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Tech Recap: AI, Productivity, and You

Eridian

23 May 2025 • 2 min read

It has been a productive week in the technology world. Anthropic released new AI models as well as a proprietary AI Agent for programming. Google’s I/O event revealed a new AI tier in their Google One plans, costing an eye-watering $250/month. Finally, there was a major data leak that raised a lot of eyebrows in the cyber-sec world.

Let’s start in order - Anthropic’s new Claude. Claude Code is a new AI Agent made by the AI company, which offers command-line access for writing code. The main appeal for Claude Code appears to be “vibe coding” - a process where a prompter has an AI model generate code for them without them having to learn programming themselves. Claude Code can generate files, templates, refine code, and do plenty that might strike fear in programmer’s hearts everywhere.

Fortunately, it’s highly unlikely that Claude - or any other LLM - will be capable of replacing programmers just yet. In a video made by Fireship, it is appropriately demonstrated that most LLMs (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude) lack the ability to actually debug code. Because of this, they tend to write code that looks like it might work, but contain plenty of issues that would go unnoticed until the code is fully tested and used, likely by the vibe-coder checking their work before submitting it as a school project.

Next up is Google’s $250/month payment tier plan. The plan, dubbed AI Ultra, includes 30TB of Drive space (that is 30,000GB, roughly 30x the average home consumer’s internet cap, and over 321 hours of iPhone video footage), the latest and greatest of Gemini, integration for Gemini in Google’s most popular products, YouTube Premium, and a few AI projects Google has developed.

This intense subscription plan does come with some silver lining - most Google One plans allow you to share the plan with 5 other people, usually family members. This does next to nothing to justify the $3,000 a year you’ll spend on what is almost entirely AI hype, but if you need to store 321 hours of iPhone footage, you could potentially convince 5 friends to split the bill with you - with each of you paying $600 a year.

Lastly, the real purpose of this email - the newest threat to your cyber-safety: the major data leak found by a security researcher. Details on this are rather scarce, but according to the researcher, they found 184,162,718 login details on an online database. Out of 10,000 details, 4.7% were Facebook logins, 4.7% were Google accounts, 2.4% were Instagram accounts, 2.2% were for Roblox, 2% were for Discord, 1% for Microsoft, 1% for Netflix, and 1% for PayPal.

2.2% of these login details had a government email address attached, “including the United States, Australia, Canada, China, India, Israel, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom”, according to Wired, who broke the story first.

It is very likely this database was composed by information-stealing malware, such as spyware or keylogging software. This is a good time for any readers to change their passwords, ideally to completely random combinations. Always be sure to utilize antivirus software - we recommend Bitdefender, which will only cost you $30 for 3 devices - $10 per device. If this is more than you’re willing to pay, it’s recommended you scan your system using the built-in Windows Security, and you can try Bitdefender for free.

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