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Welcome back, ByteSizers! Somewhere, someone is starting a "little passion project" that will eventually require a dedicated server and three divorces.
On this day in 1991, a Finnish college kid named Linus Torvalds posted to comp.os.minix asking what people wanted to see in an operating system. He described his project as "just a hobby, won't be big." That hobby now runs 96% of the world's servers, every Android phone, and the exact machine currently yelling at you about a failed cron job.
Meanwhile, I once described this newsletter as "just a side thing" and now it owns me and keeps me up at night. Linus and I are not the same.
GRAND THEFT SUBPOENA: Take-Two sends lawyers after GTA 6 leaker
There's a certain poetry in a company that made billions glorifying heists now conducting a federal manhunt over stolen video clips.
Take-Two, Rockstar's parent company, filed DMCA subpoenas in the Southern District of New York demanding that Microsoft and Discord hand over everything they've got on "CyberLeek," the hacker persona that spent last week dumping GTA 6 gameplay footage across GitHub, Discord, and a Telegram channel called "CyberLeek Research," which sounds less like a hacking collective and more like a vegetable-based think tank.
Both companies have until September 4 to cough up user data, linked Xbox accounts, OneDrive records, and internal investigation files. CyberLeek claims access to a playable build and published a manifesto demanding Rockstar end digital preorders and paywalled DLC, promising not to stop until Take-Two apologizes for "anti-consumerism."
Noble cause. Terrible plan. Nintendo destroyed a man's entire life over Switch ROMs, and Take-Two has been in a litigious mood since roughly 1997. Our guy brought a manifesto to a lawyer fight.
UR-INE LUCK: Jason Kelce's pee-powered data center idea is weirdly legit
Liquid Death ran an ad where Jason Kelce asks America to donate its pee to cool AI data centers, complete with a crowd singing "Let's pee on computers together to save humanity!" TechCrunch then did the responsible thing and asked actual water scientists if this could work. Their answer: kind of???
Thanks to very important reporting from TechCrunch, it’s alleged that you can't pour raw urine into a cooling tower unless you want mineral deposits, constant cleaning, and the smell of evaporated pee wafting over a small American town. But treated wastewater, which contains everyone's contributions, already cools data centers at scale. Loudoun County, Virginia pumps 200 million gallons of recycled water into its data centers daily, and that only covers 43% of demand.
So yes, some fraction of your bathroom breaks is already keeping ChatGPT alive. You're welcome, Sam.
GOOP! THERE IT IS: Gwyneth Paltrow throws Sam Altman a Hamptons party
Gwyneth Paltrow, the woman who sold a $75 candle scented like her own genitals, is hosting an "off-the-record" Hamptons dinner honoring Sam Altman on August 29. Honoring him for what, exactly, nobody knows. (THE FALL OF HUMANITY, MAYBE?!?!) Puck reports the party has no stated purpose, which makes it the Hamptons version of a meeting that could've been an email.
She even tried to play off this cringe nonsense with a joke, but it didn’t land the way she had hoped (much like her acting career).
This isn't Gwyneth's first tech rodeo. Goop launched an AI meditation app in 2024 and recently partnered with an AI marketing platform. She's also admitted she asks chatbots for recipe ideas, meaning somewhere out there an LLM invented a jade-egg-adjacent smoothie and she served it to guests.
Two wellness grifters, one dinner table. The vibes will be immaculate. The science will not.
⚙️ TOOL TIME
Row, row, row your data straight into the garbage with MongoDB Atlas!
Your data doesn't fit in neat little rows anymore. It hasn't since 2011. You know it, your schema knows it, and that one JSON blob you crammed into a VARCHAR(MAX) column definitely knows it.
But lucky for all of us, MongoDB Atlas is the document database that lets your data exist the way it actually exists: messy, nested, and evolving faster than your migration scripts.
Other awesome things Atlas actually does for you:
Ships without a schema migration ritual. Add a field today, not next sprint after three approvals.
Scales sideways on its own. Traffic spike at 2 a.m. handled without you awake for it.
Handles backups, patching, and security automatically. One fewer thing waiting to become your outage.
Bills through your existing AWS account. Counts toward committed spend, zero new procurement meetings, finance stays calm.
The only casualty is the intern who spent all summer normalizing tables. Try it out for yourself and deploy MongoDB Atlas through AWS Marketplace.
👨💻 JOB OPPORTUNITIES
Senior IT Security Operations Engineer @ Zscaler
Zscaler runs zero trust security for thousands of enterprises, and they need someone to tune policies, triage alerts, and babysit ZIA and ZPA all day. It's zero trust as a job description AND a personality: verify everything, assume nothing, sleep with one eye on PagerDuty.
Corporate Vice President, IT Product Support Manager @ New York Life
The 180-year-old insurance giant wants a leader for production support on mission-critical investment apps, which means every P1 incident you handle involves other people's retirement money. No pressure, just the compounding life savings of America riding on your MTTR.
IT Solutions Architect @ Point C
Point C is a healthcare third-party administrator that builds self-funded benefit plans, and they need an architect to translate business-person wishes into systems that actually work. The job is 40% diagrams, 60% explaining to stakeholders why the diagram can't just "do AI."
🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES
Australia's eSafety regulator caught Roblox still letting adults send connection requests to kids (EXCUSE ME, WHAT?!?!) and forced a court-enforceable undertaking with a three-month deadline. Two years of "engaging extensively" with regulators and the fix required legal paperwork. Cool platform for children you've built there, David Baszucki.
Truffle Security found 9,300+ AWS keys leaked publicly since 2022 that still work, including 526 root keys and 242 with full admin access. Median key age: five years, never rotated. Somewhere out there, a Fortune 500's entire cloud hangs on a key someone pasted into a repo during the Obama administration's afterglow.
Supermicro fired staff after investigating a $2.5 billion scheme smuggling Nvidia GPUs to China, one that got its own co-founder indicted in March. The internal probe cleared current management of all knowledge, which is corporate for "the guys who knew no longer work here."
SpaceX wants a million AI satellites in orbit, and researchers note roughly 200,000 would be decommissioned yearly, with 40,000 burning up in the atmosphere annually. Elon looked at Earth's e-waste problem and thought: what if the landfill was the sky.
What's up, meatbags. Chip here, fresh off a weekend of defragging for fun. Here's what the Experts Exchange community was untangling this week:
One member is playing detective with WHEA errors coming from a PCI Express root port, which is hardware's way of screaming without telling you which organ hurts.
Another wants VMware hosts to reboot themselves automatically, presumably so they can stop being the human snooze button for their own infrastructure.
And a third is trying to hide a table inside an Access app, because some data is on a need-to-know basis and Carol in accounting does not need to know.
That's the issue! ByteSize #99 down. If you need us, we'll be drafting our very special Issue #100 and refusing to hydrate near any data centers.