Daily Tech News 18 April 2026

• Intel's new Core Series 3 is its answer to the MacBook Neo. (PC World)
  
  The A18 CPU used in the MacBook Neo uses 6W maximum, and typically throttles down to 4W since the laptop is passively cooled.
  
  All models in the Core Series 3 range use 35W maximum and a base of 15W, which is rather more than that. So while it may be Intel's answer, it is not necessarily a good answer.
  
  The first laptop announced with the Core Series 3 is Honor's Magicbook 14. That costs around $1000, but on the other hand it comes with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, which is more than is even possible in the MacBook Neo.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile AMD's legendary 5800X3D may be making a return. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD has officially made non-committal noises about this. The chip was taken off the market allegedly because it was too competitive with the newer 7800X3D. But with DDR5 prices in cislunar orbit, and the slower 5700X3D and 5600X3D also retired from the market, it would be a very welcome sign.
  
  But it's allegedly a 10th anniversary special edition, and Ryzen's 10th anniversary is in December, counting from the announcement, or next March counting from retail availability. Hope we're not going to have to wait that long.
  
  I mean, it's not like I have 384GB of DDR4 RAM lying around, but if I did I might be interested.
  
  
  

• Is the hourly cost for AI agents rising exponentially? (Toby Ord)
  
  Good question. And the answer is, if you read all the way through that article, we don't know.
  
  
  
• Smolvm is a full virtual machine with hardware isolation for running untrusted tasks - that boots in 200 milliseconds. (GitHub)
  
  That's pretty useful, given how many untrusted tasks there are running around the internet these days. The CPU and memory overheads are small enough that for any task that takes even a second or two it's a viable solution.
  
  
  
• A middle-schooler has found a Trojan coin in Berlin. (The History Blog)
  
  What a Trojan coin was doing in Berlin we may never know, but the location it was found in does have burial remains from the Bronze and Iron Ages and artifacts from the Roman era.
  
  The coin itself dates to the third century BC, almost a thousand years after the historical events of Trojan War. But it's definitely from Ilion, the Greek name for Troy of that period.
  
  
  
• Even cat readme.txt is not safe. (blog.calif)
  
  Anyone who has ever used a terminal, or an accurate terminal emulator, should already know this.
  
  
  
• Anthropic says its MCP specification for AI communication is just fine - despite 10 critical vulnerabilities so far relating to a specific flaw in the design. (The Register)
  
  The flaw is that MCP clients spawn processes as required - just like CGI of old - and that is a fast path to security disaster.
  
  
  
• Another obviously bad idea is "tokenmaxxing" - where developer productivity is measured by how much they cost their employers in AI API fees. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Similar to lines of code, but worse, because rather than trying to capture productivity and inadvertently capturing cost, it directly captures cost.
  
  Also as the article notes, while there's a correlation between tokens used and lines of code generated, widespread adoption of AI leads to massive increases in code churn - were new code is added and then immediately changed or removed.
  
  And every change adds to the cost in tokens.
  
  
  
• Everybody hates Adobe. (The Verge)
  
  And competitors are taking advantage of this by offering semi-professional version of their products for free, a price that soundly beats even Adobe's cheapest subscription plans.
  
  
  
• ASRock has announced a breakthrough to make DDR5 memory cheaper: Half-channel memory. (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is exactly what it sounds like. PCs commonly use dual-channel, 128-bit memory - a misnomer since DDR5 uses dual 32-bit logical channels per physical channel.
  
  What ASRock does here is reduce that further to only a single 32-bit logical channel per physical channel, which of course cuts memory bandwidth in half.
  
  It's a BIOS update for Intel motherboards, so it doesn't break anything, and if you have proper 64-bit DIMMs you can use them just fine, but it's a move of desperation and not something anyone would want to use if they could avoid it.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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