Saturday, June 06
Daily News Stuff 6 June 2026
Sleb Edition
Sleb Edition
Top Story
- SpaceX just launched 50 more Starlink satellites into orbit in a single day, using a pair of its trusty Falcon 9 boosters from facilities at Cape Canaveral and Vandenburg. (Space)
And recovered both boosters, with them landing autonomously on the company's two purpose-built drone ships.
I was curious as to how long it took mankind to launch its first 50 satellites into orbit, and the answer surprised me: Within four years of Sputnik there were over a hundred satellite launches. "Space race" is no misnomer.
Tech News
- Speaking of SpaceX they just signed a deal for Google to pay them $920 million per month for compute capacity in SpaceX's Colossus datacenters. (Tech Crunch)
Which might sounds backwards but illustrates the scale on which the company is operating. SpaceX already has an arrangement with AI company Anthropic, which pays SpaceX $1.25 billion per month to lease compute capacity.
- SK Hynix is planning to double memory production at its factories in Korea and China. (WCCFTech)
By 2030. The drought won't break anytime soon.
- A coalition of trade associations representing the telecommunications, automotive, and medical device industries has urged the Trump administration to do something about that drought. (Tom's Hardware)
Though it's not clear what they can do. Even direct government investment or loan guarantees for Micron - the one American player among the Big Three memory makers - to accelerate expansion can only go so far because it takes years to build and fit out new factories, and the availability of the equipment for making chips is as constrained as the chips themselves.
- The Radxa Dragon Q5E is a small single board computer for embedded projects with a Qualcomm Dragonwing Q-6690 processor. (Liliputing)
(muffled screaming)
Qualcomm is infamous for masking the specs of their processors. For more than a decade every CPU shipped has contained "Kryo" cores according to the company's own datasheets. Those are relabeled Arm cores, but you're not supposed to know which relabeled Arm cores. Could be the A53 from 2012; could be the latest X925. It's all just "Kryo".
It's as if General Motors announced its 2026 Car (TM) with Engine (TM) technology.
Anyway, in this case it has four A720 cores and four A520 cores on a 4nm process, because as soon as one person outside Qualcomm gets their hands on one the real specs leak out.
- Intel is planning to refresh its new entry-level Wildcat Lake processors next year - pushing them solidly into the mid range. (Tom's Hardware)
The cheapest model, the 304, has one performance core, four low-power cores, and one graphics core; the other current models have two, four, and two respectively.
The planned upgrade will bring the count of performance cores to four, a perfectly reasonable number for an everyday laptop.
- Nvidia's on-again off-again 50 Super range of GPUs might be on again? (Tom's Hardware)
Expected at the end of last year, these models would have swapped 2GB GDDR7 memory chips for 3GB models, with some unspecified other minor improvements. The 5070 with its 12GB of RAM - limiting for some recent games - would be supplanted by a 5070 Super with 18GB of RAM.
Rumours now include a 12GB 5060 Super, plus the new 24GB 5070 Ti Super and 5080 Super.
No leaks of when or how much, but not soon and not cheap.
- Brave Origin is a new browser from Brave that costs $60 to remove features from Brave. (Bleeping Computer)
But the features it removes are Brave's own - relatively unobtrusive - monetisation efforts.
(Speaking of which, Tom's Hardware has annoying new ads that fill every inch of whitespace on the page. If you set Brave's adblock to "aggressive" it makes them go away and leaves the page readable again. I don't want website owners to starve but there are limits.)
The $60 is a one-time payment and lets you install the browser on up to 10 systems, so I'd only need two licenses.
And it's free on Linux, so I might only need one.
- Asus has a new 13" monitor on offer with a resolution of 3200x2400 - sort of - and a 35Hz nominal refresh rate. (Liliputing)
It covers around 30% of the DCI-P3 colourspace.
Yes, it's an e-ink display, so take that refresh rate with a pound of salt, and the resolution as well: In colour it is cut by half, so 1600x1200. Which is not terrible for a 13" display you would use mostly for reading text, but worth remembering.
I did some digging on the original 2012 Nexus 7 tablet - which I owned (and probably still have in a box in the garage), and which had notably murky colour thanks to the choice of a budget LCD panel. That still offered something on the order of 60% of DCI-P3 colour.
- Been very busy at work recently, pushing a new project towards release. Got sign-off from both the QA and marketing teams yesterday, so I finally get a weekend off. Ish.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: What did you say to me? No, honestly, I couldn't find a translation. (Apparently it's in Teda, a language spoken in Chad.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:17 PM
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1
> muffled screaming
Yeah, it's really annoying. But they follow the ARM spec and include hardware registers that specify the core names, so it's trivial to find out what they actually are as soon as anyone lays hands on a given new chip. But I wish they'd stop because apparently they aren't even really customizing the stock ARM cores all that much (or so I've heard).
Yeah, it's really annoying. But they follow the ARM spec and include hardware registers that specify the core names, so it's trivial to find out what they actually are as soon as anyone lays hands on a given new chip. But I wish they'd stop because apparently they aren't even really customizing the stock ARM cores all that much (or so I've heard).
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 07 2026 01:42 AM (1zWbY)
2
In yesterday's thread I mentioned not wanting to drop close to a grand on an Intel Arc B70 Pro but a 5000-series refresh with 50% more VRAM is something I could consider, depending on price, because they're (obviously) gaming GPUs as well, and also I hear that local AI is still somewhat easier on nVidia GPUs.
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 07 2026 01:49 AM (1zWbY)
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I happened to look at a Tom's article yesterday on Samsung's Android browser (where for some reason my adblocker was turned off) and it was like going back 20 years in time, with the full-background ad stuff and the frequently refreshing popovers. I don't know how normies manage to put with that.
I whitelist a music lyrics website, Quantum Vibe, and Icy Veins, and sometimes I'll pause uBlock Origin and refresh a site, but overall it's a nightmare.
I whitelist a music lyrics website, Quantum Vibe, and Icy Veins, and sometimes I'll pause uBlock Origin and refresh a site, but overall it's a nightmare.
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 07 2026 01:52 AM (1zWbY)
4
Governments COULD make it legal to own automobiles again, instead of those computers-on-wheels. Won't happen, but it would reduce the shortage problem.
Posted by: Frank at Sunday, June 07 2026 09:52 AM (HHHgi)
5
Artificial scarcity will replace actual scarcity. If you let it. There is a very simple solution, but it's a tad "unpopular" with a certain set.
*I'm using "unpopular" ironically, since it's an actual violation of "popular" in the generic sense
*I'm using "unpopular" ironically, since it's an actual violation of "popular" in the generic sense
Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 07 2026 11:32 AM (LDKo5)
6
I got the DEG and 6800 plugged in and working, gaming ran pretty well. I added lact to get fan customizability, but after it made me reboot, I could confirm the GPU fans were running; don't know what specifically caused it to work, but it does, so that's fine. Today I'll get around to starting to install AI stuff.
The X1 has one really annoying misfeature: it will not reliably wake from sleep. Pixy, have you experienced this? The advice I found suggests disabling IOMMU, but that opens vulnerabilities when using VMs and the instructions I've seen use Docker containers, which I am not fully clear on if they're VMs or not. Also, IOMMU is enabled in the UEFI and the dropdown itself is disabled, so I can't even turn it off.
Aside: someday, bios makers will handle mouse input sanely, but that day is not today.
The X1 has one really annoying misfeature: it will not reliably wake from sleep. Pixy, have you experienced this? The advice I found suggests disabling IOMMU, but that opens vulnerabilities when using VMs and the instructions I've seen use Docker containers, which I am not fully clear on if they're VMs or not. Also, IOMMU is enabled in the UEFI and the dropdown itself is disabled, so I can't even turn it off.
Aside: someday, bios makers will handle mouse input sanely, but that day is not today.
Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 08 2026 01:33 AM (1zWbY)
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Huh. I haven't run into that somehow.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 08 2026 05:26 PM (PiXy!)
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Docker containers are technically not VMs, per my reading. Linux has a bunch of tools for making containers in different ways, which can do things like run on the same kernel but with all the other elements of the OS being different. I have zero understanding of the distinctions between different ways of doing containers. chroot, docker, LXC, and incus are all the same to me. For the moment.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, June 08 2026 10:35 PM (s6adZ)
9
I did later see a suggestion that the sleep problem could be resolved by switching from HDMI to DP, so I'll try that tonight.
Didn't get to install anything software-wise because the instructions to install the AMD containers were for Ubuntu and I was running Arch. So I guess this evening's task is to replace the OS and then see what I can do.
Gaming ran pretty well for a while, but then the game froze. I think I might've been playing off a portable SSD and it may have overheated. I tried installing Diablo 4 as well but ran into problems because I wanted to hook my existing install up rather than re-downloading 80GB. Another problem for later.
Didn't get to install anything software-wise because the instructions to install the AMD containers were for Ubuntu and I was running Arch. So I guess this evening's task is to replace the OS and then see what I can do.
Gaming ran pretty well for a while, but then the game froze. I think I might've been playing off a portable SSD and it may have overheated. I tried installing Diablo 4 as well but ran into problems because I wanted to hook my existing install up rather than re-downloading 80GB. Another problem for later.
Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 08 2026 11:37 PM (Ub8u0)
10
PatBuckman, Copilot seems to agree. My concern was whether or not disabling IOMMU would leave the AI environment vulnerable to security issues it wouldn't otherwise be. But if switching cables solves the problem, I'm fine with that, too.
Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 08 2026 11:39 PM (Ub8u0)
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