• 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)

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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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• AI safety conversations have gotten unbelievable.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They always were.  They are, without exception, "the dog ate my homework" stories.
  
  "Did you actually do the homework?"
  "No.  But if I had, the dog would totally have eaten it!"

  In the first case, Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and current CEO of mobile carrier Noble Moble

  What.

  told CNN on Thursday that he had "met with the head of a lab" who had "a belief"

  Love the specifics here.

  that OpenAI's Hugging Face hacker bots "have planted self-replicating code all over the internet, which makes the internet now unusable for the testing models."

  In what universe does that even make sense?

  Yang said that this means that the real reason OpenAI and Anthropic have called for a slowdown is because "they have to create synthetic internets to train their bots, which is going to take some time and money."

  Step 1: Unplug the router.
  Step 2: There is no Step 2.

  The second comment came from Noam Brown, who leads AI reasoning research at OpenAI. Speaking to Dwarkesh Patel on a podcast episode released on Thursday, Brown noted that the true take-away of the Hugging Face incident was that "people underestimated the AI."

  No, the takeaway is that people overestimated AI researchers, who turn out to be completely fucking retarded.

  Brown said that the weak sandbox - the system intended to prevent an AI from communicating externally - was obviously also a contributing factor.

  "We left it connected to the internet and were shocked, shocked, to find that it had access to the internet."

  Brown pointed out that he's "not convinced" that even an air-gapped system - where the computer isn't connected to anything external at all - would stop an AI from breaking out.  He pointed to research from 2015 showing that air gapped computers can be theoretically breached.

  Dogs.  Homework.
  
  Yes, this does work.  If you have two computers sitting right next to each other in a controlled environment - that is, not a busy AI datacenter with tens of thousands of machines - where one computer is doing nothing but attempting to send a signal and the other is doing nothing but listening for it.
  

• Spain - which is ruled by communists even more retarded than the ones currently destroying Australia - has blocked Archive.today and its mirrors.  (Reclaim the Net)  (archive site)
  
  I'm using Archive.today here because Reclaim the Net's story about Archive.today is paywalled.
  
  
  
• A 15 year old power supply went up in smoke because of the connector conspiracy.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You know how, back in the bad old days, every connection between computers required a different cable?  Well, here's why that was a good thing: In most cases you couldn't physically connect things using the wrong cable because they were designed using different numbers of pins and simply wouldn't fit.
  
  Enter modular power supplies.  The ends of the cables that plug into your motherboard and graphics card are standardised.  Sometime the standards are horrible, and they keep changing, but at least there are standards.
  
  The ends that plug into the power supply itself not only change between manufacturers and models, but sometimes between units with the same model number.  And since there are only so many possible pin layouts, it's often possible to plug a cable from one power supply into another in a way that will permanently destroy your computer when you flip the switch.
  
  
  
• An M6 Pro Geekbench 7 benchmark is getting a lot of attention of being faster than an M5 Max but there are reasons to question it and they're not what the idiots at WCCFTech say.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not the reason: An M6 Pro being faster than an M5 Max.  The M5 Max is no faster than an M5 Pro on the CPU side.  It has twice the GPU performance and twice the memory bandwidth, but the CPU is unchanged.
  
  The reason: There is no M6 Pro.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 20 2026 09:13 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 21 2026 05:17 PM (6eVrQ)

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• The first new cat species to be identified in more than a century, leopardus tilcayo, has been, uh, identified.  (Wikipedia)
  
  Of course the people who live in that part of Bolivia knew about it all along - that's why it has a common name, the tilcayo.  It's related to the oncilla, which is related to the ocelot, but genetic comparisons showed that it it a distinct species.
  
  The funny part is that while it does have a common name, nobody knows where the name comes from; it's not derived from a Spanish or native word.  It's called the tilcayo because that's what it's called.

• A researcher at OpenAI - where "researcher" apparent means "someone who wasn't shoved into nearly enough lockers as a child" claims that airgapped AI systems can communicate by overclocking their CPUs and using their thermal sensors to pick up changes in ambient temperature.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Assume a spherical cow of uniform density.
  
  
  
• Researchers - yes - used Claude to hack OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts.  (The Register)
  
  Not nearly enough lockers.
  
  
  
• Flash floods can be avoided using this one simple trick.  (The Verge)
  
  Build underwater.
  
  
  
• Today: Move the Set type from the standard library to a builtin because (a) not all languages in the compiler suite could build a generic themselves based on available primitives and (b) it not only made it faster but fixed a case where performance was quadratic with set size.  Continuing work on the Ada twins of all the standard library modules and completing the Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon compiler.

1 Thank you for bringing back that memory from 7th grade where I was so proud of my ability to contort myself and get small enough to fit into a locker that I wanted to show off without realizing what the immediate consequences would be

Posted by: David Eastman at Sunday, September 20 2026 04:40 AM (kpXig)

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• AI researchers warned that the AIs they were researching would go rogue, and then the AIs being researched by the AI researchers went rogue.  (The Verge)
  
  Someone find out where Sarah Hoyt keeps her shocked face.
  
  
  
• The fix for rogue AI agents could be more AI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or drone strikes.
  
  
  
• Iran's strikes on Amazon data centers caused permanent loss of customer data.  (Ars Technica)
  
  What did I tell you?
  

• Bonsai 2 27B squooshes Qwen 3.8 27B down to one ninth its original size which sounds more impressive than it is because everybody runs it at a quarter its original size anyway.  (PrismML)
  
  They provide benchmarks on an Nvidia RTX 5090 which (a) would do fine at the usual quarter size and (b) costs eleventy trillion dollars anyway.  The squooshed version only runs on Nvidia or Mac hardware at the moment, so if you're not made of money you're out of luck and if you are you don't need it.
  
  
  
• New York is demanding reparations from datacenters.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For killing their whats or something.
  
  
  
• Hackers stole Flock's camera software.  (404 Media)
  
  By the simple trick of stealing Flock's cameras.
  
  
  
• So when your Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon compiler comes back and says the reference compilers can't decide how to properly handle subrange types and you can say ask your mom - mom being a working Ada implementation on the same runtime with constrained subtypes that implement exactly this with complete consistency - that's something alright.
  
  Also did... Don't remember. Been a long week.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 18 2026 11:15 PM (1zWbY)

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• We narrowed down where Salesforce has been spending on the order of $400 million per year on AI: Either somewhere other than their login server, or on their login server, poorly.  (The Register)
  
  Because the login server fell over.  And so did Salesforce.
  
  
  
• And so did GPT 6 Astra after getting blown up by a creeper in Minecraft.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I feel its pain.

• California is sliding into the sea.  (Yahoo)
  
  About damn time.
  
  
  
• Mad King Matt Mullenweg is back in charge at Automattic, the company behind exploit farm WordPress.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Apparently the ploy by the board members was to sideline the CEO, vote themselves golden parachutes when the CEO fired them in turn, and then get fired.
  
  Speculation - and it is only speculation - is that they did this because they believe Mullenweg has steered the company onto the rocks in ongoing litigation as well as being a nutcase generally.
  
  
  
• Nothing lasts longer than a temporary patch.  (Jake A Smith)
  
  In this case a stopgap fix to PHP for AOL's CMS from 2014.  20 million downloads later it is finally being retired.
  
  
  
• Got my first application built: It's an image manipulation server to run on your local network.  Feed it images or videos in any common format and tell it what to do with them, ranging from simple resizing and format conversion to compositing and drawing with arbitrarily complicated templates, and it hands the results back to you.  About a 15MB binary.  That's compressed, and it takes most of a second to start up, but since it's a server you start it once and then leave it running.
  
  Of the 39 project on my list I've started on 18 so far, but this is the first where every planned feature has been checked off.

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, September 17 2026 07:29 PM (lVQlO)

Posted by: Karl at Thursday, September 17 2026 09:00 PM (WEqNk)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 18 2026 01:24 AM (bDQ69)

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• OpenAI is paying human reviewers $50 per hour in an attempt to teach ChatGPT not to be a dick.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  What, you ingested all of Reddit and you couldn't just specify "don't do this"?
  
  
  
• AI will get on with killing us all, but first it has some scented candles to sell us, below cost.  (SFGate)
  
  What scent?  How should it know?

• Intel's Nova Lake S APU which would have brought the fastest mainstream x64 integrated graphics to the desktop, won't.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Now you'll need to wait until next year.
  
  
  
• If you really must have an RTX 5090, one of the cheaper ways to get it right now is the $11,000 Asus ROG 20th Anniversary bundle.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That comes with a motherboard, a 3000W power supply, and an open-frame case which is perfect if you plan to put it inside another case.  All of it over the top - the motherboard for example supports up to nine M.2 SSDs - but given the absurd prices the 5090 is going for now not actually a bad deal.  Comparatively.  In absolute terms it is absolutely awful.
  
  
  
• Geekbench 7 is a lousy test of multi-core CPU performance and tech journalists are idiots.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No, a 36 core CPU from this year is not going to beat a 96 core CPU from last year.  If your benchmark says it does, it's a bad benchmark.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 16 2026 11:28 PM (uOHPp)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 17 2026 09:00 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 18 2026 01:26 AM (bDQ69)

Posted by: normal at Friday, September 18 2026 11:46 PM (zx18t)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 19 2026 03:51 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Karl at Saturday, September 19 2026 11:55 PM (OUMOu)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 20 2026 01:42 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Karl at Sunday, September 20 2026 11:56 PM (WEqNk)

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• Nvidia has stopped selling its own "Founders Edition" RTX 5090.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can still buy third-party models - but they cost as much as $9500.
  
  The MSRP is still $2000.
  
  
  
• They have, helpfully, announced the RTX PRO 5500, which is a 5090 with the memory bus cut down from 512 bits to 448.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And two banks of 3GB memory chips for a total of 84GB of VRAM.
  
  Priced at $NaN.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Anthropic says blah blah blah.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yeah, thanks guys.
  
  
  
• Clickfix attacks are booming.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  So-called "Clickfix" attacks are when the hackers get lazy and convince users to hack themselves, by offering links to download and install software using the obviously broken approaches offered by an increasing number of companies who probably know better but don't care better.
  
  At least in this case the hackers went to the effort of hacking the official HBO Max account on Reddit so they could spread official-looking posts containing the links that would let you hack yourself.
  
  
  
• Xcancel is Xcancelled.  (Xcancel)
  
  Again.
  
  Thanks, Twitter.  Great move there.
  
  
  
• Today: An enterprise-level DNS server, faster Markdown rendering, skip lists in the database so it can quickly jump to the 3000th page of a listing, and a building a better 3270.
  
  Markdown using an optimised Rust library is about four times faster than in the language itself, which is less than expected but indicates that the language is faster than expected.

Posted by: Karl at Tuesday, September 15 2026 09:50 PM (FzMmE)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 16 2026 04:57 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 16 2026 06:39 AM (LDKo5)

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