Daily Tech News 22 November 2025

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• In our Daily Dose of Tech Executives are Idiots Google tells employees it must double capacity every six months to meet AI demand. (Ars Technica)
  
  It's not just college students who can't do math.

  During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google's AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC. Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides showing the company needs to scale "the next 1000x in 4-5 years."

  That would put Google Cloud Services at around $60 trillion in revenue per year, more than double the entire US GDP.
  
  Where do you expect the money to come from to fund this insanity?

  While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking "for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," he told employees during the meeting.

  Oh. Magic.

  "It won't be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we're going to get there."

  No, you're not, and everyone knows you're not.
  
  Progress over the last seven years, at truly massive cost, has been around 60% better AI performance per watt annually. Chip improvements, algorithm improvements, and manufacturing improvements combined.
  
  You're asking your team to boost that to 300% overnight.

Tech News

• SK Hynix is planning to increase memory production at its facility in Icheon, South Korea, from 20,000 to 140,000 wafers per month. (WCCFTech)
  
  This won't even scratch the surface if the AI bubble keeps demanding hardware on its current trajectory.
  
  And the memory makers aren't going to build new factories any faster because only three of them survived when the last bubble burst.
  
  
  
• Speaking of idiot tech executives, the CEO of the world's most popular game, Roblox, sat down for an interview with the New York Times. It did not go well. (Kotaku)
  
  Asked how the company was dealing with its pedophile problem, CEO David Baszucki responded:

  "We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well."

  Remarkably, things actually went downhill from there.
  
  
  
• Speaking of not being able to do math the International Association of Cryptologic Research has cancelled its annual leadership election after... Oh. (Ars Technica)

  "Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share," the IACR said. "As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election."

  An entirely understandable mistake, assuming all these people are idiots.
  
  
  
• What killed Perl? (Entropic Thoughts)
  
  Mostly, Perl.
  
  
  
• WhatsApp allows anyone who knows your phone number to look up your public details on the app, assuming you have an account.
  
  So what's to prevent someone from just iterating through all the 63 billion of so potential phone numbers in the world and finding all the people with WhatsApp accounts?
  
  Nothing. (The Register)
  
  That's the problem with systems on this scale. The researchers were probing the system with 100 million API requests per hour, for weeks, from a single IP address, and nobody noticed.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm bought open source hobbyist hardware maker Arduino six weeks ago. At the time I predicted it might not mean imminent doom since Qualcomm is not as bad as, say, Broadcom. (The Register)
  
  And they've already fucked it. Though it seems the TOS clause about reverse-engineering was already in place, the rest of the changes pushed through yesterday are a complete train wreck for its customer base.