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  1. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    Five months later, Nvidia’s $100 billion OpenAI investment plan has fizzled out

    Fine. But if the government has to bail out Nvidia, there damn well better be an RTX 5090 and 64GB of DDR5 dropped off in my mailbox come tax refund time.
  2. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    Netflix claims subscribers will get “more content for less” if it buys HBO Max

    Sarandos claimed that the merger would “create more value for consumers shareholders.” FTFY
  3. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    Newborn’s death spurs raw milk warning in New Mexico

    Unfortunately, it depends. For very large-scale, industrialized dairy operations -- you know -- the ones where the mass-distributed grocery store milk comes from -- it's probably as described to varying extents. There are simply too many cows to milk in a limited amount of time to clean every...
  4. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    China bans all retractable car door handles, starting next year

    He actually wasn't incorrect. Decades ago, the door latches themselves weren't necessarily as reliable at keeping the doors latched in a crash (Or even in certain driving conditions!) as the ones we have today. Locking them generally disconnected the door handles* and blocked the latch itself...
  5. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    ICE protester says her Global Entry was revoked after agent scanned her face

    My wife and I have been re-watching B5 lately. Some of the cautionary themes in the storyline are a bit more chilling than ever, this time through.
  6. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    ICE protester says her Global Entry was revoked after agent scanned her face

    I was opposed to the formation of DHS from the get-go. We already had adequate internal security under the FBI; we could have focused on just improving communications and information clearinghouses for the benefit of the FBI and state/local authorities. DHS' mission smacked of over-arching...
  7. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    Web portal leaves kids’ chats with AI toy open to anyone with Gmail account

    This is an absolute privacy nightmare, for parents, as well as for children (who haven't even developed much of a concept of "privacy" yet but are inadvertently giving it up. And I don't even want to go down the rabbit hole of allowing a child to form any kind of connection with a LLM-based...
  8. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    BBC’s Lord of the Flies miniseries gets a trailer

    There's a lot of underlying cultural context behind Golding's novel. British has evolved considerably since the 1950s, but at the time the novel exploits a very established cultural touchstone -- the boys' boarding school experience -- and extrapolates one possibility of what could happen if the...
  9. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    How to encrypt your PC’s disk without giving the keys to Microsoft

    Yes, these are dodgy key-sharing sellers not entirely unlike game-key sharing sellers. They usually break up Volume Licensing keys, or get ahold of individual gray-market keys. It's at minimum against legal terms of licensing, at most paying for piracy. (As someone with roots in tech going back...
  10. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    eBay bans illicit automated shopping amid rapid rise of AI agents

    That's sort of what "robo-advisor" platforms are in stock trading and financial management platforms. No, they haven't gone full-LLM and probably never will. But elements of AI agents will likely find their place in tightly-controlled niches of the platforms. It's actually where an LLM, using a...
  11. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    Blue Origin: We want to have a megaconstellation, too

    He has enough money that he can fund the infrastructure to make more money either way.
  12. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    TCL to gain majority ownership over Sony’s Bravia TVs

    I miss the Sony of the 70s and 80s that brought so many ground-breaking products to market, all at impeccable quality levels. I always felt like Sony of the 90s and onward was mostly re-hashing what they'd already pioneered, and slowly figuring how to save a little more money here and there to...
  13. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    Asus confirms its smartphone business is on indefinite hiatus

    The ROG phone has always been essentially the Zenfone with different up-market features like even more battery and a binned or up-market SOC, and different or up-market camera depending on which version over the years. In some cases, ROG phone production has cannibalized some Zenfone production...
  14. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents

    That reminds me of this observation from the article: That's basically a truism about project management -- any kind of project. It's easy enough to get close the finish line, but actually crossing it and completing the project often concentrates a lot of review, troubleshooting/debugging...
  15. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    This may be the grossest eye pic ever—but the cause is what’s truly horrifying

    He lived in the US, so yes, healthcare affordability could be seriously in question.
  16. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    This may be the grossest eye pic ever—but the cause is what’s truly horrifying

    Given the recent Ars coverage of Boar's Head meats, I'm preemptively swearing off their products. And thanks to the government's cuts to the FDA and USDA, I'm going to be super-critical of the meats, poultry and fish that enter my kitchen. If there's any question at all, it goes out. I don't...
  17. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    ChatGPT wrote “Goodnight Moon” suicide lullaby for man who later killed himself

    It seems to me like AI chatbot programming is steeped in the same kind of "dopamine loop" that pervades the foundation so many other digital games and services. The sycophantic phrasing, the bids to continue the chat and to rely on the chatbot, even the outright lying to tell the user what they...
  18. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    Buttons in cars: Australian crash testers are latest to require them

    Tesla is a US automaker... Of course they did something like that. I say that as an American myself, while firmly facepalming.
  19. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    Buttons in cars: Australian crash testers are latest to require them

    Screens and buttons (especially chiclet-type buttons) don't have to be mutually exclusive. It's possible to build a physical button panel on top of what's effectively a touchscreen. The buttons are transparent, with a transparent membrane layer which activates button functions, and the screen...
  20. Mungus the Unhyphenated

    The most fascinating monitors at CES 2026

    The new RGB-stripe tech is interesting. I didn't even realize that text fringing was a problem on OLED monitors -- I've been using a 1440p Dell Ultrasharp curved ultrawide that's around ten years old now. Excellent color and contrast (though not HDR), and very clear text. But no variable refresh...