Hey, America. You know, happy birthday.
I got you some tech news cuz I don't know if you're going to love all the
other presents your dad's giving you. So, Hell Divers 2 will officially be the
first PlayStation exclusive game actually published by PlayStation to
arrive on Xbox when it drops from orbit on August 26. Hurrah. Is that what they
It's a Super Earth for the win. I haven't played the game. It's not the
first time a PlayStation exclusive has found its way to Xbox. There's MLB The
Show, for instance, but that game is published by MLB itself, and it's
understood they kind of forced Sony to let them do it. Baseball people, you
know, very intimidating. They have bats. This appears to be the first time
PlayStation has voluntarily let an exclusive crossover to Xbox. perhaps
giving PlayStation fans a taste of the rage Xbox fans have felt for years
watching their precious exclusives being given away. And oh uh oh, seems like the
vast majority of PlayStation players think this is good or don't really care.
Uh, but that's not stopping gaming sites from trying to get some clicks with Game
Rant highlighting negative comments made by a lot of fans on Twitter, Reddit, and
the PlayStation blog, which has three comments, all negative, and also all
written by the same guy. As for why this is all happening now, I don't know.
Maybe PlayStation is throwing Xbox a bone. After all, they just got hit by
big layoffs. And then Xbox exec Matt Turnbull tried to help by offering the
best advice he can under the circumstances, which is ideas for
prompts that you can feed an AI that should make you feel better about being
fired from your game developer job by the company building AI game generators.
Thank you. In other game type news, the Stop Killing Games initiative in support
of game preservation has hit the goals for its EU and UK petitions with more
than 1.1 million and 150,000 signatures
respectively. But they could still use more as officials will have to verify
them and a bunch of those signatures probably don't count because the people
signing didn't mean it enough. So, if you live in the EU or the UK and you
want to stop the ruthless massacre of video games, go on and sign the
petitions. Links are with our new sources in the description. Now, the UK
government actually already responded to the petition in May, saying there's no
law requiring game companies to essentially support their games
indefinitely. But one, they're not being asked to do that, only to make an
end-of-life plan that gives players any option to not lose the game forever.
self-hosting servers for example and two there's no law saying that that's why
there's a petition so now as if on Q
right as the petitions hit their goals EA announced they'll be shutting down
the servers for Anthem Boware's ill- fated looter shooter from 2019 on
January 12th 2026 the news was crushing
to players in the Anthem subreddit because yeah people have still
consistently been playing this game because other games haven't quite
managed to recreate that core flying around cosplaying as Iron Man mechanic,
which was one of the things that game did right. Yes, I beat it. The story is
bad, but the soundtrack still gets me good.
You got to you got to check. You got Spotify. After passing votes in the
Senate and House, US President Donald Trump has signed his big, beautiful bill
into law, which puts some notable tech policies into place. The $7,500 EV tax
credit is being taken away on September 30th, while tax credits for building new
solar and wind energy infrastructure will be phased out by 2027, which is
expected to raise the cost of electricity in nearly every state. Uh
the big boy bill will also require 800 meghertz of electromagnetic spectrum
around the 6 to 7 GHz mark to be auctioned off by 2034 which could make
Wi-Fi slower as those bands are used in
the Wi-Fi 6 and 7 spec. But there is
something good in there. The tax credit for building chip manufacturing capacity
in the US is rising to 35% from 25%. And
that follows the Trump administration lifting its restrictions on the export
of chip design software to China. Now, this will obviously help Chinese
companies design their own chips. But it's a hopeful sign that the US's trade
deal with China did actually go through and they'll export rare earth minerals
again, which are vital to the production of batteries and have that satisfying
crunch I just can't find anywhere else. The New York Times has a helpful
breakdown of the entire bill, so check that out if you want to find out about
all the non- tech stuff. But that's none of my business. My business is telling
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demo with their expert team to learn how ODU can help your business. America,
guess what? I got you more gifts because I'm your best friend and you love QuickBit, so I got some of those for
your birthday, too. Happy birthday, America. Open them. Reviews for NVIDIA's
RTX 5050 are out. And well,
you know, it's it's 250 bucks, the same
MSRP as the Intel Arc B580, but with 4
GB less VRAM, a smaller 128 bit memory
bus, and worse performance. Uh, once again though, how gamers feel about this
literally doesn't matter to anyone, least of all to NVIDIA's market cap,
which almost got high enough to make NVIDIA the world's most valuable company
in history. But perhaps if we yell at Jensen louder, Meta is working on
training its chat bots to message users to follow up on previous conversations
unprompted. According to leaked documents seen by Business Insider,
which was later confirmed by Meta, and will do nothing to make chatbots seem
less desperate for your approval. They just fold, right? Have some backbone.
Oh, maybe the messages can show up on this touchscreen trackpad from e- in the
company, which is apparently specifically designed to display AI
generated content. Why? So, I can do
this. I mean, it might make it easier to to
ignore. Uh, the archive team is recruiting PC users to donate internet
bandwidth they're not using to the internet archive, which is unironically
one of the most important public good projects out there right now. But how?
through a tool called Archive Team Warrior, which runs inside a lightweight
virtual machine and uses almost no system resources. Check it out. Maybe
support them by getting a sticker that depicts an Archive Team Warrior running
away from danger. Ah, hey, I mean, uh,
not all wars, uh,
not all wars. The Fairphone 6, a phone
designed specifically to be super repairable, came out last week and
iFixit has given it a repairability score of 10 out of 10. Phew,
that was a close one.
That would have been embarrassing.
Oo. And a company called Black Dot has made its automatic tattooing machine,
which they insist is not a robot, available to the public in a New York
tattoo shop called Bang Bang. But while I was looking for info on their website,
the thing that stuck out to me the most is this ebook written by Black Dot's
founder and CEO about himself that you
can read for free if you give them your email address. The text seems kind of
cool, but that's coming from someone who doesn't have a single tattoo. I lost
them all in the war. But tattoo enthusiasts do not seem to like it. I
think I'd rather take my chances with Emily the Engineers Frankenstein 3D
printer tattoo printer thing instead.
Looks safer. But don't take your chances on missing any tech news. Come back on
Monday. Unless you booked an appointment with the tattoo robot. He is famously
cranky about