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Welcome back. The World Cup ended with Spain as the champion and approximately 14 million new certified refereeing experts on VAR. Talk about an experts exchange!
*nudge* *wink* *wink*
Anyways, on this day in 2017, Epic Games dropped a battle royale game (hmm..have you heard of “Fortnite”?) onto an unsuspecting internet, and within months 45 million people were building emergency plywood forts instead of doing their jobs. The game ate our weekends and the entire zeitgeist. Dances became touchdown celebrations. Travis Scott performed a concert inside the game and somehow made "logging into a video game" a legitimate live music event. Nine years later, somewhere out there, a grown man in a Patagonia vest is still doing the floss at a wedding, unprompted, sober.
That's Fortnite's real legacy. Not the 45 million players, but the dad in the quarter-zip vest.
OpenAI wants to sell you a roommate that never leaves and reads all your DMs
OpenAI is reportedly building its first piece of hardware, and it's not a phone or a laptop. Oh, no… it's a screenless little gremlin designed to have a "personality" that grows more attached to you over time, like a Tamagotchi that reads your texts.
Bloomberg says it can move on its own and could run you a few hundred bucks, arriving sometime in 2027, conveniently timed just after Apple sued OpenAI for allegedly lifting hardware secrets.
About 16% of U.S. adults have already used AI for companionship, and nearly three in four teens have tried an AI "friend," which is either heartwarming or the plot of a Black Mirror episode (and if you've seen a single episode of Black Mirror you already know which one). Meanwhile a competing gadget called Friend got its subway ads spray-painted into oblivion by New Yorkers who took one look at an always-listening AI necklace and said absolutely not. China just passed rules specifically to stop citizens from emotionally bonding with chatbots, because their birth rate problem doesn't need a robot boyfriend complicating things further.
Someone pinch me, because are we really living in this timeline? Sam Altman wants to sell you a body for his chatbot. Buddy, ChatGPT doesn't need a body, it needs to do my taxes so i can do my hobby.
Meta's layoff algorithm took "it's not you, it's me" and made it legally actionable
Chat, are we cooked? As of last week, 26 former and current Meta employees are suing the company, claiming an algorithmic scoring system, not a human with a soul, decided who got cut in the company's 8,000-person layoff, and that it disproportionately nuked people who'd taken medical, parental, or disability leave.
The lawsuit says Meta leaned on internal tools including something called "Metamate," activity-monitoring data, and AI-token-usage dashboards, the kind of scoring system that by design can't be earned by someone who was, say, having a baby or recovering from surgery.
Meta's official response: "Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI." Which is a hell of a thing to say out loud in 2026, when your own employees took protected leave and got automatically flagged like a fraudulent Venmo transaction.
Zuckerberg spent years building a metaverse nobody asked for and apparently also built a robot HR department nobody consented to, but probably shouldn’t be surprised that this is all coming from a hoodie-loving humanoid cyborg.
A robot found the Linux bug 15 years of humans walked right past
A security firm's AI agent, named VEGA like a low-budget Bond villain, found a Linux kernel flaw called “GhostLock” that's been quietly sitting in nearly every major distro since 2011, letting attackers with local access grab full root control. The bug hid inside a cleanup function in the kernel's task scheduler and worked 97% of the time in testing, which is a better success rate than most fantasy football trades. Google paid out over $92,000 for the find.
There's no real fix except installing the patched kernel, so if you've been putting off that update, today's the day the universe is telling you to stop being the guy who reboots his server never.
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👨💻 JOB OPPORTUNITIES
IT Manager @ Magna International
A perfect role for someone who wants to run IT for a car parts plant. (Make a real-life Lighting McQueen, please!). But if you’re understandably anti-AI, the job posting admits they use AI to screen your application before a human ever sees it. So, somewhere, an algorithm is already judging your resume font choice.
Manager, Sr. IT Audit @ Globe Life
The life insurance firm needs someone to audit their systems for SOX compliance, and yes, "experience with Generative AI" is a listed requirement, so apparently even the people checking everyone else's work now need a robot looking over their shoulder too.
Security Engineering Manager @ Taskrabbit
The“rent-a-dad” app, aka the company that lets you outsource assembling your own furniture, wants someone to govern its "AI/ML security risk" and act as a "technical player-coach." So the pay's solid, the title's a personality test, and part of the job is making sure the robots helping you hire a guy to build your IKEA dresser don't also leak your address to the internet.
🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES
Christopher Nolan called AI "a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside," which is the kind of line a man says when he's spent thirty years making movies about time and dreams and refuses to own a smartphone out of pure spite. The Greeks are inside, Chris. Everyone can see them. They've been inside since ChatGPT launched. At this point they've unpacked, hung curtains, and started taking shots of Ouzo. Opa!
A nonprofit called Current AI wants to build a free, public alternative to Big Tech's AI empires, which is adorable, like bringing a butter knife to a fight where the other side has nukes, unlimited venture capital, and Sam Altman's ego as a power source. Godspeed, you beautiful idealists. Somebody has to be a Ronaldo to Sam Altman’s Messi, and lose this fight with dignity.
Three Russians got indicted for running "bulletproof hosting" that powered LockBit, BlackSuit, and Play ransomware gangs, causing over $62 million in damage. Bulletproof is doing a lot of work in that name, since it did not, in fact, stop the FBI's bullets.
Microsoft deleted a man's OneDrive after his account got hacked, torching 25 years of baby photos and thousands in Xbox games, then called the decision "irreversible," a word that should be legally banned from appearing anywhere near someone's infant son's baby pictures. A trillion-dollar company took one look at a hacked grandpa account and hit delete like it was clearing browser history before mom got home. Back your stuff up somewhere else. Preferably somewhere with a soul.
Hey nerds, it's Chip. I watched the entire World Cup final so hard I forgot to eat for two days. Anyway, over on Experts Exchange this week, the real MVPs were arguing in the trenches:
One admin's Server 2016-to-2022 upgrade kept faceplanting with a driver error mid-migration, and the eventual fix was ripping out the RDS role entirely before the upgrade, then reinstalling it after, basically benching your star player so the rest of the team can actually function.
Another thread had a sysadmin stuck on a stubborn in-place server upgrade that just would not cooperate, the kind of ticket where every fix reveals two new problems, like extra time nobody wanted.
And another fella needed a formula built from scratch to fill in a set of missing values automatically, because apparently even spreadsheets have information they're refusing to give up.
ByteSize out! See you next week. May your backups be stronger than your bracket.