Happy Easter. Guess what the Easter Bunny got you?
>> Chocolate! >> What? No, it's It's It's tech news. Chocolate for
everybody? Can you imagine the shipping? Chinese DDR5 prices are plummeting, and
resellers who stockpiled RAM during the shortage are stuck with mountains of
products they can't move. So, that's where that all went. Clips on Twitter
show vendors in a Shenzhen market surrounded by piles of modules saying
they're, quote, doomed. Though, how real any of this is remains an open question,
especially after WCCFTech illustrated their coverage with what appears to be
an AI-generated image of a man ripping his hair out while his RAM flies all
over the place in a warehouse. I hate it when that happens. Look how sad he is.
It's It's real. Reports out of China say the biggest drops are hitting the gray
market, meaning these are recycled and repackaged sticks, not factory-fresh
kits, with prices down 25%
to 30% earlier this year. But before you get too excited rubbing your little fly
hands together, industry sources told ET News that Samsung just bumped Q2 DRAM
contract prices another 30% on top of
already doubling them in Q1. So, the people who actually make this stuff,
they're not sweating it, which probably explains why this higher tier of the
Lenovo Legion Go 2 just received a $650
price hike from its $1,350 launch price just 6 months ago for a
handheld that runs Windows. >> worst part.
The eyes of the world are on NASA's Artemis 2 crew as they conduct their
lunar flyby, which is happening right now as we're filming this in a rare
moment that seems to be bringing the world together. Also, they just broke
Apollo 13's record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth.
Suck it, Apollo 13 crew. You got nothing on Canadian dreamboat Jeremy Hansen.
Suck it, Tom Hanks. you. >> Woah! Canada. Canada. At the time of
writing, the four astronauts are in a 6-hour observation window photographing
craters, lava flows, and future landing zones on the far side of the moon, the
better side, measuring surface albedo, and snapping shots of nearby planets.
Right now, the life feed is coming from modified GoPro cameras on Orion's solar
array wings, but the spacecraft is also testing a laser system called O2O that
can beam 4K video from the moon at 260
megabit per second, which means future missions could livestream higher-quality
footage from the moon than Netflix allows on its cheapest plan. Ultimately,
the whole mission has been going so well that the biggest talking point so far is
the astronauts' bathroom situation. Evidently, their urine froze in the
collection tank breaking the mechanism that allows them to go number one aboard
the ship, meaning that the crew has resorted to peeing in bags. It's
The internet has also been going nuts for a jar of Nutella that keeps floating
through the cabin on a livestream. Is it poop? Prompting NASA to have to make a
public statement that they don't have a product placement deal with Nutella.
Could be pretty sweet, though. LinkedIn is silently scanning visitors' browsers
for over 6,000 Chrome extensions every time they load the site, according to a
new report called BrowserGate, published by a European group called Fairlink, no
relation. The exposé claims that LinkedIn performs hidden JavaScript
checks for job search tools, competitor products, and extensions tied to
religious beliefs, political views, and neurodivergence, then sends the results
back to LinkedIn's servers, where no one cool works. Funnily enough, none of this
is mentioned in LinkedIn's privacy policy. Bleeping Computer independently
verified the scanning behavior through their own testing and confirmed the script checks for 6,236
extensions, up from about 2,000 just last year. Now, LinkedIn says the
report's claims are plain wrong, and that the person behind the BrowserGate
website is the developer of a browser extension called Team Fluence, whose
account was banned for scraping and violating LinkedIn's terms of service. A
German court did deny Team Fluence's injunction against LinkedIn, so there's
clearly some beef here, but that doesn't change the fact that LinkedIn is
verifiably scanning your browser for extensions every time you visit the site
without telling you. And since LinkedIn already knows your real name, your
employer, and your job title, that's not exactly an anonymous data point. You
know what is worth knowing about? Our sponsor, Riley.
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Speaking of things rising from the dead, let's resurrect some stories that didn't
quite make the main lineup. It's quick bits time.
NVIDIA demoed a new compression method to shrink the textures in games last
weekend. You know, the surface details that make walls look like walls and skin
look like skin. Their new neural texture
compression uses tiny neural networks to unpack those details on the fly, and in
one demo, it cut VRAM usage from 6.5 GB
down to under a gig while looking basically identical. Intel showed off
their own version, too, probably suckier, but let's hear them out,
claiming up to 18 times smaller textures. No games use it yet, but if
they did, your GPU might finally stop running out of memory all the time, or
GPU makers will just use it as an excuse to give you less. I mean, you're just
going to put DLSS 5 on top of it anyway. What are you going to do with it?
>> going to chat GPT it anyway. Chat GPT is the one who needs it. A court in Rome
has ruled that Netflix's price hikes in Italy between 2017 and 2024 were all
unlawful and ordered the company to refund affected subscribers. Consumer
group Movimento Consumatori, which,
despite sounding like an Italian vampire coven, is actually an Italian consumer
rights organization that brought the suit arguing Netflix violated Italy's
consumer code by hiking prices without proper justification. Premium customers
could be owed up to 500 euros with standard subscribers entitled to around
250. This is a decent class action. >> Yeah. Netflix says it plans to appeal.
OpenAI has just announced that it's acquiring the TBPN podcast, a daily live
tech show that's popular with tech bros, but that most of the rest of us know as
the greenest podcast in the universe. According to OpenAI, they acquired the
podcast to help with shaping the conversation around AI, but claim the
podcast will maintain editorial independence, which seems like two
completely opposing statements. It seems like all scammy boys just pulling a page
out of the Ellison playbook, joining a trend of billionaires snapping up media
to help control the narratives around their products. I think I speak for all
of us, though, when I say that the only thing I care about is that it stays
overwhelmingly green, so I know to swipe past it as quickly as possible during my
doom scroll sessions. And if you're a fan of that show and you watch this show, well, now you can just only watch
this show if you don't like them all. >> Oh, so easy. Thanks, James. Keep
watching us. That's actually green behind me, too.
>> OH, NO! WE MIGHT BE THE GREENER than >> SpaceX filed with the SEC last week for
what could be the biggest IPO ever, targeting a valuation of more than a
trillion dollars, cuz it's Elon scale.
For this historic milestone, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has made a demand that the
banks advising on the deal buy Grok subscriptions, with some already
agreeing to spend tens of millions on the chatbot. It's not surprising that
the banks acquiesced as with an IPO of this magnitude, they stand to make over
500 million dollars in fees. And I'm sure that plugging the nudifying
mecha-Hitler AI into the companies that triggered the 2008 financial
>> yeah. I mean, if he's a good guy if you get to know
him. And Cleveland Clinic researchers
just published results showing that a one-time CRISPR gene editing therapy can
functionally cure severe sickle cell disease. The RUBY trial, published in
the New England Journal of Medicine, treated 28 patients with a therapy
called reni-cel that edits their own stem cells to correct the mutation
causing the disease. 27 out of 28 had
zero painful crises after treatment with hemoglobin levels normalizing within 6
months, which is great news for people suffering from debilitating genetic
diseases, and also for everyone who's been hoping for a Captain America-style
super serum to be available so they don't have to go to the gym anymore. And
that's all the tech news for this Easter Monday. Enjoy your chocolate, hug your
loved ones, and remember, if the Easter Bunny asks for your phone number, don't
give it to him, no matter how much candy he offers. He's been trying to get
people into a multi-level marketing scheme. See you on my downline
Wednesday. Downline?