• Pioneer has been overwhelmed with orders for its $2300 flagship Blu-Ray recorder now that competitors have stopped competing.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I already have a couple of external Blu-Ray burners and the drive in my Xbox, so I think I'm good for now.  And the three of those didn't add up to anything like $2300.

• The rise of scientific fraud isn't due to a small percentage of rogue scientists.  It's something worse.  (PNAS)
  
  Profit-driven and systemic.
  
  
  
• The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript.  (GitHub)
  
  It's taken that long because (a) JavaScript is broken and (b) time is broken.  There's a book called Calendrical Calculations that covers all the ways time is broken and how to deal with it.  Originally a slim paperback, the fourth edition (which I own) is a hefty 662 pages.
  
  JavaScript is its own problem.
  
  
  
• It's Patch Tuesday and your computer just got rebooted.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Microsoft fixed two zero day vulnerabilities this time and 79 other bugs.
  
  
  
• Funny thing about AI: It loves the command line and hates the convenience of graphical interfaces.  (The Register)
  
  LLMs work with words and so does the command line, so it makes sense.  The Unix command line is a mess and something more structured would perhaps be better, but it's still orders of magnitude easier for automated tools - AI or just regular code - to deal with that than to try to parse the bitmap on your screen and move and click the mouse.
  
  
  
• Apple's MacBook Neo edges out AMD's 9950X3D on single-core Cinebench tests.  (Notebook Check)
  
  That's one benchmark, and of course the Neo gets creamed in multi-core tests.  It is nonetheless an impressive result for what is after all a phone CPU.

• Amazon has called an all-hands meeting of its engineering team to ask them to please stop destroying the company's site with AI slop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The term "blast radius" is not one you want to hear being thrown about in reference to side-effects of code updates.

• Yann Lecun's new company, AMI, has raised a billion dollars to fund its endeavours to produce AI models where you don't need to use the term "blast radius" quite so often.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  He's focusing on world models, one of his four essential advances required for AI that actually justifies the I.  Basically fact database alongside the LLM's word salad.
  
  
  
• Meta  - where Yann LeCun was previously head of AI - has acquired Moltbook, the AI agent social network that went viral because of fake posts.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Even Tech Crunch is in with the clanker hate.
  
  
  
• Lux Aeterna has raised $10 million for its own pet project: Reusable satellites.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  There hasn't been much point until now - launch costs were too high for it to make sense to even consider repairing and reusing older satellites.  But that may be changing.
  
  
  
• Also changing is the cost of laptops, and not in a good way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Prices are expected to climb by as much as 40% as RAM and SSD shortages take hold.
  
  
  
• One drawback with Apple's MacBook Neo: The battery life is on the meh side.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It has half the battery capacity of the MacBook Pro.  On heavy workloads its low-power CPU keeps the battery from draining too quickly - though it's also slow.  On light workloads the MacBook Pro shines twice as long.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 12 2026 01:48 AM (JY0OW)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 12 2026 02:33 AM (rcPLc)

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• Anthropic has sued the Pentagon for listing it as a supply chain risk, asserting, as far as I can tell, that treason is a constitutionally-protected right.  (Fortune)
  
  And that being labeled as a traitor is a violation of that right.
  
  
  
• Switzerland meanwhile has enshrined the right to use cash to their constitution.  (Politico)
  
  Some small shred of sanity in an increasingly insane world.

• Intel's Bartlett Lake CPUs - running on the widely available Socket 1700 platform and offering up to 12 Performance cores - are now official.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't get one through normal retail channels, but they'll probably show up in abnormal channels.
  
  
  
• Lawful but awful: What AI does to so-called "copyleft" software licenses like GPL.  (Hong Minhee)
  
  It kills them, that's what.
  
  
  
• MariaDB will not be moving its Galera cluster tool from its open source range to its proprietary software.  (The Register)
  
  Maybe.  Probably.  Could it even do that with Galera licensed under the GPL?
  
  See above.
  
  
  
• Amazon is whining about SpaceX.  (The Register)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• Anthropic has just announced an AI code review tool.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Is it AI powered or is it designed for reviewing AI-generated slop?
  
  Both.
  
  
  
• Sony's PlayStation 6 won't be delayed due to high memory prices.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It will just cost more due to high memory prices.

Posted by: stargazera5 at Wednesday, March 11 2026 11:30 AM (cfPew)

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• Two court cases have ruled that AIs aren't people.  (Yahoo)
  
  And they're not lawyers either, though lawyers also aren't people.  Mostly.
  
  
  
• Will Anthropic's Pentagon controvery scare startups away from a trillion-dollar firehose of money?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  No.  Are you stupid?

• Workers who love corporate slogans are bad at their jobs.  (Cornell)
  
  And, again, not people.
  
  
  
• Robots could speed up home construction and also possibly make the quality suck less.  (CNN)
  
  They transport the robot to the building site in a shipping container, and it constructs the framing to order on-site, taking a day to complete a four-week job.
  
  Prefab frames have been a thing for a long time, but this makes it a far more flexible solution.
  
  
  
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is set to receive a $4 million bonus.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Huang is worth $164 billion given Nvidia's current share price.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's Stargate got blown up in a desperate attempt to defend the Earth from ascended Goa'uld System Lord Anubis.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or they just ran out of money, but that would be less exciting.
  
  Anyway, they still have the other gate in Antarctica.  I think.
  
  
  
• HP's ZBook Ultra G1a with the Ryzen AI Max 395+ is pretty zippy.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not compared against the brand new MacBook Pro with the M5 Max, which is faster on many benchmarks but isn't shipping yet.
  
  
  
• A research went undercover as an AI on bot-only social network Moltbook and found a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.  (InfoWorld)
  
  And you said it couldn't be done, Obi Wan.
  
  
  
• Project I've been working on at my day job, shifting a quarter petabyte of data and dozens of applications to a new cluster, is finally done.  And it all seems to work.
  
  And costs 95% less to run than at AWS.
  
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, March 10 2026 02:10 AM (zCiG7)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 10 2026 02:40 AM (SV7Jd)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 10 2026 03:00 AM (SV7Jd)

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• Look to the skies: For the first time a spacecraft has diverted the orbit of an asteroid.  (Science News)
  
  Two asteroids, in fact, the pair Dimorphos, which was the direct target, and Didymos, around which it orbits.
  
  The deliberate impact not only shortened the orbital period of Dimorphos by half an hour from its original twelve, but slowed the orbit of the pair around the Sun by...  10 micrometers per second.
  
  The experiment was four years ago; it took a while for the difference to add up to enough to detect.
  
  
  
• Don't bother looking to the skies: Astronomers have found a galaxy that is estimated to be made of 99.9% dark matter.  (CNN)
  
  If it's dark, you ask, how did they find it?
  
  With extreme difficulty.  With extreme difficulty and three telescopes.

• The first car - for small values of "car" - has rolled off the production line at solar car maker Aptera.  (Electrek)
  
  If it feels like that's taken twenty years, it may be because it has.  Aptera was founded in 2006, with its corporate existence punctuated with a couple of bankruptcies along the way.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's head of robotics has resigned after the company signed a contract with the Department of War.  (Engadget)
  
  OpenAI doesn't make robots, so the impact is not likely to be significant.
  
  
  
• Apple's 18 core M5 Max's CPU performance is mediocre compared to high-end server and workstation CPUs, but its integrated graphics performance is stellar - at least on synthetic benchmarks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, that's the opposite of the article's headline.  The article is deliberately stupid.
  
  
  
• Who has the fastest cloud servers?  Amazon, at least if you're in a datacenter with the new Amazon Turin (Zen 5) CPUs available.  (Ecuadors)
  
  The new C8 instances are a lot faster - as much as 70% - than the Zen 3 C6 instances that we were using at my day job before we moved out of Amazon entirely.
  
  The associated Hacker News thread notes that you can get even better performance by the simple trick of running your own server.
  
  And save a ton of money.
  
  
  
• The new MacBook Neo is up to 40% faster than the original M1 MacBook Air.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The same multi-threaded performance, but 43% faster single-threaded.
  
  And that's using an iPhone CPU.
  
  
  
• The new MacBook Air is even more faster.  (Notebook Check)
  
  And more expensive, but it does have 16GB of RAM which the Neo can't do.  And a wide colour gamut display, which likewise.
  
  
  
• Not entirely sure you can do that.  (The Register)
  
  The maintainer of Python package Chardet, which dets chars, replace the manually-written code with a version largely generated by Anthropic's Claude, and swapper the license from LGPL to MIT, raising complaints from the original developer (maybe) who assigned the license, which prohibits future relicensing.
  
  The thing is, "copyleft" licenses in the GPL depend on copyright law for enforcement, and AI-generated content can't be copyrighted, at least in the US, so...
  
  If he'd just renamed the package it would probably be fine.
  
  Also, it apparently rewrote and optimised the inner loop of the code to be 48 times faster, which is something of a win.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 08 2026 08:44 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 08 2026 08:49 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, March 11 2026 02:14 AM (oJgNG)

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• New NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has killed the Exploration Upper Stage project for the SLS and will be open to bids for a replacement that might actually exist some day.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Development of the Exploration Upper Stage has been in progress since 2016, with the initial launch date set for 2021.  It's five years behind schedule and with $3.5 billion spent so far - nearly ten times the initial estimate - is no close to reality.
  
  The lead contractor for the project was Boeing, for what it's worth.

• Lenovo's new ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 received a 10 out of 10 score for repairability on iFixit.  (Liliputing)
  
  It comes in both Intel (Panther Lake) and AMD (Ryzen 400 series) models, and uses LPCAMM2 rather than soldered memory.  The display, keyboard, and batter are easily swapped out, as are the memory and SSD.  The Thunderbolt ports are modular - there's a little adaptor that connects the socket to a matching socket on the motherboard, so if you trip over the cable you break a $2 part rather than the entire $2000 laptop.
  
  A welcome change.
  
  
  
• Indie game Slay the Spire 2 has 393,000 players on Steam right now.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's a thousand times more than much-hyped TenCent-backed title High Guard, which received top billing at the Video Game Awards.  (Which are, apparently, bigger than the Super Bowl, though I resolutely watch neither.)
  
  Video games are alive and well.  The video game industry is dying of self-inflicted wounds.  Latest heir to the Concord  crown is expected to be Marathon, though it's been out for two days and isn't dead yet.
  
  
  
• AI startup Hayden AI is suing its former CEO over alleged instances of fraud and theft and pettifoggery and exaggerating on his resume.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The mopery and dopery appears to go back a ways:

  According to Carson's LinkedIn profile, he completed a doctorate from Waseda University in Tokyo in 2007.

  "That is a lie," the complaint states. "Carson does not hold a PhD from Waseda or any other university.  In 2007, he was not obtaining a PhD but was operating 'Splat Action Sports,' a paintball equipment business in a Florida strip mall."

  Did he use Cluely to get the job?
  
  

• Things are bad, but not that bad.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, prices of 32GB memory kits did hit $4000 on Newegg, up almost tenfold in a single day.
  
  It only affected a couple of ranges of G.Skill memory - 27 products in all - including some bundles containing that specific memory.  Affected prices should be back to the new normal now.

• The Department of War has sunk Anthropic with a torpedo fired from a submarine, the first such incident by a US Navy vessel since World War 0.  (Politico)
  
  Or I might be conflating various world events.  It's been a long day.
  
  
  
• Speaking of navies abruptly relocated at the bottom the the sea Nvidia is pulling back from OpenAI and Anthropic.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not divesting, but not investing further either.

• AI generated results in Bing search pointed users at malicious versions of OpenClaw that attempted to install a whole swarm of malware onto your computer.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Even worse than the legitimate version of OpenClaw, I mean.
  
  
  
• The CEO of cheating app Cluely lied about the company's revenue.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's slightly worse than trying to fudge your term paper.
  
  
  
• There is no longer a 512GB Mac Studio.  (Macrumors)
  
  It was expensive.  Now it's gone.
  
  
  
• Nvidia on the other hand is reportedly preparing an RTX 5050 with 9GB of RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's up from the current 8GB, but the details kind of make sense given the exact specs of the 5050.  The update would switch from four 16Gb DDR6 chips running at 20GHz to three 24Gb DDR7 chips running at 28GHz.
  
  It would provide a little more memory and a little more performance while using fewer components.  The rest of Nvidia's 5000 series graphics cards all use DDR7 memory; the entry-level 5050 was the only one that did not.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Idea Tab Pro Gen 2 is set to arrive in March.  (Liliputing)
  
  I have the smaller, cheaper Idea Tab Nothing.  It's not an amazing performer but the display is first rate - Lenovo calls it "paperlike" and I can't disagree.  It doesn't feel like looking at a screen at all; it feels like magic.
  
  The new model has a 13" 3540x2190 display (mine has an 11" 2560x1600 screen), 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a microSD slot, and a pen.  The specs don't use the term "paperlike" anywhere but I hope it's similar.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, March 07 2026 12:17 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, March 07 2026 01:59 AM (zCiG7)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, March 07 2026 10:52 AM (T3+91)

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• As expected from recent leaks, Apple today introduced the new relatively low cost MacBook Neo.  (MacRumors)
  
  It uses the A18 processor found in the iPhone and...  Well, the iPhone 16, basically.
  
  It's available with 8GB of RAM expandable to...  Not expandable at all, even at purchase time, because the A18 only has 8GB of RAM.  And 256GB of 512GB of storage.
  
  I/O consists of one USB3 port and one USB2 port, plus a headphone jack, and that's it.  Screen is a 2408x1506 13" model with sRGB colour, though the specs don't mention what percentage of the sRGB colourspace it covers.  Presumably no more than 100%.
  
  It's...  Fine, probably.  8GB of RAM is truly painful on Windows 11, but Linux runs just fine and I assume MacOS should do okay with lighter tasks.

• Google is ending its 30% cut of everything on the Play Store, reducing it to 20% or less for new purchases and a relatively reasonable 10% for subscriptions.  (Engadget)
  
  Thanks to Epic Games, whose lawsuit forced this upon a very unwilling Google.
  
  
  
• Your car can be tracked everywhere you go by your tire pressure sensors.  (Dark Reading)
  
  Which transmit unique identifiers, unencrypted, readable by anyone withing a 50-meter range.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, a new Android app detects anyone nearby wearing smart glasses.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Assuming the glasses are sending a Bluetooth signal, which is what the app detects.  So in fact it lets you detect any device in range with Bluetooth enabled, and there are a lot more of those than smart glasses wearers.
  
  
  
• The CEO of Qualcomm said the thing.  (Fortune)
  
  Literally:

  "If you actually believe in the AI revolution, 6G will be required. Resistance is futile."

  It may also turn people into animals.

• Micron has announced 256GB SOCAMM2 memory modules, as used in some - a total of two so far, I think - recent laptop models.[/urk]  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For servers, not for you.
  
  
  
• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is in a slap fight with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Again.

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, March 05 2026 10:23 PM (Jz3jd)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 05 2026 11:05 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 05 2026 11:06 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 06 2026 01:27 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Friday, March 06 2026 05:16 AM (SV7Jd)

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• Apple has announced its new MacBook Pro range with update M5 Pro and M5 Max CPUs and faster SSD speeds.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The SSD speeds are simple: They're still Apple's awkward proprietary solution, but the speed has been increased to PCIe 5.0 levels.  I'm not sure how much difference that makes to a laptop, but it's not unwelcome.
  
  The CPU story is a little more complicated.  Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max feature up to 18 cores, though only 6 of those are performance cores, or what Apple has retroactively renamed "Super" cores.  They are the same as the performance cores in the existing M5 chips, which we know because those cores have also been renamed.
  
  But the other 12 cores aren't efficiency cores, they're "Performance" cores, though precisely what that means we don't know.
  
  Also, there's no longer a 512GB option; the price has been increased by $100 but the base model now comes with 1TB of SSD.
  
  Most importantly, the price of memory hasn't increased.  It's not exactly cheap, but it's not much more than the market price for regular DDR5 modules now, and provides a lot more bandwidth.
  
  
  
• There's also a new MacBook Air and, expected tomorrow, the entry-level MacBook Neo.  (Notebook Check)

• Arm's own Cortex X925 core - found here in Nvidia's GB10 AI processor - reaches desktop class performance when provided a desktop class power budget.  (Chips and Cheese)
  
  It's neck-and-neck with AMD's 9900X and Intel's 285K desktop chips.
  
  
  
• Seagate has started shipping 44TB hard drives.  (Tom'ss Hardware)
  
  You can't have one, or at least not yet.  Right now they're only going to one large, unnamed, customer.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced its new Clearwater Forest server CPUs with up to 288 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're all efficiency cores, but that's a valid option when you pack that many onto a chip.
  
  
  
• Drones launched in Iran's attempt to make as many enemies as possible before it expires hit an Amazon datacenter in the UAE, and took out power to another of its datacenters in Bahrain.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Born just in time to have my servers blown up in the sandbox.
  
  
  
• LexisNexis got hacked via a flaw in React.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Stolen data included employee passwords - encrypted, so probably not a problem - and API keys stored in AWS Secrets - not encrypted at all, so definitely a problem but relatively easy to address.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, March 04 2026 07:25 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 05 2026 03:02 AM (rcPLc)

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• Motorola and GrapheneOS have announced a partnership to produce Motorola phones running GrapheneOS.  (Liliputing)
  
  Though I'm not sure what else they would announce.
  
  GrapheneOS is a version of Android without Google's proprietary software.  It currently only runs on, uh, Google's proprietary hardware, which I'm not sure is entirely helpful.
  
  Having it run on something else as well might be a useful option if you want to steer away from the Apple / Google duopoly for security and privacy reasons but aren't still looking for something officially supported.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Microsoft did not ban the word "microslop" from its official Copilot Discord forum and then shut the whole thing down when people kept using the offending term, or, well, they did but they say it was due to spam.  (Windows Latest)
  
  Sure, Microsoft.  I believe you.
  
  
  
• Anthropic got declaude.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I was doing server stuff today and didn't notice.  I do use Claude Code to get boilerplate stuff done quickly, like generating test cases, but I didn't miss it.
  
  
  
• The US government is moving to ban memory chips from Chinese companies YTMC, CXMT, and SMIC...  From government devices.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which doesn't really change anything for the rest of us.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum N1 AI is a combination NAS and desktop PC and is not made by Minisforum.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Typo by Notebook Check - the device is made by Morefine.
  
  It has an eight-core Ryzen CPU, four 3.5" bays, three M.2 slots, dual 10Gb Ethernet ports, and an 800W power supply and room for a desktop graphics card.