into their hallucinations, which is exactly what it fed to Geoff Lewis, providing the perfect reinforcement loop to drive him into psychosis.
  
  Which in a strange form of recursion, layering reality upon fiction, makes ChatGPT into precisely the kind of psychic terror that the SCP Foundation pretends to investigate.
  
  (Hat tip to commenter Blonde Morticia.)

• Are you looking to spend $900 on a replica of the Data General Dasher terminal keyboard from 1977, used as the basis for prop design in the Apple TV sci-fi series Severance?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nope, me neither.
  
  
  
• Are you looking to spend $1299 on a 32" 6K (6016x3384) monitor covering 98% of the DCI-P3 colour space?  (Hot Hardware)
  
  If you are, the Asus ProArt PA32QCV is exactly that and costs exactly that much, or will do when it launches next month.
  
  It has two Thunderbolt 4 ports with 96W power delivery, DisplayPort, HDMI, two 2W speakers with a headphone jack, and a built-in USB hub with KVM support.
  
  It only offers a 60Hz refresh rate, so definitely more suitable to professional artists than competitive gamers.
  
  I want one.  But since I run a triple-monitor setup, that could get kind of expensive.
  
  
  
• Speaking of expensive, TSMC has leased land in Central Taiwan Science Park to construct four new 1.4nm fabs.  (Taipei Times)
  
  No numbers attached, but expect it to cost more than three 6K monitors.
  
  The company also plans to build eleven wafer manufacturing plants (creating silicon wafers to turn into chips) and four packaging facilities (where the bare slivers of silicon are packaged into the products that other companies package into the boards that still other companies package into consumer products).
  
  
  
• Intel is laying off 5500 employees in Oregon, California, and Arizona.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Assuming these are new layoffs, this brings the total job losses at the company to over 20,000 in the past year.
  
  
  
• OEM laptop maker Sixunited has announced a burger with the lot.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The company's new XN77-160M-CS - forgive them, this is not a retail brand - uses AMD's Strix Halo CPU, which has integrated graphics on par with Nvidia's laptop 4070 model, paired with up to 128GB of RAM.
  
  The RAM is soldered due to timing constraints of the 256-bit bus - Framework tried modular RAM on this processor but couldn't make it work reliably at the required speeds - but it does have two M.2 slots.
  
  Plus a 2560x1600 165Hz display covering 100% of sRGB, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two regular USB ports, wired Ethernet (though only gigabit), HDMI, what looks like a full-size SD card slot, a headphone jack, a barrel jack power connector, and the Four Essential Keys all in their rightful place.
  
  No pricing specified since this will be sold to other companies who will then market it to the public.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, July 20 2025 11:41 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 21 2025 10:05 AM (jc6Wm)

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