Welcome to Tech Beat. Here are the stories shaping the conversation today.
Harvard is charging six hundred ninety-nine dollars for a course taught not by its celebrated faculty, but by artificial intelligence clones of them. It's a fascinating test case — prestige education meeting cost-cutting technology, and asking whether a simulated professor carries the same weight as a real one sitting across the seminar table.
On a lighter but genuinely charming note, a piece of tech culture history is under threat in Menlo Park, where the old Sunset Magazine campus — a carefully designed mid-century paradise of gardens and low buildings — is being recommended for demolition. The argument is blunt: the Bay Area needs housing more than it needs nostalgia, and beautiful campuses are a luxury a crowded region can no longer afford.
And finally, a story for anyone who keeps old hardware in a closet out of sentiment. Linux kernel seven point three is bringing a driver update for the three dfx Voodoo three graphics card, a chip that defined PC gaming in the late nineteen nineties. It can now boot without a system BIOS, meaning that quarter-century-old silicon just got a quiet, unexpected second life.
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