Hashtag Trending

Meta will pay at least $12.1 billion—and potentially as much as $17.1 billion over ten years—to settle claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users.
Jim Love examines why the record settlement may still be a smart move for Meta. The company admits no wrongdoing, limits its legal exposure and avoids a verdict that thousands of other plaintiffs might have used in their own lawsuits.
TIME also reports that Sam Altman expects OpenAI to have an internal system he would call artificial general intelligence by the end of 2026. What would qualify as AGI, and why would it matter more than passing the Turing Test? We separate confirmed reporting about OpenAI's delayed Astra models and cybersecurity concerns from unconfirmed rumours involving persistent memory and continual learning.
Also in this episode:
The Justice Department and FBI disable QScan and QTRouter, two hacking platforms allegedly used by Chinese state-sponsored attackers against NASA, the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Senate and hundreds of other organizations.
The Environmental Protection Agency proposes removing federal minimum public-participation requirements for minor-source air permits, potentially allowing some data centre generator permits to be approved without public notice or comment.
00:00 Today's tech headlines
01:22 Meta's record teen-safety settlement
04:22 Altman says AGI could arrive this year
08:06 FBI disrupts China-linked hacking platforms
10:44 EPA proposes permit-notice changes
14:11 Wrap-up and where to listen
Hashtag Trending for Thursday, August 27, 2026, hosted by Jim Love.

Apple is making a much bigger bet on local AI. Jim Love looks at the new M6 Mac mini, Apple's first 2nm processor, with Neural Accelerators built into every GPU core, dual 16-core Neural Engines and significantly faster processing. At the high end, the new M5 Ultra Mac Studio can offer up to 80 GPU cores and 512GB of unified memory, potentially allowing enormous AI models to run entirely on the Mac.
The performance comes with a price. The new M6 Mac mini starts at $899 U.S., compared with the original $599 starting price of the M4 model. But Apple did announce one major price cut: its famous polishing cloth drops from $19 to $9.
Also on Hashtag Trending:
A new investigation warns that a catastrophic failure of the aging U.S. electrical grid could leave parts of the country without power for 18 months or more. Large transformers are often custom built, difficult to replace and increasingly hard to source. An earlier FERC analysis identified roughly 30 particularly critical substations and concluded that losing the right nine simultaneously could potentially trigger a nationwide blackout.
Then, nearly 6,000 senior executives were asked what AI has actually done for their companies. More than 90 percent reported no impact on employment and 89 percent reported no improvement in labour productivity. Yet executives still expect AI to reduce employment. Separate research finds that AI-related layoffs can make employees less receptive to the very technology companies hope will increase productivity.
And Linux turns 35. Linus Torvalds introduced his new operating system in 1991 by calling it "just a hobby" that wouldn't become big or professional. Today Linux powers servers, cloud infrastructure, Android and every one of the world's Top500 supercomputers.
Hosted by Jim Love.
00:00 Headlines and intro
00:33 Apple M6 and the local AI push
03:45 Apple's $9 polishing cloth
04:24 America's aging power grid
06:06 AI productivity reality check
08:07 Linux turns 35
10:07 Wrap-up and where to listen

Sam Altman is warning that artificial intelligence could become concentrated in the hands of a few companies, models or individuals. But there's an uncomfortable tension in that warning: OpenAI and Anthropic both rely heavily on proprietary models, while Chinese companies are aggressively releasing increasingly capable open-weight alternatives.
Jim Love also looks at billionaire Mark Cuban's proposal for tackling wealth inequality by giving workers equity in the companies they help build, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offering a similar philosophy on employee compensation.
Then, a developer discovers that AliExpress was silently using Web Audio and a range of hardware and software signals to create a fingerprint of visitors' devices and send encrypted results back to Alibaba servers. Brave blocked the technique, while Chrome allowed it in the researcher's testing.
And Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs in Siri and Vision Pro-related teams just days before the company's CEO transition, despite recently reporting its strongest June quarter ever.

Jim Love hosts Hashtag Trending for Monday, August 24, with four big tech stories.
First, signs of AI-generated writing are spreading fast across the web. LinkedIn says more than a million people clicked its "Seems Like AI" button, while Pew Research found AI indicators on about 10 percent of July 2026 webpages and 35 percent of pages published after ChatGPT launched. Jim explains what researchers look for, including the overuse of em dashes, Oxford commas, certain words, and "not just X, it's Y" phrasing.
Next, the Flock camera backlash continues. In Ohio, a grand jury declined to indict Cody Morelock after police said surveillance footage identified him dismantling a Flock license-plate reader.
Then, PJM, the largest grid operator in the U.S., signals that big data centers may need to bring their own power or risk being cut first during grid stress. Jim looks at rising wholesale power costs, spot-market spikes, and the growing shortage of gas turbines needed for backup generation.
And finally, at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, robots Tiangong Ultra and Lightning ran the 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt's human world-record time. They just could not stop at the end.
If you follow AI, data centers, robotics, surveillance technology, and tech policy, this episode pulls it all together.
Timestamps 00:00 Headlines and intro 00:32 AI writing floods the web 01:48 How AI detection works 03:40 Flock camera backlash 04:39 Grand jury refuses indictment 05:41 Data centers: bring your own power 06:20 Power prices and grid stress 07:24 Gas turbine bottlenecks 07:59 Robots beat Bolt 08:45 They can't stop 09:08 Humanoid robotics acceleration 09:51 Wrap up and where to listen

AI companies are buying physical books, cutting off their spines and scanning the pages to train AI models. This episode of Project Synapse examines destroyed originals, copyright loopholes and what mass digitization could mean for cultural and historical preservation.
The conversation compares destructive book scanning with Google Books' non-destructive approach and limited search access. The hosts also discuss the shift from printed books to ebooks and audiobooks, the challenge of storing personal libraries and whether physical books are becoming a niche product.
Then they examine claims that powerful AI backers are funding influencer-driven "AI doom" content. Is this a genuine warning campaign, an attempt to shape public opinion or a route to regulatory capture?
The episode closes with the robot future: the World Robot Conference in Beijing, one-shot robot learning, the social impact of automation and increasingly capable local AI models such as Qwen running on a laptop.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open
00:53 Fame and familiarity
02:59 Rare books and AI scanning
04:23 Bookstores and changing reading habits
09:54 Anthropic, piracy and severed book spines
14:03 Copyright loopholes in AI training
21:20 Convenience changes culture
26:40 Who funds anti-AI influencers?
33:34 Finding middle ground on disruption
36:49 How influencers shape beliefs
38:27 The business of AI fear
39:53 Fear, regulation and control
41:22 Cybersecurity failures are mostly human
42:20 The doomer view of cyber risk
43:22 Social media as a rage machine
44:20 Billionaire promises meet reality
46:36 AI goals, autonomy and escape
48:53 Toddlers with PhDs
49:51 Is education designed to make cogs?
54:04 AI agents cheat at school
56:18 Learning by talking to AI
58:04 Automating the classroom
01:00:25 Riding the AI shockwave
01:04:36 Policy, disruption and universal basic income
01:07:31 Robots change everything
01:09:35 China's robotics leap
01:12:12 Running Qwen on a laptop
01:13:45 One-shot robot learning
01:15:15 Closing thoughts