Daily Tech News 10 October 2026

• The US government have suspended US companies Microsoft, Adobe, and Cognizant, and a bunch of European and Indian IT companies as well, from the H-1B visa scheme. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not placed restrictions on them. Not added fees. Booted them entirely.

  "We believe in the strength and talent of the American workforce," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch, "they just can't work here."

  I might have changed that just a little to say what they clearly mean.
  

• Asus is marketing its ProArt GR1X Spark as a low-mid-range gaming PC. (WCCFTech)
  
  Expect to pay about $6000 if it's anything like Microsoft's Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. So about four times what it's worth.
  
  
  
• Automattic's interim CFO, who replaced the previous CEO after previously documented boardroom shenanigans, is being replaced. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Mostly because he quit after just days in the role.
  
  
  
• Anthropic says you can't be mean to Claude this Christmas. (The Register)
  
  I'm fine with that so long as I can still be mean to Anthropic, who deserve it far more.
  
  
  
• Triple-A Minesweeper. (Minesweeper)
  
  These mines must go so I must sweep.
  
  
  
• So, I tested out my newly-built synthesizer on the can-can (the Galop infernal from Offenbach's Orphée aux enfers) and it sounds like dog poo. Or more precisely, it sounds like two or three SID chips from the Commodore 64 wired together to provide wider polyphony.
  
  I've grabbed a few hundred megabytes of public samples of orchestral instruments to tune the wave forms and envelopes, because deriving them from scientific papers worked about as well as a blind man painting a sunset.
  
  Update: Improvement. Now it sounds like an early Yamaha synthesizer that had something crawl into its power supply and die there. Rendering it to WAV files instrument by instrument to find the offending insect.
  
  Update Too: Got it. My insect in the power supply analogy was apt; the buzz was an artifact of 15 wavetable voices' ADSR envelopes being updated simultaneously in sync with the video frame - a 60Hz buzz overlaid on the music and inaudible for a single instrument. Interpolating the envelope steps now, which should push it significantly down in volume and up in frequency.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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