Friday, September 04
Daily News Stuff 4 September 2026
Tigana Edition
Tigana Edition
Top Story
- Bernie Sanders (Stalinist-Vt.) is calling for a ban on AI superintelligence, having spent his life erasing the regular kind. (The Hill)
Fortunately AI doesn't yet reach the level of human general intelligence, and nobody is foolish enough to claim it does.
- GPT 6 Astra: A new level of intelligence. (OpenAI)
Um.
Tech News
- Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered, every third-level .name domain has been cancelled. (Neil Fraser)
To explain: .name is what is known as a top level domain. There's no dot that comes after it.
The companies that own top-level domains get to sell second level domains to people. Those people can then use them as the see fit and create as many third (and fourth, and so on) level domains as they want, for free. ace.mu.nu and my own ai.mee.nu, for example.
.name is different, for a good reason. Since it directly models real names, they directly sell third-level domains.
Or did. If you have one, like, say, Neil Fraser, you are about to become nameless.
Because Verisign. All my homies hate Verisign.
- Lenovo's new ThinkCentre X Ultra comes with AMD's brand new Ryzen AI Max Pro 495. (Tom's Hardware)
What's the difference between that and the previous Ryzen AI Max Pro 395?
Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Stupid! You're so stupid!
- I hugged you a face but I boughted it. (Tom's Hardware)
For $12.93 billion.
- Intel's next-generation Nova Lake processors won't ship until Q1 2027. (Tom's Hardware)
And that's for the smaller models, up to 28 cores. The high-end 52-core version will arrive an unspecified number of months later.
Also, Razer Lake and Hammer Lake will follow, though we have no details on either of those as yet.
Anyway, I'm going to buy either the 52 core Nova Lake or the 24 core Zen 6 when they come out. I didn't need one previously; now I do, because I am constantly recompiling large Rust codebases.
- Salesforce says it wasn't able to keep its profit margins up because it was spending too much on Claude AI. (The Register)
I really have to wonder what these guys are doing. If they were using the Claude AI for production tasks like spam filtering, yes, that gets expensive. But they're not. They specifically say R&D.
With my personal Claude account - I recent upgraded to Max 5x, the $100 per month plan - I have built two databases, two compilers, and an interpreter, in the space of two weeks, 280,000 lines of Rust and 70,000 lines of code in a language that didn't exist a week ago except on paper. Test suites, custom fonts and UI designs.
Yes, I've been building out specs I wrote that I didn't have time to complete before now, but if Salesforce is blowing its budget this badly that means they are not writing specs.
- Also, the emulator for my fantasy 80s home computer boots and runs Basic.
I had budgeted 24k of ROM for the font maps alone. The entire system - interpreter, compiler, assembler/disassembler, floating point library, disk manager, local networking, multi-buffer screen editor, and twice the number of fonts I had planned - currently totals 36k.

Nothing amazing yet... But it works.
As a proof of concept I'm porting Hack to it. Not Nethack; even early releases of that are too large for the base model I'm emulating. There's a modern, cleaned up repository of the original Hack C code on GitHub. Being evil, the plan is to throw that at Claude to translate it into Basic, compile the Basic, and see what it does.
- On the bigger language project, half the binary now consists of three functions: TLS, regular expressions, and image processing. 5MB out of 10MB.
Currently implementing SSH so that might change a little.
Update: It didn't. All the cryptography primitives needed for SSH were already built, so it just needed some pure code in the language itself to arrange them.
- All the superintelligentsia went down at the same time. (Ars Technica)
Oops.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Nothing will come of nothing. NULL doesn't return True with any comparison.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:27 PM
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frenz, I wonder if universities can teach people how to write specifications. I know that I did not teach myself that by reading random university books. Anyway, if the only legitimate application of the LLM were programming, the spec writing prerequisite might mean that faculty could use a subscription, but it would be useless for students. I don't think it makes sense to buy LLM subscriptions at the university level. Because helping those other fields do evil things more efficiently is not a gain.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, September 05 2026 02:54 AM (6eVrQ)
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Corporate pricing is a lot higher than individual monthly subscriptions. The initial mad rush for everyone in the company to use LLMs every day has been scaled back two or three times now, as the bills came in and the rates went up. Now it's all about watching your usage and using the least-expensive model you can, and reusing skills and components that keep the spend under control.
For students, they seem to be trying the old Adobe model where you got the tools dirt cheap for four years in the hope that you'd use them as resume-builders.
-j
For students, they seem to be trying the old Adobe model where you got the tools dirt cheap for four years in the hope that you'd use them as resume-builders.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, September 05 2026 07:18 AM (oJgNG)
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I was going to question that, and then I checked the pricing page. Claude for teams costs the same as personal plans - up to 150 users, and where I work out developer count is safely below that. Claude's API is also around ten times the cost of fixed plans. They handed out $100 in free API credit to existing subscribers and I burned through that very quickly.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 05 2026 08:08 AM (PiXy!)
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Another thing to add to Minx 2.0: Comment editing.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 05 2026 08:09 AM (PiXy!)
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