Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.
Tuesday, April 14
Greasy Spork Edition
Top Story
- Answering the questions nobody is asking: Can AI be a "child of God"? (Washington Post / MSN)
Something needs to be done about Anthropic.
- Sam Altman's home has been targeted by violent idiots for the second time in a week. (SF Standard)
That's not it, guys.
Tech News
- A Stanford report highlights a growing disconnect between AI insiders and humans. (Tech Crunch)
No, really?
- Festus, Missouri has fired half the town council and is working on firing the other half and also the mayor after they approved construction of a $6 billion datacenter. (Tom's Hardware)
This is more it.
- Maine has banned construction of new datacenters entirely for 18 months. (CNBC)
Well, sure. Maine only got electricity three years ago, so they can do that.
- Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them. (Anchor)
One of the problems with WordPress - one of the many problems with WordPress - is that the security model for plugins consists of "trust me, bro".
- CopprLink is a PCIe 5.0 x16 cable that provides PCIe 5.0 x16 bandwidth to external GPUs. (Tom's Hardware)
Would it have killed you guys to put in the e?
- Linux 7.0 is here. (Linuxiac)
It includes... Things.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Tell 'em Reggie sent you.
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Monday, April 13
Fresh Spoo Edition
Top Story
- DC. Suicide Squad is a DC property, not Marvel.
- The peril of laziness lost. (Dtrace)
AI makes it easy to generate millions of lines of code.
What it doesn't make it is a good idea.
It used to be that laziness by itself placed a brake on the wheel of code churn. Now you also need to know what you are doing. And that is hard work to begin with.
Tech News
- Don't buy the Ultra 7. (Notebook Check)
Dell's new XPS lineup comes in Ultra 5, Ultra 7, and Ultra X7 models.
The Ultra 5 and 7 have almost indistinguishable performance. The X7 is significantly faster for CPU-intensive tasks, and enormously faster for graphics.
- Twitter is cutting payments by 60% or more to clickbait accounts. (Tech Crunch)
Good.
- Europe is not a serious country. (Hacker News)
In this case, a programmer in Spain couldn't access Docker images on Cloudflare because a football match was on.
- If you wanted to play the new game Crimson Desert but couldn't because it didn't run on Intel graphics, now you can. (WCCFTech)
They fixed it.
...
Yeah, that's about it, really. They've released three major updates - including Intel graphics support - in four weeks.
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Sunday, April 12
Is It Real Edition
Top Story
- Sam Altman may control our future. Can he be trusted? No. (New Yorker) (archive site)
As the article goes on to explain, fuck no.
- My baby deer plushie told me that Mitski's dad is a CIA operative. (The Verge)
Nobody ever expects the Butlerian Jihad.
Tech News
- The AI RAM shortage is also affecting SSD prices. (The Verge)
The Verge definitely has its thumb on the pulse of the tech world here.
- You can save 57% on a Corsair 96GB memory kit at just $499. (Tom's Hardware)
No you can't. Just kidding.
- On the other hand, reader Rick C checked online prices at Micro Center and they are 60% lower than the sticker prices shown in yesterday's article. Or rather, the sticker prices were inflated by 150%.
Micro Center doesn't deliver online orders; you have to pay for and pick up the item in person. Still I'd expect a bigger fuss if prices in store were that much inflated over the prices they advertise online.
- If you were planning to start your own manned space program in this time of precented memory prices, you're in luck: NASA has released the Apollo code as open source. (Tom's Hardware)
Core memory is back, baby!
- Installing every Firefox extension. (Jack.Cab)
As the article notes, not all of them. 8 were deleted by Mozilla while the download was running and 42 couldn't be found, but still around 84,000 extensions.
And... It worked. Kind of.
It did use 37GB of RAM just to load the start page.
- Samsung's memory business is now more profitable than Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, or Microsoft. (WCCFTech)
Though it still falls a little short of Apple.
- Qualcomm is working with CXMT to develop custom RAM for smartphones. (WCCFTech)
While the Big Three memory manufacturers are making bank, the two former also-rans - China's CXMT and Taiwan's Nanya - are grabbing everything they can.
- Flash storage maker Sandisk just invested a billion dollars in Nanya, for example and Kioxia, formerly Toshiba's SSD division, invested around half a billion. (Simply Wall St, Evertiq)
SSDs - at least, good ones - need DRAM cache. Sandisk and Kioxia don't make DRAM. Nanya does, and not only that, but 90% of its production is still DDR4 which is not what current computers use but is what SSD controllers use.
- ProPublica journalists walk off the job in the first US newsroom strike over AI. (NiemanLab)
"We'll go on strike!"
"That's right! You'll have a national journalists' strike on your hands!"
"And whom will that inconvenience?"
Musical Interlude
Not an AMV, exactly. The studio hired Calli to perform the ending theme for the show.
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Saturday, April 11
Crazy Eddie Edition
Top Story
- Look around, find the worst price! But don't buy before you come to Micro Center because we can't be beat! Our prices are insane! (WCCFTech)
And not in a good way. Elsewhere it would cost you an eye-burning $1600 to buy 128GB of RAM right now.
At Micro Center it's over $4000.
Western Digital and Samsung SSDs meanwhile have tripled in price in just the last three months, and there's little relief there with even cheaper brands using YMTC flash increasing by 50% or more.
Tech News
- Anthropic has banned the creator of OpenClaw from accessing Claude, labeling him a treacherous idiot commie weasel who smells bad. (Tech Crunch)
Fair enough.
- Google, Meta, Snap, and Microsoft have excoriated the European Parliament over abandoning a law that created a carve-out in privacy laws to allow online platforms to scan user content for evidence of sexual abuse and have vowed to continue to do so. (The Guardian)
Because under a separate law, the platforms are legally responsible for user content that contains evidence of sexual abuse.
They're just no longer allowed to regulate it.
A very, very European thing to do.
- The latest bit of software to get indirectly hacked to deliver malware have been the CPU-Z and HWMonitor tools from the CPUID project. (Bleeping Computer)
The software itself was fine, but the website was hacked to randomly deliver malware instead of the software you tried to download. If you downloaded either package in the last couple of days - the poisoned versions were online between April 9 and 10 - you might have a problem.
- Cutting off the tail of DRAM latency at the cost of, well, cost. (Tom's Hardware)
Tail Slayer is a neat bit of software that avoids having critical memory accesses delayed by DRAM refresh cycles.
But it does this by replicating your data across multiple channels of memory so you are never forced to access the memory module that is being refreshed at this precise instant.
Which works, yes, but is a very expensive solution.
Musical Interlude
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Friday, April 10
Peterbyte Edition
Top Story
- A hacker has reportedly broken into the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, and made off with... Carry the twelve... Ten petabytes of data. (CNN)
That's the equivalent of 70 billion Apple II floppy disks, or the total data in all the DNA strands of six and a half dromedaries.*CNN cannot verify the origins of the alleged dataset and the claims made by FlamingChina, but spoke with multiple experts whose initial assessment of the leak indicated it was genuine.
Oops.
The alleged sample data appeared to include documents marked "secret” in Chinese, along with technical files, animated simulations and renderings of defense equipment including bombs and missiles.Hofer, who reviewed the sample of the leak, said he was able to contact on Telegram a person who claimed they had carried out the hack. The attacker claimed to have gained access to the Tianjin supercomputer through a compromised VPN domain.
One question arises: Where did the hacker get 70 billion Apple II floppies?**
Once inside, the attacker told Hofer they deployed a "botnet" - a network of automated programs that were able enter the NSCC's system and then extract, download and store the data. The extraction of 10 petabytes of data took around six months.
* Content may settle in shipping.
** Or six and a half dromedaries, for that matter.
Tech News
- Negative views of Broadcom are driving thousands of customers to abandon VMWare for literally anything else. (Ars Technica)
"Negative views" here meaning "They increased our bill by 3000%".Western Union exec says there were "challenges" working with Broadcom.
"Challenges" here meaning "When we asked for a discount they laughed at me and burned my house down".
- Kill it, gut it, and wear its skin as a suit. (EFF)
La EFF est mort.
- Anthropic has lost an appeal in its attempt to stop the Pentagon from blacklisting it for being a bunch of - and I quote, or something like that - "treacherous idiot commie weasels who smell bad". (CNBC)
I'm not sure what Anthropic expects to achieve here. If you factually are treacherous idiot commie weasels who smell bad, and a government department chooses not to work with you, even if you win in the court system you are still treacherous idiot commie weasels who smell bad.
- If you bought Intel at the bottom a year ago, congratulations, you've had a return of 250% in your investment. (Tom's Hardware)
Huh.
- The Korean government is taking action over soaring DRAM costs/ (Tom's Hardware)
Since two of the Big Three memory manufacturers are based in Korea, the action consists largely of monitoring the situation and watching number go up.
- The picoZ80 is a drop-in replacement for the very venerable Z80 processor. (engineers@work)
It drops straight into the classic 40-pin DIP socket and works just like the original.
Except that it's actually emulated on a dual-core Arm chip running at up to 300MHz with hardware assist to drive all the pins at the precise timing in the specs. And it has 8MB of RAM, with half of that addressed as 64 banks of 64k. And an MMU that allows 512 byte pages to be remapped arbitrarily. Oh, and 16MB of flash storage. And wifi and Bluetooth and a microSD card - yes, all of that fits within the 40 pin package.
And there's a pico6502 model.
And yes, they've tested both in classic hardware and they really work.
- BunnyCDN has been silently losing our production files for 15 months. (Reddit)
I looked at BunnyCDN, mostly because it's one of the cheapest CDNs around - if you stick to the volume network (which doesn't cover Australia) it's one twentieth the cost of AWS Cloudfront.
It's also been promoted recently as a European alternative to American solutions that actually work.
Because, apparently...
- With TSMC's new 2nm node, phone processors are set to approach 5GHz. (WCCFTech)
Not you, China.
Musical Interlude
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Thursday, April 09
Leapn't Year Edition
Top Story
- Apple MacBooks slow down after 49 days due to a MacOS time bomb. (Notebook Check)
Not just MacBooks. Anything running MacOS:This bug means that after exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes and 47.296 seconds from the moment a Mac is switched on, network connections are no longer terminated correctly. This initially leads to an increase in CPU utilization, because after some time hundreds or even thousands of connections are managed that should actually have been terminated. As soon as the available ports, usually 16,384 in number, are used up, no more new connections can be established.
49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47.296 seconds?
That number might ring a bell for the 29 year olds in the audience, because the same bug caused Windows 95 and 98 to crash outright when they were running for just shy of 50 days: It's a 32-bit unsigned integer counting milliseconds.
Of course Windows 95 and 98 had the saving grace that they would usually crash for some other reason well before that time ran out.
Tech News
- Amazon is ending support for older Kindles. (The Verge)
Where by "older" when mean 2012 and earlier.
The devices will continue to work, but you won't be able to load new content onto them from the Amazon store.
- Iran is demanding payment in Bitcoin or iTunes gift cards for ships that want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. (CoinDesk)
Do not redeem!
- The CIA used long-range quantum magnetometry to find the lost airman during the rescue mission in Iran. (NYPost)
Cool story, bro.
- Apple's MacBook Neo is made using defective A18 chips that would otherwise be discarded. Problem: It's selling so well that Apple is running out of defective chips. (MacRumors)
The solution in these cases is to use working chips, so it's not likely that the Neo is going to disappear.
- AMD's Ryzen 9950X3D2 has a price tag: $899. (Tom's Hardware)
Expensive, but it is a workstation chip, not a gaming chip. And it's cheaper than the RAM you'll want to attach to it.
- Continuous glucose monitoring made me continuously crazy. (The Verge)
No, dear, you were always crazy.
- The 2026 Moto G Stylus has a Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 processor, 8GB of memory, a 6.7" 2712x1220 120Hz OLED display, and a stylus. (Liliputing)
$499.
The stylus includes touch sensitivity and tilt detection and lasts for 4 hours of writing or 100 hours on standby. A bit of an advance over my Palm Tungsten T3.
- The Oppo Pad Mini has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 processor, an 8.8" 2880x1920 144Hz OLED display, and up to 16GB of RAM. (Notebook Check)
And weighs in at a svelte 279 grams. Svelte for a tablet of that size, anyway. It would be on the chonky side for a phone.
Musical Interlude
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Wednesday, April 08
Terabyte Edition
Top Story
- Anthropic has unveiled Claude Mythos, a version of its AI system aimed at security analysis. (Security Week)
This is good and bad.
Good because developers can use it to find security flaws in their code.
Bad because so can everybody else.
- Meanwhile AMD's AI director has slammed Claude Code for becoming dumber and lazier. (The Register)
'Claude cannot be trusted to perform complex engineering tasks' according to GitHub ticket.
Neither can anyone attempting to use it that way.
Tech News
- Google's AI Overviews tell millions of lies a day. (Ars Technica)
You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket.
- Following its decision in the Cox vs. Music Cartel case, the Supreme Court has vacated the stupid decision in a similar case against Grande Communications. (TorrentFreak)
It has been sent back to the Fifth Circuit with a note saying "be less stupid this time".
- The Asus Zenbook A16 is here with the new Snapdragon X2 Elite. (Tom's Hardware)
Finally, some good Arm hardware that isn't from Apple. It's an 18 core CPU, so while still a little slower on single-threaded tasks than Apples M5 CPU, it's a lot faster in multi-threaded work.
Battery life is still lacking, somehow.
Oh, it has an OLED display. That'll do it.
Musical Interlude
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Tuesday, April 07
The Command Line Cometh Edition
Top Story
- A critical security vulnerability has been discovered in the leaked version of Claude Code. (Adversa)
If you've used Claude Code, you've noticed that it loves running shell commands to examine your codebase, rather than, say, reading it. Or having simple fixed-function code built into the software to do it on your computer.
And it also loves to ask you for permission to run those shell commands.
The vulnerability comes into play when a very long string of shell commands are run together. For the first fifty commands it will check - manually if needed, and in its history of permitted and denied commands if it's in there already.
And on the fifty-first command, it rests. And executes it regardless.
So if someone triggers a long string of commands and the first fifty are innocuous, after that they can take full control of your computer - because Claude Code runs on your computer, and just communicates with the Claude AI service as needed.
The particularly lovely thing here is that Anthropic already fixed this.
But both versions are present inside Claude Code and it using the broken one.
- The cult of vibe coding is insane. (Bram Cohen)
Claude Code is the preeminent vibe coding tool.
Guess how it was coded? Guess how that horrible bug stayed in, even how it was fixed.
You'll never guess.
Oh, you guessed.
Tech News
- Why the majority of vibe coded projects fail. (Reddit)
It's a war zone in that thread, between the crusty old hardboiled engineers and the idiots vibe coders no, idiots.
- Intel's Bartlett Lake CPUs are here - sort of - and the top of the line 12 core model competes with AMD's 9900X3D and Intel's own 13900K. (Tom's Hardware)
Bartlett Lake has up to 12 performance cores, the most of any mainstream Intel processor. Except that while it runs on common Socket 1700 motherboards, it's not a mainstream processor and only sells to industrial users, and is not supported by common Socket 1700 motherboard BIOSes.
Except it turns out that by changing one digit in the BIOS and reflashing it, it works fine.
- OpenAI is once again calling for public funds to clean up the mess it is creating. (Business Insider)
The best time for a Butlerian Jihad is now.
- What various Nova Lake models bring to the table. (WCCFTech)
Anything from 6 cores at 15W to 52 cores at 200W.
Base TDP. Intel's peak TDP can be several times higher.
Musical Interlude
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Monday, April 06
Break Fast And Move Things Edition
Top Story
- Samsung has raised its contract memory prices by another 30%. (Notebook Check)
That's after doubling their prices in the first quarter, and whatever they did in the previous quarter.
Best time to buy 128GB of RAM was a year ago. Which I did.
Second best time was New Year's Eve during a short-lived sale of Corsair modules on Amazon. Which I also did.
So I'm set for now.
- Ubuntu has quietly increased the memory requirements for the upcoming 26.04 release. (OMGUbuntu)
To be fair, they increased the requirement from 4GB for 18.04 to 6GB. And that's for a full client install with the Gnome UI; you can install a server with a quarter of that.
Tech News
- Apple continues to roll out device-level age verification. (9to5Mac)
First Britain, now Singapore and South Korea. Though they do use the age of your Apple / iTunes account to calculate that, and mine is at least 14 years old, and you have to be 13 to have an Apple account, making me 27.
Good to know.
Also, this is only if you want to download "mature content" through Apple services, and why the hell would anyone do that?
- Apple has just approved drivers to let users attach external GPUs to Macs. (Tom's Hardware)
Given that there are now zero Macs that support internal GPUs, this is kind of a big deal.
Because the alternative would be to just install the driver without Apple's approval.
- Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold. (Jeffrey Snover)
Charles Petzold wrote the seminal book Programming Windows.
In 1988.
- The XFX Swift Radeon RX 9060 XT OC Gaming Edition is $460 on Amazon. (WCCFTech)
That's a 16GB model, so the MSRP is $350. Given the clusterfrog of current hardware prices, that might not seem too bad.
But in Australia right now, you can pick up that exact model on Amazon for the equivalent of $310 before tax. I have to pay that tax (10% GST), but you don't.
Not sure if you can order from Amazon Australia in the US, or if it just laughs in your face and redirects you.
Musical Interlude
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Sunday, April 05
Bug Buggy Bugger Edition
Top Story
- North Korea used a supply-chain attack to gain access to widely-used open-source web client package Axios. (Axios)
- And here's a version you can actually read. (CNN)
The name is just a coincidence.
- And here's a version you can read which actually explains what happened. (Bleeping Computer)
The state of the technical media today is a microcosm of the state of the mainstream media, which is to say, it would be a good name for a rock band.
But this story highlights a huge problem: Common "wisdom" involves constantly downloading fresh copies of all the dependencies of your software, building it unattended, and deploying it to production likewise.
Sticking with known-good versions? Old hat. Manual review? Out the window.
So as soon as one key component is compromised this way, the infection spreads like wildfire.
Everyone with any experience knew this was a bad idea, but we were ignored.
Tech News
- Microsoft has pulled a faulty Windows 11 update that was breaking installs. (Tech Republic)
I think this is the same one I reported on the other day. Might be a new one. Who knows?
- Microsoft is moving Windows 11 24H2 into hospice care and forcing all users to update to 25H2. (Tom's Hardware)
Did you ask for that? No.
Does Microsoft care what you want? Also no.
- Can you install Windows 3.1 from 1992 natively on a Ryzen 9900X system from 2024 and forget about all the complexity of modern systems? (Tom's Hardware)
Shockingly, yes. It does depend on a couple of open-source drivers to run smoothly on modern motherboards and video and sound cards, but it loads and runs even without that in 286 compatibility mode.
Bring your own floppy drive.
- There is no cloud, there's just someone else's computer, which just got hit by an Iranian missile. (Tom's Hardware)
If you were running in Amazon's datacenters in Bahrain or Dubai, you no longer are.
Likely the power systems were affected rather than the servers themselves - and storage in Amazon's cloud is duplicated and physically distributed so not subject to easy destruction - but Amazon did not provide much detail or a timeframe for restoration of services.
- There is no cloud, there's just someone else's computer, which just got sold to an AI company. (PC World)
Oh, were you using that? Too bad.
- Linux 7.0, due to arrive in distributions like Ubuntu 26.04 this month, can cut your database performance in half. (Phoronix)
Specifically if you're running PostgreSQL on Amazon's Arm CPUs, but if it happens there it could happen anywhere.
- How many products does Microsoft have named Copilot? (Tey Bannerman)
75.
But they all have one thing in common: They're all named Copilot.
- AI can make anyone a 10x programmer. (The Register)
It just requires 10x the effort.
- Intel's upcoming 42-core Nova Lake S processors will have 44 cores. (WCCFTech)
Basically, there are four models we know of. They all have 4 low-power cores that live on the I/O die, plus one or two CPU dies each with 8 performance cores and 12 or 16 efficiency cores, for a total between 24 and 52 cores, and up to 320MB of cache.
That's the good news.
The bad news? From information that has leaked so far, these will have a peak power consumption of 350W... For the models with one CPU die. For the high end models, 700W.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: The red light just means your computer is on fire.
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