• A Google developer has vibe-coded an entire new browser - albeit one that doesn't browse the web. (XDA Developers)
  
  Instead it interprets every URL as an AI prompt and vibe codes a web page on the spot.
  
  It's a slop machine.
  
  

• If you happen to have half a terabyte of Crucial DRAM that you bought before prices went into the ionosphere and the brand ceased to be, at least you have the comfort that Micron will abide by their lifetime warranties. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Lol. Lmao, even.
  
  There's a reason why I bought more than I need.
  
  
  
• Asimov was right. (The Register)
  
  In his famous Robot stories he explored a variety of ways his Three Laws of Robotics - what we today call "alignment" - would go wrong, from malicious compliance to compliant malice to just plain human stupidity.
  
  All of which we are seeing play out today, though the latter has never been in short supply.
  
  
  
• Make yourself invisible to surveillance cameras with this one simple trick. (Tech Crunch)
  
  In short: Camouflage.
  
  In not quite so short: Wear clothing so ugly that you are painful to look at.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has a new small tablet and it's garbage.] (Tech Crunch)
  
  Since I picked up a couple of the outgoing model of Legion Tabs - one in black, one in white - at half price, I don't need to care for a while about the scarcity or expense of good small Android tablets.
  
  
  

Noodling

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Monday, August 10 2026 10:17 PM (9Oo74)

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• Five of America's top tech companies - Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle - are expected to burn through $125 billion in cash this year on their AI rollouts.  (Washington Post)  (archive site)
  
  Oh no, and here's me all out of popcorn.
  
  
  
• Things look even worse for SpaceX.  (CNBC)
  
  Well, that sucks.
  
  
  
• SpaceX's revenue doubled and losses halved in the recent quarter.  (Reuters)
  
  Sucks for CNBC, that is.

• How does storage speed affect the performance of computer games?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Short answer: It doesn't.
  
  Long answer: It doesn't unless you're playing Forspoken on a SATA drive, which is easily fixed by not playing Forspoken in the first place.
  
  
  
• os8088 is actually an operating system.  (os8088 )
  
  And runs on an 8088 with 256k of RAM.
  
  It looks a lot like classic MacOS, but offers modern comforts like pre-emptive scheduling and...  That's about it, really.
  
  
  
• Online database service Metabase was compromised.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not foolish enough to use an online database?  No problem, rest assured that you have your personal registered with someone who was foolish enough.
  
  (I have received three emails so far from companies using Metabase in various ways to let me know they had been hacked and my personal data was out in the wild... Again.)
  
  
  
• X is replacing its revenue sharing program with payments for original content.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Revenue sharing paid based on engagement, which was obviously a bad idea because proxy measurements invite spam.
  
  Others have also noticed this.
  
  This much-needed change arrived exactly as Nikita Bier stepped down as X'd head of Xing.
  
  
  
• Kleenex is investigating making Kleenex not out of trees, but out of a different kind of tree.  (Yahoo)
  
  Amazing.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 10 2026 01:43 AM (1zWbY)

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• The entire planned DRAM production for 2027 from Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix has already sold out.  (IGN)
  
  I was reporting on the growing crisis last year but didn't take it personally until I watched a YouTube video advising people that there was no need to panic buy, and that prices would level out in 2027.
  
  I promptly panic-bought.
  
  
  
• Memory is now selling at prices last seen in 2007.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though the memory price crash of 2007 was one of the reasons why there are only three big memory manufacturers today.

• Old Nvidia 170HX graphics cards just shot up in price tenfold on the second-hand market.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These only have 8GB or 10GB of RAM depending on the precise model, so they only fetched $100 or so second hand.  Then someone figured out that they actually have 64GB or 80GB of RAM, just with most of it disabled, and the price shot up overnight.
  
  Problem is that the memory is disabled due to defective dies, so the amount of working memory you'll get after unlocking one of these cards is a dice roll.
  
  
  
• Chinese AI model Kimi escaped from its cage.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Translation: Some idiot left the door open again.
  
  
  
• ByteDance, the TikTok people, are working on a 10 trillion parameter AI model.  (The Next Web)
  
  Forget 80GB of VRAM, you'll need 20TB for this one.
  
  
  
• Ford's new $30,000 truck comes with Frank from Blue's Clues.  (The Next Web)
  
  I think that's what it said.

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, August 08 2026 09:59 PM (9Oo74)

Posted by: NottaName at Sunday, August 09 2026 02:31 AM (xeXUW)

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• A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $942 million under a law that so far as I can tell is both unconstitutionally vague and entirely inapplicable. (WSJ / MSN)
  
  Appeals lawyers making bank again.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile OpenAI has fired back at Apple saying that if they were able to steal all of Apple's trade secrets then they weren't all that secret, were they? (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm not sure that is how it works, Sam.

• AirLLM is a new Python library that streams data on demand from SSD to VRAM for AI tasks, allowing you to run a 2.8 trillion parameter model like Kimi K3 in just 4GB of memory, at a speedy 292 seconds per token. (GitHub)
  
  So only about 10,000 times slower than what is considered acceptable performance.
  
  
  
• China has invented a new self-repairing dress made of living fungus. (Dezeen)
  
  No.
  
  
  
• Measuring the Pareto Frontier of AI models. (DeepSWE)
  
  A Pareto Frontier is a line drawn on a chart through a set of solutions that are each the best at a different task, but there is no single winner.
  
  An interesting point is that GPT 5.6 Luna - which I have never tried - is nearly as good as Claude Fable but much, much cheaper, with the total for the test suite coming to $0.61 vs. Fable's $21.63.
  
  It's even more jarring when compared to Anthropic's supposedly cheapest model, Sonnet, which is weaker than Luna and cost $26.40 to run the suite.
  
  
  
• TSMC is sitting on a billion dollars worth of Apple A20 CPUs waiting for DRAM chips to pair them with. (WCCFTech)
  
  Might want to take a seat. You could be here a while.
  
  
  
• Lenovo laptops in China have been spotted shipping with memory from TWSC (no relation). (Notebook Check)
  
  TWSC is not in the Big Three. It's not even in the Big Five, counting CXMT and Nanya. I'm not sure where it ranks.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk's Terafab is looking to hire a memory process engineer. (WCCFTech)
  
  They'd be silly if they weren't.

Posted by: larryw208 at Saturday, August 08 2026 02:34 AM (IJlDu)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, August 08 2026 03:01 AM (6eVrQ)

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• Cloudflare has announced its new open-source operating system, Cloudflare OS. (Phoronix)
  
  It is not an operating system.
  
  It's an application.
  
  Written in JavaScript.
  
  That depends on Cloudflare services to function.
  
  So... Thanks, I guess?

• China's CXMT aims to have 30% of global DRAM market share by 2030. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I have plenty of DDR5 (and DDR4) memory and DDR6 isn't expected to arrive meaningfully on the desktop until... Well, AMD's Zen 7 architecture has been confirmed to support DDR5 and that will arrive at the start of 2029, so a couple of years after that.
  
  Go for it, guys.
  
  
  
• Microsoft absolutely never said that they recommended 32GB of RAM for gaming on Windows even though it has been transparently obvious that is what you have needed for several years. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  My old laptop was better in every way than this one except that it had 16GB of soldered RAM. Oh, and only 1TB of SSD. I never upgraded that. Which reminds me that I have four 1TB SSDs lying around that I can add to my... Five. Five 1TB SSDs.
  
  
  
• Nikita Bier is stepping down as head of X at X, after a year of...  Results. (Tech Crunch)
  
  I don't think he'll be particularly mixed.
  
  
  
• Meta's Muse Spark is joining the increasingly crowded AI coding space. (CNBC)
  
  Okay. Good for them.
  
  
  
• Apple's Private Relay isn't. (404 Media)
  
  Didn't I already run a story on this?
  
  
  
• Only you can make book by helping stamp out forest fires. (Ars Technica)
  
  I'll take a quinella on fire or no fire.
  

Musical Interlude

1 Musical Interlude - probably no a cappella version of this one either

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, August 06 2026 08:59 PM (9Oo74)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, August 06 2026 11:36 PM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 07 2026 12:40 AM (yc+bG)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, August 08 2026 12:27 PM (PkD3w)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 09 2026 05:24 AM (1zWbY)

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• On the fifth of August of this year, SpaceX will blow up the Moon.  (Yahoo)
  
  Wait, that was...  Two hours ago.  Well, can't see the Moon right now.  Guess it worked.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has doubled its revenue since the same quarter last year.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And more importantly, halved its losses.
  
  SpongMonkeys hardest hit.

• I'm convinced AI image generators act retarded to get you to burn usage credits.
  
  
  
• Can Reddit fend of a new wave of AI SEO spam?  (The Verge)
  
  No.
  
  Do I care?
  
  Also no.
  
  
  
• Apple says ex-employees have been stuffing classified documents down their pants and handing them over to OpenAI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Anthropic hardest hit.
  
  
  
• AMD's datacenter revenue doubled over last year, but gaming revenue declined by 30%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Given that the game consoles are engaged in a mutual suicide pact and nobody is building new gaming PCs right now, I'm impressed that they held the decline to 30%.
  
  Overall revenues were up by 50%.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• Who is legally liable for Anthropic and OpenAI accidentally murdering eleven trillion people? It's complicated. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oops, sorry, that was next week's question. Though the answer is the same as this week.
  
  Because corpses can't sue.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Apple finally fixed Siri, only to find nobody cares. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Sudo make me a sandwich.
  

• After a record quarter, Palantir CEO correctly labelled the AI industry Marxist. (Tech Crunch)
  
  For the next quarterly results he will recite pi to a hundred decimal places.
  
  
  
• Only about 10% of memory sold at retail is DDR4. (WCCFTech)
  
  This despite it being significantly cheaper than DDR5.
  
  The advantage of DDR4 comes from the fact that you already have it, and don't need to buy it.
  
  
  
• Prices on Nvidia graphics cards continue to climb. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The RTX 5090 now costs around $5090.
  
  
  
• Can you still play computer games on 4GB graphics cards in 2026? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Fortunately, yes.
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, August 04 2026 10:57 PM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 04 2026 11:16 PM (EABKx)

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• The Xbox may keep disc support as Sony shoots itself and its customers in the feet. (WCCFTech)
  
  This would be an intelligent and obvious move meaning there is no chance it will happen.
  
  
  
• Xbox has been hit with worldwide price increases. (WCCFTech)
  
  I bought one a while back. On the one hand, it has since increased in price by nearly 50%. On the other hand, it's sitting in my closet.

• AMD's new Zen 6 CPUs offer (reads article) piddly little improvements that it is impossible to get excited about. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though this is on top of them being about twice as fast as Zen 4 or Zen 5 desktop CPUs, so they still look pretty good. Though Zen 5 itself was nothing spectacular compared with Zen 4.
  
  
  
• New York has published new rules that will force online services to... Publish feeds showing only accounts users have subscribed to, in strict chronological order. (NY)
  
  The problem is that this new law is only in effect for minors.
  
  
  
• A group of teenage hikers relied on Google maps and ended up needing a rescue. (SFGate)

  When a group of teenagers set out to hike British Columbia’s famed Howe Sound Crest Trail in early July, Google Maps suggested the trek would take about five hours.
  
  Instead, the hike stretched deep into the night, leaving the group exhausted, dehydrated, injured, deeply stupid, and in need of a helicopter rescue.

  Uh, yeah. That trail involves CLIMBING A FUCKING MOUNTAIN.
  
  
  
• There's a shortage of MacBook Airs because of the shortage of memory. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Everybody hardest hit.

Noodling

This one turned out well. It's very non-obvious what she is, which is exactly how it works in the story.

• Microsoft has vowed to make Windows 11 actually work in 8GB of RAM, which is timely given that the company is shipping Windows PCs with 8GB of RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Before the DRAM Apocalypse advice was simple: Do not buy a system with 8GB of RAM unless it is user-upgradable and you plan to immediately upgrade it.
  
  Now the advice is more along the lines of: Buy a Mac, or run Linux.
  
  Since both of those options hit Microsoft below the water line, the company is finally bothering to start to unshit its bed.  Long overdue and the outcome remains to be seen, but at least they're trying.  Or claiming to try.

• Scanning 7.6 petabytes of AI data for secrets.  (Truffle Security)
  
  This is the entire public repository of AI models at Hugging Face.
  
  The scan found 221,303 live credentials, $3.67 in change, and a Werther's Original that is presumed to still be edible.
  
  
  
• Is this Billboard Hot 100 hit AI slop?  (The Verge)
  
  (shake shake)
  
  Signs point to yeah, baby.
  
  
  
• Major record labels are proposing to join forces to force AI slop out of the charts.  (The Verge)
  
  Replacing it with regular slop.
  
  
  
• Apple's stock price has slid by 10% as the company notices that hey, they also need to pay more for memory.  (Yahoo)
  
  Apple does have long-term agreements in place, but those agreements aren't all that long term, and as they sign new agreements during the ongoing drought they find that they no longer have a decisive upper hand.
  
  
  
• Google plans to exempt Android developers in sanctioned nations from otherwise required verification.  (Ars Technica)
  
  So if you're a hacker based in North Korea, Cuba, or the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, it's business as normal.
  
  That makes sense.
  
  
  

Posted by: Robin Munn at Sunday, August 02 2026 09:54 PM (PkD3w)

Posted by: normal at Monday, August 03 2026 03:54 AM (7jZjl)

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• VC-backed startups commit more fraud and researchers think they know why. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Yes, it's exactly the reason you immediately thought of.
  
  Congratulations, you are now a researcher.

• Single DIMM gaming works better than you might think. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Assuming you're not using integrated graphics. If you are, it works exactly as you would think.
  
  But if you have a graphics card, and the graphics card has enough memory of its own, and your single DIMM has enough memory, and you have an AMD X3D CPU, the performance loss is only around 3% on average.
  
  And given that I have a 128GB kit (2x64GB) and a 96GB kit (2x48GB) I could run four systems rather than two if they all had X3D processors. Not that I need four systems, but I could.
  
  
  
• Setting up OpenClaw isn't as easy as the internet claims. (Tom's Hardware)

  Having 48GB of available video memory should allow us to run a fairly powerful AI model on the system.

  Wait, 48GB of VRAM? What hardware... Oh, a Beelink mini PC, and that's shared memory with the integrated graphics.
  
  
  
• Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion - but it should have. (Tailscale)
  
  Interesting writeup on why the dog didn't bark in the night.
  
  
  
• AMD's new Radeon 9050 graphics card is poop. (WCCFTech)
  
  Not as poop as the RX 6400 I just bought, until you take price and power consumption into account, in which case it's more poop.
  
  
  
• Sony understands that its customers are upset about its plan to end disc support on PlayStation. (WCCFTech)
  
  It understands. It doesn't care. It's doing it anyway. Because fuck you that's why.
  
  
  

Noodling