In the future, tech news will be delivered by a holographic host.
It'll be just like the Doctor from Star Trek Voyager, except it'll probably be me or Linus or Riley instead of Robert Picardo.
But we are in talks with Picardo. Steam has set a new concurrent player record for itself.
Data from SteamDB shows that Valve's platform recently surpassed 41.6 million simultaneous users.
That's more than the population of Canada, bud,
and nearly double the player count from just five years ago.
Seems like PC gamer growth accelerated after the WHO declared a pandemic,
the only world event that was notable enough to include on their chart.
I bet about half that player jump was from among us.
Steam's new record high comes after Battlefield 6, Hades 2, and Hollow Knight Silk Song all
broke their own franchise player records as well. So clearly the lesson for gaming companies here is to keep pumping out sequels.
That's what we all want, right? More Star Wars. Do it like the movies do.
That said, I can't help but notice that the total number of users increased more
than the number of users in-game, which reached me like people are spending more time staring at their bloated Steam backlog
than actually playing their games. Let this be a call to action to you.
Go beat something off the backlog. It's time to finally play Disco Elysium or Red Dead Redemption 2.
No new games until you beat those ones. OpenAI has stopped letting people generate fake videos of Martin Luther King Jr.
at the request of the late Dr. King's estate. Apparently his family wasn't jazzed about OpenAI's sloppily TikTok clone being filled
to the brim with disrespectful depictions of MLK delivering a stirring speech on the beauty
of the female form.
It's yet another feature rollback from OpenAI who always seems to focus more on the
latter part of the move fast and break things. But at least OpenAI isn't pulling a Facebook and rummaging through your phone's local storage
and editing one of your photos with AI without you even asking it to,
like a cat bringing you a dead mouse. What am I supposed to do with it?
I'm thankful. That feature rolled out in beta this past summer and is now launching more widely for some reason.
You can opt out at any time if you're aware that it's happening in the first place
and didn't absentmindly press okay when the prompt asked you to and it just popped out like,
you know, just how it does that and you're trying to do something else. Yeah.
Big Tech is looking for extra uses for AI that people don't even want.
It's no wonder they're all bringing back nuclear power.
And even if that is probably a good idea, we should probably still want to set some ground
rules for how AI is used to see MLK junior videos.
So Pope Leo the 14th hosted a seminar at the Vatican this week,
urging global cooperation and regulating the technology.
The Pope reminded attendees that AI is above all else a tool.
He's American though, right?
And so we must be careful that in using it, we do not ourselves act like tools.
Amen. Robert Percardo frequently collaborates with director Joe Dante,
who just so happens to be one of the quick bits favorite directors.
Gremlins is a Christmas classic and Phil Hartman is sublime in Small Soldiers.
Small Soldiers. Yeah. Kip Kelligan. We need a sequel to that.
I'll take a sequel to that. Well, there might have been a sequel.
Apple is apparently cutting production of the new iPhone Air.
According to Japan's Mizuho Securities, while the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max models are seeing higher sales than their predecessors,
the new iPhone Air is a sales let down.
Now Apple is chopping production of the Air down by up to 1 million units this year,
down by up to what the language. Similarly, a report from News Pym in Korea alleges that Samsung has halted work on the Galaxy S26 Edge,
letting employees know that the product line is to be discontinued.
The news isn't totally unexpected. The S25 Edge didn't sell well and like Gizmodo said,
slim phones might be on thin ice.
While it looks like these thin phones are about to be skinny dipping in the discount bin.
Google Workspace is trying to steal some of Microsoft's business customers
with the power of SaaS or SaaS if you're in the UK.
After calling out the architectural brittleness in Microsoft's infrastructure
and saying Microsoft 365 crashes are a question of when and for how long not if,
which I'm pretty sure is the software engineer's equivalent of a glove slap,
Google talks up its new cost-effective Google Workspace plans
meant to help businesses transition away from office,
which is now called Microsoft 365. What a boring and confusing name.
Wouldn't you rather subscribe to a workplace plan called business continuity
or work transformation set?
Wouldn't you? Uber is launching a new program that allows its contractors to earn additional cash
by telling jokes as they drive, you know, testing out new bits.
I'm just joking. It's additional cash by completing micro tasks that train AI models.
That's way worse. These tasks include everything from voice recordings to capturing and uploading images
to submitting documents in a certain language in exchange for variable rewards.
In this example, if you upload a picture from a Spanish restaurant menu,
you could earn a whole shiny dollar. One, a greenback.
I've always dreamed of being a mental blood bag for AI.
This move could help Uber use its army of freelance workers
to challenge companies that train AI models by having humans annotate and label data.
And besides, they're already constantly feeding customers via Uber Eats.
Why not feed the hungry machine your time, energy and knowledge as well?
It's the same thing. That's my job.
And PayPal's blockchain partner, Paxos,
mistakenly minted $300 trillion in PYUSD stablecoin.
As pointed out by both CNBC and Engadget, $300 trillion of these stablecoins are worth more than double the world's estimated total GDP.
It just seems like there's something terribly wrong when you can just accidentally mint more money than the global GDP.
Thankfully, this all appears to be a huge and embarrassing gaffe.
And don't worry, Paxos tweeted to assure folks that the issue was a technical error
and that their customers' funds are safe. Paxos even says they've burned the excess PYUSD.
I've been known to burn through a lot of excess money myself, but I really hope that's not what they mean.
The coin's still pegged. Don't worry, guys.
And you should know what I mean when I say, Peck, when I tell you to come back on Monday for more tech news.
I can't promise you we'll have holograms by Monday, but I swear I'm working really hard on Picardo.