Weekly Roundup

SKH Roundup: March 30th 2026

All of the tech companies are racing to be in the most precarious position imaginable

Endeavorance

30 Mar 2026 — 7 min read

It Must Be My Birthday

Someone got me a big ol' present, it seems.

There's been an absolute flurry of tech lawsuits recently. Many haven't gone the way I think tech companies—and most people at this point—would expect.

In addition to the lawsuits against Meta and Google for intentionally producing dangerous products, Elon Musk has had a few setbacks of his own in court.

One of those setbacks would be that a judge threw out Musk's 2024 court case where he alleged that advertisers were "illegally boycotting" Twitter after he purchased it. Of course, a lot of advertisers did indeed stop purchasing ad space on Twitter after Musk's acquisition, but that had more to do with it becoming a Nazi bar than a coordinated boycotting effort. Still, Musk trades extensively in victim-playing, hence, lawsuit.

Thankfully, the judge did not mince words:

The very nature of the alleged conspiracy does not state an antitrust claim, and the court therefore has no qualm dismissing with prejudice
—US District Judge Jane Boyle

Beyond that, Musk is facing another legal issue from the EU, this time coming from Amsterdam after Dutch officials ordered Twitter to disable their website feature which allows for generating non-consensual sexually explicit images of anyone, including children. Seems like a thing that probably shouldn't be a built-in feature for a global social network operating by the world's richest man but, y'know.

This also comes as every single co-founder of Musk's xAI company has left, leaving Musk telling a story about how he's simply restructuring the company because it "wasn't built right the first time."

In conclusion, it is not my actual birthday. But like, it's damn close.

Antimatter in Motion

Scientists successfully contained literal antimatter and put it in a truck for shipping. Like, that's a thing humanity did.

GRANTED: it was a very small amount, and the truck shipped it from one side of a parking lot to another. But, eureka!

Scientists at CERN have been casually poking at antimatter for a bit now. "Antimatter" refers to a mysterious presence of a type of matter—as in, the stuff that is everything—which exhibits an inverted magnetic charge compared to "normal" matter. We're not fully clear on the details, but that's why we gotta study it.

CERNbois have managed to capture "antiprotons" and store them for up to a calendar year. But the problem is that the massive machines needed to capture an antiproton are powerful and complex, emitting magnetic fluctuations that make it difficult to then use machines that can measure the outrageously tiny readings we'd need to measure on these bad boys. So, TRUCK 'EM.

The plan is to eventually take antiprotons, put 'em in a box (note: not actually a box) and then have a truck take them somewhere with less magnetic fluctuation for further study. But you gotta start somewhere.

Just like a terrified father taking his son to a school parking lot to practice parallel parking, CERN scientists took their baby antiprotons to their parking lot and successfully transported them.

Now just do that but like, further. And also don't forget to use your side view mirrors.

Kash App

FBI Director Kash Patel was hacked by an Iranian-aligned hactivist group called "Handala."

A few things up front: this isn't a little hacker group that is operating out of someone's basement for shits and giggles. Handala is a subsidiary group of a larger network of major hacking operations. They work with the larger "Void Manticore" group, which works with Iran's military intelligence.

Anyway, they pwned Kash pretty bad.

The hackers managed to break in to Kash Patel's personal Gmail account, getting access to personal files, photos, and claiming they also got access to classified information. Immediately, I saw attempts at downplaying that this was just "his personal email so its no big deal"

THIS IS THE HEAD BOY

OF THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

It should not be easy to hack his personal email, but it apparently was, as he didn't even have two-factor authentication enabled.

THE HEAD. OF THE FBI.

The hackers released some stuff like personal photos and his personal resume with his address and phone number on it. I've seen viral posts about more scandalous stuff like the name of his porn website accounts, but that appears to be unverified and likely spreading due to how funny it is in concept.

It's pretty likely that there's plenty of other embarrassing stuff they've got on him now. But the fact remains that one of the highest officials in our country's "national security" sector had his email hacked by a foreign-aligned hacking group, which should be grounds for this entire administration to be ground to a halt and ejected. But instead it's literally just "Friday."

AI Comes for Gamer Wallets

Both Sony and Nintendo announced big pricing changes recently, though pretty different in nature, they're both reflective of the current landscape of tech.

The Sony Side

Sony announced price hikes across their entire modern PlayStation lineup. The price hikes are significant too, so it's not your average slowly-boiling-pot scenario. Though, note well that these prices are increasing just after another price increase last year.

Here's a quick look at whats changing. I've rounded the prices to the nearest dollar.

Product	Price Before Change (USD)	New Price (USD)	Change
PlayStation 5 (Base)	$550	$650	+$100
PlayStation 5 (Base, digital only)	$500	$600	+$100
PlayStation 5 Pro	$750	$900	+$150
PlayStation Portal	$200	$250	+$50

The Nintendon't

Nintendo also announced some minor price changes to their published games. Digital-only versions of Nintendo-published games will "have an MSRP that is different from physical versions" according to their statement about the change.

This is seemingly a response to consumer outcry about Nintendo's pricing of the Switch 2 system and games. Switch 2 games can go up to $80 or $90 USD, which is a big step up from the previous standards of $40 to $60. So when the Switch 2 was announced and Nintendo hit the market with a double-whammy of "games may be up to $90 and also digital-only versions will cost the same as physical copies," people were a bit unhappy about it.

They've directly acknowledged that this "reflects the difference in costs" between physical and digital copies, though it seems like the digital discount may be around $10, which, I mean, that's almost enough to cover half a burrito bowl.

The Undercurrent

Both of these changes come as there's a huge problem in the world of hardware with AI companies buying up critical components from everywhere. As AI infrastructure retains it's center-stage focus in the US economy, billions and billions of dollars are being spent to purchase not just the chips that are out in the market, but chips that haven't even been built yet.

Gaming PCs, consoles, and really any consumer electronics that require meaningful computing power are skyrocketing in price, driven by the surging costs of computer storage and memory (RAM and SSDs, specifically).

So Sony's price hike is likely tied to that, while Nintendo's is more along the lines of trying to adjust in response to the market, having already gone through the initial shock phase when the Switch 2 pricing was originally announced.

We also have seen this with the Steam Machine—a project by Valve to make an affordable, reliable, casual PC gaming machine, like a console version of a Steam Deck. They announced the thing, curated some hype, then announced a delay and price change as the prices of parts went through the roof.

I don't have a "it'll be okay because XYZ" part for this story, though I will leave you with something I can't stop thinking about:

Tech companies are dumping an unbelievable amount of money into buying up all these computing resources for their AI systems which require so much power because they're wildly inefficient. Right now, our entire economy is focused on building out AI data centers to expand infrastructure "horizontally" so that these systems can do… something.

But if history is of any indication, it won't be all that long until we really do not need these data centers to run AI stuff. Especially if you factor in the dismal consumer sentiment about AI, it makes me wonder if we're going to see a sort of "dead mall" phenomenon with data centers in about ten years. I could be wrong! But it's a lot—and I mean a LOT—of physical space and infrastructure being maintained to run a thing that very well may just run fully on your phone in a few years time.

But for now, pollution and price spikes! Offset, of course, by the wonderful AI-generated movies and TV shows we're all watching now, right?