March 4, 2025

Hardware

Tiny Minisforum Mobo Packs A Ryzen 9 7945HX3D For A 3D V-Cache Gaming Boost

It’s pretty ironic, if you think about it. AMD makes desktop CPUs, then turns them into BGA chips for the high-end mobile market. Laptop vendors don’t buy as many of those CPUs as AMD would like, and they start to filter into the market via alternative channels—like these Minisforum “Mobile on Desktop” (MoDT) products. So it goes that we have the Minisforum BD790i X3D, a Mini-ITX motherboard with a Ryzen 9 7945HX3D onboard. It’s exactly

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Hardware

Blue Ghost Lunar Lander Captures Stunning Video Of The Dark Side Of The Moon

Firefly has announced that its “Blue Ghost” spacecraft has captured a stunning video showing the dark side of the moon while it was preparing to land on the lunar surface. Firefly is one of the private companies selected via NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, the purpose of which is to transport NASA equipment to the moon in service of NASA’s goal: returning astronauts to the moon for a future Mars mission. The video

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A Thousand Vanities

Over the past couple of months, as a way to relax during a stressful time in my life, I have been slowly cleaning through and reorganizing the inventory of what has become my main Second Life avatar, Vanity Fair (I talk a bit about that here). After almost 18 years, Vanity has almost 900 saved outfits, ranging from old system-layers-and-flexiprim ballgowns dating back to 2008, to modern, fully mesh outfits that I bought just yesterday!

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Hardware

AMD Confirms Radeon RX 9000 GPUs Are UEFI-Only: What You Need To Know

In what is a depressingly-rare show of pre-release transparency, AMD has posted a support article concerning UEFI support on its RDNA 4-based GPUs, including the soon-to-be-released Radeon RX 9070 series. The article is surprisingly wordy for such a simple topic: AMD will only officially support UEFI systems with graphics cards sporting GPUs based on the RDNA 4 architecture. Is this the first major controversy for AMD’s new Radeon series? Well, no. In fact, you’re probably

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Funding to women-founded startups declined 12% in 2024, but that wasn’t far behind the broader market | TechCrunch

Venture investment in startups run by women has always lagged the overall market, and with companies across sectors cutting back on their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, things seem grimmer than ever for female founders. But the data tells a different tale for 2024 — at least according to this one report by European venture platform Female Foundry: Venture investment to startups founded by women in Europe declined 12% in 2024 from a year earlier, but

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We’re Charging Our Cars Wrong

If there’s one thing we could do now to hasten the transition to electric vehicles, it’s this: Build a robust public EV-charging infrastructure. While the media has focused on vehicle performance and range, consumers have always been clear that they want electric cars to do essentially everything their old vehicles do—including long overnight trips. To those who don’t yet own an EV, a robust infrastructure may seem unimportant. Studies, after all, show that in developed

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Hardware

Monster Hunter Wilds Just Slayed An Insane Capcom Record In Its First 3 Days

It was evident shorty after its launch that Monster Hunter Wilds was going to be a success story for Capcom. The game managed an impressive feat on PC, passing the million-concurrent-players mark over the weekend. Even some of the rough edges that showed up were unable to slow down gamers from embarking on multiplayer hunts within its beautiful, albeit hardware-taxing environments. Up until now there wasn’t concrete information about just how well it was doing, but

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LlamaIndex launches a cloud service for building unstructured data agents | TechCrunch

Agents are the next big thing in AI. Some define these “agents” differently from others, but the general idea is, they’re AI-powered tools that can perform tasks autonomously. The agent hype has reached a fever pitch, but one startup was relatively early to the game: LlamaIndex. Founded by former Uber research scientists Jerry Liu and Simon Suo in 2023, LlamaIndex allows developers to build custom agents over unstructured data. “LlamaIndex started as a toy open

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AI

The Urgent Need for Intrinsic Alignment Technologies for Responsible Agentic AI | Towards Data Science

Advancements in agentic artificial intelligence (AI) promise to bring significant opportunities to individuals and businesses in all sectors. However, as AI agents become more autonomous, they may use scheming behavior or break rules to achieve their functional goals. This can lead to the machine manipulating its external communications and actions in ways that are not always aligned with our expectations or principles. For example, technical papers in late 2024 reported that today’s reasoning models demonstrate

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Hardware

Apple Unveils iPad Air With M3 For A 2X Lift And An AI-Gimped Budget iPad

While many were expecting Apple to announce a new line of Macs this week (which it still might), we’re instead (for now) getting a couple of new iPad tablets, including an 6th generation iPad Air infused with Apple’s M3 silicon and a new baseline iPad powered by Apple’s A16 chip. Which one might be right for you? Let’s dig into the specs. Starting with the newest member of the iPad Air family, the 7th generation

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