• Two court cases have ruled that AIs aren't people.  (Yahoo)
  
  And they're not lawyers either, though lawyers also aren't people.  Mostly.
  
  
  
• Will Anthropic's Pentagon controvery scare startups away from a trillion-dollar firehose of money?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  No.  Are you stupid?

• Workers who love corporate slogans are bad at their jobs.  (Cornell)
  
  And, again, not people.
  
  
  
• Robots could speed up home construction and also possibly make the quality suck less.  (CNN)
  
  They transport the robot to the building site in a shipping container, and it constructs the framing to order on-site, taking a day to complete a four-week job.
  
  Prefab frames have been a thing for a long time, but this makes it a far more flexible solution.
  
  
  
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is set to receive a $4 million bonus.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Huang is worth $164 billion given Nvidia's current share price.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's Stargate got blown up in a desperate attempt to defend the Earth from ascended Goa'uld System Lord Anubis.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or they just ran out of money, but that would be less exciting.
  
  Anyway, they still have the other gate in Antarctica.  I think.
  
  
  
• HP's ZBook Ultra G1a with the Ryzen AI Max 395+ is pretty zippy.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not compared against the brand new MacBook Pro with the M5 Max, which is faster on many benchmarks but isn't shipping yet.
  
  
  
• A research went undercover as an AI on bot-only social network Moltbook and found a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.  (InfoWorld)
  
  And you said it couldn't be done, Obi Wan.
  
  
  
• Project I've been working on at my day job, shifting a quarter petabyte of data and dozens of applications to a new cluster, is finally done.  And it all seems to work.
  
  And costs 95% less to run than at AWS.
  
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• Look to the skies: For the first time a spacecraft has diverted the orbit of an asteroid.  (Science News)
  
  Two asteroids, in fact, the pair Dimorphos, which was the direct target, and Didymos, around which it orbits.
  
  The deliberate impact not only shortened the orbital period of Dimorphos by half an hour from its original twelve, but slowed the orbit of the pair around the Sun by...  10 micrometers per second.
  
  The experiment was four years ago; it took a while for the difference to add up to enough to detect.
  
  
  
• Don't bother looking to the skies: Astronomers have found a galaxy that is estimated to be made of 99.9% dark matter.  (CNN)
  
  If it's dark, you ask, how did they find it?
  
  With extreme difficulty.  With extreme difficulty and three telescopes.

• The first car - for small values of "car" - has rolled off the production line at solar car maker Aptera.  (Electrek)
  
  If it feels like that's taken twenty years, it may be because it has.  Aptera was founded in 2006, with its corporate existence punctuated with a couple of bankruptcies along the way.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's head of robotics has resigned after the company signed a contract with the Department of War.  (Engadget)
  
  OpenAI doesn't make robots, so the impact is not likely to be significant.
  
  
  
• Apple's 18 core M5 Max's CPU performance is mediocre compared to high-end server and workstation CPUs, but its integrated graphics performance is stellar - at least on synthetic benchmarks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, that's the opposite of the article's headline.  The article is deliberately stupid.
  
  
  
• Who has the fastest cloud servers?  Amazon, at least if you're in a datacenter with the new Amazon Turin (Zen 5) CPUs available.  (Ecuadors)
  
  The new C8 instances are a lot faster - as much as 70% - than the Zen 3 C6 instances that we were using at my day job before we moved out of Amazon entirely.
  
  The associated Hacker News thread notes that you can get even better performance by the simple trick of running your own server.
  
  And save a ton of money.
  
  
  
• The new MacBook Neo is up to 40% faster than the original M1 MacBook Air.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The same multi-threaded performance, but 43% faster single-threaded.
  
  And that's using an iPhone CPU.
  
  
  
• The new MacBook Air is even more faster.  (Notebook Check)
  
  And more expensive, but it does have 16GB of RAM which the Neo can't do.  And a wide colour gamut display, which likewise.
  
  
  
• Not entirely sure you can do that.  (The Register)
  
  The maintainer of Python package Chardet, which dets chars, replace the manually-written code with a version largely generated by Anthropic's Claude, and swapper the license from LGPL to MIT, raising complaints from the original developer (maybe) who assigned the license, which prohibits future relicensing.
  
  The thing is, "copyleft" licenses in the GPL depend on copyright law for enforcement, and AI-generated content can't be copyrighted, at least in the US, so...
  
  If he'd just renamed the package it would probably be fine.
  
  Also, it apparently rewrote and optimised the inner loop of the code to be 48 times faster, which is something of a win.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 08 2026 08:44 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 08 2026 08:49 PM (1zWbY)

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• New NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has killed the Exploration Upper Stage project for the SLS and will be open to bids for a replacement that might actually exist some day.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Development of the Exploration Upper Stage has been in progress since 2016, with the initial launch date set for 2021.  It's five years behind schedule and with $3.5 billion spent so far - nearly ten times the initial estimate - is no close to reality.
  
  The lead contractor for the project was Boeing, for what it's worth.

• Lenovo's new ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 received a 10 out of 10 score for repairability on iFixit.  (Liliputing)
  
  It comes in both Intel (Panther Lake) and AMD (Ryzen 400 series) models, and uses LPCAMM2 rather than soldered memory.  The display, keyboard, and batter are easily swapped out, as are the memory and SSD.  The Thunderbolt ports are modular - there's a little adaptor that connects the socket to a matching socket on the motherboard, so if you trip over the cable you break a $2 part rather than the entire $2000 laptop.
  
  A welcome change.
  
  
  
• Indie game Slay the Spire 2 has 393,000 players on Steam right now.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's a thousand times more than much-hyped TenCent-backed title High Guard, which received top billing at the Video Game Awards.  (Which are, apparently, bigger than the Super Bowl, though I resolutely watch neither.)
  
  Video games are alive and well.  The video game industry is dying of self-inflicted wounds.  Latest heir to the Concord  crown is expected to be Marathon, though it's been out for two days and isn't dead yet.
  
  
  
• AI startup Hayden AI is suing its former CEO over alleged instances of fraud and theft and pettifoggery and exaggerating on his resume.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The mopery and dopery appears to go back a ways:

  According to Carson's LinkedIn profile, he completed a doctorate from Waseda University in Tokyo in 2007.

  "That is a lie," the complaint states. "Carson does not hold a PhD from Waseda or any other university.  In 2007, he was not obtaining a PhD but was operating 'Splat Action Sports,' a paintball equipment business in a Florida strip mall."

  Did he use Cluely to get the job?
  
  

• Things are bad, but not that bad.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, prices of 32GB memory kits did hit $4000 on Newegg, up almost tenfold in a single day.
  
  It only affected a couple of ranges of G.Skill memory - 27 products in all - including some bundles containing that specific memory.  Affected prices should be back to the new normal now.

• The Department of War has sunk Anthropic with a torpedo fired from a submarine, the first such incident by a US Navy vessel since World War 0.  (Politico)
  
  Or I might be conflating various world events.  It's been a long day.
  
  
  
• Speaking of navies abruptly relocated at the bottom the the sea Nvidia is pulling back from OpenAI and Anthropic.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not divesting, but not investing further either.

• AI generated results in Bing search pointed users at malicious versions of OpenClaw that attempted to install a whole swarm of malware onto your computer.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Even worse than the legitimate version of OpenClaw, I mean.
  
  
  
• The CEO of cheating app Cluely lied about the company's revenue.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's slightly worse than trying to fudge your term paper.
  
  
  
• There is no longer a 512GB Mac Studio.  (Macrumors)
  
  It was expensive.  Now it's gone.
  
  
  
• Nvidia on the other hand is reportedly preparing an RTX 5050 with 9GB of RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's up from the current 8GB, but the details kind of make sense given the exact specs of the 5050.  The update would switch from four 16Gb DDR6 chips running at 20GHz to three 24Gb DDR7 chips running at 28GHz.
  
  It would provide a little more memory and a little more performance while using fewer components.  The rest of Nvidia's 5000 series graphics cards all use DDR7 memory; the entry-level 5050 was the only one that did not.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Idea Tab Pro Gen 2 is set to arrive in March.  (Liliputing)
  
  I have the smaller, cheaper Idea Tab Nothing.  It's not an amazing performer but the display is first rate - Lenovo calls it "paperlike" and I can't disagree.  It doesn't feel like looking at a screen at all; it feels like magic.
  
  The new model has a 13" 3540x2190 display (mine has an 11" 2560x1600 screen), 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a microSD slot, and a pen.  The specs don't use the term "paperlike" anywhere but I hope it's similar.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, March 07 2026 12:17 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, March 07 2026 01:59 AM (zCiG7)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, March 07 2026 10:52 AM (T3+91)

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• As expected from recent leaks, Apple today introduced the new relatively low cost MacBook Neo.  (MacRumors)
  
  It uses the A18 processor found in the iPhone and...  Well, the iPhone 16, basically.
  
  It's available with 8GB of RAM expandable to...  Not expandable at all, even at purchase time, because the A18 only has 8GB of RAM.  And 256GB of 512GB of storage.
  
  I/O consists of one USB3 port and one USB2 port, plus a headphone jack, and that's it.  Screen is a 2408x1506 13" model with sRGB colour, though the specs don't mention what percentage of the sRGB colourspace it covers.  Presumably no more than 100%.
  
  It's...  Fine, probably.  8GB of RAM is truly painful on Windows 11, but Linux runs just fine and I assume MacOS should do okay with lighter tasks.

• Google is ending its 30% cut of everything on the Play Store, reducing it to 20% or less for new purchases and a relatively reasonable 10% for subscriptions.  (Engadget)
  
  Thanks to Epic Games, whose lawsuit forced this upon a very unwilling Google.
  
  
  
• Your car can be tracked everywhere you go by your tire pressure sensors.  (Dark Reading)
  
  Which transmit unique identifiers, unencrypted, readable by anyone withing a 50-meter range.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, a new Android app detects anyone nearby wearing smart glasses.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Assuming the glasses are sending a Bluetooth signal, which is what the app detects.  So in fact it lets you detect any device in range with Bluetooth enabled, and there are a lot more of those than smart glasses wearers.
  
  
  
• The CEO of Qualcomm said the thing.  (Fortune)
  
  Literally:

  "If you actually believe in the AI revolution, 6G will be required. Resistance is futile."

  It may also turn people into animals.

• Micron has announced 256GB SOCAMM2 memory modules, as used in some - a total of two so far, I think - recent laptop models.[/urk]  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For servers, not for you.
  
  
  
• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is in a slap fight with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Again.

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, March 05 2026 10:23 PM (Jz3jd)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 05 2026 11:05 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 05 2026 11:06 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 06 2026 01:27 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Friday, March 06 2026 05:16 AM (SV7Jd)

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• Apple has announced its new MacBook Pro range with update M5 Pro and M5 Max CPUs and faster SSD speeds.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The SSD speeds are simple: They're still Apple's awkward proprietary solution, but the speed has been increased to PCIe 5.0 levels.  I'm not sure how much difference that makes to a laptop, but it's not unwelcome.
  
  The CPU story is a little more complicated.  Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max feature up to 18 cores, though only 6 of those are performance cores, or what Apple has retroactively renamed "Super" cores.  They are the same as the performance cores in the existing M5 chips, which we know because those cores have also been renamed.
  
  But the other 12 cores aren't efficiency cores, they're "Performance" cores, though precisely what that means we don't know.
  
  Also, there's no longer a 512GB option; the price has been increased by $100 but the base model now comes with 1TB of SSD.
  
  Most importantly, the price of memory hasn't increased.  It's not exactly cheap, but it's not much more than the market price for regular DDR5 modules now, and provides a lot more bandwidth.
  
  
  
• There's also a new MacBook Air and, expected tomorrow, the entry-level MacBook Neo.  (Notebook Check)

• Arm's own Cortex X925 core - found here in Nvidia's GB10 AI processor - reaches desktop class performance when provided a desktop class power budget.  (Chips and Cheese)
  
  It's neck-and-neck with AMD's 9900X and Intel's 285K desktop chips.
  
  
  
• Seagate has started shipping 44TB hard drives.  (Tom'ss Hardware)
  
  You can't have one, or at least not yet.  Right now they're only going to one large, unnamed, customer.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced its new Clearwater Forest server CPUs with up to 288 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're all efficiency cores, but that's a valid option when you pack that many onto a chip.
  
  
  
• Drones launched in Iran's attempt to make as many enemies as possible before it expires hit an Amazon datacenter in the UAE, and took out power to another of its datacenters in Bahrain.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Born just in time to have my servers blown up in the sandbox.
  
  
  
• LexisNexis got hacked via a flaw in React.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Stolen data included employee passwords - encrypted, so probably not a problem - and API keys stored in AWS Secrets - not encrypted at all, so definitely a problem but relatively easy to address.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, March 04 2026 07:25 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 05 2026 03:02 AM (rcPLc)

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• Motorola and GrapheneOS have announced a partnership to produce Motorola phones running GrapheneOS.  (Liliputing)
  
  Though I'm not sure what else they would announce.
  
  GrapheneOS is a version of Android without Google's proprietary software.  It currently only runs on, uh, Google's proprietary hardware, which I'm not sure is entirely helpful.
  
  Having it run on something else as well might be a useful option if you want to steer away from the Apple / Google duopoly for security and privacy reasons but aren't still looking for something officially supported.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Microsoft did not ban the word "microslop" from its official Copilot Discord forum and then shut the whole thing down when people kept using the offending term, or, well, they did but they say it was due to spam.  (Windows Latest)
  
  Sure, Microsoft.  I believe you.
  
  
  
• Anthropic got declaude.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I was doing server stuff today and didn't notice.  I do use Claude Code to get boilerplate stuff done quickly, like generating test cases, but I didn't miss it.
  
  
  
• The US government is moving to ban memory chips from Chinese companies YTMC, CXMT, and SMIC...  From government devices.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which doesn't really change anything for the rest of us.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum N1 AI is a combination NAS and desktop PC and is not made by Minisforum.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Typo by Notebook Check - the device is made by Morefine.
  
  It has an eight-core Ryzen CPU, four 3.5" bays, three M.2 slots, dual 10Gb Ethernet ports, and an 800W power supply and room for a desktop graphics card.

• The entry-level PC market - systems priced between $500 and $1000 - is predicted to be wiped out by 2028.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The leading cause of this mass extinction is everyone's favourite villain, Sam Altman of OpenAI.  CPU and motherboard prices haven't moved, but RAM prices have increased 300 to 500%, with video cards as collateral damage, and storage prices are heading into the stratosphere as well.
  
  I suspect the video game market will be forced to adjust to lower average specs for the next few years.  Either that or they're going to lose all their remaining customers to indie titles that run fine on ten-year-old hardware.
  
  Hytale recommends a Radeon 400 series, a range that came out in 2016.  Silksong recommends a Radeon 380 from 2015, but will run on a Radeon 7750 from 2012.  And that means it will run on pretty much any laptop's integrated graphics.
  
  Custom PC builders are going to be hurting for years, though.

• We've cured cancer in mice.  Again.  (Science Daily)
  
  The new treatment this time uses a metal-organic framework - iron-based nano-particles - to trigger oxidative stress with the tumour cells while leaving healthy tissue untouched.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has announced a whole bunch of expensive toys at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the latest Legion Tab.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The Legion Tab 5 is slightly better and a whole lot more expensive that the Legion Tab 3 I have.  Display resolution is up from the already excellent (for an 8.8" tablet) to 3040x1904, and the CPU has been upgraded from an already fast Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
  
  The microSD card slot on earlier models has not returned, nor has the headphone jack.  And the MSRP is two and a half times what I paid for mine, making it an easy upgrade to skip.
  
  
  
• ClawJacked is an attack that lets people break into your local OpenClaw instances by getting you to load a web page.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Because web pages running on your browser are free to access websocket services running on your local PC, which is something OpenClaw does.  OpenClaw is password protected but not rate-limited on its local ports, so code running in your browser can simply keep guessing.
  
  I won't judge OpenClaw harshly on this one.  Too few developers understand that this is even possible, let alone take any measures to guard against it.
  
  
  
• I said I was done buying new computer bits.  I lied.
  
  As I mention on my own blog yesterday, I was wandering around the web looking for specs for something - I've since forgotten what I was looking for - when I noticed that an Aussie online store was selling 4TB SSDs at the 2TB price.
  
  I was very good.  I wanted to buy eight.  I bought two.  About $290 each including tax and shipping, which is a damn good price for a PCIe 4.0 TLC drive right now.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 03 2026 01:28 AM (cv9yd)

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• OpenAI has announced a deal with the Department of War with - apparently - the same limitations that Anthropic was demanding.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Guess Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, really pissed someone off.
  
  Sam Altman of OpenAI knows when to lie, and sometimes also who to lie to.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Google is building a datacenter in Pine Island, Minnesota, powered by 1.9GW of wind and solar energy and a 300MW battery.  (Interesting Engineering)
  
  Before you ask, yes, the author of the article does know that the power delivered by a battery is only half the data.  It's designed to deliver 300MW for 100 hours, which makes it possibly the largest single installation in the world.
  
  Also it's an iron-air battery which I didn't know they had working at scale.  It produces energy by rusting iron, and recharges by unrusting it.  It's heavy, less efficient that common lithium batteries, and requires a source of water and air to keep the cycle going.  And I'm not sure if they've ironed (sorry) out the durability issues.
  
  But air and water aren't hard to find in most places a datacenter might be build, and importantly it's cheap.
  
  
  
• Well, maybe not in orbit where SpaceX is planning to build its new datacenters and where Reflect Orbital has approval approval to place a 50-foot mirror as a test of its daylight-on-demand service.  (MSN)
  
  The idea being that if you have an area that's dark and you need it to be less dark, a constellation of 50,000 orbital satellites will make daylight a phone call away.  The mirrors will be orbiting 400 miles up so the light that reaches the ground will be very spread out and not remotely as bright as full daylight, but even moonlight-on-demand could be worthwhile.
  
  The article is by the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, so it's overly verbose and spends most of those words whining.
  
  
  
• Myrient, a 390TB archive of computer and video games and...  Stuff...  Is going offline at the end of the month.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The maintainer cites rising costs - around $6000 per month - thanks in part to AI, and also people abusing the service and creating paywalled sites that take money for the service he provides for free.
  
  
  
• India has blocked online database service Supabase, popular with vibe coding and with the hackers who siphon off the inevitably exposed person data afterwards, because reasons.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Reasons India did not bother to tell anyone about.
  
  
  
• South Korea's tax agency lost $4.8 million from a photo of a wallet.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The photo was of a Ledger crypto storage device seized in a raid, an item normally secure enough and perfectly safe to photograph and publicise.
  
  But right next to the device was a handwritten note containing a mnemonic for the wallet address and private key.  These are commonly used with various blockchains and machine-readable, so it didn't take long for someone to empty the wallet out, even while it was sitting in the tax agency's vault.
  
  
  
• AMD still doesn't support its latest FSR4 upscaling technology on RDNA on older RDNA2 and RDNA3 graphics cards - like my Radeon 7800 XT - even though we know it works because they accidentally published the source code for the drivers that make it work.
  
  OptiScalar does that now.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's a bit of fiddling around so you might be better off just buying an Nvidia graphics card, or even an RDNA4 card like the 9070 XT, but it does work.
  
  
  
• Apple is poised to deliver a new MacBook Nothing.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Not Pro, not Air, just a cheap-for-Apple base model.
  
  The question is, what are they going to cut to hit the target price?  The article discusses configurations with 8GB of RAM, 128GB of SSD, and possibly a low-quality screen, all of which sound awful.
  
  
  
• Why does the Asus ProArt PX13 have a 60Hz display?  (Notebook Check)
  
  Seems an odd pairing with the Ryzen 395 CPU (16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores) and 128GB of RAM - and the anticipated €4000 price.  Particularly when my current laptop cost a sixth of that and has a high-resolution 14" OLED panel running at 120Hz.
  
  And the answer is that my laptop has a 14" screen, and the Asus has a 13" screen, and nobody makes high-resolution 13" OLED panels that run faster than 60Hz, while at 14" and above they've become common even on modestly-priced systems.  And professional artists, the target audience of the ProArt range, don't need high refresh rates so much as colour fidelity, which that panel delivers.
  
  
  
• Monitor might have to wait: I accidentally bought two more 4TB SSDs.
  
  Well, I did click on the buy button, but I just went to that online store for...  I don't actually remember what I was looking up.
  
  But they had 4TB SSDs - mid-tier ones from TEAM, TLC and PCIe 4.0 but cacheless - discounted to the same price as the 2TB model.  Just what I was looking for ever since Amazon lost my order, except that I already bought a top-tier 4TB PCIe 5.0 model with DRAM cache.
  
  So now I have enough SSDs for a while.  Money...  Not so much.

• OpenAI has raised $110 billion in new investment from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank - sort of - valuing the company at somewhere between $730 billion and bankrupt.  (Trading View)
  
  A lot of the stories just report the numbers and not the strings wrapped around them.
  
  Amazon for example chipped in $50 billion, but only $15 billion up front.  The rest requires OpenAI to either deliver AGI - human-level intelligence - or a successful IPO.  And the deal requires OpenAI to commit to an additional $100 billion in spending on Amazon's cloud services, on top of the $38 billion deal they've already signed.
  
  Nvidia invested $30 billion - much less than the $100 billion discussed previously but not a small amount either - apparently on similar conditions that OpenAI spend all of that and more on Nvidia chips.
  
  SoftBank is also in for $30 billion, but I've seen no details of what they are getting out of it other than a slice of the pie.

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 28 2026 07:55 PM (Xd0ag)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, February 28 2026 08:29 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, February 28 2026 11:53 PM (1zWbY)

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Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, March 01 2026 02:18 AM (rcPLc)

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