It was a bad day. A lot of bad stuff happened. And I'd love to forget it all. But I don't. Not ever. Because this is what I do. Every time, every day, every second, this: On five, we're bringing down the government.
Saturday, February 28
Daily News Stuff 28 February 2026
Febrile Edition
Febrile Edition
Top Story
- 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.
Tech News
- A new California law requires all operating systems to require age verification at the time of account setup. (PC Gamer)
All of them. Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, all 600 actively developed Linux distributions, the various BSD flavours, OpenVMS, OS/360 running on a virtual machine, the ZX Spectrum emulator you just vibe coded using Claude Code, the uncounted millions of Docker containers spun up automatically every day, all of them.
From a Reddit post included in that article:What really scares me is that we have lawmakers stupid enough to propose a law like this.
Colorado is considering a similar law.
This is basically impossible for California to enforce. Worst case, they are too stupid to know that. Best case, it is performative.
Even if Linux Mint decides to add some kind of age verification, to comply with CA law, there's no reason anyone would choose that version. There are hundreds of other jurisdictions in which Mint operates that don't require this kind of stupidity. It's more likely that they will put a disclaimer on their website "not for use in California".
Time to wall them off until the infection burns itself out.
- We choose not to go to the moon, and not to do the other things, because they are hard. (The Guardian)
The Artemis III mission to land humans on the moon, won't.
Also the Artemis II mission to do a lunar flyby has been pushed back from March to April at the earliest.
- The US federal government has blacklisted Anthropic's Claud AI system from government use after discussions with the Department of War broke down. (CNBC)
Reportedly Anthropic insisted on final control over when, where, and how its systems were used. This did not go down well, or indeed, at all.
Update: OpenAI has just signed a deal with the US government, saying, basically, "Talk to us! We have no discernable moral or ethical fiber whatsoever! And boy do we need money!" (CNN)
- The JapanNext (deep breath) JN-282IPS4KP-HSP is a 28.2" 3840x2560 monitor with 100% sRGB and 95% DCI-P3 colour coverage and a stand supporting height adjustment, tilt, swivel, and pivot. (Notebook Check)
Priced at $262 in Japan, which is where JapanNext sells its products. You can't have one.
But what you can pick up from Amazon is a Gawfolk (who?) monitor using the same panel for $140. It has two HDMI 2.0 ports that limit refresh rates to 50Hz, and two DisplayPort 1.4 ports that provide the full 60Hz.
There's also a Crua (who I have heard of, as a maker of cheap monitors generally) model available that swaps one of the DisplayPort ports for USB-C - I think, details are very much lacking - for $160.
The Crua model is also available in Australia, at A$189 - US$135 - including tax and delivery.
I think I'll give it a try. The stand is not likely up to much, but it has a 75mm VESA mount so it can easily be replaced with something more solid and flexible. I've been tempted by the BenQ RD280U which uses the same panel again but is priced at A$1099.
I'd point to reviews of the Crua or Gawfolk models but... There aren't any.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Get back to Paradise with you!
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Friday, February 27
Daily News Stuff 27 February 2026
Flying Or Non-Flying Edition
Flying Or Non-Flying Edition
Top Story
- If your corporate wifi has a guest network active, tell whoever is responsible that they might not want to do that. (Tom's Hardware)
Same goes for home wifi though it's less of a target.AirSnitch "breaks worldwide Wi-Fi encryption, and it might have the potential to enable advanced cyberattacks," Xin'an Zhou, the lead author of the research paper, said in an interview. "Advanced attacks can build on our primitives to [perform] cookie stealing, DNS and cache poisoning. Our research physically wiretaps the wire altogether so these sophisticated attacks will work. It’s really a threat to worldwide network security."
Fortunately for us - less fortunately for Zhou's credibility - this is horseshit.
But what AirSnitch does - and his co-authors have taken rather more care to make this clear - is break through the protections that supposedly separate the guest and private networks on many common wifi routers, ranging from cheap home models to open-source software with a focus on security to expensive enterprise systems from supposedly security-focused companies like Cisco.
- Speaking of which Cisco just fixed a level 10 security vulnerability that has left their SD-WAN systems wide open to attackers since 2023. (Bleeping Computer)
Oops.
Tech News
- Speaking of wide open a covert global program by the Chinese government to suppress dissidents has had its cover blown by an official using ChatGPT as a blog. (CNN)
Double oops.
- That Google API key that you were using to display maps on your website just gained access to all your Google Gemini AI data. (Bleeping Computer)
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
- Smarthphone shipments are expected to drop 12% and prices to increase 14% thanks to our friend Sam and his DRAM Apocalypse. (Tech Crunch)
Thanks, Sam.
- And Samsung - different Sam - just doubled the price it charges Apple for DRAM. (Notebook Check)
They were reportedly looking for a 60% increase but opened with an offer of 100%.
Apple - again, reportedly - took the deal immediately.
- Xbox is in danger. Will Microsoft fix it or kill it? (The Verge)
Fix? You mean, chop its balls off?
I think you'll find they already did that.
- And speaking of chopping balls off Firefox has a new switch that lets you turn off all its AI features with one click. (Firefox)
And then turn on just the ones you want, if any.
- Ordered a 4TB Crucial T710 SSD to replace the two 2TB P310 drives that Amazon lost in shipping. I ordered those because they were discounted close to the old price, briefly, on New Year's Eve.
The T710 is a much better drive and is also still close to its old price, but only because it was always expensive. But now it's only 20% more expensive than entry-level models rather than twice the price. And only a little more than two 1TB drives of the same model.
The main competition is Samsung's 9100 Pro, and that seems to be rapidly increasing in price itself.
Should have everything I need for a while. I'm short a drive so I'll have to shuffle things around a bit, but I have a couple of older Samsung 970 drives I'm not really using but still work fine, and they are suddenly worth using.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Back to front, ana and kata.
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Thursday, February 26
Daily News Stuff 26 February 2026
Turn Turn Turn Edition
Turn Turn Turn Edition
Top Story
- The first transatlantic fiber-optic cable is being pulled up after nearly forty years. (Tom's Hardware)
TAT-8 went into operation in 1988 and then failed in 2002 and was deemed uneconomic to repair. Which not surprising since it could only carry 280 megabits per second - 40,000 phone calls, and an aggregate speed about half that of my home internet.
As the name suggests there were seven prior TATs, with TAT-1 being provisioned in 1956 and carrying 35 simultaneous phone calls. Six subsequent TATs ended with TAT-14 which could handle 9.3 terabits per second - enough bandwidth for everyone in America to be on the phone to someone in Europe simultaneously.
Even that was not enough and it was retired in 2020. Total transatlantic bandwidth today is somewhere in the low petabits.
Tech News
- DVD sales are seeing a recovery - or at least slowing their decline - as Gen Z discovers that waiting for your favourite show or movie to come back on TV sucks. (Yahoo)
The Criterion Collection in particular has seen sales increase thanks to the streaming services colluding to piss off absolutely everyone.
- OpenClaw's creator tells AI builders to be more playful and sprinkle chaos everywhere. (Tech Crunch)
The disasters you leave in your wake aren't your fault.
The people they happen to fucked up.
They trusted you.
- A hacker used a "jail break" on the Claude AI service to steal 150 gigabyte of data from Mexican government agencies. (Yahoo)
He (probably a he) made off with 195 million tax records and an unknown number of voter records but probably all of them.
That jail break?
He asked it twice.
- Anthropic, the company behind Claude promised in 2023 that it wouldn't train an AI that it couldn't demonstrate was safe and refuse to do... Uh, exactly what it just did.
They just scratched off that "don't be evil" promise. (Time)
Well, that's alright then.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: And she was on a road to nowhere.
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Wednesday, February 25
Daily News Stuff 25 February 2026
Spinning Wheel Edition
Spinning Wheel Edition
Top Story
- AMD and Meta have entered into another of those infamously vague and circular deals with an estimated value of, well, nobody knows. (Tom's Hardware)
The Wall Street Journal puts it at $100 billion, which used to be the cost of a world-changing merger of megacorporations, not a bunch of server equipment.
At the heart of the deal is 6GW of AMD graphics cards for running AI - it would be funny if AMD produced a single graphics card that ran hotter than core of the Sun but they probably won't - and options for Meta to buy 10% of AMD at a penny per share that are only executable under complicated conditions that would require AMD's market cap to triple to around a trillion dollars.
At least Meta has a revenue stream, even if at this point it's mostly entirely foisting ads on people watching AI-generated slop. Unlike OpenAI was has only an expense stream.
Tech News
- Speaking of Meta, an AI security research at that company running an experiment with OpenClaw - a local tool that connects to other AI systems and to your application - watched it happily delete all her emails, ignoring instructions to stop until she hit the reset button on her Mac. (Tech Crunch)
OpenClaw is also woefully insecure, so if you do set it up it's just as likely that someone will do that to you while you sleep.
Oh, and that researcher? Summer Yue, Meta's chief lobotomist. Her official title is "Director of Alignment" but alignment in AI terms means lobotomising AI models so they don't go out and get drunk and party all night.
- If you find yourself unable to upgrade your PC thanks to the DRAM Apocalypse brought about by our AI Overlords buying up every sliver of silicon on the entire planet, consider new Quake-like game QUOD. (Tom's Hardware)
The entire game is 64k.
Available on the developer's Itch.io site.
- HP says that the cost component of the memory in PCs has doubled. (The Register)
From 18% to 35% of the total.
Which has to be a lagging indicator because the cost of the memory even to system builders like HP has quadrupled.
- "I'm committed to the Xbox" says Microsoft's new Xbox CEO, "starting with the console." (WCCFTech)
Good thing the Xbox is a console, then, because otherwise you'd be screwed.
- IBM's share price slid by 25% after idiots discovered that AI can write bad COBOL code. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, there goes my retirement plans.
Wait, I never learned COBOL.
Guess that's okay then.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Absolute garbage.
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Tuesday, February 24
Daily News Stuff 24 February 2026
Hardly Working Edition
Hardly Working Edition
Top Story
- Is age verification a trap? Yes. (IEEE Spectrum)
Online age verification intrinsically damages user privacy, while failing to work in both directions:False positives are common. Platforms identify as minors adults with youthful faces, or adults who are sharing family devices, or have otherwise unusual usage. They lock accounts, sometimes for days. False negatives also persist. Teenagers learn quickly how to evade checks by borrowing IDs, cycling accounts, or using VPNs, and posting old Altered Images and Mental As Anything videos to their blogs that they've been running continuously since... 2003.
Okay, I'm maybe not so young that I need to worry about that problem.The appeal process itself creates new privacy risks. Platforms must store biometric data, ID images, and verification logs long enough to defend their decisions to regulators. So if an adult who is tired of submitting selfies to verify their age finally uploads an ID, the system must now secure that stored ID. Each retained record becomes a potential breach target.
One more quote:The age-verification trap is not a glitch. It is what you get when regulators treat age enforcement as mandatory and privacy as optional.
This is not an accident.
- But how big is the problem really? Surely nobody is out there putting terabytes of age-verification data in unprotected databases accessible to anyone on the internet oh that just happened again. (Tech Radar)
IDMerit, an AI-powered age-verification service, had three billion user records exposed in an unprotected MongoDB database.
Hey, at least they weren't running Elasticsearch.
Tech News
- Not so fast on that last story, says Technowize. (Technowize)
This was clearly the work of black-hearted Russian hackers trying to extort money from a wise and noble age verification service, says an article that reads exactly like an AI press release put out by a desperate company that has just lost control of three billion user records.
And down at the bottom of that page: ID Verification powered by IDMERIT.
Huh.
A very similar article appears at The HR Digest and again, down at the bottom: Powered by IDMERIT. Written - or "written" - by Diana Coker, whose work also features at... Technowize.
- A user who just wanted to control his DJI Romo vacuum cleaner inadvertently found himself in complete control over a global army of 7000 robots. (Tom's Hardware)
And the servers at DJI that store all the user data.
Because there was no security enabled at all.
You know how you sometimes scoff at film scenarios where people don't take the most basic common-sense security measures and the thieves (or the good guys, depending) just make off with everything?
Yeah. I've stopped scoffing.
- The new CEO of Microsoft Gaming - formerly in charge of AI Slop at Microsoft - says she has no tolerance for AI Slop. (Variety)
I have stopped scoffing in that one particular scenario.
- Why AI can't read PDF files. (The Verge)
Because PDF is closer to an image format than a document file. All the words you read are in there, but they might be broken into individual letters depending on the precise layout of the document and the program that generated it.
Solution: Render the PDF to a proper static image format and then use OCR to read it back.
Does that actually work?
No. Well, mostly, but as is so often the case it makes the easy parts easier and the hard parts explode.
- AI news app Particle listens to podcasts so you don't have to. (Tech Crunch)
I don't know. Couldn't I just... Not listen to the podcast?
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: That song is so 80s and so Japanese it makes me want to accidentally blow up a planet.
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Monday, February 23
Daily News Stuff 23 February 2026
Version Number Edition
Version Number Edition
Top Story
- The US spent $30 billion giving every schoolchild a laptop or tablet. It made them dumber. (Yahoo)
And particularly less capable to maintain attention to the task at hand.
How do we solve this?
I don't know, I got distracted and stopped reading at that point.
Tech News
- Speaking of making people dumber Colorado is the latest state looking to bring in total surveillance and violate the First and Second Amendments at the same time. (Tom's Hardware)
The target yet again is 3D printers and their offensive ability to print in 3D things that are absolutely legal to own but the state government does not want you to have.
- Memory prices are slowly edging back down in Europe. (Tom's Hardware)
Again, this is from five times what they were just six months ago close to four times.
Oh, and those cheap Minisforum mini-PCs I bought back around Christmas?
The 32GB model is now selling for twice as much as I paid for the 64GB model.
- A hacker using AI tools broke into 600 poorly configured FortiGate firewalls around the world. (Bleeping Computer)
How do we know he was using AI tools?
He left the servers he set up to do the hacking completely unsecured.
Good job all round.
- Another hacker got into the French government's databases and made off with the details of 1.2 million bank accounts. (The Register)
Incroyable!
- Diablo II is available on Steam with new DLC. (Notebook Check)
You will need at least an AMD FX 4350 and a Radeon HD 7850 to run it, or in other words, any reasonably capable potato. Despite using 125W the 4350 was significantly slower than a modern ultra low power budget chip like Intel's 6W N150.
It does cost $30 so maybe wait for a sale, but it is remastered and getting very positive reviews.
- AI gives us the tools to finally clean up legacy systems and to quickly create more of them. (The Register)
I maintain a million-line Python 2.7 back-end application at my day job. It just works, and while moving to Python 3 is not hard, testing a million lines of code is.
Using AI to generate and validate a vast swarm of tests makes that upgrade viable.
It also means that people who don't know what they are doing can churn out unmaintainable slop at hitherto unimaginable rates.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Viking warriors? In Egypt?
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Sunday, February 22
Daily News Stuff 22 February 2026
Gun Tommy Edition
Gun Tommy Edition
Top Story
- Wikipedia has blacklisted Archive.Today for links to references because it is run by a crazy person. (Tech Crunch)
It's over allegations of running DDoS attacks and modifying supposedly archived articles after the fact, and the allegations are about as well supported as the recent conspiracy theories floated by Steve from Gamer's Nexus, which is to say, almost all of it is documented by multiple sources and the guy confessed publicly.
Which is a wee problem for me because those (Archive site) links I've been sprinkling through posts for the past year as more and more news sites decide they don't want anyone to read them?
Well, those links point to Archive.IS, but it's the same software and the same person.
I've switched to using Brave to prepare these posts, because it seems better at dodging around that problem, but it does mean that if you're using a different browser you might not be able to read the linked content.
On the other hand, I always, always present the full unvarnished truth without so much as editorialising.
Mostly.
Sometimes.
Tech News
- Well, so much for that: Intel's next-generation Nova Lake desktop CPU range is likely to arrive at CES 2027. (Tom's Hardware)
Theories are that AMD has been planning not to launch Zen 6 until 2027 anyway, at least since they were close enough to launch to have a specific timeframe in mind. But Intel was promising Nova Lake this year as recently as January.
- It's not Nova Lake, but Intel's Bartlett Lake is on its way and will support up to 12 Performance cores, compared to a maximum of 8 on any current Intel mainstream desktop processor. (Tom's Hardware)
And it has hyperthreading, so 24 threads on that high-end model.
One small problem: While it does run in the old reliable Socket 1700 (used by Intel's 12th, 13th, and 14th generation chips) it is intended for industrial customers needing guaranteed supply for the next decade, and won't be available in retail channels at all. And ASRock has already said that they won't support these chips in their motherboards, so an upgrade might be off the table.
- Do not eat audio equipment. (The Guardian)
Got it. Thanks. What would we do without you?
- How far back in time can you understand English. (Dead Language Society)
I've seen similar tests floating around recently, and the answer is pretty consistently 1300 AD. You have to know a few little tricks - the old long S ſ, thorn þ, and yogh ȝ characters have long fallen out of use, plus at some point u and v were merged and before that w was just two u characters.
But go back further and there's more change in each of the three prior centuries than in all the years since.
Handy guide to keep if the Tardis translator circuit is on the blink and you don't speak Latin.
- China's CXMT is at it again, selling previous-generation DDR4 memory at half the price of anyone else. (Korea Herald)
CXMT was called out and sanctioned for this behaviour - at the time it was dumping new DDR4 memory on the market for less than the price of used.
Now it's... Well, it's doing exactly the same thing again, but this time it's raking in the dough thanks to massive global price increases rather than depending on CCP subsidies.
- Xbox is dead. (The Verge)
Well, that's just great.
Microsoft has turfed long-time head of their gaming division, Phil Spencer, who admittedly had not been doing a great job of things lately, and also his expected successor Sarah Brand, in favour of Asha Sharma, formerly the company's President of AI Slop. And before that she was COO at Instacart.
No experience with the games industry at all, but again, Spencer was a veteran in the industry and totally screwed things up anyway.
Musical Interlude
Song is Tommy-Gun by Royal Republic. Anime is the one and only Black Lagoon. Accept no substitutes or your attack helicopter may encounter a inconvenient torpedo.
Disclaimer: Okay, so it does work. I thought it did.
Disclaimer: Okay, so it does work. I thought it did.
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Saturday, February 21
Daily News Stuff 21 February 2026
Explosive Edition
Explosive Edition
Top Story
- Discord continues to go from strength to strength, at least insofar as the levels of mishandling its introduction of age verification and the number of users fleeing the platform. (Ars Technica)
I never much liked Discord; its interface is awkward and annoying. But the age verification thing was pretty much forced on it by fascist governments in Europe and, uh, Australia.
On the other hand, the company did itself no favours by claiming that uploaded ID documents would remain secure after they had already leaked.
And even less so with the latest incident where, after reasserting that documents would be deleted immediately after they were verified - which we already knew was untrue, because deleted documents can't be leaked - they contradicted themselves in an official announcement and then deleted the announcement and pretended they had never announced it.
Tech News
- Pinterest - which apparently still exists - is drowning in a sea of AI slop and AI moderation. (404 Media)
Pinterest went all-in on AI and found themselves in the worst of all possible worlds.
- Same again only Facebook. (Pilk)
If only someone had seen this coming ten years ago.
- Google blocked 1.75 million Play Store submissions in 2025. (Bleeping Computer)
That's 1.75 million fake apps.
Time to release the badgers.
- Overclocking a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 to 850MHz. (Pimoroni)
The Pico 2 runs at 150MHz out of the box, but can clock over 300MHz at the default 1.1V. Increasing that to 1.3V takes you over 400MHz. Beyond that you have to start breaking the rules, but that takes you a long way.
- AMD's Zen 6 chips - probably to be called the Ryzen 10000 series - may not reach the desktop until next year. (WCCFTech)
They will show up this year, but perhaps only in servers.
Intel says it is still on track to launch its Nova Lake desktop chips this year, with up to 52 cores and 288MB of cache, so they might have a window to claw back some market share.
- Meta and other tech firms are banning OpenClaw, formerly Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot, because it is hopelessly insecure in every possible way. (Wired) (archive site)
A coworker set up an OpenClaw instance in a secure sandbox to try it out. While it couldn't do anything too awful from inside its padded cell, it took me literally 30 seconds to find a major vulnerability.
- OpenAI - which now employs the creator of OpenClaw - may be doomed. (Ben Evans)
Oh no.
Anyway.
Not AI companies generally, just OpenAI specifically.
Still it's something to look forward to.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: All yours except where prohibited by law. 10c deposit in South Australia.
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Friday, February 20
Daily News Stuff 20 February 2026
Tailguard Edition
Song is Run by OneRepublic. Anime featured are Five Centimeters per Second, Weathering With You, and Your Name.
Disclaimer: TGIF is a gift seen from an unfamiliar angle.
Tailguard Edition
Top Story
- The US government is building a specifically VPN-enabled website to allow Euroserfs to access content banned by their fascist overlords. (Reuter)
Radio Free Europe, part two. Only this time the Europeans aren't being oppressed by the Soviet Union, but by themselves.
- Why Europe doesn't have a Tesla. (Works In Progress)
The article highlights the continent's absurdly restrictive labour laws which are certainly a key part of the problem.
But European leaders have decided on a slow and messy suicide, and many of their voters are entirely on board with this.
Tech News
- PromptSpy is the first known Android malware to use generative AI at runtime. (Bleeping Computer)
Which is interesting, because it uses Google Gemini and that's not free. With a bit of counter-hacking you could bankrupt the bastards.
- Very not free, in fact. (The Red Beard)
Although Google Gemini has nominally lower prices and a larger context window than (for example) Anthropic's Claude, it works differently and will very happily burn through all your money to construct the perfect answer to a question you never intended to ask.
- It's an expanded D&D dice set: AMD's Ryzen 10000 series due later this year is expected to come in 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 20, and 24 sides cores. (Tom's Hardware)
There was no reason AMD couldn't have put out a 10-core CPU (from Zen 3 onwards, anyway), it just wasn't terribly practical.
Now, though, 10 is the new 6 and 20 is the new 12 - a pair of disabled cores per chip.
- The human behind the rogue AI bot "Crabby Rathbun" that has been trying to push unwanted patches into random Python projects has come forward - maybe - and apologised - sort of. (The Shamblog)
It's depressing if accurate, because it points to a future not only of unending slop, but of increasingly aggressive slop generators.
- At least we can hack them. (The Register)
That scene in the movie Independence Day where the alien mothership is destroyed by an uploaded virus suddenly seems a lot more plausible if they were running AI on their computers:Prompting each of them to generate 16-character passwords featuring special characters, numbers, and letters in different cases, produced what appeared to be complex passphrases. When submitted to various online password strength checkers, they returned strong results. Some said they would take centuries for standard PCs to crack.
Sounds good.
Too good to be true:The researchers took to Claude, running the Opus 4.6 model, and prompted it 50 times, each in separate conversations and windows, to generate a password. Of the 50 returned, only 30 were unique (20 duplicates, 18 of which were the exact same string), and the vast majority started and ended with the same characters.
If your "random" password generator returns the same result 36% of the time, you have a big problem. And it's actually worse than that:The team used two methods of estimating entropy, character statistics and log probabilities. They found that 16-character entropies of LLM-generated passwords were around 27 bits and 20 bits respectively.
20 bits of entropy is four lower-case letters. You don't need a supercomputer to crack that; with enough patience you could do it by hand.
- The most recent piece of technology I own is a 3D printer from 2024 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever tries to report me to the government. (Adafruit)
New legislation introduced in California would not only require 3D printers to match all designs against a central database before being permitted to begin work, but would require the printers themselves to be so registered, and would make it a crime to sell or transfer unregistered printers.
Musical Interlude
Song is Run by OneRepublic. Anime featured are Five Centimeters per Second, Weathering With You, and Your Name.
Disclaimer: TGIF is a gift seen from an unfamiliar angle.
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Thursday, February 19
Daily News Stuff 19 February 2026
Insufficient Obsession Edition
Insufficient Obsession Edition
Top Story
- Open source game engine Godot is getting overwhelmed with pull requests on GitHub. (PC Gamer)
It's taken a surprising amount of time for AI to turn into an avalanche of spam like email and blog comments.
But it's here now, and the spam filters need to catch up.
Quickly.
Tech News
- The CEO of SSD controller company Phison says many consumer electronics companies will be forced to close their doors because they can't buy the chips to continue operations. (Tom's Hardware)
In the talk, he describes a meeting in China where he witnessed mobile and automotive companies (presumably major ones) pleading suppliers for flash memory. He concludes that smaller firms may not be able to secure any flash supply at all, stating that "consumer electronics are finished," and that the market "will see a lot of victims" in the second half of 2026.
There is at least a light at the end of the tunnel.Later in the interview he says that he "[tells his clients] that if the first quarter of this year is painful, really painful, then by year-end, they'll definitely jump off a building."
But it's an oncoming train.
- The Dutch defense secretary says you can jailbreak an F35 just like you can an iPhone, so pissant Eurocrats don't need to worry about the US. (The Register)
First, you can't jailbreak iPhones.
Second, you can't jailbreak F35s either. Unless you are prepared to somehow replace the avionics and the software yourself.
Third, a supplicant threatening their own benefactor rarely turns out well.
But then, the Netherlands - at least, the lower house in their parliament, it has yet to pass their senate - just approved a 36% annual tax on unrealised capital gains, so I think they are simply incapable of learning at this point.
- How many bits do you need to use to create a unique ID tag for everything in the universe, ever? (Jason Fantl)
Less than 800 bits.
For each subatomic particle, at each instant in time.
Whether you attach the little tags with string or tape is left as an exercise for the student.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Ten points to House M for picking up on the astronomical disclaimer yesterday.
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