• AMD's "budget" Radeon 9060 XT graphics card is here.  Is it any good?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Yes.  And also no.
  
  The 16GB model is pretty decent if you can find it for under $400.  The MSRP is $349 for basic models, but they sold out pretty quickly in the US.  You should still be able to find slightly faster models for around $389.
  
  (In Australia the MSRP models are still available.)
  
  The 8GB model is $50 cheaper and is readily available at MSRP because it sucks and you shouldn't buy it.
  
  It's consistently faster than Nvidia's RTX 5060 and the same price.  Compared to the 5060 Ti it's cheaper, and faster on non-ray-traced games, though a little slower in ray-traced titles.  (And a lot slower on Black Myth Wukong which significantly favours Nvidia hardware, but that's an outlier.)
  
  If you want a graphics card that is merely a bit expensive but not actually insanely overpriced, this is the one to buy.
  
  (Or go back in time a few months and nab a 7800 XT for $400 like I did.)

• SpaceX is planning to build an advanced chip packaging factory in Texas.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That is, a factory that takes individual silicon dies and puts them together to build a more complicated "chip".  AMD's server CPUs for example can contain up to 17 individual "chiplets".
  
  SpaceX plans to go a bit further, packaging devices up to, uh, two feet square.
  
  
  
• Highpoint has a PCIe 5.0 SSD RAID card that takes four M.2 drives and costs less than $1000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That includes no SSDs.
  
  I did buy a similar PCIe 3.0 RAID card, but that only cost me $200.  It still delivers up to 8GB per second, which is more than enough for me.
  
  
  
• Living without episodic memory.  (AtherMug)
  
  Better than mistaking your wife for a hat, but still a subtly unsettling read.
  
  
  
• Intel wants a 50% gross margin on all new products.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Same.
  
  
  
• Discord's CEO is just as worried about "enshittification" as you are.  (Engadget)
  
  (Looks at Discord.)
  
  No.  No he is not.
  
  
  
• Anthropic cut off direct access to its AI services to coding startup Windsurf because they suspsected the latter company was being targeted for acquisition by OpenAI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They were right.
  
  
  
• Regulate me!  Regulate me!  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  Anthropic is upset that the AI industry is not being targeted with an impenetrable swamp of state-level regulations that only a multi-billion-dollar can afford to navigate, because it is a multi-billion-dollar company and can afford to navigate it.
  
  How can we have regulatory capture without regulations?

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 07 2025 05:04 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 07 2025 02:42 PM (PiXy!)

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