• OpenAI has shuttered its Sora AI-generated video app just six months after it first launched.  (Hollywood Reporter)
  
  Disney was planning to invest $1 billion in OpenAI and license some of its IP to be used in Sora.  That deal is as dead as the app itself.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's "Instant Checkout" feature that allowed used to purchase products from within a chat session has likewise been deprioritised.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  K-i-l-l-e-d, deprioritised.

• Arm has announced its first AGI CPU, dubbed reasonably enough the Arm AGI CPU.  (Arm)
  
  It has 136 Arm Neoverse N3 cores running at 3.7GHz, 96 lanes of PCIe Gen 6 - yes, 6, and support for DDR5-8800 memory, which is pretty fast for a server.
  
  That's all nice, but you might be wondering where the AGI comes into it.
  
  That's the neat part.  It doesn't.
  
  
  
• The FCC has banned imports of new routers made in other countries, which is where imports come from.  (Liliputing)
  
  This follows an unending series of massive exploits of consumer networking equipment in recent years.
  
  Companies can apply to a conditional approval program to continue to sell products to the United States, but that comes with certain caveats, like upgrading device security to be "not total shit".
  
  Security experts that are usually critical of government inaction in this area appear stunlocked at seeing all their recommendations enacted in one fell swoop.
  
  
  
• Telling an AI that it is an expert programmer makes it worse.  (The Register)
  
  To nobody's surprise.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, March 25 2026 08:03 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 25 2026 09:37 PM (1zWbY)

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• Intel's Arrow Lake Refresh desktop CPUs are here - the 250K and 270K Plus.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Are they fast?  Yes.  They close in on the regular AMD parts for gaming, and the 270K competes with the 9950X for heavy desktop workloads.
  
  Are they power-efficient?  Not especially, but they are a big improvement over Intel's notoriously power-hungry 13th and 14th generation chips.
  
  Are they good value?  Definitely.  $200 for the 250K with 6P and 12E cores, and $300 for the 270K with 8P and 16E cores would make them hard to resist if you could buy the rest of the components for a system.
  
  Should you buy one?  Probably not.  These run in Intel's Socket 1851 platform and that will be retired within a year for Nova Lake and its Socket 1954.
  
  If that's not a concern - and particularly if you already have DDR5 memory sitting around - then yes, these look worth considering.

• GrapheneOS has refused to comply with new age verification laws that target operating systems.  (Tom's Hardware)

  If GrapheneOS devices can't be sold in a region due to their regulations, so be it.

  Meanwhile fuck systemd.
  
  
  
• Walmart tried using ChatGPT and in-chat purchases.  It failed.  Hard.  (Search Engine Land)
  
  Sales rates were one third of just directing people to the website.
  
  
  
• There are new exploits circulating that can trivially hack any iPhone or iPad running iOS 18 or older.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  But there's only about half a billion of those so no need to worry.
  
  
  
• Google's new Pixel 10a phone is a Pixel 9a.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Is it a bad phone?  No.  Is it a new phone?  Also no.

1 Musical Interlude song - saw a reaction video to this song being done by a gal. After listening to the lyrics for a while she started blushing. Almost fifty years later, and still getting special effects

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, March 24 2026 06:18 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 24 2026 09:50 PM (1zWbY)

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• Elon Musk has announced TeraFab, a Tesla-SpaceX joint venture to bring the various companies' (including xAI and I guess Twitter) chip manufacturing together under one very large roof.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  $20 billion buys a lot of roof.
  
  Primarily it will be producing local AI chips for robots - vision processing and similar systems, and large scale general purpose AI chips for orbital datacenters.
  
  This is the 21st century I asked for.  Certainly more so than anything OpenAI has delivered.

• Trapped in a closet self-driving taxi with Vanna White a screaming homicidal leftist lunatic outside.  (Seattle Times)
  
  Don't go to San Francisco, and if you do, don use self-driving taxis, and if you do, pack a nuclear-powered flamethrower.
  
  
  
• Corsair is offering a 25% discount on some DDR5 memory kits.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So they're only at a 200% over the past six months rather than 300%.
  
  
  
• An extremely awkward workaround for the Crimson Desert's extremely awkward inventory system.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Or you can just wait a month while they fix this and other issues.
  
  
  
• Cursor's new coding model was built on top of Moonshot AI's Kimi. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Who?

• An Ohio datacenter planned by Japanese company SoftBank will cost $40 billion to build - and require a new 9.2GW gas turbine generator complex that will cost another $33 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or, as the article notes, 9 nuclear reactors, though that option is off the table due to the excruciatingly long lead times thanks to a thousand layers of bureaucratic nonsense.
  
  Which is ironic considering that the site chosen for the datacenter near Piketon was used to produce nuclear fuel from 1956 until 2001.

• Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100 billion to buy existing manufacturing companies and automate them using AI.  (MSN)
  
  That's probably better than letting the companies slowly go broke.  Maybe.  I guess.
  
  
  
• AMD has released its updated FSR 4.1 AI-based upscaling technology - the company's equivalent to Nvidia's DLSS.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Reports are that it's genuinely good.
  
  But AMD is still keeping a pillow firmly over the face of FSR 4 for older RDNA2 and RDNA3 graphics cards, even though following an accidental leak of the source code it is known to work perfectly well.  Not as efficiently as on RDNA4, but still fine.
  
  And it's not as if you can just buy a top-of-the-line Radeon 9070 XT below MSRP right now.  I mean, you can, and I did, but I'm an idiot when it comes to money.
  
  
  
• Crimson Desert is here and AMD used it to demonstrate FSR 4.1.  Should you buy it?  Nnngh.  (PC Gamer)
  
  Reviews are mixed, with some calling it the greatest thing since cut cheese and others calling it a buggy mess, and Intel graphics card owners crying in their soup - because the game simply won't start.
  
  One of the strongest criticisms apart from that comes from leaked internal conversations that allege the company didn't decide on the plot of the game until shortly before release.  Which rings true because the developer, Pearl Abyss, is best known for it's MMO title Black Desert.  In fact, I'm not sure they've released anything else.
  
  
  
• It does run at 50 fps on a MacBook Neo, though.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Albeit at 180p, upscaled to 540p - in testing the reviewer had to cut the desktop resolution to salvage something - and with frame generation to create fake frames with AI.
  
  The game fully supports Mac systems, but recommends at least an M3 CPU.  And even the just-released and seriously M5 Max is hardly a gaming powerhouse, requiring both upscaling and frame generation to perform acceptably.
  
  
  
• You know sometimes you see something for sale that is obviously, painfully useless and simultaneously has an eye-watering price tag, and you wonder who could possibly be the target market?  (The Verge)
  
  
  
• Trivy supply chain attack triggers self-spreading CanisterWorm across 47 NPM packages.  (The Hacker News)
  
  What?
  
  
  
• Widely-used Trivy scanner compromised in ongoing supply-chain attack.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Slightly better.
  
  
  
• Trivy vulnerability scanner backdoored with credential stealer in supply-chain attack.  (CSO Online)
  
  The best headline I've seen so far, because it explains what Trivy (it scans for vulnerabilities in your software) and what the attack does (it steals your login sessions).
  
  That's horrifying.  The very people most interested in making sure systems were secure were the target here.  If they built Trivy into their code testing process, it would have automatically pulled in the compromised version and stolen their GitHub credentials (this targeted GitHub) and used that to spread the chaos further.
  
  That's what led to the CanisterWorm attack on those NPM packages - and that is probably a very incomplete list.
  
  More at Socket and Wiz.
  
  The maintainers of Trivy posted a thread on GitHub to communicate the details to their users - which the attackers promptly deleted since they had effective control over the Trivy GitHub account at that point.
  
  
  
• Fuck systemd.  (It's FOSS)
  
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 22 2026 08:24 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 22 2026 08:38 PM (s6adZ)

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• Press X to doubt: Microsoft says it is fixing Windows 11.  (Nerds.xyz)
  
  Almost everything on the list is reversing changes that they push on users against vehement objections, or side effects of those changes.
  
  I'll believe it when I see it.  Or six months after that, really.
  
  Meanwhile the Windows 10 IoT Enterprise Edition still exists (and there's a Windows 11 version that is also less broken than the Home edition, if you need support for recent features like Ethernet-over-Thunderbolt.)

• Opera GX is here for Linux.  (Nerds.xyz)
  
  This is not the browser you are looking for.  Opera is now owned by a group whose primary business is payday loans in Africa.  The entire technical team left and launched Vivaldi.
  
  I'm not saying that Opera GX is actively scamming users; I'm just saying that I would not need to borrow Sarah Hoyt's shocked face if that turned out to be the case.
  
  
  
• Blue Origin has filed an application with the FCC to launch 51,600 datacenters into space.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That seems to be rather a lot.
  
  
  
• Suspicious compliance: The story of Delve.  (Substack)
  
  Who will certify the certifiers?
  
  
  
• Trump's AI framework targets state laws, sifts child safety burden to parents.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well.  I had mixed feelings about this: Tenth Amendment notwithstanding, state legislation on complex technical issues is usually bad, but federal legislation on complex technical issues is also usually bad.  And in this particular case, the people working and reporting on the complex technical issues are also usually bad.
  
  But if Tech Crunch is against it, I'm sold.
  
  
  
• Another day, another state: Don't-call-it-gambling agency Kalshi is banned in Nevada.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not that Nevada is against gambling, just that the state demands its cut.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, March 21 2026 06:19 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 22 2026 12:18 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, March 22 2026 01:20 AM (SV7Jd)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 22 2026 05:24 AM (57+IP)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 22 2026 04:00 PM (PiXy!)

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• Bluesky, one-time social network and latterly psych ward for those who can't cope with the harsh truths dished out daily by CNN and whatever MSNBC is called today has raised $100 million in a new funding round.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's million with an M.  Almost enough to buy -
  
  
  
• Your new car might need 300GB of RAM.  (The Register)
  
  Said US memory maker Micron, whose most recent quarterly results showed three times the revenue and nine times the profit of the same period the previous year.

• Walmart is flooded with previous generation Nvidia RTX 4000 series graphics cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At reasonable prices, so as you might expect the flood has been mopped up pretty damn quickly.
  
  If you're in Australia and don't have easy access to Walmart, look around for Radeon 9070 XT cards which for some reason are steeply discounted right now, sometimes selling for less than the slower Radeon 9070.
  
  I expected shortages and price increases, and some Nvidia 5000 series cards have all but disappeared from US store shelves, but overall...  Not so much.
  
  
  
• A rogue AI cause a security incident at Meta.  (The Verge)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• UK censorship agency Ofcom tried to levy fines against 4Chan again.  (BBC)
  
  They got a picture of a giant hamster instead.
  
  
  
• Kitten TTS is a text-to-speech model.  (GitHub)
  
  That's not remarkable, at least not in the 22nd century where we find ourselves when we're not being stupid which is rarely.
  
  Where was I?
  
  Oh, right.  What's remarkable is the whole thing fits in 25MB.  Megabytes with an M.
  
  
  
• Half the size of the front page of the New York Times website.  (Daring Fireball)
  
  That page on Daring Fireball uses 0.1% that much bandwidth.
  
  
  
• The Verge is having another normal day.  (The Verge)
  
  By which I mean they are barking at the moon.
  
  
  
• Can I run Crimson Desert?  (Notebook Check)
  
  Well, probably.  It runs at more than 60 fps at 1080p native using high settings on five year old midrange cards like the 3060 Ti or 6750 XT.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 20 2026 09:44 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 20 2026 09:48 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Sponge - F*ck Cancer at Saturday, March 21 2026 03:28 AM (Zz0t1)

Posted by: Sponge - F*ck Cancer at Saturday, March 21 2026 03:29 AM (Zz0t1)

Posted by: Sponge - F*ck Cancer at Saturday, March 21 2026 03:30 AM (Zz0t1)

Posted by: Sponge - F*ck Cancer at Saturday, March 21 2026 03:39 AM (Zz0t1)

Posted by: Sponge - F*ck Cancer at Saturday, March 21 2026 04:06 AM (Zz0t1)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, March 21 2026 04:10 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Sponge - F*ck Cancer at Saturday, March 21 2026 04:17 AM (Zz0t1)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 21 2026 04:32 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Sponge - F*ck Cancer at Saturday, March 21 2026 04:47 AM (Zz0t1)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, March 21 2026 05:12 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Sponge - F*ck Cancer at Saturday, March 21 2026 05:20 AM (Zz0t1)

Posted by: Sponge - F*ck Cancer at Saturday, March 21 2026 05:23 AM (Zz0t1)

Posted by: bob at Saturday, March 21 2026 05:33 AM (koMdH)

Posted by: Sponge - F*ck Cancer at Saturday, March 21 2026 05:36 AM (Zz0t1)

Posted by: at Saturday, March 21 2026 06:39 AM (Puq9y)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 21 2026 08:58 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, March 21 2026 12:25 PM (s6adZ)

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• A bipartisan gaggle of US senators is looking at blowing up DMCA Section 230, the law that makes modern social networks - and to a certain degree, blogs and forums - possible.  (The Verge)
  
  Section 230 shields website operators from lawsuit over the behaviour of commenters.  But it also serves as a shield for website operators that deliberately inculcate certain behaviours in their users - or that censor users to block behaviour they find undesirable.
  
  It's a people problem, basically.  There is not single technical or legislative answer to this mess.

• Federal cybersecurity experts thought Microsoft's cloud service offering to the government was "a pile of shit".  (ProPublica)
  
  They approved it anyway.
  
  
  
• Apple dropped the Musi app - which streams music from YouTube, apparently without paying anyone or making ads visible - from its app store.  A judge ruled they can do that.  (Ars Technica)
  
  And sanctioned Musi's lawyers for making shit up.
  
  
  
• AI job losses aren't particularly high, unless you're writing for a fourth-tier news outlet that prevents people from reading your articles, in which case you're boned.  (404Media)
  
  Sign up to access this post?
  
  No, I don't think I shall.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix says memory shortages will last until 2030.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Production currently only covers 80% of demand, and nobody is rushing to fill the gap because everyone who behaved that way went bankrupt in previous memory boom/bust cycles.
  
  
  
• Remove your Ring camera with a claw hammer.  (How Things Work)
  
  From the same tertiary syphilis patient who brough us such hits as The Subway Is Not Scary, Quit Your Evil Job, and Things You Can Lie About.
  
  
  
• A new font-rendering trick hides malicious commands from AI tools.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That is, the commands are visible to humans but invisible to AI agents.
  
  I'm more concerned about the opposite approach, where invisible-to-human instructions are fed to AI agents, but I see no reason why this couldn't be used that way as well.

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, March 19 2026 06:26 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 19 2026 11:14 PM (2wuHw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 20 2026 12:01 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: David at Friday, March 20 2026 01:05 AM (FAnMG)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, March 20 2026 02:57 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 20 2026 03:30 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 20 2026 05:23 PM (PiXy!)

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• Overwhelmingly Negative: Everybody hates DLSS 5.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Ars Technica rounds up the response to Nvidia's showcase of its DLSS 5 $10,000 AI slop filter and concludes that...  It's bad.
  
  (Not kidding about the cost: The demo required two RTX 5090s and they currently cost between $4000 and $6000 each, depending on the model.  Yes, they launch at $2000.  That was then; this is now.)
  
  
  
• A roundup of some of the memes.  (Notebook Check)
  
  AI-generated.  Because of course.
  
  
  
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says you're holding it wrong.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Thanks Steve.

• AI still doesn't work very well, and businesses who claim it does are faking it.  (The Register)
  
  Or are looking at a very specific use case.  If you need to translate code from one language to another, it works pretty well.
  
  Sometimes.
  
  Maybe.

  To underscore the consequences of not having that kind of data, Smiley pointed to a recent attempt to rewrite SQLite in Rust using AI.
  
  "It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right," he said.  It's 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite.  Two thousand times worse for a database is a non-viable product.  It's a dumpster fire.  Throw it away.  All that money you spent on it is worthless."

  
  
• Except that's not actually accurate.  (Medium)
  
  It wasn't 2000 times slower.  It was 20,000 times slower.  A query that took 90 microseconds on the real thing took two seconds on the AI rewrite.
  
  
  
• Please-don't-call-it-gambling site Kalshi faces criminal charges in Arizon because guess what?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  You'll never guess.
  
  Oh, you guessed.
  
  
  
• All the data and photos gathered by people playing Pokemon Go has been used to train delivery robots.  (Popular Science)
  
  We already knew this, right?  The developer of Pokemon Go, Niantic, wasn't created to develop games.  It was founded as a geospatial services company.  And they put millions of players to work harvesting data.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 18 2026 09:54 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, March 19 2026 08:31 AM (e0fX0)

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• Nvidia held its keynote address at its annual GPU Technology Conference, where it showed off a preview of its new DLSS 5 software, two months after DLSS 4.5 was released at CES.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  DLSS 5 goes all-in on AI, changing game graphics into the AI developer's idea of game graphics.  It's...  Not great.
  
  It uses face detection to overlay what it things faces should look like on your game's graphics, adding twenty years to the age of characters while leaving their clothes untouched and sometimes leaving random items looking like they've just been dragged backwards through an industrial recycling facility.
  
  And it achieves all this in real time using the power of your own graphics card...  Assuming you have dual RTX 5090s, which you don't.

• Encyclopedia Britannica has sued OpenAI for "stealing our shit".  (Engadget)
  
  They may not have used precisely those words.
  
  
  
• "Investors" on Polymarket have threatened to murder an Israeli reporter for reporting stories that ran against their "investments".  (Times of Israel)
  
  They "invested" in predicting that an Iranian missile would be intercepted; instead it crashed in empty land outside Jerusalem so that they lost their "investments".
  
  Yes, they are gamblers trying to nobble a horse, only the horse is a person and the nobbling would be fatal.
  
  
  
• The cast of Firefly are looking for funds to reboot the series in animated form.  (Hollywood Reporter)
  
  Uh...  Maybe?  It was a great series cut off far too early, and it's probably been too long for them to reprise their roles in a live action series.  Also one of the characters is canonically dead.
  
  But animated?  Anything can happen in an animated series.
  
  
  
• Micron has begun volume production of 36GB HBM4 modules, 28Gbps PCIe 6.0 SSDs, and 192GB SOCAMM2 laptop memory modules.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You can't have any.  Not unless your name is Nvidia.
  
  
  
• Dell has introduced its new Pro Max desktop with an Nvidia GB300 CPU and 696GB of LPDDR5X memory.  (Notebook Check)
  
  They did not list a price, for obvious reasons.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, March 18 2026 11:26 AM (zCiG7)

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• The Big Three memory makers are publicly saying they expect the AI bubble to pop - or at least fizzle - by 2028, which is why they're slow-walking expansion plans in the face of unprecedented demand.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That does mean that if you need memory now you're kind of screwed.
  
  It also means that Taiwan's Nanya and West Taiwan's CXMT - the fourth and fifth largest memory manufacturers - are making hay while the sun shines.

• North Korea's latest scam is placing remote workers with tech companies.  (NBC)
  
  They've actually been doing this for a while.  They fake their ID, phone a friend for interviews, send the money to the government, and steal secrets if they get a chance.
  
  
  
• Electric vehicle sales are booming in countries where a hundred miles is a long distance and nobody has children.  (Electrek)
  
  Less so in places with a future.
  
  
  
• Myrient, the 385TB archive of retro games that was dying of exorbitant hosting fees, has been saved.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The entire archive has been backed up and volunteers are working on a new website and torrent server.
  
  I took a look myself, but I don't have 385TB of space available and it was hard to know where to start with a partial archive.
  
  
  
• Britain is investing $2.5 billion in nuclear power to protect itself from future energy price shocks.  (GB News)
  
  Not fission which exists and actually works, but fusion which doesn't.  Except on an inconveniently abrupt scale.
  
  
  
• What good is a glass worm?  (Aikido)
  
  Glassworm, an attack that injects vulnerabilities into open-source projects by slipping invisible Unicode characters into sensitive places, is back.
  
  Unicode merges all human languages, ever, into a single character set.  Its creators never bothered to ask if this was a good idea.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 16 2026 10:07 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, March 17 2026 01:31 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: wheels at Tuesday, March 17 2026 02:28 AM (AxWHc)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 17 2026 05:51 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, March 17 2026 07:15 AM (s6adZ)

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