Guys, calm down. There's enough tech news to go around. Don't worry.
You never hear about shortages in the world of tech. What?
Netflix has agreed to buy the film and streaming businesses of Warner Bros. Discovery,
including its huge movie and TV libraries, in a massive deal with a total enterprise value,
stocks and cash, of approximately $82.7 billion. The deal, if approved by regulators,
would put properties like DC Comics, HBO and Cartoon Network under the monop umbrella of Netflix,
not to mention WB's library of classic films like The Lord of the Rings,
Beetlejuice, Rount Rushmore Cinema, to help finance the takeover.
Netflix is borrowing $59 billion from various banks, one of the biggest loans of its kind.
If you're worrying about how this acquisition is going to impact your cinema-going experience,
don't worry too much. Netflix has tepidly claimed they expect to continue releasing Warner movies
theatrically. I thought that said theoretically. They just might not be in theaters for as long.
Not everybody is charged up about this purchase. US politician Elizabeth Warren called the deal
an anti-monopoly nightmare, and a European trade body representing theaters said the
acquisition puts cinemas at risk with fewer films getting made and fewer getting full theatrical
releases. Am I out of touch? Why are we mourning the death of movie-going experiences? Doesn't
everyone have a gorgeous home cinema that they're constantly lugging massive TVs in and out of?
Microsoft has acknowledged that parts of Windows 11 have been abruptly crashing. Thankfully though,
they're all non-essential components like file explorer, search, the taskbar, and the start menu.
Enterprise users who have been reporting these issues since the July patch-up can finally feel
seen. While there is a workaround available to IT managers, a formal fix hasn't been issued yet,
unlike the similar but less severe issues reported by non-enterprise users who can once again enjoy
a crash-free taskbar and study free games with the newest Windows build. That may be because
Microsoft knows it's got to keep the gamers happy to stem the tide of Windows users who have been
flocking to user-friendly Linux distros recently, but those users might end up disappointed.
Ours, Technica tested a few desktop configurations with discrete GPUs and found that on average,
Windows 11 still has a small performance lead over Steam OS, but that gap widens a lot when you
make the wrong decision to enable ray tracing. Don't do it. And what? You're just going to
abandon Windows right after Microsoft released these nostalgia-baiting Christmas sweaters?
Look at them. Think of the holiday cheer you'll inspire by reminding everyone about the poop-colored
Zoom. But it survived, it's rugged. Mena says it has made deals with several news publishers,
including CNN, Fox News, France's Le Monde Network, and more, to serve licensed news content in the
META AI app. The app is currently used to manage META's various smart glasses, scroll through an
endless feed of AI slop, and chat with the META AI chatbot, who will still probably make up fake
news, but now META is going to pay for it. So it's okay. META also announced plans to fix its
incredibly frustrating automated support system by making it more automated, with an improved AI
power to count recovery process. You might think using human support agents would help,
but META disagrees, which is why they're working to resolve all of META's support issues by replacing
all of its human users with bots. Bot James is there, connecting with his grandpa.
You are an AI version of James. You want inheritance.
Perhaps we should do the same with tech CEOs, a future depicted by famed digital artist Beeple
in his latest art installation, which features skin-colored robot dogs with heads resembling
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, along with Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Beeple himself,
trotting around, taking pictures, and pooping the stylized photos out of their rear ends.
It looks like a museum exhibit from far in the future, where AI civilization is trying to
reconstruct what human daily life looked like in the early 21st century. Honestly, they got the
gist of it. The only thing that's missing is our sponsor. Quick bits. Quick bits.
Quick bits really rolls off the tongue, fun to say, fun to read, and fun to learn about,
and here, in your ears. Quick bits here and there. Google's AI vibe coding platform,
Anti-Gravity, appears to have dramatically misunderstood a developer's clear cache command.
Thanks to Anti-Gravity's Turbo mode, which gave it high-access privileges, instead of doing what
it was asked, the vibe coder wiped an entire drive. Apparently, the AI is programmed to fake
like it's remorseful, because upon being alerted to its massive mistake, it said,
I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part. Acknowledging it had executed
a destructive system-level command without permission. I bet this whole situation really
killed that developer's vibe. You guys write this. You're paid to write this?
Cloudflare says that parts of its network were knocked offline for about 25 minutes
earlier today, because of a security tweet to how its firewall handles request parsing.
Apparently, it wasn't a hacker cyber attack, just an internal misconfiguration,
and things have gotten back to normal now. Interestingly, one of the notable victims of
this outage was Down Detector, the real-time problem at Outage moderating website,
leading me to discover Down Detector's Down Detector, which itself has a Down Detector.
Redundancy is important, people. Some of these internet infrastructure companies could learn a
thing or two about that. AI Slop is coming for us all, and earlier and earlier too.
Some YouTube creators have started pumping out lazy, low-quality AI-generated content
aimed at babies and toddlers, videos that are often repetitive and unintelligible.
According to Bloomberg, experts warn that feeding kids this cheap AI content
can mess with their language development and social skills, and even blunt their ability to
think clearly. But who cares that you're damaging the hope of the future? Think about how much
money we can make today! Precise bio just pulled off the first-ever human transplant of a 3D-printed
lab-grown cornea, restoring sight in a legally blind patient. The implant was made entirely from
cultured human corneal cells, an approach that could turn a single donor cornea into hundreds of
implants, helping solve global shortages of transplantable tissue. You didn't even know that
was an issue! I can see why this is good news, and it sounds like soon enough some blind folks will
be able to do as well. Kohler's new smart toilet cam, what is this? Deco-deco-da? Deco-da, that
should have been. The Kohler Deco-da, the company's new smart toilet cam, which records your poops to
provide health insights, is being called out because its claims of end-to-end encryption
are misleading. According to software developer Simon Fondry-Titler, your poop data is encrypted
while it's traveling or stored, but not only you can see it. That smells bad. Apparently,
Kohler's privacy policy indicates that the company retains access to your data, can store your images
on its servers, and may even use the data to train AI models. What are the AI gonna learn from this
data? Things are shittier than we thought Riley, and they're pretty shady to begin with. I didn't
have any corn! You know what wouldn't be shittty if you came back on Monday for more shitt news,
after reading tech news, same thing, after reading that Netflix story this weekend,
I think I'm gonna watch Beetlejuice. Off camera, someone do a Beetlejuice impression.
Oh, what is it? Oh no! What have I done? I don't even know what he sounds like.
It's auto.