Hey, America, you know, happy birthday.
I got you some tech news, cause I don't know if you're gonna 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 26th. Hoorah! Is that what they, is that?
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 cross over to Xbox.
Perhaps giving PlayStation fans a taste of the rage
Xbox fans have felt for years watching their precious exclusives being given away.
Oh, seems like the vast majority of PlayStation players
think this is good or don't really care.
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 wanna stop the ruthless massacre of video games,
go on and sign the petitions. Links are with our news 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 cue, right as the petitions hit their goals,
EA announced they'll be shutting down the servers for Anthem Bioware'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, ooh, still gets me.
Bum-ba-dee, oh, you gotta check, you gotta 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. The big boy bill will also require 800 megahertz
of electromagnetic spectrum, around the six to seven gigahertz 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 wanna find out about all the non-tech stuff.
That's none of my 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 250 bucks,
the same MSRP as the Intel ARC B580,
but with four Gigabyte less VRAM, a smaller 128-bit memory bus, and worse performance.
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 chatbots 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 eInk, 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 ignore. 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, 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. Hey, I mean, not all wars.
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.
Whoo! 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 e-book 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 Engineer's 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 that.