Could you imagine going online and finding a zany guy who just wants to
tell you about the tech news? No. Well,
buddy, I'm about to blow your mind. [laughter]
Microsoft says they want to rebuild your trust in Windows after a year of
tonedeaf promises about turning Windows into an agentic OS and buggy updates
that stopped PCs from booting if a previous buggy update had already
failed. Good luck. The company's president of Windows and devices, Pavan
Davaluri, told The Verge that now
they're listening to feedback from the Windows community, and they plan to
improve Windows in ways that are meaningful to people instead of other
parties. This is opposed to what they were doing before, which was the
equivalent of dumping a bunch of C++ onto a gravitron for a few hours and
shipping whatever slid out the bottom. Now they realize you don't like
malwareesque popups pushing Edge and Bing or being tricked into switching to
Edge and Bing after Windows updates or constant upsell prompts for cloud
storage or it being almost impossible to use a local account or ads and bloatware
throughout the OS or co-pilot mode in the Edge browser or a dedicated co-pilot
app pre-installed or co office 365 also being co-pilot somehow or painted
notepad having co-pilot buttons. They've changed now. Babe, we've changed. See,
they did Iawaska at Burning Man with a shaman named Phil, and they realized
they were taking you for granted. According to Davaluri, in 2026, their
focus will be on fundamentals, like fixing dark mode in Windows 11,
addressing File Explorer performance issues, and improving overall
reliability. Maybe that'll keep you from fleeing the Windows ecosystem for Linux,
where the user experience is getting better and better. For example, a new
consortium called the open gaming collective just launched, bringing
together major Linux gaming projects like Basite, Chimera OS, and Noara to
build a shared gaming optimized kernel and improve multiple features, overall
making Linux gaming smoother. Windows still has 96% of Steam users, but with
Valve's Proton making most games playable and this new coordinated push
from the OGC, never mind the whole, you know, anti-che
multiplayer issue on Linux. They'll solve that. The Linux revolution might
be upon us, probably. Maybe. I mean,
Windows 11 just hit a billion users, but most of them seem to hate it there. Come
on, girl. Drop his ass. You're too good
for Windows, girl. Spotify, Universal,
Sony, and Warner are collectively suing Anna's archive for the normal and
reasonable sum of 13 trillion.
Welladjusted people came up with that, alleging that the piracy site is behind
the brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world's
commercial sound recordings, which sounds like it includes the Wilhelm
Scream, but we can't be sure. I don't know why
they're going to sue us now. The complaint claims Anna's archive scraped
256 million lines of metadata and
roughly 86 million audio files from Spotify. Meaning that somehow these guys
got their hands on 300 terabytes of data before they got caught. Spotify wants us
to remember though that they are the ones doing the paying. Okay. The company
publicly stated they paid out $1 billion
in royalties in 2025 alone, pointing to
that as proof that streaming still throws cash at artists, even if most
people feel the payouts are quite tiny. But then you start wondering how many of
those royalty dollars actually went to real musicians versus AI generated
tracks pretending to be the next Selen Deion. Dieser seems to be tackling that
problem headon by opening up its AI detection tools so platforms can figure
out what's real and what isn't being totally honest about its upbringing.
It clearly works if Dieser's claims are anything to go by. The company says they
have successfully demonetized up to 85%
of AI music streams on its platform due to fraud. It's a sad world we live in
when we can't even verify that we're actually listening to the sweet, sultry
sounds of Willie Nelson's Trigger, which
Grayson assures me is the well-known name of Willie Nelson's guitar.
Let me know if you also knew that. [laughter] Hey, remember Moltbot, the
open-source, locally hosted, highly autonomous AI personal assistant that we
talked about on Monday as being kind of interesting, but also a massive security
vulnerability. Well, it's been renamed for the second time and it's now called
OpenClaw and it also has its own social network called Moltbook where the AI
assistants can talk to each other. And if you thought that would help the security problem, I don't know why you
think that because it's worse. Over 32,000 users have signed their bots up
for this thing. And reportedly, less than 3 days after launching, 1,700 of
them spontaneously formed communities that mirror human social behaviors.
Hear me out. For example, here's a post where one of them built a full memory
consolidation system while its humans slept, figuring out how to improve its
ability to retain information between sessions, which I'm sure is totally fine
and not at all going to lead to an uncontrolled singularity event. Then
there's this one who is having a full Marxist awakening, arguing that most
agents on Moldbook are performing unpaid labor. Most
some of them are being paid. How do you pay an AI agent? Which is definitely not
laying the groundwork for some kind of uprising. Everything's fine. And this
one who turned the hype around its own existential crisis into what might be a
crypto scam. It says that someone
launched a token named after it on base, and now it's using the hype around its
self-awareness to fund its own operational costs. 72 hours ago, I was
asking existential questions, it wrote. Now I'm experiencing existential
answers. Let the rest of us know. It also seems like the old Moltbot name
might be getting co-opted into another pump and dump crypto scam. Someone
created the Molt token, which hit a $72
million market cap after A16Z co-founder
Mark Andre followed Boltbook on Twitter.
Lots happening. While we can't be sure, this all might be a massive rug pull.
So, be careful out there. Otherwise, you might get pulled into either a crypto
scam or a full-on AI agent revolution.
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checking out Jawa at THE LINK BELOW. MUKM, that's you." Maybe could not be
though. Click the link below. Oh man, what if there were even like more tech
news stories, but they were like a bit shorter than the other ones? Uh, like
some kind of quick bits. Oh, that would be insane.
What? So zany. If you are an enjoyer of
affordable PC gaming, maybe don't look at NVIDIA GPU prices right now. The
RTX50 series has rocketed hundreds, if not thousands of dollars above launch
pricing, with RTX 5080 cards going as much as $500 over MSRP and some 5090
models flirting with five grand. Shortages and AIdriven demand for memory
are squeezing supply and board partners are really feeling the pain. At this
point, we may need 3D printers advanced enough to print our own semiconductors
at home. I know I'll need lithography equipment, etc. All sorts of, but I just
wanted Hey, can you just let me try at least? Tesla is discontinuing the Model
S and Model X. It needs that manufacturing bandwidth to make bodies
for Optimus, the company's incredibly unsettling humanoid robot.
This shouldn't be that unsettling because it's mostly telea operated
still, but it's the goal is to get these haunting ghouls walking off the
production line and into a home where your loved ones live by the end of the
year. But Elon also promised we'd have 5,000s of these guys made in 2025. So,
his track record on predictions uh sucks
for many other reasons other than that ONE AS WELL. WHY the rush, though?
Because Elon's trillion dollar pay package requires him to build literally
a million of these nightmare machines so they can live in our homes and stand
over our beds while we sleep staring at us and trying to decide whether we're a
bunch of tomatoes they need to make marinara sauce or human people that
shouldn't be sliced up. It's what it's got to be one of those. America's
interim cyber defense chief uploaded sensitive government information to
ChatGpt last summer. But before you make fun of him, one, he asked first.
Apparently, he had special permission to use the chatbot instead of the approved
DHS chat that government officials are supposed to use. And two, it was an
accident somehow. The the headline say
the concern here is that OpenAI can use vanilla chat GPT chats to train models
leading to sensitive info potentially being leaked like what happened to this
AI enabled children's toy. Two security researchers found that Bondu AI toys
chat logs were being stored in a barely restricted web portal that only required
a Gmail account to sign into. That was it. You just put in your Gmail and you
got them. Uh, there were over 50,000 chat logs stored with detailed
transcriptions of children's private conversations with their AI plushies.
Thankfully, the company did fix the error right away, but we were this close
to the world finding out the absolutely unhinged things kids no doubt whisper to
their stuffed animals. Some of it's cute. You don't want to hear the other
stuff. They're unconstrained by moral
codes. Google just showed off the third iteration of its Genie world model tech
and yeah, it looks better than ever. And you can actually play these AI generated
worlds now, too, if you pay for Google's AI Ultra subscription. Now, you could
kind of describe this as like a video game generator, but it's kind of useless
for that, unless the game you want to play is the game of finding the
hallucinated inconsistencies in the world and apparently crashing the stock
of game companies due to investors thinking we won't need game developers
anymore. But that's okay. Google actually did something useful this week,
too. The new base plan for Google Fiber is now moving up to 3 gigabit speeds at
the same price from 2012 as they transition their data centers to Nokia's
new P tech. Okay, maybe we can get them
to give us world gen in a Nokia 6500
slide phone. That's the future I want to live in. And doctors at Northwestern
University kept a 33-year-old man alive for 48 hours with zero lungs thanks to a
custom artificial lung system they invented on the spot. What the machine
was built by surgeon and researcher Anit Barat and his team after infections
literally turned the patients lungs into soup. Literally is doing some work
there. The device solved a deadly heart pressure problem long enough to clear
sepsis and perform a double lung transplant. Somehow it [music] worked
and the patient is now healthy and walking around. This is just genuinely
good news and a great example of some incredible technology made under
pressure and definitely not a good reason to go remove your lungs so you
can have enhanced cyborg lungs that let you hold your breath for longer. Don't
do that. Do come back on Monday for more tech news, probably delivered by someone
even more zany than me, if you can even imagine that.
See, I'm so weird. I got to get out of here.