Microsoft joins the World Nuclear Association, Google and Amazon invest in Small Modular Reactor (SMR) technology. The first deployments of SMRs could be used to power AI anime waifu chatbots.
Satellite TV was revolutionary in Europe, but in Ireland & the UK, its days are numbered. The Astra satellites at 28.2°E, are nearing the end of their service lives, and KA-Sat 9A (Saorsat in Ireland) ends its service life around 2026. You may have to talk to your Granny about IPTV soon.
The European Processor Initiative has developed its first ARM based European designed microprocessor (Rhea) and RISC-V vector/stencil/tensor accelerator chip (EPAC). No path to consumer commercialisation that I can see. That’s going to make TMSC charge an arm and a leg for fabbing low volume parts.
It’s remarkable that PowerPC is dead in the consumer market. At one point, it was in the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii all at the same time. ~300M units in homes. Now we’ve got x86-64 or ARM. Maybe you’ll get a RISC-V CPU on the controller of your next SSD. Maybe you won’t.
The internal battery of my Sega Saturn has gone kaput. So tonight I party like it’s 1994.
IPV6 is now the infrastructure protocol of the Internet, and most end users never noticed. HTTP3 is built into all Chrome-derived web browsers. It’s been in web servers since 2019. Handsets will make it the default. And most users will never notice. Except for their page loads getting faster.
20 a month for access to AI has created history’s largest beta test group. I think mass exposure is a good thing, as the more people use it, the better they’ll get at detecting when AI starts making things up. There’s a point where you can almost feel it collapse under its context window.
Having looked at several different public DNS resolvers I can say that those who have DNS Over TLS running correctly are the large operations (money to hire nerds with OCD) and the one person outfits (has nerd OCD). There’s a lot of poorly configured junk out there from those providers in between.
The male urge to stay up all night putting 10Gbps Ethernet into the house and building a DNS resolver & cache “because if I dumped that hardware it would just be e-waste anyway.”
Then I watched this week’s episode of Foundation, where none of my networking changes mattered.
Larry Ellison’s dream of revolutionizing agriculture on his private island of Lanai has led to one of Hawaii’s most expensive produce offerings: lettuce, which is priced at $24 per pound.
The Oracle database was a hell of a trick. But Larry has a disease where he thinks he can repeat it on anything.
I’m impressed by the HD remaster of The X-Files on streaming. I was never a “monster of the week” series fan so I skipped it when it first aired, but this show now looks pristine. It’s a great looking procedural TV time capsule show.
It’s amazing that the Atari ST had such an effect on 80s and 90s music. Some engineer pitched building in MIDI because it was a cheap differentiator versus the Amiga. That gave bedroom musicians a digital music studio in a box. Wintel killed the ST. Internet piracy nearly killed the music biz.
I remember mocking No Man’s Sky when it first came out. It was janky and felt small. I’m not laughing now. It’s possibly had the best comeback in gaming history.
Weird streaming issue where some services claimed to be having technical issues. Quad9 was routing my IPv6 DNS lookups to a resolver of theirs in the US. DNS0.eu routes it just up the road from here and the streams are flowing. I’ll use that for now.
Today is failed hard drive destruction day. Which involves a Torx 6 & 8 set of screwdrivers to get into the case and then a hammer to finish off the platters. Five down, three to go.
Thomas Harris: Red Dragon
Media has made killers cute. We've given them sardonic voice overs in TV shows. Some have become "I can fix them" characters in books. They'll kill only the bad people, or so the authors would have us believe. That's not how these people work. The reality is that everyone around a serial killer will be in some way damaged or destroyed by them. Other people's pain is their point. Red Dragon, written in 1981, doesn't do cute.
Dante: The Divine Comedy
When Dante wrote this narrative poem he did so in Italian instead of Latin to make it as accessible as possible. Alas, I can't read 14th century Italian so I have to depend on translators and their copious amount of footnotes. Over the past 700 years the footnotes have piled up at the bottom of the page like centuries of snow. Dante would be horrified. Ignoring the opinions of academics and slogging my way through the translated poem, this is a groundbreaking piece of creativity.
Lorde’s transparent CD for her latest album is giving older players fits. Because it’s not a CD. It doesn’t have the Compact Disc logo. It’s a low reflectivity disc being used in a laser reader that requires reflectivity. It probably leans heavily on modern CD player error correction just to work.
The Naked Gun (2025)
In 1996, Liam Neeson starred in the historical drama Michael Collins; likewise, Pamela Anderson was in Barb Wire. If you had told me at the time that they’d reboot The Naked Gun franchise together, I’d have laughed at you. In this reboot of a franchise that first started in 1982 with the six-episode Police Squad!, Neeson’s Frank Drebin Jr. takes on Danny Heuston’s reverse effective altruist green technology billionaire. Anderson’s crime writer has a family connection and a score to settle, which brings her into Drebin’s life.
I walked into someone’s office to have a discussion, and he grabbed a stack of dot matrix printer paper and then marked up the issue we were discussing in penmanship that was so clear you could almost smell the computer pioneer off it.