In the realm of his other unrealistic plans and potentially broken promises, Elon Musk's Terafab stands out as one of the biggest pipedreams, promising to boost semiconductor production by 50x for the benefit of orbital datacenters. But hey, this idea must have legs, because now Intel has announced it is joining the aspiring Bond villain's initiative.

"If you add up all the fabs on earth combined, they're only about 2% of what we need for the… Terafab project," Musk said.

In case you were wondering, Musk has never built a wafer fab before. Neither have any of his companies. So when the world's richest man revealed a pie-in-the-sky plan to build a factory capable of churning out enough chips to make his dream a reality, folks were understandably skeptical.

Fabs are among the most complex and expensive facilities in the world. It can cost $30 billion and take as long as five years to bring a modestly-sized facility online, and that's if you already know what you're doing.

There is nothing modest about what Musk has proposed.

But at least it's "going to be happening" in a city with skyrocketing electrical costs and in a yearslong drought.

"We will have all of the equipment necessary to make a chip of any kind [including] logical memory," Musk said of the first Terafab facility, which will purportedly be located in Austin, Texas, which has become the fabulist hecto-billionaire's geographic center of gravity over the last few years. "So in a single building, we can create a lithography mask, make the chip, test the chip, make another mask, and have an incredibly fast recursive loop for improving the chip design."

Let's be reasonable. It's not going to be "in" Austin, because then the city has jurisdiction. Just look out for annexation, Elon.

The Supreme Court yesterday overturned a 5th Circuit ruling that could have forced Internet service provider Grande Communications to terminate broadband subscribers accused of piracy.

Yesterday’s ruling follows a precedent-setting decision last month in which the Supreme Court threw out a 4th Circuit ruling against Cox Communications, another ISP accused by record labels of not doing enough to fight piracy. In the case involving Cox and Sony, the court said that “a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”

N.B.: This looks an awful lot like the litigation and resolution surrounding VCRs. (Ask your parents.)

Cox is one of several cases in which record labels sought financial damages from ISPs that continued to serve customers whose IP addresses were repeatedly traced to torrent downloads or uploads. In October 2024, record labels Universal, Warner, and Sony got a win over Grande when the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit decided the ISP was liable for contributory copyright infringement.

The conservative-leaning 5th Circuit court held in a 3-0 decision that “Grande knew (or was willfully blind to) the identities of its infringing subscribers” but “made the choice to continue providing services to them anyway, rather than taking simple measures to prevent infringement.” But the 5th Circuit now has to reconsider the Grande v. UMG case after a two-sentence ruling issued yesterday by the Supreme Court.

Grande’s petition “for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for further consideration in light of Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment,” the Supreme Court said.

Hundreds of thousands of tech workers are facing a harsh reality. Their well-paying jobs are no longer safe. Now that artificial intelligence (AI) is here, their futures don’t look as bright as they did a decade ago.

As US tech companies have ramped up investments in AI, they’ve slashed a staggering number of jobs. Microsoft cut 15,000 workers last year. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees in the last six months. Financial-services company Block eliminated more than 4,000 people, or 40% of its workforce, in February. Meta laid off more than 1,000 in the last six months, and, according to a Reuters report, may cut 20% of all employees in the near future. Just this week, the software giant Oracle laid off thousands of workers. Smaller players like Pinterest and Atlassian also made recent cuts, culling about 15% and 10% of their workforces, respectively. Estimates put the total number of tech layoffs in the past year at more than 165,000, according to the tracker Layoffs.fyi.

“At no point in my career have I ever been this pessimistic about the future of careers in tech,” said a tech employee, who has worked at big tech companies for decades and requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “And that’s really sad because I love tech.”

These robots are smaller than a strand of human hair but can move independently even without a motor and sensors.

Do we want a half dozen tech giants spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers around the world to build what is essentially the same technology, spiking energy costs, creating noise and pollution, and even, according to one study, dramatically raising the temperature around the complexes due to an advanced heat island effect? So that those tech giants can make good on their promises to automate jobs en masse and remake the social contract to their liking? A great many people who live closest to said projects have decided they do not, and rather than cut deals or hedge bets, they have chosen to refuse them.

Do we want AI text and image generators producing our journalism, safeguarding our stores of knowledge, creating our art? Even if it can? If not, then it makes good sense to refuse outright those products’ entry into those arenas. To ban AI-generated content from Wikipedia, from publishing, from video games. And to ban the companies aspiring to enrich themselves by taking over all that knowledge and content production from setting up shop in our backyards.

There is great power in refusal. The Luddites are mocked today because elites worked hard to distort their legacy—it is too inconvenient, too dangerous, even—but they were cheered as folk heroes and left the industrialists deskilling their jobs terrified by refusing outright to submit to rank automation. The writers and actors in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA who went on strike in 2023 rallied millions to their cause by drawing a line in the sand and refusing to let their work be turned over to studio bosses with enterprise ChatGPT accounts.

Looking back at the events of the last few weeks, I can’t help but wonder if we’re seeing a reawakening of our capacity for this sort of mass refusal. As it becomes clearer by the day that AI promises to be an implement of automation; of worker exploitation and knowledge degradation; an enormous energy and resource consumer; a tremendous engine of wealth transfer.

Wanting to replace my awesome Bose Soundsport wired but it seems nothing with a similar form factor exists...

A proposed class action lawsuit claims that Perplexity covertly shares chat content with both Google and Meta for ad targeting.

Hello,

I recently came across the Tech Learning Collective, but found they have no currently scheduled workshops and classes are postponed.

Is there anything similar to their work, or is anyone familiar with TLC still having workshops or something somewhere?

I just got really excited about the prospect and then found they were sort of hibernating, save for some blog posts it seems.

Thank you.

A Korean developer named Sigrid Jin—featured in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month for having consumed 25 billion Claude Code tokens—woke up at 4 a.m. to the news. He sat down, ported the core architecture to Python from scratch using an AI orchestration tool called oh-my-codex, and pushed claw-code before sunrise. The repo hit 30,000 GitHub stars faster than any repository in history.

Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs as the US technology company seeks to reassure investors that its bet on AI infrastructure will pay off.

The $420bn (£315bn) company, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, started making employees redundant on Tuesday, with thousands of its 162,000-strong workforce expected to leave.

About 10,000 people have lost their jobs so far, the BBC reported, citing an unnamed employee at the company, which is chaired by Larry Ellison, the billionaire ally of Donald Trump. Ellison is worth $189bn and is the world’s sixth richest person, Forbes estimates.

Michael Shepherd, a senior manager at Oracle, who was not affected by the cuts, posted on the social media site LinkedIn that there had been a “significant reduction in force” at the business.

Shepherd said the decision had affected “senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, program managers, and technical specialists with deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, government and sovereign cloud environments, and enterprise-scale systems”.

That's just what we need. More senior tech workers out of work in Austin. Thank god we now have a fresh supply!

To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let's quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took up around 4 to 5 MB. This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album's worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the global average broadband internet speed back then was about 1.5 Mbps. Your browser would continue loading this monstrosity for several minutes, enough time for you to walk away and make a cup of coffee.

If hardware has improved so much over the last 20 years, has the modern framework/ad-tech stack completely negated that progress with abstraction and poorly architected bloat?

The Match Group strikes again!

I never thought I'd be posting a Prince Harry story in Technology, but it's 2026, and all bets are off.

The Duke of Sussex has welcomed two landmark lawsuits against major tech companies, declaring: “Finally, some truth and accountability has arrived.”

In a speech in Washington DC to the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) global summit on privacy, AI governance and cybersecurity law, Prince Harry said he had done a “deep dive into the tech-fuelled world in which my children – all our children – are growing up”.

He spoke of “harrowing stories” of how time spent on the big tech companies’ platforms had led to “grave and irreversible harm”.

Referring to the two cases last week, in which a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375m (£280m) in civil penalties and a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $6m damages to a 20-year-old woman, Harry said: “About bloody time!”

he open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.

Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.

Today, the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count while —not incidentally— also creating trillions of dollars of value and countless jobs around the world. But the increasingly-extremist tycoons of Big Tech have decided that that's not good enough.

Now, the hectobillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.