• Apple has announced new Mac Mini models based on the M5 Pro and M6 CPUs.  (MacRumors)
  
  The M6 is a marked upgrade over the M4 - the M5 never showed up on the Mac Mini - but there is no M6 Pro, so the higher-end models of the Mac Mini, anything with more than 32GB of RAM, steps back to the M5 Pro.
  
  But if you don't need that the M6 should run a lot faster.  Apple says up to 40%, and that's actually believable, because it not only increases the core count from 10 to 12, it adds two high-end "super" cores, not just two low-end efficiency cores.
  
  Oh, and 2.5 Gbit Ethernet is standard, not the ancient 1 Gbit.
  
  Not cheap - the 64GB model costs five times as much as I paid for a 64GB mini-PC last December, but the same mini-PC at the same price now only has 32GB, so it has gotten closer.
   
  
  
• If you need more than that, Apple also announced M5 Max and M5 Ultra Mac Studios with up to 512G of RAM.  (Mac Rumors)
  
  That's a big jump as well, because the high-end Studio model was limited to the old M3 Ultra, and even then maxed out at...  I think 96GB of RAM, with anything faster sold out.  Now you can get those high-end models again, and they come with 1.2TB of bandwidth, suitable for pretty serious tasks.
  
  Yes, they're wildly expensive, but right now so is everything, so Apple looks, if not more affordable, less unaffordable.

• Perplexity has partnered with Nvidia to launch a local AI platform with no token costs.  (Venturebeat)
  
  All you need is a Pro or Pro Max Perplexity subscription and a $4700 DGX Spark or a $4700 RTX 5090.
  
  Uh.
  
  
  
• Commodore has unveiled a Cyberpunk 2077 themed Commodore 64 that runs at 77MHz.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  $377.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced the announcement of its 256 core Xeon 7 server CPUs.  (The Register)
  
  The actual announcement will follow in 2027.
  
  
  
• SpaceX is building a new spaceport in Louisiana.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Price tag $100 billion.
  
  Learn a trade.
  
  
  
• New Zealand just announced legislation that bans children under 16 from social media and from using AI companions.  (Jurist)
  
  They kicked their communists to the curb and replaced them with communists.
  
  
  
• Accidentally vibe-coded a blogging platform - a lot less capable than Minx but incredibly fast since it's written in Rust with an embedded database - and then took a step back and started properly designing the embedded database component using existing libraries where available.
  
  Spent about $10 of the $100 worth of free credits Anthropic gave me when they cut Fable out of my cheapo plan, but those credits expire in three weeks so it's time I started using them.
  
  If that works I'll retarget my existing blogging/social platform on top - the one that never went live because Elon bought Twitter and it didn't seem there was a market anymore.

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, August 27 2026 12:20 AM (oJgNG)

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• Why Aliexpress is muting your music.  (The Register)
  
  Because they're taking your fingerprints using inaudible sonar.
  
  Really.

• OpenAI is building agents for everything.  Will anyone use them?  No.  (Tech Crunch)

  For Andrew Ambrosino, the lead engineer for OpenAI's desktop app, it’s the only way to test the future, which is why that app now has access to, and control over, his inbox, his Slack account, his phone, apps like Notion and Figma, and more.

  The people building these things are the only ones using them.
  
  
  
• Get yourself a password book.  (The Register)
  
  Because AI agents can't break into your house and steal a physical notepad.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's latest masterpiece is a bug that breaks printing of WPF documents from Windows 11 if they are written using fonts with names starting with C.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I'm not even mad.  That's amazing.
  
  
  
• Xiaomi's AI cube is not a cube.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Lies!
  
  
  
• FIIO's new cassette player plays cassettes.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Peace, love, and mung beans, baby.

• The that guy who thought it would be a fine jape to hand Border Patrol a "duress password" making his phone wipe itself rather than unlocking is facing felony charges. (Law Commentary)
  
  His lawyers say that the CBP were unconstitutionally using their clients past criminality as a pretext to search for his present criminality. Uh, not admitting that either of those occurred.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Nvidia has announced pricing on its new GB300 home AI system. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not something that you put in your home. It's something you buy instead.
  
  
  
• Maxell is making cassette tapes again. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Even I don't miss those.
  
  
  
• 170,000 non-profits lost all their data. Is Microsoft to blame? (Slate)
  
  Apparently, yes. Good work, guys.
  
  
  
• Surveillance company Flock is talking compromise. (Tech Crunch)
  
  It think there's a happy medium to be found between hitting them with a relativistic neutron star and dropping them into a black hole and then dropping that black hole into another black hole.
  
  
  
• How do AMD's AM4 X3D CPUs work on older motherboards? (WCCFTech)
  
  Just fine, thanks for asking.
  
  
  
• d-Matrix has reinvented IBM's eDRAM. (WCCFTech)
  
  Basically using DRAM rather than SRAM as the basis for last level cache, giving similar performance at four times the memory density or one quarter the cost if you're looking at it from that direction.
  
  
  
• Micron says that things are only going to get worse on the memory front. (WCCFTech)
  
  Though they are talking a different kind of worse - a widening gap between processor speed and memory bandwidth.
  
  Don't worry, everything is getting more expensive as well.
  
  
  
• Can parents trust OpenAI? (CTV News)
  
  No.

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, August 24 2026 10:58 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, August 24 2026 11:45 PM (HHHgi)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 25 2026 01:43 AM (aDa+d)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 25 2026 01:47 AM (aDa+d)

Posted by: wheels at Tuesday, August 25 2026 03:14 AM (fVvPE)

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• Never send a Link to do a Zelda's work: The LINK mission intended to boost the Swift Observatory into a higher orbit has itself spun out of control, leaving Swift to burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp, by which we mean disintegrate upon re-entry and any surviving fragments fall harmlessly into the ocean and Canberra.  (CNN)
  
  The loss is lessened slightly, perhaps, by the fact that Swift was launched with a planned operational lifetime of two years...  In 2004.

• Inherent's AI teammate is claimed to outperform Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating research.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Inherent, which just raised $50 million in funding, didn't build its own LLM.  It runs on Qwen 3.6-27B, which anyone can download and run on a Mac or a 32GB graphics card like an RTX 5090 or the much cheaper Radeon R9700.
  
  
  
• A decent laptop with 16GB of RAM is better than a good laptop with 8GB.  (The Verge)
  
  At least if you're running Windows 11 where, despite everything Microsoft says, you really need 32GB of RAM for anything serious.
  
  
  
• Microsoft also says your games are crashing because of you kids and your RGB lighting.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Despite the fact that it all worked perfectly before the latest Windows Update.
  
  
  
• AMD has published Linux drivers for RDNA 4m (mobile) graphics devices.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is slightly interesting because there are no RDNA 4m graphics devices.  Not yet, anyway.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, August 24 2026 05:28 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 24 2026 09:04 PM (PiXy!)

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• All the news is stupid.
  
  
  
• AI use boosts the quality of students' homework - and then craters their exam scores.  (Economist)  (archive site)
  
  Who knew?
  
  
  
• Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 is a smut machine.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The whole article is about users deliberately jail-breaking Claude Opus 4.6, an older version of that particular LLM, to use it to write porn.  And blames Anthropic for it.

• Micron is building a $10 billion AI memory research center in Boise, Idaho.  (Yahoo)
  
  Not a factory, just a lab.
  
  Good news if you're an AI memory researcher.  Or a builder.
  
  
  
• Florida is seeking a court order to classify ChatGPT as a public nuisance.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is getting silly.
  
  
  
• Canada plans counter-tariffs to fight tariffs being imposed by the US as trade talks implode.  (BBC)
  
  Cratering its economy while barely affecting the US.
  
  
  
• Slovakia bought hundreds of new traffic cameras - only to find that all of the are Russian spy equipment.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Lowest bidder, huh?

• "Whistleblower" Arturo Béjar leads testimony in landmark trial against Meta. (NPR)

  "At the end of the day, it was the company culture that Mark had created that made it so that it was practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues that we've been talking about," he said.

  Well, that sounds serious.  What wellbeing and safety issues are we talking about?
  
  Grooming? Sex trafficking? Drugs?

  But he said efforts to introduce or change features to effectively address those risks were difficult to implement.  Instead, Béjar testified, at almost every turn the company chose policies that boosted usership and revenue over safety.  Safety was "not a meaningful priority," he said.

  Yes, but what safety?  What are the actual concerns here?

  He called features like video autoplay, "like" counters and infinite scroll "inherently unsafe for teenagers."

  This is why Meta is facing a fine of $1.4 trillion.
  
  Likes.

• SpaceTimeDB isn't.  (Strn.Cat)
  
  Neither space nor time.
  
  
  
• Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful.  (Yaros)
  
  Based on the examples linked, I am inclined to agree.
  
  
  
• Castelion has reached a valuation of $13 billion based on contracts to mass produce hypersonic missiles.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Wake me when they're hyperluminal.
  
  
  
• Meta glasses aren't the problem.  (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  No matter how much The Verge wants to claim they are.
  
  Assholes are the problem.
  
  
  
• You can pick up Intel's new Core Ultra 5 250K Plus for just $140 from Micro Center right now.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Unless you live in Australia in which case it's a bit of a hike.
  
  It's a good price for the CPU...  Except that you need RAM and storage for it and it's a lame duck platform that will be dead by the end of the year.  There's nothing to upgrade from and nothing to upgrade to.
  
  
  

• Microsoft GitHub says the 8-hour outage of its systems was caused by a combination of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft VS Code.  (The Register)
  
  Have you tried turning it off and just leaving it like that?

• AI was supposed to win people over by now.  It hasn't.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm finding it much improved over even a year ago.  If it weren't for that small detail of collapsing the entire tech economy into concentric black holes I'd feel a lot more generously inclined.
  
  
  
• China landed a rocket.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yes, SpaceX has been doing that a couple of times a week for years, and the Space Shuttle kinda sorta did it back in the 80s, but still, good job, China.
  
  
  
• Anthropic and Suno have been hit by yet another billion-dollar copyright lawsuit, this time by music company Round Hill.  (Hollywood Reporter)
  
  Git 'em.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, August 21 2026 12:49 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, August 21 2026 01:01 AM (oJgNG)

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• A federal judge has ruled that a state judge who used AI to handle the entire decision in a case so she could spend the day playing Cookie Run Kingdom or something equally important cannot be sued.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The state judge's actions may not be reasonable, or even legal, and the decision can be appealed, but the judge cannot sued.

• Move fast and crash planes: Google just bought the anonymised databases of the defunct Spirit Airlines for $10 million to train AI models.  (CNN)
  
  With OpenAI training on Reddit, Amazon training on Twitch streams, and now Google training on incompetent and defunct airlines, I don't think we have to worry too much about AI taking our jobs.
  
  And more about AI destroying the economy so there aren't any jobs to be taken.
  
  
  
• Building a Steam Machine in an ASRock Deskmeet X300.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Interesting thing: The Deskmeet X300 has four DDR4 SODIMM slots.  Which is great if you just happen to have a stockpile of DDR4 SODIMMs from old laptops and mini-PCs.
  
  Which I do.
  
  
  
• Best Buy apparently did not steal half this customer's memory.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They took half the memory out, yes, but returned it along with the laptop.  And since it has a dedicated GPU, performance won't suffer too much.
  
  Actually, it just sounds like one stick of RAM went bad, and since the laptop was upgraded by a third-party, it wasn't Best Buy's responsibility, and the system is now working again.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, August 20 2026 03:47 AM (6eVrQ)

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• Meta faces a $1.4 trillion fine in a case brought by multiple US stats over (checks notes) creating a product that people wanted to use. (Engadget)
  
  May be time to pull some strings and drop space rocks on statehouses.
  
  
  
• Speaking of space rocks, power operator PJM has proposed a plan to kick its largest customers off the grid whenever it runs out of electricity. (Reuters)
  
  That will make them popular.

• OpenAI has announced it is building an 8GW AI datacenter in Ohio, with a $105 billion guarantee from Nvidia. (Axios)
  
  Uh, guys, you might want to look at a map first.
  
  
  
• Mini-PCs are cheap and convenient... Were cheap and are still convenient, with configurations to suit almost any need unless you want to play (insert resource-intensive recent computer game here). Just wipe the drive and reinstall Windows first. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Today's contestant in the malware race: Geekom.
  
  
  
• Can't afford an AI graphics card? Nobody else can either, so why not upgrade your 2080 Ti to 22GB? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  As the article notes you can push it all the way to 44GB, though that becomes expensive. More expensive.
  
  
  
• GitHub went. (The Register)
  
  I am responsible for the corporate GitLab server, which means that any such problems are my responsibility to fix, but also means that I can fix them.
  
  
  
• Cursor, the AI coding company just acquired by SpaceX, announced its own Git-compatible code hosting platform on the same day that GitHub fell over. (Cursor)
  
  Totally not space rocks.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, August 18 2026 08:25 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 18 2026 11:02 PM (0xQ95)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 19 2026 06:27 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 19 2026 06:57 AM (Wj1pt)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 19 2026 06:59 AM (Wj1pt)

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• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the AI backlash is fundamentally a crisis of trust and also that water is wet. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well... Yes.
  
  
  
• Anthropic is planning to watermark text produced by their AI systems. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  At fault is the European Union, as usual.

• Bluesky has shrunk by 50% in 18 months as the crazies come crawling back to Twitter. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Damn.
  
  Meanwhile, the Phantom Zone of online speech known as Threads continues to lie about its numbers.
  
  
  
• Also now extinct: Audrey Hepburn and neutrinos.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 18 2026 03:44 AM (XL74C)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 18 2026 03:58 AM (XL74C)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 18 2026 07:22 AM (PiXy!)

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