• Bitlocker: The encryption technology where everyone has access to your data except you.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Microsoft's Bitlocker is infamous for suddenly enabling itself without you explicitly going through the setup process so that neither you nor anybody else has any idea what the encryption key is, and you data is simply gone.
  
  But if you do go through the setup process, it automatically shares your key with Microsoft so the government can ask for and receive your keys.
  
  Which government?
  
  All of them.

• Charge me $3000 for a box of rocks once, shame on you.  Charge me $3000 for a box of rocks four times...  (WCCFTech)
  
  A Reddit user ordered a "resale" unit of an Nvidia RTX 5090 from Amazon - that is, a unit that had been return during the 30 day window - and received a box containing a towel and a bunch of rocks.
  
  Well, scams happen.  Not your fault.
  
  Except this was the fourth time.  It's Amazon's fault for not checking returns, yes, but it's also his fault for still believing that they do.
  
  
  
• Of course you could order your 5090 directly from a card maker like Zotac instead of Amazon and avoid this issue and instead they'll abruptly raise prices by 20% and cancel your order at the old price while blaming a system error.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You could also just play Hytale which runs smoothly on Vega 8 laptop graphics from 2021 even at 2880x1620.  Albeit on low settings, but low settings are almost identical to "epic" settings - the only visible difference is render distance.
  
  
  
• Lemonade plans to half Tesla insurance rates for miles driven using the FSD - Full Self-Driving - mode, because it has fewer accidents than humans.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  Which, yes, means that your insurance company knows exactly when and how and how much you are driving.
  
  It's also not quite clear what the actual reduction in your insurance rates from this would be.  Half cost...  But what component of the cost is directly attributable to the number of hours (or miles) driven?
  
  
  
• I built more in two months with agents than in the previous year.  I used almost none of it.  (Mahdi Yusuf)
  
  This guy gets it.  AI coding assistants aren't useless; they range from super helpful for churning through boring repetitive tasks, to actively dangerous.

  Point an agent at a vague goal - "build me a tool that helps with X" - and you'll get something that looks impressive and rots in a folder.  Point an agent at a specific task - "rewrite these 200 API calls to use the new authentication pattern" - and you'll save a week.

  I had to perform a task with a particular piece of unfamiliar software with painfully poor design and documentation.  I used ChatGPT and after a couple of days of trial and error I got something that was slow but worked - and it would have taken me at least a week to perform the same task myself.
  
  The it turned out that the tool I needed to interpret the results was offline, possibly permanently dead.  I found an alternative, which my company already had a subscription to...  And found that this alternative solved the entire problem and the two days had been completely wasted.

  One is generative theatre.  The other is actual leverage.
  
  The difference is tactical versus strategic deployment.

  Where, in this case, tactical deployment is solving a problem that you actually have, and strategic deployment is solving a problem that nobody has.
  
  
  
• cURL no longer offers bug bounties.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because the project is being overwhelmed with AI-generate fake bug reports.
  
  
  
• Microsoft 360 went down again.  (CRN)
  
  I had a typo there.  Almost left it in.
  
  
  
• A new test for AI labs: Are you even trying to make money?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good question.  Dumb article, but good question.

  Think of it in these terms:
  
  

  • Level 5: We are already making millions of dollars every day, thank you very much.
  • Level 4:We have a detailed multi-stage plan to become the richest human beings on Earth.
  • Level 3:We have many promising product ideas, which will be revealed inthe fullness of time.
  • Level 2:We have the outlines of a concept of a plan.
  • Level 1:True wealth is when you love yourself.

  Fine so far.  At the top, actually making money.  At the bottom, idiot dreamers or possibly communists.

  The big names are all at Level 5: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and so on.

  Hold up.
  
  OpenAI lost $8 billion last year, is expected to lose $14 billion this year, $40 billion next year, and as much as $74 billion in 2028 even if they meet revenue goals.
  
  Did an AI write that article?
  
  
  
• AI luminaries at Davos clash over how close human-level intelligence really is.  (Yahoo Finance)
  
  What a useful word, "luminaries".  It covers equally objects that shine of their own right, and masses of stone and dust that merely reflect the brilliance of others.
  
  On the one hand, Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, formerly of Meta, and genuine Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis of Google, who both say that current AI systems are nowhere near human levels and - at least in the case of LeCun - that current approaches can never get there and entirely new methods are needed.
  
  On the other hand Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI who say that their tools are approaching the level of Nobel Prize winners and you'll all be out of work by next week.
  
  I think I'm going to go with the guys who didn't trash the global electronic supply chain only so they could burn a hundred billion dollars of investor money.

Posted by: Robin Munn at Sunday, January 25 2026 06:35 PM (/YfO5)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Sunday, January 25 2026 06:53 PM (/YfO5)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Top Story

• Yeah, I'm going to stay right here in my insulated, double-glazed, air-conditioned bunker for a week.
  
  
  
• You can get an AMD Ryzen 9800X3D, an Asus X870 motherboard, and 32GB of RAM for $939 at Newegg right now - and even get a bonus mouse.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's a $480 CPU, a $300 motherboard, and memory that did cost around $100 but  suddenly finds itself at $440.  And a $125 mouse that isn't worth $125 or it wouldn't be included for free.
  
  
  
• Just one small problem: Asus is currently reviewing - though not recalling - all of its 800-series motherboards over a string of failures specifically involving the 9800X3D CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  ASRock has been battling this for months.  It's rare, but seems to keep happening.
  
  
  
• Oh, and the faster 9850X3D is here.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's only slightly faster, but it's only slightly more expensive.  If you were planning on a 9800X3D build - or upgrading an existing system that already has DDR5 RAM - it's not a compelling option but not an awful one either.

• Some perspective: Intel reported a loss for 2025, yes, but it was 98% smaller than the loss in 2024.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The $300 million loss for the year also has to be compared with the $20 billion in fresh investments.  I certainly wouldn't count them out yet.
  
  
  
• Intel also confirmed that its new Nova Lake CPUs will be showing up late this year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are expected to have twice the number of CPU cores of any recent consumer models - up to 16 performance cores and 32 efficiency cores, plus 4 low-power cores.  Which is rather a lot.
  
  
  
• Japanese toilet maker Toto is seeing its share price rise for an unexpected reason.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For nearly forty years, the company has also made electrostatic chucks used to hold silicon wafers in place during manufacturing - one of many afterthought components that has seen a sudden surge in demand:

  Interestingly, the source name checked a few other unlikely Japanese companies that are benefitting from the AI boom.  An MSG seasoning maker also makes chip-insulating films, for example.  Meanwhile, cosmetics brand Kao’s expertise in facial cleansers has an unexpected twin: the company also makes cleaning agents for semiconductor wafers.

  Find what you're good at, and keep doing it.
  
  
  
• AMD has prepared a chart showing why its laptop chips are still better than Intel's new Panther Lake CPUs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They're not.
  
  
  
• If you were thinking of buying an Nvidia 5000-series graphics card, now might be a good time to think of buying an AMD graphics card, or to simply find a new hobby like gardening or making fun of people online.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Nvidia is cutting production and has abandoned its Open Price Program which tried to keep boards available at MSRP, meaning they soon won't be.
  
  Higher end cards already aren't.
  
  
  
• What TikTok's new ownership means for your feed.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  It means you're still the same idiot you were yesterday.  Stop watching slop that is making you retarded.
  
  
  
• What TikTok's new privacy policy means for you.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It means you're still the same idiot you were yesterday, because the policy has been in place since 2024.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, January 25 2026 02:20 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 25 2026 04:18 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, January 25 2026 04:38 AM (KOtXO)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• With the tech world embroiled in AI frenzy and every major chipmaker hitching its wagon to the fashion and recording record sales and record profits while the bubble lasts, it is comforting to see one company bucking the trend and...  Recording declining sales and an unprofitable quarter.  (Thurrott)
  
  Take a bow, Intel.  
  
  Though to be fair Intel showed off new consumer products at CES when AMD and Nvidia couldn't be bothered, and the integrated graphics on Intel's latest Panther Lake chips looks to be faster than AMD's fastest mainstream models (though slower than the Ryzen AI Max if you use it for gaming and not AI.)
  
  
  

Tech News

• Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?  (Eieio)
  
  Basically it's obfuscating your typing patterns to block side-channel attacks.  Though your data is encrypted, if it just sends one packet each time you press a key a lot can be inferred from the timing.
  
  
  
• For everything else, there's Telnet.  (The Register)
  
  Where in this case "everything else" includes "instantly gaining root access to any server silly enough to expose Telnet to the internet".
  
  And the bug has been around since 2015 before anyone noticed.  Noticed officially, anyway.
  
  Nobody sane offers public telnet, anyway.
  
  
  
• There's a tidal wave of spam headed your way thanks to a Zendesk attack.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Companies affected include Discord, Tinder, Riot Games, and Dropbox.  With this attack you can receive spam from their official Zendesk servers even if you're not a customer.
  
  
  
• Are AI agents ready for the workplace?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  (shake shake)
  
  Signs point to fuck no.

  Faced with queries from real professionals, even the best models struggled to get more than a quarter of the questions right. The vast majority of the time, the model came back with a wrong answer or no answer at all.

  It can't replace junior programmers and it can't replace anyone else.
  
  If not bubble, why bubble shaped?
  
  
  
• The world's largest advertising network is surprised that ChatGPT is adding ads.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm sure.
  
  
  
• The EU Parliament has called for a mass migration from US cloud and AI services to European ones that don't exist.  (Heise)  (archive site)
  
  These are not serious people.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 24 2026 01:20 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, January 24 2026 02:44 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, January 24 2026 06:10 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, January 24 2026 12:41 PM (QWr8X)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Anthropic - the company behind AI tool Claude - has updated its Claude Constitution, now a sprawling 57 page mess, five times the length of the actual Constitution, which has, for the most part successfully, guided the most powerful nation in history for nearly 250 years.  (The Register)
  
  Fortunately we are provided with a summary:

  Anthropic hopes that Claude’s output will reflect the content of the constitution by being:
  
  

  1. Broadly safe: not undermining appropriate human mechanisms to oversee AI during the current phase of development;
  2. Broadly ethical: being honest, acting according to good values, and avoiding actions that are inappropriate, dangerous, or harmful;
  3. Compliant with Anthropic's guidelines: acting in accordance with more specific guidelines from Anthropic where relevant;
  4. Genuinely helpful: benefiting the operators and users they interact with.

  If Claude is conflicted, Anthropic wants the model to "generally prioritize these properties in the order in which they are listed."

  If only someone had given thought to a prioritised list of general rules - laws, you might call them - to govern the behaviour of autonomous thinking machines - robots, essentially - and all the myriad ways in which things might go awry.
  
  Maybe a Boston biochemist in 1942, while we're engaged in idle speculation.

• Nvidia is expected to launch its consumer-oriented N1X processor this quarter.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nvidia hasn't said anything about this, but eagle-eyed observers have spotted the chip in shipping manifests for test hardware, most recently in a Dell laptop.
  
  
  
• OpenAI has committed to "paying its own way", admitting essentially that it hadn't been.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Specifically for electricity.  Everyone else - like people who want to own computers - can fuck off and die I guess.
  
  
  
• The creator of Ruby on Rails says that AI can not yet replace junior programmers.  (Final Round)
  
  He notes that sometimes - sometimes - an AI tool can come up with an elegant solution to a small problem, maybe even a better one than you could have built yourself.  But overall, 95% of the code his company creates is still built by humans, because at the end of the day for a system to be reliable, people have to understand it.
  
  Which is a complete and welcome turnaround from the demented slopfest of Gas Town which has one simple rule: We don't know what is going on and we don't care.  Oh, and a second implied rule: The solution to too much slop is more slop.
  
  
  
• Apple is reportedly working on an AI powered wearable pin.  (9to5Mac)
  
  You know that literally nobody is going to buy this thing, right?  Even the Tame Apple Press is, well, unimpressed.  (9to5Mac)
  
  
  
• OpenAI is working on its own AI wearable device, probably earbuds.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well, unlike an AI pin which is not useful at all, earbuds are at least useful for cleaning earwax.
  
  What?  Something different?  Don't be silly.
  
  
  
• Apps for boycotting American products surge to the top of the Danish app store.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Nobody tell them.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is building 15 datacenters in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.  (Fox6Now)
  
  This is on a site originally slated for a Foxconn factory, a plan that never went anywhere.  Microsoft purchased the land from Foxconn and the first two datacenters are under construction now.
  
  
  
• Rocket company Blue Origin's TeraWave satellite constellation plans to deliver speeds of up to 6 terabits per second, bidirectional, to enterprise customers.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Why is America increasingly obsessed with prediction markets that perform no better than chance?  (The Atlantic)  (archive site)
  
  They should read serious journals like Fascist Quarterly The Atlantic.  We reliably get everything wrong.
  
  
  
• AI company Eightfold is being sued in California for - apparently - successfully removing litigious idiots from lists of job applicants.  (Reuters)
  
  Also, there's this self-ad in the middle of the article:

  Make sense of the latest ESG trends affecting companies and governments with the Reuters Sustainable Switch newsletter.  Sign up here.

  No.  I don't think I shall.
  
  
  
• Ubisoft has ended remote work and told staff to be in the office five days a week because it makes mass layoffs more enjoyable to watch easier to manage.  (Notebook Check)
  
  If you had bough Ubisoft stock for 100 Euros in 2018, you would have jumped off a building by now.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 22 2026 11:11 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, January 22 2026 11:51 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, January 23 2026 04:42 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Frank at Friday, January 23 2026 12:32 PM (amxkj)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Micron has bought a 300,000 square foot factory in Taiwan from Powerchip for $1.8 billion.  (MSN)
  
  Powerchip manufactures DRAM, but is much smaller than Micron or even Taiwanese competitor Nanya.  Micron is valued at $400 billion - the largest pure-play memory company in the world.  Nanya's market cap is now around $25 billion, and Powerchip is around a third of that.
  
  The new site is expected to be producing DRAM in volume by the second half of next year.

• Tesla has restarted construction of it's Dojo 3 supercomputer based on the in-house AI5 chip.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And also the future AI6 and AI7 chips, because the company plans to be in production of those designs before it finishes building this computer.
  
  
  
• The DockFrame is a modular USB4/Thunderbolt hub compatible with Framework I/O modules and Lego.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It takes up to four of the Framework I/O modules, and is a 20x8 Lego-compatible baseplate.
  
  
  
• The new Web3IsGoingGreat.  (Firehound)
  
  Firehound vibe-coded apps with known vulnerabilities, along with the number of files and database records exposed.
  
  And 99% of the apps analysed so far have vulnerabilities.
  
  
  
• The Bank of England must plan for a financial crisis triggered by aliens.  (MSN)
  
  Well, it's good that someone on Airstrip One can see the danger.
  
  What?
  
  Oh.  The other kind of aliens.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, January 22 2026 05:12 AM (rcPLc)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Two things to clarify from yesterday.  First, that quote at the top of the post explaining the DRAM Apocalypse was from Jatin Malik, an engineer at Atlassian.
  
  Second, brains are computers.
  
  
  
• Agent psychosis: Are we going insane?  (Armin Ronacher)
  
  Apparently, yes:

  You can use Polecats without the Refinery and even without the Witness or Deacon.  Just tell the Mayor to shut down the rig and sling work to the polecats with the message that they are to merge to main directly.  Or the polecats can submit MRs and then the Mayor can merge them manually.  It's really up to you.  The Refineries are useful if you have done a LOT of up-front specification work, and you have huge piles of Beads to churn through with long convoys.

  That's from the Gas Town Emergency User Manual which would be a great name for a work of surrealist speculative fiction but is quite literally a user manual.

  Looking at Gas Town (and Beads) from the outside, it looks like a Mad Max cult. What are polecats, refineries, mayors, beads, convoys doing in an agentic coding system? If the maintainer is in the loop, and the whole community is in on this mad ride, then everyone and their dæmons just throw more slop up.  As an external observer the whole project looks like an insane psychosis or a complete mad art project.  Except, it's real?  Or is it not?  Apparently a reason for slowdown in Gas Town is contention on figuring out the version of Beads, which takes 7 subprocess spawns.  Or using the doctor command times out completely. Beads keeps growing and growing in complexity and people who are using it, are realizing that it's almost impossible to uninstall.  And they might not even work well together even though one apparently depends on the other.

  What is Beads?
  
  Beads is a quarter of a million lines of code to manage Markdown files in Git repositories.
  
  I have written entire enterprise systems with paying customers and decade-long track records that are no larger than that.
  
  But I didn't have agentic AI to help me, so they actually worked.
  
  There's a term in programming called technical debt, which measures the cost of a quick fix that you know you will have to rip out and fix properly one day.
  
  Vibe coding is the technical debt singularity.

• Minecraft-meets-Torchlight game Hytale supports modding out of the box.  So someone modded in Hytale.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can play the entire game inside the game.
  
  You can also run Windows 95 as a mod inside Hytale.
  
  And Doom.
  
  The game has been out for a week.
  
  
  
• Dumbphone owners have lost their minds: The deranged rantings of a smartphone owner.  (Wired)
  
  It's hard to know where to even start with this.  The author - self-reportedly Gen Z - has a crippling codependency with her iPhone, and her friends who have abandoned such devices for dumbphones are crippled without them.
  
  They're like walking, talking, quarter-million line codebases that can only do a single task, and fail even at athat.
  
  
  
• Minisforum is planning to introduce the DeskMini BD395i Max - a mini-ITX motherboard with a Ryzen 395 CPU, up to 128GB of soldered RAM, and a PCIe slot.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Okay.  Sure.
  
  Let me know when you have something out in a Zen 6, okay?
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, January 21 2026 01:16 AM (rcPLc)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.
  
  — Jatin Malik on Twitter
  
  
  
• The mythology of conscious AI.  (Noema Mag)
  
  This article gets one important thing right: LLMs are not conscious.

  In a 2022 interview with The Washington Post, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made a startling claim about the AI system he was working on, a chatbot called LaMDA. He claimed it was conscious, that it had feelings, and was, in an important sense, like a real person. Despite a flurry of media coverage, Lemoine wasn’t taken all that seriously. Google dismissed him for violating its confidentiality policies, and the AI bandwagon rolled on.

  I commented on that story at the time.  Lemoine is a crazy as a sack of rats on crazy pills.  And was also completely and very obviously wrong, which is not the same thing.

  As AI technologies continue to improve, questions about machine consciousness are increasingly being raised. David Chalmers, one of the foremost thinkers in this area, has suggested that conscious machines may be possible in the not-too-distant future. Geoffrey Hinton, a true AI pioneer and recent Nobel Prize winner, thinks they exist already.

  Wait.  David Chalmers said what?
  
  Huh. He did say that.  A mostly sensible article summarising the evidence on both sides, concluding that pure feed-forward LLMs are not conscious but extended LLMs with recurrent processing - feedback loops - could be.  (Boston Review)
  
  Back to Noema:

  Taken together, these biases [anthropocentrism, which is irrelevant, human exceptionalism, which is irrelevant, and anthropomorphism, which is actually the key here - Pixy] explain why it’s hardly surprising that when things exhibit abilities we think of as distinctively human, such as intelligence, we naturally imbue them with other qualities we feel are characteristically or even distinctively human: understanding, mindedness and consciousness, too.

  A little bit of nonsense thrown in at the start but an accurate description of the problem in the end.
  
  But then it all falls apart:

  The very idea of conscious AI rests on the assumption that consciousness is a matter of computation.

  Which is rather like assuming that water is a molecule made of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms.

  More specifically, that implementing the right kind of computation, or information processing, is sufficient for consciousness to arise.

  Because it is.

  This assumption, which philosophers call computational functionalism, is so deeply ingrained that it can be difficult to recognize it as an assumption at all.

  As much as the molecular structure of water is an assumption.

  But that is what it is.

  Nope.

  And if it’s wrong, as I think it may be, then real artificial consciousness is fully off the table, at least for the kinds of AI we're familiar with.

  "Kinds of AI we're familiar with"?  Do you mean feed-forward models, which are definitely not conscious, or enhanced systems with feedback loops?

  Challenging computational functionalism means diving into some deep waters about what computation means and what it means to say that a physical system, like a computer or a brain, computes at all.  I'll summarize four related arguments that undermine the idea that computation, at least of the sort implemented in standard digital computers, is sufficient for consciousness.
  
  First, and most important, brains are not computers.

  And we're dead.
  
  Brains are obviously computers and it is trivially easy to prove this.
  
  Take a line of BASIC code, like:
  
  10 PRINT 3+7
  
  What does that do?
  
  It prints 10.
  
  How do you know?
  
  Because you can execute that code in your head.
  
  How can you do that?
  
  Because your brain is a computer.
  
  It may be more than a computer - though nobody has produce a coherent, let alone convincing argument for this - but it is unquestionably a computer.
  
  There follow dozens of paragraphs of irrelevancies I won't get into, but suffice to say that it all goes downhill from there.

• Quick reminder that Intel's B570 is still available at $200.  It's not the fastest graphics card - it's comparable with Nvidia's RTX 3060, a midrange card from five years ago - but it's cheap, in stock, and works.  And it has 10GB of RAM, a small upgrade over common 8GB cards.
  
  
  
• An Altair 8800 that has been broken since its owner made a mistake assembling it in 1974 has finally been fixed.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Never too late.
  
  
  
• Reasons to stop using MySQL.  (Optimized by Otto)
  
  Oh, yeah?  What would you recommend?
  
  MariaDB.
  
  Oh.  Yeah.  Good call.  Carry on.
  
  
  
• The Slimbook Executive ticks all my boxes.  Pretty much.  (Liliputing)
  
  I'm not really in the market for a new laptop right now, but this seems to get a lot right.
  
  It's a 14" model with an Intel 255H CPU (6P/8E/2LP cores), a 2880x1800 120Hz screen - LCD rather than OLED, but it covers 100% of sRGB so it should be fine unless you're a professional artist of video editor - and a 99Wh battery despite weighing a modest 1.2Kg.
  
  It has two SODIMM slots and two M.2 2280 slots - unusual and welcome in a 14" laptop - and one USB4 port, a 5Gb USB-C port with DP and PD (DisplayPort and Power Delivery), three 5Gb USB-A ports, HDMI, wired gigabit Ethernet, an audio jack, and a full-size SD card slot.
  
  And the Four Essential Keys.
  
  No dedicated graphics, but the CPU includes Intel's Arc 140T graphics which are quite competent and generally comparable to AMD's 780M.
  
  Oh, and the keyboard is backlit and there's a physical privacy shutter for the camera.
  
  They don't ship to Antarctica though.
  
  
  
• Why Silicon Valley is really talking about fleeing California (it's not the 5% theft wealth tax).  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Oh, do tell.

  Take Larry Page, who [owns] about 3% of Google but controls roughly 30% of its voting power through dual-class stock. Under this proposal, he’d owe taxes on that 30%.  For a company valued in the hundreds of billions, that’s a lot more than a rounding error.  The Post reports that one SpaceX alumni founder building grid technology would face a tax bill at the Series B stage of the company that would wipe out his entire holdings.

  Oh, right.  It's not the 5% wealth tax.  It's the 100%+ wealth tax.  I can see how that would be a problem.

  David Gamage, the University of Missouri communist kleptocrat retard law professor who helped craft the proposal, thinks Silicon Valley is overreacting.  "I don’t understand why the billionaires just aren’t calling good tax lawyers," he told The San Francisco Standard this week.

  That's just it.
  
  They did.
  
  Their tax lawyers advised them to flee.  Immediately.

Posted by: David Eastman at Tuesday, January 20 2026 03:28 AM (J69gL)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 20 2026 04:16 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, January 20 2026 10:04 AM (plzaG)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 20 2026 10:56 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 20 2026 10:57 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, January 20 2026 12:35 PM (u8IQw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 20 2026 01:22 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 20 2026 01:23 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Tuesday, January 20 2026 02:33 PM (u8IQw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 20 2026 05:15 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Same: Elon Musk wants $134 billion in his OpenAI lawsuit.  (Tech Crunch)

  The figure comes from expert witness C. Paul Wazzan, a financial economist whose bio says he has been deposed nearly 100 times and testified at trial more than a dozen times in complex commercial litigation cases.

  I have acted as an expert witness once.  You couldn't pay me enough to do it again...  Though $134 billion would be tempting.

  Wazzan, who specializes in valuation and damages calculations in high-stakes disputes, determined that Musk is entitled to a hefty portion of OpenAI's current $500 billion valuation based on his $38 million seed donation when he co-founded the startup in 2015.

  Much of the article is devoted to ad-hominem attacks by the partisan lunatics at Tech Crunch, who think fraud is okay against people for whom they feel irrational hatred.
  
  
  
• Better be quick, Elon because an analysis of OpenAI's finances suggests they could run out of money as soon as 2027.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you're wondering why the beancounters at the big memory manufacturers are being wary of rapid expansion in the face of unprecedented demand, well, it's because they are able to read a spreadsheet and they do not like what they see.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Also because they are. Well, not Samsung but Micron has broken ground on its new $100 billion, 1.2 million square foot factory in upstate New York, which is expected to be in production by 2030.  (The Register)
  
  They originally planned to start construction in 2024, but were delayed by bats.

  The megafab - which would displace 500 acres of woods and wetlands, as well as two endangered species of bats - is scheduled to begin producing DRAM chips by 2030.
  
  Micron said it will create 1,216 acres of off-site bat habitat including maternity roosts to mitigate the potential damage its fab will cause to the Indiana and northern long-eared bat populations, as well as 628 acres of land to offset impacts to the sedge wren, short-eared owl, and northern harrier bird populations.

  Part of the land the factory will be built on is swamp, so Micron has been obligated to build a new swamp to replace the old one.
  
  
  
• Hardware Unboxed reported that there were no Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti review cards to be had for a planned model roundup, that Asus told them the 5070 Ti was "end of life", and that Australian retailers reported that there was zero stock of any model at suppliers.
  
  Nvidia insisted this was all lies and slander and slanderous lies and every model of the RTX 5000 lineup was still in production.
  
  For the real story, let's check Newegg, since their site can easily be filtered to exclude second-hand and out-of-stock items and cards from strange marketplace sellers in Uzbekistan.
  
  Total 5090 models available at any price: Zero.
  5080 - one, at 80% over MSRP.
  5070 Ti - one, at 40% over MSRP.
  5070 - 8 models starting at close to MSRP.
  5060 Ti 16GB - I initially found none at all, but a second search dug out one card.
  5060 Ti 8GB - the model all the reviews told you not to buy is readily available starting at MSRP.
  5060 - 20+ models in stock starting at MSRP.
  5050 - 4 models in stock starting at MSRP.
  
  So if you're looking for a low-end card or for the mid-range 12GB 5070, you're in luck - they're in stock and selling for their listed prices. But the cards with 16GB or more VRAM are gone.
  
  On the AMD side things are a little better. The three 16GB cards - the 9060 XT, 9070, and 9070 XT - all show multiple models available, but all starting at 5% to 20% above MSRP, a problem that has persisted since they launched except for a few short weeks late last year.
  
  Advantage: Team Unboxed.
  
  
  
• Well, that's...  Something.  Intel's Bartlett Lake embedded processors will bring up to 12 P-cores (full-size performance cores) and no E (efficiency / low power cores) running at up to 5.9GHz to Socket FC-LGA16A for the embedded market.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No Intel consumer CPU has ever had 12 P cores; the largest number ever was with the 10-core 10900 introduced in 2020, and subsequent to that the maximum has been 8.
  
  But, you point out, these are embedded CPUs, not consumer models.
  
  True.  But Socket FC-LGA16A is better known as Socket 1700, the same one used by Intel's 12th, 13th, and 14th generation desktop CPUs, and for which inexpensive motherboards supporting both DDR4 and DDR5 are readily available.
  
  Might be worth keeping an eye out for these.
  
  
  
• There are no cheap PCIe 4.0 switches to expand the number of lanes available in PC motherboards...  Except motherboard chipsets like the AMD B650 which does exactly that so people are using it in unintended ways.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I mentioned this before but this is a nice roundup with pictures of expansion cards using the B650 to provide four additional M.2 slots and four SATA ports in a half-height form factor.
  
  It's an open source project but it would be interesting to see someone pick it up and run with it.
  
  
  
• Rebuilding New York...  In Minecraft.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A project born of the Wuflu lockdown and weaponised autism.  It's legitimately impressive.
  
  
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, I played some more Hytale.  Despite being in early access and its developers apologising for its unpolished state, it's a fun game - and it only costs $20.
  
  The best way to think of it is that it's not a pure Minecraft clone but a combination of the best features of Minecraft and older action RPGs like Torchlight.  The world can be taken apart and rebuilt block-by-block - mostly - but it's faster-paced and more action-oriented than Minecraft, and has story elements that Minecraft is mostly lacking.
  
  
  
• In praise of tyranny: Nearly 5 million social media accounts have been shut down in Australia, and the New York Times thinks that's a good thing.  (New York Times)
  
  What The Times largely avoids mentioning is that the teenagers affected immediately created new accounts and worked around the ban.  Traffic from the sites to Australia has not been reduced at all since the ban went into effect.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 19 2026 04:20 AM (1zWbY)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Taiwan has reached an agreement with the US for a $500 billion investment project in return for a tariff reduction from 20% to 15% and tariff waivers during the construction of new factories.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That amount includes $250 billion of direct investment and $250 billion of credit guarantees by Taiwan's government, but it also includes $100 billion of already-planned investment by TSMC.
  
  If you're throwing literally hundreds of billions of dollars around for Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturers setting up in the US, maybe earmark a few billion for Nanya to expand consumer DRAM production.
  
  
  
• Because Samsung sure ain't doing it.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Samsung is expecting a 5% increase in DRAM production in 2026 - and that's in the face of unprecedented shortages and a projected additional 30% increase in demand over the course of this year.
  
  The Big Three are just begging for Taiwan or West Taiwan to eat their lunch.

• AMD's long-awaited dual-vcache CPU was a no-show at CES but increasingly looks real.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Dubbed the 9950X3D2, it keeps leaking in benchmark results.  It is exactly two 9850X3D CPU complexes in a single package - 16 cores and 192MB of cache running at up to 5.6GHz.
  
  
  
• If you're in the market for a four-port 400Gb Ethernet switch, Mikrotik has one.  (Serve the Home)
  
  $1295.  And considering it has the same bandwidth as a 640-port 2.5Gb switch - if such a thing existed - that's pretty darn cheap.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT Go is now available at $8 per month.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  With ads.  But of course with ads, as OpenAI is bleeding cash like a US federal agency under a Democratic president's second term.
  
  
  
• OpenAI says its new ads won't influence answers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It will lie to you exactly the same as the more expensive plans.
  
  
  
• TSMC says AI demand is endless, just like tulip bulbs.  (Ars Technica)
  
  But you can eat tulip bulbs.
  
  
  
• Naya Connect is a very keyboard.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has a fairly standard 85-key layout - a little cramped but it does include the Four Essential Keys - plus an optional 6-key macropad, plus an optional 24-key numeric keypad, plus an optional 24-key macropad with either blank keys or a assortment of 84 interchangeable icon keys to choose from, plus an optional trackball with four buttons and four macro keys, plus an optional trackpad with four macro keys, plus an optional haptic dial (that is, it gives programmable physical feedback) with an integrated trackpad and four macro keys, plus an optional 3D mouse with six degrees of freedom...  With four macro keys.
  
  With five choices of keyswitch, keycaps in either black or white, and the metal frame in either plain aluminium or black anodised aluminium.
  
  The basic keyboard costs $119 (with your choice of colours and keyswitches), while the full setup costs...  A lot.  Well over $1000.  They have an early-bird "All-in" bundle that isn't complete and that's already $917.
  
  
  
• Microplastics from washing clothes could be hurting your tomatoes.  (Washington Post)  (archive site)
  
  You heard them.  Stop putting tomatoes in with your laundry.
  
  So, how solid is this study?

  "Sometimes microplastics can have a positive impact on soil or plant properties, and sometimes it could be negative," Djuric said.

  So you're saying maybe I should put tomatoes in with my laundry?
  
  
  
• Fixing the HTTP rate limit header specification.  (Dotat.at)
  
  A 429 response means you're asking too many questions, go away.  The new spec tries to tell you how long you should go away for, but at the moment it assumes that everyone involved is equally stupid.  This is an attempt to fix that.
  
  
  
• Played some more Hytale today.  It runs at 30fps on low settings on my laptop, which means it should run faster on just about anything else, since my laptop has a 2880x1620 screen and five year old integrated Vega 8 graphics and I habitually run it in silent mode (with the fan speed turned all the way down).  It's a great system for doing work, lousy for playing games.
  
  Also, in Hytale low graphics settings look basically the same as "epic" graphics.  The main change there is the render distance, just as with Minecraft, so unless you spend all your time looking to the horizon it make little difference.  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, January 18 2026 06:19 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, January 18 2026 09:21 AM (e0fX0)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The best graphics cards for gaming in 2026.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At #2 is Nvidia's 5070 Ti, and at #5 is the 5060 Ti, both of which have ceased to exist.
  
  
  
• The best options for building a new PC with DDR4 RAM you already have.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Both systems include the 5060 Ti, which as we have just noticed, has gone to the great parts bin in the sky.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has rebutted claims that the 5070 Ti and 5060 Ti are "end-of-life", insisting that all cards are still shipping and are just shagged out after a long render.  (PC Magazine)
  
  The fact that you can't actually buy them is clearly a skill issue.  Git gud, scrub.
  
  Hardware Unboxed - an Aussie hardware review channel - was planning a market roundup of currently available 5070 Ti models, and reached out to their industry contacts for review cards.  There were no review cards to be had anywhere.  (YouTube)
  
  Their contacts in the Australian retail market confirmed that there was no stock of the 5070 Ti at distributors at all, echoing recent reports from Germany and Japan.  And Asus told them, and subsequently confirmed, that the 5070 Ti was "end-of-life", had ceased production, and would not be restocked.
  
  Then Nvidia... Clarified...  That all RTX 5000 series cards are still in production, and Asus walked back earlier comments and agreed that the 5070 Ti is still in production.
  
  Hardware Unboxed requested - again - a review sample.  There has been no response as yet.
  
  
  
• AMD meanwhile is working with its board partners to prevent GPU price hikes.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Good luck with that.  The 8GB 9060 XT seems to have bounced back up from its recent low price - it was briefly selling below MSRP - but it and the three 16GB cards (9060 XT, 9070, and 9070 XT) are all in stock.  As is the 32GB 9700, though that model is quite expensive.

• TSMC plans to spend $56 billion on new production facilities and equipment this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's equal to three Nanyas.
  
  
  
• Reprompt is - or was, it's just been patched - a Copilot exploit that, once you clicked on the link, kept stealing your data even after you closed Copilot.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  It worked like most so-called "Prompt Injection" vulnerabilities: It asked the AI for your data, and the AI helpfully handed it over because it has less self-interest than the average mycoplasma.
  
  This particular instance has been patched, but it was active in the wild for four months before Microsoft took action.  This is why even people who use AI tools are up in arms about Microsoft integrating it directly into their operating system. 
  
  If you use AI through your browser, it stops the moment you close the tab.  Copilot never stops until you kill it with fire.  Hot Hardware has a detailed article on removing it that involves running unsigned code directly out of GitHub because that may actually be safer than leaving Windows untouched.
  
  
  
• US senators are demanding answers from X (Twitter), Meta (Facebook), and Alphabet (Google) on sexualised deepfakes.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Answers to questions like "How do I do it?", "Does it have pictures of Sydney Sweeney?", and "You're not recording this are you?  Stop recording right now!"
  
  
  
• Italy's privacy watchdog is under investigation for corruption and embezzlement.  (Reuters)
  
  I am shocked, shocked, to see corruption and embezzlement going on in here!
  
  
  
• The Minisforum N5 Air is a $499 5-bay NAS.  (Liliputing)
  
  It's a cheaper version of the N5 with a plastic rather than metal case, but otherwise almost identical.  Apart from five 3.5" drive bays, it has room for three M.2 SSDs (with two running only at PCIe 4.0 x1 speed and one at x2), and includes a Ryzen 255 CPU, room for two DDR5 SODIMM modules (none as standard, so beware of that), and a whole lot of ports: OCuLink, two USB4 ports, 10Gb and 5Gb Ethernet, three USB3 10Gb ports, and HDMI.  One of those USB3 ports is inside the system to host a boot device so that you can dedicate all the drives to data.
  
  
  
• The best office mini-PCs review by Notebookcheck.  (Notebookcheck)
  
  Top spot goes to the Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro.  With 64GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, though, it costs more than three times as much as the same configuration for the Minisforum AI X1 at #5.  (They list the 32GB model, but I bought the 64GB model.)
  
  
  
• The FDA has announced a recall of chocolate bars from Spring & Mulberry.  (Southern Living)
  
  Then we have number four: Crunchy Frog.
  
  We use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and sealed in a succulent, Swiss, quintuple-smooth, treble-milk chocolate envelope, and lovingly frosted with glucose.
  
  And what is this one: Spring Surprise?
  
  Ah, that’s one of our specialities.  Covered in dark, velvety chocolate, when you pop it into your mouth, stainless steel bolts spring out and plunge straight through both cheeks.
  
  
  
• Everything I ordered during my definitely not drunken New Years Eve shopping spree has now shipped.
  
  The SSDs doubled in price and the memory tripled the next day.  I do need to pick up an AM4 CPU to use it all - the motherboard is on its way - but those are cheap and readily available.
  
  
  

Bananya Interlude

Musical Interlude

1 Sigh.  My son's got a 6800 that he's happy with and I am using a 4070 which, again, works fine...but if the market's going to be stagnant for a couple of years I wonder if we ought to upgrade to a 9070 and a 5000-series.  But the 5070 isn't a worthwhile upgrade based on benchmarks and the 5070 Ti is both a lot more than I want to spend, and also higher wattage than I want to use.
Speaking of graphics, I updated all the drivers and stuff on my X1, and then installed the Radeon drivers, and now if I watch YT videos and try to do something in another window, the whole display flickers.  I solved that problem by installing Arch Linux.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 17 2026 02:00 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Saturday, January 17 2026 05:00 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, January 17 2026 06:02 AM (rcPLc)

Hide Comments | Add Comment