Welcome to the show. Today, I'll be preparing a classic tech news stew. If
you want to start by preheating the dot-com bubble to about 350°, then once
it pops, let it simmer for about 25 years, and you've got a
techno-feudalistic society that goes great with risotto. NVIDIA's
long-rumored N1 laptop chip has finally shown its face in the wild. A laptop
motherboard with a chip installed was briefly listed for 14 bucks on the
Chinese resale site Goofish before yanking it, probably so they could list
it on another site with a less wacky name. Can leave it on there. The board
was flanked by eight SK Hynix LPDDR5X
packages totaling a ludicrous 128 gigs
of unified memory, which is more RAM than most people's entire computer,
phone, and smart fridge combined. The N1 is reportedly near identical to the GB10
superchip powering NVIDIA's DGX Spark AI
workstations, just repurposed for gaming in typical laptop stuff instead of
spinning up an AI bot army to reply to your friends and family's messages and
sway elections. It's expected to pack a 20-core ARM CPU co-designed with
MediaTek and a Blackwell GPU with up to 6,144 CUDA cores, landing it somewhere
around RTX 5070 territory, ish. Dell and
Lenovo are reportedly on board for a potential Computex 2026 reveal, which
could mark NVIDIA's first real swing at consumer laptop silicon since the Tegra,
back when mobile gaming meant Shield tablets nobody actually bought. Nintendo
Switch, though? That had a Tegra, I think. Apple is
developing display-free smart glasses code-named N50. According to Bloomberg's
Mark Gurman, the company is planning a reveal in late 2026 and a release in
2027. Apple's design team has created at least four different frame styles from a
large Wayfarer-like design to a slim rectangular look like the ones Tim Cook
wears, although I'm not sure if the world can handle that much raw
sexuality. Maybe if he dies. Apple is clearly jumping on the AI wearable
bandwagon after seeing the success of Meta's Ray-Ban glasses. Similar to
Meta's offering, Apple's glasses will feature a camera, but instead of a
circular lens, Apple's will have a vertically oriented oval lens. The
frames are made from premium acetate, which is more durable and luxurious than
the standard plastic most brands use. And unlike Meta, which partners with
Essilor Luxottica, or Google and Samsung, who went with Warby Parker,
Apple is designing everything in-house. Duh. The glasses are part of a broader
AI wearables push that also includes camera-equipped AirPods and a pendant,
all built to work with a significantly upgraded Siri, which is definitely, for
sure, 100% coming in iOS 27, now that
Apple brought Google in to do the hard stuff. Rockstar Games has
confirmed it got breached by the hacker collective Shiny Hunters, who are
demanding a ransom payment by tomorrow, April 14th, or they'll dump a pile of
stolen corporate data onto the dark web. I mean, whatever gets us GTA 6. The
group didn't actually crack Rockstar servers directly. They slipped in
through Anodot, a third-party cloud analytics service Rockstar uses, stole
authentication tokens, and walked into Rockstar's data warehouses like they
were playing a heist mission in GTA Online.
Not GTA 6, though. No one knows what that's like. Shiny Hunters says they've
got enough leverage to make Rockstar the next headline, which normally has
already happened. I mean, look at us. While Rockstar's statement insists the
breach involved a limited amount of non-material company information with no
impact on the organization or its players. Reports say the stolen files
likely include contracts, marketing plans, and financials, but not the GTA 6
source code. Shiny Hunters is quite the naughty group with a long list of
victims, so they might want to consider that the last person to hack Rockstar
got sentenced to life in a hospital. What? You know what isn't a felony,
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vehicles, boosters, and more. War Thunder. For the quick bits, we're going
to dice the stories up real small and fry at a high heat for about 1 minute
each. Make sure you don't overcook them, or they will explode. Verbatim Japan and
I-O Data have pledged to keep Blu-ray drives and discs flowing in Japan,
doubling down on a commitment they first made last year when Sony shuttered its
recordable Blu-ray factory. Since then, Buffalo, Elecom, and LG have all bailed,
leaving Panasonic as the only Japanese company still making its own optical
drives in-house, but only for TV recorders, not PCs. That's where
Verbatim and I-O Data come in, securing components and adjusting production
lines to meet demand. Somewhere out there, a secret order of monks is
chanting in gratitude over a freshly burned BDR of Shrek 2. Blue Origin
announced last Monday that it had refined a process for extracting
breathable oxygen from moon dust using a small-scale reactor that melts lunar
soil and separates the oxygen through electrolysis. Words. The company calls the device Air
Pioneer and says the reactor design is small enough to allow it to be shipped
to the moon. According to experts, reactors like this are key for the
creation of a sustainable moon base, providing oxygen for habitats as well as
fuel. So, if Bezos has his way, in a few years, we'll all be huffing rocks on the
moon. Could have phrased that better. Meta CEO
and least popular graduate of Innsmouth High School, Mark Zuckerberg, is
reportedly building an AI clone of himself to attend meetings and give
personal feedback to Meta employees. Hooray. It's what the metaverse was always for,
not talking to people. The avatar is being trained on his mannerisms, which
he has none, tone, which is robotic, and public statements, so that employees
might feel more connected to the founder. If the experiment succeeds,
Meta plans to let influencers and creators build their own AI versions of
themselves. And as an added bonus, old Zuckercorn's unbridled charisma could be
available for Meta users around the world to experience.
>> Do you drink coffee, man, or no? Nah.
Really? Yeah. I mean, have you you've had it? I have.
Cool. The CDC has flagged a Ryzen
theft and smuggling of genetically engineered cells for industrial
espionage. So, researchers at Georgia Tech built a system that encrypts DNA at
the genetic level, making stolen material useless without the right key.
And no, that's not the plot of a Neal Stephenson novel. This is the dystopia
we live in. Decryption requires adding specific chemicals in the right order,
like entering a passcode, and guessing wrong triggers the release of toxins
that shred the DNA and destroy the cell, which is the most extreme consequence
for forgetting your password ever. Imagine your hands just fall off.
You up 10 times. No! And a GROUP OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS in
Wyoming have built and deployed hot, sexy robot grouse in Grand Teton
National Park, further muddying the waters of the birds aren't real
conspiracy. Evidently, due to collisions with aircraft, grouse numbers at the
nearby Jackson Hole Airport have dropped from 73 to just three. So, the students
created robots to mimic grouse mating dances to lure real birds away from the
airport. One student admitted that before he started working on this
project to build robot girlfriends for birds, he didn't even know grouse were a
thing. And according to some people out there, they're not. And there you have it, a
beautiful eight-course tech news dinner, plated and ready to serve. Come back on
Wednesday, where we'll be making a lovely croquembouche out of the AI
bubble.