Good morning, it's Friday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 83. The Hacker News stove is already hot, the coffee is doing contract work in my bloodstream, and somehow the tech world brought us ancient scrolls, sad industry news, Apple sticker shock, and the internet asking for papers like a nightclub bouncer with a printer jam.

First up... an entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time. That's wild, because for two thousand years this thing was basically a burnt burrito from history, and now computers are peeking inside it like, yeah, I can read that. This is the nice kind of AI story, where instead of writing a fake meeting summary, it helps archaeology open a locked door without turning the evidence into dust.

Second... Om Malik has died. That's a heavy one. Om helped shape how a lot of people understood broadband, startups, gadgets, and the web's whole noisy carnival before everybody was yelling about agents and chips and subscription buttons. The tech world can get real obsessed with the next shiny box, but voices like his remind you somebody has to actually explain why any of it matters.

Third... Apple is raising prices on MacBooks and iPads as memory costs go up. So if you were hoping your next laptop would cost less than a used canoe, bad news, pal. Heh. Hhh, okay, that's something. Apple says components are getting expensive, and I believe them, but it still feels like every checkout page now has a little trap door that drops your wallet into Cupertino.

And finally... the internet may be heading into a real papers-please era, where age checks and identity rules keep spreading under the banner of safety. That sounds tidy until you remember privacy usually gets lost in a filing cabinet labeled temporary exception. Once every website asks who you are before letting you read a page, the web starts feeling less like a library and more like airport security with banner ads.

That's your daily byte. Have a great day. Until next time.