It was hard not to talk about the rapidly ballooning Nvidia scandal this week, involving smuggling advanced AI chips to Chinese cutouts in violation of US law, CEO Jensen Huang's affairs with a Chinese spy and two Nvidia employees, signs of malfeasance in the Trump administration. We try to take stock of where the reporting is at on this growing story, along with what it might mean for the future of Nvidia as a gaming hardware company. Since it's an extra nutty week, we also talk about the Federal Aviation Administration's nationwide grounding of air travel, and the huge Microsoft 365 outage that's plagued the Internet late this week.

Some articles referenced in this ep:

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/live/news/nvidia-jen-hsun-scandal/

https://www.techpowerup.com/354814/nvidia-allegedly-engineered-scarcity-by-funding-ai-startups-to-buy-its-gpus

https://unemploymentlabs.com/checkpoint-forensics

https://www.wired.com/story/the-microsoft-outage-is-a-warning-for-the-world/

https://gizmodo.com/the-faa-is-rolling-out-its-ai-air-traffic-tool-nationwide-2000839347

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It was a pretty momentous week in US politics this week with a historic midterm election outcome that inspired us to sit down and discuss our media consumption on election night, including the Kornacki Cam and the Giant Bombification of the Internet, plus algorithmic social media bubbles and more. We also caught up on some recent news we've been meaning to get to, like the touchscreen MacBook Pros, (minor) problems with the iPhone Duo, Reddit moving to a logged-in-only site, and the end of the Cybertruck. Lastly, we touch on some low-cost 10 gigabit network hardware and Steam Frame insert optics that we've been hands-on testing. It's a pretty packed podcast!

Notes 'n links: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-364-kornacki

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Last week was a rough one in the annals of cybersecurity, with a major vulnerability in the PHP language that runs the majority of the web, and a grossly negligent lapse in the certificate chain of trust that validates the identity of major websites. There have also been very serious exploits in Plex, the Linux kernel, and plenty of other stuff lately, so we put on our amateur infosec hats and try to make sense of all this chaos, what's driving it, how you can protect yourself, and where this all might be going.

Show notes and links: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-363-cybersec

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The year's most horrifying crop of questions has arrived (accompanied by some fun spooky usernames), and we bare our fangs as we address such topics as: 5AM air travel hacks, what to do with decommissioned Ring cameras, extending your devices' lives in these uncertain times, home VPN options in a world of rapidly increasing security issues, choosing a monitor refresh rate, Halloween candy rankings, the AI-driven Eternal September, whatever happened to the Optimus keyboard, launching your own CubeSat, and a bunch of other stuff.

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Inspired by the recent 30th anniversary of the Nintendo 64's release in North America, we decided to do some reading this week and try to gain at least a layperson's understanding of how the system worked under the hood. Join in for a mostly structured discussion about the N64's unique hardware architecture, the forward-looking 3D graphics techniques it used years before Nvidia's Geforce, the origins of SGI's involvement in the consumer games space, the hype around Rambus, and a bunch of other stuff.

Show notes and links: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-361-n64

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Brad's on the road this week, so we shook up another potpourri of mini-topics to discuss, including DIY VR mods, the questionable wisdom of working remotely on a brand new laptop, backing into creating a site-to-site VPN, a those vibe-coded clones of Adobe apps like Photoshop and Lightroom, high-tech tire technology, baby's first attempt at Nix (or in this case Lix), and a bunch of other stuff.

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This week we round up some news items that have caught our interest in the last few weeks. Google and Walmart have rolled out a backyard drone-delivery program for small orders. Valve is beta testing a unique ultra-low-latency video codec for Steam Remote Play. A recent circuit court decision may have wide-ranging precedent for copyright penalties around AI training data. And the Dutch government is the latest in Europe to pursue its digital sovereignty by moving from Windows to... NixOS? Seems like a lot to talk about!

The Verge on Walmart drone deliveries: https://www.theverge.com/report/1002172/potato-by-air-wing-drone-delivery

Valve's Pyrowave beta update: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/0/564794422009744473

The Pyrowave author's deep dive on the codec: https://themaister.net/blog/2025/06/16/i-designed-my-own-ridiculously-fast-game-streaming-video-codec-pyrowave/

Third Circuit finds AI training is copyright theft: https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-material-not-fair-use-third-circuit/

Dutch government turns to NixOS for a sovereign desktop: https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/09/28/dutch-government-turns-to-nixos-for-a-sovereign-desktop/5299501

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

It turns out we haven't answered all the questions that have ever been asked yet, so we figured we'd take a few more from you, the listener, this week, covering topics like cell phone signal strength and the way your carrier prioritizes your traffic, ARM vs. x86 in the context of efficiency, how much vibe-coding is going on in OSs and drivers right now, open source wearable devices, how to store a Nintendo Switch for the very long term, the long and mysterious legacy of the D-subminiature standard, and more.

Sparkfun's D-sub blog post: https://news.sparkfun.com/14298

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod