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While my body resides in Canada, where there's a federal election today,

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my mind resides in the ethereal realm of tech news.

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So in the voting booth, I covered my eyes and just scribbled something random. It's whatever.

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This is what matters! The Homebrew Channel, a set of tools for running software on jailbroken Wii consoles,

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has had its GitHub repository archived in a slap in the face to the many people

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still booting up their Wii's every day. I know someone uses this as their main PC.

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And I actually do think that's great. Don't stop. The group that maintains the HPC repository and who have now archived it,

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Fail Overflow, said they knew a while ago that a critical homebrew component called

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LibOgc contained code stolen from Nintendo,

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which is a bit like holding a giant pulsing beacon that attracts lawyers.

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But they didn't know that much of the rest of LibOgc's code was also stolen from an open source

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project without any attribution. And that crossed Fail Overflow's ethical principle against stealing two things.

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Everybody gets one. On the plus side, seems like all the Wii homebrew resources will still be available,

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at least until Jack Black hears about this. Oh, because Jack Black played Bowser,

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which is the last name of Nintendo of America president, Doug Bowser.

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Try to keep up. Large parts of Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and southwestern France

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experienced a sudden power outage this morning. Power has since been restored to about half of Spain,

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with the rest hopefully coming back tomorrow.

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Traffic lights, elevators, and electronic doors stopped working,

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shops and restaurants were plunged into darkness, and the Madrid Open Tennis Tournament was suspended.

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God! While some were initially concerned about a cyber attack,

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Spain and Portugal's primary power supplier and minor GI Joe villain,

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RedElectrica, said no. This was the result of grid oscillation caused by extreme temperature variations in Spain.

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You know, you're hot, then you're cold. Somebody call Katy Perry, there is a social media opportunity here.

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Variations like that may be having a strong effect in that region due to

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heavier reliance on renewable energy sources like wind and solar,

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which successfully powered 100% of Spain's energy grid for the first time on April 16th.

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I mean, hey, it's great for the planet. It's just that for various technical reasons,

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renewable energy is often less resilient to sudden environmental changes.

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That's a challenge we should maybe solve soon, because oil is gross and slimy, and coal is dirty, and it gets everywhere.

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I'm over it. And there's a couple buzzy science experiments going around right now.

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The first one involves researchers from the University of Zurich,

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who conducted an unauthorized experiment secretly posting 1,700 comments,

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which were partially AI generated in the Change My View subreddit,

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to see how effective AI-assisted content could be at manipulating public opinion.

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The answer? Pretty successful. The posts were generally rated as more persuasive than the human baseline.

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No one in the subreddit was aware of the experiment, though,

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until after the researchers, who have successfully remained anonymous thus far,

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told the sub's mod team about it, prompting some members of the sub,

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to point out that if it's so easy to pass the researchers' AI posts off as human,

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what the researchers may have just studied is how effective AI content is at persuading other AI bots.

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Speaking of which, the other buzzy study is one in which researchers at Carnegie Mellon

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University created a simulated company and staffed it with AI agents,

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tasked with doing normal human worker stuff, browsing the web, writing code,

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running programs, and communicating with coworkers.

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Unlike in the first study, these AIs kind of sucked,

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with the researchers highlighting a lack of common sense and social skills,

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incompetence in web browsing, and even lying to themselves without realizing it,

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which may be more human than many of us realize. The study calls into question Microsoft's recently published work trend report,

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which predicts every human will soon manage a team of AI agents,

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which, if chatGPTs recently rolled back update as any indication,

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would just glaze you for every prompt you provide.

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You do the best prompts. Thank you, boss.

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Slay. I'm not even going to check who's winning the election right now,

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because the real winner is you, because you get to hear these quick bits.

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Google announced last week that first and second generation nest learning thermostats,

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which launched in 2011 and 2012, will no longer receive updates after October 25th of this year,

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meaning they'll still work as thermostats, but they'll lose their smart features like remote

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control. But Android Authority argues that Google did give customers a sizable credit towards a new nest,

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and for better or for worse, this is kind of an inevitable consequence of techifying our homes.

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Google doesn't have the resources to keep 20 different models of the thermostat properly updated.

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They need those resources to keep finding new and innovative ways to ruin search.

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The Wall Street Journal published a concerning piece on how Meta discouraged the development

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of guardrails for the company's AI chatbots, even when they knew it would lead them to engaging

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in explicit romantic roleplay with users it knew to be miners.

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Zuck reportedly wanted less guardrails after competitors in a hacking competition weren't

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able to get Meta's AI to misbehave as much as other chatbots, which meant they were bored.

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Thankfully, after the journal demonstrated Meta AI's ability to sex with users posing as children,

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Meta added some guardrails back. In other Meta news at their antitrust trial, we learned that Reddit leadership

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doesn't consider its site a social networking platform.

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And the judge doesn't understand why anyone would reply to a celebrity on Twitter.

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Both things that I'm also going to blame Meta for, just because.

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Leakers on the ChipHell forums claim that an RTX 5080 Super and 5070 Super are in the works

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featuring big upgrades to VRAM. According to these sources, the 5070 Super would get an additional 6 gigabytes for a total of 18

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gigs of memory while the 5080 Super would jump from 16 to 24 gigs, which would make these cards

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much better at running games at higher resolutions and more importantly,

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prevent more accumulation of complaints about how gaming isn't even worth it.

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With 12 gigabytes of VRAM, what is this? VRAM for ants, etc.

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An astronaut Don Petit, Petit, returned to Earth from the International Space Station on April 20th,

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his 70th birthday. Ah, nice.

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Which he wasn't super happy about, actually, because all of his aches and pains apparently

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virtually disappear when he's up there. Now, when reporters implied that he didn't look too good when he exited the capsule,

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he replied that, well, that's because he didn't feel too good, because all of the aches came back.

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And that just leads me to wonder whether old people would have a way better time

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if we put, you know, old folks' homes in space.

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There's long-term health effects, but, you know, it'd be fun.

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Even more fun, the idea of you coming back here on Wednesday for more tech news.

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Wow, that would really be something. You know, I think we'd have a good time.

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Hey, you know what? Think about it. No pressure.

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Please, though.