Hashtag Trending

Jim Love
  • 4.9 (34)
  • Technology
  • Updated Daily

A daily news program covering the top stories in technology with a weekend in depth interview.

  1. 15 hrs ago

    Apple M6 Goes All-In on Local AI, U.S. Grid Blackout Risk & Linux Turns 35

    Apple is making a much bigger bet on local AI. Jim Love looks at the new M6 Mac mini, Apple's first 2nm processor, with Neural Accelerators built into every GPU core, dual 16-core Neural Engines and significantly faster processing. At the high end, the new M5 Ultra Mac Studio can offer up to 80 GPU cores and 512GB of unified memory, potentially allowing enormous AI models to run entirely on the Mac. The performance comes with a price. The new M6 Mac mini starts at $899 U.S., compared with the original $599 starting price of the M4 model. But Apple did announce one major price cut: its famous polishing cloth drops from $19 to $9. Also on Hashtag Trending: A new investigation warns that a catastrophic failure of the aging U.S. electrical grid could leave parts of the country without power for 18 months or more. Large transformers are often custom built, difficult to replace and increasingly hard to source. An earlier FERC analysis identified roughly 30 particularly critical substations and concluded that losing the right nine simultaneously could potentially trigger a nationwide blackout. Then, nearly 6,000 senior executives were asked what AI has actually done for their companies. More than 90 percent reported no impact on employment and 89 percent reported no improvement in labour productivity. Yet executives still expect AI to reduce employment. Separate research finds that AI-related layoffs can make employees less receptive to the very technology companies hope will increase productivity. And Linux turns 35. Linus Torvalds introduced his new operating system in 1991 by calling it "just a hobby" that wouldn't become big or professional. Today Linux powers servers, cloud infrastructure, Android and every one of the world's Top500 supercomputers. Hosted by Jim Love. 00:00 Headlines and intro 00:33 Apple M6 and the local AI push 03:45 Apple's $9 polishing cloth 04:24 America's aging power grid 06:06 AI productivity reality check 08:07 Linux turns 35 10:07 Wrap-up and where to listen

  2. 1d ago

    Sam Altman Warns of AI Power Concentration as China Pushes Open Models

    Sam Altman is warning that artificial intelligence could become concentrated in the hands of a few companies, models or individuals. But there's an uncomfortable tension in that warning: OpenAI and Anthropic both rely heavily on proprietary models, while Chinese companies are aggressively releasing increasingly capable open-weight alternatives. Jim Love also looks at billionaire Mark Cuban's proposal for tackling wealth inequality by giving workers equity in the companies they help build, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offering a similar philosophy on employee compensation. Then, a developer discovers that AliExpress was silently using Web Audio and a range of hardware and software signals to create a fingerprint of visitors' devices and send encrypted results back to Alibaba servers. Brave blocked the technique, while Chrome allowed it in the researcher's testing. And Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs in Siri and Vision Pro-related teams just days before the company's CEO transition, despite recently reporting its strongest June quarter ever.

  3. 2d ago

    AI-Written Web Pages Surge, Flock Case Dropped, Data Center Power, Robots Beat Bolt

    Jim Love hosts Hashtag Trending for Monday, August 24, with four big tech stories. First, signs of AI-generated writing are spreading fast across the web. LinkedIn says more than a million people clicked its "Seems Like AI" button, while Pew Research found AI indicators on about 10 percent of July 2026 webpages and 35 percent of pages published after ChatGPT launched. Jim explains what researchers look for, including the overuse of em dashes, Oxford commas, certain words, and "not just X, it's Y" phrasing. Next, the Flock camera backlash continues. In Ohio, a grand jury declined to indict Cody Morelock after police said surveillance footage identified him dismantling a Flock license-plate reader. Then, PJM, the largest grid operator in the U.S., signals that big data centers may need to bring their own power or risk being cut first during grid stress. Jim looks at rising wholesale power costs, spot-market spikes, and the growing shortage of gas turbines needed for backup generation. And finally, at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, robots Tiangong Ultra and Lightning ran the 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt's human world-record time. They just could not stop at the end. If you follow AI, data centers, robotics, surveillance technology, and tech policy, this episode pulls it all together. Timestamps 00:00 Headlines and intro 00:32 AI writing floods the web 01:48 How AI detection works 03:40 Flock camera backlash 04:39 Grand jury refuses indictment 05:41 Data centers: bring your own power 06:20 Power prices and grid stress 07:24 Gas turbine bottlenecks 07:59 Robots beat Bolt 08:45 They can't stop 09:08 Humanoid robotics acceleration 09:51 Wrap up and where to listen

  4. 4d ago

    AI Companies Destroy Books, Backers Fund AI Doom, Robots Learn Fast | Project Synapse

    AI companies are buying physical books, cutting off their spines and scanning the pages to train AI models. This episode of Project Synapse examines destroyed originals, copyright loopholes and what mass digitization could mean for cultural and historical preservation. The conversation compares destructive book scanning with Google Books' non-destructive approach and limited search access. The hosts also discuss the shift from printed books to ebooks and audiobooks, the challenge of storing personal libraries and whether physical books are becoming a niche product. Then they examine claims that powerful AI backers are funding influencer-driven "AI doom" content. Is this a genuine warning campaign, an attempt to shape public opinion or a route to regulatory capture? The episode closes with the robot future: the World Robot Conference in Beijing, one-shot robot learning, the social impact of automation and increasingly capable local AI models such as Qwen running on a laptop. CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 00:53 Fame and familiarity 02:59 Rare books and AI scanning 04:23 Bookstores and changing reading habits 09:54 Anthropic, piracy and severed book spines 14:03 Copyright loopholes in AI training 21:20 Convenience changes culture 26:40 Who funds anti-AI influencers? 33:34 Finding middle ground on disruption 36:49 How influencers shape beliefs 38:27 The business of AI fear 39:53 Fear, regulation and control 41:22 Cybersecurity failures are mostly human 42:20 The doomer view of cyber risk 43:22 Social media as a rage machine 44:20 Billionaire promises meet reality 46:36 AI goals, autonomy and escape 48:53 Toddlers with PhDs 49:51 Is education designed to make cogs? 54:04 AI agents cheat at school 56:18 Learning by talking to AI 58:04 Automating the classroom 01:00:25 Riding the AI shockwave 01:04:36 Policy, disruption and universal basic income 01:07:31 Robots change everything 01:09:35 China's robotics leap 01:12:12 Running Qwen on a laptop 01:13:45 One-shot robot learning 01:15:15 Closing thoughts

  5. 6d ago

    Qwen 3.8-27B Runs GPT-5.6-Level AI on a Laptop | Flock, Defender, AI Clock Fail

    Jim Love covers four technology stories for Thursday, August 20, 2026. Alibaba's open-weight Qwen 3.8-27B model scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, matching OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna at its highest reasoning setting. Quantized versions can run locally on a laptop using roughly 18 GB, with reported speeds of about 15 to 30 tokens per second. Flock Safety may be discovering the downside of the network effect. As communities pull out of its license-plate camera network, the system becomes less valuable to the jurisdictions that remain. WIRED also examined Flock's OS Investigate system, which combines camera data with police records, dispatch information and commercial databases. Public opposition is growing, while Flock is expanding rapidly into police drones. Microsoft confirmed problems with Windows Defender after an update caused some antivirus scans to fail. The trouble came as Microsoft was dealing with the ShieldBreak zero-day vulnerability, and a later signature update restored normal scanning. And researchers at the University of Edinburgh found that several leading multimodal AI models still struggle with some very human tasks: reading analogue clocks and answering calendar questions. 00:00 Headlines Intro 00:27 Qwen 3.8-27B Runs Locally 02:56 Flock's Reverse Network Effect 04:15 Flock OS Investigate and Backlash 05:39 Flock Expands Into Police Drones 06:36 Microsoft Defender Scan Failure 08:27 AI Can't Read Clocks 10:03 Wrap Up and Contact Hashtag Trending is hosted by Jim Love and covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, enterprise technology and the stories shaping the technology industry.

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4.9
out of 5
34 Ratings

About

A daily news program covering the top stories in technology with a weekend in depth interview.

Information

  • Creator
    Jim Love
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    923
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Hashtag Trending

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