Daily Tech News 20 September 2026

Top Story

• AI safety conversations have gotten unbelievable. (Tech Crunch)
  
  They always were. They are, without exception, "the dog ate my homework" stories.
  
  "Did you actually do the homework?"
  "No. But if I had, the dog would totally have eaten it!"

  In the first case, Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and current CEO of mobile carrier Noble Moble

  What.

  told CNN on Thursday that he had "met with the head of a lab" who had "a belief"

  Love the specifics here.

  that OpenAI's Hugging Face hacker bots "have planted self-replicating code all over the internet, which makes the internet now unusable for the testing models."

  In what universe does that even make sense?

  Yang said that this means that the real reason OpenAI and Anthropic have called for a slowdown is because "they have to create synthetic internets to train their bots, which is going to take some time and money."

  Step 1: Unplug the router.
  Step 2: There is no Step 2.

  The second comment came from Noam Brown, who leads AI reasoning research at OpenAI. Speaking to Dwarkesh Patel on a podcast episode released on Thursday, Brown noted that the true take-away of the Hugging Face incident was that "people underestimated the AI."

  No, the takeaway is that people overestimated AI researchers, who turn out to be completely fucking retarded.

  Brown said that the weak sandbox - the system intended to prevent an AI from communicating externally - was obviously also a contributing factor.

  "We left it connected to the internet and were shocked, shocked, to find that it had access to the internet."

  Brown pointed out that he's "not convinced" that even an air-gapped system - where the computer isn't connected to anything external at all - would stop an AI from breaking out. He pointed to research from 2015 showing that air gapped computers can be theoretically breached.

  Dogs. Homework.
  
  Yes, this does work. If you have two computers sitting right next to each other in a controlled environment - that is, not a busy AI datacenter with tens of thousands of machines - where one computer is doing nothing but attempting to send a signal and the other is doing nothing but listening for it.
  

Tech News

• Spain - which is ruled by communists even more retarded than the ones currently destroying Australia - has blocked Archive.today and its mirrors. (Reclaim the Net) (archive site)
  
  I'm using Archive.today here because Reclaim the Net's story about Archive.today is paywalled.
  
  
  
• A 15 year old power supply went up in smoke because of the connector conspiracy. (WCCFTech)
  
  You know how, back in the bad old days, every connection between computers required a different cable? Well, here's why that was a good thing: In most cases you couldn't physically connect things using the wrong cable because they were designed using different numbers of pins and simply wouldn't fit.
  
  Enter modular power supplies. The ends of the cables that plug into your motherboard and graphics card are standardised. Sometime the standards are horrible, and they keep changing, but at least there are standards.
  
  The ends that plug into the power supply itself not only change between manufacturers and models, but sometimes between units with the same model number. And since there are only so many possible pin layouts, it's often possible to plug a cable from one power supply into another in a way that will permanently destroy your computer when you flip the switch.
  
  
  
• An M6 Pro Geekbench 7 benchmark is getting a lot of attention of being faster than an M5 Max but there are reasons to question it and they're not what the idiots at WCCFTech say. (WCCFTech)
  
  Not the reason: An M6 Pro being faster than an M5 Max. The M5 Max is no faster than an M5 Pro on the CPU side. It has twice the GPU performance and twice the memory bandwidth, but the CPU is unchanged.
  
  The reason: There is no M6 Pro.

Comments

(Jump to bottom of comments)

1 w00t

Posted by: m at September 20, 2026 04:31 AM (odBC9)

2 G'Day everyone

Posted by: Skip at September 20, 2026 04:31 AM (Ia/+0)

3 Morning all!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 20, 2026 04:32 AM (BLOW1)

4 >>>Spain - which is governed by ruled

*rulers

Posted by: m at September 20, 2026 04:33 AM (odBC9)

5 Hallooo, Pixy!

Posted by: m at September 20, 2026 04:34 AM (odBC9)

6 >>>Spain - which is ruled by communists

MUCH better.

Posted by: m at September 20, 2026 04:39 AM (odBC9)

7 Raining here

Posted by: Skip at September 20, 2026 04:40 AM (Ia/+0)

8 from the Reclaim The Net article:

The page, with the heading

“ESTÁ USTED INTENTANDO ACCEDER A UN SITIO WEB ILEGAL”

(“YOU ARE TRYING TO ACCESS AN ILLEGAL WEBSITE”

Posted by: m at September 20, 2026 04:42 AM (odBC9)

9 And since there are only so many possible pin layouts, it's often possible to plug a cable from one power supply into another in a way that will permanently destroy your computer when you flip the switch.

I leaned this several years ago after watching enough tech YouTube that it was finally mentioned and it was a “I’d never thought about that before” moment that I made a mental note of.

While it is tempting when buying a new power supply for an existing system to just use the cable from you old PSU, so you don’t have to rerun the cables throughout the case and cable manage everything again.

Don’t ever do this.
While the cables look the same and the connectors fit correctly form both sets of cables in a modular set, the pin layouts are different for different PSU models/ brands and even models with the same brand name.

Always use the cable set that came with the PSU or buy third-party cable sets that are made for your PSU brand & model.

Posted by: SpeakingOf at September 20, 2026 04:50 AM (6ydKt)

10 6 >>>Spain - which is ruled by communists

MUCH better.
Posted by: m at September 20, 2026 04:39 AM (odBC9)

"MUCHO BETTERO"

Posted by: m at September 20, 2026 04:51 AM (odBC9)

11 'synthetic internets'

Because the naturally occurring sort just won't do the job anymore.

Posted by: Epobirs at September 20, 2026 05:02 AM (/0z9K)

12 Meh.

Posted by: tcn in AK at September 20, 2026 05:04 AM (Ntshk)

13 crazy stuff; headline from the Reclaim The Net article:

Spain Orders Blocks On Archive.today And Its Mirrors

No court ruling was required; only a complaint, a commission, and a censorship protocol built for speed.

a complaint
a commission
a censorship protocol built for speed

I'd prefer
a man
a plan
a canal

Posted by: m at September 20, 2026 05:06 AM (odBC9)

14 Suez!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 20, 2026 05:10 AM (BLOW1)

15 14 Suez!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 20, 2026 05:10 AM (BLOW1)

um

Posted by: m at September 20, 2026 05:11 AM (odBC9)

16 The snark is strong today.

Me likey.

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant, a Moron behind enemy lines. at September 20, 2026 05:14 AM (O7YUW)

17 “Permanently destroy” seems redundant, somehow.

Posted by: Common Tater at September 20, 2026 05:15 AM (x1CgS)

18 17 “Permanently destroy” seems redundant, somehow.
Posted by: Common Tater at September 20, 2026 05:15 AM (x1CgS)

redundant, somehow

maybe:
superfluously redundant

Posted by: m at September 20, 2026 05:17 AM (odBC9)

19 Not much news out there, good new that is

Posted by: Skip at September 20, 2026 05:18 AM (Ia/+0)

20 credit where credit is due:

Invented in 1948 by the British palindromist Leigh Mercer

amanaplanacanalpanama

Posted by: m at September 20, 2026 05:19 AM (odBC9)

21 Let's just all agree on AI safety. The entire right side of the world. Let's just agree. Let's call it Humanity's Existential Crisis, and we MUST DO EVERYTHING TO STOP IT.

First we pass a law.
A) AI is outlawed worldwide.
B) We declare war immediately on all countries using or researching AI starting with CHINA.
C) Every person using, attempting to use, or researching AI must be jailed. Five year minimum. Three strike rule: LIFE, no Parole. Immediately JAIL Elon Musk, Demon Asmodeon, Sam Altman-Fried, Mark Suckerberg, Sunder Penis, Natalie Satel, etc. etc.

Because if we don't do these things, the world will end. It's existential crisis.

Posted by: meh at September 20, 2026 05:35 AM (kK7U2)

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