• Global PC shipments have plunged 20%, shocking industry analysts.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Who expected the numbers to be much worse.
  
  One of them tried to blame it on "macro conditions", which is of course pure bullshit, unless he's referring to the scale of the price increases.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The developer of ArtCraft posted the announcement on Reddit, which was a mistake.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It always is.  Also:

  Skeptics also warn of safety concerns with vibecoded software; a single person has generated potentially hundreds of thousands of lines of code for multiple pieces of software very quickly, and verification of the code becomes a mountain of a task for a developer without a team; a 2026 State of Code Developer Survey of 1,100 professionals by Sonar indicates that 96% of developers do not fully trust AI-generated code.  Privacy problems, malicious code, unsafe file handling, and more are among the list of concerns.

  First, it's a desktop app.  Second, compared with Adobe?
  
  
• Global Foundries (formerly AMD's chip manufacturing division) is going to produce cows for TSMC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I think.
  
  
  
• Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?  (Jono's Corner)
  
  Because, as the Hacker News thread points out, subscriptions, dummy.
  
  DeepSeek is a fraction of the price of Anthropic's API usage-based rates.  Anthropic's subscriptions, though, can be a fraction of the price of DeepSeek.  And of itself.
  
  
  
• Arranged Offenbach's Galop infernal for a 35-voice synthesiser, reading the orchestral parts from PDFs of actual 19th century score sheets used (and written in) by an actual 19th century orchestra.  As a demo for my fantasy 10-bit home computer.
  
  
  
• Which is almost but not quite entirely unlike the Atari 800XL.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is going on sale again soon priced at $219.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, October 09 2026 11:37 PM (6eVrQ)

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