Daily Tech News 8 November 2025

• Sam Altman's pants are totally on fire. (Marcus on AI)
  
  So, Sam Altman recently said that OpenAI was not asking for government loan guarantees to bail the company out when things blew up in their faces, after Trump Administration AI Czar David Sacks said point-blank that no such guarantees would be forthcoming after OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said that the company was in fact seeking government guarantees for its several septillion dollars in loans, currently backed only by its annual revenues of $3.18.
  
  With me so far?
  
  Well, slight problem. The author of this piece did a little digging and found that Sam Altman went on a podcast just recently to say that the company was seeking such loan guarantees, and documents still on OpenAI's own web site confirm this.
  
  There's a reason I call him Sam Altman-Fried.
  
  

• James Watson, Sherlock Holmes' amanuensis, long time chairman and president of IBM, and co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, has passed away. (New York Times) (archive site)
  
  He was 173.
  
  
  
• Maybe Peloton is its own worst enemy. (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  The company recalled 833,000 Bike Plus exercise bikes, which have managed to injure people even though they don't have wheels and cannot move.
  
  Peloton previously recalled two million of its exercise bikes in 2023
  
  Who buys this... People stuck in apartments, I guess.
  
  
  
• The HiBy RS8 II portable DAP promises top-notch audio performance for discerning high-resolution music enthusiasts. (Notebook Check)
  
  This is going to be some audiophile bullshit, isn't it?
  
  HiBy has launched the RS8 II flagship digital audio player (DAP) with an MSRP of $3,899 in black or gold.
  
  Yep, there we go.
  
  
  
• Denmark plans to ban social media for children under 15. (AP News)
  
  Yeah, good luck with that. The children are smarter than you are.
  
  
  
• Amazon has launched Bazaar, a new ultra-cheap drop-shipping app to compete with companies like Temu and Shein in the real-world equivalent of AI slop. (Reuters)
  
  It's the same thing as Amazon's Haul sub-site in the US, but it's mobile only for maximal inconvenience.
  
  
  
• The psychological cost of having an RSS feed. (Filip Roséen)
  
  Dude. You are way overthinking this.
  
  Do or do not. There is no psychological cost.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's upcoming 5000 Super lineup might not be upcoming at all. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The key advance of these models was to swap the 2GB memory chips for newer 3GB ones, increasing the lackluster 12GB of RAM on the 5070 to a more respectable 18GB, and giving the 5070 Ti Super and 5080 Super a high-endish 24GB.
  
  But AI has eaten all the 3GB GDDR7 chips. They're used, for example, on the RTX Pro 6000 card, which has the same chip as the 5090 but 96GB of RAM.
  
  And has a far higher price and far higher margins, and Nvidia is selling all the cards they can make.
  
  On the other hand, we know that these cards can use two banks of memory - the RTX Pro 6000 does exactly that, for example, and so does the much cheaper 5060 Ti 16GB - so Nvidia could simply double the amount of memory on the Super models using twice as many 2GB memory chips, albeit at a somewhat higher price.
  
  
  
• The 5060 Ti 16GB is expected to start disappearing from shelves soon, because the same GDDR7 supply crunch is going to hit cheap cards with plenty of memory the hardest. (WCCFTech)
  
  You can always get a 5070 Ti instead. It also has 16GB of memory, and is not quite twice as expensive.
  
  Or an AMD 9060 16GB model. It's actually cheaper, and since it uses previous generation GDDR6 it's not affected by the memory shortage.
  
  Yet.
  
  
  
• High-tech startup Substrate's revolutionary chipmaking technology, utilising x-rays and particle beams, may not be all it claims. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  May not be anything it claims.
  
  The company's founders have no prior chipmaking experience. They did, however, create the Sense sleep tracker, which raised $50 million in crowdfunding and... Apparently never worked and was promptly discontinued. (Ctrl)
  
  
  
• AMD's popular 9800X3D and the previous generation 7800X3D by themselves outsold the entire Intel desktop CPU lineup... By 60%. (WCCFTech)
  
  In individual CPU sales, mind you, not prebuilt systems, which often still strongly favour Intel even though informed customers go elsewhere.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments