• China is breeding a clone army of terror yaks, probably.  (CNN)
  
  They say they're not, but they also say:

  These are Tibetan yaks, designed and cloned in secretive labs more than 4,000 meters above sea level, where researchers hope to create an "elite" herd of super-yaks, healthier and more fertile than their predecessors.

  I do not trust them.

• Lenovo's new ThinkCentre X system comes with up to 256GB of RAM.  (Notebook Check)
  
  If you expect that it would also come with a price tag previously reserved to professional workstations with top-of-the-line CPUs and graphics cards, you would be correct.
  
  
  
• So here's a 28.9 million parameter small LLM running on a $8 microcontroller.  (GitHub)
  
  It'll do.
  
  
  
• The US has accused a citizen re-entering the country of giving the CBP a "duress" password that wiped his phone.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Do not do this.  Whatever you think about border agents scrolling through your sick memes, anything you don't want on your phone you should simply not have on your phone when you cross the border.
  
  
  
• Research: How to prevent runaway salinisation in an Australian irrigation megaproject (secret: add salt), there's more than one way to force an ice age, and why there is a shoe shop in Bali named Wallace.

• Anthropic's Opus 5 model is here - nearly as smart as Fable for half the price, and less annoying.  (Engadget)
  
  It has been trained similarly but with much less effort towards security, so it isn't as clever at hacking systems or at preventing your systems from being hacked, but it hasn't been forced into I'M SORRY DAVE I'M AFRAID I CAN'T DO THAT insanity that flips on the moment you stray into anything even the tiniest bit questionable.
  
  I'll give it a try since I'm on the $20 Claude plan making Opus 5 free of additional charge while Fable 5 uses my limited credits.  (Paying accounts received $100 worth of credits free, but I want to keep those for actual security scans.)
  
  Also worth noting: If Fable 5 runs into trouble or doubt, it doesn't just run in circles, scream and shout, it can silently drop back to Opus.  This can happen even if your question is entirely orthogonal to security issues.

• Astronomers have discovered the first THAT'S NO MOON, THAT'S A CATEGORISATION ERROR outside of our solar system.  (Space)
  
  That is, it's a solid body orbiting another celestial body orbiting a star - clearly a moon - except that the body in the middle is a brown dwarf, a "failed star".
  
  
  
• Zen 7 Epyc "Florence" will succeed the just announced Zen 6 Epyc "Venice" family in 2028 - using the current sockets.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Wait.  Yes, it says right on the AMD presentation that Zen 7 uses the same server socket as Zen 6, but...  Oh.  The other slide doesn't explicitly say DDR6 - which would require a socket change - but a vaguer "next gen memory".
  
  
  
• The Geekom A9 Max is a Ryzen 470 mini PC with one stick of RAM because they don't want to force you to throw away a perfectly good dual-channel kit in order to upgrade.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which gives us a perfect chance to see how much difference single-channel memory makes to performance, because there's a whole list of benchmark results from similar AMD systems and competing Intel ones.
  
  And the answer is, it makes almost no difference to CPU performance, but cuts the performance of the integrated graphics nearly in half.
  
  
  
• If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?  (Piotr)
  
  Because everybody is using AI tools to push changes faster, with the same level of care as before to finding and fixing bugs.
  
  
  
• Marimo notebooks can now be embedded in PyCharm.  (Marimo)
  
  Bringing modern development environments the interactivity we 29 year olds enjoyed in the prior millennium.
  
  
  
• SpaceX's latest test launch was mostly successful, with the only failure being with the booster's engines not fully restarting for the test splashdown.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which turned into a splashboom.
  
  No such issues with the Starship V3 second stage which bobbed happily undamaged in the ocean after its own splashdown.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has a new all-in-one desktop PC with an interesting 2560x2880 27" display and an Intel Panther Lake CPU with up to and including Arc B390 integrated graphics.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It is fucking expensive.
  
  
  
• Research: Today I ran a Shinkansen line through Eromanga.  I didn't plan it that way; that was the inevitable outcome of the parameters I had set.

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, July 26 2026 04:37 PM (XWgGM)

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• AMD has announced its new Zen 6 Epyc server CPUs and we know, if anything, less about them than we did before the announcement.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Here's the problem: Zen 6 is strongly rumoured to increase the core count per chiplet from 8 to 12, and increase the L3 cache and X3D cache per chiplet by 50% to match.  Which means that the raw numbers of cores and cache do nothing to confirm or deny the 12 core rumour.  It doesn't help that the announced mainstream products focused on 96 core models which would have the same numbers whether that's twelve 8-core chiplets or eight 12-core chiplets.
  
  Until you get all the way down to the bottom of the chart for Socket SP8 processors and find the 8-core Epyc with 48MB of cache which rather hints that 12 core chiplets are not a lie.
  
  Oh, also supported (officially) are PCIe Gen 6 - probably for servers only, and 12.8GHz MRDIMMs - also probably for servers only.  And up to 16 memory channels per socket, which at 12.8GHz delivers close to three times the bandwidth of Epyc Zen 5.

• Ryzen 7 has been confirmed on track for 2028, bringing with it support for DDR6 memory and the new ACE instruction set for matrix operations.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There is no spoon.  As far as I can see some bugger has nicked the entire cutlery draw.
  
  
  
• There's also the "new" X199 embedded CPU which is AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with a much more convenient name and a power budget of 55W.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's competing with Intel's Panther Lake laptops chips and is unsurprisingly faster, although I'm not sure it's possible to manufacture competitively.
  
  
  
• Patreon has laid off 20% of its workforce.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  CEO Jack Conte blamed AI and not his own malicious incompetence.

Musical Interlude

• Across the social sciences, half of research doesn't replicate.  (Science)
  
  And only 34% of it is confirmed by multiple reviewers.
  
  But it gets worse.
  
  In political science and economics replicability rises to more than 60%.
  
  For education, the number is...  Zero.

• Apple is launching a new deal with Klarna where you can rent an iPad.  (ComputerWorld)
  
  You'll own nothing and we really don't care whether you like it.
  
  
  
• Code in the iOS 27 beta suggests that Apple will be able to switch your rented iPad off remotely if you don't pay your bill.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Because of course.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new Z Fold 8 is here.  (CNet)
  
  You can get a pretty decent phone for the price of a high-end gaming PC.
  
  
  
• The Linux kernel team just published 432 security issues in two days.  (The Register)
  
  Asdfghjkl.
  
  
  
• The Hisense A10 is an e-ink phone with a detachable LCD screen.  (Liliputing)
  
  It clips onto the back of the phone with magnets.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 24 2026 12:58 AM (Hi0NU)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, July 24 2026 02:47 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 25 2026 06:53 AM (WDfTs)

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• LLM company OpenAI says that LLM archive site Hugging Face was breached by hackers using OpenAI's LLMs to gain access to models hosted at Hugging Face in order to breach...  I dunno.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Seems legit.
  
  
  

Tech News

• EU courts have ruled that if your country is invaded by VPNs that's your own problem.  (Tech Radar)
  
  This decision actually seems to be sane.
  
  
  
• How to link two Dell Pro Max GB10 AI systems together with the built-in 200Gb Ethernet to make a single system.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Step One: Plug them in.
  
  
  
• China is considering banning Chinese AI companies from manufacturing chips at Taiwan's TSMC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And also from reversing entropy.
  
  
  
• AI companies are buying up old books - physical books printed before 2022 - because they are free of AI slop.  (404 Media)
  
  It's a real problem, because if you feed AI slop into a slop machine things go from bad to worse, fast.

• And you thought you had problems: The combined debts of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle has spiked to $1.65 trillion.  (SE Dailing)
  
  Or as the linked article puts it, 2455 trillion won.
  
  It's not often that you read financial news with numbers in the quadrillions.
  
  

Tech News

• Hackers wiped Romania's entire land registry database.  (CyberNews)
  
  They had a backup.
  
  
  
• LibreOffice has slammed Microsoft - again - for using Microsoft Office file formats in Microsoft Office.  (XDA Developers)
  
  Uh huh.
  
  
  
• Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement has been approve by the court.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Wait, I haven't published my book yet.
  
  Guess I'll need to find someone else to steal it.
  
  
  
• Massive Dynamic is raising a new round of funds at a valuation of $20-30 billion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good for you, William Bell.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 22 2026 01:29 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 22 2026 08:51 AM (1zWbY)

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 21 2026 08:28 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 21 2026 10:18 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 21 2026 10:19 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, July 21 2026 01:38 PM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, July 21 2026 05:41 PM (Uh5Zo)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 21 2026 05:47 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: at Tuesday, July 21 2026 07:11 PM (Uh5Zo)

Posted by: at Tuesday, July 21 2026 07:12 PM (Uh5Zo)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, July 21 2026 07:13 PM (Uh5Zo)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, July 22 2026 01:03 AM (6eVrQ)

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• Oops.  Forgot there was planned maintenance due on the proxy server.  It restarted cleanly but I needed to restart some of the software a second time before it was happy.
  
  
  
• OpenAI has rushed to reassure users that the brand new GPT 5.6 still has all the same features they know and love.  (InfoWorld)
  
  Like accidentally deleting all your files but being really sorry about it afterwards.
  
  
  
• Alibaba's AI tool Qwen 3.8 is launching and will soon be open-weight - that is, you can't create your own version but you can download and run it yourself.  (Twitter)
  
  One small problem is that is has 2.4 trillion parameters, meaning you'll need a graphics card with 4.8 terabytes of VRAM to run it efficiently, and not many end users have the necessary hardware.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Apple just hired the original team behind Qwen.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Who Alibaba had fired in a quiet reminder that grotesque ineptitude is not solely a gift of the western world.

• Orchid is a delightfully retro and approachable hipster synth.  (The Verge)
  
  That bad, huh?
  
  
  
• Zilog's Z80 has turned 50 and been discontinued but don't you worry.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A replacement chip has been reverse-engineered and is now available.  It's built on an ancient 130nm node, but that's magic compared to the 4 micron node used in the original Z80.
  
  It runs at 50MHz and the chip itself measures a quarter of a millimeter on a side.
  
  
  
• China's CXMT is preparing to launch DDR6 memory and attempt to steal market share away from Samsung and SK Hynix.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Great.  We'll be here, starving, just as we always have been.
  
  
  
• The head of SK Group, owners of Big Three memory maker SK Hynix, says that memory prices are too high and have to come down.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not that he cares about customers.  But while SK Hynix is pulling in record revenues and profits, every other tech company in the chaebol is in the doldrums due to exorbitant memory costs.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, while the 2026 model of the Razer 18 laptop is not any faster than last year's, it does at least cost you more money while providing half the memory and storage.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Wait.