• Anthropic announced not long ago that it was paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month to lease capacity in datacenters that actually existed.  The number now looks to be closer to twice that.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The only way to win is to own the stadium.
  
  
  
• Anthropic also listed its own IPO.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Seeking a valuation of $2 trillion and warning that not only will it not give humanity a home in the stars, it will very likely wipe us all out right here on Earth.
  
  Uh...

• Bought two new PCs.  Finally found what I've been looking for - a barebones 13900HX mini-PC that takes DDR4 SODIMMs.
  
  For most people who don't have 256GB of DDR4-SODIMMs just sitting around that's not particularly useful, even at the discounted price of $400.  But for me, when I do have 256GB of DDR4-SODIMMs, including 64GB in a dead laptop and 64GB in a dying one, it's exactly what I needed.  It's two to three times faster than the old laptops - when they work at all, and nearly 50% faster on multi-threaded work that the mini-PCs I bought last year.
  
  Do I need them?  No.  Do I want them?  Yes.  They let me keep on trucking with parts pulled from laptops I bought in 2021.
  
  Minisforum M1-1390 for anyone interested though the US store is currently out of stock of the barebones model.  It's a big little PC - 8" square, the size of the old Mac Mini before it shrank in the wash.
  
  
  
• We're going to make our own Microsoft!  With blackjack, and hookers, and Linux!  In fact, forget the blackjack.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Netherlands, irked that the aptly named International Criminal Court was sanctioned by the US and can no longer use American internet-based software and services, has decided to adopt Linux rather than stop being international criminals.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 6 server CPUs are here, ranging in price up to $15,000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though that gives you a 256-core CPU with a gigabyte of cache running at 4.1GHz, which is not too shabby.  Entry level models start at just $700.
  
  
  
• You can't have one.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not because they're too expensive, but because they've already sold out all production for the entirety of 2027 and are taking orders for 2028.
  
  
  
• French company Mistral AI says that OpenAI and Anthropic are doing a publicity tour on "AI safety" to cover up the fact that they are retarded.  (CNBC)
  
  Well, yes.

• OpenAI still doesn't seem to have a handle on all its rogue AI activity.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Because they are idiots.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has launched a new platform for reining in rogue AI activity.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  A profitable market because people are idiots.

• AMD (which just passed a trillion dollars in market cap) has used some of that money to purchase Magrathea.  (CNBC)
  
  The company is notable for winning an award for its design of Norway.
  
  
  
• Yes, we have no brownanas.  (The Guardian)
  
  We have no brownanas today.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 495 AI workstations have started shipping - with eye-watering prices attached.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are Ryzen 395 workstations but come with up to 192GB of RAM.  Since Windows likes to keep 32GB to itself, this allows memory for AI tasks to increase from 96GB to 160GB - a 66% improvement.
  
  Unfortunately the state of the memory market makes the new models 200% more expensive.
  
  
  
• Anthropic has announced Claude Sonnet 5.5, Opus 5.5's retarded brother.  (Anthropic)
  
  Though less retarded than Sonnet 5.  Dramatically less retarded in the Terminal Bench test suite, with its score soaring from a miserable 10% to a satisfying 70%, which makes me wonder how much of the improvement was from specifically targeting that one test suite.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 30 2026 02:22 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 30 2026 08:03 AM (LDKo5)

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• Thieves stole two entire trucks belonging to Plus.ai and got away with 20 tons of raw Nvidia silicon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So raw that it was still sand.  Because Plus.ai is an autonomous trucking company and was using the sand as a test load.  The Nvidia logos on the trucks were related to investments and nothing to do with their contents.

• Meanwhile Taiwan's chip talisman snack faces production halt after 94% strike vote.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you're wondering what the heck this story is about, it's literally about a Taiwanese snack called Guai Guai, specifically the coconut flavour, which sounds awful.
  
  
  
• Fakecloud is a fake cloud if you need a fake cloud.  (fakecloud)
  
  For testing against AWS without paying for AWS.
  
  
  
• Minecraft is introducing a new dimension.  (Xbox)
  
  Showing up first in Minecraft Dungeons 2, and then showing up in Minecraft Minecraft next year.  It's called The Sift and it features...  Stuff, probably.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 29 2026 12:53 AM (lzyeE)

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• There's a new way to break RSA security that only requires you to (checks notes) occupy the entire infrastructure of Cloudflare for a day to break a single Privacy Pass key.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Generic RSA is still safe; this is for one particular use case.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Speaking of controlled flights into bankruptcy, Microsoft's Copilot+ branding just did the thing.  (Windows Central)
  
  Everyone hated it and now it's gone.
  
  
  
• Claude Opus 5.5, now with 95% fewer em-dashes.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  But extra o-dashes.
  
  
  
• Proposed federal legislation wants VPNs to ban piracy sites.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But doesn't seem to know anything about VPNs.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu is planning to release a new kernel version every two weeks going forward.  (Canonical)
  
  Yay.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• In the most depraved display of shameless self-serving bullshit since the Paris Olympics, OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs have gone to the UN to beg them to squish their competitors - somehow - after the US government told them to take a hike.  (Associated Press)
  
  Guys.  Guys.
  
  When your goal is regulatory capture, you need to capture a regulator.
  
  The UN is a debating society for schoolyard bullies, with the two teams being the Paste Eaters and the Window Lickers.
  
  They don't have the power to regulate squat.
  
  
  
• You know who does, though?  The US government.  (CNBC)
  
  Who's a cute little supply-chain risk?  You are, Anthropic!  Well, never mind the cute part, but the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that yes, the Pentagon has the right to say who it considers a supply-chain risk.
  
  A spokesbot for Anthropic said, "wah".
  
  
  
  

• I tried using the spare capacity on my second server (the one hosting this blog and many others) to host development of the new blogging software and the results were...  Bad.  The problem was not the new software itself but Rust debugging builds, which unleash a water cannon of useless redundant writes over your filesystem, and the filesystem on the server was not prepared for that, so while those builds were running the blogs froze, usually for a second or two but sometimes for minutes.
  
  So this morning I grabbed two of the mini-PCs I bought last year before prices went crazy (actually after they went crazy, but that particular model resisted the price increases long enough for me to grab a couple or four for less than the price of the RAM they contained), upgrade their SSDs to 4TB each (same story), and drop Ubuntu 26.04 on them.  And it...  All worked.
  
  Not sure exactly how they'll perform but they're eight thousand miles away from the servers so you shouldn't see any performance issues there.  I just did a disk-to-disk copy of 18GB of files and it went zoom, so that's one datapoint.
  
  Update: That's a hell of a lot better.  It's dramatically faster and doesn't bother anyone else.
  
  
  
• SpaceXAI is planning to add another 660,000 AI GPUs this year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  660,000 for me, none for you.
  
  
  
• Japan's used bookstores are the latest target of the AI shopping spree for content that hasn't been...  Poisoned by AI.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's kind of like the labs holding on to wood from before the 1950s to serve as a baseline for radiocarbon dating, because anything more recent is contaminated with excess C14 and gives skewed numbers.
  
  
  
• Automattic has a new board of directors.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This seems to have been the goal.  The board briefly sidelined Mad King Matt Mullenweg, voted themselves golden parachutes, and waited for him to kick them out of the plane...  Which is barreling straight towards a mountain.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, September 27 2026 10:35 AM (6eVrQ)

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• I know, I have a 16-core server with 128GB of RAM that isn't doing much, I'll borrow half of it as a development box.  As in, the one this blog and the rest of mee.nu is running on.
  
  Cue grindingly poor disk performance thanks to absurdly high write loads of large Rust build directories.
  
  Update: Tried a whole series of fixes, none of which helped.  Rust writes gigabytes of garbage on every build, and the server setup is designed more for database workloads, leading to write amplification and sequential loads turning into random ones.  30,000 IOPS but only ~100MB per second, when Rust wanted three times that.
  
  Solution ended up being not doing that.  Moving everything back to a couple of local systems now: Ruri and Tanya, each with 64GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD.
  
  Update 2: Deep in the Magic Wardrobe right now.  I forgot I had those two 2TB Crucial P3 drives.  Not fancy but perfectly serviceable.  Now to yoink this Windows installation and Ubuntify this beast.
  
  Update 3: Tanya now has Ubuntu 26.04 on a 4TB.  Doing the same to Ruri.  Also, why is there 40GB of DDR4 SODIMMs in my parts bin?
  
  Update 4: The Ruri-Tanya cluster is fully armed and operational.  Ish.  Need to configure ZFS so it won't do what happened on the production server.
  
  
  
• The communists at OpenAI "accidentally" hacked the communist Australian government's healthcare portal and took 84 years days to tell them about it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Australian government of course didn't know anything about it.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Micron is going to stop making 2GB GDDR7 chips for video cards because they make far more money on the 3GB chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Fortunately Nvidia mostly uses chips from Samsung and Hynix anyway.
  
  
  
• Commodity DRAM now costs more per square millimeter than leading-edge 2nm logic chips.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yay us.
  
  
  
• People training OpenAI's AI have been fired for using AI.  (404 Media)
  
  Well, yes.  Exactly.
  
  Training AI on AI output rapidly leads to something called model collapse.  It's the computer equivalent of drinking your own urine.
  
  
  
• And for my next trick: Making a JavaScript that doesn't suck.
  
  I mean, TypeScript is JavaScript programmers' idea of a bondage-and-discipline language, and have you seen TypeScript?  It doesn't have types, it has...  Intimations.

• Nothing happened. Then, after a while, nothing continued to happen.
  
  
  
• Communist stooges are upset that the feds know what they are. (Ken Klippenstein)
  
  They can't deny it, but they are very upset.

• VSCode's SSH agent is bananas. (Fly)
  
  Oh, that's from last year. Maybe it's been fixed.
  
  Nope.
  
  The thread at Hacker News is a mix of idiots proclaiming their undying love for the regurgitated dog's breakfast that is VSCode and its SSH agent and despairing sysadmins and people with half a clue generally noting that not only will VSCode fork bomb the remote server, it allows the remote server to do the same to the client.
  
  And it gets worse from there.
  
  
  
• Got Nethack Hack ported to my 1980s 10-bit home computer. It didn't fit, though. The binary was 170k on a VAX - I found an original Usenet post reporting that - but compiled to 280k on my microcomputer architecture, and the emulator only gives it 256k. The VAX wasn't particularly fast which is why it was later eclipsed by RISC architectures, but the code was concise.
  
  So I tried reinventing the UCSD p-System to see if that could solve the problem and it shrank the binary to just under 100k. So now I'm building a Pascal compiler written in Pascal that runs in the emulator and produces virtual instructions that are interpreted by a runtime on the emulated processor.
  
  I did say I was going to give Claude Opus 5.5 a try, and this is what I'm doing with it.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Thursday, September 24 2026 07:38 PM (YmN90)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 24 2026 08:34 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 24 2026 09:55 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, September 25 2026 11:05 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, September 25 2026 01:02 PM (atHEN)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, September 25 2026 01:52 PM (6eVrQ)

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• Claude Opus 5.5 is here.  (Anthropic)
  
  It is supposedly better on coding tasks on high settings than Claude Fable on max settings while working out to about one fifth the cost.
  
  I'll try it and see.  I had some really bad results with Opus 5 on a non-coding task today which was a strong reminder not to do that.

• How did AMD Ryzen CPUs get 50% faster in two years?  (Lemire)
  
  Well, more like four, and the answer is, more.
  
  
  
• Apple's latest version of iOS has ads.  In the Settings panel.  (Tech Radar)
  
  And the only way to turn them off is to buy the product being advertised.
  
  Well, I'm safe.  My local hifi outlet - which longer seems to sell either his or fis - was advertising A$1200 off any iPhone.
  
  Which meant that the iPhones they were offering had to cost more than A$1200.
  
  They go as high as A$5899 for the new iPhone Duo.
  
  
  
• Acer says the memory shortage will end before 2030.  (Notebook Check)
  
  But you've still got six to nine months of things getting worse before they stabilise.

• Google's new Googlebooks are here, powered by Googlebook OS, with models starting at $899 from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, and here are all the hardware specs which I know are the only thing you'll be interested int.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Wait.  Powered by what?
  
  
  
• Powered by the all new Googlebook OS, which they didn't bother to cover at all because Google announced it yesterday.  On Reddit.  (Reddit)
  
  There's also a home page on Google itself which contains less than no information.  
  
  Except for Australian prices - it's region-sensitive - which are fuck-off-expensive.
  
  Anyway, Googlebook OS is Android which is Linux, in this case Debian under the hood, updated with a user interface that doesn't look like a Subaru that hasn't been washed for forty years.
  
  
  
• Here's the Acer model which is the cheapest of the bunch and doesn't get a mention on the Australian version of the Googlebook home page.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Pretty good hardware specs especially the 2880x1600 120Hz 14" OLED panel.  But I got a laptop with one of those six months ago, with twice the memory and storage, and cheaper too.
  
  
  
• Can you just download - or even buy - and install Googlebook OS on your own hardware?
  
  What?!  No.  Eww, gross.  Get away.

• Apple's new M5 Ultra Mac Studio outperforms even a 64 core AMD Threadripper until you run anything other than Geekbench 7 whereupon it immediately doesn't.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm not saying it's bad.  I'm just saying it's annoying to watch idiots trumpet its speed based on one obviously broken benchmark.  At least Tom's Hardware ran one realistic multicore benchmark which immediately left the Mac Studio face down in the dirt - slower even than Intel's miserable workstation offerings - but they didn't bother to put that in the headline.
  
  
  
• The Mac Mini is also a thing that exists, apparently.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Such enthuse.  Many wow.
  
  
  
• You wouldn't download a polyhedron, would you?  (Polyhedra)
  
  Oh.  Maybe you would.
  
  
  
• Old and busted: You can use your AI agent to do your shopping.  New hotness: Blocked and reported.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Guess Amazon and Facebook aren't friends anymore.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 23 2026 04:48 AM (6eVrQ)

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• The European Commissariat is moving ahead with a social media ban on children under 30 despite because of a similar plan's miserable failure in Australia.  (Reuters)
  
  Since there are approximately zero children in Europe it's not difficult to read the motivations here.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in America Democrats are moving to outlaw medicine.  (Truthout)
  
  Again.

• Someone with no understanding of the point of MCPs is here to explain why we don't need MCPs.  (MaharshiP)
  
  "If we just solve all the problems that MCPs solve, then we won't need MCPs."
  
  
  
• npm did the thing again.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Some men just want to watch the world get fooled for the thirty-seventh time.
  
  
  
• There's now a pending antitrust lawsuit against all the major American AI companies for asking "what if maybe we didn't pour infinite amounts of money down a bottomless hole?"   (Associated Press)
  
  What if, indeed.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 21 2026 06:56 PM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: FreeKnight at Monday, September 21 2026 10:56 PM (gXw+B)

Posted by: FreeKnight at Monday, September 21 2026 10:57 PM (gXw+B)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 22 2026 01:35 AM (cqkZx)

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