Thursday, April 16
Daily News Stuff 16 April 2026
Refinery Fire Edition
Refinery Fire Edition
Top Story
- 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.
Tech News
- 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.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Mary counts the walls.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:24 PM
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1
"Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain."
Heh.
Heh.
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 16 2026 11:14 PM (1SgfN)
2
They'll probably give the same response that 4chan (registered and operated in the USA) gave when a UK court found them liable for breaking a law that would be unconstitutional in the USA. 4chan sent the UK enforcement agency (OFCOM, probably short for Office of Communications but I don't care about them enough to look it up) an AI picture of a hamster (and, more relevantly, an email saying "As has been explained to your agency, ad nauseam, the United Kingdom lost the American Revolutionary War. We are not in the mood to discuss the matter further, and have not been in the mood for 250 years. [....] My client reserves all rights and waives none. Reserved rights include the right to sue you again and/or to respond to future correspondence with an even larger rodent, such as a marmot. Or, maybe, you could just stop sending Americans stupid letters and acknowledge the sovereignty of the United States."
Posted by: Robin Munn at Friday, April 17 2026 12:58 PM (5o0to)
3
4chan's lawyer is Preston Byrne, he has blogs.
(Okay, 4chan has some other lawyers, as well.)
Preston seems to imply that his core point wrt the initial hamster document is that a) email is a valid serving process under UK law b) it is not valid under US law c) Ofcom has not done the things to implement its orders under US law, which might involve US judicial review.
Anna's archive is maybe breaking US law, and the court maybe can get compliance from US infrastructure operators about blocking traffic. The lawyers probably are sending the letters to them.
I don't really like the archive case, and have opinions.
But, it is a little different from OfComm's interactions with Sasu, 4chan, kiwifarms, and I forget what the fourth was.
(Okay, 4chan has some other lawyers, as well.)
Preston seems to imply that his core point wrt the initial hamster document is that a) email is a valid serving process under UK law b) it is not valid under US law c) Ofcom has not done the things to implement its orders under US law, which might involve US judicial review.
Anna's archive is maybe breaking US law, and the court maybe can get compliance from US infrastructure operators about blocking traffic. The lawyers probably are sending the letters to them.
I don't really like the archive case, and have opinions.
But, it is a little different from OfComm's interactions with Sasu, 4chan, kiwifarms, and I forget what the fourth was.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, April 18 2026 12:23 AM (s6adZ)
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