CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?

Tuesday, November 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 November 2025

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

Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Hexwriter?

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Monday, November 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 November 2025

Investing In Pins Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: Thing.

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Sunday, November 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 November 2025

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



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: I actually prefer Falco's German cover of this one, but we already had Amadeus.

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Saturday, November 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 November 2025

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


They've even got Milet back for the closing theme.

Airs starting January 16.


Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Gotta be cool to be kind.

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Friday, November 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 November 2025

Turbo Intercal Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: I KNOW!

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Thursday, November 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 November 2025

Sparkly Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude


There was an official music video released for Eye in the Sky, but for the life of me I cannot find it online.



Disclaimer: Ptui.

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Wednesday, November 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 November 2025

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



Hold My Beer Interlude


160 proof beer?  What could possibly go wrong?


Musical Interlude


Disclaimer: Everything alright there, Mose?

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Tuesday, November 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 November 2025

Ambient Everything Edition

Top Story

  • If you gaze too long into CoreWeave, CoreWeave gazes back at you.  (The Verge)  (archive site)

    Some actually sound reporting from The Verge's usually reliably crazy Elizabeth Lopatto, about deeply dubious datacenter holding company CoreWeave.
    But as I began to look more closely at the company, I began feeling like I’d accidentally stumbled on an eldritch horror. CoreWeave is saddled with massive debt and, except in the absolute best-case scenario of fast AI adoption, has no obvious path toward profitability.  There are some eyebrow-raising accounting choices.  And then, naturally, there are the huge insider sales of CoreWeave stock.
    Yes, naturally there are those.

    Wait, what?
    After I unfocused my eyes a little, I realized CoreWeave did make a horrible kind of sense: It’s a tool to hedge other companies' risks and juice their profits.  It's taking on the risk and the costs of building data centers that bigger tech companies can then rent while they build their own data centers which may very well wind up competing with CoreWeave.  What’s more, it’s part of a whole stable of companies that are propping up demand for the behemoth of the AI boom: Nvidia.
    The usual names pop up in the list of investors in CoreWeave.  Nvidia is a major investor and is selling the company billions of dollars worth of GPUs, which CoreWeave then provides access to for customers like OpenAI and Microsoft, which are also major investors.

    It also has billions in outstanding loans at variable interest rates.

    It's not a bubble.


     
  • Meanwhile Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is deeply worried about the power a handful of unelected people like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have to shape the future of AI.  (Business Insider)

    Deeply worried, I tell you.  Deeply.


Tech News


Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Yeah, I read it as $5.3 billion for a moment.

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Monday, November 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 November 2025

Who's On First Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude


That's not your PC or your internet stuttering near the start, unfortunately that's the video itself.  Only for a couple of seconds, though, the rest is fine.



Disclaimer: It's lynxes and rabbits all over again.

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Sunday, November 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 November 2025

Turn The Beep Around Edition

Top Story

Tech News

  • I was reading through the service manual for the HP 9121 disk drive that I found on Bitsavers - it rained this weekend - and it turns out it did in fact run at 600 rpm, twice as fast as was common for other 3.5" drives.

    I then asked Grok to check some details for me, and was swiftly reminded that Grok is less reliable than random half-remembered facts I read in a long out-of-print publication twenty years ago.

    I asked if there were any historical 10-bit processor architectures, and it gave me a couple of examples from the late 60s and early 70s.  It even gave me the detailed opcode format of one of the models and a bunch of links for further details.

    The machines were real.

    They were not 10 bit, though; they were 16 bits, which is hardly a rarity.

    The opcode format was entirely fictional, which is actually a little impressive.  Very minimal but it could have worked.

    The links were also entirely fictional.


  • Some models of Intel's Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs have more cores.  (WCCFTech)

    The 250K, which replaces the 245K, and the 270K, which replaces the 265K, both add 4 efficiency cores, taking them from 6 + 8 to 6 + 12 and 8 + 12 to 8 + 16 respectively.

    The high-end 290K is basically a 285K but 1.8% faster...  And also just 1.8% faster than the new 270K making it ENTIRELY POINTLESS.


  • Copy-and-paste is now the leading cause of corporate data leaks.  (SCWorld)

    Because people are copying and pasting data into AI to get it to lie to them.


  • Google has filed a sweeping lawsuit against one of those companies that are constantly spamming you with fake SMS messages.  (BGR)
    Google's legal action is comprehensive and is intent on completely dismantling Lighthouse's operations.  The search giant is bringing claims under RICO, the Lanham Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
    I'm not sure yet how it will turn out that this is a bad thing.


  • No uncertainty with this one, though: A group of developers has been working tirelessly behind the scenes to restore a lost video game AND IT'S FUCKING CONCORD.  (Aftermath)

    Concord came out in August last year and quickly achieved notoriety for two reasons: First, it cost $400 million and took eight years to develop, and second, it made absolutely no money whatsoever because it was so bad Sony shut down the servers and refunded everyone after just two weeks.
    Concord wasn't a bad game
    Yes it was.  Objectively so.  It cost $400 million to make, sold just 25,000 copies in total at $40, and was gone in just two weeks.

    Until now.  Until now, you bastards.


  • The International Energy Agency now predicts we will reach Peak Oil by 2050 maybe.  (CNBC)

    Okay.


  • Scientists have confirmed what is inside the Moon.  (Science Alert)

    Cheese sauce?
    A thorough investigation published in May 2023 found that the inner core of the Moon is, in fact, a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron.
    Ah.  Cheese and garlic sauce.  An important distinction.

    Thanks scientists.


  • Turkey is stuffed, seasoned, and in the oven.  We'll see how it goes.

Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: That HP 9121 270k disk drive cost nearly $1200 in 1982.  Which used to be a lot...  And will buy you a whole computer these days so I guess it still is.

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