• Windows 11 now has a billion users, all of whom hate it.  (Thurrott)
  
  I wouldn't advise clicking on that link without adblock enabled.  (Or even better, just using Brave.)  The comments weren't loading, so I tried turning off adblock, and it launched multiple videos all playing at once and choked my browser to the point that I couldn't even close the tab.
  
  And it turns out they're testing a new comment system and it's not working properly.
  
  Anyway:

  As part of today’s quarterly earnings conference call, Microsoft revealed that there are now over one billion Windows 11 users.  That's a big milestone by any measure, but here’s what I find interesting: It took Windows 11 less time to reach one billion users than it did for Windows 10.

  By three months, and they had to murder Windows 10 to do it.

  Today, the narrative is that everyone hates Windows 11.  I complain about the enshittification, which is real.  But that started with Windows 10 (or, really Windows .  And I don’t "hate” Windows 11, nor do I see hatred out in the world.

  I don't think you've looked, Paul.
  
  
  
• Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux.  (Himthe)

  So there I was, finally grasping the reality of what you're up against, as a Windows user:

  • Random bugs that break basic functionality
  • Updates that install without permission and brick my system
  • Copilot and OneDrive ads appearing in every corner of the OS
  • Copilot buttons everywhere, coming for every application
  • Can't even make a local account without hacking the setup with Rufus (they even removed the terminal workaround)
  • Zero actionable fixes or even an aknowledgment of their fuckups
    

  Sounds about right, yes.

  People often say Linux is "too much work.".

  And I agree.  They're completely justified to complain.  There's the documentation page diving, the forums, the reddit threads.  And, most importantly, you have to basically rewire your brain and stop expecting it to behave like Windows used to.

  But I looked at the list above and realized: Windows is now also too much work. 
  And the difference with Windows is that you're going to do all that work while actively fighting your computer only for it to be undone when the next surprise update comes and ruins everything.

  There is also Windows 10 IoT Enterprise Edition LTSC.
  
  Or Windows 7, which doesn't get updates so it doesn't break.

• AMD's 9850X3D is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's only slightly faster than the 9800X3D and uses a lot more power, but it's still a lot faster and uses a lot less power than the best Intel chips, so...  Whatever.
  
  If you want a system that runs cool the 7800X3D is a little slower but amazingly power-efficient.
  
  
  
• An illustrated guide to hippo castration.  (Science)
  
  Oh, good.  I was wondering where I put that.
  
  
  
• There is no mold at the Uffizi.  (Scientific American)
  
  And when we say there is none, I mean there is some.
  
  
  
• France is planning to follow Australia in banning social media for children under 15.  (The Guardian)
  
  In Australia the number of visitors to such sites hasn't declined one iota despite five million accounts being banned.
  
  Odd, that.  You'd almost think that kids are smarter than politicians.
  
  
  
• Beyond Meat's protein soda might be its last chance and best hope.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 30 2026 02:29 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Friday, January 30 2026 03:31 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 30 2026 03:49 AM (6UXNC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 30 2026 03:52 AM (6UXNC)

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• Memory prices may be leveling off - at four times what they were just a few months ago.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Supplies are still very constrained, but people are buying less RAM - either avoiding upgrades entirely or building smaller systems - so prices are stalling in the ionosphere rather than continuing on an intergalactic cruise.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix - one of the big three memory manufacturers - has reported its most recent quarterly results.  (CNBC)
  
  No surprise, the numbers are good.  Revenue is up 66% over the past year, and profit is up 137%.
  
  Good for them.  Not good for you.

• Nvidia's DGX Spark can be significantly faster on AI tasks than systems built on AMD's Ryzen AI Max.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  When it launched it cost twice as much as the AMD systems, leaving plenty of room for the two to compete.  But the AMD systems seem to have been hit badly by the DRAM Apocalypse while the Nvidia systems have somehow come down in price.
  
  So if all you want to do is run local AI models, the DGX Spark is a better bet.  If you want to do anything else with it - certainly if you want to run Windows - you may be better of sticking with AMD.
  
  
  
• Google's desktop version of Android looks to be real.  (Liliputing)
  
  The year of Linux on the desktop?
  
  I mean, it can't be worse than Windows.
  
  Surely.
  
  
  
• The Khadas Mind Pro has been updated with Intel's new Panther Lake CPU with is B390 graphics.  (Liliputing)
  
  $1799 with 64GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, which used to be wildly expensive, and now seems normal.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, January 29 2026 05:44 PM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 29 2026 06:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, January 30 2026 02:23 AM (rcPLc)

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• Intel's new B390 integrated graphics, featured in certain Panther Lake laptop processors, are genuinely a huge leap forward.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Previously the best mainstream integrated graphics were found in AMD chips, like the 780M and 890M units that are included in a three nominal generations of processors.  Intel's latest graphics unit runs rings around them - 50% faster or more.
  
  AMD still holds a convincing lead with its Ryzen AI Max family, but those are not cheap or widespread.
  
  The one major catch here is that the B390 is only available in laptops with soldered memory.  No exceptions.  If you user-upgradable RAM you get graphics running at one third the speed, half the speed of comparable AMD systems.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Television is one hundred years old today.  (Diamond Geezer)
  
  Happy birthday, television!
  
  
  
• After two years of vibe coding, I'm back to writing everything by hand.  (Atmoio)

  It's not until I opened up the full codebase and read its latest state cover to cover that I began to see what we theorized and hoped was only a diminishing artifact of earlier models: slop.
  
  It was pure, unadulterated slop. I was bewildered. Had I not reviewed every line of code before admitting it? Where did all this... gunk.. come from?

  Technical debt as a service.

  In retrospect, it made sense.  Agents write units of changes that look good in isolation.  They are consistent with themselves and your prompt.  But respect for the whole, there is not.  Respect for structural integrity there is not.  Respect even for neighboring patterns there was not.

  What there is, is code spam.
  
  
  
• We have met the enemy and he is slop: A new digital divide?  Coder worldviews, the "Slop economy," and democracy in the age of AI.  (TandFOnline)
  
  Okay, one moment.
  
  Ctrl-F "democracy"
  
  54 hits.  Never once do they specify what they mean, but it readily becomes apparent:

  On one side are the 'digital elites' - those with the means, skills, or institutional support to obtain high-quality information and online experiences. This group enjoys reliable news sources, can afford ad-free subscriptions or premium content, and benefits from platforms and regulations that attempt to uphold standards of accuracy, privacy, and democratic values.  Their internet experience includes credible journalism (e.g., The New York Times, BBC), fact-checked content, and fewer mis/disinformation traps.

  Stalin or Mao.  Those are your only options, apparently.
  
  
  
• Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, creators and operators of Claude AI, is a fuckwit.  (Dario Amodei)

  A country of geniuses in a datacenter could divide their efforts among software design, cyber operations, R&D for physical technologies, relationship building, and statecraft.

  Yeah, "geniuses in datacenters" have a remarkable track record on relationship building and statecraft.
  
  Just... Remarkable.

  It is clear that, if for some reason it chose to do so, this country would have a fairly good shot at taking over the world (either militarily or in terms of influence and control) and imposing its will on everyone else- or doing any number of other things that the rest of the world doesn’t want and can’t stop.

  Everyone has a plan until they get a Hellfire missile to the face.
  
  
  
• Dell's 52" 6K ultra-widescreen monitor is a... 52" 6K ultra-widescreen monitor.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  And it has a 120Hz refresh rate, which is a bit of a surprise.
  
  And it only costs as much as a dozen 27" 4K monitors.
  
  
  
• Google Gemini can now help you find the best meeting time for all attendees.  (Digital Trends)
  
  All it needs to know is the full schedules of all of everyone, and then it becomes an easy task.
  
  Of course, it already was if everyone's schedule is in a computer, so I'm not sure what problem AI is pretending to solve here.
  
  
  
• Google is set to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that it recorded private conversations.  (BBC)
  
  Oh, that problem.  If no conversation is private, you can't sue Google for recording it.
  
  
  
• The Trump administration is planning to use Google Gemini to draft transport regulations.  (ProPublica)

  The answer from the plan’s boosters is simple: speed.  Writing and revising complex federal regulations can take months, sometimes years.  But, with DOT's version of Google Gemini, employees could generate a proposed rule in a matter of minutes or even seconds, two DOT staffers who attended the December demonstration remembered the presenter saying.  In any case, most of what goes into the preambles of DOT regulatory documents is just "word salad," one staffer recalled the presenter saying.  Google Gemini can do word salad.

  Great.  Now it's regulatory spam.
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, January 28 2026 01:05 AM (rcPLc)

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• Replication crisis as a service.  (Columbia)
  
  You may have heard about the replication crisis science, and if you haven't, you should.  Half of all published medical research, for example, cannot be replicated, and for preclinical trials the rate increases to four fifths.
  
  An interesting point from that Wikipedia article is that 70% of scientists have tried and failed to replicate another researcher's work, but only 20% have been contacted by another scientist trying to replicate their work.
  
  Which is perhaps by design:

  This paper in Management Science has been cited more than 6,000 times.  Wall Street executives, top government officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it.  It’s fatally flawed, and the scholarly community refuses to do anything about it.

  Management science, huh?  Bad as things are in medical research, at least they admit to baseline reality.
  
  When someone tried to correct the record on this particular paper, his efforts were not well received:

  The authors ignored me, the journal refused to act, and the scholarly community looked the other way.  Two universities disregarded evidence of research misconduct - even after the authors admitted publishing a misleading report.
  
  The article remains largely uncorrected - misleading thousands of people each year.
  
  I believe our systems for curating trustworthy science are broken and need reformation.

  A latter-day dissolution of the monasteries?

  Having received no response from the authors, I contacted Management Science. After getting advice, I submitted a comment.
  
  It was rejected.
  
  The reviewers did not address the substance of my comment; they objected to my "tone".

  As the article says, ah, the tone police.

  The authors did admit to the editor that they had misreported a key finding - labeling it as statistically significant when it was not.  The authors claimed the error was a "typo."  They intended to type "not significant" but omitted the word "not".

  That's one hell of a typo.
  
  The story gets worse from there.  And that's just a single paper out of millions.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Washington state wants 3D printers and CNC milling machines to monitor everything you do and report on you if you are creating something that could be used in a firearm.  (Adafruit_
  
  Violating the First and Second Amendments with a single piece of legislation.  Such efficiency!
  
  
  
• Google won't stop replacing our news headlines with terrible AI.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The Verge may have gone full-blown communist revolutionary newspaper but on this they are not wrong.  Google is sometimes completely reversing the meaning of tech articles in its AI summaries.
  
  
  
• How to add a coin slot to your gaming PC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sometimes the quest for an authentic arcade experience goes a little too far.
  
  And sometimes it goes a lot.
  
  
  
• A New York startup has built a machine that produces gasoline from air.  (Jalopnik)
  
  Which is perfectly possible, just not very efficient.  After all, dinosaurs breathed air, and all our gasoline comes from liquified dinosaurs.
  
  It takes carbon dioxide and water vapour from the air, electrolyses the water, and combines them to create methanol.  Then it goes through a more complicated process to turn the methanol into usable fuel.
  
  The device costs an estimated $20,000, and if you have a free source of electricity, a gallon of gas costs around $1.50, though the article doesn't mention exactly how this was calculated.
  
  Since you probably don't have a free source of electricity, a gallon of gas will actually cost between $10 and $30, which is why dinosaurs always win.
  
  
  

Anime Update

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 27 2026 12:17 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 27 2026 12:31 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 27 2026 01:27 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, January 27 2026 02:14 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, January 27 2026 03:29 AM (Sbqr6)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, January 27 2026 07:12 AM (ZLF73)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 27 2026 08:55 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, January 27 2026 10:27 AM (ZLF73)

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• 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)

Posted by: normal at Monday, January 26 2026 02:17 AM (lzyeE)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 26 2026 02:38 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 26 2026 02:42 AM (1zWbY)

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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)

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• 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)

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• 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)

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• 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)

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• 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)

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