Royal Exoskeleton Ping Pong

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A man wearing an exoskeleton played ping pong versus the King of Spain

You read that correctly. I cannot stop thinking about this. There's a company in Spain that is building medical-use exoskeletons for disabled folks to get increased mobility. As a sort of publicity stunt or whatever, one of their patients played ping pong with the King of Spain.

To be clear: its not like cybernetically enhanced super ping pong. But a dude who cannot otherwise walk is able to do that. And that is cool.

CPAC happened

CPAC—the festival for unhinged fascists—happened. I am not going to talk about any of the actual bullshit that happened there. There's gonna be a trillion headlines about it. Instead, let's talk about...

Former crypto company leader pleads guilty to 6 federal charges

The former director of engineering at FTX (the crypto company that imploded) has plead guilty to 6 federal charges, including wire fraud. Hilariously, the group chat that the high level people from FTX were in was titled "wirefraud".

In case you've not seen much about this, essentially FTX was this massive crypto organization that was supposed to be like, a major player in the space and was supposed to be safe and stable and whatnot and then turns out it was all built on lies, fraud and bullshit. Kinda like all of crypto. Anyway, the resulting economic landslide has taken out countless downstream organizations, and analysts have referred to the whole situation as "worse than Enron."

Hey, reminder that tech companies collect way too much data

There is an article making the rounds with a rather alarming headline: "Facebook and Google are handing over user data to help police prosecute abortion seekers"

The article is not lying, but the actual situation is that cops are requesting data from companies using warrants, and the companies are complying with the law. Now, that seems to shift some of the blame to cops (and the absurd, inhumane and unjust situation with women's healthcare in America), but keep in mind that these tech companies have that information saved in the first place. It is more profitable to collect your information and deal with possible PR hits like this than it is to respect your privacy and help prevent cops from arresting your loved ones for seeking medical care.

This is a very, very good example of why the whole narrative of "we don't want Americans using services from other countries because its a national security risk" is actual bullshit. They just don't want your data to be out of their jurisdiction. Stay safe, y'all.

Musk plays chicken with Amazon

Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has been trying to pull the usual "I'm extremely rich so the rules don't apply to me" stuff that seems to be popular among billionaires, including not paying for services.

One of those services is AWS, Amazon's cloud hosting solution. Basically, Twitter and Amazon had a preexisting contract made in 2020. Musk doesn't seem to want to make good on that, and has decided to just not adhere to it. In response, Amazon is now threatening to pull their ads from Twitter (which is already hemorrhaging ad revenue, like >50% down)

This is ongoing, so who knows which way this will end. But Twitter has stopped paying for more pressing things, like their literal office rent.

More Stuff

• They're making Detective Pikachu 2
• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners won Anime of the Year from Crunchyroll's awards
• Amazon puts Virginia headquarters construction on hold indefinitely
• Meta drops pricing on some of their VR headsets (Quest 2 and Quest Pro)
• Norfolk Southern, the company with the literal trainwreck in Ohio, has another trainwreck, again in Ohio
• Protests break out in Greece after train collision leaves nearly 60 dead