Daily Tech News 16 April 2026

• Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits & paid services to improve itself? Yes. (GitHub)
  
  As everyone in the attached Hacker News thread notes, this is entirely in keeping with the Gas Town philosophy, and with the recent practices of project lead Steve Yegge: It's a Ponzi scheme that turns Ponzi schemes into more Ponzi schemes, without at any point approaching utility.
  
  Gas Town is an AI project for creating and managing AI projects, created and managed entirely by AI. Nobody knows how or if it works, and in fact it mostly doesn't. And now it spends your money on expanding itself.
  
  If you're thinking this all sounds like another crypto scam yes, it's that as well.

• Microsoft's Recall tool that watches everything you do, takes screenshots, and stores it all in one convenient place still isn't secure. (Ars Technica)
  
  The vault itself is secure - now - but as the user you still have access to the vault, and the process that manages that isn't secured from the user. So if you can be convinced to download some malware, it can lie in wait until you log in to Recall and then silently scoop up all your data.
  
  Microsoft responded promptly... By saying this is not a bug and won't be fixed.
  
  
  
• The MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG is a mini-PC using Intel's new Panther Lake laptop processors, but all models in this range use SO-DIMM memory so it doesn't offer the high-end B390 graphics option. (WCCFTech)
  
  Apparently there will be a desktop processor with B390 graphics with the Nova Lake release later this year, but then you can only have four P cores.
  
  
  
• The B390 graphics in Intel's Panther Lake chips use the new Xe3 cores - the successor to the Xe2 cores used in dedicated graphics cards like the B580. Details of upcoming Xe3 dedicated cards have leaked and can be summed up as "not for you". (WCCFTech)
  
  Intel plans to launch Pro and AI-focused models... Only.
  
  
  
• Spotify won a $322 million default judgement against whoever is running Anna's Archive. (TorrentFreak)
  
  Since nobody knows who that is and it's doubtful they have $322 million, it may prove difficult to collect.
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

| Access Comments