Daily Tech News 18 December 2025

• Micron says the memory shortage will get worse before it gets better, and also that it won't get better if they have anything to say about it. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Micron has two factories under construction in Idaho due to come on line in 2027, and another planned in New York to be operational in 2030.
  
  Even with those three new factories churning out chips they only expect to meet half to two thirds of demand.
  
  In the meantime, though, the company posted a revenue increase of 57% over last year, so they don't really care about you and your money, as indicated by them shutting down their Crucial consumer brand after nearly 30 years.
  
  
  
• And the second of my two new mini-PCs arrived today. I set up the first one last night - just plugged it in, turned it on, lied and told Windows I didn't have internet, and it works. It's pretty fast too, with none of the lag I get with my laptop.
  
  Partly because the CPU is nearly twice as fast as the one in my laptop, partly because it's a clean install of Windows and doesn't have about 200 different applications installed yet. I'll fix that.
  
  It really does have 64GB of RAM. 64GB of Crucial RAM, apparently, which is now a collectors item.
  
  It's available for sale now on Minisforum's US store, but the price is about 70% higher than in Australia even after a 20% discount, so it's no bargain.
  
  Update: Unnamed computer #2 is plugged in and working.

• The Corsair MP700 Pro XT is the new fastest consumer SSD. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  15GB per second and 3.3 million IOPS, the equivalent to a RAID array of 25,000 hard drives.
  
  And it's not much more expensive than PCIe 4.0 models. Not because it's cheap, but because the price increases in flash memory have overwhelmed the price increment for the faster PCIe 5.0 controller.
  
  
  
• GitHub is not charging you $0.002 per minute for using your own hardware. (The Register)
  
  They were planning to. Users were not impressed.
  
  
  
• Jared Isaacman has been confirmed by the Senate as the new administrator of NASA, where he will do... Stuff. (Politico)
  
  Or more accurately, hand money to SpaceX for them to do stuff.
  
  
  
• AI-generated code contains 70% more bugs than human-generated, and is twice as likely to introduce security vulnerabilities. (The Register)
  
  In my experience, if you can precisely specify the requirements, and the AI can crib from public code in another programming language, and you can run the code in a sandbox where break-ins can't happen, and you're willing to do the testing, and the job is the sort of annoying boilerplate work of plugging two things together that don't really want to be plugged together, AI is useful.
  
  In other words, the stuff that you would dump on a junior team member so that one day they would be a senior team member.
  
  But this kind of work wasn't much fun back when we didn't have AI, so I'm not sure we've made things worse.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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