This holiday season, you're getting the greatest gift of all, a James-hosted tech news.
So be grateful. And yes, James does refer to himself in the third person.
Good boy. Spotify has had its entire music library scraped
by a pirate activist group and dumped on Anna's archive
an open source search engine for shadow libraries books with black pages.
The scraped data is about 300 terabytes, including metadata and of course,
tens of millions of tracks. Apparently making up 99.6% of Spotify listens.
Take a second to appreciate just how much shitty music that no one cares about is in these files.
Now it's all AI. Just delete the file. Apparently this hack is a preservation project,
but Spotify says it was done by abusing public access and bypassing protections.
Spotify insists no customer personal info was compromised. Now this is more about scraped audio and metadata
than some full internal leak, but still, it's a lot of data.
It's not a lot in size, but it's a lot in file count.
For its part, Spotify isn't gonna take this lying down, promising to defend the rights of the artists
on their platform. Sure, yeah, when hacktivists scrape someone's data,
they call the lawyers, but nobody bats an eye when data from YouTube, Twitter or Reddit
gets scraped by AI. The AI doesn't know any better. It's still learning.
Maybe if those platforms owned the license to my content, they would fight for me.
Valve has officially discontinued the original Steam Deck LCD,
quietly sun setting one of the best bang for your buck handheld gaming devices ever made.
Launched in 2022 for 400 US dollars, the LCD model was the most affordable way
to play your Steam library on the go, and even helped kick off the entire handheld PC boom
that we're still basking in today. Once existing stock has gone, she gone for good,
leaving the Steam Deck OLED as the new entry point at $550.
Valve hasn't exactly said why they pulled the plug, but the writing's been on the wall
since the OLED model first launched. The newer version has a better screen,
improved internals and likely cannibalized sales of its little brother, the murderer.
The cane of handhelds. Still, it stings.
With handheld prices climbing across the board, the Steam Deck LCD was one of the cheapest great options.
In related Valve, new Steam itself is going fully 64-bit on Windows.
Support for 32-bit installs is entering its final countdown and will stop receiving updates in 2026.
So if you are still somehow running 32-bit Windows, don't worry, Steam isn't mad, it's just moving on.
China's tech giants have found a hilarious workaround to get at NVIDIA's banned AI chips.
While NVIDIA Blackwell B200 accelerators are barred from being sold in China,
companies like Tencent are still getting access by renting them from overseas.
According to the Financial Times, Tencent is leasing large amounts of Blackwell compute
through a Japanese neocloud operator called Data Section,
which owns the hardware and runs data centers in Japan and Australia.
They're kind of like the Blockbuster video for AI. The chips never physically entered China,
so the arrangement stays technically legal under current rules.
Block what? I guess more like Netflix. Tencent reportedly has access to thousands of B200 GPUs
and even newer B300 chips under contracts worth billions
of dollars, allowing them to continue training advanced AI models.
Analysts say this rental approach may actually be more attractive than buying approved chips
inside China since overseas Blackwell hardware massively outperforms what's allowed domestically.
That's the whole reason to do it, right? Meanwhile, NVIDIA is still strengthening
its position elsewhere, recently receiving US antitrust clearance for a major investment in Intel.
Quietly expanding its influence across the industry, vertically integrating, consolidation,
owning the world. Speaking of hardware you can actually own,
you should check out these sick deals from our sponsor. Trying to hide Christmas presents from the quick bits
is a nightmare. They just zip around until they find them.
Painly ass little ingrates. Mozilla says Firefox will add a dedicated AI kill switch
after community pushback. The company's new CEO has been pitching Firefox
as a modern browser with optional AI features to keep up with competition.
And so far, everything that's been added is optional to use. The new change simply adds a single explicit toggle
to disable all AI features at once, instead of making you hunt through settings.
One big button to make the annoying thing go away. I wish I could do this with Christmas
and you just get them all. Cuckoo, enough.
I wish I could do it with all AI. Hell people.
YouTube accounts appear to be showing strangely high CPU usage, even when videos are paused
or just when you're on the homepage before you've watched anything. And a chunky post on the LTT subreddit user Ray Zazzle
caught the issue, surmising that YouTube premium seems to have a web worker, a way for a website
to run JavaScript in the background, called echoworker.js that sits in a busy wait loop
using the CPU for no real reason. Sounds like my old job.
Luckily, our boy Ray Zazzle does offer a fix
for Firefox users. So if you're a member of the dog pack, go check out that post.
If you're a wrestling.
The dog pack is Firefox users? Yeah, I guess. If there's not a dog, it's a fox.
It's a f-k9? Who is this guy?
It's half cat. If you're a Chrome user, I guess pick up some more CPU cores
while you're downloading more RAM Homeboy. You're on your own.
Chinese chip designer, More Threads, has just rolled out a new set of GPUs,
including its next generation, Huashan AI chip,
that it says can compete with NVIDIA's high-end products,
helping fuel a stock price jump. You love to see it and invest your excitement.
It's still going higher as China pushes for tech independence.
Huashan!
2026, Riley? What? I wasn't... Despite all this, the company
hasn't given detailed benchmarks yet, and there's no third-party benchmarks,
leaving some questions about how it really stacks up against NVIDIA.
More power to you, More Threads. I'm just looking for an affordable GPU
that can run crisis, you know? What is today's crisis?
Let me know in the comments! A big old power outage,
knocked out traffic lights in San Francisco, causing Waymo's driverless taxis to get stuck.
This is fine and normal. With the cars immobilized and adding to the blackout mess,
Waymo paused its RoboTaxi services for safety,
but has since resumed operations as power came back on. If this story didn't turn you off RoboTaxi's,
and you live in London, good news. Uber and Lyft are teaming up with China's Baidu
to bring Apollo Go RoboTaxi's to London streets for testing in 2026,
putting them on the starting grid against Waymo, who's already testing cars in the old smoke.
Just hope there's no power outages, Londoners, or you'll be back to check in the tube.
Wow. And Google has finally pulled the plug on the Sega Dreamcast Planet Web 3.0 browser.
No! Officially breaking web access on a console released all the way back in 1999.
The last good year on this planet. The shutdown happened because Google services
simply stopped responding to the ancient browser, quietly ending a 25 year run.
Which is honestly impressive, because this might be one of the longest running services
Google didn't intentionally kill. How the heck am I supposed to get my optimal
seaman growth strategies now? Jeff, I need you to stay strong.
I will get you out of that tank eventually. It's a Dreamcast game Riley.
Okay. And you don't need to stay strong to make it through to these next few days
without any tech news. But don't worry, we'll be back soon enough. Me and my seaman are gonna stay safe and cozy
in my house over the break though. If I hear anyone banging the roof, I'm not gonna be checking out.
You're not gonna catch me in any of that Tim Allen Santa Claus bullshit.
Ugh! Ha ha ha. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I.