Daily Tech News 9 November 2025

• The latest US Mars mission will launch from Cape Canaveral today at around 2:45 PM EST. (Space)
  
  The mission - dubbed ESCAPADE - involves two orbiters that will map the magnetic fields and upper atmosphere of the planet, providing data essential to human landings and settlement.
  
  The two orbiters, named Blue and Gold respectively, were built by Rocket Labs and will be operated by the University of California. They will launch on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket - only the second flight for that design.
  
  They'll fly out to the Earth-Sun L2 point around a million miles away to make observations there and say hello to the James Webb telescope, before heading back to Earth for a gravity slingshot this time next year and finally arriving in Mars rendezvous September of 2027.
  
  New Glenn is designed to have a reusable booster and they'll be attempting to land it on a ship at sea, so that will also be fun to watch for.

• OpenAI has asked the government to expand coverage of tax credits created for integrated circuit manufacturers to also cover incontinent wastrels AI companies even though it is explicitly a manufacturing credit and rent-seeking man-whores AI companies do not actually manufacture anything. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  How about no, Sam?
  
  
  
• AMD has posted patches to the GCC compiler suite to support new features in next year's Zen 6 architecture. (WCCFTech)
  
  Nothing groundbreaking, but the new chips will add support for FP16 (16 bit floating point) and VNNI-INT8 (8 bit integer instructions aimed at neural networks) to AVX-512.
  
  AMD introduced AVX-512 support in Zen 4 in 2022 with an implementation that performed 256 bits of calculation per cycle, and then updated it in Zen 5 last year to perform the full 512 bits in a single cycle.
  
  With the new instructions AMD will offer the most complete implementation of AVX-512, despite the instruction set being Intel's baby.
  
  
  
• Intel also released GCC patches last month for its upcoming Nova Lake processors. (Hot Hardware)
  
  Intel's recent desktop (and laptop) chips do have AVX-512 support built in - in theory - but it was never officially supported in 12th generation chips (2021) and since the 13th generation (2022) has been fused off permanently during manufacturing and cannot be used at all.
  
  With next year's Nova Lake, so far as we can tell from the patches, there will be no support for AVX-512 at all, nor for its nominal successor, AVX10. That makes it a datacenter-only technology if you're an Intel customer, but built in to everything from handheld gaming consoles to supercomputers that use AMD hardware.
  
  
  
• How a ransomware gang encrypted Nevada's government computer systems (Spoiler: DON'T CLICK ON RANDOM LINKS WHEN DOWNLOADING CRITICAL SECURITY SOFTWARE YOU IDIOT) and how they got everything working again without paying ransom. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Backups.
  
  
  
• Lego has announced a model of the USS Enterprise... 1701-D. (The Independent)
  
  $399.
  
  I'd much rather have the large Millennium Falcon model, though. It's big enough that it's in scale for regular Lego mini-figs, which this 1701-D is very much not.
  
  
  
• Congratulations to m yesterday for figuring out exactly why I said James Watson was 173 years old.
  
  Not everything I say should be treated like a cryptic crossword puzzle but it's nice to see when I do throw something like that in, there's somebody who will figure it out.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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