Shut it!
Sunday, June 07
Mixed Herb Edition
Top Story
- I mentioned before how PCIe switches - at least ones operating faster than PCIe 3.0 - are prohibitively expensive and reserved for enterprise customers except for the ones built into every mainstream PC motherboard. All but the cheapest models have a chipset, and that chipset's primary function is to act as a PCIe switch.
And hobbyists have started tinkering with using AMD's B650 chip, which is a serviceable and reasonably priced example - plus one that already works because every operating system has drivers to support it.
Now it's moving beyond a hobby. (Tom's Hardware)
Raspberry Pi shop WisdPi announced its PROM21 All In Expansion Card - the codename for the chip in the B650 chipset is Promontory 21. For $199 - not cheap, but it's a small production run - you get four extra M.2 slots, five 10Gb USB 3 ports, a selection of USB 2 headers, and an OCuLink header that can provide four PCIe 4.0 lanes or through an adaptor cable four SATA ports (the magic happens in the chipset, so the cable is easy). And it's a single slot half-height half-length card so it will fit easily into any PC.
Minisforum is preparing a similar card.
This would have been much more interesting before storage prices went into orbit, but at least it exists.
Tech News
- Speaking of things more interesting in the Before Times, the Zima Cube 2 is a worthy successor to the old Cobalt Cube, though a little larger and disappointingly unblue. (Notebook Check)
It has an Intel 1215U or 1235U processor, two DDR5 SODIMM slots (so up to a nominal 64GB and a theoretical 128GB), one M.2 slot on the motherboard for the boot device, four more M.2 slots in a removable bay for storage, 6 3.5" drive bays for more storage, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports plus a 10Gb port in the Pro model, HDMI, DisplayPort, and Thunderbolt 4, two regular USB ports, and two PCIe slots, all in a compact, roughly 9" cube.
The Qube was a little less than 8" on a side so the newer device beats it in every respect except that.
$799 for the basic model with 8GB RAM; $1299 for the Pro model with 16GB.
Also, the power supply is pretty limited so if you want to add a graphics card you need one that doesn't require any more than the 70W it can draw from the motherboard.
- AMD has expanded on its continued support for its current AM5 motherboards, stating that new products will arrive for that standard until 2029. (WCCFTech)
AM6 with support for DDR6 memory and the PCIe 6.0 bus will arrive only when it "makes sense". PCIe 6.0 devices for the enterprise are trickling out now, but DDR6 isn't expected to appear until 2028.
- CXMT is coming to the rescue in the memory drought. (WCCFTech)
Unfortunately it is rescuing itself, raising prices to match the Big Three.
- And Lexar's regional manager for Australia and New Zealand says that memory prices are expected to double by the end of the year. (Tom's Hardware)
On top of the already 5x increase, making the 128GB kit I bought a year ago one of the most valuable items I own.
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Saturday, June 06
Sleb Edition
Top Story
- SpaceX just launched 50 more Starlink satellites into orbit in a single day, using a pair of its trusty Falcon 9 boosters from facilities at Cape Canaveral and Vandenburg. (Space)
And recovered both boosters, with them landing autonomously on the company's two purpose-built drone ships.
I was curious as to how long it took mankind to launch its first 50 satellites into orbit, and the answer surprised me: Within four years of Sputnik there were over a hundred satellite launches. "Space race" is no misnomer.
Tech News
- Speaking of SpaceX they just signed a deal for Google to pay them $920 million per month for compute capacity in SpaceX's Colossus datacenters. (Tech Crunch)
Which might sounds backwards but illustrates the scale on which the company is operating. SpaceX already has an arrangement with AI company Anthropic, which pays SpaceX $1.25 billion per month to lease compute capacity.
- SK Hynix is planning to double memory production at its factories in Korea and China. (WCCFTech)
By 2030. The drought won't break anytime soon.
- A coalition of trade associations representing the telecommunications, automotive, and medical device industries has urged the Trump administration to do something about that drought. (Tom's Hardware)
Though it's not clear what they can do. Even direct government investment or loan guarantees for Micron - the one American player among the Big Three memory makers - to accelerate expansion can only go so far because it takes years to build and fit out new factories, and the availability of the equipment for making chips is as constrained as the chips themselves.
- The Radxa Dragon Q5E is a small single board computer for embedded projects with a Qualcomm Dragonwing Q-6690 processor. (Liliputing)
(muffled screaming)
Qualcomm is infamous for masking the specs of their processors. For more than a decade every CPU shipped has contained "Kryo" cores according to the company's own datasheets. Those are relabeled Arm cores, but you're not supposed to know which relabeled Arm cores. Could be the A53 from 2012; could be the latest X925. It's all just "Kryo".
It's as if General Motors announced its 2026 Car (TM) with Engine (TM) technology.
Anyway, in this case it has four A720 cores and four A520 cores on a 4nm process, because as soon as one person outside Qualcomm gets their hands on one the real specs leak out.
- Intel is planning to refresh its new entry-level Wildcat Lake processors next year - pushing them solidly into the mid range. (Tom's Hardware)
The cheapest model, the 304, has one performance core, four low-power cores, and one graphics core; the other current models have two, four, and two respectively.
The planned upgrade will bring the count of performance cores to four, a perfectly reasonable number for an everyday laptop.
- Nvidia's on-again off-again 50 Super range of GPUs might be on again? (Tom's Hardware)
Expected at the end of last year, these models would have swapped 2GB GDDR7 memory chips for 3GB models, with some unspecified other minor improvements. The 5070 with its 12GB of RAM - limiting for some recent games - would be supplanted by a 5070 Super with 18GB of RAM.
Rumours now include a 12GB 5060 Super, plus the new 24GB 5070 Ti Super and 5080 Super.
No leaks of when or how much, but not soon and not cheap.
- Brave Origin is a new browser from Brave that costs $60 to remove features from Brave. (Bleeping Computer)
But the features it removes are Brave's own - relatively unobtrusive - monetisation efforts.
(Speaking of which, Tom's Hardware has annoying new ads that fill every inch of whitespace on the page. If you set Brave's adblock to "aggressive" it makes them go away and leaves the page readable again. I don't want website owners to starve but there are limits.)
The $60 is a one-time payment and lets you install the browser on up to 10 systems, so I'd only need two licenses.
And it's free on Linux, so I might only need one.
- Asus has a new 13" monitor on offer with a resolution of 3200x2400 - sort of - and a 35Hz nominal refresh rate. (Liliputing)
It covers around 30% of the DCI-P3 colourspace.
Yes, it's an e-ink display, so take that refresh rate with a pound of salt, and the resolution as well: In colour it is cut by half, so 1600x1200. Which is not terrible for a 13" display you would use mostly for reading text, but worth remembering.
I did some digging on the original 2012 Nexus 7 tablet - which I owned (and probably still have in a box in the garage), and which had notably murky colour thanks to the choice of a budget LCD panel. That still offered something on the order of 60% of DCI-P3 colour.
- Been very busy at work recently, pushing a new project towards release. Got sign-off from both the QA and marketing teams yesterday, so I finally get a weekend off. Ish.
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Friday, June 05
Lilo Pelekai Multipass Edition
Top Story
- AI token costs are becoming a meme. Here's why that's a good thing. (Tom's Hardware)
It's not. I mean, not for the AI companies, and not for anyone else unless it pops the bubble, and not even then as trillions of dollars of virtual money suddenly disappearing would cause a certain amount of drama.Despite that, Altman projects that AI token usage will continue to increase. He said that six-and-a-half years ago, the top token spender at the startup used 100,000 tokens a month - today, that is the global per capita average token usage, and that OpenAI’s token leader uses about 100 billion a month. The OpenAI chief also admitted, to his own embarrassment, that someone else uses even more. So, if token usage were to grow linearly, then he would expect the global per capita token usage to hit 100 billion monthly.
Somehow I don't think that will happen. At OpenAI's current rates, that would cost the average user over a million dollars a month and provide the company with a quadrillion dollars in monthly revenue.
Tech News
- Everything new is old again: DDR4 is back on the menu. (Tom's Hardware)
I'm thinking of picking up a 5800X3D because I have plenty of DDR4 and the larger cache on that chip helps hide the lower bandwidth.
In addition to production of DDR4 modules restarting, CPUs using DDR4 have resumed production - or, from Intel, never stopped - and fresh motherboards are rolling out of factories.
- There is now - or soon will be - a 12,060 piece Lego model of the Sagrada Familia. (Lego)
Available to pre-order now; shipping in November. $799.
- The UN suffered a breach that revealed the household details of 600,000 welfare recipient families. (Bleeping Computer)
In Gaza.
- Alphabet - Google's parent company - just raise $85 billion for its AI division. (Tech Crunch)
Google made $110 billion in profit last year, and it's still not self-funding its AI plans.
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Thursday, June 04
Nonexistent Edition
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- Apple's MacBook Neo is selling so well the company has doubled production. (MacRumors)
At that rate they'll run out of bad chips and have to start using good ones, but economies of scale may make up for it.
Also the company is reportedly working on a 12GB model for next year. If they can hit the same price that will offer a worthwhile bump in capabilities; 8GB is a bit restrictive even on a Mac.
Tech News
- Another Arm-based computer with 8GB of RAM is Radxa's new Dragon Q8B. (Liliputing)
It's a single-board computer for embedded projects like the Raspberry Pi. With an MSRP of $209 for the 8GB model, it's 60% more expensive, but it's also 60% faster for single-threaded tasks, and 200% faster for multi-threaded workloads. You can get models up to 32GB, but it becomes distinctly uncheap at that point.
- A new DOS attack can cause most fully-patched web servers to run out of memory in under a minute. (Bleeping Computer)
Well, that's just great.
- Are AI models conscious? (The Atlantic) (archive site)
No.
Why?
Because I said so.
Well, that settles it then.
- Google has released a version of its Gemma LLM that you can run locally on any PC. (Twitter)
If you have a 16GB graphics card. 5070 owners can wail and gnash their teeth I guess.
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Wednesday, June 03
Switch Edition
Top Story
- Windows has a fever and the only cure is more Linux. (The Verge) (archive site)
Seriously, though. Microsoft is planning to fix problems with Windows by embedding more Linux into its operating system.
It seems there might be an easier way to achieve that.
- Also, Microsoft, fire your designers. (Notebook Check)
Now.
All of them.
Tech News
- Laptops based on Nvidia's new RTX Spark N1X CPU will start at $2900. (WCCFTech)
And go up from there.
Models using the low-end N1 CPU will start at $1800.
Do not send to ask for whom the bell tolls, Nvidia.
- Intel says that "something has to give" with memory prices. (Tom's Hardware)
And that they're not planning to stop production of older CPUs that use DDR4 memory, not while there's still demand.
- AMD meanwhile had to re-engineer its DDR4-friendly 5800X3D to bring it back into production. (Tom's Hardware)
TSMC has changed its die-stacking technology (the X3D part in the name) so they couldn't simply restart production of the chip with the same process as before. The CPU chiplet remains the same, but it needs to be packaged differently.
- Phison showed off a PCIe 6.0 SSD controller that supports transfer rates of 28GB per second and 6.8 million IOPS. (Tom's Hardware)
While drawing just 7W of power. Which would be a lot for a consumer model, but no more than early PCIe 5.0 controller chips.
- A perfect companion for your new 5800X3D, Nividia's RTX 3060 is back as well.] (WCCFTech)
Only in China so far. Priced at $325.
- The European Parliament has ditched Google Search for French competitor Qwant. (Politico)
I'm usually more than ready to dump on European idiocy, but Google makes it easier every day to break up with them, even for those of us who are not European idiots.
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Tuesday, June 02
Rainy Rene Edition
Top Story
- Anthropic has submitted a draft filing for its IPO. (Tech Crunch)
They are seeking a valuation close to $1 trillion.
Tech News
- Hackers have been stealing high-profile Instagram accounts via the cunning plan of asking Instagram for them. (404 Media)
Well, that and using a VPN so that they appear to be in the right general geographical region, but mostly because Instagram support is used to dealing with dumbasses who keep forgetting their passwords.
- Multiple laptop makers are preparing to launch models with Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip and eye-watering price tags. (The Verge)
Look at models with AMD's AI Max chips for a guideline, and add between 50% and 100% on top of that.
- Wizards of the Coast are reportedly in the process of remaking the classic computer games Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2. (WCCFTech)
Baldur's Gate 3, developed externally by Larian, was a massive hit, but Larian found Wizards of the Coast so toxic to work with that they want nothing to do with DLC or a sequel.
- AMD's Radeon 9070 GRE is a thing that exists. (Tom's Hardware)
Actually it has existed as a China-only product for a year now and the only change was the global release, so there are already plenty of reviews of its technical capabilities. What's new is the price, and the price is awful.
At $400 it would be interesting. Below $400, compelling. It costs $550 - as much as the faster and readily available Radeon 9070.
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Monday, June 01
Leftover Chinese Edition
Top Story
- AMD has announced two new old CPUs that are on the one hand somewhat overpriced and underwhelming and on the other hand eagerly awaited by hobbyists. (Tom's Hardware)
The first is the Ryzen 5800X3D priced at $349. This first appeared in 2022 priced at $449, but was taken off the market in 2024 because it competed a little too well with the newer 7800X3D.
The second is the Ryzen 7700X3D, priced at $329. This is a 7800X3D, just 10% slower.
If you happen to have an unused AM4 motherboard and 64GB of DDR4 RAM sitting idle, the 5800X3D may be just what you need. Otherwise you're probably be better off with the newer, faster 7700X3D.
- AMD has also updated its roadmap to confirm that the AM5 platform (the current generation) will remain current through at least 2029. (Tom's Hardware)
The previous AM4 platform - home to the once and future 5800X3D - was introduced in 2016, and is still viable today.
Tech News
- AMD also announced global availability of its 9070 GRE, previously a China-only edition. (Tom's Hardware)
This is essentially 75% of the company's flagship graphics card, the 9070 XT, trimmed from 64 cores and 16GB of RAM to 48 cores and 12GB of RAM.
The only problem is the MSRP was reduced from $599 to $549, which makes it rather the opposite of a good deal.
- Nvidia is announcing - oh, wait, it just went official - its RTX Spark laptop chip. (Tom's Hardware)
This offers up to 20 Arm CPU cores, coupled with up to 128GB of RAM and an up to RTX 5070-class integrated GPU.
This is the same chip used in Nvidia's DGX Spark AI desktop, which retails for $4699, so don't expect the laptop version to be cheap.
- Speaking of cheap laptops, Dell's new XPS 13 starts at $699 ($599 for students). (Liliputing)
It uses Intel's low-end Wildcat Lake CPU, but one of the better ones with actually quite acceptable performance. And unlike many competing models it has a screen on par with Apple's MacBook Neo, a 2560x1600 IPS panel covering 100% of DCI-P3 colour and a variable refresh rate from 30 to 120Hz, at a healthy 500 nits brightness.
Basic model has 8GB of RAM (soldered) and 512GB of SSD. I/O consists of two USB-C ports and... That's it, really. Doesn't have the Four Essential Keys either.
- What does have the Four Essential Keys is Lenovo's new Thinkpad T14 Gen 7. (Notebook Check)
It comes with a 6 or 8 core Ryzen processor with Radeon 840M or 860M graphics respectively - good if not great - the aforementioned keys which while not in my preferred layout are all present and unshared, and expandable memory and storage.
And a 2880x1800 OLED display... With 500 nits brightness and a variable refresh rate from 30 to 120Hz.
(A word of caution with these OLED panels: They look amazing but burn-in is real.)
- Download all the computers. (Virtual OS Museum)
Ever wanted to see what the old days of computing were like - as early as 1948?
Want to play with that Apple II or BBC Micro your parents couldn't afford?
Or just want to play with a Lisp or Smalltalk workstation?
It's all here. 179GB of it.
- Wikipedia editors are threatening a global strike where they'll stop airbrushing history. (The Register)
Oh no.
Tech News
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Sunday, May 31
Nesting Countries Edition
Top Story
- GitHub Copilot users are aghast at the exponentially higher costs they are facing starting tomorrow with the introduction of usage-based billing. (Tech Crunch)
"What a joke," one Redditor recently wrote, claiming that, while they currently only pay around $29 per month, the new rate will balloon their costs to nearly $750 a month.
He posted this with a screenshot of his estimated bill... From a visibly unactivated version of Windows.Another user posted "WOW, didn’t expect new pricing model to be this ridiculous," sharing a screenshot that appeared to show that their costs had shot up from around $50 to some $3,000.
Both of them posted to Reddit, and both got dunked on for being obviously incompetent vibe-coders.
I use Claude Code. My company pays for the 5X plan, and I rarely hit the 1X mark. The people who do hit the limit are either experimenting - fair enough - or trying to tell the AI to generate an entire application with a single prompt, which just doesn't work.
Tech News
- What to expect from Nvidia at Computex. (WCCFTech)
A new Arm-based laptop chip. Which would be great if anybody could afford a new laptop.
- What to expect from AMD at Computex. (WCCFTech)
A new x86-based laptop chip, specifically Medusa Halo, the successor to the Ryzen AI Max 395+. Up to 24 CPU cores and a bigger GPU upgraded from RDNA 3.5 to RDNA 5. Which would be great if anybody could afford a new laptop.
- What to expect from Intel at Computex. (WCCFTech)
Updated handheld gaming things, using the new Panther Lake chips with the B390 graphics core, which is actually faster than AMD's mainstream integrated graphics. Which would be great if anybody could afford a new handheld gaming thing.
- MSI's Claw 8 EX AI, for example. (Liliputing)
It has a 1920x1200 8" 120Hz display, up to 32GB of RAM, and an M.2 2280 slot for storage, along with Intel's new Arc G3 which is a low-power edition of the Panther Lake laptop chip with Arc B390 graphics.
Don't expect it to be cheap though.
- You can now print 3D objects in colour on your colour 3D printer. (Prusa)
Well, that's novel.
What they're doing here is taking an existing multi-colour 3D printer (ideally you want a 5-colour model) and then feeding it CMYKW filament spools and printing your model in halftone using a 0.1mm screen.
That's not very high resolution but it helps that it's 3D so you get some colour from the obscured layers as well as from adjacent dots.
Really have to wonder what it does to performance though. 3D printers are slow enough as it is.
You can use it with existing filament, not just the new CMYKW spools designed specifically for the purpose, but you'll need to recalibrate the colour model.
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Saturday, May 30
Phlegmish Edition
Top Story
- In the comments yesterday, Seth asked:
Regarding Anthropic and their IPO. Why the statement as to it crashing?
Which is a fair question because Anthropic's Claude Code is actually a useful product and well worth the $20 per month.
And the answer is that Anthropic (and likewise OpenAI) spend a lot more than $1 to make $1 in revenue. Subscription plans in particularly are wildly unprofitable; it's the much more expensive per-token charges on their API services that make the balance sheets look less insane.
And if they hiked their subscription fees by around 1000% to reflect the real cost of the services, they'd lose the bulk of their customers, which would just make things worse because the training costs for new AI models are fixed regardless of how many people are using them.
That's why both companies are rushing for an IPO.
- Microsoft is under fire for threatening a "security researcher" with criminal investigation. (Tech Crunch)
The "security researcher" in question is anonymous and definitely no White Hat. The moment "Nightmare Eclipse" finds a security flaw, he goes public with it, regardless of the chaos that might ensue.
On the other hand, Microsoft could do well to put fewer security flaws in their code in the first place.
Tech News
- ChatGPT blindly trusts browser content, turning the page into a payload. (The Register)
This is a bigger problem than ChatGPT, and a bigger problem than most people realise.
Traditional computer programs have code and data. The code tells the computer what to do; the data tells it what to do it to. And you never mix the two up. When you do - because of course that happens - your get a security problem and you fix it. Languages like Rust, Ada, and Java are designed to prevent that happening in the first place.
LLMs have a training set, and then after that everything is data. There's no fundamental distinction between the system prompt which tells the LLM how to deal with your prompt, or the skill file attached to application you're trying to work with, or the data in the application itself. There's just a sea of tokens.
And if you use an LLM to try to sniff out problems with prompts or skill files or datasets, a malicious actor can use any of those to infect your AI security system.
This comes back to the problem I mentioned with ClawHub, a repository for sharing open-source skill files for AI agents. They were using a security scanner, but it only checked the first 10,000 characters of each file to avoid blowing the its context window - the amount of data it can consider in one place. (LLMs are bad at chunking.)
So all a hacker needed to do was put their malware anywhere after the first 10,000 characters.
But worse than that: They could put malicious code in the file crafted not to infect users but to infect the security scanner itself, and from there they could slip anything in.
There's no known solution to the problem; it's like trying to teach people not to do stupid shit. The workaround is to limit the damage the agents can do, like not giving a toddler your car keys.
- Linux is planning to retire the x32 ABI (application binary interface) next year. (Tom's Hardware)
x32 lets developers work with 64-bit data but only use 32-bit addresses, the idea being that this uses less memory while providing the same performance as full 64-bit mode.
Only problem is, nobody uses it. And it's Linux-only; neither Windows nor MacOS provides an equivalent mode of operation.
- Did some work on my own blog today, which somehow resulted in it going offline for about fifteen minutes. There was a long-existing problem with various log files (both application and database) growing to enormous sizes, and since the containers and since the containers are snapshotted and backed up daily, it was a lot of work to clean up afterwards.
That's now automated, with proper log rotation.
And then I cleared out a terabyte of backups and snapshots which pretty much froze ZFS for the entire server for a good ten minutes.
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Friday, May 29
Fiery But Fireful Edition
Top Story
- Anthropic has raised another $65 billion as it approaches a planned $1 trillion IPO. (Tech Crunch)
Buy the dip. Or just stand back and enjoy the crashing sounds.
- Anthropic has also released Claude Opus 4.8. (Anthropic)
It's 0.1 louder.
Tech News
- The Steam Deck is back in stock, bearing a 40% price hike. (Liliputing)
And it's already sold out again.
- Sandisk has announced two new models of SATA SSDs. (Tom's Hardware)
Samsung was the leading provider of these models, followed by Crucial. Samsung dropped its SATA lineup, and Crucial dropped dead.
- The new Acer Aspire Go 15 has up to 8GB of RAM. (Notebook Check)
"Up to" meaning there are models with less.
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