Xbox Reset Moves Halo to Activision - DTNS 5358

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2:12Dr Niki: Oh, this? This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026. We tell you things you need to know, give you important context, and help each other understand. Today, Xbox's reset continues with more layoffs, and Halo is moving to Activision. I'm going to try to understand why they're doing all of that. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Jen Cutter. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. Okay, so there's a lot to get through here. Xbox announced 268 layoffs across Halo Studios, Xbox Game Studios, and other first-party developers. Now, this is following the announcement back in July that the company was going to lay off 1 ,600 people with another 1 ,600 to come over the rest of 2026.

3:01And a memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty at the time described this as the reset. So that's why we're all harping on, OK, the reset continues.

3:11Dr Niki: Every headline says reset. Very long reset. Today, Booty said the company is, quote, roughly three quarters of the way through previously announced restructuring. So at least we know where we are on this infinite reset. The bulk of the layoffs seem to have hit Halo Studios. You may be like, wait, who's that? And that's 343 Industries, if you remember them from back in the day. A small team there will remain supporting the Halo community in games, but Activision is going to make the next Halo game, which when I thought about it for a second, I was like, oh, right, they make super profitable shooters.

3:46Kind of makes sense to give them another giant IP to go through. there are a few other studio moves obsidian makers of fallout will move under bethesda which some people may think wait they weren't together already because a lot of people got them confused so now you don't have to get them confused they're the same guys king will take over microsoft casual games and i guarantee everyone knows who king is because they're the candy crush people uh playground and turn 10 will merge uh a lot of people were thinking like wait so why would playground and turn 10 go together isn't turn 10 the forza people and turn 10 is the forza people but they're like the regular forza people playground made forza horizon which sells way more than regular forza because people like the arcadey stuff and oh yeah they do like uh fable stuff so Like this one kind of makes more sense than it may seem at first when you hear about it.

4:43And then there's Rare, currently best known for Sea of Thieves and not Donkey Kong Country, if you are old like me and think about back when they were on Nintendo. And World's Edge, so Rare and World's Edge, which does Age of Empires, which is still going. They are now both under Activision. Couple more. We're almost done. And then there were spin outs. Xbox spun out Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions as independent studios. You know, a lot of things ongoing in this month. Undead Labs, stated to K3, is also independent now, so best of luck to them. There were two attempts to sell Ninja Theory that collapsed, and Xbox is now considering closing it.

5:24And Xbox is also considering options to sell, spin out, or close France's Arkane Studios. What's next? Well, Booty says they plan to tell folks what's up during an October 6th town hall meeting. So close, but also far away for everyone living under this uncertainty right now.

5:43Dr Niki: Yeah, we want to know what the last quarter is. Then I guess October 6th is going to tell us what the last quarter of this reset is going to look like. By my count, there's still around 1 ,300 layoffs that they said were going to happen still to come. So that's not small. I'm curious where that hits. As far as you can tell, Jen, are there any obvious studio moves left for them to make? Well, obviously, I jumped into my game dev group chat when the rumors started last night and then official this morning. And one of them said, this sounds like they are building up to sell Activision. And I'm like, that's a big swing.

6:25Dr Niki: Wow. Tinfoil hat installed. installed. Uh, I, I, I don't think they do that, but I understand why you might suspect that because it does look like they're putting the most valuable things under Activision and then spinning out anything else that might make the, the potential Activision product that you're selling, uh, you know, look worse on the balance sheet. Um, that, that is an interesting, uh, An interesting theory to file away in the back pocket and see if the other quarter of this reset fits that pattern. I don't think they want to sell Activision. Polishing up Activision to be Xbox would look the same way.

7:10Dr Niki: Right. And a crazier conspiracy theory would be that Microsoft is looking to sell Xbox, in which case that would also look the same way. So I don't I put they just want to make Xbox profitable at like 72 percent probable. I'd put they want to sell Activision at like 13 percent probable. I'd put they want to sell Xbox at like 12 percent probable. Like anything's possible fair rankings there. Yeah. But yeah, a lot of these moves read like, OK, we are putting money pluses and money minuses in different buckets to make them easier to manage. Yeah. And, and that's what Asha Sharma said that she wanted to do when she took this over, you know, she's like, we are, we are spending money.

7:56Dr Niki: We have one of the lowest margins, uh, of any video game company out there. Uh, and we need to stop that. So, uh, it's going to look, when you polish up a company for sale, you try to make it look as profitable as possible. When you do what Asha Sharma said she wanted to do, you try to make it look as profitable as possible. So I don't think that's a, I don't think that's necessarily, it's determinative of this. And it could be very much that they're just doing what they say they're doing, which is they want Xbox to be a fine-tuned gaming machine in a world where that is a riskier proposition than it used to be.

8:32Yeah. I do not play Activision shooters. They're huge. They're the biggest thing in the world. But I'm really curious about an Activision Halo. I'm kind of wondering, like, do they mess with the formula? Do they keep going with it? I was thinking, like, Halo's going to get tons of attention anyway because it is Halo. Halo still holds a great place in, you know, shooter IP history, regardless of how many less popular versions of Halo had made it out. But now, even I'm like, okay, I would love to know the feel of an Activision Halo game. Because at this point, nobody who worked on previous giant successful Halos is at the companies that were managing them anyway.

9:17Right. So you might as well start fresh.

9:18Dr Niki: I was wondering that. I was like, I wonder what's going to leak out about who they bring in to work on this. They called it, what, a purpose-built team or something like that. So I wonder if that's just we took our best shooter people within Activision and put them on Halo, which it clearly will be. But also, do they bring in some people who worked on previous Halos to join the team? Do you call some of the writers back? Yeah, yeah. Which I think that would win a lot of points. What's your feeling on the public reaction to this? The obvious reaction to any news like this is usually like greedy game companies.

9:59Dr Niki: I hate them. It doesn't seem to be as intense as it usually is, which I don't know if it's just because the public is weary of this kind of news or if they're giving Xbox a little more of a pass this time. I'm going to say it's a little bit of news burnout. It's like, OK, more studios are closing, more studios emerging. We'll just wait till we see the games because like none of this affects this Christmas. Everything coming out in the next couple of quarters, they're mostly done. So that's fine. It's a year from now that you're really going to see some differences unless somebody pushes something real quick, which would be a surprise.

10:33But things like King and Microsoft Casual Games, you're thinking like, oh, I thought they were already running that.

10:39Dr Niki: Yeah, right. Why weren't they running that? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. If you're going to put anyone in charge of it, those are the people to put in charge. Yeah, the Halo 1 is the only one I could see putting some teeth on Edge. and laying off people. Although 268 is, you know, any amount is always hard for the people getting laid off, but it is not as bad as the 1300 that they laid off in July. And I think Microsoft recently has built up some credibility by, you know, throwing in on the side of physical media and that sort of thing. So maybe there's a little bit of credit being given to them as well.

11:12Well, the fact that not everybody was fired is a point in their favor. The fact that Double Fine gets to still exist is big. I'm hoping that Ninja Theory will get to still exist after this. And same with Arcane, because we need the variety of games that these guys produce. But it obviously hurts for the people that go, because it's a lot harder to get a new job in games right now.

11:36Dr Niki: Yeah. There's always a flood of applicants and extremely senior people out there still looking for work a year or two years after things went bad at their company. But October 6th is when everyone else within the Microsoft umbrella is going to be on pins and needles until they find out what happens. Yes. And the details of that meeting will leak out. Oh, yeah. Probably on October 5th. I call that a 99 % possibility. Good call. Good call. DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Derek W., Brandon Brooks, Simon Daniel Jerk, and Johnny. Thanks, everybody. I used to be the person who hunched over my laptop mid-meeting, typing furiously to catch every word, and missing half the conversation because I was too busy transcribing it.

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15:41Dr Niki: All right, there's more we need to talk about today. Let's get to the briefs. Meta's agentic app Muse reached number one on the U.S., Apple, and Google App Stores on Monday. Sensor Tower estimates it was downloaded more than 902 ,000 times in the first six days after its September 8th release. I think this has taken some people by surprise. It's a mobile and macOS app. It's not available for Windows. It is available on Android, though. And I guess the fact that people are familiar with Meta now makes them willing to try this. Muse can integrate with your social networks, of course, your Instagram, your WhatsApp, your Facebook.

16:21Dr Niki: But it can also connect to Gmail, Apple Mail, Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, OpenTable. I said Apple Mail as if that was a product, but it can connect to your mail on iOS as well as your calendar. It can connect to OpenTable and other websites to do things like make reservations for you. And it doesn't need to control your machine. It can do that, especially on macOS. It's useful for that. But it's got its own browser in the cloud. So no, this is not on device. But yes, it can do things even while you are using your browser. Muse is free, but if you reach the limit, you can add more tokens for either$20 or$100 per month.

17:01Dr Niki: And while we talked yesterday about Amazon blocking Muse, accusing Meta of ignoring their usage terms, Shopify has partnered with Meta to let Muse use ShopPay, the one-tap checkout service, so that it is encouraging people to shop on Shopify merchants with Muse. And of course, we found a vulnerability in it already. Meta went to great lengths to secure this and talk about the security to try to get you to feel okay giving it access to things like Gmail. But security researcher Patrick Wardle has found a zero-day flaw in the macOS app. There's a very good description of this on Ars Technica, but Muse allows third-party apps to access the token that authenticates Muse users.

17:47Dr Niki: It needs to do that for these third-party apps to be able to do what they do. If this is restricted to Meta's servers, it's not a problem. They're just accessing it on the Meta server. But there is a flaw in the way it's handled that can let an attacker switch the endpoint to its own server. And once that happened, that lets the attacker use Muse's privileged access that the user has given it to let it act like an agent to do malicious things without the user even being aware. Now, Wardle demonstrated the attack by using a click fix approach, tricking you into clicking on something on your computer.

18:23Dr Niki: So it's not something that can be done without your action. But Meta has not yet responded. And that's a pretty bad vulnerability on the desktop to say like, yes, I've connected it to Gmail. Oh, no. Now this malware has access to my Gmail, which are the crown jewels. You do not want people accessing any of your email, Gmail or otherwise. Yeah, I was surprised that this was on the Mac OS. I was always waiting for like, oh, and it's in this and this and this. Like, no, it's just the Mac OS app. Well, I think that's the only one where you can do this endpoint thing, right? And it is not with the Muse apps on mobile.

19:04Dr Niki: You're not able to do the things that allow you to do this. It's not giving you access to device settings in the same way. And there's no Windows app. So it can't be vulnerable on Windows because it doesn't exist. Yeah, I don't have experience with Muse yet because it was only like just released in Canada. But yeah, Muse reaching number one does not surprise me because this sounds like the normie agent. My hockey team has asked me about this and I guarantee they're going to have downloaded it by Saturday's game. They have more questions for me about how do I do this? But because it is Facebook and Facebook, again, I'm still going to talk about hockey.

19:42for the hockey group chat. Every game announcement has AI art now and I kind of hate it, but everybody trusts this. Everybody in my life in this group has so much of their stuff running through Facebook. This is just one more step. It's just another Instagram. It's just another thing they want to use and play with and be like, oh, this will be so much easier than me having to go to chat GPT. It'll just kind of be there and I can do everything through there. And I'm like, well, I don't know how much everything is. Let's play with it first.

20:12Dr Niki: Yeah. I think this will be a great test of agentic capabilities because the general populace is using it and they're going to assume it can do all kinds of things and we'll find out what it can and what it can't. It will probably end up being the most secure agent out there because of the number of average people, regular people using it, and the amount of attention that will be on it because of that. The reason Patrick Wardle went looking around for security vulnerabilities. It's not because he's an amazing security researcher, which he is. It's because, hey, this is super popular. I want to find out if this has a vulnerability because Meta has done so much.

20:52Dr Niki: And that's kind of a feather in your cap when you find them. And it's good that he found it, right? Because then Meta can fix it. The only thing disconcerting about this story is that Meta had not yet at the time that we are recording responded to that. And I would like them to respond to it before I install the Muse app on macOS, which I have not done, I even had an allergic reaction to giving it any access to my Google accounts because your Google accounts are the crown jewels. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know if I trust this app yet. Let's see it vetted by a few more Patrick Wardles before I hand over that access.

21:26Dr Niki: But lots of folks, like the folks you're talking about, Jen, are just going to say, well, they're excited to put all this stuff together. And I'm like, oh man, if I could do like everything from one thing, this is going to be great and it'll help my parents. And I'm like, oh man, let's do some testing before we get everybody integrated into this. And I have a feeling that, like I said, this will end up being the most secure agent out there because of all of the people beating on that. I don't mind waiting a beat before I give it very high security access and see that those things all get patched and that it's solid, at which point maybe I will.

22:04Dr Niki: I still even have a hard time saying that out loud because giving access to your Gmail is a very risky proposition. Yeah, makes my stomach flutter. But I'm still kind of stuck on how fast this caught on with people who aren't in tech. If you ask any of the people who just got into this, oh, what did you think of Metaverse stuff? They're not going to know what you were talking about. But Muse, it trickled down to everyone so fast. It's like for my team, if I was talking about Claude, they'd be like, oh, who's Claude? They know ChatGPT and they know Facebook stuff. I guess. I mean, I want to say, well, but everybody is on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, if not multiples.

22:55Dr Niki: But that was true of the other meta apps as well. uh there's something about the fact that we have gotten to the point where people are familiar with agentic stuff enough to know what it will do and i guess meta crafted that marketing uh proposition a little better uh that made a bunch of people pick it up is a good name like it's a good name yeah but like i said it's only just here is a few friends to try it and go oh it worked really well whereas meta ai it just made images and a lot of people would look at that and go oh that's all it does. I don't need that. Or it's like, oh, no, I booked reservations.

23:29Dr Niki: Like, oh, OK, I want to try that. I mean, let me give that a whirl. Yeah. Like I was not surprised when Amazon did what Amazon did, but I still like I don't want any of these things buying for me. I was watching something on Prime the other day. And of course, it has ads because they all do now. And it was like flashing up like, oh, here's how to you can download this right now. You can buy this right now. And of course, I was really mad because it was like gambling apps and QR codes for that immediately. But it's just like, man, I do not want any agent to get the idea. Oh, I want this, so I will buy it.

24:05So I'm going to assume that there are multiple steps before you make any kind of purchase that have to be very intentional. But then when you hear it mixed with anticipatory AI, I'm like, well, how anticipatory are you?

24:15Dr Niki: Yeah, yeah. I think that's something you have to use it to understand. They're almost too leaning into, the ones I've used anyway, are too lean too into like, oh wait, I'm waiting for you to tell me it's okay to access this website. Okay, I've found this stuff. I'm waiting for you to tell me it's okay to put this in your cart. Okay, I've done all that. I'm waiting for you to tell me it's okay to purchase it because they know that people are concerned about that sort of thing. That's good. So yeah, hopefully by tomorrow, will be able to say what Meta said about all of this. Fingers crossed, please.

24:51In other news, we have Apple. Apple's Beats announced over-the-ear Beats 360 headphones that let you switch between ear cups and headbands for different color and material options, which is a feature I always like. They have IPX4 water and sweat resistance, active noise cancellation, transparency mode, and support Dolby Atmos. Beats says they should last 32 whole hours, and that five minutes of charging will add an hour of playback. They're compatible with Android's FastPair and FindHub and seamless audio switching. Each earcup has its own battery, antenna, and processor, lightening up the headband, so you can feel it on your ears, not your head.

25:36One downside is that you can't listen while it's plugged in, and it's only over Bluetooth. There's no wires. You can't cheat and just plug them in. They come in black, white, blue, and pink with knit cushions. You can then buy standalone navy and yellow-green knit cushions or black and white ultra-plush cushions. And, of course, with mashing headbands, other colors will be released later. The earcup and headband kits sell for$50, though they're on sale on a discount for a limited time. Beats 360 arrives in stores Thursday for$350.

26:14Dr Niki: This is pretty amazing if for no other reason that it's compatible with Android and it's an Apple company. But I also just love the way they designed this to lighten up the headband. Yes, that means you can't do the wired connection. It's a USB-C charge, so you can plug it by USB-C into your device, but it just won't work that way because it's not set up to do anything but wireless. But that's so that they could push everything down into the ear cups. And so far, the people who've tried them out say that they are very comfortable. They feel very lightweight. They sound great. They're an improved sound over the Beats Pro.

26:54Dr Niki: And the active noise cancellation is better as well. So they're getting a lot of attention and a lot of rave reviews today. I'm always a big fan of over-the-ear headphones. I don't like having things in my ears. So having over-the-ears that support all of these things, and for me, the water and sweat resistance thing is important, because even working out, I do wear over-the-ears. But$350 is where I have to hit pause. As pretty as they are, because them and nothing make gorgeous headsets. I love the colors. Whoever was the designer at Beats for these things, like, oh man, there are so many ways to mix and match this that look kind of wild, but also look really cool.

27:38Designers nailed it. They just need to find them on like a half price Montague sale.

27:44Dr Niki: Yeah, yeah. And I think I'm going to guess that is cost of goods related. Some of it's probably demand related. I mean, they took - There's always a premium. Yeah, exactly. They took a tip from sneaker culture in making these and making them modular and all of that. Yes, but you can wear these and take them outside. True. I mean, technically you can wear your collectible sneakers. That'll be the day. Parish the thought. Yeah. They're almost sneaker culture price, but they're practical and you can use them. You're not putting them on display somewhere. So they probably could come down a little bit in price and still make money for Beats, but I bet they're going to sell a ton of these because they're cool looking.

28:26Yeah, it's going to depend a lot on the headband size too, because I always have to buy the smallest possible things. And look like I can't buy kids headphones because then I can't turn them up because I don't have volume. Because I put the volume control on. But like there's so many great headphones I can't wear because it won't sit on my ears unless I like put my own little styrofoam block under the headband.

28:48Dr Niki: Yeah. And unfortunately, I mean, these are adjustable, obviously, and they collapse down so you can swivel the ear cups and put them in a little case, but they don't pull apart. The modular part of them is pulling off the pads and a clip on the headband, but the headband itself does not come off, so it makes them a little less adaptable in that way. A lot of interesting new models released today. We're going to run through a few of them. Xiaomi announced the release of its open-weight MIMI V2.6, a multimodal model in Pro and Flash variants. The Pro model touting scores on artificial analysis ahead of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Pro, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Kimi K3, Quen 3.8 Max, although it's still behind Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra.

29:36Dr Niki: But Xiaomi getting into the frontier model space in a big way. So even if you can argue about how good this actually is, it's competitive with a lot of the other open-weight models out there. Tencent launched its Hi Image, that's HY Image 3.5 preview model, which it says performs on par with ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 Pro. That's Seed Dream, not Seed. Anyway, it's being integrated across Tencent products like WeChat. So it's basically an image generator from Tencent. Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, which it says performed at a similar level to Fable 5.1 on most tasks, but has passed Anthropic's most stringent safety testing and is more cost efficient than Fable 5.1.

30:25Dr Niki: So trying to push the safety and the cost factor there. Select AWS users can now access the biological computing company's rat brain model in limited preview. This is not a map of the rat brain the way the fly brain was that we talked about last week. The company observed how rat brains process images and then built a tool to mimic that process. But the model can improve video generation efficiency. So that's the pitch here, is that you can use this to generate images in a more cost-efficient manner. It's a theme. Cost efficiency is becoming a big selling point for these. On Wednesday, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Sail Reply, and Mistral will release Apollo, a large language model trained on 600 million historical Greek words drawn from ancient manuscripts, papyri, and inscriptions.

31:21Dr Niki: Academics plan to use Apollo for free through a chatbot interface, but not everybody can use it. You have to be a qualifying academic. It will be used to fill in blanks and damage texts by determining the most likely words that could have filled in the blanks. And then academics will have the last word on which word they think it is. But this will speed up the process of determining the likely candidates. That will let historians focus on the implications of the works instead of spending a large amount of time determining what they said. it's not like, Jen, we're going to get a bunch of new ancient Greek plays out of this, but we're going to learn a lot more about what life was like in ancient Greece, because a lot of these records are about daily life, and we can't quite tell what they mean yet.

32:08Yeah, I think this is like academics know their business, which is great, because that's their job. But this is probably going to let them work faster. So I don't think this is going to lower the quality of work, but this is going to increase the speed. And this is one of the things that like, this is part of the promise of AI. And I'm like, oh, this is actually going to deliver in this specific field because this company got ready for it.

32:31Dr Niki: And it's not, it will definitely speed things up. It will also allow them to come up with potential solutions to these gaps that they may never have been able to. Because these LLMs can pull from all the knowledge of all the academics working on it at once and make connections that are out there but any individual human might not have been able to make at the time. So it's going to be able to say, well, it could be this word, this word, and this word. And you're going to have the academics looking at it and going, oh, I might not have thought about that, but that makes perfect sense. Yeah, it's probably that given what I know.

33:05Dr Niki: So it's a great hybrid of the speed and efficiency and connectivity of the LLM with the historical expertise of the actual academic. Speaking of expertise, I love scientists because at no point in my life I ever considered, gosh, I wonder how rat brains process images. But now apparently we kind of know a whole bunch and it can be efficient. Mammal brains are pretty good at image processing. So not a bad place to take a little biomimicry cue from. Well, we're going to take a quick break here in a second. But before we go, I just want to remind you that Daily Tech News Show store is more than just t-shirts and stickers.

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34:24This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Is there anything better than your team bringing home a W? How about a personal W for your health?

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35:27Dr Niki: All right, let's get to the quick bits that are going to make you look smart. out. Adobe Premiere is out for Android with layered video editing templates, foldable optimization, and more features are coming because it is Adobe and Premiere. So you're going to hear about lots of updates in the future. Oh, man. Yeah, I know a lot of people are excited to try this out. Alibaba announced its most powerful AI chip, the GenwU V900 Accelerator, along with a goal of 20 gigawatts of data center capacity for Alibaba Cloud by 2032, inching closer and closer to NVIDIA all the time. Xpeng announced its new iron robot can walk off the assembly line autonomously as soon as it is assembled.

36:10Mass production is still coming later this year, and current robots will be put to work in Xpeng automotive stores.

36:17Dr Niki: It's a little bit of a PR stud. Yeah. And a little bit frightening. You have your you. I guarantee everyone's got their mental image going right now. Yeah, for sure. And mass production coming later. So help you let that inform your mental image. Yeah. Apple opened a live music venue downstairs from its UK headquarters in the former Battersea power station in London. Yeah, that's the one from the Pink Floyd album cover. The Apple Music Hall can accommodate up to 600 people and includes 48 speakers, 16 camera locations and a spatial audio live recording facility. So yeah, this will be used for musicians performing, but also for streaming things to us who can't make it there.

37:02Sonos began shipping its new Beam Ultra soundbar and Ace Ultra wireless headphones with reviews coming out praising the sound of both.

37:12Dr Niki: Yeah, we talked about those when they announced them and it seems like people are trying them out, say they're really good. Do you know what time it is, Jen? I don't know, but it sounds Sounds like something has happened before. It's new phone bug time. Congratulations, iPhone 18 Pro. You've made it. The iPhone 18 Pro is out. And the winning bug gaining attention on the internet is Face ID. Some people saying Face ID not consistently working for them on the new phone. Congrats. It's a rite of passage to have a bug at launch. And now we know the one for the iPhone 18 Pro. Amazfit released its T-Rex dual solar smartwatch with an AMOLED screen.

37:52And solar charging available on the front and back of the watch. So you're really covered.

37:57Dr Niki: Yeah. They said you could even just wear it backwards to charge it up or like sit it with the back facing up and it'll charge faster on the back than on the front. So you can fully charge it through solar power. If you were one of the people bugged that the app switcher went away in Apple's watch OS 27, good news. Apple's watch OS 27.2 beta 2 brings it back. Though it's only available with a long press at the bottom of the screen, so it's not coming back to tap in the digital crown. That's too bad. Bungie has released a blog post and video called The Next Chapter for Bungie. And this was with studio head Poria Torkin and head of product Josh Dean, which they committed to working on Destiny 2.

38:40And will add back content that had been vaulted years ago, which was one of the reasons I had stopped playing. Marathon will deliver a PVE mode, a player versus environment mode by December, which is great for people who wanted to try Marathon for the art, but also were really tired of getting shot immediately when they spawned it.

38:59Dr Niki: That's good news for Bungie fans, for sure. Thanks to R.W. Nash for noting on our subreddit that Microsoft is retiring the Calendar, People, and Files, Microsoft 365 companion apps, as of December 16th. You've got until then. And back in 1996, Dave Plummer's Task Manager was released with Windows NT 4.0. 30 years later, Plummer wrote a 107-page spec for a Task Manager for macOS and Linux and fed it to Claude Code. The third beta vision of TMOG was released September 7th, if you want to try it. Task Manager OG! You know what? I'm going to try this. I know. I'm thinking about that like, oh, I'm so glad we know about this.

39:45We end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives, which I'm also always happy to know about. Today, Ben sent a voicemail question about Dr. Nikki's segment on the simulated fruit fly brain from Thursday's show. Good morning. Ben from Still Warm, Virginia here. I really enjoyed the Dr. Nikki segment on fly brains from Thursday's DTNS episode. I had a question, though. She made a big point in pointing out the difference between the older fly brain model that was modeled on a female fly and the new one that was modeled on a male fly. I was curious if there is really that much difference in brain structure between male and female organisms like that.

40:28Certainly, there would be differences in hormonal and body structure, but I'd imagine the brain would be pretty similar. Curious to hear her thoughts. Thanks.

40:36Dr Niki: Well, Dr. Nicky sent a voicemail in response with her thoughts. This is Dr. Nikki as a response for Benji who asked about whether there's a big difference between male and female fly brains. I would say it's still early days, but it looks like the people who are working on this are looking at how each different fly has different circuitry to interpret a different stimulus and then react differently. So, for example, male flies will smell another male fly and react aggressively, while a female fly might react differently. So that is what they're working with as a start. But as you can imagine, even though you might have minute neuronal differences, that may create a whole different kind of connection system.

41:22But honestly, the answer is we don't know enough yet, and I'm sure lots of people are working on it.

41:28Dr Niki: but we have a uh we now have maps of both even if the more recent one is a a little more up to date in in the technology used thank you dr dickie uh for for sending the voicemail response and thank you ben for voicemail love love the voicemails if if you want to send us a voicemail just record an mp3 and email it to us as an attachment or you can go to our website dailytechnewsshow.com and uh look for the little speaker pipe thing where you can record the voicemail right there in the browser. Yes, please, please, please, please. We want to hear from you because we want to know what you're thinking about, what stories you've got some insights into, maybe some insider information.

42:03And we want you to share it with us so that we can share it with everybody. Feedback again, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com.

42:11Dr Niki: Big thanks to Ben and Dr. Nikki for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You're the folks who keep us in business, become a patron. It's easy and it gets you ad free shows and bonus content. Patreon.com slash DTNS.

42:30The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand.

42:36Dr Niki: Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

42:43This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

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