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 Welcome to Log Level Debug, a technology show where I find out in real time that Dolly

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 Pardon and Tim Curry died this week. What? This is how I find out. You just put it in

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 the script? And I was having such a good day until now. Recorded live Monday, August 31,

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 2026, and I'm also finding out Peter Colin died too. Optimus Prime died. Apparently, I

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 need to read the script before we sit down to film. The past week has been full of news

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 with stories like these from globalglob.dev. With no mention of beloved celebrity deaths.

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 What's that? You're just telling me, Hayden Panettiere died two weeks ago? I mean, that's

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 sad, but could have just put it in the script. Now, let's talk about the other news we

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 logged over the past week with links in the show notes. And in the depressing QR codes right here. Don't scan that one.

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 Apple introduced a new M5 Ultra chip to the lineup. This brings

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 their lineup of M5 chips to 4. The M5, M5 Max, M5 Pro, and now the M5 Ultra. They had

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 another chip in the pipeline and ran out of adjectives. So this week, they also introduced

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 the M6. No modifier on that one, just M6. The M5 Ultra has Ultra Fusion, a neural accelerator on each core

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 and second generation dynamic caching. What those words mean in that order?

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 No one knows. But now they're trademarked. So be careful how you talk about them or you

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 will be sued. As is tradition, when moving to a new major chip number, the M6 also changes

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 what the M stands for. The M5 was the Magnanimous 5, and the new M6 stands for Maximonious 6.

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 No, that was made up. But it sounds real huh? Yeah, you thought it was true. We all know the M stands

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 for Mauve, like the color. And Apple will never change that. So which of the new chips is better,

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 more powerful? Well, on paper, we know the base M6 is better than the base M5 because

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 of the name, it's one higher. Though with so many M5 models, the M6 has to be at least two

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 better. There are so many of the M5s. The M5 Ultra has Ultra in the name. So it's like 3 better

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 than the base M5. All right, if I did the math right, the better chip is the more expensive one.

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 In more Apple news, the company announced new desktop machines this week. And just like

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 always, they're very shiny. Point of flashlight at them, and they light up the whole room.

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 Like a disco ball. They announced the new Mac Studio desktop machine, and the press release

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 mentioned AI, a whopping 64 times. I assume. I only counted the first 40, but just like with

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 a story, once you've seen enough numbers, you can tell where they're going.

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 The Mac Studio is an AI first device built for, and I'm quoting Apple here, "the most extreme

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 workflows". So if you regularly use a computer while doing sick kick-flips on your skateboard

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 and chugging a Mountain Dew, this is a computer for you. And for the sake of completeness, what

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 I just described is also called a "totally tubular" workflow. By all accounts, the Mac Studio

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 is a bigger version of the Mac Mini, except it weighs four times as much. So keep it on

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 a desk. If you walk into it, you will break a toe. Apple also announced a refreshed Mac Mini

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 for always on agentic computing. So you can run agents in the morning, agents in the

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 evening, agents at supper time. With agents on a Mac Mini. You can have AI anytime.

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 I really hope you got that reference. I spent a lot of time on it. A Mac Mini is like a small version

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 of the Mac Studio. So if you need it, it will fit in your pants. But don't do that. Weirdo.

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 Both the Mac Studio and Mini can be powered by the newly announced M5 Ultra and M6 chips.

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 Buy one of each. So you can, as Apple always says, catch 'em all.

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 Tom hanks is still alive. That's good. 

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 Apple held a farewell party for the soon-to-be former CEO Tim Cook on Sunday, August 23rd. Around 200 people attended the event, which

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 is a lot when you realize they went to a work event on a Sunday. Some Apple executives gave

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 speeches, but the band OneRepublic performed. So, trade-offs.

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 Normally, when someone leaves Apple, they're considered dead to the people remaining, but

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 Tim Cook will continue to be involved with Apple as executive chairman of the board. This

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 means he'll still be a big boss at the company and continue to get the employee discount

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 at the office cafeteria. It's hard to give up their Taco Tuesday deal. Two tacos for

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 $1. And as former CEO, he'll be able to buy 40 tacos every Tuesday instead of 20 like

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 everyone else. That's just the perks of the job.

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 Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and former, FORMER, former Jeffrey Epstein associate, has written a 6,000-word essay stating AI needs

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 limits, or it could harm our society. The essay is titled The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.

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 With some good luck people will heed the warnings and listen. And with some bad luck, they'll roll a critical failure. That 5% chance on

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 a D20 comes up way too often. Gates says he doesn't see any evidence, people are confronting

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 these challenges adequately. Obviously, he hasn't heard about the work Google did to pull their

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 AI responsibility team outside of the DeepMind business unit. Because as we all know, the

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 further a team is the better oversight they will be.

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 Gates emphasized the transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in

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 human history, and suggested taxing AI agents and robots to slow the shift away from human

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 labor. Pft, good luck doing that in the US.

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 I'm told his essay has criticisms and praises of AI, but at 6,000 words, it's about 5,900

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 words more than I want to read at one time. So I had Google Gemini summarize it for me,

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 and I didn't see any criticism. Based on what I read, AI will be awesome in the future!

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 Meta, sorry Facebook, abandoned internal plans to restructure the company by laying

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 off a ton of people because of AI productivity gains. Executives at the company saw other

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 startups restructure around AI, whatever that means, and wanted to copy them by laying

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 off 60% of employees. Which included 0% of all executives. The overall plan was reportedly

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 cancelled because everyone working there hated it. Employee morale has been getting lower

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 and lower over the past year, causing employees to organize against policy changes like when

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 Facebook used software to track employee keystrokes and mouse movements to get AI training

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 data. Which is the entire reason Facebook agents move the mouse in circles for hours

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 before outputting any code. According to internal metrics, all the fancy AI stuff has led to 220%

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 more code changes, but only 36% more changes, making it out to users. And with 40% more technical

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 incidents, employees are spending 70% more time working on issues. I know numbers are hard

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 over an audio medium, so I'll summarize. The extra AI led to more code, more problems and

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 less people. Just to be clear, the less people were because they were laid off. They weren't

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 killed by some AI overlord. Not yet anyway. The AI restructuring is behind the 10% global

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 layoffs Facebook did this past May. Another round of layoffs was set for this November,

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 but those were cancelled. Mark Zuckerberg has implied more layoffs will happen just

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 not this year, unless they do, because they might.

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 Now that SpaceX has purchased Cursor, OpenAI says it's ending its deal with the company and pulling its models out of Cursor because

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 Elon Musk suuuuuucks. They use different words, but you can read between the lines. OpenAI says

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 Elon Musk's companies have a history of violating contracts, and they don't trust the new Cursor

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 owner to use OpenAI's models within their terms of service. An executive from Cursor said

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 OpenAI models only serve 5% of Cursor's traffic, but they still really want OpenAI models

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 to be offered on the service. This is a continuation of the feud between Elon Musk and everyone.

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 Musk tried to sue OpenAI this past May, but the judge voided the suit, saying he waited too

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 long. Musk will try to appeal to OpenAI, saying quote, I don't understand why they would do such a thing. Only *I* get to violate contracts.

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 Like when I made xAI violate OpenAI's terms of service to train Grok: end quote, and bad impression. In the meantime, Cursor users

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 will be able to use OpenAI models until November 12th. And if Elon Musk actually does reach

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 out to OpenAI until November 5th.

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 RAM is very expensive these days due to large cloud companies building data centers. And one of those poor loser companies being hit hard is the large

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 cloud company CloudFlare. In order to save money, developers there have to optimize their

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 software to save every possible bit of memory like it's the 1900s again. They've optimized

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 internal software to shrink the memory allotment for their DNS cache service. After praying

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 to the machine God and changing some code, they saved 533 bytes per entry. It's sad to see

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 a company skim so much to avoid potential bankruptcy. But that's just the world we live in.

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 Due to CloudFlare's size, each byte per DNS object takes up 250 GB across all

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 cached entries. So at this scale, they save the total of 100 TB of memory across

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 all entries in the DNS cache. Sadly, all those leftover bits didn't save them enough money

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 to just buy a Redis license. These changes also improved read and write performance of

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 the cache service. Unfortunately, the surprise performance gains are not being tracked by

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 a KPI. The CloudFlare team plans to artificially slow down the service until next year, when

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 it can be tracked by a KPI and tied to the team's yearly performance evaluations.

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 And that's all the news we logged this week. If you enjoyed the show, tell your vampire

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 hunting group. And if you didn't, tell your...three people from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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 died in the past year! Why is this how I find out? If you watch the video, please like and

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 subscribe. And if you listened to the audio-only podcast, please leave a review somewhere, preferably

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 without telling me about beloved celebrity deaths. For more news before the next episode,

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 remember to visit globalglob.dev for news, technology professionals really care about.

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 Until next time, go to it all some bits. What? Sam Neal?!

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 [MUSIC]