• The EU has fined Facebook 800 million euros for making the Facebook Marketplace part of Facebook.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Even Ars Technica knows this shit is coming to an end:

  In the past five years, EU regulators have also passed a landmark piece of legislation—the Digital Markets Act—with the aim to slow down dominant tech players and boost the local tech industry.

  There is no local tech industry.

  However, some observers expect the new commission, which is set to start a new 5-year term in weeks, to strike a more conciliatory tone over fears of retaliation from the incoming Trump administration.

  There are going to be so many tariffs.  Beautiful tarriffs.  You've never seen tariffs like them.

• Google has a new AI tool that alerts you when a caller is trying to scam you out of your money.  (Google)
  
  I thought they already announced that.
  
  
  
• UK phone company O2 has an AI tool that answers scam phone calls for you and pretends to have Alzheimer's until the scammers quit in despair.  (O2)
  
  That's more like it.
  
  
  
• Intel's integrated graphics in its Lunar Lake laptop chips are...  Pretty good actually.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This review puts Intel narrowly ahead of AMD here.   AMD begs to differ but I'll take the independent benchmarks over corporate ones
  
  Both processors averaged around 30W in the test, which is quite reasonable.
  
  On the CPU side of things there is no competition though with AMD being around 75% faster.
  
  
  

Holocure 0.7 Trailer Video of the Day

Holocure 0.7 is out today.

This is a Hololive-related game as the name would suggest, but unofficial, fan-made, and completely free.  (Hololive is perfectly happy with that although technically they own the IP.)

And it's good.

It's basically a Vampire Survivors clone where you battle swarms of annoying fans as one of - hang on - 47 playable characters, all with unique weapons and skills, and a crazy number of upgrades that switch around randomly between games.

It's also starting to be a Stardew Valley clone with home-building, farming, fishing, and mining (and slave labour), and apparently now a Jump King clone, and has a casino where you can bribe the dealer, and I don't know what else.

Small problem for the team working on the game is that Hololive is adding new talents faster than they can be added to the game.  There are two EN generations and four JP generations, with the latest group appearing only a week ago.