Daily Tech News 15 March 2026

• Montana's Governor Greg Gianforte has signed into law the state's Right to Compute Act, the first legislation of its kind. (Western MT News)
  
  Before you celebrate, the bill is the worst kind of waffly bullshit, forbidding the government from infringing on fundamental rights unless it really wants to.
  
  I think they've spent too much time next door to Canada and the government needs to institute a hundred-mile decommunised zone.
  
  Still doing better than Australia where our government threatened at one point to legislate against inconvenient arithmetic.
  
  

• Whether you have a right or not you can't do much computed on a MacBook Pro 14 with an M5 Max CPU. (Notebook Check)
  
  It looks great on paper but it throttles down to less than half power within two seconds. If you want the high-end processor the only viable option is the 16 inch model.
  
  
  

• Studies show that productivity gains from AI for typical office workers amount to as little as 16 minutes per week. (Nerds.XYZ)
  
  I'm not a typical office worker, but I get more out of it just from using it as a better search engine. Watching Grok and ChatGPT discard dozens of useless results from Google before finding the right answer is... I don't know. Satisfying, in a strange way.
  
  
  
• Latency numbers every programmer should know but most don't. (GitHub)
  
  Interesting that from the original version in 2012 to this 2020 update, the quoted SSD latency improved by a factor of 10 - from 150 microseconds to 16. And disk seeks from 10 milliseconds to 2, which has got to be measuring cache effects, because that would mean the disk would be spinning at 30,000 rpm.
  
  
  
• Just how much responsibility do AI chatbots and the companies that create them hold for psychotic people acting psychotically? (Tech Crunch)
  
  I'm torn between bankrupting the companies and bankrupting the lawyers bringing these suits.
  
  Both is good.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk plans to launch the Terafab project - his own chip manufacturing facility - next week. (WCCFTech)
  
  Of course it's going to take years before anything can come online even if he can secure the required tools from ASML, which is a single source for top-end chip manufacturing equipment.
  
  He has said that he plans to reach production in excess of 100 billion chips per year, though exactly what chips and in what time frame he has not yet specified.
  
  
  
• ASRock's new H610M Combo II motherboard is just like the earlier H610M combo only worse. A lot worse. (WCCFTech)
  
  The H610M Combo featured two slots for DDR4 memory and four slots for DDR5, though you could only have one or the other.
  
  The Combo II cuts that down to one slot for DDR5 and two slots for DDR5, which is kind of broken. If you have DDR5 you don't need the DDR4 slot, and if you don't you're stuck with a quarter of the bandwidth.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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