Friday, January 02
Daily News Stuff 2 January 2026
Early Entries Edition
Song is Konya wa Hurricane from the anime Bubblegum Crisis. Anime is... Oh. You guessed.
One of the best opening sequences to anything ever. Apart from the great soundtrack, it introduces us to all the major characters without telling you that they are the major characters, and to the premise of the series without saying a word. There are a couple of minutes of establishing shots before the song starts, but I chose this clip precisely because it has those.
Early Entries Edition
Top Story
- OpenAI is betting big on audio. (Tech Crunch)
OpenAI is betting big on audio AI, and it’s not just about making ChatGPT sound better. According to new reporting from The Information, the company has unified several engineering, product, and research teams over the past two months to overhaul its audio models, all in preparation for an audio-first personal device expected to launch in about a year.
This is going to sink without a trace and I am here for it.It's not just the tech giants placing this bet. A motley crew of startups has emerged with the same conviction, albeit with varying degrees of success. The makers of the Humane AI Pin burned through hundreds of millions before their screenless wearable became a cautionary tale.
OpenAI's effort is going to burn through far more money and achieve the same results, which is to say none whatsoever.
We already have phones. They already do everything these AI devices do, and more, and if we don't want to look at the screen, we can just not look at the screen.
But there's a reason video killed the radio star.
At least Tech Crunch has an early entry in its "Dumbest Things in Tech in 2026" roundup.
- The phone is dead long live... What, exactly? (Tech Crunch)
OpenAI and the unlamented Humane pin are not alone in this folly. There's billions of dollars chasing this lack of ideas.
The one place where I see possibility is AI glasses. You can integrate a camera and a speaker and a microphone and a tiny display. Your hands are free to do whatever. There are problems, yes, but also real value.
Tech News
- On the other hand, Apple reportedly shipped just 45,000 Vision Pro headsets in the fourth quarter. (Financial Times) (archive site)
That has all the listed features - but it's bulky, heavy, costs $3500, and does nothing.
- Orange Pi's new single board computer runs circles around the Raspberry Pi 5. (Notebook Check)
It has 16 cores running at 1.9GHz, 10 AI cores each able to perform 4096 multiple-and-add operations per clock cycle, and 48GB or 96GB of RAM. Do not expect this one to be cheap.
They have also announced - at least in China - the Orange Pi AI Studio Pro which runs two of these boards linked together. Price not listed for that one either.
- It looks like a NES that shrank in the wash. Inside is a Ryzen 370 12 core CPU. (Notebook Check)
It's designed for emulating old video game hardware, and it will certainly do that, but it seems a little bit overkill.
- Sony's PlayStation 5 just got hacked forever. Here's why that's a good thing. (Hot Hardware)
The hack here was the leaking of secure boot keys for the hardware, which means that owners can now jailbreak their PlayStation. Sony can release new hardware that can't be jailbroken - and probably will - but it can't do anything about the 85 million consoles already sold.
- It's "Fuck the Consumer" year at the Consumer Electronics Show. (WCCFTech)
Nvidia will announced no consumer products at all, AMD will announce only relabels of existing products, and Intel will announce Panther lake, which is not a bad product unless you need more than four full-speed cores because that's all it has. (And all three versions of Panther Lake announced involve major tradeoffs even with that limit stipulated.)
- The European Space Agency got hacked. (Bleeping Computer)
Though the biggest question here is why anybody would bother.
- I think I bought too many computers. The parts I need for Froppy just shipped, and I've run out of names for all the others.
On the other hand, I'm now thoroughly covered in case I start having hardware failures in the older systems, and I can re-use all the old RAM and SSDs in newer motherboards. And I didn't pay hyper-inflated prices for any of it.
Musical Interlude
Song is Konya wa Hurricane from the anime Bubblegum Crisis. Anime is... Oh. You guessed.
One of the best opening sequences to anything ever. Apart from the great soundtrack, it introduces us to all the major characters without telling you that they are the major characters, and to the premise of the series without saying a word. There are a couple of minutes of establishing shots before the song starts, but I chose this clip precisely because it has those.
Disclaimer: Burning touch? We have pills for that now.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:57 PM
| Comments (8)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 749 words, total size 6 kb.
1
I think I may have figured out the AI device folks. These are more Steve Jobs imitators, like Elizabeth Holmes, and like Elizabeth, they are also not Steve Jobs.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, January 03 2026 02:09 AM (rcPLc)
2
I mean, even the mactards who enthusiastically snarf up every steaming turd sandwich apple dot com produces can't be bothered to choke down the headsets, so I suspect the market for useless toys is running up against some fundamental problem.
Posted by: normal at Saturday, January 03 2026 03:44 AM (LADmw)
3
Minisforum's margins are so tight that they didn't ship an m.2 screw for the OCuLink adapter.
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 03 2026 04:04 AM (1zWbY)
4
Rick C - I haven't opened mine up yet, just powered them on and updated Windows to confirm all was as expected. Fortunately I have boxes and boxes of tiny fiddly screws, so that's not an issue.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 03 2026 06:40 AM (PiXy!)
5
PatBuckman - That's 100% true of Sam Altman at OpenAI. There's a reason I call him Sam Altman-Fried.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 03 2026 06:42 AM (PiXy!)
6
I ordered a package of "m.2 screws" from Amazon. They'll probably work. Search suggests there's no standard per se for what gets used but the standoff looks like the typical ones.
The thing is pretty good: my 7735HS Firebat got around 20FPS at 2560x1440 in Diablo 4 low settings; this one got 40+, although with some stuttering. More or less playable, though. Stock Minecraft 1.21.11 was doing 300+fps at the top of a mountain looking off into the distance. Pretty impressive increase over the 680m, plus whatever boost 5600MT/s RAM gives over the I think 4200 or 4800 stuff in my older machine.
Of course everyday stuff like web browsing is perfectly smooth.
The thing is pretty good: my 7735HS Firebat got around 20FPS at 2560x1440 in Diablo 4 low settings; this one got 40+, although with some stuttering. More or less playable, though. Stock Minecraft 1.21.11 was doing 300+fps at the top of a mountain looking off into the distance. Pretty impressive increase over the 680m, plus whatever boost 5600MT/s RAM gives over the I think 4200 or 4800 stuff in my older machine.
Of course everyday stuff like web browsing is perfectly smooth.
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 03 2026 06:53 AM (1zWbY)
7
Interesting. The 680M and 780M have the same hardware - 12 RDNA2 cores - but the 780M moved from 6nm to 4nm and is clocked 500MHz higher. I guess what you're seeing there is the higher clocks, faster RAM, and possibly the increased TDP of the mini-PC, which can clock higher than most laptops.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 03 2026 09:37 AM (PiXy!)
8
The 780M is RDNA3, not RDNA2 (at least, according to Wikipedia and Techpowerup.)
Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 03 2026 11:04 AM (1zWbY)
57kb generated in CPU 0.0206, elapsed 0.1224 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.1134 seconds, 368 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
58 queries taking 0.1134 seconds, 368 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
