Tech is in Trouble

0:00 Uh, well, I'm sorry to say we don't have any tech news today.

0:07 APRIL FOOL!

0:07 I'M SO LIKE I GOT I GOT YOU SO GOOD.

0:10 That was so The look on your face.

0:13 Uh, I love this holiday.

0:14 It's good that we do this.

0:18 Iran has announced plans to attack 18

0:23 major tech companies across the Middle East,

0:25 either as part of its ongoing military conflict with the US

0:28 or the most ambitious April Fools' joke of all time.

0:32 The threat was posted to Telegram on Tuesday,

0:35 naming Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Boeing,

0:39 and GE among the companies it accused of helping

0:42 the US and Israeli military carry out strikes on Iran.

0:47 Wait, GE?

0:49 Is the US dropping shitty washer-dryers on their enemies now?

0:51 You're going to have to run the Ayatollah who or whoever's pants

0:55 through the wash twice if he doesn't want weird detergent residue on them.

0:58 Do you What do you have against GE?

1:01 They They make shitty products.

1:03 These tech companies have thousands of employees across the Gulf region

1:06 who were warned to evacuate a 1-km radius around all targeted facilities.

1:11 The attacks were expected to start at 8:00 p.m.

1:15 Tehran time on April 1st, but as of recording, no strikes have been confirmed.

1:20 Risk management firm Helix's CEO, James Henderson,

1:24 told CNBC that since AI is now being used as a weapon in the theater of war,

1:29 cloud infrastructure assets like data centers will

1:32 be pulled into conflict more and more.

1:35 And then, also GE for some reason.

1:38 I mean, their microwaves suck, but are they like jihad bad?

1:41 The writer that wrote that is Muslim, by the way, so I'm allowed.

1:51 Allahu Akbar.

1:52 Open-source software is under siege from AI,

1:56 and not in the fun Steven Seagal way, either.

2:00 Two security researchers recently launched an AI

2:02 tool that can clone entire open-source projects

2:05 as a tongue-in-cheek provocation to show how easily

2:09 AI can be used to bypass open-source licensing.

2:12 The dubiously named Malicious spelled m a l

2:17 u s recreates software from public documentation alone,

2:22 producing code that's functionally identical to the original but proprietary.

2:27 The seemingly satirical service markets itself

2:30 as targeting companies that don't want

2:31 to credit the original developers or share their changes back to the project,

2:36 promising legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing.

2:40 It's still unclear whether Malicious is real or not,

2:44 but what is definitely real is

2:45 the broader threat to genuinely beloved open-source tools.

2:49 Curl was forced to shut down its bug bounty

2:52 program to stem the massive tide of vibe-coded slop submissions.

2:56 GitHub is considering a kill switch to let

2:58 maintainers disable pull requests entirely for the same reason.

3:02 And Tailwind Labs laid off 75% of its

3:05 engineers after AI tools tanked their revenue.

3:08 As for whether Malicious is satire, well, on the one hand,

3:11 its blog includes cartoonishly villainous

3:14 posts thanking maintainers for their unpaid

3:16 labor and testimonials from clients like Chad Stockholder at Profit First LLC.

3:23 On the other hand, a guy named Chad Stockholder is, on paper,

3:27 arguably more believable than about half

3:29 of the weirdo tech bros in Silicon Valley, so.

3:31 Now, in case you hadn't noticed, today was April Fools,

3:35 aka the hardest day of the year for us here because Teemu TikTok

3:39 store slop has completely flooded the internet

3:43 and it's hard to tell what's real.

3:45 These are probably jokes, though, that I'm going to say now.

3:47 Yahoo showed off the Scroll Stopper,

3:50 a thumb helmet inspired by what I can only imagine is Juggernaut,

3:54 the Marvel bad guy, designed to physically stop you from doom scrolling.

3:58 And I'm kind of sad that this is a joke cuz

4:00 for a second there I thought I knew one thing that Yahoo still does.

4:04 PlayStation's Project PlayMode goes the opposite direction,

4:08 letting AI take over your controller,

4:10 your gameplay, and maybe one day your role as a father and husband.

4:14 Traeger's Meat AI Glasses promise real-time steak intelligence

4:18 for those who love meat and don't love meta.

4:21 There's got to be some crossover.

4:24 Metro by T-Mobile dropped Cala Own, a phone-based fragrance,

4:28 so you can smell like an old Nokia.

4:30 And Sega released a Sanic shirt

4:33 collection that thankfully did not include Sonichu.

4:37 CD Projekt Red's Project Roach, or ride on a controller horse,

4:42 is exactly what it sounds like,

4:42 an experience that gaming has been sorely lacking until now.

4:46 MSI added a cat bed to a monitor arm because of course they did, and I want it.

4:50 And then there were these articles.

4:52 One from TechSpot about AMD buying Intel, which is thankfully not true,

4:57 or it would trigger the shitty naming scheme apocalypse.

4:59 And another one from TechPowerUp about AMD's answer to DLSS 5,

5:06 called FSR 5 Scarlet Cortex, which genuinely broke my brain because it's seven

5:12 pages long with AMD branded presentation slides, detailed diagrams,

5:16 and even interactive comparisons, which is a lot of work for an April

5:19 Fools' joke about a feature that, in all likelihood,

5:22 AMD is probably going to release for real at some point soon.

5:26 We confirmed with AMD that this is not real.

5:29 For now.

5:29 But like, it's like making an April Fools'

5:31 joke about Apple working on the iPhone 18.

5:34 Haha, what if they did that?

5:36 They're going to.

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6:36 Oh man, look at you.

6:37 You've seen so many April Fools' jokes

6:39 that your entire internal model of reality is breaking down.

6:43 You're like straight-up been set ontologically adrift.

6:47 HAHA, GET GOT, SON.

6:50 Anthropic accidentally open-sourced part of AI

6:53 coding tool Claude code source code.

6:56 Say that five times fast.

6:56 I won't.

6:58 The flub was spotted by security researcher Chow Fan Shu,

7:01 who linked to the relevant zip archive on Twitter.

7:05 Anthropic told Axios it was a release packaging issue caused by human error,

7:10 not a security breach.

7:11 I feel like those can be the same thing,

7:13 but so at least no user data was leaked.

7:16 Sysadmins on Reddit point out the sweet irony of Anthropic building 23 separate

7:21 layers of bash security only to be undone by one misconfigured text file.

7:27 Haha, I I wouldn't have done that.

7:29 Uh Anthropic has since DMCA'd the leaks,

7:32 because publicly accessible data is only valid when

7:36 Anthropic is the one doing the scraping, okay?

7:39 FYI.

7:39 NASA's Artemis 2 successfully launched today at 6:24 p.m.

7:44 Eastern Daylight Time from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

7:47 The first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in the '70s.

7:52 The 10-day lunar flyby is part of a longer road map

7:57 in the Artemis program focusing on lunar

7:59 exploration and carries the first black astronaut, first woman astronaut,

8:03 and even the first Canadian astronaut to ever visit

8:07 the moon's orbit shattering the glass dome that encompass

8:11 is the entire Earth causing our atmosphere to vent

8:13 into space and giving us all hours to live.

8:16 But at least those guys will get to see the moon.

8:19 Oracle is laying off thousands of its employees as the company

8:22 decides AI data centers have a better value proposition than people.

8:27 Workers across the US, India, Canada,

8:29 and Mexico received a termination email from Oracle leadership at 6:00 a.m.

8:35 which is an AI robot thing.

8:37 Uh with no prior warning and access to systems was cut immediately.

8:42 Senior operations manager Michael Shepherd took to LinkedIn to write,

8:46 "To my colleagues who were impacted today,

8:48 your worth is not defined by this moment."

8:51 A post looking like it was drafted with ChatGPT.

8:54 But I think what calms my restless heart is knowing

8:58 somewhere out there Larry Ellison is unaffected by all this sipping

9:02 chardonnay in a bubble bath while keeping his perfect wax visage

9:06 out of the water so it doesn't melt off his head.

9:10 Over a hundred of Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxis turned into 4,000-lb

9:15 paperweights on Wuhan highways Tuesday night after a total system failure.

9:19 The second worst news to come out of Wuhan in the last 6 years.

9:25 Passengers were trapped for almost 2 hours.

9:28 Some stranded in the middle of high-speed lanes with trucks speeding past them.

9:34 Some of them those driverless blocks that are just there's no humans in there.

9:40 Okay, China uses you've seen them.

9:42 No.

9:43 Okay.

9:43 One passenger told a journalist it took her 30

9:46 minutes just to connect to a customer representative.

9:49 Turns out AI drivers don't get sleepy, but they do occasionally decide to take

9:52 a simultaneous unprompted coffee break in traffic.

9:57 This will be fine.

9:59 Let's do more of this.

10:00 And scientists at USC built a memory chip that works at 700° C,

10:06 which could finally allow computers to be used

10:09 by denizens of the elemental plane of fire.

10:11 The team used tungsten, ceramic, and a single atom thick graphene layer to block

10:16 the short circuits that normally kill chips in extreme heat.

10:20 It held data for over 50 hours at 700°

10:23 and survived over a billion switching cycles at that temperature.

10:27 So, for all the supervillains out there who have been

10:30 eyeing up those primo volcano locations for their evil data centers,

10:34 now's your time to shine.

10:36 Teal, I'm looking at you.

10:39 And I'm looking at you, viewer, hoping you'll come back on Friday.

10:42 Oh, just kidding, WE GOT YOU AGAIN.

10:46 IT'S A STAT HOLIDAY.

10:47 WHAT?

10:48 We'll be back on Monday, April 6th with more tech news.

10:50 Man, you are really gullible.

10:52 You should do something about that, like severely doubt

10:54 everything and maintain high heinously high standards of evidence.

10:57 No intuition or vibes at all, just question everything.

11:01 Try that.