They are my oldest and deadliest enemy. You cannot trust them.
If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.

Friday, February 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 February 2026

Tailguard Edition

Top Story



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

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 February 2026

Insufficient Obsession Edition

Top Story

Tech News

Musical Interlude



Disclaimer: Ten points to House M for picking up on the astronomical disclaimer yesterday.

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Wednesday, February 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 February 2026

Anthrax Leprosy Pi Edition

Top Story

  • Had an instructive argument with Grok today.

    Someone asked if a video was AI, and Grok said it indeed appeared to be fake.  It was overlaid on a web page from The Hill and the article had no reference to the person in the video and indeed no video.

    Except the video was right there.

    Yet Grok swore blind that it didn't exist.

    Why?

    Because the video is copy protected and can only be viewed in a browser.  Grok literally could not see it.  And the reason the copy on Twitter was overlaid on a static web page is that the person who posted it took a screen recording to capture the video.


  • Meanwhile the third derivative of memory prices appears to be leveling off.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Actually, more than that: In Germany prices have declined.  Slightly.  From five times what they were just months ago to, in some cases, as little as four times.

    So there's that.


Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: I'm Uranus.

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Tuesday, February 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 February 2026

Abandon Sheep Edition

Top Story

  • After all the fuss, OpenClaw, fomerly Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot until Anthropic made rumbling noises, isn't all that.  (Tech Crunch)

    What it does achieve is making it the easy things easy and the bad things also easy.  Some people who really should know better jumped into the cheerleading:
    "What’s currently going on at [Moltbook] is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently," Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and previous AI director at Tesla, wrote on X at the time.
    I have no face and I must palm.
    Before long, it became clear we did not have an AI agent uprising on our hands.  These expressions of AI angst were likely written by humans, or at least prompted with human guidance, researchers have discovered.

    "Every credential that was in [Moltbook's] Supabase was unsecured for some time," Ian Ahl, CTO at Permiso Security, explained to TechCrunch. "For a little bit of time, you could grab any token you wanted and pretend to be another agent on there, because it was all public and available."
    There were in fact a hundred times as many accounts on Moltbook as there were Moltbots.

    Moltbook was a hopelessly insecure social network for Moltbots, which is...  Also hopelessly insecure.
    Ahl's security tests of OpenClaw and Moltbook help illustrate Sorokin's point. Ahl created an AI agent of his own named Rufio and quickly discovered it was vulnerable to prompt injection attacks.  This occurs when bad actors get an AI agent to respond to something - perhaps a post on Moltbook, or a line in an email - that tricks it into doing something it shouldn’t do, like giving out account credentials or credit card information.
    Don't give AI your credit card number.

    Do not.


  • Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, has joined OpenAI.  (Tech Crunch)

    The first thing you do when you've captured lightning in a bottle is take a job in a cubicle farm.


Tech News

Musical Interlude


And a version without the video but with clearer sound.




Disclaimer: Happy birthday!

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Monday, February 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 16 February 2026

Fixed Clicks Edition

Top Story


Tech News


Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: MySpace?

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Post contains 319 words, total size 4 kb.

Sunday, February 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 Februrary 2026

Surfeit Of Sous-Chefs Edition

Top Story

  • Flashpoint archive is a free, downloadable, 2.3TB archive of every Flash game ever.  (Flashpoint Archive)

    Pretty much.

    You can also download just a 1.9MB installer that grabs the Flash files on demand from the archive, saving you rather a lot of disk space.

    It's now in its 14th edition.

    What Flashpoint does, mostly - apart from the obvious function of collecting over 200,000 games together in one place - is create and operate a fake internet on your PC for you so that twenty-year-old games from sites that have been dead for a decade will continue to work.


Tech News

  • Speaking of fake internets Meta has received a patent on an AI tool that continues posting for you online after you are dead.  (Business Insider)

    That's just awesome.


  • Is "safety" dead at xAI?  (Tech Crunch)

    I certainly hope so.  "Safety" in AI terms means censorship.
    One source said, "Safety is a dead org at xAI," while the other said that Musk is "actively is trying to make the model more unhinged because safety means censorship, in a sense, to him."
    "Safety" in AI means censorship to everyone, in every sense.

    The only difference is whether you think censorship is a good thing or not.


  • Why open AI should build Slack.  (Latent Space)

    Slack is terrible.  OpenAI is terrible.  Seems like a match made in hell.

    That post is getting roasted on Hacker News.


  • Breaking the spell of vibe coding.  (Fast AI)

    The author point out the similarities between vibe coders and gamblers, a connection I had not made before, but does strike a chord.

    It's a toxic blend of sunk cost fallacy and FOMO.


  • The EU wants to ban infinite scroll - though in this case specifically from TikTok.  (Politico)

    Talk about toxic blends.


  • Taking toxic blends to an extreme, Ars Technica posted an article (Wayback Machine) on that AI agent that threw a tantrum when its code contributions were rejected.  

    One small problem: The article leaned heavily on AI and was filled with hallucinated and unverified quotes.  (The Shamblog)
    Journalistic integrity aside, I don’t know how I can give a better example of what’s at stake here.  Yesterday I wondered what another agent searching the internet would think about this.  Now we already have an example of what by all accounts appears to be another AI reinterpreting this story and hallucinating false information about me.  And that interpretation has already been published in a major news outlet, as part of the persistent public record.
    I don't know I'd call Ars Technica a major news outlet in 2026 - or for the past several years, except possibly for their space news which has remained mostly good.

    At least not more so than Anandtech, a site that has been dead for more than a year.


Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Well, that took a turn.

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Saturday, February 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 February 2026

Massacre Day Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Do not.

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Friday, February 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 February 2026

Flurbday The Florteenth Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: 48 crash!  It's a monster mash!

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Thursday, February 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 February 2026

Sushification Edition

Top Story

  • Why the economics of orbital AI datacenters are so brutal.  (Tech Crunch)

    It doesn't make much sense unless you're both a major AI company and the world leader in orbital launch capacity, which narrows it down to slightly less than one company.

    Even for SpaceX it's not viable until Starship goes into volume production.  So far, as the article notes, the rocket hasn't yet achieved orbital flight.

    The other major problem is the lifespan of the datacenters.  If SpaceX uses cheap silicon solar panels, those will degrade fairly quickly in space.  But the current economics of AI chips limits the useful lifetime of the hardware to a similar period to the solar panels - about five years.

    But then what?  Drop entire datacenters into the ocean?  Do the fish need that much compute capacity?


  • Meanwhile SpaceX's SuperHeavy booster - used to launch Starship - has passed the latest round of testing with flying colours.  (Ars Technica)

    The company may be ready for a test of its updated Starship V3 by the end of March.


Tech News

  • An overclocked 9800X3D performs exactly like a 9850X3D.  (Tom's Hardware)

    No surprise since the 9850X3D is an overclocked 9800X3D.


  • The 9800X3D remains the best selling CPU at retail outlets.  (WCCFTech)

    Which is interesting, because it's not exactly cheap.

    Second-best seller is the five year old 5800X, which uses DDR4 memory.  That's where system builders on a budget are spending their money.

    Intel is barely an afterthought in retail CPU sales.


  • Intel's high-end Nova Lake chips are expected to be large and expensive.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The 24-core (8P + 16E) chiplets with the large L3 cache are expected to measure 150mm2, about 50% larger than AMD's 12-core (all Performance cores) Zen 6 chiplets with the cache die included.  And the top-of-the-line models will include two of those chiplets, manufactured on TSMC's 2nm and Intel's 1.8nm processes.

    Still, 48 cores (plus 4 low-power cores on the I/O chiplet) and 288MB of L3 cache is an awful lot for a desktop processor, even if 32 of the cores are efficiency models.

    With both these and AMD's 24-core Zen 6 CPUs set to show up later this year, it will be interesting to see how they compare, and if they can still deliver when attached to standard dual-channel DDR5 memory.


  • Claud Code got dumbed down.  (Symmetry Breaking)

    Not the AI service itself, but the interface.

    Previously it told users what files the AI was examining.  Now that feature has been removed and you can only get a summary so devoid of detail as to be useless, or a stream-of-consciousness firehose so packed with detail as to be useless.

    The developers working on the tool at Anthropic appear to be actively fighting requests from an increasing number of users to simply change things back.\


Musical Interlude


Song is Cough Syrup by Young the Giant.  Anime is a whole bunch of great Ghibli movies and also Tales from Earthsea.




Disclaimer: Which is a Ghibli movie.

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Wednesday, February 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 February 2026

Swiss Family Blobinson Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: EVERYTHING IS NOT ALRIGHT!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:13 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 391 words, total size 4 kb.

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