Daily Tech News 2 December 2025

Top Story

• Samsung and SK Hynix - two of the three major DRAM manufacturers - issued a big fat "nope" when asked if they were planning to increase production beyond work already in the pipeline. (WCCFTech)

  Rather than rapidly expanding facilities, we will pursue a strategy of maintaining long-term profitability. We will minimize the risk of oversupply through a capital expenditure (CAPEX) strategy that balances customer demand and pricing.

  Translation: All our competitors tried this and went broke in the last "boom-and-bust" cycle. We don't plan to go broke.
  
  
  
• Shortages are starting to hit close to home, though, with Samsung denying a large memory order from... Samsung. (WCCFTech)
  
  Samsung's phone division ordered more than a year's supply of memory for the new Galaxy models. Samsung's memory division told them no way.

Tech News

• Did Alexander Fleming discover penicillin the way history tells it? Well... Maybe. (Asimov Press)
  
  Attempts to recreate it exactly as Fleming described it - with the Petri dish contaminated with mold after the bacterial samples were placed - fail. But if the contamination happens before or at the same time, the results can come out pretty much as stated, under the right conditions. It's particularly temperature-dependent.
  
  And it turns out that right when Fleming went on his week's vacation leaving his experiment unmonitored, there was a cold spell that put conditions right in the path of a happy accident.
  
  If that is how it worked out, there was even more luck involved than we thought.
  
  
  
• Colleges are preparing to self-lobotomise - again. (The Atlantic) (archive site)
  
  The Atlantic is complaining about the ill-considered use of AI in higher education, which is fair enough. They are not complaining about all the other self-inflicted metaphorical head wounds in academia, which is less fair.
  
  
  
• Santa Monica has told Waymo it can't recharge its self-driving taxis at night. (Inside EVs) (archive site)

  It's unclear whether Waymo or its Virginia-based charging operator, Volterra, intends to comply.

  Signs point to no.
  
  
  
• You shouldn't shard your database. (PgDog)
  
  If someone says you should, shard them straight out the nearest window.
  
  
  
• Be careful what you wish for: Now I've found the Door Bypassing Summer and Autumn and Heading Straight Back into Winter.