SpecCat.com is a web site I’ve made, mainly for myself trying out LLMs, for easily comparing detailed specifications of different silicon chips; CPUs, APUS, GPUs etc. as shown in screenshots of header below and full at bottom. It should work reasonably well on mobile, but main use case was for larger screens. I tried hard to make it colorful and fun, and dark only. I made this a while ago but never got around to announcing it, so here we are.

Example top part of website for CPUs.

Example top part of website for GPUs.

I made this because I often check chip specifications, since I find it endlessly fascinating but also for professional use. That is, I often go to ark.intel.com, which unfortunately is not as great a site as it once was. It’s not dense enough. Slow too. And naturally you can’t compare to other chips/products from AMD, AMD Product Specifications, or NVidia GPUs, Compare GeForce Graphics Cards or similar.

I also often have to spec new PCs for work or friends and family based on a budget. Similar to what I discussed in my old blog post from 2020 Core Developer PC™ v20.09.dGPU - AMD 3700X vs Intel i7-10700 8c/16t with NVidia 2060 Super, you know back when DDR RAM was dirt cheap ($110/850 DKK for 2 x 16 GB DDR4 3200)! So having specs at hand makes that a lot easier.

There are, of course, several media sites that have comparisons like TechPowerUp specs databases; CPU Specs Database, GPU Specs Database, SSD Specs Database. Or CPU Monkey.

All of which are fine, but none really go into the detail I am looking for or present such details in a dense enough way and allowing for easy comparison across all details for many products. My main source has, thus, often been Wikipedia ♥, which has great detailed tables, as for example in:

• AMD Zen 5
• Intel Panther Lake
• NVidia Blackwell
• NVidia GeForce RTX 50 Series

Given my unhealthy obsession with performance/minimalism I created this as a vanilla static html, css, javascript web site. Zero libraries or frameworks are used. I spent quite a bit of time prompting and adjusting output to keep site small and instant by bundling everything into just two assets, as shown in Chrome Developer Tool below. Code is a mess for sure, though.

The entire site clocks in at just ~30 KB. A lot less than this blog post. Basic design is very simple, I keep specs in json as js-files for each product family. Then include these in index.html, which means it works fine locally out-of-the-box, as part of deployment all this is then bundled into one single index.html file together with app.js that contains site logic and the favicon. The AI generated logo of a cat holding a silicon wafer then being the only other asset, served as highly compressed avif-file for browsers that support this (almost all). In comparison ark.intel.com is 1.6 MB (that’s +50x more) for just going to welcome page.

Given I have used LLMs for this and no matter what I provide no guarantees to the correctness of the specifications. I checked as much as I could manually, but if you find any mistakes please to let me know. It is very much a preview and I do not know if I will invest more time in it or not. Probably depends on others finding this useful or not, so feedback and suggestions are welcomed.

Ideally, I would like to expand this with other silicon products (e.g. gaming consoles, mobile SOCs), but also include rumored specifications for upcoming chips like Zen 6 or Nova Lake based on leaks from Moore’s Law Is Dead or similar, as when to buy/update a PC for example is a cornerstone of any silicon enthusiasts reasoning.

That’s all!

Microsoft says “New” Outlook will soon group your notifications and reduce interruptions, aka notification spam, on Windows, but it won’t admit that Outlook Classic loads emails faster, almost more than 10 seconds faster when you open emails via notifications.

It’s crazy that after all these years, Microsoft doesn’t realize New Outlook has a major reliability problem, particularly with notifications. You either don’t receive notifications for your connected accounts, or if you receive notifications for any of your emails, it could take longer than ten seconds to open the mail. I’ve observed this behavior on Windows 11 and Windows 10.

But don’t get me wrong. New Outlook isn’t exactly an unusable or terrible client. It gets the job done, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone because it’s based on Outlook.com, after all.

We’ve been using Outlook.com for decades now, so if that worked for your tasks, New Outlook is also more than enough for personal use, but at the same time, it doesn’t do justice to the Windows client.

Outlook Classic is a perfectly capable product, and New Outlook wasn’t required, but now that we have it, Microsoft has no choice but to maintain it.

As first spotted by Windows Latest, on June 9, Microsoft confirmed that it’s testing a new feature that will group email notifications received within seconds into a single alert.

That means, instead of getting bombarded with dozens of email notifications, which can happen when you sign up or order a product, you’ll get a single notification that says you have received a new email.

I haven’t been able to try grouped notifications on my PC yet, so I asked Microsoft, and it told me that the feature will be available starting in late June, but it won’t roll out to everyone until at least mid-September.

Also, Microsoft plans to turn on notification grouping by default, so you’ll need to opt out from Settings > General > Notifications > Email > Group notifications.

Why is Microsoft adding notification grouping to New Outlook?

Outlook’s upcoming grouped notifications feature is a great idea, and it could reduce notification fatigue.

Microsoft’s study found that grouping notifications could help improve focus and make you more productive.

This feature will roll out to both Outlook on the web and Outlook for Windows, and once you have it, you will notice that some notifications are now grouped. The grouping happens when multiple emails arrive within a few seconds, and if you click a grouped notification, it opens the most recent email in the inbox.

You can always go back to the inbox and find the other emails sent as part of the group.

Outlook Classic is far better than New Outlook for notification management

Outlook Classic “Win32” app has been around for almost three decades, and while it’s no longer the center of attention at Microsoft, it still does many things better than the glorified web app, aka “New Outlook.”

In our tests, Windows Latest found that when you receive an email notification via New Outlook and click on the alert, it can take anywhere between 10 seconds and 30 seconds for Outlook to open and slowly load the email. If you don’t believe me, look at the video below from our benchmark:

New Outlook is so bad at notifications that you could literally open New Outlook and navigate to the email manually faster than by clicking the alert in Windows Notification Center:

Outlook Classic, which is supposedly old and “legacy” code, smokes New Outlook and opens emails in a second or two when you hit the notifications:

Also, it’s not just about performance because I’ve observed that New Outlook notifications are a hit or miss for connected accounts.

For example, on a PC with close to 10 Microsoft 365 domains/accounts, I do not get alerts for all my accounts all the time. It’s a hit or miss, and there’s no pattern other than the fact that New Outlook can be messy with notifications.

Microsoft previously told Windows Latest that it’s aware of unreliable email notifications and is working on a fix. Now, we’re also getting grouped notifications, which is a nice improvement, and there are up to 10 major changes planned for New Outlook in 2026, but we do not have any word from Microsoft on slow email opening.

What is your wishlist for New Outlook? Let me know in the comments below.

The post Microsoft is killing New Outlook’s notification spam, but Classic still loads emails faster on Windows appeared first on Windows Latest

After a rollercoaster negotiation process with the Trump administration that dragged on for two weeks, Anthropic's Mythos 5 is finally back in action - at least, somewhat, for a select group of organizations, according to a letter from the government to Anthropic that was viewed by The Verge. Fable 5, however - the public-facing Mythos-class model - appears to still be in limbo, with no apparent timeline for a rollout agreement.

The letter, dated June 26th and sent by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown, who had been recently leading negotiations, states that there's been a "revision to the license requiremen …

Read the full story at The Verge.

This episode is a fun crossover from our Python news and tips podcast, Python Bytes. We have had some big changes over there. Brian Okken has moved on and Calvin Hendryx-Parker has joined the show as the new co-host. To kick off this new era, we decided to do a longer and more personal episode called "All Our Tools". The idea is both of us talk about some of our most useful day-to-day developer and business owner tools that we think you all would find useful. It was so well received, that I'm bringing it to you all as a crossover episode. Enjoy and we hope you find something new and awesome to help you with your software and data science day to day.

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