Sunday, March 29
Daily News Stuff 29 March 2026
Spin Gauge Edition
Spin Gauge Edition
Top Story
- DDR5 RAM prices have dipped slightly following Google's TurboQuant announcement that allows AI models to run in a fraction of the amount of memory. (Notebook Check)
While TurboQuant is real and does substantially reduce the amount of memory taken up for quantized vector database used to store LLM weights while - and this is the trick - not noticeably increasing noise in the models, any connection with commodity DDR5 memory pricing is best expressed in the polar co-ordinate system that TurboQuant is built on.
By which I mean it is imaginary.
- Meanwhile the third horseshoe of the Tech Apocalypse has dropped with SSD pricing headed into orbit. (YouTube)
Thanks Steve.
This has been expected since DRAM prices headed the same way starting in November, but it was delayed by the large volume of devices already in the retail channel.
Now reality has hit, hard, with prices doubling and further increases likely. The video notes that spot prices have increased ninefold, though that doesn't mean that drive prices will increase by the same amount.
What it does mean is that the smaller manufacturers who didn't have existing long-term contracts have just been wiped out, while the companies making the NAND flash chips - Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix, again, plus Western Digital, Kioxia, and China's YTMC, can set whatever prices they choose.
(The second horseshoe was the graphics card market, though that has been muted so far unless you were looking to buy an RTX 5070 Ti or higher. Prices of AMD and Intel cards have increased a little, but nothing like the devastation that has hit the memory market.)
Tech News
- What if the bubble bursts? (Financial Times) (archive site)
That would be bad for OpenAI which is 100% bubble and good for Apple which is close to 0% bubble.
As for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, they'll survive either way, and Anthropic and xAI will likely do fine on a smaller scale than they had hoped.
- The latest ClickFix attack on MacOS installs Python malware compiled using Nuitka. (Bleeping Computer)
ClickFix is an anagram which means "I'm too lazy to hack you myself but I think you're dumb enough do do the work for me". As the article shows, it presents a page telling users to open a terminal session and execute a command that will download and install the malware in question.
Where upon it steals all your passwords and the contents of any crypto wallets while laughing so hard it makes itself sick.
- The guy who put age verification in systemd is whining that people pointed out that this obviously bad idea was in fact a bad idea. (It's FOSS)
Let them drink whine.
- AI chatbots won't slap you upside the head and tell you you're an imbecile no matter how badly you need it. (Tech Crunch)
Which for many users is very badly indeed.
Tech News
Disclaimer: Yeah, some rain would be nice.
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