Daily Tech News 19 November 2025

• So, Cloudflare. (Cloudflare)
  
  Cloudflare carries something like 20% of the world's web traffic, but for a few hours late last night (my time) or early yesterday morning (US time) it wasn't carrying much of anything, because it stopped working.
  
  Six times.
  
  Not a DNS problem like the recent outages at Azure and Amazon, but a fumbled configuration file change like that massive Crowdstrike outage sixteen months ago.
  
  
  
• And it's going to keep happening, so buckle up. (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  I run traditional unshared physical servers at a smaller datacenter, not bound to any of the major players. On the one hand, a few years ago that datacenter had a fire and while the fire didn't cause any damage, the same could not be said for the sprinkler system mandated by local fire codes. (Yes, a sprinkler system. In a datacenter.)
  
  On the other hand, not one of these big global outages have affected us.

• It's now been discovered that the popular Mac Classic II model from 1991 - the original compact format with an updated 68030 processor - never actually worked. (PC Gamer)
  
  A developer working on the MAME emulator found that an emulated Mac Classic II running in 32-bit mode would crash immediately on startup.
  
  100% of the time, despite MAME being a reliable and thoroughly-tested emulator for the 68030 (and many other architectures) and the testing being conducted with a bit-perfect copy of the original firmware.
  
  Testing traced this to a single bad instruction in the Apple ROMs for this hardware. But the hardware was shipped, and it sold well, and it worked fine.
  
  It wasn't until the developer bought and restored an original Mac Classic II to test the code on the the real hardware that he worked out what was going on: Magic.
  
  (Thanks to Comrade Arthur for the link to this story.)
  
  
  
• Bitcoin prices have crashed to just $90,000. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  After hitting $125,000 in early October.
  
  I told you at the time that you could double your money by investing in DRAM.
  
  Well, I didn't, but imagine if I had.
  
  
  
• If you get an email from Monotype, burn it without reading. (Insanity Works)
  
  Trust me on this.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is adding an "Agentic AI" features settings to Windows 11 for all the stuff you don't want but that they insist on shoving in. (Windows Central)
  
  Thanks, I think.
  
  
  
• Talking to your Windows PC quickly reveals how much Windows sucks, and Copilot AI sucks, and the combination is exponential rather than merely additive. (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  Translation: Don't do that.
  
  
  
• The CEO of LLM marketplace Hugging Face says we're not in an AI bubble, just in an LLM bubble. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is a valid point.
  
  LLMs are generative AI - you tell them to draw a picture of a frog eating a set of deep-fried bagpipes and they pull together petabytes of tagged and shredded images and spit out something that may or may not resemble what you asked for.
  
  That's the bubble.
  
  Discriminative AI is where you point your camera at some weird piece of modern art and it figures out it's supposed to be a frog enjoying a meal of deep-fried bagpipes. Or more usefully, when your self-driving car swerves the precise amount needed to avoid a black cart darting across an unlit road on a moonless night.
  
  That's getting less than 10% of the attention but represents 99% of the long-term value.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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