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However, this is going to be bad news for enthusiasts and consumers. Although many people prefer SSDs for most electronics, there is still a market for consumer hard drives, especially for use in NAS systems and long-term data storage. But the massive demand brought by the AI infrastructure buildout is causing shortages even for this component. Many HDD models have surged in pricing already, with costs jumping by an average of 46% since September 2025. PC hardware shortages are only getting worse as the AI race continues. What started as a memory and storage chip shortage has soon spread into...

Western Digital has run out of Hard Disk Drive capacity through 2026, with CEO Irving Tan confirming the company is sold out to its top customers as artificial intelligence and enterprise demand consumes storage at unprecedented levels. The shortage has driven HDD prices to their highest point in two years, according to wccftech.com, which reported on Western Digital's Q2 earnings call. Firm orders through 2028 Speaking during the company's Q2 earnings call, Tan revealed the extent of Western Digital's committed capacity. "As we highlighted, we're pretty much sold out for calendar 2026. We have firm POs with our top seven...

Abstract AIs have made rapid progress on research-oriented benchmarks of knowledge and reasoning, but it remains unclear how these gains translate into economic value and automation. To measure this, we introduce the Remote Labor Index (RLI), a broadly multi-sector benchmark comprising real-world, economically valuable projects designed to evaluate end-to-end agent performance in practical settings. AI agents perform near the floor on RLI, with the highest-performing agent achieving an automation rate of 2.5%. These results help ground discussions of AI automation in empirical evidence, setting a common basis for tracking AI impacts and enabling stakeholders to proactively navigate AI-driven labor automation....

A New Report Says AI Layoffs Are Backfiring and Half of Companies Will Start Rehiring, Organizations are starting to come to terms with the limits of AI. Businesses and workers are actively adopting artificial intelligence tools to automate various workplace tasks and boost their productivity in the process, surveys indicate. Still, managers should probably think twice about using the tech to replace employees anytime soon. Many companies that have swapped people for chatbots will be reversing course and hiring cut staffers back before long, according to top consultancy Gartner. Recent studies have captured the significantly increased pace with which workplaces...

Building a brand new gaming PC in 2026 is officially a nightmare thanks to skyrocketing RAM and GPU prices. In this video, I’ll show you how to beat the market by building a powerful 1440p small form factor gaming PC using a smart mix of new and used hardware. High-end gaming doesn't have to cost thousands. Today, we are piecing together a sleek SFF (Small Form Factor) build designed to crush 1440p gaming without breaking the bank. By leveraging the Intel Core i5-11600 and the surprisingly capable Intel Arc B570, we achieve performance that rivals modern mid-range systems at a...

In an interview with PC Gamer, Dell has commented on the current state of the PC industry and explained why its latest wave of hardware wasn't marketed directly as AI PCs. It turns out, Dell says it has learned that consumers don't seem to particularly care about AI in PCs and aren't making buying decisions based on it. "... what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Dell's head of product, Kevin Terwilliger said. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them...

The Streisand effect continues to be real, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's AI comments go viral. A couple of days ago, Nadella penned a short note on his hopes for artificial intelligence going into 2026. As you know, Microsoft is very much "all in" on AI, with Azure providing a significant chunk of the backbone for OpenAI's ChatGPT. Microsoft has been baking its ChatGPT-powered Copilot app into virtually every product it has, whether you like it or not. The brute force by which Microsoft is introducing these products has led to an unrelenting backlash on social media, and Nadella's latest...

COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for high‑volume, high‑reliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes. Which reminds me, mainframes are still alive and well too. Banking, insurance, governments, inventory management – all the same places you'll find COBOL, you'll find mainframes as well.None of that is as sexy as the latest AI program or the newest cloud-native computing release, but...

Welcome to the techno-feudal state, where citizens are forced to underwrite unnecessary and harmful technology at the expense of the technology they actually need. The economic story of 2025 is the government-driven build-out of hyperscale AI data centers — sold as innovation, justified as national strategy, and pursued in service of cloud-based chatbot slop and expanded surveillance. This build-out is consuming land, food, water, and energy at enormous scale. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright bluntly put it, “It takes massive amounts of electricity to generate intelligence. The more energy invested, the more intelligence produced.” That framing ignores what is being...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JfOxx6Hh4 In this video, we walk through the anti-consumer AI circlejerk contributing to what we think is an "AI bubble." NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel are now all sort of working with each other, despite also being the only competitors in some of their market segments. This creates opportunity, we think, for price fixing and anti-consumer collusion; at the same time, the three are now crossing over in their partnerships with OpenAI, CoreWeave, Oracle, xAI, and other AI-obsessed companies demanding more AI pickaxes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JfOxx6Hh4

For the seventh straight year, Visual Capitalist sifted through the forecast landscape to bring you the Prediction Consensus, a synthesis of what analysts, thought leaders, and industry experts expect for the year ahead.This year, Nick Routley analyzed over 2,000 individual predictions from a wide variety of sources including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, the IMF, The Economist, Deloitte, Microsoft, Gartner, and dozens more.By mapping where these forecasts overlap, we’ve distilled the noise into 25 high-conviction themes displayed in our “Bingo Card” format, with the number of dabs reflecting the volume of supporting predictions.To get the full analysis of the Prediction Consensus...

Linux users often hear phrases like “the terminal is faster” or “real Linux users don’t rely on the GUI.” While these statements are common in online communities, they rarely reflect how people actually use Linux in daily life. Most users browse the web, manage files, edit documents, connect external devices, and install apps without ever touching the command line.For everyday computing, the graphical interface is usually the most comfortable path. It is visual, discoverable, and forgiving. If you want to move a document, rename a set of photos, preview a video, or open a PDF, there is no reason to...

In October 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that his social media empire was officially rebranding itself as “Meta” as part of a sweeping company-wide doubling down on virtual reality tech.The head-scratching pivot has been nothing short of a disaster ever since, from blocky “Horizon Worlds” online environments filled with screeching children to never-ending rounds of layoffs and exorbitant losses.All told, the company has lost more than $70 billion since the beginning of 2021 on its enormous long-term VR bet, a staggering sum that has left investors itchy and unimpressed as Zuckerberg has failed to convince the public of the...

The RAM Shortage Comes for Us All | 4:29 Jeff Geerling | 1.01M subscribers | 1,265 views | December 4, 2025

New research shows that a substantial proportion of children aren’t playing outdoors at all, even on the weekends...researchers focused on a subset of 2,568 children between the ages of 7 and 12, analyzing responses from surveys filled out by the children and their parents... All told, 34% of kids reported not playing outdoors during weekdays, and 20% reported not playing outdoors during weekends. And based on their parents’ responses, the more the children played outside, the better their social-emotional skills were on average. Children with these skills are more able to clearly express their emotions or build positive relationships with...

Like them we should ask: ‘What is this tool for and what does it make us become?’ As new technology, AI and the internet take over 21st-century life, I suggest looking to the Amish for guidance. Far from being the Luddites most folk assume, the Amish undertake a guided policy of technological discernment.When a new practice or device emerges into the world, the elders often gather to test it out over a set period of time. The entire process rests upon this deceptively simple inquiry – “What is this tool for and what does it make us become?” All...

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Many of you now think that the best option is just to stick with Windows 10, even though it is classified as end-of-life by Microsoft. End-of-life means you will not get security updates. I know that for $30 you can get an extra year of security updates from Microsoft, but after that, zero. So regardless of short-term solutions, in the end you will have an unsafe OS. Also, the reality is that many of you cannot upgrade to Windows 11, and even if you could, my recent videos show that...

I don't do anything hinky or illegal on my PC. But is CCleaner good for cleaning up cache? At the moment, I use the "delete history" feature on my browser and the "delete history" feature on "Internet Options." Does CCleaner do anything else?

A prominent computer science professor at one of the world’s most prestigious universities says his graduates are struggling to find work — a far cry from just four years ago when they had their pick of high-paying jobs and “had the run of the place.” Hany Farid, a world-renowned expert in digital forensics and image analysis, told Nova’s “Particles of Thought” podcast that computer science is no longer the future-proof career that it once was. Farid was discussing the reasons that podcast host Hakeem Oluseyi’s son, a college senior who is studying computer science, is struggling to find work. “For...

AI PCs are equipped with powerful processors and AI accelerators designed to increase productivity and creativity. With our round-up of the latest news, learn how AI PCs are poised to shape the future of computing. Virtually every aspect of technology has been affected, and potentially improved, by artificial intelligence (AI). PCs are no exception. While the meaning of “AI PC” is still evolving, it generally refers to a computer specifically designed to excel at AI-powered tasks. These beefed-up computers typically feature: High-end CPUs and GPUs to handle the demanding computational requirements of AI applications such as AI assistants that automate...