Daily Tech News 12 March 2026

• Pioneer has been overwhelmed with orders for its $2300 flagship Blu-Ray recorder now that competitors have stopped competing. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I already have a couple of external Blu-Ray burners and the drive in my Xbox, so I think I'm good for now. And the three of those didn't add up to anything like $2300.

• The rise of scientific fraud isn't due to a small percentage of rogue scientists. It's something worse. (PNAS)
  
  Profit-driven and systemic.
  
  
  
• The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript. (GitHub)
  
  It's taken that long because (a) JavaScript is broken and (b) time is broken. There's a book called Calendrical Calculations that covers all the ways time is broken and how to deal with it. Originally a slim paperback, the fourth edition (which I own) is a hefty 662 pages.
  
  JavaScript is its own problem.
  
  
  
• It's Patch Tuesday and your computer just got rebooted. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Microsoft fixed two zero day vulnerabilities this time and 79 other bugs.
  
  
  
• Funny thing about AI: It loves the command line and hates the convenience of graphical interfaces. (The Register)
  
  LLMs work with words and so does the command line, so it makes sense. The Unix command line is a mess and something more structured would perhaps be better, but it's still orders of magnitude easier for automated tools - AI or just regular code - to deal with that than to try to parse the bitmap on your screen and move and click the mouse.
  
  
  
• Apple's MacBook Neo edges out AMD's 9950X3D on single-core Cinebench tests. (Notebook Check)
  
  That's one benchmark, and of course the Neo gets creamed in multi-core tests. It is nonetheless an impressive result for what is after all a phone CPU.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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