Reverse engineering circuitry in a Spacelab computer from 1980
Article URL: https://www.righto.com/2026/05/reverse-engineering-spacelab-computer.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48248954

Points: 9

# Comments: 1 ⌘ Read more

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This Cannes Film Cost $500,000 to Make. $400,000 Was AI Compute Costs.
Higgsfield AI is debuting a 95-minute fully AI-generated film at Cannes called “Hell Grind” that reportedly cost $500,000 to make, $400,000 of which was spent on compute alone. The project took just two weeks to produce and is intended to showcase the startup’s AI production tools. But it also underscores the current limits of AI f … ⌘ Read more

Expanded Reset Support Coming For AMDGPU To Recover From More GPU Compute Hangs
A set of 42 patches were posted on Thursday for the AMDGPU kernel driver and associated AMDKFD compute driver code for enabling pipe reset capabilities for compute workloads… ⌘ Read more

Flipper One Could Be the Ultimate Linux Cyberdeck
BrianFagioli writes: Flipper Devices has finally revealed Flipper One, a Linux-powered cyberdeck that sounds less like a gadget and more like an attempt to rebuild portable ARM computing from the ground up. Unlike Flipper Zero, which focuses on offline protocols like RFID and Sub-1 GHz radio, Flipper One is all about networking, modular hardware, SDR experimentation, local … ⌘ Read more

US To Award $2 Billion To Quantum Companies, Take Equity Stakes
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Quantum Insider: The Trump administration is preparing a new round of industrial policy aimed at quantum computing, with roughly $2 billion in grants expected to go to nine companies developing quantum hardware and related technologies. According to Reuters, citing a Wall Street Journal report, the U.S. Dep … ⌘ Read more

More AMDGPU Driver Fixes Prepped For Linux 7.2
AMD is ready with more AMDKFD compute driver and AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes for the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window… ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Is Spending $2.8 Billion to Buy Gas Turbines for Its AI Data Centers
The investment comes as Musk’s AI unit faces complaints about the carbon-emitting units and looks to become a big player in cloud computing. ⌘ Read more

SpaceX IPO Filing Reveals Anthropic Is Paying $15 Billion a Year to Access Its Data Centers
The long-awaited documents SpaceX filed with US regulators Wednesday included details about a lucrative deal to lend GPUs to a major AI rival. ⌘ Read more

GitHub’s Internal Repos Breached Via Employee’s Use of Malicious VS Code Extension
Longtime Slashdot reader Himmy32 writes: GitHub has announced on X that their internal repositories have been breached through a compromised VS Code Extension on an employee’s workstation. Bleeping Computer reported that the attack is linked to TeamPCP who have been in the news for a recent campaign affecting Checkm … ⌘ Read more

Initial Benchmarks Of The SpacemiT K3 RVA23 RISC-V CPU With The K3 Pico-ITX
One of the RISC-V SoCs we have been most looking forward to this year is the SpacemiT K3 that features the X100 RISC-V cores that are RVA23 compliant and among the first readily available RVA23 RISC-V platform for running on the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. In this article is a preview of some very early benchmarks of the SpacemiT K3 with the new Pico-ITX single board computer offering. ⌘ Read more

[$] What’s brewing in CXL
Compute\
Express Link (CXL) is a technology intended to enable the provision of
“memory nodes” in data centers that provide (possibly shared) memory to
nearby CPUs. It has, Dan Williams said at the beginning of his
memory-management-track session on the topic at the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, “been making
memory-management problems worse since 2021”. He used the sessi … ⌘ Read more

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Booed During Graduation Speech About AI
Today former Google CEO Eric Schmidt “was booed multiple times,” reports NBC News, “while discussing AI during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona.”

Schmidt had started by remembering how computer platforms “gave everyone a voice” but also “degraded the public square… They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instin … ⌘ Read more

FluidX3D Lands A Big Speed-Up For This OpenCL CFD Software
Released this week was FluidX3D 3.7, the latest feature update to this computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that is CPU/GPU accelerated by way of OpenCL… ⌘ Read more

The UK Finally Starts Reforming Its ‘Computer Misuse Act’
Computer Weekly reports on “the long-awaited reform of Britain’s outdated Computer Misuse Act of 1990 — which has hamstrung the work of the nation’s cyber security professionals and researchers for years.”

The Computer Misuse Act was passed 35 years ago in response to a high-profile hacking incident involving no less than the King’s father, the late Duke of Edi … ⌘ Read more

B&H Photo Promo Codes and Deals This May
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Newegg Promo Code: 10% Off in May 2026
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SOLAI Launches $399 Solode Neo Linux AI Computer
BrianFagioli writes: SOLAI has launched the Solode Neo, a $399 Linux-based mini PC designed for always-on AI agents, browser automation, and persistent developer workflows. The compact system ships with an Intel N150 processor, 12GB LPDDR5 memory, 128GB SSD storage, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a Linux-based operating system called Solode AI OS. The company says th … ⌘ Read more

Meta Employees Launch Protest Against Mouse-Tracking Tech At US Offices
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta employees distributed flyers at multiple U.S. offices on Tuesday to protest the company’s recent installation of mouse-tracking software on their computers, according to photos of the pamphlets seen by Reuters. The flyers, which appeared in meeting rooms, on vending machines and … ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime 26.18.38308.1 Brings More Xe3P Enableement, Nova Lake P Support
Intel on Tuesday released a new version of their open-source Compute Runtime for OpenCL and Level Zero support across their integrated and discrete graphics hardware… ⌘ Read more

I’m not always on the same page as Rob Pike, but this hit close to home:

Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I’m being charitable).

Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.

I spent my time trying to make it better. Not just write code, but find better or at least different ways to do so. Simpler, cleaner, more general, more comprehensible.

What’s happening today is a complete repudiation of everything I was trying to achieve.

“Simpler, cleaner, more general, more comprehensible”, that’s what I’ve been trying to establish in our teams as well. Obviously not to the same degree, but you get the idea.

And it all goes out the window now. We’re doing the complete opposite – and with full force.

CUDA Proves Nvidia Is a Software Company
Nvidia’s real AI moat isn’t “a piece of hardware,” writes Wired’s Sheon Han. It’s CUDA: a mature, deeply optimized software ecosystem that keeps machine-learning workloads tied to Nvidia GPUs. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: What sounds like a chemical compound banned by the FDA may be the one true moat in AI. CUDA technically stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, … ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.351 Brings Six New Extensions, Including A Ray-Tracing Improvement
Quietly sneaking out at the end of last week was Vulkan 1.4.351 as the newest spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API… ⌘ Read more

Intel IGC 2.34.4 Compiler Brings Many Improvements
The Intel Graphics Compiler “IGC” 2.34.4 release is out today as this compiler used by the Intel Compute Runtime for Level Zero and OpenCL compute on Intel graphics hardware plus is also used as the graphics shader compiler under Windows… ⌘ Read more

NYT: ‘Meta’s Embrace of AI Is Making Its Employees Miserable’
“Meta’s embrace of AI is making its employees miserable,” reports the New York Times.

And “After Meta said late last month that it would start tracking employees’ computer use, hundreds of workers spoke up.” (One employee even told Meta’s CTO in an internal post, “Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning.”
In an internal post … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Raises Claude Code Usage Limits, Credits New Deal With SpaceX
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At its Code with Claude developer conference on Wednesday, Anthropic announced a deal with SpaceX to utilize the entire compute capacity of the latter’s data center in Memphis, Tennessee. On stage at the conference, CEO Dario Amodei said the deal was intended to increase usage limits … ⌘ Read more

AMD Instinct MI350P: PCIe Add-In Card For High Performance Open-Source AI/Compute
While there is the AMD Instinct MI400 series coming this year, today AMD announced an interesting and arguably overdue offering for the Instinct MI350 series: the MI350P. The AMD Instinct MI350P is a PCIe add-in-card to add Instinct MI350 compute capabilities to existing PCIe 5.0 air-cooled servers as an alternative to the Open Accelerator Module (OAM) currently used by the Instinct MI350 series. ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Gets in Bed With SpaceX as the AI Race Turns Weird
In an unexpected turn, the two companies signed a deal for Anthropic to use computing resources from Elon Musk’s xAI. ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 To Integrate The AMDGPU “Power Module” To Better Align With Windows
Sent out today was a batch of “new stuff” for the AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel drivers that are ready for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 7.2 merge window happens in June. Most notable is the introduction of the AMDGPU DC power module to better align with the Radeon power management behavior under Microsoft Windows… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan SC SDK Released For Safety-Critical Graphics / Compute
Yesterday was the OpenCL 3.1 release and today is another exciting development for The Khronos Group standards: the debut of the Vulkan SC SDK for safety-critical applications… ⌘ Read more

B&H Photo Promo Codes and Deals This May
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ROCm 7.2.3 Brings Minor Updates, ROCm XIO Documentation
Less than one month after releasing ROCm 7.2.2, the ROCm 7.2.3 is now available with some minor improvements to this open-source AMD GPU compute and AI stack… ⌘ Read more

Newegg Promo Code: 10% Off in May 2026
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Convicted Former Harvard Scientist Rebuilds Brain Computer Lab In China
Reuters reports that Charles Lieber, the former Harvard scientist convicted of lying to U.S. authorities about payments and ties to China, is now leading China’s state-funded i-BRAIN lab in Shenzhen, where he has access to advanced nanofabrication tools and primate research facilities for brain-computer interface work. From the re … ⌘ Read more

Remembering Seth Nickell
LWN has received the sad news that Seth Nickell passed away, on
April 16, from his father, Eric Nickell:

Many of you knew Seth from his work in the GNOME Usability Project, but his
roots in that community trace back to his high school years. As a father of
a high school junior, I remember being terrified when he flashed the hard
drive of a computer he purchased for himself with this weird “Linux” thing.
And I was a bit awed by the college application essay he wrote about open
source and Linus Tor … ⌘ Read more

Get Ready for More Brain-Scanning Consumer Gadgets
Neurable, which makes noninvasive brain-computer interfaces, is licensing its technology and promises a “flood” of new third-party hardware this year and next. ⌘ Read more

The Hottest Anti-AI Gadget Is a Cyberdeck
On TikTok, young women are going viral for crafting whimsical homemade computers inside purses. ⌘ Read more

A Brain Implant for Depression Is About to Be Tested in Humans
While many brain-computer interface companies are focused on helping paralyzed people communicate, Motif Neurotech is targeting mental health disorders. ⌘ Read more

Privacy Advocate Accuses US Government of Investing in AI-Powered Mass Surveillance
The Conversation published this warning from privacy/tech law/electronic surveillance attorney Anne Toomey McKenna (also an affiliated faculty member at Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences). The U.S. government “is able to purchase Americans’ sensitive data because the information it buy … ⌘ Read more

Google To Invest Up To $40 Billion In Anthropic
Google plans to invest up to $40 billion more in Anthropic, starting with $10 billion now and another $30 billion tied to performance milestones. CNBC reports: Anthropic said the agreement expands on a longstanding partnership between the two companies. Earlier this month, Anthropic secured 5 gigawatts worth of computing capacity as part of an announcement with Google and Broadcom … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Says Its New GPT-5.5 Model Is More Efficient and Better At Coding
OpenAI released its new GPT-5.5 model today, which the company calls its “smartest and most intuitive to use model yet, and the next step toward a new way of getting work done on a computer.” The Verge reports: OpenAI just released GPT-5.4 last month, but says that the new GPT-5.5 “excels” at tasks like writing and debugging code, doing … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 Allows “sudo apt install rocm” But It’s Months Out-Of-Date
Canonical announced last year that in collaboration with AMD they would be bringing the ROCm software libraries into the Ubuntu archive for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. The plan has been to ship AMD ROCm AI/ML and HPC libraries in the Ubuntu archive so it would be as easy as sudo apt install rocm for getting started with AMD’s open-source GPU compute stack. With today being the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release day, I decided to revisit the topic… ⌘ Read more

Firefox: The zero-days are numbered
This\
Firefox blog post reports that the Firefox 150 release includes
fixes for 271 vulnerabilities found by the Claude Mythos preview.

Elite security researchers find bugs that fuzzers can’t largely by
reasoning through the source code. This is effective, but
time-consuming and bottlenecked on scarce human
expertise. Computers were completely incapable of doing this a few
months ago, and now they excel at i … ⌘ Read more

Meta To Start Capturing Employee Mouse Movements, Keystrokes For AI Training Data
Reuters reports that Meta plans to start collecting U.S.-based employees’ mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and occasional screen snapshots to train AI agents that can better learn how humans use computers. The tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will reportedly “not be used for performance assessme … ⌘ Read more

Framework Computer Announces The Framework Laptop 13 Pro
At Framework Computer’s next-gen hardware launch event today they announced the Framework Laptop 13 Pro as a ground-up redesign of their 13-inch modular laptop… ⌘ Read more

Framework Previews The OCuLink Dev Kit
In addition to announcing the Framework Laptop 13 Pro today, Framework Computer at their next-gen hardware event also previewed the OCuLink Dev Kit for attaching high throughput peripherals like external GPUs (eGPUs) to Framework Laptops… ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Benchmarks: The Best Desktop Performance For Linux Developers, Creators
Today we can finally share performance benchmarks of the long-rumored AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor. This new halo product for the Ryzen 9000 series desktop line-up offers captivating performance for developers frequently compiling code, creators, technical computing workloads for students or hobbyists or those not able to afford a Threadripper / EPYC type workstation, or similar heavy computing use. With … ⌘ Read more

Allbirds’ Move To AI Has Echoes of the Dot-Com Frenzy
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by writer Austin Carr: Allbirds is pivoting to artificial intelligence. The San Francisco brand, whose wool running shoes were once the sneaker du jour among the tech crowd, announced last week that it was expanding into AI computing infrastructure. The bizarre strategic shift was immediately greeted with a surpris … ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime Promotes Support For Wildcat Lake, “Early” Crescent Island
Out today is the Intel Compute Runtime 26.14.37833.4 that now includes production support for the newly-launched Wildcat Lake cut-down Panther Lake SoCs that debuted last week as the Core Series 3… ⌘ Read more

A Lot Of Memory Management “MM” Improvements Merged For Linux 7.1
Andrew Morton recently sent out his various “MM” related pull requests for the ongoing Linux 7.1 kernel. There are a number of memory management optimizations in this next kernel version, which is always nice to see but all the more so these days with the inflated RAM pricing and other computer component prices… ⌘ Read more