Saturday, July 18
Daily News Stuff 18 July 2026
Accidental Umpires Edition
Top Story
-
Speculation is that it's a unit conversion error in the cost estimation tool, but all we know for sure is that people who barely use the service are being alerted to cost estimates in the billions of dollars, and for businesses that have active applications the predicted bills run into the trillions.I tried to embed the tweets two different ways but the end result was that the editor ate the entire post, so links are all you get. Saved by my reflexive habit of Ctrl-C to capture the post content before I hit save, from back when the server glitched a lot more often than it does now.
Tech News
- TSMC says that its work towards 1.4nm technology is progressing well, with 90% yield on SRAM dies and 90% of targeted performance on logic circuits. (Tom's Hardware)
1.4nm is the node after the 2nm node that we are expecting to see late this year, so it won't reach production until at least 2028. A 90% yield this early is a good sign.
- AI datacenters must produce as much energy as they consume, says retarded communist and part-time Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese. (Tom's Hardware)
Alexa, please repeal the laws of thermodynamics.
- The Zilog Z80 has turned 50. (Goliath32)
As has that website.
- Microsoft's new Surface Laptop is here with its complement of eight whole gigabytes of RAM. (The Verge)
That's plenty for Linux, and tolerable for MacOS. Running Windows 11 it's a miserable experience.
- The Redmagic Astra 2 tablet is here, with a 9" 185Hz OLED screen, a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 CPU, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, and... Active cooling? (Liliputing)
The one thing I want from a tablet is not to have a fan whining at me.
- The Lenovo Legion Y700 Infinite tablet is here, with an 8.8" OLED display, a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 CPU, up to 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, and... Passive cooling, apparently. (Notebook Check)
It's going the be horribly expensive and I just picked up their Gen 3 model at half price so I'm not even tempted, but at least it's silent.
- Beelink's new ME Pro 370 is a NAS with a Ryzen 370 12-core laptop CPU, supporting two or four 3.5" hard drives, three M.2 SSDs, and... Up to 256GB of RAM? (Notebook Check)
That seems unlikely, because that amount would require four 64GB DDR5 modules, and nobody is putting four SODIMM slots in consumer equipment.
I have ten DDR5 SODIMMs. Believe me, I've looked.
Research
The Eighth Law already requires that every admissible alteration of the noetic field (and, by extension, every macroscopic world-line that couples to that field) lie along a null geodesic of the full 6D manifold that satisfies the 2T-gauge conditions. Ordinary 3+1 orbital motion is the projection of such a higher-dimensional geodesic. Spin-orbit locking therefore cannot be a purely 3-spatial mechanical equilibrium; it must also be consistent with the hidden
and
components of the geodesic. In practice this appears observationally as an additional, apparently arbitrary ceiling on how tightly a world can remain synchronized: once the integrated "geodesic resistance”
exceeds a threshold set by the unknown couplings
,
and the noetic tensor, further dissipative evolution is forbidden even if ordinary tidal torque remains. The result is that perfect, permanent 1:1 locking may be rarer or more fragile than in 3+1 physics, and residual libration or slow drift in the relative orientation of the permanent day/night hemispheres can persist.
This actually makes complete sense given the context, and solves the problem, but even so gives me a headache.
All I wanted to do was make the sky blue.
I've also been tinkering with Fable as well as Grok, and while it's impressive, I don't trust it. It heaped effusive praise on what I consider one of the weakest points of the plot of the story I'm working on.
All I wanted to do was make the sky blue.
I've also been tinkering with Fable as well as Grok, and while it's impressive, I don't trust it. It heaped effusive praise on what I consider one of the weakest points of the plot of the story I'm working on.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Do not eat the dark snow.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:18 AM
| Comments (2)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 711 words, total size 8 kb.
1
A less idiotic way of saying that thing about data centers would be to mandate that if a data center is planned to consume 1 GW, the company putting in the data center must also contract to put in a new power plant putting out 1 GW.
But very few politicians are going to say that, because new power plants = CO2 = sad Gaia. Idiots.
A while back, like a couple decades ago, I was thinking "Well, if this 'CO2 causes global warming' nonsense continues, at least it'll lead to more of a push for nuclear power". I was naive: many of the people screaming about CO2 are doing so for political power, not because of the actual issues. Who was it who accidentally said the quiet part out loud? I can't remember, but it was something like "We're not trying to sovle the climate issue, we're trying to smash capitalism". Really gave the game away.
Besides, the same people panicking about CO2 would also panic if someone proposed a nuclear plant in their area. Personally, I would be the president of the "Yes, In My Back Yard" society; I would love to see a new nuclear plant going in right across the street from me. But that's because I actually understand how they work. Which most of those NIMBYists don't.
But very few politicians are going to say that, because new power plants = CO2 = sad Gaia. Idiots.
A while back, like a couple decades ago, I was thinking "Well, if this 'CO2 causes global warming' nonsense continues, at least it'll lead to more of a push for nuclear power". I was naive: many of the people screaming about CO2 are doing so for political power, not because of the actual issues. Who was it who accidentally said the quiet part out loud? I can't remember, but it was something like "We're not trying to sovle the climate issue, we're trying to smash capitalism". Really gave the game away.
Besides, the same people panicking about CO2 would also panic if someone proposed a nuclear plant in their area. Personally, I would be the president of the "Yes, In My Back Yard" society; I would love to see a new nuclear plant going in right across the street from me. But that's because I actually understand how they work. Which most of those NIMBYists don't.
Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, July 18 2026 06:15 PM (HcJvv)
2
P.S. Pixy, I tried to spell "naive" with an i-plus-diaresus character but got an error from line 648 of Form.py: ascii codec can't encode `0xef`. The offending line:
print('Akismet check %s in %0.3fs on %s %s %s "%s"' % ('error' if aki_err else 'accept' if aki_ok else 'reject', time.time()-taki, tags.get('form.name',''), tags.get('form.web',''), tags.get('form.mail',''), text))
You probably need to slap a (text if type(text) == 'str' else text.decode('utf-8', 'backslashreplace') at the end of that line instead of "text"; this is probably also why I couldn't use an em dash character a few days ago. (Note that I haven't tested that Python code in an actual Python file, just typed it into the text box here, so there might be errors in it. Caveat coder).
print('Akismet check %s in %0.3fs on %s %s %s "%s"' % ('error' if aki_err else 'accept' if aki_ok else 'reject', time.time()-taki, tags.get('form.name',''), tags.get('form.web',''), tags.get('form.mail',''), text))
You probably need to slap a (text if type(text) == 'str' else text.decode('utf-8', 'backslashreplace') at the end of that line instead of "text"; this is probably also why I couldn't use an em dash character a few days ago. (Note that I haven't tested that Python code in an actual Python file, just typed it into the text box here, so there might be errors in it. Caveat coder).
Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, July 18 2026 06:20 PM (HcJvv)
58kb generated in CPU 0.0228, elapsed 0.1165 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.1008 seconds, 368 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
58 queries taking 0.1008 seconds, 368 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.









