Daily Tech News 11 September 2026

• Twenty-five years. I was only four at the time, like the rest of us, but I remember the day.
  
  
  
• The Exploration Company has raised $450 million in series C funding in an attempt to show that Europe is not irrelevant. (Ars Technica)
  
  And to explore space, maybe.
  
  Problem is they need to add three more zeroes to that number to make a dent. It's being billed as the "fastest growing space company in Europe", which is like being the most successful oyster farmer in Eromanga, population 98.

• AI has a 10% chance of killing all of us by the end of next week mostly by falling off a roof and landing face first on a rake so that we die of laughter. (The Register)
  
  Copilot this time.
  
  
  
• Anthropic says it has blocked attempts to build biological weapons. (New York Times) (archive site)
  
  Anthropic says a lot of things. I am a paying customer; their product is a lot better than their PR.

  "You are not seeing someone in a comic book kind of way say, 'Hey, I want to build a biological weapon to kill everybody,'" Jacob Klein, the head of threat intelligence at Anthropic, said in an interview. "It's an incredibly nuanced situation. They're saying things like 'But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.'"

  Don't we all, Jake. Don't we all.
  
  
  
• Anthropic also detailed distillation campaigns by Alibaba, Moonshot AI and Deepseek. (Tech Crunch)
  
  You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, and I think it most ungentlemanly.
  
  Also, you know who isn't blocking attempts to build a resistance to iocane powder?
  
  
  
• HP has introduced its latest home computer. (Notebook Check)
  
  Returned, the unaffordable RISC workstations of the late 90s have.
  
  
  
• Deepseek beats Anthropic's Opus 5 on coding - where Opus 5 is actually good - at one 86th the cost. (WCCFTech)
  
  Though if you're able to live within a plan and not burn infinite tokens through the API, Opus 5 can be one 20th the price that comparison assumes.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which: Fixed the performance of my runtime. The interpreter is now as fast as Ruby, where before it needed the compiler to match that. The compiler averages around 3x faster. And because it has a rich set of builtins, using those really puts on the afterburners, with minor changes in code lifting it to 15x the performance of the Ruby interpreter.
  
  Of course, Ruby now has a compiler of its own, which I haven't tested against.
  
  Right now, integrating multiprecision maths into the core.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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