Tech News — 2026-07-12#

Story of the Day#

SK Hynix has issued a grim warning that 2027 will be the memory industry’s “worst-ever” year for supply shortages, driven almost entirely by the relentless demand for AI hardware. The crisis means commodity memory is taking a backseat to premium HBM chips, which will inevitably drive up prices across consumer PCs, smartphones, and consoles through 2030.

Top Stories#

AI-driven Datacenter Builds Increased Microsoft’s Emissions 25% In One Year · Slashdot Microsoft’s greenhouse gas emissions spiked by a massive 25% over the past year, largely due to the rapid construction of AI data centers. This surge throws a serious wrench into the company’s 2030 “carbon-negative” ambitions and highlights the severe environmental cost of the generative AI boom.

Elon Musk And Sam Altman Spar On X After Apple Files OpenAI Lawsuit · Slashdot The release of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and SpaceX’s Grok 4.5 has reignited a highly personal feud between Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Amid a backdrop of Apple suing OpenAI over alleged trade secret theft, Musk repeatedly accused Altman of “scamming” investors, prompting Altman to mock Musk’s obsession and tout GPT-5.6 Sol’s benchmark dominance.

Meta Removes Controversial AI Feature On Instagram After Backlash · Slashdot Following intense pushback from users and talent agencies, Meta has quietly axed a feature that allowed people to use AI to modify photos from public Instagram accounts. The controversial tool failed to alert users when their images were being altered, prompting an immediate backlash over consent and digital manipulation.

Apple’s failed self-driving car program left a legacy of powerful AI chips · The Verge While Apple’s self-driving car program was famously scrapped, the immense on-device processing power it required led directly to the creation of the Neural Engine. This foundational work now serves as the backbone for Apple’s on-device AI and directly influenced the development of its powerful new M-series chips.

Facial Recognition in UK Shops Will Soon Instantly Alert Police About Offenders · Slashdot Over 100 UK businesses are deploying “Facewatch,” an AI surveillance system that will now alert police in real-time when suspected repeat offenders enter a retail store. Civil liberties groups are sounding the alarm over this opaque escalation of retail surveillance, pointing to numerous instances of innocent shoppers being falsely flagged and ejected.

Linus Torvalds on AI, Junk Patches, Humans, and Godzilla · Slashdot The creator of Linux hasn’t bought into the AI coding hype, noting that LLMs have generated far more “junk” patches than useful code for kernel-level development. Torvalds warned that AI often spits out “mindless band-aid” fixes that obscure deeper issues, maintaining that human oversight remains strictly necessary for core infrastructure.

Also Worth Knowing#

• Refreshed Apple Pencils may arrive next year with improved repairability (Engadget): Upcoming EU regulations are reportedly forcing Apple to redesign its Apple Pencil to include replaceable batteries by next year.
• Cloudflare Identifies Race Condition in hyper’s HTTP/1 Implementation (InfoQ): After six weeks of digging, Cloudflare engineers finally isolated and fixed a rare, years-old race condition in the Rust HTTP library hyper that was silently truncating large responses,.
• Id Co-founders Carmack and Romero Respond to Microsoft’s Layoffs (Slashdot): John Carmack and John Romero publicly expressed their sorrow over recent Microsoft layoffs impacting their former studio, with Carmack noting that merely beloved games aren’t enough to survive today’s brutal market.
• 10 Million Cubans Suffer Nationwide Blackout - For The Second Time This Week (Slashdot): Nearly 10 million Cubans lost power for the second time this week as the country grapples with a severely deteriorating power grid and massive fuel shortages.
• Billionaire Exodus? California Drew 10x More Venture Capital Than Any Other State This Year (Slashdot): Despite narratives of an ultra-rich exodus, California pulled in $335 billion in venture capital this year—10 times more than New York—with nearly 90% of the funds backing AI startups.