Daily Tech News 29 March 2025

• xAI has acquired parent-ish company X in an all-stock transaction that values xAI at $80 billion and X itself at $45 billion less $12 billion in debt. (Twitter)
  
  What does all this mean?
  
  Well, now xAI officially has access to and is fully integrated with Twitter rather than semi-officially having access to and being fully integrated with Twitter.
  
  Also, xAI was valued at $50 billion just three months ago.

• The 2025 Razer Blade 16 is... God dammit you guys. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a 16" laptop with a 120Hz 2560x1600 OLED display - not astounding but perfectly usable, up to a Ryzen 370 (four Zen 5 cores and eight low-power Zen 5c cores, plus 16 graphics cores), up to an RTX 5090 - laptop edition, meaning a downvolted desktop 5080 with 24GB of RAM rather than 16GB, up to 64GB of soldered RAM, up to 4TB of SSD, and almost but not quite the Four Essential Keys because Razer literally hates you.
  
  I mean, the keys are there, but PgUp is where Home should be and PgDn is where PgUp should be and the other two are weird squiggles that I can't interpret. (Game Mode and Performance Mode, apparently.)
  
  Windows PowerToys can solve that, except for the labels being wrong.
  
  It lasts over seven hours on battery playing video, which is not all day but blows other gaming laptops out of the water; some don't even manage three hours.
  
  Fortunately, there's the price: Starting at $3000 and going up to $4900, there is no chance that I would ever consider buying one.
  
  
  
• Hynix has paid Intel $1.9 billion to finish acquiring Intel's flash memory division. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The headline is a bit confusing, but this is actually the last phase in the agreement signed in 2020 and not a new deal.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's 5000 series graphics cards are now available at retail. (WCCFTech)
  
  I mean, not the 5090, and the 5080 and 5070 Ti are selling way above MSRP, and nobody should buy the 5070 at all, but... Yeah.
  
  
  
• Are the latest AI platforms secure? No. (Lupin & Holmes)
  
  The authors hacked the Gemini Python sandbox and downloaded the source code.
  
  
  
• US banks no longer need prior government approval to deal with cryptocurrencies. (Axios)
  
  This doesn't make it safe, but does make it slightly less irritating.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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