Daily Tech News 25 July 2026

• Anthropic's Opus 5 model is here - nearly as smart as Fable for half the price, and less annoying. (Engadget)
  
  It has been trained similarly but with much less effort towards security, so it isn't as clever at hacking systems or at preventing your systems from being hacked, but it hasn't been forced into I'M SORRY DAVE I'M AFRAID I CAN'T DO THAT insanity that flips on the moment you stray into anything even the tiniest bit questionable.
  
  I'll give it a try since I'm on the $20 Claude plan making Opus 5 free of additional charge while Fable 5 uses my limited credits. (Paying accounts received $100 worth of credits free, but I want to keep those for actual security scans.)
  
  Also worth noting: If Fable 5 runs into trouble or doubt, it doesn't just run in circles, scream and shout, it can silently drop back to Opus. This can happen even if your question is entirely orthogonal to security issues.

• Astronomers have discovered the first THAT'S NO MOON, THAT'S A CATEGORISATION ERROR outside of our solar system. (Space)
  
  That is, it's a solid body orbiting another celestial body orbiting a star - clearly a moon - except that the body in the middle is a brown dwarf, a "failed star".
  
  
  
• Zen 7 Epyc "Florence" will succeed the just announced Zen 6 Epyc "Venice" family in 2028 - using the current sockets. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Wait. Yes, it says right on the AMD presentation that Zen 7 uses the same server socket as Zen 6, but... Oh. The other slide doesn't explicitly say DDR6 - which would require a socket change - but a vaguer "next gen memory".
  
  
  
• The Geekom A9 Max is a Ryzen 470 mini PC with one stick of RAM because they don't want to force you to throw away a perfectly good dual-channel kit in order to upgrade. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which gives us a perfect chance to see how much difference single-channel memory makes to performance, because there's a whole list of benchmark results from similar AMD systems and competing Intel ones.
  
  And the answer is, it makes almost no difference to CPU performance, but cuts the performance of the integrated graphics nearly in half.
  
  
  
• If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse? (Piotr)
  
  Because everybody is using AI tools to push changes faster, with the same level of care as before to finding and fixing bugs.
  
  
  
• Marimo notebooks can now be embedded in PyCharm. (Marimo)
  
  Bringing modern development environments the interactivity we 29 year olds enjoyed in the prior millennium.
  
  
  
• SpaceX's latest test launch was mostly successful, with the only failure being with the booster's engines not fully restarting for the test splashdown. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which turned into a splashboom.
  
  No such issues with the Starship V3 second stage which bobbed happily undamaged in the ocean after its own splashdown.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has a new all-in-one desktop PC with an interesting 2560x2880 27" display and an Intel Panther Lake CPU with up to and including Arc B390 integrated graphics. (Notebook Check)
  
  It is fucking expensive.
  
  
  
• Research: Today I ran a Shinkansen line through Eromanga. I didn't plan it that way; that was the inevitable outcome of the parameters I had set.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:45 AM

| Access Comments