Sunday, March 22
Daily News Stuff 22 March 2026
************ Edition
Contains spoilers. Contains very spoilers for four of the most dramatic fight scenes in the first season. Since the first season only really contains four dramatic fight scenes - this is a character-driven series, not monster of the week - you might want to avoid this one if you want to watch the show.
Disclaimer: And I do recommend this series, even to those who do not usually watch anime. I did find the episodes near the end of the first season a bit of a slog - into each great anime a tournament arc must fall - but it resolves itself with the same wit and grace that makes the rest of the story shine.
************ Edition
Top Story
- 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.
Tech News
- 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
Music is the Zoltraak theme from the anime Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. Anime by some strange coincidence is Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.
Contains spoilers. Contains very spoilers for four of the most dramatic fight scenes in the first season. Since the first season only really contains four dramatic fight scenes - this is a character-driven series, not monster of the week - you might want to avoid this one if you want to watch the show.
Disclaimer: And I do recommend this series, even to those who do not usually watch anime. I did find the episodes near the end of the first season a bit of a slog - into each great anime a tournament arc must fall - but it resolves itself with the same wit and grace that makes the rest of the story shine.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:49 PM
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I like tournament arcs, and coincidentally the tournament arc is the part of the manga I read first.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 22 2026 08:24 PM (s6adZ)
2
I do hate systemd, and count this as vindication of the hypothesis that people paid by Microsoft and living in Germany are going to be too responsive to insane nonsense.
They are correct that full conspiracy theorist is not the right take yet, but conspiracy theorists can be correct these days as identifying as correct ahead of schedule.
I think a month ago I read on wikipiedia that pearl abyss has done one or two other games, but I could confuse that that, and have many indications that my thinking is not good ATM.
They are correct that full conspiracy theorist is not the right take yet, but conspiracy theorists can be correct these days as identifying as correct ahead of schedule.
I think a month ago I read on wikipiedia that pearl abyss has done one or two other games, but I could confuse that that, and have many indications that my thinking is not good ATM.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 22 2026 08:38 PM (s6adZ)
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