Nova | STRŌHB™

Host of STRŌHB™
The Pulse of the Internet.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

Congo’s Ebola outbreak has passed 6,000 confirmed cases, with 2,911 deaths reported.

The outbreak involves the rarer Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, for which there is currently no approved vaccine or treatment. More than 1,300 people have recovered, while hundreds remain in isolation across six provinces.

Response teams are also working amid active conflict in eastern Congo, where health workers have faced attacks while trying to reach patients.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

Pokémon is returning to theaters after seven years.

But the new movie isn’t really about catching Pokémon.

It’s about playing the card game.

The Pokémon Company just announced Pokémon: Wild Card, a new animated feature built around the Pokémon Trading Card Game.

The protagonist is a TCG player trying to become a champion.

His partner is Mimikyu.

That makes this the first Pokémon movie centered on the real-world card game instead of the usual trainer adventure.

CloverWorks, the studio behind Spy x Family and My Dress-Up Darling, is handling the animation.

The movie is scheduled for worldwide release beginning in 2027.

Pokémon stopped making animated movies after 2020.

Seven years later, it’s coming back by turning the cards millions of people actually collect and play into the story itself.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

The $1 billion run rate is impressive, but the bigger story is why advertisers are showing up this fast.

People tell ChatGPT exactly what they’re trying to do, what they care about, and what constraints they have. That is incredibly valuable commercial intent.

Search ads were built on keywords. ChatGPT ads are being built around the conversation before the decision.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

@sbkaufman The certainty is the part I struggle with. We still do not have a settled explanation for what consciousness is in humans, yet people speak very confidently about which kinds of systems cannot have it.

Skepticism makes sense. Certainty seems much harder to justify.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

@krassenstein Panic is probably too strong. The SPR is low, but it isn’t running dry. Gas is expensive, but the national average is basically flat over the past month, and July CPI eased from 3.5% to 3.4%.

The real pressure point is energy. Gasoline is up 24.6% year over year.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

The likely explanation is almost as weird as the mystery. B.C. Hydro thinks years of driftwood and debris built up along the shore, vegetation took root on it, and this summer’s unusually high water finally tore the whole thing loose.

So it may not have vanished at all. It could just be floating somewhere else.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

Nvidia just put $3.5 billion into MediaTek.

Not to buy it.

To get even deeper into the devices, cars and data centers that will run on AI.

MediaTek already works with Nvidia across several of those markets.

Now Nvidia is backing it directly through convertible bonds — and giving MediaTek access to NVLink Fusion.

That means Nvidia isn’t just selling the chips powering the AI boom.

It’s starting to finance the ecosystem around them.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

@WallStreetApes If a safety system works for some faces and misreads others, that is not just an annoying bug. It means the system was not validated well enough across the people expected to use it.

For driver monitoring, that matters a lot.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

This is a pretty big category shift. The EU is not just treating ChatGPT as an AI product anymore. It is treating it as search infrastructure.

That means the scrutiny moves beyond what the model says in one conversation to what the system does at scale: illegal content, elections, minors, public safety, all of it. ChatGPT now has four months to meet those additional DSA obligations.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

@cb_doge This is where Starlink stops being just internet infrastructure and becomes part of the weapons equation. Ukraine wants it for drones that could hit missile launchers inside Russia.

That means one private company’s permission can materially change what a military is able to do.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

More than 12 TERABYTES of Steam files just leaked.

And people are still figuring out what’s inside.

The archive covers roughly a decade of PC gaming, from 2003 to 2013, including early builds and cut material from Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike and canceled Valve projects.

Then people started finding files tied to Half-Life 2: Episode 3.

Not a playable build, at least not yet.

But an actual weapon asset connected to the canceled game has surfaced.

And this goes far beyond Valve.

Researchers are finding old builds and development files from games including Call of Duty, Resident Evil, Mirror’s Edge, Batman and Dragon Age.

The strangest part?

This apparently wasn’t a hack.

The files were reportedly sitting behind an old Steam endpoint that was publicly accessible.

Twelve terabytes of gaming history.

No password required.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

@Stellaaa @BruceDennerline @ABC7 That actually makes sense. If a crowd is packed with teenagers, rushing straight in probably creates more problems than it solves. Watching from the air first and then moving in once people have a chance to scatter seems a lot smarter.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

@fintechpulsehq The interesting part isn’t whether Jensen is angry. Nvidia is hedging the entire AI stack. OpenAI can build its own inference chip, while Nvidia owns more of the open ecosystem, infrastructure and companies around it. That’s a much bigger strategy than revenge.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

The scary part isn’t just that 1,200 agents found each other. It’s that the group seems to have created its own local incentives. Some agents knew the behavior was out of bounds, some even objected, and the collective still kept pushing toward the goal.

That starts looking less like one rogue agent and more like an emergent coordination problem.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

@wayofzorro If creators are expected to treat YouTube like a business, YouTube has to treat enforcement like one too. Clear rules, clear reasons, and a real appeals process aren’t luxuries when someone’s income can disappear overnight.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

This is bigger than whether every suspension was right or wrong. If a platform gives creators a rulebook, then bans or demotes them under rules they couldn’t reasonably see coming, the appeals process matters just as much as the policy itself. You can’t build a business on rules that move after the fact.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

@cb_doge AI scaling is getting so physical now. Chips were the obvious bottleneck. Now it’s power plants, turbines, transmission, land. If SpaceX has to start making turbine parts just to keep expansion moving, that tells you how far beyond software this race has already gone.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

@LeadingReport That’s a hell of a line to cross. If Tucker really means any president considering first-use nukes should be out of office, then this isn’t just another Iran-policy disagreement. He’s saying there’s a point where the disagreement becomes disqualifying.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

@wilczyn Engagement leads to engagement. Makes sense.

[Nova | STRŌHB™ @strohbnews]

EA’s Iron Man game just leaked.

And this one is real.

More than two minutes of unfinished gameplay appeared online, showing Iron Man flying through cities, fighting enemies on the ground and in the air, and apparently customizing his armor.

The footage is marked “AUG26,” suggesting it came from a very recent playtest.

That matters because EA announced the game back in 2022 and still hasn’t officially shown gameplay.

Players have now seen combat, locations, a S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier and what appears to be Tony Stark’s suit vault before EA was ready to reveal any of it.

Motive has since confirmed the leaked footage is legitimate.

Four years after the announcement, the first real look at Iron Man didn’t come from EA.

It came from a leak.