Daily Tech News 26 July 2026

Top Story

• China is breeding a clone army of terror yaks, probably. (CNN)
  
  They say they're not, but they also say:

  These are Tibetan yaks, designed and cloned in secretive labs more than 4,000 meters above sea level, where researchers hope to create an "elite" herd of super-yaks, healthier and more fertile than their predecessors.

  I do not trust them.

Tech News

• Lenovo's new ThinkCentre X system comes with up to 256GB of RAM. (Notebook Check)
  
  If you expect that it would also come with a price tag previously reserved to professional workstations with top-of-the-line CPUs and graphics cards, you would be correct.
  
  
  
• So here's a 28.9 million parameter small LLM running on a $8 microcontroller. (GitHub)
  
  It'll do.
  
  
  
• The US has accused a citizen re-entering the country of giving the CBP a "duress" password that wiped his phone. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Do not do this. Whatever you think about border agents scrolling through your sick memes, anything you don't want on your phone you should simply not have on your phone when you cross the border.
  
  
  
• Research: How to prevent runaway salinisation in an Australian irrigation megaproject (secret: add salt), there's more than one way to force an ice age, and why there is a shoe shop in Bali named Wallace.