Steam Machine Red Light Fix, Epic Wins Android App Stores, Meta AI Layoff Lawsuit + more!

Valve has confirmed the steam machine's red overheating warning is going off way too early. So if your GabeCube's light bar is glowing ominously, your hardware probably isn't cooking. A BIOS bug is just making it panic at temperatures that the hardware considers a normal Tuesday. Also, it might be haunted. I'm Riley Murdoch, this is TechLinked, and this Anxious Little Box's LED is supposed to go red at 95 degrees Celsius on the CPU or 90 degrees on the GPU. But one Redditor received the full alarm while they were gaming at 81 degrees and 75 degrees. Now the fix is a BIOS update coming soon, quote, that raises the threshold to 100 degrees for both chips, which is where this laptop grade silicon starts throttling anyway. The hardware's real limits aren't changing, just the light. And no, this is unrelated to the red line of death from launch. Valve's manual said that light meant a dead GPU, but Valve recently admitted that the LED bar in the console is oriented the opposite way from what they thought it was when they programmed it. Whoops. So these machines weren't dead. They were just doing routine memory training. And the GabeCube doesn't yet know what's left and what's right. It's a baby. It just got here. The epic Google versus Epic Games legal saga that's felt like it's dragged on for a hundred years has finally been laid to rest this week. Fingers crossed. Meaning Google will start allowing third-party app stores on Android starting on July 22nd. Now, for anyone unaware of the history here, back in 2020, Epic nerd Tim Sweeney sued Google over its monopolistic control of Android's app store. A few years later, a jury sided with Epic that Google had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. Appeals followed, but the verdict was upheld. After the ruling, the two companies tried to pitch the judge on something else, a mutually beneficial settlement. Epic would get a surprise million from Google for something And Google would still be able to force users to sideload rival app stores instead of hosting them directly in the Play Store, which is admittedly a little strange to force Google to host Google's competitors on Google's platform. The judge, however, called out that this was stupid because it didn't fix the monopoly issue that the whole lawsuit was originally about. So get ready for me to release my own custom app store where everything is exactly the same as the regular Play Store, but all of the apps have the word fart in their name. Fartbook, InstaFart, FartGPT, you get it. Thank you, Tim Sweeney, for this freedom. Meta is being sued by its employees for violating US employment law because the AI systems that it was apparently using to decide who got laid off allegedly discriminated against workers on medical leave. They didn't tell the robot to do that. It just hates all of us meatbags. The 26 employees behind the suit are asserting that Meta's key logging tools were tracking metrics like keystrokes and token usage, but didn't account for people who were sick or away on protected leave. So the system read their lack of activity as underperformance and ranked them for termination. They should have been working on vacation. It's also worth noting that when this keystroke tracking software was first rolled out by Meta back in April, they said it was only being used for AI training, not performance evaluation. Meta's defense is that it only used AI to flag unproductive workers. And in a statement to Reuters, the company said humans ultimately made the call on who to fire. Oh, I'm so sorry. It wasn't your AI that broke the law. It was just your employees listening to the AI. Ah, I guess we'll drop the lawsuit then. Oh, wait, no, it's apparently still illegal for humans to break the law. Dang it. Luckily, it isn't illegal for you to check out our sponsor. ManageEngine and their op manager, Nexus. If your network, infrastructure, applications, user experience, and everything else are the infinity stones, then ManageEngine, OpManager, Nexus is the infinity gauntlet. It's an observability platform that lets IT teams monitor everything in one place bringing all of those critical systems into a single unified view instead of assembling a whole team of separate tools like those dang Avengers It works with what you already have, uses smarter insights to cut through alert noise, and helps you troubleshoot before a small issue turns into an end game level crisis. Whether you deploy it in the cloud or on-prem, OpManagerNexus makes managing your IT environment almost as easy as snapping your fingers. Ah, stop guessing and start knowing with Op Manager Nexus. Link in the description. Quick bits are like Go-Gurt. Nobody knows if it's a drink or a food, but you've finished five of them before the doubt kicks in. Apple is suing OpenAI over stolen trade secrets that OpenAI is allegedly using to build its flagship hardware product, a Johnny Ive-designed AI smart speaker. Apple says OpenAI's hardware chief, Tang Tan, who is a former Apple VP, tried to poach more Apple employees to come join them, going so far as to coach departing employees on how to evade Apple security. Now, if this is true, it's a wild risk for OpenAI to take in designing what amounts to a hallucinating HomePod, especially given that OpenAI is apparently releasing even dumber hardware products. Most recently, the Codex Micro, a $230 macro pad with a built-in microphone designed to allow you to talk to ChatGPT without the exhausting activity of using your normal keyboard. Use this other smaller keyboard instead, much better. New York has become the first state to ban new hyperscale data centers. Those are the ones drawing 50 megawatts or more, buying the state a year to write regulations for this industry. Now, a 50 megawatt data center uses 50,000 homes worth of electricity, but already approved projects will still go ahead. Meanwhile, the companies that build these things say they'll just build them somewhere else. New York swears it just needs a year and that it will absolutely text the industry when it's ready, please. Sony disc future has a math problem 121 countries 62 of the world nations can access the PlayStation Store at all There's no PSN in Georgia, Estonia, Kenya, Vietnam, or Jamaica, meaning once disc production ends in 2028, gamers there will have no official way to buy a PlayStation game. Sony has not announced any expansion plans, meaning the PS6 will be something gamers have argued about for decades, A true console exclusive. Exclusive to 38% of Earth. Stepfun, a Chinese AI startup, claims that it has built the world's first agentic smartphone. A phone where you simply state a task and AI agents do the actual stuff. The StepX Neo's agent books rides, orders food, and plans trips across its partner platforms like Alipay and Didi, though there's no price, specs, or release date yet. This is interesting because it's kind of like the same agents, not apps vision that Microsoft pitched as Project Solara back in June, which is fitting since StepFund was founded by ex-Microsoft employees. The race to start using agents and stop using apps is on Microsoft versus people who quit Microsoft. And Hinge founder Justin McLeod has raised $18 million for Overtone, an AI matchmaking service with no profiles and no swiping. The AI gets to know you by voice, then only introduces you to someone when it decides that you're compatible, which fans will recognize as the literal plot of Black Mirror's Hang the DJ. Now, the wackiest part of all this is that Match Group, the owner of Hinge and Tinder, is helping to fund it. The swiping empire is officially paying to hear that swiping was the whole problem. Personally, I can't wait for phase two of these AI-powered where you cut out the middleman and just date the app itself. And if you find yourself living in a real-life episode of Black Mirror, don't panic. Do what I do whenever I feel existential dread creeping in. Grab a Go-Gurt and come back on Friday for more tech news. It works every time.