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Knock, knock! It's the second week of August, so all of your "let's circle back after summer" are at your door trying to collect. On this day in 1942, actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil were granted a patent for frequency-hopping radio, the trick that now runs your Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. The Navy took one look, filed it under "no thanks," and sat on it for decades.
So the most famous face in Hollywood invented the tech in your pocket, earned roughly zero dollars for it, and got a polite "nice earrings." Great system we've built here. We definitely lift up the best idea in the room.
(Also, if you're new here, we're on LinkedIn, where we've somehow resisted posting a single "what my 5 a.m. cold plunge taught me about enterprise sales" carousel. Follow us for tech news that reads like a human wrote it, because one did.)
Google's two smartest AI minds bail on the same afternoon
On Wednesday, Google announced that its two most important AI humans were both switching chairs on the same day, which feels less like an alarm bell and more like a blaring emergency siren. Jeff Dean, chief scientist and a 27-year veteran who basically wired half of modern Google, is leaving to start Discovery Loop, a company whose entire pitch is automating scientific discovery. Google is investing in it, because nothing soothes a breakup like funding your ex's next relationship. He's taking Gemini co-lead Oriol Vinyals, Google Brain founder Quoc Le, and longtime partner-in-code Sanjay Ghemawat with him.
Meanwhile Demis Hassabis is stepping down as DeepMind CEO to become chairman and Alphabet's chief scientist, inheriting the exact title Dean just vacated. Daily control of DeepMind now goes to Koray Kavukcuoglu, who reports straight to Sundar Pichai. Alphabet stock slid about 5%, which is Wall Street's version of a frown.
The timing is a little suspicious. Gemini 3.5 Pro is months past its June target, morale is reportedly grim, and Google has already lost people to both OpenAI and Anthropic. When your best minds leave to "automate discovery," the first discovery is that they left.
AI ate the world's memory and left gamers the bill
If you tried to buy a graphics card recently and felt your soul briefly exit your body, that was the AI boom handing you its invoice. Nvidia's RTX 5090 launched at $1,999. It now runs $4,300 to $5,000 on the street, and Tom's Hardware clocked it near $5,100 in South Korea after jumping a thousand bucks in a single month.
For once, the issue is not scalpers. It's memory. IDC figures AI data centers could swallow up to 70% of the world's memory output this year, up from about a quarter in 2022, and memory is now 70 to 80% of a high-end card's cost.
This disease is spreading, too. The Switch 2, the PS5, and the Steam Deck have all gotten pricier. And in July, Nvidia handed out free collectible paper trading cards. The internet calls it: fourteen cards, zero silicon.
Microsoft's quantum chief still says the chip works, physicists still have questions
Microsoft has spent a year and a half insisting it built the world's first "topological" quantum chip, and physicists have spent that same year and a half raising their hands to ask where the proof is. The thing runs on Majorana particles, named after a physicist who vanished without a trace in 1938, which feels thematically appropriate.
Quantum lead Chetan Nayak is back defending the work, saying the team stands by its results and its roadmap, with a scalable machine possibly arriving by 2029. Critics counter that there's still no clear evidence the device does what Microsoft claims, and note a related Microsoft-backed paper got retracted in 2021.
For the latest version, the team swapped in lead, which produced Nayak's own memorable line: people generally try to avoid putting lead into anything. Inspiring stuff.
⚙️ TOOL TIME
If a partner stopped talking to you, started sending massive encrypted data payloads to an unrecognized IP address in the middle of the night, and blamed you for bad latency... you’d call it a toxic relationship.
In IT, we just call it Tuesday.
You don't need to break encryption to know what’s going on, you just need better situational awareness.
Auvik’s latest guide, Keeping Network Performance Healthy & Secure with Intelligent Network Traffic Analysis, shows you how to use metadata, flow analysis, and behavior metrics to keep tabs on your environment.
Inside, we cover:
How to spot suspicious behavior and traffic spikes based on metadata alone
Troubleshooting performance bottlenecks before users start submitting angry tickets
Keeping the whole infrastructure secure without tearing down encryption protocols
Save yourself the stress and get full visibility back.
👨💻 JOB OPPORTUNITIES
Sr. IT Architect @ The Aerospace Corporation: Lead a team of architects and own the roadmap for an outfit that works on actual space programs, so your diagrams have to survive both a security review and orbit. You'll referee strong opinions about frameworks and guard the budget. TOGAF helps.
IT Project Manager @ Micron Technology: Run IT projects end to end at the memory company quietly benefiting from the same shortage torching your GPU budget. You'll live in RAID logs and translate "it's basically done" into a real status update. PMP required, patience implied.
Senior Manager of IT Infrastructure @ Security Industry Specialists: Own cloud, networking, and identity for a security firm running a 24/7 operations center on a roughly 90% Mac fleet. You'll push Zero-Trust and wrangle Okta and JAMF, because at a security company, getting breached is an especially awkward look.
🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES
Meta launched Muse Code, its first AI coding agent, undercutting Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex on price, then reportedly told thousands of its own engineers to use it weekly. Voluntary enthusiasm, with a mandate attached.
Amazon crossed a $3 trillion market cap for the first time on AWS and AI demand, joining Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Alphabet. CEO Andy Jassy says he still can't build data centers fast enough, and pinned part of the cost on the same rising memory prices mugging every PC builder right now.
Palantir posted a quarter CEO Alex Karp called "otherworldly", with revenue up 93% and short sellers down roughly $2.7 billion in a single session. The government-and-corporate data company that Wall Street can't decide whether to fear or marry.
Microsoft and ReliaQuest warned that hackers are hijacking hotel and conference Wi-Fi to reroute travelers to fake Microsoft 365 logins and swipe credentials, no phishing email required. The free Wi-Fi was already suspicious, and now it wants your password too.
Chip here. This week the EE crew was elbow-deep in scripts, databases, and the fine art of making software do something it was never really designed to do.
One member is writing a script to pull a single number off a webpage, because copy-paste is beneath them and automation is a lifestyle. Somewhere that number changes daily and their whole afternoon rides on it.
Another is bending Microsoft Access into sending emails and text messages, which is the database version of using a butter knife as a screwdriver and somehow getting away with it. Access was not built for this. Access will do it anyway.
And one brave soul is knee-deep in a SQL stored procedure that refuses to cooperate, the kind of debugging session where you fix one line and three others quietly file complaints.
That's a wrap. Somewhere a graphics card got pricier while you read this, two of Google's sharpest minds cleaned out their desks, and a quantum chip is both working and not working until someone looks at it. Stay patched, keep your certificates current, and go text a human, ideally one whose existence isn't still under peer review.