Happy Easter! Guess what the Easter Bunny got you?
Chocolate! What? No, it's tech news.
Chocolate? For everybody? Can you imagine the shipping?
Chinese DDR5 prices are plummeting, and resellers whose 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 WCCF tech 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 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 25-30% from their peaks earlier this year.
But before you get too excited rubbing your little flyhands 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 $1350 launch price just six months ago.
For handheld. That runs Windows. That's the worst part.
The eyes of the world are on NASA's Artemis II crew as they conduct their lunar flyby, which is happening right now as we're filling 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. Fuck you. Canada.
Canada. At the time of writing, the four astronauts are in a six 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 live feed is coming from modified GoPro cameras on Orion solar array wings.
But the spacecraft is also testing a laser system called 020 that can beam 4k video from the moon at 260 megabit per second, which means future missions could live stream higher quality footage from the moon.
That 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, they're 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.
The internet has also been going nuts for a jar of Nutella that keeps floating through the cabin on a live stream.
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 Fairlinked.
No relation. The expose 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.
Leaping computer independently verified the scanning behavior through their own testing and confirmed the script checks for 6,236 extensions up from about 2000 just last year.
Now, LinkedIn says the reports claims are plain wrong and that the person behind the Browsergate website is the developer of a browser extension called TeamFluence,
whose account was banned for scraping and violating LinkedIn's terms of service.
A German court did deny TeamFluence'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 it is worth knowing about? Our sponsor, Riley.
Speaking of things rising from the dead, let's resurrect some stories that didn't quite make the main lineup.
It's QuickBits 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 gigabytes 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 that as an excuse to give you less.
I mean, you're just gonna put DLSS5 on top of it anyway.
What are you gonna do with it? You're just gonna chat GPT in 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 effective 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. 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 pros,
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 claimed the podcast will maintain editorial independence,
which seemed like two completely opposing statements.
It seems like ol' scammy boy is 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 this, 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 Droom 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 examine it.
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,
because it's Elon's scale. For this historic milestone, SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk,
has made a demand that the banks advising on the deal buy GROC 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,
that they stand to make over $500 million in fees.
And I'm sure that plugging the new-defying Mechahitler AI into the companies
that triggered the 2008 financial crisis that affected us globally
will be totally completely fine. 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 ReniCell
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 six 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.