Author: Chris Szewczyk

Unless you’re an excited kid or 150cm tall, nobody really enjoys flying in cattle class, do they? You get to put up with longer queues, uncomfortable seats, average food (at best) and poor in-flight entertainment. The latter is certainly better in more modern airliners, but the screens usually leave a lot to be desired. Thankfully,…

The ongoing and escalating tech war between the world’s largest economies shows little sign of easing. Whether it’s the banning of certain AI chips or restrictions on chip making equipment, China and the US really don’t want the other side to have access to its best toys. The latest escalation comes from China, which is…

Whether you’re a Bitcoin maximalist, you think it’s a giant scam or you fall somewhere in between, what’s not up for debate is that Bitcoin mining uses a lot of energy. In order to keep costs as low as possible, miners look for cheap energy. The lower the energy costs, the greater the profit. And…

It’s now been a couple of months since Nvidia launched its RTX 40 Super-series of graphics cards. The RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super were welcome, if only evolutionary upgrades over their non-Super predecessors. I’ve written about how the lower tier RTX 40 cards were the ones that really deserved…

The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, is the biggest mystery in the crypto world. There’s been a lot of speculation as to who the person or persons behind the first and most valuable crypto really are—and there are a few claimants too. The most publicized of whom is Australian academic Dr…

The CHIPS Act was signed into law in August 2022. Its aim is to boost US based semiconductor manufacturing, and not just for commercial reasons, but for broader strategic reasons including the desire to reduce reliance on manufacturing in Asia. Some of the money allocated to woo chipmakers onto US soil is soon to flow,…

Asus unveiled its first ROG NUC back at CES 2024. We got a look of the unit itself along with some launch specifications, but pricing and a release date were not revealed. We now have a pretty good idea of both thanks to a pre-order listing at European retailer Proshop (via NotebookCheck). The listing reveals…

Anyone that was in the market for a GPU in the period from 2020 to 2022 would remember the ridiculous prices caused by demand from miners. Among other reasons related to the pandemic, GPUs were particularly strong at Ethereum mining, leading to shortages of graphics cards. Thankfully that came to an end in September 2022,…

Google is developing a DeepMind based AI that could end up being the ultimate virtual co-op buddy. It’s not some play-to-win opponent or super-bot, but a general, instructible game-playing AI agent. Google presented a research article (via @rowancheung) on what it calls a Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent (SIMA). The general idea is that it’s a…

TikTok users in the US are facing the possibility of being locked out of the app following the passage of a bill in the US House of Representatives. The bill gives ByteDance, the China-based parent company of TikTok, six months to sell its controlling stake in the app. If it does not, the app will…