Latest posts from ByteHaven - Where I ramble about bytes
Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. AppleInsider had a story yesterday that's getting covered as a flex: Apple trained its own LLM for China instead of just using Google Gemini like it does everywhere else. Proprietary model, Alibaba's help behind the scenes, first company to launch a homegrown AI model in the country. Neat, right? Apple doing its own thing again. Except that's not…
Nvidia just told Wall Street it'll personally cover up to 25% of the loss if the GPUs backing $500 billion in AI data center loans turn out to be worth less than the paperwork says. TechCrunch called it "risky but brilliant." I'd call it the most honest thing Nvidia has said about this bubble all year — because you don't insure an asset's resale value unless you're worried it might not have one.…
Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. 9to5Mac had a piece today that I can't stop turning over, because it's not really about the feature it's describing. It's about the fact that Apple is building the disease and the diagnostic test in the same operating system, and shipping both in the same beta cycle. The feature is called Apple Reference Image , or ARI, and it showed up in a…
Where We Left Off Part 18 was a Friday-evening update to Vaultwarden's version, making sure I was ahead of a Bitwarden app update before it could cause me any issues — one service, one box, a couple hours. This one is not that. This is the post where I found out what "resilient" actually costs when you have to cash it in for real, on hardware that's dying, against a deadline I didn't pick. There…
$55 billion. $20 billion of that in debt. The largest all-cash leveraged buyout in corporate history, bigger than the $45 billion TXU deal that held the record for almost two decades. That's what it took to take Electronic Arts private this week. GamingOnLinux's writeup is what showed up in my feed, and the comment section under it was already doing most of the work of figuring out what this…
Sorry for the delay getting this out — nixos2 developed a problem I've been chasing down as I could find the time, and it ate most of the week. There'll be a homeserver post on that saga soon. In the meantime, a lot happened with Paramount-WBD while I wasn't looking, so let's catch up. I last left this at a 14-day TRO — a judge hitting pause on the merger while the states' antitrust case played…
Where We Left Off Part 17 was a dashboard cosplaying as the bridge of the Enterprise. Fun, low-stakes, nothing load-bearing. This one is the opposite. A Mastodon post about Vaultwarden's 1.37.0 release sent me down a rabbit hole that ended with me swearing at a terminal for the better part of an evening, learning a genuinely useful Nix lesson the hard way, and coming out the other side with my…
Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. This week, within days of each other, Google and Meta both shipped facial recognition as the answer to trust online. Turns out you don't need a bar stool and a theme song for everybody to know your face anymore — you just need a Google Account or a Facebook profile. Google launched selfie video sign-in : record a short video of yourself once, and…
Quick one, because the states just won round one . On Monday, a federal judge granted a 14-day temporary restraining order (a TRO — an emergency, short-term freeze, not a ruling on the merits) halting the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in Oakland issued the order. Paramount and WBD had hoped to close as soon as July 22. That's off the table for…
I wasn't expected to post after the Apple Hide My Email case post today, but then I scrolled my feed and ran into this. If you've been following along, I've been covering Warner Bros Sale since Netflix first started to buy Warner Bros. — back when Paramount wasn't even the frontrunner. Since then Warner Bros went with a counter offer from Paramount and as I was mentioned a few days ago the DOJ…
Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. When I wrote Part 1 of the privacy asterisk series back in April, one of the smaller points in a long list was that "Hide My Email" doesn't mean what it sounds like it means. There are documented cases of Apple handing over the real address behind a Hide My Email alias to federal agents, under warrant, exactly as their terms of service say they…
It's been a while since I checked in on the Paramount-Warner Bros. saga . Last time, the shareholders had voted yes, the Gulf money was on paper, and I said everything from there would be harder. Turns out that was an understatement too. The Feds Said Yes On June 12, the DOJ cleared the merger with no conditions — no divestitures, no behavioral remedies, nothing. The antitrust division said the…
Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. A TechCrunch headline crossed my Mastodon feed today about Meta wanting its AI glasses to "seem less creepy," and I laughed reading it. Not because the premise is wrong. Because the timing is so bad it's almost generous of Meta to hand it to us like this. Here's the sequence. Meta announced its AI glasses will now disable the camera entirely if…
Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. I've been watching this one develop for a while now, and this week it stopped being speculation and became a permission dialog on your phone. 9to5Mac spotted a new popup showing up in both iOS 26 and the iOS 27 beta — it appears when you use shape generation in iWork, and similar AI features in Freeform. The popup tells you your data is being…
3,200 jobs. Five studios out the door. And a CEO who opened her memo by admitting the business is, in her own words, "not healthy." That's not spin from a leaked internal doc some outlet had to fight for — Sharma posted the whole thing publicly , on Xbox's own newsroom and on X, on a Monday morning, to a team that was about to lose 1,600 people that same day. I want to be careful here, because…