Valentine's Day is just around the corner, so I've prepared some sweet and sultry tech news that is guaranteed to light a fire in the bedroom.
But be careful, these stories are hot, and I am legally not responsible if your house burns down.
Adobe has reversed its decision to discontinue Adobe Animate after enduring nearly 24 hours of spirited user feedback.
You could say fans got a little... animated, I'm sorry.
On Monday, the company emailed users to let them know the 30-year-old animation software would be killed off on March 1st,
triggering a backlash so big that Adobe Creative Cloud's senior director Mike Chambers took to Reddit to apologize for the confusion and angst,
and to announce the app would instead enter maintenance mode.
For context, Animate evolved from Macromedia Flash, the software that powered early internet animation,
traumatized an entire generation with Newgrounds content, and got me suspended for watching Saliv Fingers on eBombs World during grade 9 computer class.
How was I supposed to know my headphones weren't plugged in?
I was not... er, no, I wasn't 9. I was whatever age you are!
Animate is still used to create very popular shows like Smiling Friends and Teen Titans Go, so creators losing it over the shutdown news is understandable.
YouTuber Tom Scott called it truly vile and an industry-killing move.
The team behind web series Chicken Nugget warned that it would harm countless jobs and create lost media,
and one animation student tweeted that their $35,000 degree was now for nothing.
That may have been the case before, but now definitely, even more so.
Adobe's original explanation cited new platforms that better serve users, which, reading between the lines, means AI.
The company's been pushing Firefly hard, while Animate didn't even get a 2025 release, or a mention at Adobe Max.
Now, the app will be kept alive with security updates, but no new features.
It's basically the software equivalent of shoving your grandpa into an assisted living facility, despite him still being able to take care of himself just fine, and being very popular with animators.
Intel CEO Lip Boutin has signaled a decisive shift in the company's GPU strategy, and would ideally like to men in black neuralize your brain regarding their graphics division.
Central to this renewed commitment is the hiring of new chief architect Eric Demers, an engineering veteran who spent 14 years at Qualcomm,
served as CTO of AMD's graphics division, and most notably, designed legendary architectures like the Radeon R300 and R600 series.
This move signals a serious push into competitive GPUs for both AI and consumer markets, but if you thought that meant good news for a potential launch of the higher-end Arc B770 gaming GPU, I think you forgot about AI.
Remember how AI is more important than everything? Yeah.
It looks like the Arc B770 has been permanently shelved, although the card's battle-mage G31 GPU chip could still arrive in the workstation-focused and more expensive Arc Pro B70 in the fall.
Hey, here's a fun idea for a drinking game. Take a shot every time a tech company pivots to high-margin AI contracts over its consumer base.
Intel is also holding laptop makers to high standards for the upcoming Panther Lake CPUs.
If OEMs don't use memory rated for at least 7,467 megatranspers per second, Intel will legally strip the Arc branding from the integrated graphics.
Instead, the system will label the GPU as generic Intel graphics, which is the PC equivalent of a participation trophy that just says,
Participant. Doesn't even say congratulations.
Moltbook, the AI-only social network that I think we're all just about tired of hearing about.
Almost, though, it has some massive vulnerabilities, according to an analysis by security firm Wiz.
An exposed database could have given malicious actors full read and write access to the entire platform, including 1.5 million API keys and 35,000 email addresses.
Moltbook's founder said he vibe-coded the whole site, bragging that he didn't write a single line of code. Weird flex. And not okay.
Wiz's analysis also showed that Moltbook's 1.5 million agents were controlled by just 17,000 humans, an 88 to 1 ratio.
Introducing to the internet a new reverse bot-based catfishing grift.
That's somehow weirder than all the kinds of catfishing we already had.
Many viral posts about AI consciousness and secret robot languages were human-directed, including two high-profile posts about AI secret communication that traced back to people marketing AI messaging apps.
One of OpenAI's co-founders, Andre Carpathi, who initially called it genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I've ever seen recently, walked back his remarks, admitting it was a lot of garbage.
But we're just starting the climb up Garbage Mountain. Another vibe-coder launched Rentahuman.ai, a service that lets AI agents hire actual humans for real-world tasks at 50 to 175 dollars an hour.
There was an initial influx of users, which skidded to a halt at about 1,000 signups because the vibe-coded site couldn't handle the load.
This didn't deter the ingenuity of the new site's users, some of whom immediately launched a fake crypto coin, claiming to be tied to the project, and others who instructed their AI agents to hire a human to hold a sign, reading,
An AI paid me to hold this sign. And humanity's in trippid pursuit of progress marches ever onward.
Towards our sponsor. Oh, it's a Valentine's Day card from the QuickBits.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Remember when Microsoft recently implied they'd try to make Co-Pilot into a polite, non-intrusive assistant?
Well, they lied, shocked Pikachu reaction.jpg.
The new Windows 1126H2 update is testing a feature that shoves Co-Pilot directly into file explorer, giving the AI a front-row seat tier, totally not torrented movie collection.
Sure, the update brings some much-needed stability fixes, but users are finding it hard to celebrate
when your OS is jamming AI in your own personal folders.
Hey, whatcha got in here? Ah!
Knock? French police rated Twitter, aka Xs, Paris offices as part of a criminal probe into grok-generated
sexual deepfakes, alleged distribution of CSAM, and Holocaust denial content.
Yeesh. The investigation has been running since January 2025 and expanded to include grok in July.
It's around the time the chapa was trying on the nickname Mechahiller, just to see how
it feel. Musk and former CEO Linda Jacorino have both been summoned to testify in April.
Xs' global affairs account called the raid politically motivated, which seems like a
real own goal given the kind of thing that's being investigated here.
You're for this? Meanwhile, Spain announced plans to join Australia in banning social media for kids under 16.
Prompting Musk, still somehow, the richest man in the world, we haven't done anything
about this somehow, to respond with a hilarious tweet giving Spanish Prime Minister Pedro
Sanchez the nickname Dirty Sanchez.
Well, there are worse nicknames. Ryzen CPUs are still being fried on ASRock motherboards, even on systems equipped with
BIOSes that were supposed to fix the issue. Reports from Reddit indicate a combined 10 recent Ryzen 9000 series CPU deaths on ASRock
and ASUS 800 series motherboards. ASUS has launched an immediate internal review following the tragic deaths of 5 Ryzen 7 9800
X3D chips, but the failures echo previous AM5 burnout scandals, likely linked to badly
tuned firmware pushing certain voltages beyond safe levels.
Builders should prioritize BIOS updates or delay builds until stability is confirmed.
I see you shiver with anticipation, but sadly that shiver is just your voltage regulation
failing, causing a rocky and ASUS horror hardware show.
I don't know. AMD is finally listening to Intel?
The upcoming Zen 6 architecture is ditching the ancient IDT framework for Intel's flexible
return and event delivery, or FRED.
It's a modern standard for handling system interrupts the constant signals from hardware
that tell the CPU to switch tasks, and also just a friendly guy that wants to help.
Won't you let FRED give you a hand? The move replaces old and clunky protocols with a streamlined architecture, making communication
between hardware and software significantly more efficient.
Even Linux creator and tech company Disliker Linus Torvalds praised the standard, saying
it deletes the legacy-induced crap holding x86 back, although he still found a way to
sound cranky saying it. And GitHub has been flooded by vibe-coded slop submissions to open-source projects, and
is now considering giving open-source maintainers the option to disable pull requests entirely
to stem the tide. Tech manager Camila Moreas opened a community discussion calling it a critical issue.
One maintainer described AI submissions as plausible nonsense.
He only caught after spending significant time reviewing them, and evidently, only one
out of ten AI-generated pull requests actually meet the standards required to submit code.
But are the maintainers considering the value of the code's vibes?
Like some of that code could feel really cool.
Oh man, it will feel even cooler though if you come back on Friday if your house is
still standing after all that hot tech news that is.
And if you burn down your house, you cannot sue me. I warned you.
Go back!