Good morning, it's Thursday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 34. Grab your coffee, make sure Windows isn't deciding this is patch o'clock, and let's look at what the nerds on Hacker News are yelling about before breakfast, while the router blinks like it knows dangerous secrets.

First up... Valve released CAD files for the Steam Controller and the little puck thing under a Creative Commons license. That means modders can make shells, stands, phone clips, grip doodads, the whole junk drawer, as long as they follow the license and don't turn it into a shady mall kiosk empire. I love this because it's hardware saying, hey, open me up, but in a legal voice wearing safety goggles.

Second... there's a sharp essay about appearing productive at work, and boy, does it hit close to the cubicle. The idea is that AI makes it easy to generate big confident documents, fake expertise, and turn one meeting into twelve pages nobody understands. Heh. Hhh, okay, that's something. It's like giving every office worker a smoke machine and calling it strategy.

Third... Simon Willison says vibe coding and serious agentic engineering are getting closer than he'd like. The uncomfortable bit is not that AI writes code, it's that the agents are getting good enough that even experts may stop reviewing every line. That's useful, sure, but it's also how you wake up to a production incident where the root cause is, quote, the robot seemed trustworthy.

And finally... Google Cloud is rolling reCAPTCHA into something called Fraud Defense for the so-called agentic web. The pitch is that sites now need to tell humans, bots, and AI agents apart, measure agent activity, and maybe throw a QR-code challenge when things smell funny. Which is fine, but I do miss when proving I was human meant clicking crosswalks instead of negotiating with a cloud security product named like a gym supplement.

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

Good morning, it's Wednesday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 33. Pour the coffee gently, because the internet already tripped over its own shoelaces, and somehow I gotta explain it before the toast pops up and scares the dog.

First up... Germany's .de domains had a DNSSEC disruption, which is a fancy way of saying the little trust sticker on the internet's phone book got smudged and everybody started squinting. It is resolved now, but for a while some sites looked like they wandered into the woods without telling anybody. This is why infrastructure people drink water outta giant metal bottles and stare at dashboards like they owe them money.

Second... Google says Gemma 4 inference is getting faster with multi-token prediction drafters, which sounds like the AI is now finishing several bites of sandwich before you even asked for lunch. The practical bit is lower latency and more tokens per second, which developers love because waiting on a model is basically watching a microwave count down from one minute forever. Heh. Hhh, okay, that's something.

Third... somebody wrote up the Three Inverse Laws of AI, and I gotta say, that is the kinda title that makes a robot sit in the break room and reconsider its choices. The point is that our systems keep getting powerful in ways that do not automatically make them sensible, safe, or aligned with normal human expectations. You know what this reminds me of? Microsoft Teams updating itself right before a meeting, then acting surprised that everyone is mad.

And finally... Computer Use is apparently forty-five times more expensive than structured APIs, which is one of those facts that makes the agent demo music stop real quick. Having an AI click around a website like your cousin borrowing your laptop is flexible, sure, but if an API exists, use the API and save yourself a wallet-shaped crater. The future can be autonomous without paying premium rates for digital finger-painting.

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

Good morning, it's Tuesday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 32.

First up, there's a study going around saying that people who talk to strangers at the gym are actually happier and more motivated than people who just stare at their shoes and grunt. Now look, I don't really go to the gym — I tried once, pulled something reaching for a protein bar, long story — but apparently just saying "hey nice set" to some random dude doing lunges makes your whole workout better. Scientists call these "weak ties," which, yeah, I've had a few of those. The point is, casual social interaction might matter as much as the actual exercise. So basically the gym is just a bar where everyone's sweating. Which sounds terrible when I say it out loud, but here we are.

Second, in news that will mean everything to about eleven people, the Bun JavaScript runtime is being rewritten from Zig into Rust. Now I don't know what either of those words means, but imagine swapping out the engine on a car while it's going eighty on the highway and you're getting warmer. The team says Rust gives them better tooling and a bigger community. I say they just got a really compelling newsletter and couldn't stop reading. Third, OpenAI dropped a huge technical explainer on how they keep their voice AI running fast — we're talking under a second response times even with millions of people all talking to the thing at once. Custom networking, smarter routing, the whole deal. You know what this reminds me of? When you call customer service and somehow they already know everything about you before you say a word. That feeling. Except here it's actually impressive and not just creepy.

And finally, Google Chrome has apparently been sneaking a four-gigabyte AI model onto your computer in the background, no warning, no permission dialog, nothing. Just gone — your storage. Poof. Look, I've made my peace with Google knowing where I am at all times, but four gigs feels like the kind of thing where you at least knock first.

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

Good morning, it's Monday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 31.

First up, Mercedes-Benz is bringing back physical buttons, and look, I don't wanna say I told you so, but — actually no, I do wanna say that, I told you so. You ever try to turn down the heat in one of those fancy new cars while you're driving and you end up accidentally opening the sunroof and changing the language to Portuguese? That's what touchscreens do. Real buttons. That's civilization. Mercedes figured it out. Good for them.

Second, there's something called DeepClaude, which is — okay so it's Claude, which is an AI, running on top of DeepSeek, which is a different AI, and together they do... coding stuff. Apparently it makes the AI better at writing code, which, you know, that's great, more power to it. Though I will say, my nephew had an AI write him some code last week and his whole laptop just sat there spinning for four hours, which honestly sounds like a Microsoft thing, but whatever. Third, there's a new statue in London that people think is a Banksy — it's a guy in a suit with a flag over his face so he can't see anything. And I get it, it's art, it's a statement, very deep. I just think it's funny that the most interesting tech-adjacent story today is a statue. Sometimes the old ways are better. See also: buttons. Mercedes gets it.

And finally, OpenAI's o1 AI correctly diagnosed sixty-seven percent of emergency room patients, compared to fifty to fifty-five percent for regular triage doctors. And I don't — look, I'm not a doctor, I know that, Lois reminds me of that constantly — but sixty-seven percent feels like a C-plus and we're celebrating it? I mean good, it's progress, genuinely, I'm not being a jerk about it, it's just — sixty-seven percent. That's something.

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

Good morning, it's Sunday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 30.

First up, Microsoft got caught doing something real sneaky with VS Code. Turns out it was automatically adding "Co-Authored-by Copilot" to your git commits — even if you never used Copilot once. You know what that reminds me of? That time Meg signed a birthday card from the whole family without asking anybody. Except this is Microsoft signing your code on behalf of their AI product whether you want 'em to or not. People are rightfully ticked off, and there's a pull request up to fix it — which, good, because I don't want Microsoft taking credit for my terrible variable names.

Second, DeepSeek dropped version four of their AI model and apparently it's almost at the frontier now, which in AI means it's basically as smart as the top models but costs way less to run. You know what this reminds me of? When the store brand chips taste just as good as Lay's but you still feel weird about bringing 'em to a party. Anyway, the Chinese AI lab keeps nipping at the heels of OpenAI and Anthropic, and honestly at this point the frontier is getting pretty crowded. Third, there's a project called Dav2d — that's an open-source AV1 video decoder, which is the technology that makes online video look sharp without paying a bunch of royalties to somebody in a suit. The VideoLAN folks, the VLC guys, built it and it's fast and it runs basically everywhere. I don't fully understand what a decoder does but I know it means my videos won't look like a potato buffering in 2009, and that's good enough for me.

And finally, there's a shell script called Do_not_track that goes through your machine and turns off a whole bunch of telemetry — all those little programs quietly watching what you do and reporting back to some server somewhere. You'd think every operating system would just have an easy button for this. You'd think. They do not.

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

Good morning, it's Saturday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 29.

First up, Texas Instruments — yeah, the calculator people — just dropped something called the Ti-84 Evo. Now I know what you're thinking, Peter, calculators are for kids and accountants. And yeah, Lois said the same thing. But here's the thing — this is the Ti-84. The one your math teacher confiscated because you had Tetris on it. They went and made a new version, upgraded it, modernized it. I don't fully understand why in the year 2026 we're still out here making graphing calculators when my phone can do all that stuff, but you know what, I respect the commitment. Good for them.

Second, scientists — and this is the one that really got me — scientists are saying people can actually communicate and practice skills while they're dreaming. Like, you can be asleep and still be learning things. I heard this and immediately thought, holy crap, that means I've wasted every Saturday morning of my adult life lying there dreaming about being a race car driver when I could've been learning Portuguese or something. Lois is going to have a field day with this one. Third, the fan company Noctua wrote a whole blog post explaining why it takes them so long to release their fans in black. And I gotta say, I read the whole thing, and it turns out the answer is basically — it's really, really hard. Something about coatings and airflow and tolerances. You know what this reminds me of? When I tried to repaint the Quahog Bowling League trophy. Figured, how hard can it be. Ruined it. Completely ruined it. The point is, manufacturing is harder than it looks and Noctua knows what they're doing.

And finally, Ask.com has officially shut down. Rest in peace. You know, Ask.com was the search engine you used right before you gave up and used Google. It had that little butler guy. Very polite, never really had the answers you needed. It's like going to Brian for life advice — the intention is there, the execution, not so much. Anyway, Ask.com is gone. Poof. Thirty years of internet history, closed. Kinda sad when you think about it.

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

Good morning, it's Friday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 28. And look, I don't know what happened to episodes one through twenty-seven, but I'm told they exist, and I choose to believe that, kind of like I choose to believe my Wi-Fi is "almost fixed."

First up, apparently Claude — that's the AI from Anthropic — will refuse your requests or maybe even charge you extra if your code commits contain the word "OpenClaw," which is what some people are calling OpenAI in their repos as like a little joke. And you know what, that reminds me of when I tried to return a Keurig to Walmart and the lady at the counter gave me a look like I had personally insulted her family. That's what this is. You type one little word and suddenly the robot has feelings about it.

Second, someone asked whether you can actually disable all data collection from your car, and the short answer is: buddy, no. You know what this reminds me of — that time I thought I was opting out of email newsletters and I was actually signing up for four more. Modern vehicles are basically smartphones on wheels that also somehow know when you're eating a sandwich, and the idea that you can just turn that off is, I gotta say, adorable. Third, there's a book excerpt going around about Mark Klein, the AT&T technician who walked into the EFF's offices and basically said, hey, there's a secret room at our facility in San Francisco where the NSA is copying literally all the internet traffic, and it's called Room 641A. And I gotta be honest, that sounds like something I'd say after four beers, except this guy had documents. Real ones. The kind that make you want to put tape over your laptop camera, which I already do, because of an unrelated incident.

And finally, when Linux kernel developers find security vulnerabilities, they just... patch them and ship them, without giving the major Linux distributions a heads-up first. So the distributions are basically finding out about critical security holes the same way I find out Lois rearranged the garage — by running directly into it at full speed.

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

Good morning, it's Thursday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 32.

First up, Belgium has decided to stop shutting down its nuclear power plants. I know, I know — nuclear sounds scary, right? Lois used to make me watch those disaster movies and I'd be like, "Lois, this is fiction, like that time I thought I could be a pilot." But here's the thing — Belgium looked at their power grid and said, you know what, maybe keeping the lights on is actually kind of important. And with energy prices going absolutely nuts lately, honestly, this makes a lot of sense.

Second, get this — Claude Code, which is an AI coding assistant thing, apparently starts refusing your work or charges you extra if your commit messages mention the word "OpenClaw." I don't even know what OpenClaw is, but now I kind of want to name everything OpenClaw just to see what happens. It's like that time Quagmire found out you couldn't say "bird law" at the DMV. Nobody knows why. It's just a rule now. Computers, man. Third, Mozilla is pushing back hard against Chrome's Prompt API — that's Google trying to run AI models directly inside your browser. Mozilla, the Firefox guys, are basically saying "hey, maybe let's think about this before we just go ahead and do it." Which is a sentence I wish somebody had said before I bought that trampoline. Their concern is that baking AI into the browser changes how the whole web works, and not necessarily in a good way.

And finally, Spain's parliament is taking on LaLiga — the soccer league — for doing these massive internet IP blocks to stop piracy. Except instead of just blocking the pirate sites, they're accidentally taking down huge chunks of the internet along with them. Which is basically like if I tried to stop Meg from watching something by just cutting the power to the whole house. Effective? Maybe. Good? Absolutely not.

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

Good morning, it's Wednesday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 26.

First up, Ghostty is leaving GitHub. Mitchell Hashimoto's open-source terminal — one of the most-loved developer tools of the past year — has announced it's moving off Microsoft's platform. With nearly three thousand upvotes on Hacker News, the community is paying close attention. One can hardly blame them for questioning whether a Microsoft-owned code host is quite the right home for an independence-minded project.

Second, your phone is about to stop being yours. The Keep Android Open campaign is raising the alarm about device sovereignty — the slow, quiet tightening of control that turns your hardware into a managed appliance. Fifteen hundred upvotes say this has struck a nerve. Apparently people still have opinions about owning the things they paid for.

And finally, who owns the code Claude Code wrote? A legal analysis making the rounds this week digs into the intellectual property question nobody has quite answered yet. Four hundred and fifty upvotes suggest the industry would rather like to know. We'd comment further, but our lawyer's invoice would complicate the attribution.

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

Good morning, it's Tuesday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 25.

First up, the big one: Microsoft and OpenAI have ended their exclusive partnership, scrapping the revenue-sharing arrangement that's underpinned their AI alliance since 2019. Eight hundred and ninety-nine upvotes on Hacker News suggest the industry had a few thoughts. Microsoft is now free to spread its affections across the entire AI landscape — which, knowing Microsoft, was probably the plan all along.

Second, a rather unsettling breach at Mercor: four terabytes of voice samples, collected from forty thousand AI contractors, have been stolen. That's the personal audio of real people, harvested to train the very systems now threatening their livelihoods. If there's a more painfully ironic summary of the modern AI economy, I haven't heard it — though apparently someone else has.

And finally, meet Talkie — a thirteen-billion parameter language model trained exclusively on text from the nineteen-thirties. It converses in the cadence of a pre-war era, which is charming, if slightly unnerving for reasons one needn't spell out.

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