• Agent harnesses like OpenClaw are changing how we build and run AI models.  (The Register)
  
  Oh, are they?
  
  
  
• The creator of OpenClaw burned through $1.3 million in OpenAI usage in a single month.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, that would certainly be a change.  But I like not living under a bridge.

• Halupedia is a Wikipeda-style website that is made up on the spot by AI.  (Halupedia)
  
  It does remember articles it has already created - mostly - but it fills them with links to related articles that it may or may not have created, and if you click through to a never before seen page it fills it in for you.
  
  It's a lot like the SCP Project but faster and less coherent and lacking the bits of whimsy and beauty amid the cosmic horror.
  
  Also, don't ask about 1788.  We don't talk about 1788.
  
  
  
• Can Apple's new MacBook Neo game?  No.  (Digital Foundry)
  
  Leave aside for the moment the sorry state of gaming on MacOS generally, it has about one third the graphics performance of the iPad Pro.  On the CPU side, while the single-threaded performance is quite good, it is so power-constrained that it runs slower than a Ryzen 5 1600 from nine years ago.  Great for a phone CPU, but it is what it is.
  
  
  
• Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt did not receive a warm welcome when he tried to sell the wonders of AI in his commencement speech at the University of Arizona.  (NBC)
  
  At all.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, May 19 2026 01:07 AM (s6adZ)

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• If you're looking for an inexpensive CPU to soothe the bite of memory and storage prices, should you choose AMD's 7600X3D, or Intel's new 250K?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Both have six full-speed cores and the AMD chip has an extra 64MB of cache, making it 10% faster for games.
  
  However, the Intel chip is 28% faster for single-threaded productivity tasks, which don't often take great advantage of the larger cache.
  
  And for multi-threaded tasks the Intel chip is 114% faster.
  
  On the fourth hand, AMD's socket AM5 platform currently supports Zen 4 and 5, and will see Zen 6 and probably Zen 7 in the future, so you have a plenty of upgrade options if you start with the 7600X3D.  Intel's Socket 1851 ends with the 250K and 270K, there's a new socket and chipset out later this year.

• Asus is jumping into the memory market - assembling modules, not manufacturing chips - but don't expect any relief from high prices.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  $880 for a 48GB kit is no bargain.
  
  
  
• 2K Games is killing its racing game Lego 2K Drive.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It will disappear from online stores (like Steam) on the 19th and the multiplayer servers will shut down at the end of May next year.
  
  I already have it (though I have never played it) because it was in a Humble Choice monthly package.  Which is where I get most my games these days.
  
  
  
• Europe is spending billions of dollars to build its own clouds to escape pernicious American ideals like personal responsibility and civil liberties.  They forgot just one thing.  (The Register)
  
  Well, a lot of things, but as the article points out, Europe doesn't make its own CPUs.
  
  
  
• Zerostack is an AI coding agent written in Rust.  (Crates)
  
  All the hard stuff is running in remote datacenters anyway, but that doesn't mean the easy part should be pure slop with vulnerabilities oozing from every pore looking at you OpenClaw.
  
  Or even Claude Code, which is no paragon of efficiency or of safety.
  
  Zerostack uses 12MB of RAM.  Not gigabytes, megabytes.

• SpaceX has shown off its Starship V3 and is planning for a test flight as early as this week.  (Teslarati)
  
  The upgrades include an improved PEZ dispenser.
  
  Disappointingly, the PEZ dispenser is the name given to the release system for satellite clusters launched to orbit and doesn't actually dispense PEZ.
  
  Starship V3 completed a static fire test last month and the test flight is scheduled for the 19th.

• OpenAI wants ChatGPT to access your bank accounts.  (The Verge)
  
  Not their bank accounts.  Just yours.
  
  
  
• Americans would rather have a nuclear power plant in their backyard than a datacenter.  (The Register)
  
  I wonder what might be causing this negative sentiment.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix workers are now the hottest marriage prospects in South Korea, ahead of doctors, lawyers, and corporate executives.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In unrelated news, the company just gave its workers an aggregate $2.5 billion in bonuses.  I think that's for a single quarter.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Samsung is facing the prospect of a protracted strike by its own staff after failing to reach an agreement on bonuses.  (PC Magazine)
  
  If the strike goes ahead as planned, the company faces losses of around $1 billion per day.
  
  Memory prices have increased on the news, because of course they have.
  
  
  
• Scientific paper preprint site ArXiv plans to ban researchers for a year if they submit AI-generated slop.  (404 Media)  (archive site)
  
  One em-dash and you're out.
  
  
  
• The problem is the threat is only effective if they catch you.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  And AI is getting better at disguising its slop.

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, May 17 2026 02:43 AM (oJgNG)

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• AMD has announced FSR 4 upscaling support for Radeon RX 6000 and 7000 cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A year after it was released for the 9000 series, and eight months after the source code for a version that worked on RX 6000 and 7000 cards was accidentally leaked.
  
  This is good news for owners of older AMD graphics cards - and also for Xbox and PlayStation owners, which also use custom versions of those older graphics designs.  In fact Sony has announced its own release of FSR 4 technology for the PlayStation 4.
  
  It may be the console contracts that held AMD back from announcing FSR 4 for older cards for so long.  They could have released a beta driver for PCs, but for consoles it has to just work.
  
  The update will be out for the RX 7000 range in July; RX 6000 owners will need to wait until early next year.

• Cerebras, the company that makes the world's largest CPUs - the chips are literally the size of a dinner plate - has launched its IPO and is now valued at $66 billion.  (The Register)
  
  Cerebras has been around for a decade and has been shipping working silicon for years, so this valuation isn't vapour.  It's just a lot of money.
  
  
  
• The open source and right-to-repair community has declared war on leading 3D printer maker Bambu Labs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At the core of this is Bambu's move to restrict access to its open-source software.
  
  
  
• Subnautica 2 is out and has already sold a million copies.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In two hours.
  
  I think it may be a success.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

• This must be Thursday.  I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
  
  Fragnesia is the fourth local privilege escalation bug to hit Linux in the past two weeks.  (Phoronix)
  
  Bad news: No major distributions have patches out yet.
  
  Good news: It's in the same kernel modules as all three other vulnerabilities, so if you applied the quick fix of just disabling those modules entirely, you're protected this time as well.
  
  
  
• Oh, and five new vulnerabilities in CPanel since the weekend.  (InMotion)
  
  But these ones aren't being actively exploited yet, so just update and you're good.

• Samsung memory workers are planning to strike over bonuses.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  SK Hynix is paying its staff close to half a million dollars each in bonuses this year on the back of record profits, with numbers expected to be even higher in both respects next year.
  
  Samsung decided to play dumb.
  
  
  
• Intel and Qualcomm will be providing CPUs for Google's upcoming Googlebook.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• If BitLocker reared its ugly head and encrypted your drive without you activating it in the first place, you can now get your data back.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not because BitLocker has been fixed.  Quite the opposite.
  
  
  
• LLMs are breaking dumb 20 year old system designs.  (/dev/knill)
  
  I reinserted the word "dumb" into the headline which the author inexplicably misplaced.
  
  
  
• AMD has increased its share of the CPU market from 24% to 30% in the past year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Ten years ago the company was on death's door.  Now it is being held back only by supply constraints at TSMC.
  
  
  
• Apple has reportedly signed a deal to produce Mac and iPhone CPUs at Intel.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Perhaps no coincidence given that Apple has the same supply constraints as AMD.
  
  
  
• Software developers say AI is rotting their brains.  (404 Media)  (archive site)
  
  Because they're holding it wrong.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 14 2026 11:06 PM (Ma5Hu)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 15 2026 12:12 AM (Ma5Hu)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 15 2026 12:15 AM (Ma5Hu)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, May 15 2026 02:40 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: Robin Munn at Friday, May 15 2026 05:38 PM (oZnrC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, May 15 2026 10:38 PM (s6adZ)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, May 16 2026 12:40 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 16 2026 11:28 AM (1zWbY)

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• Google's Googlebook is the company's answer to Google's Chromebook.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a laptop running Android.
  
  Which raises the question: Why didn't the Chromebook run Android in the first place?
  
  There are no specs or indeed any hardware information at all; that will be left to Google's partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.
  
  It might potentially be a good time to be launching a laptop that doesn't need 32GB of RAM to get out of bed - as indicated by the runaway success of Apple's MacBook Neo.  And there's a slim chance that at least one of the partner companies won't screw things up.

• TokenSpam.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These people are literally retarded.
  
  Amazon is requiring its developers to use AI tools to boost productivity.  I mean, fair enough up to a point; I use Claude to review code and it catches conceptual issues and pattern mismatches that my IDE can't.
  
  But Amazon is measuring productivity by the amount each developer costs the company on their AI tool usage, with perfectly predictable results.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is constructing a new datacenter in Kenya that will - if completed - use half the power of the entire country.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's a bit of an overstatement; the number is closer to 40%.
  
  
  
• Micron is sampling 256GB DDR5 modules running at 9200MHz.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You can't have one.
  
  
  
• The EU is cracking down on TikTok and Instagram because they are...  Popular.  (CNBC)
  
  Honestly, that seems to be it.
  
  Time to cut the cables.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Robin Munn at Wednesday, May 13 2026 06:58 PM (NlLZz)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 13 2026 11:34 PM (21d6y)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 13 2026 11:55 PM (21d6y)

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• Digg is back - again - this time as an AI news aggregator.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That is, the content is about AI, but it seems to be ranked by human readers.
  
  I'm not sure why just AI  - though that is a hot topic at the moment - but Digg was originally a news aggregator just like this.

• Sales data from Korea indicates that SSD prices are up 63% and memory prices up 29%.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Compared with last month.
  
  
  
• The SINKER brand under the POWEV division within Jiahe Jinwei has announced it is shipping DDR5 modules for domestic, server, and industrial use.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yes, it's a Chinese company.  How could you tell?
  
  
  
• Who is the Palantir chore coat for, asks the Verge?  (The Verge)
  
  Well...
  
  
  
• The third season of The Rings of Power airs November 11.  (The Verge)
  
  I think there's some overlap there.
  
  
  
• Anthropic's bug-hunting Mythos AI is just a marketing stunt.  (The Register)
  
  Accoridng to the creator of the library and utility cURL, who knows a thing or two about AI bug hunting having been inundated with AI-generated bug reports for years.
  
  
  
• If AI writes your code, why use Python?  (Medium)
  
  Actually a very good question.
  
  Python is a great programming language for humans to use, because it makes it easy to get something up and running - at the cost of becoming slow and burdensome for large systems.
  
  But the same properties that make it easy for humans to write make it hard for AI models to reason about, and languages like Rust and Go that favour strict, static typing are easier for AI models to generate correctly and also compile to code that runs faster.
  
  The remaining win for Python is its massive ecosystem with modules like Numpy and PyTorch for numerical processing and AI respectively, but if you don't need to use those directly, why not go straight to Rust?
  
  
  
• AMD looks like it's gearing up to release the Radeon RX 9050.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's basically a slightly slower version of the 8GB 9060 XT, drawing slightly less power.  The recommended power supply has dropped from 500W to 450W, so we may be seeing a card that draws 120W or less.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 12 2026 10:42 PM (6Fjsh)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, May 13 2026 05:46 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 13 2026 05:56 AM (6Fjsh)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 13 2026 05:59 AM (6Fjsh)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, May 13 2026 07:37 AM (LDKo5)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, May 13 2026 08:40 AM (s6adZ)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 13 2026 11:47 PM (21d6y)

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• Valve's Steam Machine - the GabeCube - appears to be on its way.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's not going to be cheap thanks to the RAMpocalypse, but shipping manifests show that Valve has collected 50 tons of something in a warehouse, and the latest update to Steam includes four new product codes and a reservation queue that again appear to correspond to the new device.
  
  I'm not sure I'll get one - it's a low-end console replacement and I have multiple systems more powerful - but it's good to see signs of life.

• Open source repositories are getting slammed with 10 trillion downloads a year.  (ZDNet)
  
  It's a combination of AI slop and Node.JS slop.  And AI Node.JS slop and Node.JS AI slop.
  
  
  
• Speaking of slop, Anthropic says Claude went evil because of fictional depictions of evil AI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Same.
  
  
  
• Support for AMD's K5 - the company's first independently-designed x86 processor - will be removed from the Linux kernel with version 7.2.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The CPU launched in 1996, so I'd consider that fair enough.  And older Linux kernels aren't about to disappear.
  
  
  
• Speaking of old CPUs, here are eight from the 1970s, some of which I've never heard of.  (The Chip Letter)
  
  The TMX 1795 and the Mostek 5065 are new to me, as is the Electronic Arrays 9002.  Interesting point there: It had 64 bytes of on-chip memory, which is a single register today but this processor shipped fifty years ago.
  
  
  
• HP's Eliteboard has all of the disadvantages of a notebook with none of the advantages.  (The Register)
  
  It's a computer built into a keyboard.  Which might be okay if the keyboard layout was perfect and the system was cheap but it's neither of those.
  
  
  
• Fake DDR5 memory is "flooding" the PC market.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I put "flooding" in quotes because the example provided explicitly lists the memory as "completely junk".

Posted by: furball321 at Monday, May 11 2026 08:46 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 11 2026 09:51 PM (1zWbY)

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• NASA is planning a rescue mission for its Neils Gehrels Swift Observatory - a.k.a the Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer - which is sinking fast and will re-enter the atmosphere later this year without a boost.  (Spaceflight Now)
  
  Which is precisely what they plan to give it.
  
  
  
• Also sinking fast and being closely tracked by NASA is Mexico City.  (The Guardian)
  
  Large parts of the city are subsiding by more than two centimeters a month.  This causes problems.
  
  

• CPanel's terrible, horrible, no good very bad week.  (Copahost)
  
  CPanel issued patches for three new vulnerabilities over the weekend, after 44,000 CPanel servers were hacked in the past week.  (My own server was affected, but I managed to get it locked down before the wave of ransomware hit.  And I have off-site backups.)
  
  Since each server can host hundreds of websites, 44,000 hacked servers could affect a lot of people.
  
  
  
• With mid-range smartphone sales dropping as memory prices bite, Mediatek and Qualcomm have cut their production orders with TSMC for 5nm and 4nm chips.  AMD immediately took up the slack.  (WCCFTech)
  
  All current AMD CPUs (and GPUs) are built on TSMC's 5nm and 4nm processes - they don't use 3nm at all, and 2nm is set to arrive at the end of the year with Zen 6 - and AMD is selling every CPU they can churn out.
  
  
  
• I mentioned that Intel's stock recently hit a 20-year high.  You know who bought the dip?  The federal government.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The Trump Administration converted a Biden-era grant - which came with conditions attached that Intel couldn't meet - to a straightforward share purchase.
  
  At the bottom of the market.
  
  Oh, and Intel is currently in talks to manufacture chips for Apple 25% cheaper than TSMC.
  
  
  
• Fiber optic cables can listen in on your conversation.  (Science)
  
  If someone shines a laser down the cable and monitors the results very, very carefully.
  
  
  
• Micron is shipping a 245TB SSD.  (Nerds.xyz)
  
  Not one of the tiny M.2 drives, but a still compact U.2 2.5" model.

• Maybe we should just not install software for a bit.  (Xe Iaso)
  
  There's another new - or newish - Linux privilege escalation bug.  It's literally called Copy Fail 2: Electric Boogaloo.
  
  But under the hood it's abusing the same module as yesterday's Dirty Frag, so if you already applied the mitigation for that, you're protected from CF2EB.
  
  
  
• Also, my recommendation is don't install Ubuntu 26.04 just yet.  Unlike 24.04 which worked smoothly from release day, Ubuntu 26.04 still has some odd quirks.  Particularly if you want to use it under WSL and integrate with JetBrains IDEs (CLion in this case, but they'll all be the same here) where it just doesn't work.
  
  I went back to 24.04 and had no more issues.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Thousands of vibe-coded apps expose personal and corporate data to everyone on the internet.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  AI coding tools are like hiring an autistic teenager to program for you.  Great if your requirements are clearly defined and you check their work carefully.
  
  But if you just blindly deploy whatever they produce, that's on you.
  
  
  
• AI slop is killing online communities.  (rmoff)
  
  It's not that AI is intrinsically bad, anymore than email is bad.
  
  It's just that it makes being annoying far too easy:

  Material created with the assistance of AI is not bad in itself. It’s the purpose to which it's put.

  A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn't do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.  Done with the care and good intent of a human behind it, this is a nett positive.

  Bad AI slop, on the other hand, is monkeys throwing crap over the fence for a purpose other than furthering the community.  This includes spam, engagement farming, and simply thoughtless noise in a space which is not for that purpose.

  We need more spam filters.
  
  
  
• Mojo has gone beta.  (Mojolang)
  
  Mojo is a Python-like language (more so than, for example, Nim) that compiles directly to binary and has similar safety features to Rust.  It's designed to work with Python in both directions: Importing Mojo modules into Python code, and importing Python code into Mojo programs, though apparently the latter is more robust than the former.
  
  Not sure how well it works otherwise; the first release some years ago actually had a waiting list.  At least now you can just click a link and download it.  Well, you can't, but apparently you can install it with uv or pixi.