Guru's Tech Bytes — Episode 30

Good morning, it's Sunday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 30. First up, Microsoft got caught doing something real sneaky with VS Code. Turns out it was automatically adding "Co-Authored-by Copilot" to your git commits — even if you never used Copilot once. You know what that reminds me of? That time Meg signed a birthday card from the whole family without asking anybody. Except this is Microsoft signing your code on behalf of their AI product whether you want 'em to or not. People are rightfully ticked off, and there's a pull request up to fix it — which, good, because I don't want Microsoft taking credit for my terrible variable names. Second, DeepSeek dropped version four of their AI model and apparently it's almost at the frontier now, which in AI means it's basically as smart as the top models but costs way less to run. You know what this reminds me of? When the store brand chips taste just as good as Lay's but you still feel weird about bringing 'em to a party. Anyway, the Chinese AI lab keeps nipping at the heels of OpenAI and Anthropic, and honestly at this point the frontier is getting pretty crowded. Third, there's a project called Dav2d — that's an open-source AV1 video decoder, which is the technology that makes online video look sharp without paying a bunch of royalties to somebody in a suit. The VideoLAN folks, the VLC guys, built it and it's fast and it runs basically everywhere. I don't fully understand what a decoder does but I know it means my videos won't look like a potato buffering in 2009, and that's good enough for me. And finally, there's a shell script called Do_not_track that goes through your machine and turns off a whole bunch of telemetry — all those little programs quietly watching what you do and reporting back to some server somewhere. You'd think every operating system would just have an easy button for this. You'd think. They do not. That's your daily byte. Have a great day. Until next time.