Oh, well, I'm sorry to say we don't have any tech news today, April Fool!
I'm so like, I got you so good to look on your face.
I love this holiday. It's good that we do this. Iran!
Iran has announced plans to attack 18 major tech companies across the Middle East,
either as part of its ongoing military conflict with the US, or the most ambitious April Fool's
joke of all time. The threat was posted to Telegram on Tuesday, naming Apple, Google,
Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA, Boeing, and GE. Among the companies it accused of helping the US
and Israeli military carry out strikes on Iran. Wait, GE? Is the US dropping shitty
washer dryers on their enemies now? You're gonna have to run the Ayatollah or whoever's
pants through the wash twice if he doesn't want weird detergent residue on them?
What do you have against GE?
These tech companies have thousands of employees across the Gulf region, who were warned to
evacuate a 1 kilometer radius around all targeted facilities. The attacks were expected to start
at 8pm Tehran time on April 1st, but as of recording, no strikes have been confirmed.
Risk management firm Helix's CEO, James Henderson, told CNBC that since AI is now being used as a
weapon in the theater of war, cloud infrastructure assets like data centers will be pulled into
conflict more and more, and then also GE, for some reason. I mean, their microwaves suck,
but are they like, Jihad bad? The writer that wrote that is Muslim by the way, so I'm allowed.
Open source software is under siege from AI, and not in the fun Steven Segal way either.
Two security researchers recently launched an AI tool that can clone entire open source projects
as a tongue-in-cheek provocation to show how easily AI can be used to bypass open source licensing.
The dubiously named MALLUS, spelled M-A-L-U-S, recreates software from public documentation alone,
producing code that's functionally identical to the original, but proprietary. The seemingly
satirical service markets itself as targeting companies that don't want to credit the original
developers or share their changes back to the project, promising legally distinct code with
corporate friendly licensing. It's still unclear whether MALLUS is real or not,
but what is definitely real is the broader threat to genuinely beloved open source tools.
Curl was forced to shut down its bug bounty program to stem the massive tide of vibe-coded
slop submissions. GitHub is considering a kill switch to let maintainers disable pull requests,
entirely for the same reason, and Tailwind Labs laid off 75% of its engineers after AI tools
tanked their revenue. As for whether MALLUS is satire, well on the one hand,
its blog includes cartoonishly villainous posts thanking maintainers for their unpaid labor,
and testimonials from clients like Chad Stockholder at Profit First LLC.
On the other hand, a guy named Chad Stockholder is, on paper, arguably more believable than
about half of the weirdo tech bros in Silicon Valley. Now in case you hadn't noticed, today
was April Fool's, aka the hardest day of the year for us here,
because Timu TikTok's store Slop has completely flooded the internet and it's hard to tell what's
real. These are probably jokes, though, that I'm gonna say now. Yahoo showed off the scroll stopper,
a thumb helmet inspired by what I can only imagine is Juggernaut, the marvel bad guy,
designed to physically stop you from doom scrolling. And I'm kinda sad that this is a
joke because for a second there, I thought I knew one thing that Yahoo still does.
PlayStation's Project Playmo goes the opposite direction, letting AI take over your controller,
your gameplay, and maybe one day, your role as a father and husband.
Triggers meet AI glasses promise real-time steak intelligence for those who love meat
and don't love meta. There's gotta be some crossover. Metro by T-Mobile dropped Kalaon,
a phone-based fragrance so you can smell like an old Nokia,
and Sega released a sanic shirt collection that thankfully did not include Sonichu.
CD Projekt Red's Project Roach, or Ride on a Controller Horse,
is exactly what it sounds like, an experience that gaming has been sorely lacking until now.
MSI added a catbed to a monitor ARM because of course they did, and I want it.
And then there were these articles, one from TechSpot about AMD buying Intel,
which is thankfully not true, or it would trigger the shitty naming scheme apocalypse,
and another one from TechPowerUp about AMD's answer to DLSS5, called FSR5 Scarlet Cortex,
which genuinely broke my brain because it's seven pages long, with AMD branded presentation
slides, detailed diagrams, and even interactive comparisons, which is a lot of work for an
April Fool's joke about a feature that, in all likelihood, AMD is probably going to release
for real at some point soon. We confirmed with AMD that this is not real, for now.
But like, it's like making an April Fool's joke about Apple working on the iPhone 18.
Haha, what if they did that? They're going to!
Oh man, look at you. You've seen so many April Fool's jokes that your entire internal model
of reality is breaking down. You're like, straight up, been set ontologically adrift,
get got, son! Anthropic accidentally open sourced part of AI coding tool clod code
source code. Say that five times fast, I won't. The flub was spotted by security researcher
Chow Fan Xu, who linked to the relevant zip archive on Twitter. Anthropic told Axios it was a
release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. I feel like those can be the
same thing, but so at least no user data was leaked. Cis admins on Reddit point out the sweet
irony of Anthropic building 23 separate layers of bash security, only to be undone by one
misconfigured text file. I wouldn't have done that. Anthropic has since DMCA'd the leaks,
because publicly accessible data is only valid when Anthropic is the one doing the scraping.
Okay, FYI. NASA's Artemis-2 successfully launched today at 6.24pm Eastern Daylight Time from NASA's Kennedy
Space Center in Florida, the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in the
70s. The 10 day lunar flyby is part of a longer roadmap in the Artemis program, focusing on lunar
exploration and carries the first black astronaut, first woman astronaut, and even the first Canadian
astronaut to ever visit the moon's orbit, shattering the glass dome that encompasses the
entire Earth, causing our atmosphere to vent into space and giving us all hours to live.
But at least those guys will get to see the moon. Oracle is laying off thousands of its
employees as the company decides AI data centers have a better value proposition than people.
Workers across the US, India, Canada, and Mexico received a termination email from Oracle leadership
at 6am, which is an AI robot thing, with no prior warning and access to systems was cut immediately.
Senior operations manager Michael Shepard took to LinkedIn to write,
To my colleagues who are impacted today, your worth is not defined by this moment.
A post looking like it was drafted with chat dbt.
But I think what calms my restless heart is knowing somewhere out there,
Larry Ellison is unaffected by all this sipping chardonnay in a bubble bath while keeping his
perfect wax visage out of the water so it doesn't melt off his head.
Over a hundred of Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxies turned into 4000 pound paperweights on Wuhan
highways Tuesday night after a total system failure, the second worst news to come out of Wuhan in the
last six years.
Passengers were trapped for almost two hours, some stranded in the middle of high speed lanes with
trucks speeding past them, some of them those driverless blocks that are just, there's no humans
in there. Okay, China uses, you've seen them. One passenger told a journalist it took her 30
minutes just to connect to a customer representative. Turns out AI drivers don't get sleepy,
but they do occasionally decide to take a simultaneous unprompted coffee break in traffic.
This'll be fine. Let's do more of this. And scientists at USC built a memory chip that works at 700 degrees Celsius,
which could finally allow computers to be used by denizens of the elemental plane of fire.
The team used tungsten, ceramic, and a single atom thick graphene layer to block the
short circuits that normally kill chips in extreme heat. It held data for over 50 hours at 700
degrees and survived over a billion switching cycles at that temperature. So for all the
supervillains out there who have been eyeing up those primo volcano locations for their evil
data centers, now's your time to shine. Teal, I'm looking at you. And I'm looking at you,
viewer, hoping you'll come back on Friday. Oh, just kidding. We got you again. It's a stat holiday.
We'll be back on Monday, April 6th with more tech news. Man, you are really gullible. You should
do something about that, like severely doubt everything and maintain heinously high standards
of evidence. No intuition or vibes at all. Just question everything. Try that.