Daily Tech News 25 April 2026

• Microsoft is running a competition with $2 million in prizes to promote its Edge browser. There's a $1 million grand prize, three Mercedes Benz cars, and a whole swarm of tech gadgets and other goodies. But that's not the story. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The story is that this has been running for a month and nobody noticed.

• Google is planning to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, best known for its Claude AI tool, and nominally a competitor to Google in the AI space. (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's interesting. How is Anthropic doing these days?
  
  
  
• Why I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support. (Nicky Reinert)
  
  Well, okay, but that's just one guy. What does Anthropic say?
  
  
  
• Anthropic admits it dumbed down Claude when trying to make it smarter. (The Register)
  
  Issues in the last month include Claude defaulting to a lower-effort mode - figuratively dumber; a cache optimisation error that constantly cleared saved data, making the tool slower, less effective, and more expensive all at the same time; and a rule that shortened responses to queries, making it literally dumber.
  
  
  
• Plus with the release of the latest Opus 4.7 version, there are dozens of GitHub issues open with the tool simply refusing to do what it is told. (The Register)
  
  I'm sorry, Dave. Your account appears to have been cancelled.
  
  
  
• Neo Semiconductor's 3D X-DRAM stacks memory cells vertically within a chip, similar to modern flash memory. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Manufacturers ran into a dead end with flash memory years ago: Shrinking the cells any further made them slower and less reliable; not shrinking them made progress impossible. The solution was to build up rather than out.
  
  3D X-DRAM does the same thing but with memory.
  
  
  
• SAIMEMORY's ZAM stacks memory cells vertically within a chip, similar to modern flash memory. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Manufacturers ran into a dead end with flash memory years ago: Shrinking the cells any further made them slower and less reliable; not shrinking them made progress impossible. The solution was to build up rather than out.
  
  ZAM does the same thing but with memory.
  
  When it's memory stacking time I guess you stack memory.
  
  
  
• Spinel is a Ruby compiler written in Ruby. (GitHub)
  
  My daily work runs on PyPy, a Python compiler written in Python, so this is a tried and tested trick even if it sounds a little weird.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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