Daily Tech News 26 September 2026

Top Story

• In the most depraved display of shameless self-serving bullshit since the Paris Olympics, OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs have gone to the UN to beg them to squish their competitors - somehow - after the US government told them to take a hike. (Associated Press)
  
  Guys. Guys.
  
  When your goal is regulator capture, you need to capture a regulator.
  
  The UN is a debating society for schoolyard bullies, with the two teams being the Paste Eaters and the Window Lickers.
  
  They don't have the power to regulate squat.
  
  
  
• You know who does, though? The US government. (CNBC)
  
  Who's a cute little supply-chain risk? You are, Anthropic! Well, never mind the cute part, but the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that yes, the Pentagon has the right to say who it considers a supply-chain risk.
  
  A spokesbot for Anthropic said, "wah".
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• I tried using the spare capacity on my second server (the one hosting my own blog and many others, though not this one) to host development of the new blogging software and the results were... Bad. The problem was not the new software itself but Rust debugging builds, which unleash a water cannon of useless redundant writes over your filesystem, and the filesystem on the server was not prepared for that, so while those builds were running the blogs froze, usually for a second or two but sometimes for minutes.
  
  So this morning I grabbed two of the mini-PCs I bought last year before prices went crazy (actually after they went crazy, but that particular model resisted the price increases long enough for me to grab a couple or four for less than the price of the RAM they contained), upgrade their SSDs to 4TB each (same story), and drop Ubuntu 26.04 on them. And it... All worked.
  
  Not sure exactly how they'll perform but they're eight thousand miles away from the servers so you shouldn't see any performance issues there. I just did a disk-to-disk copy of 18GB of files and it went zoom, so that's one datapoint.
  
  
  
• SpaceXAI is planning to add another 660,000 AI GPUs this year. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  660,000 for me, none for you.
  
  
  
• Japan's used bookstores are the latest target of the AI shopping spree for content that hasn't been... Poisoned by AI. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's kind of like the labs holding on to wood from before the 1950s to serve as a baseline for radiocarbon dating, because anything more recent is contaminated with excess C14 and gives skewed numbers.
  
  
  
• Automattic has a new board of directors. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This seems to have been the goal. The board briefly sidelined Mad King Matt Mullenweg, voted themselves golden parachutes, and waited for him to kick them out of the plane... Which is barreling straight towards a mountain.