tech, culture, and whatever's online today.
EPYC 9006 brings Zen 6 with up to 256 cores, the MI455X packs 432 GB of HBM4, and the Helios rack is AMD's most serious swing at Nvidia yet. The numbers are vendor numbers, but the customer list is real.
A joint Science and Retraction Watch investigation found that a Shanghai hospital treated a six-year-old with an experimental base-editing therapy, charged her family $860,000, and never reported her death. Every safeguard that should have stopped it failed in order, and the public trial registry still says the study is going fine.
A headline made the rounds claiming Linux cracked 5% of Steam. The number really did appear on Valve's survey page, in a month the survey was visibly glitching. The sustained figure is 3.69%, a record anyway, built by the Steam Deck and the gaming distros that grew up around it.
The person who has triaged GNOME's vulnerability reports for nearly six years is cutting the disclosure window to 30 days, halting forwarding to projects that ban AI content, and stepping down. The reason is a flood of machine-generated reports.
Subscription fatigue plus privacy fatigue has quietly rebuilt the home server. The 2026 homelab stack is genuinely good now. The catch is that you are the IT department.
The Xteink X4 is a cheap, locked-down pocket e-reader. CrossPoint, a community open-source firmware, turns it into the reader it should have shipped as, and installing it takes one click in a browser, provided you buy the right unit.
DIY Perks built a beautiful all-in-one from a salvaged laptop board and a shattered iMac's Retina panel, for about a third of what the same power costs new.
LegacyHive runs on every supported version of Windows, July's patch included. Nightmare Eclipse released it anyway, then tore out the pages that would let anyone turn it into a weapon.
The loudest names in paid data removal share a family tree with the internet's scraping infrastructure. I spent time checking the receipts, and the same holding company gets paid on both sides of the fence.
Valve rebases its compatibility layer onto Wine 11.0, un-breaks the EA catalog, and the proudest names on the list shipped in 1998. Meanwhile the press is hyping the one feature Valve's own changelog never mentions.
While the tech industry argued about the future of microblogging, the open social web quietly transformed into a durable standard. Now it just has to fix its front door.
At the RISC-V Summit in Bologna, an open, royalty-free chip ran a 7-billion-parameter model with no GPU and no cloud. The open ISA is suddenly everywhere, and people have started calling it the 'third pillar' of computing next to x86 and ARM. The 25 percent market-share number needs a closer look.
A peer-reviewed proposal argues that as we start hauling samples back from Mars and beyond, the safest place to open the containers is a robotic lab on the Moon, not one on Earth. The 'alien plague' headlines miss what the argument is actually about.
The supergiant isopod is internet-famous for skipping meals for years at a time. A new study finally explains the trick: a stomach that fills two-thirds of its body, an engine idled almost to a stop, and maybe a gene it borrowed from bacteria.
The itch.io summer sale is on through July 6th, a good chance to try some hidden gems while a larger share of your money goes to the people who made them. Here are two games I'm picking up to try and one I already love and think more people should play.
The latest numbers just broke every record on the books, and they all point one way: the memory crunch is only getting worse from here. Prices have already tripled and keep climbing, the world's supply is being vacuumed into AI data centers, and there is no real relief anywhere in sight.
The latest biweekly development release bundles FFmpeg's audio and video libraries, updates the Mono engine, reimplements the MSXML XSLPattern parser, and fixes 27 bugs.
The open-source engine's 4.7 release is stuffed with new tools, from rectangular area lights to a stable on-device Android editor. A quick tour of the highlights of a release too big to fully summarize.
For the second time in a decade, Microsoft says it has built a qubit from a brand-new state of matter, and for the second time independent physicists say the data does not show it. The pattern deserves more attention.
One anonymous person with a grudge dropped six Windows zero-days in six weeks, turned Defender against itself, and may have cracked BitLocker. The Linux flaws that set off alarms the same month took an entire global community to find, and the more dangerous streak got the least early attention.