• East during the spring and west during the fall: You know you're in for a ride when you read an article that includes the sentence Most magnets have two poles: north and south.  (Phys.org)
  
  Most?
  
  Most.
  
  They've found a new type of magnetic material that has eight poles.

• Do you miss the days when you could just switch a computer on and it would instantly come up with the BASIC prompt?  Miss them no more.  (ThoreauBasic)
  
  It can run as a regular Windows app, but can also boot directly from BIOS.
  
  
  
• Is everyone at OpenAI insane?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Another "safety" employee has left the company, saying it needs to be run "like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster."
  
  But that's missing the point.  If you pour toxic waste into a reservoir of drinking water, you go to jail.
  
  
  
• It being spring and all, I made my pilgrimage to the hardware store's gardening section to see what native plants they had on offer.  I needed to replace the boronia that died over winter and start finding new plants to substitute those lost to wallaby predation.
  
  Came back with a boronia already in flower, a kangaroo paw likewise, another  westringia to complement the one I planted this time last year which is absolutely thriving, and an aca-cia.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• I am altering the deal.  Pray I do not alter it any further.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Apple is changing the meaning of granting applications full disk access, because it meant that applications granted full disk access were granted full disk access.

  In Muse's case, the AI optionally allows users to enable Full Disk Access. This setting, Apple explains, gives an app permission to access files, mail, messages, and even browsing history.

  As I said.
  
  Apple thinks its customers are idiots.
  
  Much of the time, this is true.

  "Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems…without users' full knowledge and understanding," Apple said in a new blog post aimed at developers.

  Illiterate idiots.

• Cloudflare is trying to outplay Jev with Clef, an open-weight model that allows you to run the already open-weight Qwen 3.5 9B while using only seven times as much memory.  (The Register)
  
  Jev is an LLM model for making simple decisions with a good degree of accuracy, rather than performing complex tasks badly.  Qwen 3.5 9B running at a default quantisation (level of detail) needs about 6GB of RAM - VRAM or shared RAM on a Mac or a PC with integrated graphics.
  
  Somehow Clef requires 41GB.  I presume that's not just because Cloudflare are idiots; they're generally not.  But it does cost six times as much as Jev if you choose to run it in the cloud because you don't have 41GB of VRAM.
  
  
  
• A new antitrust case against Google for (checks notes) running a search engine in this economy has been thrown out by the same judge who ruled against Google in the government's recent anti-trust suit.  (Ars Technica)
  
  "Yeah," explained Judge Amit Mehta, "nah."
  
  
  
• Socialists harm democracy.  (Reuters)
  
  Do tell.
  
  
  
• Hey, FBI.  This company right here.  OpenAI has alerted more than a hundred companies and other groups that it may had inadvertently hacked their systems.  (Reuters)
  
  AI safety isn't about AI being too smart.  It's about humans not being sent to prison.
  
  
  
• After all these year's it's no longer a typo: The 4970K is on its way.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel's 4790K appeared back in 2014 as a four core 4.4GHz CPU.  The new 4970K has 28 cores - though only eight of them full size - and a Big F*cking Cache.
  
  Seriously, the full model number is the Core Ultra 9 4970K BFC and there's only one thing that could stand for.
  
  
  
• Toshiba is planning to double its hard drive production next year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Maybe a little relief in one small segment of the market?
  
  
  
• OpenAI's Dot agent is enterprise software that can also order you dinner and wipe out all life in the galaxy.  (The Verge)
  
  Thanks, I already ate.
  
  
  
• Only the EU could produce a worse alternative to Microsoft Teams.  (Politico)
  
  Our expectations were low, but...

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, October 03 2026 10:43 PM (oJgNG)

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• Xbox is not for sale, says Xbox.  (Windows Central)
  
  Unless you have a lot of money.
  
  Like...  Any at all.
  
  

• Pi 1.0 is here.  (Earendil)
  
  It's a thing.  That people use.  Apparently.
  
  What it does is not mentioned.
  
  
  
• Micron says that memory is going to get even more expensive over the next two years.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Even though because the company is booking an 86% gross margin it is in no hurry at all to see prices go back to normal.
  
  
  
• Anthropic and OpenAI keep saying their products will kill all life in the galaxy.  The FTC decided to take a look at that.  (CNBC)
  
  Either they're lying, which is bad, or they're not lying, which is worse.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 02 2026 10:32 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 03 2026 02:59 AM (6eVrQ)

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• Google has announced Gemini 4 Argon, which the company is calling its most powerful AI model to date that you are not allowed to use.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Thanks Google.  Thanks for thirteen years of sucking.
  
  
  
• Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because fuck you that's why.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Shut up, you're not my real dad!
  
  Also, this:

  RSS, or Really Simple Syndication/Rich Site Summary, is a web feed that lets users and applications access updates to a website in a standardized format. The format became particularly popular in the blogging era, as it offered a way to subscribe to a site’s new posts in a news-reading app. Google once operated the most popular of these, but shut it down in 2013, ceding the market to companies like Feedly and other indie applications.

  2013 was 13 years ago.

• The Department of Defense has launched Project Meridian, a bold new effort to stop fighting the previous war.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They've called upon Elon Musk, Palmer Lucky (CEO of defense contractor Anduril), and Newt Gingrich to offer their expertise, a move that has deeply offended the perpetually deeply offended.
  
  
  
• Speaking of the Pentagon, hackers stole millions of personnel record during a months-long data breach.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good work, guys.
  
  
  
• Speaking of months long data breaches, a teenage hacker found himself in an unprotected Microsoft internal environment with access to 17 trillion records.  (Faav)
  
  What is this, a database of ants?
  
  
  
• Moonshot AI, the Chinese company behind AI model Kimi K3, tried to hack into OpenAI...  And failed.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, an I find it most ungentlemanly.
  
  
  
• Got my Christmas cakes, and my Japanese maple is showing signs of life.  Also have my 12-bit 1980s personal computer emulator showing signs of life.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 01 2026 10:01 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, October 02 2026 12:32 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Friday, October 02 2026 01:04 PM (dqnrn)

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• Anthropic announced not long ago that it was paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month to lease capacity in datacenters that actually existed.  The number now looks to be closer to twice that.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The only way to win is to own the stadium.
  
  
  
• Anthropic also listed its own IPO.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Seeking a valuation of $2 trillion and warning that not only will it not give humanity a home in the stars, it will very likely wipe us all out right here on Earth.
  
  Uh...

• Bought two new PCs.  Finally found what I've been looking for - a barebones 13900HX mini-PC that takes DDR4 SODIMMs.
  
  For most people who don't have 256GB of DDR4-SODIMMs just sitting around that's not particularly useful, even at the discounted price of $400.  But for me, when I do have 256GB of DDR4-SODIMMs, including 64GB in a dead laptop and 64GB in a dying one, it's exactly what I needed.  It's two to three times faster than the old laptops - when they work at all, and nearly 50% faster on multi-threaded work than the mini-PCs I bought last year.  And half the price...  Albeit for 100% less RAM and storage, but as I said that's the opposite of an issue for me.
  
  Do I need them?  No.  Do I want them?  Yes.  They let me keep on trucking with parts pulled from laptops I bought in 2021.
  
  Minisforum M1-1390 for anyone interested though the US store is currently out of stock of the barebones model.  It's a big little PC - 8" square, the size of the old Mac Mini before it shrank in the wash.
  
  Seems that I missed the announcement of this model last month.  But saved myself $200 by accidentally waiting until it went on sale.
  
  
  
• We're going to make our own Microsoft!  With blackjack, and hookers, and Linux!  In fact, forget the blackjack.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Netherlands, irked that the aptly named International Criminal Court was sanctioned by the US and can no longer use American internet-based software and services, has decided to adopt Linux rather than stop being international criminals.
  
  
  
• AMD's Zen 6 server CPUs are here, ranging in price up to $15,000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though that gives you a 256-core CPU with a gigabyte of cache running at 4.1GHz, which is not too shabby.  Entry level models start at just $700.
  
  
  
• You can't have one.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not because they're too expensive, but because they've already sold out all production for the entirety of 2027 and are taking orders for 2028.
  
  
  
• French company Mistral AI says that OpenAI and Anthropic are doing a publicity tour on "AI safety" to cover up the fact that they are retarded.  (CNBC)
  
  Well, yes.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 30 2026 10:04 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 30 2026 11:57 PM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 01 2026 02:07 AM (OPHXG)

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• OpenAI still doesn't seem to have a handle on all its rogue AI activity.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Because they are idiots.
  
  
  
• Nvidia has launched a new platform for reining in rogue AI activity.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  A profitable market because people are idiots.

• AMD (which just passed a trillion dollars in market cap) has used some of that money to purchase Magrathea.  (CNBC)
  
  The company is notable for winning an award for its design of Norway.
  
  
  
• Yes, we have no brownanas.  (The Guardian)
  
  We have no brownanas today.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 495 AI workstations have started shipping - with eye-watering prices attached.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are Ryzen 395 workstations but come with up to 192GB of RAM.  Since Windows likes to keep 32GB to itself, this allows memory for AI tasks to increase from 96GB to 160GB - a 66% improvement.
  
  Unfortunately the state of the memory market makes the new models 200% more expensive.
  
  
  
• Anthropic has announced Claude Sonnet 5.5, Opus 5.5's retarded brother.  (Anthropic)
  
  Though less retarded than Sonnet 5.  Dramatically less retarded in the Terminal Bench test suite, with its score soaring from a miserable 10% to a satisfying 70%, which makes me wonder how much of the improvement was from specifically targeting that one test suite.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 30 2026 02:22 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 30 2026 08:03 AM (LDKo5)

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• Thieves stole two entire trucks belonging to Plus.ai and got away with 20 tons of raw Nvidia silicon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So raw that it was still sand.  Because Plus.ai is an autonomous trucking company and was using the sand as a test load.  The Nvidia logos on the trucks were related to investments and nothing to do with their contents.

• Meanwhile Taiwan's chip talisman snack faces production halt after 94% strike vote.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you're wondering what the heck this story is about, it's literally about a Taiwanese snack called Guai Guai, specifically the coconut flavour, which sounds awful.
  
  
  
• Fakecloud is a fake cloud if you need a fake cloud.  (fakecloud)
  
  For testing against AWS without paying for AWS.
  
  
  
• Minecraft is introducing a new dimension.  (Xbox)
  
  Showing up first in Minecraft Dungeons 2, and then showing up in Minecraft Minecraft next year.  It's called The Sift and it features...  Stuff, probably.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, September 29 2026 12:53 AM (lzyeE)

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• There's a new way to break RSA security that only requires you to (checks notes) occupy the entire infrastructure of Cloudflare for a day to break a single Privacy Pass key.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Generic RSA is still safe; this is for one particular use case.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Speaking of controlled flights into bankruptcy, Microsoft's Copilot+ branding just did the thing.  (Windows Central)
  
  Everyone hated it and now it's gone.
  
  
  
• Claude Opus 5.5, now with 95% fewer em-dashes.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  But extra o-dashes.
  
  
  
• Proposed federal legislation wants VPNs to ban piracy sites.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But doesn't seem to know anything about VPNs.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu is planning to release a new kernel version every two weeks going forward.  (Canonical)
  
  Yay.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• In the most depraved display of shameless self-serving bullshit since the Paris Olympics, OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs have gone to the UN to beg them to squish their competitors - somehow - after the US government told them to take a hike.  (Associated Press)
  
  Guys.  Guys.
  
  When your goal is regulatory capture, you need to capture a regulator.
  
  The UN is a debating society for schoolyard bullies, with the two teams being the Paste Eaters and the Window Lickers.
  
  They don't have the power to regulate squat.
  
  
  
• You know who does, though?  The US government.  (CNBC)
  
  Who's a cute little supply-chain risk?  You are, Anthropic!  Well, never mind the cute part, but the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that yes, the Pentagon has the right to say who it considers a supply-chain risk.
  
  A spokesbot for Anthropic said, "wah".
  
  
  
  

• I tried using the spare capacity on my second server (the one hosting this blog and many others) to host development of the new blogging software and the results were...  Bad.  The problem was not the new software itself but Rust debugging builds, which unleash a water cannon of useless redundant writes over your filesystem, and the filesystem on the server was not prepared for that, so while those builds were running the blogs froze, usually for a second or two but sometimes for minutes.
  
  So this morning I grabbed two of the mini-PCs I bought last year before prices went crazy (actually after they went crazy, but that particular model resisted the price increases long enough for me to grab a couple or four for less than the price of the RAM they contained), upgrade their SSDs to 4TB each (same story), and drop Ubuntu 26.04 on them.  And it...  All worked.
  
  Not sure exactly how they'll perform but they're eight thousand miles away from the servers so you shouldn't see any performance issues there.  I just did a disk-to-disk copy of 18GB of files and it went zoom, so that's one datapoint.
  
  Update: That's a hell of a lot better.  It's dramatically faster and doesn't bother anyone else.
  
  
  
• SpaceXAI is planning to add another 660,000 AI GPUs this year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  660,000 for me, none for you.
  
  
  
• Japan's used bookstores are the latest target of the AI shopping spree for content that hasn't been...  Poisoned by AI.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's kind of like the labs holding on to wood from before the 1950s to serve as a baseline for radiocarbon dating, because anything more recent is contaminated with excess C14 and gives skewed numbers.
  
  
  
• Automattic has a new board of directors.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This seems to have been the goal.  The board briefly sidelined Mad King Matt Mullenweg, voted themselves golden parachutes, and waited for him to kick them out of the plane...  Which is barreling straight towards a mountain.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, September 27 2026 10:35 AM (6eVrQ)

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• I know, I have a 16-core server with 128GB of RAM that isn't doing much, I'll borrow half of it as a development box.  As in, the one this blog and the rest of mee.nu is running on.
  
  Cue grindingly poor disk performance thanks to absurdly high write loads of large Rust build directories.
  
  Update: Tried a whole series of fixes, none of which helped.  Rust writes gigabytes of garbage on every build, and the server setup is designed more for database workloads, leading to write amplification and sequential loads turning into random ones.  30,000 IOPS but only ~100MB per second, when Rust wanted three times that.
  
  Solution ended up being not doing that.  Moving everything back to a couple of local systems now: Ruri and Tanya, each with 64GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD.
  
  Update 2: Deep in the Magic Wardrobe right now.  I forgot I had those two 2TB Crucial P3 drives.  Not fancy but perfectly serviceable.  Now to yoink this Windows installation and Ubuntify this beast.
  
  Update 3: Tanya now has Ubuntu 26.04 on a 4TB.  Doing the same to Ruri.  Also, why is there 40GB of DDR4 SODIMMs in my parts bin?
  
  Update 4: The Ruri-Tanya cluster is fully armed and operational.  Ish.  Need to configure ZFS so it won't do what happened on the production server.
  
  
  
• The communists at OpenAI "accidentally" hacked the communist Australian government's healthcare portal and took 84 years days to tell them about it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Australian government of course didn't know anything about it.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Micron is going to stop making 2GB GDDR7 chips for video cards because they make far more money on the 3GB chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Fortunately Nvidia mostly uses chips from Samsung and Hynix anyway.
  
  
  
• Commodity DRAM now costs more per square millimeter than leading-edge 2nm logic chips.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yay us.
  
  
  
• People training OpenAI's AI have been fired for using AI.  (404 Media)
  
  Well, yes.  Exactly.
  
  Training AI on AI output rapidly leads to something called model collapse.  It's the computer equivalent of drinking your own urine.
  
  
  
• And for my next trick: Making a JavaScript that doesn't suck.
  
  I mean, TypeScript is JavaScript programmers' idea of a bondage-and-discipline language, and have you seen TypeScript?  It doesn't have types, it has...  Intimations.