Daily Tech News 9 August 2026

Top Story

• Five of America's top tech companies - Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle - are expected to burn through $125 billion in cash this year on their AI rollouts. (Washington Post) (archive site)
  
  Oh no, and here's me all out of popcorn.
  
  
  
• Things look even worse for SpaceX. (CNBC)
  
  Well, that sucks.
  
  
  
• SpaceX's revenue doubled and losses halved in the recent quarter. (Reuters)
  
  Sucks for CNBC, that is.

Tech News

• How does storage speed affect the performance of computer games? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Short answer: It doesn't.
  
  Long answer: It doesn't unless you're playing Forspoken on a SATA drive, which is easily fixed by not playing Forspoken in the first place.
  
  
  
• os8088 is actually an operating system. (os8088 )
  
  And runs on an 8088 with 256k of RAM.
  
  It looks a lot like classic MacOS, but offers modern comforts like pre-emptive scheduling and... That's about it, really.
  
  
  
• Online database service Metabase was compromised. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not foolish enough to use an online database? No problem, rest assured that you have your personal registered with someone who was foolish enough.
  
  (I have received three emails so far from companies using Metabase in various ways to let me know they had been hacked and my personal data was out in the wild... Again.)
  
  
  
• X is replacing its revenue sharing program with payments for original content. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Revenue sharing paid based on engagement, which was obviously a bad idea because proxy measurements invite spam.
  
  Others have also noticed this.
  
  This much-needed change arrived exactly as Nikita Bier stepped down as X'd head of Xing.
  
  
  
• Kleenex is investigating making Kleenex not out of trees, but out of a different kind of tree. (Yahoo)
  
  Amazing.