Guru's Tech Bytes — Episode 125

Good morning, it's Saturday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 125. First up... a New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay five hundred sixty-seven million dollars over harm to children's mental health. Most of that money is supposed to fund treatment, while Facebook and Instagram also have to explain their safety tools better. Which is nice, because usually the safety tool is your aunt posting, “Everybody log off,” under a minion picture. Meta says it will appeal, so the lawyers have unlocked another season. Nothing says healthy childhood like spending the college fund on a courtroom argument about whether the algorithm needed one more dance video. Second... tech workers are apparently staring into the middle distance and wondering whether the spreadsheet ever loved them back. A Noema essay says AI anxiety is mixing with something older: people built their identity around knowledge work, then discovered the big meaningful project was moving numbers between slides. Now everybody wants to knit a hat or raise goats. Honestly, if the goat asks for a quarterly roadmap, I'm going back to bed. Third... DeepSeek V4 Flash posted serious ARC reasoning numbers: eighty-nine percent on ARC-AGI-1 and sixty-one point four percent on ARC-AGI-2 at just pennies per task. That's the computer version of the guy who fixes your transmission for twelve bucks and somehow leaves you worried about what he knows. Cheap reasoning is great, but now every app can afford to argue with me about whether I really meant “close tab.” Heh. Hhh, okay, that's something. And finally... Oracle has temporarily banned AI-generated contributions to OpenJDK, including code and other project material, over safety, security, and intellectual-property concerns. Developers can still use the tools to analyze, debug, and review, but the submitted work has to be human-made. So the company selling the robot future just put a little velvet rope around Java. After my last Windows update, I support any policy that asks, “Did a person actually look at this?” That's your daily byte. Have a great day. Until next time.