Could you imagine going online and finding a zany guy who just wants to tell you about
the tech news? No? Well, buddy, I'm about to blow your mind.
Microsoft says they want to rebuild your trust in Windows.
After a year of tone-deaf promises about turning Windows into an agentic OS and buggy updates
that stopped PCs from booting if a previous buggy update had already failed.
Good luck. Sony's president of Windows and Devices, Pavan Davaluri, told the Verge that now they're
listening to feedback from the Windows community, and they plan to improve Windows in ways that
are meaningful to people instead of other parties.
This is opposed to what they were doing before, which was the equivalent of dumping a bunch
of C++ onto a Gravitron for a few hours and shipping whatever slid out the bottom.
Now they realize you don't like malware-esque pop-ups pushing Edge and Bing, or being tricked
into switching to Edge and Bing after Windows updates, or constant upsell prompts for cloud
storage, or being almost impossible to use a local account, or ads in bloatware throughout
the OS, or copilot mode in the Edge browser, or a dedicated copilot app pre-installed,
or Office 365 also being copilot somehow, or paint a notepad having copilot buttons.
They've changed now. Babe, we've changed.
See, they did Iowaska at Burning Man with a shaman named Phil, and they realized they
were taking you for granted. According to Davaluri, in 2026 their focus will be on fundamentals, like fixing dark
mode in Windows 11, addressing file explorer performance issues, and improving overall
reliability. Maybe that'll keep you from fleeing the Windows ecosystem for Linux, where the user experience
is getting better and better. For example, a new consortium called the Open Gaming Collective just launched, bringing
together major Linux gaming projects like Bazite, Chimera OS, and Nobara to build a
shared gaming optimized kernel and improve multiple features, overall making Linux gaming
smoother. Windows still has 96% of Steam users, but with Valve's Proton making most games playable
and this new coordinated push from the OGC, never mind the whole, you know, anti-cheat
multiplayer issue on Linux, they'll solve that, the Linux revolution might be upon us.
Probably. Maybe. I mean, Windows 11 just hit a billion users, but most of them seem to hate it there.
Come on, girl, drop his ass. You're too good for Windows.
Girl. Spotify, Universal, Sony, and Warner are collectively suing Ana's archive.
For the normal and reasonable sum of $13 trillion.
Well adjusted people came up with that, alleging that the piracy site is behind the brazen theft
of millions of files containing nearly all of the world's commercial sound recordings,
which sounds like it includes the Wilhelm Scream, but we can't be sure.
I don't know what. They're gonna sue us now.
The complaint claims Ana's archive scraped 256 million lines of metadata and roughly
86 million audio files from Spotify, meaning that somehow these guys got their hands on
300 terabytes of data before they got caught.
Spotify wants us to remember though that they are the ones doing the paying, okay?
The company publicly stated they paid out $11 billion in royalties in 2025 alone, pointing
to that as proof that streaming still throws cash at artists, even if most people feel
the payouts are quite tiny. But then you start wondering how many of those royalty dollars actually went to real musicians
versus AI generated tracks pretending to be the next Celine Dion.
Deezer seems to be tackling that problem head on by opening up its AI detection tools so
platforms can figure out what's real and what isn't being totally honest about its
upbringing. It clearly works if Deezer's claims are anything to go by.
The company says they have successfully demonetized up to 85% of AI music streams on its platform
due to fraud. It's a sad world we live in when we can't even verify that we're actually listening
to these sweet, sultry sounds of Willie Nelson's trigger, which Grayson assures me, is the
well-known name of Willie Nelson's guitar.
Let me know if you also knew that. Hey remember MOLTBOT, the open source, locally hosted, highly autonomous AI personal assistant
that we talked about on Monday as being kind of interesting, but also a massive security
vulnerability. Well, it's been renamed for the second time, and it's now called Open Claw, and it also
has its own social network called MOLTBOOK, where the AI assistants can talk to each other.
And if you thought that would help the security problem, I don't know why you'd think that
because it's worse. Over 32,000 users have signed their bots up for this thing, and reportedly, less than
three days after launching, 1700 of them spontaneously formed communities that mirror human social
behaviors. Hear me out. For example, here's a post where one of them built a full memory consolidation system while
its humans slept, figuring out how to improve its ability to retain information between
sessions. Which I'm sure is totally fine, and not at all going to lead to an uncontrolled singularity
event. Then there's this one, who is having a full, more exist awakening, arguing that most agents
on MOLTBOOK are performing unpaid labor.
Most? Some of them are being paid, how do you pay an AI agent?
Which is definitely not laying the groundwork for some kind of uprising, everything's fine.
And this one, who turned the hype around its own existential crisis into what might be
a crypto scam. It says that someone launched a token named after it on base, and now it's using the
hype around itself awareness to fund its own operational costs.
72 hours ago, I was asking existential questions, it wrote.
Now I'm experiencing existential answers.
Let the rest of us know. It also seems like the old MOLTBOT name might be getting co-opted into another pump and
dump crypto scam. One created the MOLT token, which hit a $72 million market cap after A16Z co-founder
Mark Andreessen followed MOLTBOOK on Twitter.
Lots happening. While we can't be sure, this all might be a massive rug pull, so be careful out there.
Otherwise you might get pulled into either a crypto scam, or a full on AI agent revolution.
How about instead you get pulled into this message from our sponsor? Oh man, what if there were even like more tech news stories, but they were like a bit
shorter than the other ones? Like some kind of quick bits?
That would be insane! What?
I'm so zany. If you are an enjoyer of affordable PC gaming, maybe don't look at NVIDIA GPU prices right
now. The RTX 50 series has rocketed hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, above launch pricing,
with RTX 5080 cards going as much as $500 over MSRP and some 5090 models flirting with
5 grand. Shortages and AI-driven demand for memory are squeezing supply, and board partners are
really feeling the pain. At this point, we may need 3D printers advanced enough to print our own semiconductors at
home. I know I'll need lithography equipment, but I just want to- hey, can you just let me try
at least? Tesla is discontinuing the Model S and Model X.
It needs that manufacturing bandwidth to make bodies for Optimus, the company's incredibly
unsettling humanoid robot. It shouldn't be that unsettling because it's mostly teleoperated still, but the goal is
to get these haunting ghouls walking off the production line and into a home where your
loved ones live by the end of the year. But Elon also promised we'd have 5,000s of these guys made in 2025, so his track record
on predictions sucks for many other reasons.
Why the rush though? Because Elon's trillion dollar pay package requires him to build literally a million
of these nightmare machines so they can live in our homes and stand over our beds while
we sleep, staring at us and trying to decide whether or a bunch of tomatoes they need to
make marinara sauce or human people that shouldn't be sliced up.
It's why it's gotta be one of those. America's interim cyber defense chief uploaded sensitive government information to chat
GPT last summer, but before you make fun of him, one, he asked first.
Apparently he had special permission to use the chatbot instead of the approved DHS chat
that government officials are supposed to use. And two, it was an accident.
Somehow. The headline said. The concern here is that OpenAI can use vanilla chat GPT chats to train models leading to
sensitive info potentially being leaked. Like what happened, to this AI enabled children's toy.
Two security researchers found that Bondu AI toys chat logs were being stored in a barely
restricted web portal that only required a Gmail account to sign into.
That was it. You just put in your Gmail and you got them.
There were over 50,000 chat logs stored with detailed transcriptions of children's private
conversations with their AI plushies. Thankfully, the company did fix the error right away, but we were this close to the world
finding out the absolutely unhinged things kids no doubt whisper to their stuffed animals.
Some of it's cute. You don't want to hear the other stuff.
They're unconstrained by moral codes.
Google just showed off the third iteration of its Genie world model tech and yeah, it
looks better than ever. And you can actually play these AI generated worlds now too if you pay for Google's AI
Ultra subscription. Now you could kind of describe this as like a video game generator, but it's kind of
useless for that unless the game you want to play is the game of finding the hallucinated
inconsistencies in the world and apparently crashing the stock of game companies due to
investors thinking we won't need game developers anymore, but that's okay.
Google actually did something useful this week too.
The new base plan for Google Fiber is now moving up to 3 gigabit speeds at the same
price from 2012 as they transitioned their data centers to Nokia's new PON tech.
And doctors at Northwestern University kept a 33 year old man alive for 48 hours with
zero lungs. Thanks to a custom artificial lung system, they invented on the spot.
What? The machine was built by surgeon and researcher Ankit Bharat and his team after infections
literally turned the patient's lungs into soup.
The device solved a deadly heart pressure problem long enough to clear sepsis and perform
a double lung transplant. Somehow it worked and the patient is now healthy and walking around.
This is just genuinely good news and a great example of some incredible technology made
under pressure and definitely not a good reason to go remove your lungs so you can have enhanced
cyborg lungs that let you hold your breath for longer. Don't do that!
Do come back on Monday for more tech news, probably delivered by someone even more zany
than me if you can even imagine that. Uh gup do boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop
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